Back from Yunnan

I'm back in Beijing again after my couple-week long trip to Yunnan. Sorry it's taken so long to post; I didn't have internet access for a couple of days, but now all is well. My camera is jam-packed with great photos, and I've got all sorts of cool stories from the trip. However, upon re-read, I realize that this post is huge. Grab some tea, and take a couple meals and put them on your computer table, because this might take a while.

If you remember from last post, we first were to travel to Kunming, then to Dali, then to Zhongdian (a.k.a. Shangri-la), and lastly to the small Napa Village outside Shangri-la. Kunming was wonderful. I could really imagine myself working here someday, actually. The weather is consistently comfortable the whole year-round. Typically, the temperature is 80s-60s during the summer, 70s-50s during the winter. The town is really lively due to the presence the prestigious and beautiful Yunnan University and a growing influence in the realm of South-East Asian trade. We stayed in the hotel/guest-house on the campus of Yunnan University, so the area close-by is student-oriented (read: packed with bars). But other than places to get hammered, there are fantastic little restaurants and shops that don't look totally corrupted by rich tourists.

The first night there, a small group of us (including our adorable Chinese professors) went on a walk around the neighborhood and found a relatively well-known local park called Cui Hu, which translates to Green Lake (pics: 1, 2). It was Saturday night, so tons of local musicians and dancers were out performing (pics:1, 2, 3), each act about 20 to 30 feet from the next.

The next day, we were paired up with students from Yunnan University and set to roam the town. Our 'guide' was a soft-spoken and short female graduate student who run us through the park again and showed us a bit of campus. We got to talking, and she was partly responsible for building up a lot of confidence in my Chinese aptitude that carried my through this trip. Here are some of the photos we took while on our walk: 1, 2, 3.

That afternoon, we drove to the mountains at the edge of Kunmin, where there sits Xi Shan (西山). It's a relatively steep and well-known climb, partially carved out by Daoist ascetics centuries ago. On the route up, there are all sorts of cool statues and little shrines dedicated to Daoist deities. Pictures here:1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.

That night, we hopped on a sleeper train to Dali. This was a bit of a strange experience. Each train car has about thirty 'rooms', which are really just three-walled partitions of the car. Each wall (other than the one that runs parallel with the train, which has a window) has three bunks: a lower one, middle one, and higher one. As things go, the ride was pretty comfortable, although damage to the train-tracks kept forcing us to stop every two hours or so on the 10 hour ride.

To be totally honest, I wasn't that impressed with Dali. It seems a lot like Estes Park back home. In Estes, there are fake log cabins that serve as storefronts, staffed by people in raccoon-hats selling kitschy tourist crap. Just replace the log cabins with buildings with glossed-green pagoda-style roofs, and the raccoon hats with traditional ethnic headdresses, and you've got Dali. Not a great an example here, but it gives you the idea.

I'm not being totally fair, here. Once you got off of the main drag, it turned out to be a really beautiful little town. Moreover, the afternoon we arrived, we rented out some cheap, rickety bikes and took a ride through the countryside (1,2,3,4,5). The day after, about half of our group drove out to Cai Shan, a historically-important mountain for the local Bai people who used to have Dali as their capital centuries ago. Very, very lush. It had that 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' vibe to it. When it comes to the scenery in movies like that, they really don't make that stuff up (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10)! And hey! It came with a number of beautiful fruit stands and larger-than-life Chinese chessboards. How could I go wrong?

From Dali, we bussed down to Tiger-Leaping Gorge, which is hands down one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. First we stopped at the upper narrows (1,2,3,4,5,6) and then wound our way through the gorge to our guest-house. It's a really cool place, this village at which we stayed. It's had the same, quite comfortable guest-house for the last decade (which provides spectacular views, I might add), but despite this, the town has remained remarkably free of tourists. Farming, and an itty-bitty tourist-oriented industry, is what keeps this town cookin'. This town, as it happened, also treated me to one of the most amazing meals of my life.

After we had gotten settled into the guest-house, Benji, another student on this trip who I would best classify as a combination of 'Harold and Kumar' and a 60's flower-child, came up to me and said, "Charlie, we're going to try and get dinner with a local family. You in?" I thought this was nuts. Who in the United States would host a group of four male foreign tourists who show up on their porch asking for food in exchange for money? With nothing to lose, however, we set off down a dirt path away from the public road on which we drove in. Soon enough, we found a small farmhouse with a woman in her late 20's inside. In my broken Chinese, I asked if we could have dinner with her. After making sure we knew there was a restaurant up the hill, she agreed. When I asked, she even let us come a little early to help make dinner!

