Due to my insomnia amid the continuous blaring of off-key
Mandarin opera and stale cigarette smoke, I found myself aimlessly staring at
the walls of the sterile sleeper train cabin.
I’d already crammed a few dozen Chinese characters and
finished reading The Heart of Darkness, so in terms of onboard “entertainment”,
my options were sadly limited. Yet the
more I stared at the walls, the more I began thinking of possible alternatives:
count yaks outside, scroll through my camera until its already low battery
died, or maybe restart my blog. The
third of those seemed the most attractive at the moment, so with that in mind,
I began typing. Yes, I’ve
been terribly irregular with my updates, but since I had a bit (aka 9 hours) of
free time, I figured I could at least describe my journey through Yunnan, China
over the course of the last week.
Last Saturday, I presented my newly minted 10-year Chinese visa
to the glare of the border officer and crossed into an oddly deserted
Shenzhen. The approaching Chinese New
Year holidays meant that that economic boomtown was oddly depleted of migrant
workers, and so my group of five casually strolled the empty streets in search
of renminbi and coffee. Both were easy
enough to find, so we ended up killing time in the city. Eventually, we decided to catch the subway
over to the airport, when we had the rude awakening that the phone we had been
checking for time was an hour late. Realizing
that we only had about an hour to clear the airport, we sprinted through the
terminal, and after a brief battery related interrogation, arrived at our
gate. Our rush turned out to be futile,
though, as our flight ended up being delayed nearly two hours. We eventually boarded the plane, and I ended
up having a great 2 hours talking with fellow passengers in Mandarin after they
realized I could kind of read the inflight magazine in Chinese.
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| Gotta love Chinese massive infrastructure projects |
When I hopped off the flight in Yunnan’s capital of
Kunming, I proceeded to the baggage claim area, grabbed my bag and sat down
along with two of my friends to wait for our other two friends, who were placed
on the next flight from Shenzhen. We
waited, and occasionally strolled around in the cold, dry air (a nice break
from Hong Kong), and yet they didn’t arrive. Turns out their flight was delayed even longer
than ours, so at around 1:30 a.m., we managed to reunite and reach the taxi
stand.
Unfortunately, our reunion didn’t even last 10
minutes. At the taxi stand, we were
forced to split into two groups, and so we threw our bags in two different
vehicles, showed the drivers the same address, and hoped for the best. Our place, the IC serviced apartments, was
supposedly a 40 minute ride away, and so for a while, my friend Hannah and I
made awkward Chinese conversation with the cab driver about British soccer/football,
Michigan weather, and who knows what else.
After 40 minutes, he dropped us off, but at a very different IC hotel,
that is, the Intercontinental. Exhausted
and frustrated, we stumbled over to concierge and tried to find our way to our
actual hotel. Turns out it was 40
minutes away, and too tired to continue, we called up Klaus, Elena, and Pyone
about our diversion. We tried to
negotiate with the late shift hotel workers to reduce the room charge a bit,
but as that didn’t work, I ended up losing a good portion of my summer work money in order to crash in their overly comfortable rooms.
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| The site of my food coma aka the Intercontinental |
After struggling a bit to leave the wallet-killing down pillows,
I woke up in the morning and decided to utilize every complimentary amenity
that I had unfortunately (?) paid for.
So for the following three hours before check out, I ended up swimming
in my gym shorts, overheating in the hot-tub and sauna, and feasting on the
endless breakfast buffet. When my
Cinderella story ended as the clock hit 12, I lugged my bags out onto the
streets and with my entire group proceeded to the dingy long-distance bus
terminal.
We managed to find a fairly cheap bus to Dali, an interesting
backpackeresque mountain retreat four hours west of Kunming. When we arrived, we toured the old walled
city, ate adequately safe street food (a bit of an oxymoron in China), sat
through odd tea ceremonies and checked into a nice guesthouse. It may not have been the Intercontinental,
but that was a bit of a given considering our increasingly remote location and
our increasingly empty wallets. The next
day, we continued our exploration on bike to the stunning Tang Three Pagodas
complex. Over a hillside, dozens of
giant temples and pagodas sprawled, with an incredible view of snowcapped
mountains in the background. When the
time came to depart Dali, we found another bus towards another ancient city,
Lijiang.
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| Around Dali |
Yet the modern Chinese definition of "ancient" puzzles me. As soon as UNESCO awards a World Heritage
designation to a location, for example the old city of Lijiang, thousands of
identical, tacky stores spring up and endless signs in broken English
materialize like “AAAA Scenic Spot”
and “Auspicious Fortune, Cultural Heritage”. Yes, the architecture is still quite nice,
but the glimmering neon lights, karaoke bars, and McDonalds definitely detract. Nonetheless, we embraced this new China and
entered a deserted karaoke place, where I managed to perform a beautiful/ear-bleeding
rendition of Beyoncé’s “If
I Were a Boy”.
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| ??? |
That night, our new guesthouse managed to defy the trend of the
overly gaudy, non-historic historic district.
