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.