Hong Kong I

4.29.2011
In a non-caffeinated stupor my day more or less started when I tried to call my parents at the gate at Pudong international airport. As soon as my call went through a horde of retired Chinese tour-goers invaded my clearly available waiting bench and personal space. Fighting for seats they barked in full volume from across the airport. When it was time to board the plane the aircraft quickly filled to capacity with more extremely loud Chinese tour groups. These are the people that are taking retirement trips provided (presumably) by their former employers. Chinese grandmas and grandpas populate these tour groups, many had never been on a plane before, nonetheless traveled across the border to Hong Kong.
I left the Mandarin China behind me when the Chinese tour groups were grazed in the opposite direction by the florescent flags of their tour guides, the flags that they would live and die by for the next few days. In Hong Kong I was immediately presented with a humid tropical smell mixed up in the ping-pong like syllabic clarity of Cantonese. I knew by the smell and the language that this was a new country all of its own. And also because the first business I saw was a caviar bar serving winded jetsetters.
I stood in the immigration line with a constantly increasing number of foreigners. I was quick to get my carryon and person into Hong Kong as I sprinted through declarations. Upon official entry into the Special Autonomous Region I asked information how to get to my hostel on public transportation and if I had the right SIM card. I soon bought my ticket on the fast train to the city center and was whisked into one of city that I had always dreamed about traveling to.
My analysis of Hong Kong began underground in the metro towards my hostel. I felt I could look at people here because they did not stare at me with infinite curiosity like migrants and common peddlers might in the Shanghai metro. People got on and off the train, mostly Hong Kongers speaking Cantonese, but also Australians, Brits and Americans. Generally speaking young people looked fit and healthy, wearing new designs and classy dress; old folks looked older than in China but with the humble grace of the elderly.
When I finally got to my train station I felt a bit like a paratrooper dropping into the depths of chaos and disorganization; everything was new to me. I focus on finding my hostel and followed some maps and directions, crossed the rooftop walkway that felt a bit like a tree house, climbed to the 12th floor of an immaculate youth center and found my fresh and clean hostel. I checked into my room, the cheapest single in town at a cost of $80USD a night.
Once I got situated in my new room, I stumbled out of the hostel in hypoglycemic delirium. I searched for any restaurant with edible options. The first place I found was packed and the food looked good but the menu was in traditional characters and I didn’t have a clue what was going on. The place next door had a menu with pictures and English, so I got some duck noodles and was happy.
After the quick refresher I headed out to explore the city, after all I hadn’t yet seen terrestrial Hong Kong. I headed for a street walk which the guide book claimed was a taste of the old world. After riding the Island Railway to its end (HK gives its metros names instead of numbers) I emerged into a normal day in Hong Kong. Small streets lined with sidewalks filled with hurried workers and business people lay bellow the towering apartment buildings. The streets reminded me a lot of Chinatown (in Boston or San Francisco) because the shops sold dried meats and fish, along with herbal medicines. I snapped shots of giant shark fins and dried lizards on sticks while shop keepers watched me in amusement. Along the way I also walked around a hospital and saw some double-decker street cars. After a while the newness of everything was warring off and I decided to move onto Central Hong Kong to see some buildings.
This time I got off at the Central Hong Kong stop and headed for the ferry terminal. I walked on one of Hong Kong’s many tree-house like rooftop walkways through the financial institutions and five star hotels bellow. Along the way I saw lots of expats, to my surprise many Americans. Judging by their suits and tastes in eye glasses these Americans had been here since the 80s. The ferry I got on took me across the harbor to Kowloon. It was very foggy and I could not see buildings or the surrounding hilltops very well. All the same I walked on the water front. After a little walk I went to the same place I had lunch and crashed in my hotel room.

