For the first part of my train ride from Chengdu to Kunming I shared my compartment with a World Bank group headed for a small village in the Sichuan countryside. In the middle of setting up a project to help Chinese farmers, they were arguing with Chinese authorities over whether the money should be distributed as grants (for the poorest) or loans (for the better off). The government was in favor of loans. I enjoyed a lively discussion with a Nepalese man and a Canadian woman, and found, in a woman formerly high in the Singaporean civil service, the first person I had met on the road with a good word to say about George Bush – her Texan friends spoke well of him, she said.
Kunming glowed in the sunshine I had missed in Chengdu, and I was glad to thaw out, strolling wide streets lined with flowering trees. I stayed in another backpacker hangout, the Camellia, opting for the more up-market main building rather than the hostel wing. With English-speaking staff, two travel agencies and cafes offering Western food just around the corner, it attracted plenty of travelers. Indeed, if I had been staying longer I could even have acquired a visa for Laos from the consulate on the ground floor.
I distinguish “cafes offering Western food” from Western food outlets. The former, often run by locals, generally provide some local food as well as the backpackers’ beloved pizza, French-fries, banana pancakes and beer, along with a laid-back atmosphere. The latter, chains such as McDonalds, KFC and Pizza hut, not to mention Starbucks, are becoming all too common in China, although MickyD’s seems to be losing out to KFC. (I was amused to see that the Pizza Hut in Chengdu was all decked out for Halloween!) My pick in Kunming, MaMa Fus, served up delicious chicken soup and fine pizza.
Western-style architecture is also popular, and Kunming’s city center was being remade in glass and concrete. I walked through a gleaming new pedestrian precinct in search of Muslim street food, only to find many of the vendors surrounded by the rubble of just-destroyed buildings.
Escaping the cold and rain of Chengdu had given me extra time in Yunnan, and I added a loop south through less-visited towns to my itinerary. After an evening split between the “English Corner”, where locals came to practice their language skills with travelers and ex-pats, and a beer with a fire-fighter from Aspen, I stashed some of my gear in the Camellia’s left luggage office and took a taxi to the southern bus station.
The 27-seat bus headed south on an expressway, the ride fast but boring, and I noticed that many of the crops in the flat fields were covered with plastic. The bus driver dropped me on the main road through Tonghai, my first stop, instead of at the bus station, but a helpful rickshaw driver pointed me in the right direction. The hotel I was looking for had closed, so I opted for the “best hotel in town”. Since the receptionist spoke no English, I pointed to “I would like a single room” in the phrase book I had bought in Shanghai, and she wrote the price down for me. My room, big, with a huge bed and a wide view, cost only 150 yuan (around $18), but required a 300 yuan deposit.
Tonghai, small enough that I could see the whole town from the top floor bar in the hotel, quickly became one of my favorite places. In the café across from the bus station I ordered a meal of beef over tart greens, Chinese cabbage and rice, by pointing at the pots of food, and paid less than a dollar. I saw only one other foreign visitor. And I spent a memorable afternoon on the quiet hill called Xiu Shan Park.
Camellia gardens and bonsai trees, pavilions and temples, moon gates and hump-backed bridges, men in blue Mao suits drinking tea and playing checkers – I felt that I had stepped back in time. And then, in the dusty Guan Yin temple, I found a group of women and a small boy performing a ritual. An arch joined the wall altar holding the statue of the Bodhisattva to a smaller altar, and the women, holding banners and gongs and chanting, were processing around and around, under the arch, the boy with them. He wore red boots and a formal, robe-like coat in Buddhist purple.
I settled quietly in to watch, careful to take no pictures, as I thought the activity was probably illegal. Although adult religious observance is mostly allowed in China these days (with the notable exceptions of Falun Gong and Roman Catholicism), children are not allowed to participate. Indeed, when I asked, during a break in the ritual, if I might photograph the boy, his mother quickly removed the coat before I did so.
After a while I headed further down the hill to what seemed to be a sports pavilion, where two men playing checkers invited me to watch. They banged the wooden counters down with such ferocity that one was cracked. Perhaps this reflected the influence of mahjong – I heard the clicking of mahjong tiles quite often in the tea gardens and back streets of Southwest China, and the posh Sofitel in Chengdu had a notice asking visitors to play in a special room so as not to disturb other guests.
Pausing at the foot of the hill to consult my map, I was suddenly surrounded by the women from the Guan Yin temple, and the boy’s mother insisted that I go with them to her house for dinner. This was one day when I really regretted my inability to speak Mandarin, but we managed to communicate a little using my phrase book. She lived in an apartment in a middle-aged block, with a big TV and stereo, a floor fan and a fridge in the main room. From the gallery kitchen a procession of stir-fried dishes emerged, with tea and bananas offered before the meal and chocolates afterwards. It seemed to be the boy’s sixth birthday, and his father and grandparents were doing the cooking.