These were some of the sweetest people I've met. They're ethnically Naxi, one of China's 55 non-Han minorities. The 20-something year-old woman we met (named Xia Chaoying) is a new mother; she had a 7-month-old boy strapped to her back for most of the evening. She lives with her husband and her mother- and father-in-law. When I asked, I learned that the family had been living in the same house for over 100 years! Grandma and Grandpa don't speak much (if any) Mandarin at all. They know only Naxi. Fortunately, however, Xia Chaoying spoke flawless Mandarin (due to the fact that she's part of the younger generation) and actually knew quite a bit of English from middle school and her days working in a tourist-oriented restaurant up the hill. Naturally, the food was fantastic, and with the backdrop mountains like these, and in the company of such fascinating people, it was an incredibly memorable experience.

Here are the rest of the pictures we took while hiking around the gorge: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18.

From Tiger-Leaping Gorge, we moved on to Shangri-La by bus. As I'd expected, Shangri-La was mobbed with tourists. A little unexpectedly, though, very few of them were white; most were Han Chinese from the east coast. Apparently the mystique behind Shangri-La carries beyond the West. The real pearl of this part of the trip, though, was the opportunity to stay with local Tibetans in their homes in a hamlet called Napa Village about one and a half hours from Shangri-La proper.

This was one hell of an experience. We were fortunate enough to arrive in Napa Village the day before a Tibetan marriage! The day of the marriage, we had a bit of business to take care of in the morning, and so unfortunately missed the ceremony itself, but from what I can tell, it was only about a half-hour long. The emphasis really lies in the reception afterwards, which my friends and I were glad to take part in.

A little background: Tibetan houses are huge. Which is a little odd if you think of how cold it gets there. They're really designed to hold large numbers of people for gatherings like wedding receptions. Moreover, Tibetan homes are also extremely ornate: beautiful woodworking, bright religious paintings on the wood paneling, and a shrine to the Buddha, decked out with fruit and colorful cloth, in every home. It is in this context that we found ourselves, munching on sunflower seeds and chatting with the locals. We learned that the marriage was between a local Napa villager, and a girl from one of the villages nearby. As we looked about the room, we saw about 50 to 60 people sitting and chatting at low tables around the room, which the immediate family of the bride and groom were sitting at tables in a horseshoe shape around a man dressed in a tall, furry hat and leopard-skin, giving a memorized, half-spoken/half-sung speech to the families. As the evening wore on, people came and went, particularly the bride and groom, who ceremonially eat dinner with their respectively families and away from one another.

But when the sun went down, the dancing began.

The form of the dance was as follows: You have two concentric rings of people, each with about 25 to 40 dancers. One group begins singing a traditional song and dancing around the circle to their tune. When they finish, the other group performs the same dance, only louder. It's a competition between the two sides that lasts all... night... long. They do not stop dancing until dawn of the next morning. Of course, we ended up bugging out at around 10:30pm, but seeing as they let us take part in the dancing the entire time, we felt like we had taken a lot away from it.

The family we lived with (it was me and five other guys in our home) was really interesting. The patriarch of the family of four is a government employee, working to help boost tourism to Napa Village. From our conversations with him and others, we learned that back in the day, Napa Village's biggest industry was logging. That turned out to be unsustainable, so with a little bit of government help, they've been reshaping Napa's image to be something of a 'dude ranch,' taking in foreigners to live with them a couple of days and see Tibetan lifestyles. When I asked whether this was seen as a good or bad thing, people generally seemed to be happy with the set-up. I think people really do like meeting people 'from the outside', and I'm sure they're more than happy to have that money flooding into the local economy.

Despite this, opinion of the government is not always the greatest. The family patriarch told me that he was really only a government employee because it paid the bills, and he really had no other alternative. He was surprisingly forthcoming with some of the sensitive questions I asked, justifying his loose-tongued-ness in that we were students. However, at one point, I asked him this question:

"Do you think China is becoming freer as time goes on?"

And he didn't say a thing. I asked if he understood my question, figuring I had spoken unclearly.

He said, "Oh, yes. I understand clearly. Very clearly."

But he still wouldn't answer. A pretty telling response on his opinion of freedom in Yunnan.

After living in the village for a couple days, we took small day-packs and hiked to the old Napa Village, back in the old lumber days. There are still a few people living up there, and I can absolutely understand why. Broad grassy plains run up to steep bamboo forests that top out in tundra mountain peaks. After we arrived and set up our tents, four ex-Boy Scouts, two ROTC cadets, and I hiked up to the top of one of these hills. A beautiful climb, the pictures of which are soon to be forthcoming.

Ai! Sorry for such a long, long, post. I just had a lot to say. My camera ran out of batteries soon after we left Tiger-Leaping Gorge, so I don't have many pictures of the Napa Village. I had my friends take plenty of pictures for me, so once they pass 'em off to me, I'll post them here.

Also, once I have a little bit more free time on my hands, I'll make some posts on the National Day celebration here in Beijing, and my trip to Xiangshan. Best wishes to you all back home and abroad!