Yunnan VIII

3-19
In the morning I knew it was time to get up not when the rooster hollered at 3am but more when the Water buffalos started farting at 6am or so; once the funny looking beasts were awake they start eating and digesting. I was particularly fond of the water buffalos and they were interested in me too. The first one I saw was when we were first entering the village. She came up and greeted us all with big black eyes and loud sniffs.
Before breakfast the group toured a monastery. In the regional sect of Buddhism—which is closer to the Thai sect rather than traditional Chinese Buddhism—it was the beginning of the New Year. Traditionally people head to the monasteries before breakfast and give offerings but either 8am in the morning is not early in the village or people were still doing chores because the place was deserted except for a few orange robed boy monks. The temples shrines and religious statues were small and simple but touching all the same.
Breakfast was simple and soon we slapping on sunscreen in preparation to hit the trails back toward another village with paved roads. The trip started out downhill through hill side tea plantations. The morning air was cool and pleasant and we walked fast. Our tour guides encouraged us that we were going to make our destination in half the time. As we eventually hiked uphill and the South East Asian sun showed its might, the village couldn’t come soon enough. Some pathetic hikers refused to walk anymore forced our super-man tour guide Jimpa to whisk them to our destination on a motorcycle he borrowed from a villager.
After lunch I dug into my seat on the tour bus and rested the three hour trip back to the city. Outside were fruit, sugarcane and rice plantation. I saw the first evidence of mechanized agriculture on the sugar cane fields.
Back in the city we were treated to a five star hotel—I would have been fine with just a place with a shower. At night I walked around with a rowdy group of my friends. We were happy to eat at KFC and drink cold beer in the humid night. Later I walked around a bar district right next to the Mekong River with Annie—a friend from Brooklyn, Alex and Jimpa. Our last night in Yunnan was clear and pleasant; it was night to end a great trip in a city that smelled like flowers.

Yunnan VII

3-18
Felling better I ate a great Western breakfast. Today was the day to leave beautiful Lijian which by 8am was quickly becoming overrun by tourists. We were flying to the south of Yunnan province, to the prefecture of Xishuangbanna. The flight out of town was a simple 20 minutes. It was comfortable because I got my own row on the airplane. It really beat the hell out of taking a 10+ hour bus ride through the mountains.
At the airport it was clear that Xishuangbanna was a completely different place—the northern tip of South East Asia. The climate was once again tropical and the ground flatter. Huddling into a tour bus we headed toward the center of Jinghong to have our lunch and drop off our bags. Also leaving the airport was a tour bus full of women in their colorfully traditional South East Asian dresses.
After leaving the city, which is the first city of the Mekong River, we headed to the hills. It took us three hours to get to a place where the tour bus could no longer move. The bus got stuck in the mud and after Team Gucci hoisted enough logs into the thick brown mess the entire group set out by foot for a village deep in the mountains.
We walked through tea groves for about an hour until we reached the village of Bulang at dusk. The humid air was coming off of the cane houses. There was a pleasant warmth and coziness to the little hamlet. We took pictures of the sunset and the cute babies that were wandering about. The hills five miles in the distance belonged to Burma, not China. We took pictures of that too.
After dinner there was some talk that the villagers wanted to challenge our group to a game of basketball but with nine o clock darkness no one showed up. A group of friends and I decided that we wanted to get to bed so we found our accommodations on the floor of the house of a family from the village. The village was populated with an ethnic flock that had more similarities with Thai people than Han Chinese, known commonly as Dai people. This was mainly because they took most of their religious practices from Theravada Buddhism.
The house that we stayed in reminded me of the cane houses that I routinely visited in the slums of Ecuador. They were simple structures made of bamboo and flattened cane, the roofs were tin, there was an outhouse outside and of course there was no electricity. Before we went to sleep, we drank tea with the house’s matriarch. Our mandarin skills were at about the same level as hers but we communicated enough to learn that she had once been to Beijing but traveled back to her village because it was a much better place by far. Even though we only had the hard wood floor for a bed I was comfortable there and fell asleep soon.