Located in a quiet alley, our inn was a traditional courtyard style
building overlooking the 15,000+ ft. Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. But before we could even relax, a minor
disaster unfolded: our sink exploded.
The hot water pipe turned into a minor geyser, until I played plumber
for a bit and cut off the water supply.
Nonetheless, the really nice hotel owners felt sympathy for us and in
apology gave us a complimentary room.
Just as in the Intercontinental case, our brief misfortune quickly
reversed. The next morning, we visited
another temple complex, before meeting up with our driver for the next four
days for our expedition of the mountains and valleys of northwestern Yunnan.
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| The view from one of our rooms |
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| "Archaeology" |
We spent that day along the banks of the upper Yangtze River,
where we visited an archaeology site at the first major bend of the river and
drove through and hiked the incredibly deep Tiger Leaping Gorge. I would post the video of what may have been
the most terrifying drive of my life, but one, I don’t know how to do
that, and two, I’d rather not frighten some of my
family members. Parts of the road were
destroyed (but hey, we’re used to that in Michigan), and no
safety rails existed to stop cars from tumbling down hundreds of feet to the
turquoise waters of the Yangtze.
Regardless, we arrived at the trailhead alive, and then hiked the three
hour circuit to the base of the valley and back. After sitting in the spray of the not-yet
polluted river and relaxing, we returned and drove over to our next
destination: Shangri-La.
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| A house near the Yangtze |
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| Songzanlin Monastery |
The city of Shangri-La has really only been the city of Shangri-La
for a few years now. Supposed historians
and Chinese tourist officials “officially”
declared the city of Zhongdian to be the inspiration of James Hilton’s
novel “Lost Horizon”, and as a result renamed the city to
spur tourism in the mainly Tibetan city.
This blaze of tourism led to a literal inferno, as most of the old town
eventually burnt down due to faulty electric wiring among the proliferation of
hotels. Nonetheless, the remainder of
the city and its monasteries were totally worthy of their hyped-up name. We were lucky enough to visit the largest
monastery in Yunnan, Songzanlin monastery, an enormous hillside compound, on
the first day of Chinese New Year, and so we managed to explore the place in
relative peace, as most Chinese families were celebrating the holiday at home
with family.
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| Shangri-La |
We were also lucky enough to celebrate Chinese New Year at the
home of a local Tibetan family. Our
driver had close friends in the town, and they kindly invited us for a feast of
yak, pork, and who knows what else at their cozy place. When we finally left and our stomachs nearly
popped like the Lijiang sink, we stopped by a local store and purchased some
sparklers to celebrate in traditional Chinese New Year style. The sparklers were far brighter than
anticipated, and after a while we went to our hotel and sipped on ginger tea,
played cards, and chatted until midnight.
The city rang with mortar-like explosions until I was concerned that
Shangri-La would burn down again, but eventually the surroundings quieted down
and we went to sleep.
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| Chinese-style sparklers, also I'm pretty much a wizard |
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| Beyond Shangri-La |
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| Hiking China |
The next day, we planned to continue our adventure to the border
of Yunnan, Tibet, and Myanmar, aka the 22,000 ft. Mt. Kawagerbo. However, our driver informed us about the
potential dangers of the high road between Shangri-La and the mountain, so we
re-planned a bit. We called the boss of
our driver’s agency, a bitter woman with an overly sweetened name,
Apple, to explain our change of plans.
She gave us around five obscure plans, and then repeatedly expressed how
“disappointed”
she was that we had arrived a little
late to breakfast and how we made her rebook our itinerary. Eventually, the conversation was going
nowhere, so we decided to head out to the subtropical valley of Liming, where
we hiked a bit and tried to find the critically endangered Yunnan golden
monkeys. We didn’t end up
encountering the monkeys, but like everywhere else in the trip, the natural
surroundings were excellent. Klaus and I
took a 3-hour hike on top of the sandstone peaks of the park while the others
slept, and we reluctantly left the park to return to the city of Lijiang, where
our sleeper train would depart.
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| Random Chinglish signpost from the park |
Lijiang devolved into a slight logistical nightmare when our
favorite tour advice giver, Apple, decided to call us back. She spewed complaints about our reluctance to
pay her online without any physical evidence of a company, our uneasiness to
book hotels without TripAdvisor ratings, and our decision to pay our driver at
the end of the week instead of the beginning.
At that point, she told her driver to stop driving us in Lijiang, even though
we were 30 minutes from the train station.
But again, everything worked out.
We found ourselves in a very nice park, returned to the old town for a
nice walk, and managed to affordably split the bill on a minibus towards the
train station with some tourists from Xinjiang province.
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| Adam in the garden post-Apple |
Random unlucky events happened all throughout the trip, and yet they always ended for the
better. I had an excellent week through Yunnan province, and I was thoroughly
surprised by the mix of climates, cultures, and people I met along the
way.
And with that, I’ll end my too long, train
time-killing blog.
