haonowshaokao

As I left Lijinag Mama Naxi packed me off with a selection of fruit and a bag of lavender and sent me with one of her drivers to the bus station, where I got on the sleeper bus to Jinhong. Sleeper buses seem to be a phenomenon confined to Asia and are exactly as you might expect – large coaches full of beds instead of seats, usually on two levels. I managed to get one of the worst spots – in the middle, at the front, on top – which meant that I was forced to watch the movies since the TV was directly in my face. Fortunately they showed Happy Ghost 2, one of the most entertaining things I’ve seen in years. When we stopped to use the toilets I found out what the bag of lavender was for.
We got to Jinhong at a stupidly early hour and everything was closed. It’s the capital city of the Xishangbanna region, where a host of different ethnic minorities live, none of whom seem to be particularly Chinese. The city has an air of Laos and Burma about it, and is noisy and hectic in a laid-back, tropical way – a description you wouldn’t find, say, anywhere else in China.
After an hour or so things started to open and I found a place that rents out bamboo huts on stilts. My room-mate was an Israeli girl who turned out to be a Mossad officer on a year-long break. After a long afternoon kip I spent the rest of the day hanging out with her at a cafe, avoiding controversial conversation topics.
The next day I had the place to myself and went off on a bike trip recommended by a travel cafe. The route wasn’t particularly interesting and led to a “hot spring” which seemed to be more like a large outdoor swimming pool full of stagnant water. Inside there were a few people who studiously ignored me. I lay on the grass and read my book, then cycled back. I took a different route and found some fairly nice scenery.

On my final day in Xishangbanna I went on a tour of the area with two middle-aged Austrian lesbian women I’d met at the cafe. I had to get up at 7, which was not as unreasonable as usual due to the heat. Of course the weather took a turn and it immediately started raining when we reached the countryside, but then miraculously stopped when we got to the market.

(Austrian women on the right there)
The rest of the day we went to see a fair few tribal villages a couple of tea factories and a temple. The view from the mountains was just immense.

…and in the villages our guide just let himself in to Dai houses as if he owned them. I suppose he’s been doing these tours for long enough that he doesn’t need to ask any more.

The best thing was probably the temple. It was a proper Burmese-style one, all gold and sloping roofs. Since Burma’s off-limits for this trip at least it was my only opportunity to see what a strange and fascinating place it is, and somewhere I’ll have to go when the political climate is better.

Last were the tea factories, where we tried endless pots of puyi tea, the local variety that is prized all over China. As far as green tea goes it’s about the best I’ve tried, with a warm, sweet aftertaste. Actually we drank far too much of it, giving me the jitters for the rest of the night but thankfully allowing sleep.
The next day was supposed to be my last in China but it ended up not being. I’ll come to that later, though.

On the advice of Dylan from the hotel in Dali I saved myself a couple of quid by getting the bus to Lijiang from the side of the road instead of booking it through an agency in town. That’s how I came to spend most of my afternoon sitting between a dusty road and a building site and most of my evening sitting on the one remaining minibus-seat, in the middle, at the back, having to grab strangers’ shoulders and knees whenever we went over a pothole to avoid being thrown down the aisle. That day I’d been reading about a particularly nasty bus crash in South American, and sure enough twenty minutes into the journey we passed the scene of an accident where a bus and taxi had collided head-on.
Much as I like complaining, though, that’s pretty much where it needs to end, because there’s nothing bad to say about my four days or so in Lijiang. The first thing I did when I got there was to get completely lost, which in most places would be a negative. In Lijiang Old Town it was a pleasure. The mass of little winding passages and canals seemed to be exactly designed to give me that feeling of being thrown into an alien world which most travelers are looking for in one way or another.

When I’d asked for directions enough times I finally found what turned out to be one of the best hostels I’ve stayed in – Mama Naxi’s Guesthouse – and headed for bed. Every night was an early sleep and nobody seemed to bother getting drunk. There just wasn’t really any need.
The next day I went out with Carla from Argentina to take a look at the lake, which provides one of the most famous views in China. It was a cloudy day, so the mountain in the background wasn’t really visible. Still, it’s improved with a few flowers in the foreground.

On the second day I joined a few other people from the hostel and cycled out to a Naxi village about 10km away.

There wasn’t a lot of difficuty finding it, but a morning’s cycling was tiring, so we ended up hanging out in a cafe for a couple of hours.

The village is famous for being the home of a particularly renound doctor. We found him pretty much by accident, but within a minute he’d lured us into his house to insist we read articles written about him in the western press, one by Michael Palin who apparently featured him on his ‘Himilaya’ series.

Amanda was feeling a little ill, so he prescribed her a bag of grey powder to drink with hot water and told her the most important thing was to be happy.

After we cycled back she gave it a try and immediately became a lot sicker. Mama Naxi said that everyone goes there and gets the same bag of powder. Ah well.
The next day was my last full one, and I spent most of it hanging out in cafes, reading and writing.

In the evening I went along with the same crew, plus a guy from Shenzhen called ‘Echo’, to see the famous Naxi orchestra.

Traditional Chinese music was wiped out everywhere else in the country during the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s. Naxi musicians hid or buried their instruments and used the opening of China in the 80s as an opportunity to form a band.

The music was decent, the long speeches in-between maybe a little less so, but it was a good thing to have seen. The next day I left, along with most of the other people I’d met, who were mainly going north to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge, which is something I’ll have to save for another time. It’ll be a good excuse to come back to this wonderful little city.