Yunnan VI

3-17
A combination of tired white blood cells and dogy food meant I had to take the day off. The group was planning on taking a bike ride out to see a performance by Zhang Yi Mo (the guy who designed the opening ceremony for the Olympics). One guy from Team Gucci asked me “what you can’t do the bike ride?!” My only response was:“Are you joking me?!”
I spent the day sleeping reading. In the mid afternoon and the evening I took light walks through the alleys and along the canals of Lijiang. The old city is stunningly beautiful, kept the way it must have been hundreds of years ago. It is very easy to get lost anywhere but luckily there are maps on almost every corner, the only problem is that they are written in Chinese.
The shops mostly sell modern things like sushi and souvenirs. The city caters to armies of urban Chinese and a few foreign tourists. Regardless of tackiness, the old architecture remains and there are a few ancient walking humanoids that look like they have been living in the old city since the beginning of time. In the evening some friends of mine dragged me out for a night walk to do some shopping. I wasn’t quite feeling up to it, but I tagged along for a couple of blocks.

Yunnan V

3-16
The next day started out with the delicious banana pancakes. After breakfast we were given “hiking instructions” and then told to organize in groups ranging from the fastest walkers to the slowest. I was in the fastest; one guy had a knock-off scarf that we raised like a flag so we called ourselves team Gucci. We were six guys and one Tibetan tour guide, Jimpa.
It took us an hour to get to the top. At times we were almost running up the peak. At the top we raised our flags and then quickly began again. There was very little time to enjoy the jagged mountains and the snaking river thousands of feet below. Tiger Leaping Gorge is China’s equivalent of the Grand Canyon. The trail got warmer as we went higher up and the trail also gets more interesting. The end of the walkway fell almost immediately into the emptiness bellow. Along the way we saw a group of Korean tourists who we cheered on with the enthusiastic rowdiness of any group of American men. We also came across a goat Sheppard dressed in traditional mountain attire. I told him in Chinese that I liked his vest.
After having lunch at a hotel along the trail we made the boring decent back down to the road. The trail went through a mineral factory which was busy putting holes in the mountains. By the time that the bus left the mountainous road I got the idea that beautiful scenery destroyed by bad engineering to make this place accessible to tourists. Chinese people think they can completely control Mother Nature whereas Americans think that nature gives gifts that much be harnessed from the earth. The end result of the prior ideology causes great erosion and environmental destruction.
Our stop for the next two nights was the UNESCO world heritage site of the old town of Lijiang. There I ate some bad beef which floored me for the next two nights.

Yunnan IV

3-15
Leaving Shaxi in the morning I got to enjoy some morning light by the crystal clear river on the outskirts of the old town. The first place the tandem tour busses stopped at was a monastery in the hills where images of the Buddha had been carved into a mountain side until the youth brigades of the Cultural Revolution blew them to dust. It was a freezing morning walk to the top of the main part of the monastery. The climax of the monastery trail was beautiful but I was sure if I could walk a little more up the trail I would find something a little more significant.
I wandered up the trail and I began to miss my mountain bike. The trails reminded me of Nor Cal and the best mountain biking trails I could imagine. Climbing up a rocky switch back I could hear voices above me. It was a group of my colleagues and we hiked up the mountain together.
We ended up finding an untouched nunnery that was as old as time. Walking further we entered the temple associated with the monastery to find that two people were still constructing and painting the images of their deities. There were flowers blossoming in front of the wooden monastery. It looked like the ancient temple had been gutted a few years ago but came upon a little pity money from the government to rebuild what had been lost during the destructive frenzy of the Cultural Revolution.
Continuing on the trail we came to the flat part of the mountain where I could see nothing but trees and mountains—the first time this has ever happened to me in China. It was unstoppably awesome: all I could see was trees and mountains all I could hear was wind. There is a connection with nature that knows no national boundaries—only peace of the natural world.
On the walk down back to our tour bus doom we saw a tribe of monkeys as interested in us as we were in them. It’s always nice to see relatives. The bus took us through a valley known for stone carving and eventually had a tasty lunch in an agricultural and industrial town.
On the way up the mountains our tour bus caravan stopped abruptly and we all got out to go into a Naxi woman’s home (Naxi being the main ethnic minority of the region). This was in a village in which no one knew its name, a woman who was not expecting 40 foreign visitors let us into her home. With all that aside she offered us all tea and walnuts that we cracked with the bottoms of our shoes.
She wore traditional Naxi dress and told us she was a communist party member and she lived in the home of the former landlord. I looked around her house and found ancient farming tools and donkey sheds that have since changed their purpose. It turns out that Naxi people are an umbrella minority for many other minorities in the area. Many villages have different languages and styles of dress but if they were all to be official minorities they would get a place in the National Congress, which would make there be more minorities than Han Chinese. Outside a very old Naxi woman was working the canola fields. It was all a great site (see the picture of the woman in the field).
Back on the bus we burned through mountainous death roads on the cliffs of the steep canyons that we would soon call home for the night. By the time we got to our hostel we all became aware that we were surrounded by mountains and cliffs at a place called Tiger Leaping Gorge. I took a before dinner walk to a waterfall then had a simple night of sipping beers and talking about Giants baseball.

Yunnan III

3-14
Now that we were further west in China early morning light was scares. After a breakfast of the odd combination of drip coffee and one steamed bun the tour was led to a small village outside the limits of Dali. By the time we got off the bus in the village, the light was just perfect enough to snap a few great shots of village life. The village was a little too nice to be true. We walked through the streets as a 40 foreigner army of students and yet no one really glared at us too closely. This is an odd occurrence, a sign that too many tourists visit this town. The village was clean and beautiful and the blossoms were just coming out in the gardens of the white walled homes.
The goal of seeing this village was to farm a little bit and get a feel for peasant life. What we actually accomplished was trampling the villagers’ plots. We crossed into three garden plots, about the size of a plot in Dad’s garden, and picked cabbages and onions. I worked as hard as I could and for that my Chinese teacher, Miss Ding said: “you are a bad student but a good farmer.” It was a very nice feeling to work with some dirt in the middle of the massive valley in the sky blue air. I felt a strong connection with the natural surroundings in the valley and the small villages close by.
Once we had “sold” the poorly picked vegetables at the market we crammed on the tour busses to head to another tourist scam, a tie-die factory. There while I waited around for lunch I went for a little walk. I walked by an amazing aqueduct that pushed lake water uphill to service raised rice patties. I went down the road to find the most Chinese scene I was yet to come across. As the valley flattened out into the lake small farming plots were spread across, all the way to water’s edge—some two or three km away. Cutting across the valley, where I was, was a newly constructed freeway. It was still being worked on and not officially open to traffic but famers were driving their two stoke tractor-trucks over it and peasants would cross the road with their rice patty hats and their vegetables on their backs. I wondered how much peasant life will change when they can no longer cross the freeway. For a few moments, it was just me and China, a dialogue between a student and his teacher.
On the way back from the perfect Chinese scene a young woman came running up along the path. I thought she found something I dropped but she passed me, started to walk and then took out her cell phone. She was wearing elements of one of the Naxi traditional dresses and she wanted my attention.
My nice breakaway was ended by bad lunch and bad company. The bus ride to our mountain destination was the bus ride from hell. For four claustrophobic hours the bus thrashed up and down dangerous mountain roads, swerving around oncoming semis and tractors. Bellow the mountains that we were climbing you could see the construction of an impossible highway. Finally at the end of the road we stopped in an especially calm and peaceful village.
After dinner Alex and I explored the town of Shaxi. It reminded me of Bhutan to see kids playing with their brothers and sisters right outside the monasteries. Shaxi seemed to be a relatively affluent and lively place—a nice center to the high mountain village. We ended up finding a carnival at the night market. As the night went on the place picked up and we met some friends to nock prizes off the wall with baseballs and shoot balloons with bb guns for winnings—I won a coconut soda and oddly enough for a carnival, a pack of cigarettes.
The day ended in my cozy bed at the beautiful guesthouse that we stayed at. I fell asleep thinking about Balboa and how he claimed to be the first to discover the Pacific Ocean. As he came across the ocean, he claimed it for himself not thinking that millions before him had interacted with the great natural monument. Balboa may have felt once he discovered the amazing new place but there were plenty of people before him who also found it who did not call it the Pacific Ocean.