Click here for a fairly strange story

Arriving in Dali I couldn’t help thinking “What a dump.” The dusty dirtiness, the urinal-grey-tiled buildings, the aggressive taxi drivers… All seemed calculated to induce a feeling of weary disgust.
Judging a city by its bus station is never really fair though (Prague’s, for example, is one of the most godawful holes in the world) so I jumped into the first taxi I saw and handed the driver the address of my hostel.
Over the next half an hour or so I slowly came to realise that I hadn’t been in the old city of Dali at all, but in Xiaguan, the dilapidated capital of “Dali County.” I suppose this is probably what it’s like being a backpacker in the UK. The second thing I slowly came to realise was that not only was Dali a good distance away, but my hostel was a fair bit further than that. In short I ended up paying about 50 kuai, which when I think about it is only just over three quid, and felt like a bit of a fool when I realised there was a bus available for 1 kuai.
The hostel I stayed in was a refreshingly old-school hippy-ish sort of place – the kind that should be everywhere but inexplicably isn’t. The dorm was in what looked like an old shed, beds were 10 kuai a night, everything was on the tab, payable whenever, and there were all sorts of proper travellers to hang out with. The best perk of the place, though, was the close vicinity of Erhai lake. Apparently you’re supposed to pay to get on the pier, but I don’t remember anyone asking me for money, at least no more than usual. I may have just walked past them, thinking they were selling something. Which they were, I suppose.
Anyway, take a look at the lake. You must admit that it’s simply stunning.

This city itself wasn’t too bad either. The top end starts well with an impressive, if fairly standard, old gate…

…and for a few streets everything seems to be about right, with a fair few straight-cut cobbled pedestrian streets with tasteful shops along the side. Perhaps being English immunises you from being impressed with cobbles and tastefulness, but all the same there was a calm, relaxed air to the place, miles away from the hecticness of “walking streets” in Guangzhou or Beijing. A few streets down, though, and the whole place seemed to be one big building site.
Back at the top there were a couple of narrower passages with fairly decent cafes and women in traditional dress trying to sell grass to occasional foreigners. Come to think of it, there were surprisingly few foreigners around, especially considering this is supposed to be a famous backpacker hangout.
The lack of tourists became especially clear when I decided to take the cablecar up the mountain. It was a fair twenty minute journey to the top, but I saw not one person coming down the other way. It was a perfect day for it anyhow, and after a half-hour walk along the pristine mountain pathways I decided to jack it in and spent the afternoon lying on rocks, reading my book and looking at the scenery below.

Altogether, then, the city itself didn’t make much of a mark on me, but the hostel, the lake and the mountain are all the kind of slow-paced getaways that China seems to lack, on the whole, and it’s certainly somewhere I’ll be going to again.
There was also a very strange daytrip I took, but that deserves an entry of its own.

After leaving Yangshuo I finally got to go somewhere new. The sleeper train was easy and fairly pleasant this time – I shared it with Tabitha from the hostel in Yangshuo, and a few Chinese people, including a local travel guide who gave us some partially correct information.
After a good sleep (for me at least) we were in Yunnan, China’s wild south-west.

On first viewing Kunming looked pretty much like any other Chinese city, which is to say not particularly inspiring. After dumping the bags and having naps we tried to have a better look around and didn’t find much apart from pretty decent dumplings and a couple of unusual pagodas.

After an evening playing pool and a morning spent sleeping I took an afternoon to have a look around. Kunming has a reputation as a pleasant enough city, albeit one with nothing much to see, and the reputation seems to be pretty much deserved. There was a fairly nice, fairly small museum, some shops and cafes, but not much that you couldn’t see elsewhere.
On the plus side Kunming is comparitively clean and has a much slower pace to most of China. The view from the hostel balcony at night was quite nice too.

After a night out with some cool hostel people at a standard shit Chinese disco and another long sleep, that was my two days in Kunming finished.

The journey to Yangshuo was all too familiar – the same uncomfortable hard-sleeper where they locked all the toilets at midnight, the same unwelcome 7am arrival in Guilin and the all-too-familiar bus to the town itself. Last time I did all these things I got pretty sick (with giardia, I think) and my body somehow decided the same circumstances called for the same symptoms to repeat themselves, though in a thankfully milder form. It was all I could do not to be sick all over the bus.
Still, I wasn’t anywhere near as ill as the last time, and the town looked as awe-inspiring as ever.

I spent the first day or so lying in bed, trying to get better. I was in Lisa’s hostel again, and possibly in the same room too, but this time things seemed to have slipped a bit. The sheets were damp and the room smelled mouldy. Other than that it was much the same as before, only a lot quieter. It was nice to see these two again, especially, even if Jackie tainted the reunion a little by presure-selling me some sunglasses.

After I got better there was some time to cycle out of the town and see the usual bits of dramatic scenery, particularly Moon Hill, a large karst mound with a thousand steps up the the stange circular hole at the top. It’s a stunning sight, but one I’d like to see in the summer when there’s a little less haze.

In the evenings I again repeated myself by hanging out in the Balcony Bar, who served me potato salad and onion soup, the only foods I seemed to be able to keep down. I also met a few people of course, though not nearly so many as last time as the town seemed to have surprisingly few travellers this time. The only people I spent any time with really were my room-mates Tabitha from the US and Lisa from Norway.
To be honest this particular visit wasn’t exactly the height of excitement, but that’s not really how Yangshuo is supposed to be anyway. Though I was sick it was still nice to be in a quieter place, with decent food, places to unwind and beautiful scenery to look at every now and again.