Yunnan II

3-13
Our first real day in Yunnan province was meant to get two tour buses (one big one full of non-intensive language students, and one small bus full of intensive language students) out of the big city and into the beautiful countryside. It did not take long to be outside of Kunming and surrounded by beautiful countryside. The landscape was full of free flowing beautiful fields with patches of dark greens interrupted by mustard yellows. There were butterflies fluttering all over and off and on I could see a peasant’s head working her land. We stopped and had lunch in the heart of the “Dinosaur Valley” (a location with a high concentration of prehistoric bones) at a model village. After the meal I trekked around the canal town and discovered the pristinely reconstructed town was completely deserted. Finally some peace and quiet!
The further we went on the highway it seemed the peasant lifestyle became more concentrated. The villages we passed through had no conception of a 10% GDP growth model and the communist revolution was something only important in textbooks. In the late afternoon we came into the large crossroads town of Dali. Dali was situated on a series of hills that eventually turned into mountains. Bellow the city was a glacier lake.
The bus caravan stopped next to the beautiful old town and we checked into a dirty hotel. Outside the streets were made more beautiful by the explosions of pink blossoming trees (momo in Japanese, not sure on an English name). It was already late afternoon but the tour led us to an ancient Buddhist monastery carved into the hill side. It was famous because the three pagodas at the bottom of the abbey were created in the Song dynasty about a thousand years ago. I climbed up the stairs to the pagodas to take some pictures and soon realized that ascending up the stairs were more temples. There were something like seven temples in all but because of a lack of oxygen and the feeling of aw I lost count. The temples were all recently rebuilt, because they were destroyed in the cultural revolution. Now they have a much more touristy feel. To my disgust I found gift shops inside the shrines right next to statues of Buddha and the various prophets and deities. At the second to highest level I found some prayer wheels which I gave a twirl. As they were spinning the sun came out and it seemed like the heavens opened up because I had awakened the giant mechanical prayer devices.
The group ate duck hot pot together and after that I went to the tourist old town for some evening drinks. I roamed the streets with a buddy from the Bay Area and somehow we were able to find cheap local brews.

Yunnan I

3-12
My trip may have started out with a bad push-off from my apartment complex. My travel group of 40 obnoxious (many of them drunk) Americans filled a bus and headed to the airport. The process of getting on the plane was slow with a group so large but after an expensive airport espresso I climbed into an uncomfortable middle seat at the front of the plane.
Sitting next to me was a crusty old Chinese man with a thick Shanghaiese accent. This turned into a bit of a mixed blessing for me as for the three hour long flight the man relentlessly tried to strike up conversation. He was aware that my Chinese language skills were beginner to say the least but nonetheless we were able to communicate vey complex details about each other. I told him that my dad keeps a huge garden and my mom is a practicing doctor. It turns out he was a generator salesman from Shanghai who spends much of his time selling units in Kunming, the destination of our airplane.
Arriving in Kunming was rough, the air was thick and the pilots seemed inexperienced in the bumpy transition back to the surface of the earth. Getting out of the plane it was great to swallow some fresh air. Walking to our tour bus the group enjoyed a sunset that reminded me of the tropical endings to the days in Ecuador.
After a group dinner I went with a few friends to find a Ferris wheel that we could see illuminated from a distance. Kunming looked like a very basic large Chinese city with a maze of communist bloc buildings, small cheap clothing stores and a frenzy of KFCs. On the walk to the far off amusement park however I came to realize that Kunming was a quietly laid back city of canals with a lazy climate that felt great coming from the hectic Shanghai. The moon shined against the water in the summer-like evening—it was like walking through ancient Chinese poetry. We walked along water ways and passed bright night markets but when we got the gates of the Ferris wheel we learned that the place had been closed for many hours. I wanted to hop the fence but my friends told me it would be better if we headed back. On the way back we stopped at a nice snack shack to have a few warm beers by the canal.