From Tonghai it was another two and a half hours further south to Jianshui, but this time the bus took bumpy rural roads – those in the know try to avoid the back seats on Chinese buses, as you can find yourself airborne. I got occasional glimpses of an almost empty expressway, but found the minor roads much more interesting, shared by buses, trucks, motorbikes, bicycles, and bullock, horse and donkey carts – but few cars. We wound our way around shaggy hills and past flat paddy fields, through villages and towns, and past one busy mud brick factory.
The only other foreigners I saw in Jianshui were a lone German man I had already encountered in Tonghai, two couples, and a small French tour group, and I had my choice of rooms at the beautiful Zhujia Huayuan Kezhan. This traditional Qing dynasty home, set in carefully manicured gardens, is a combination museum and hotel. I was enchanted by my room, off a side courtyard, its old-style four-poster bed covered with a lovely quilt embroidered with a dragon and a phoenix, and by the complex itself, a series of quiet stone courtyards and lavishly carved wooden buildings full of traditional furnishings, including an ancestral altar.
A modern market bustled just outside the peaceful compound: while some vendors sold from fixed stalls, others had brought their produce in on bicycle-drawn carts. Women wearing broad-brimmed straw hats mingled with others in minority-style headscarves. Although some of the baskets and pots would have made good souvenirs this was not a tourist market, and foodstuffs predominated.
Further on I found the past again in the Confucius Temple, part meticulous restoration and part ancient wood and cobwebs. Outside the main temple building a tall wooden frame, guarded by dusty stone lions, held two sets of eight bronze bells, and one man-sized bell hung alone from its own braced and decorated frame. A group of men, dressed in ground-length ivory robes under orange jackets, with ivory mortarboards on their heads, gathered in front of the temple and began a concert of traditional music. For a while I was their only audience.
A trip out of town to the Zhang Family Gardens in Tuanshan village turned up less magic but more reality. The village seemed in bad shape, with empty buildings and decaying paint, although at least one home boasted a small TV. But piles of corn and sweet potatoes spoke of a recent harvest, and a group of smiling older women had gathered for a communal meal in a central compound. I had bargained for a ride to the village with a group of drivers in Tonghai and wound up on a wooden seat in an open motorbike rickshaw. This gave me an excellent if windy view both of the agricultural countryside, and of the stonecutters’ section on the edge of town.
Another rural bus ride delivered me to “Tin City”, a.k.a. Gejiu, with its Golden Lake nestled at the foot of steep cliffs. The lake is recent: in 1954 the ground collapsed under half of the original downtown, dropping it into a limestone cavern. The town made the best of the situation, building a promenade around the lake and turning it into a park. I reached the top of the cliffs on the eastern side by cable car, but found the ride so scarily steep that I decided to walk back, down all 2,660 (numbered) steps.
I also spent time in Baohua Park, at the southern end of town, which I found rather schizophrenic. The park proper included the ugliest Buddha I have ever seen, covering the entrance to a cave; some children’s rides; a few truly depressing animal cages; several tai chi areas; a shuttlecock court and a walkway lined with tombs marked with red stars. But at the far end I found a faded but atmospheric Taoist temple, dating back to the 1600s. Both the temple and the park had a monkey motif, perhaps the rare Yunnan snub-nosed monkey?
Gejiu was also memorable for an admirable “point and stir fry” restaurant hidden behind a posh new hotel. After I indicated that spicy food was fine, I was served superb sliced pork in pepper oil, with my choice of veggies.
While I was in town the edge of a typhoon brought cold, windy, grey weather, driving me indoors and in desperate search of something to read. With very few exceptions, bookshops in China, even those called Foreign Language Bookstores, are terrible places to find English-language novels: plenty of dictionaries and text books, yes, but novels, no. Chinese school children must be developing a really strange view of the West, as I often saw, for example, “Black Beauty” next to D. H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”.
Thinking I might work on at least reading Mandarin, I bought the “New Age Little Chinese-English Dictionary”, alphabetized by pinyin rather than organized by characters, which would prove useful later. Then I retreated to my hotel with an abbreviated copy of “Wind in the Willows” (a childhood favorite) and “The Scarlet Letter” (which I had never read). Once I left Kunming, only Chinese-language TV was available, and I had in fact become quite absorbed in a Chinese soap opera, easy enough to follow even without understanding the dialog.
It was time to head north, with a stop at Shilin on the way back to Kunming. Shilin, the Stone Forest, was overrun with tour groups – big Chinese tour groups. Most people visit Shilin as a day trip from Kunming, but I planned to spend the night in the park, thinking I might have it myself in the morning. Wrong: the Chinese groups arrived very early. Still, it was possible to find all the solitude one could want by walking beyond the main paths.
The Stone Forest, a remarkable maze of jagged, grey, limestone pillars, is a National Park, but this has a different meaning in China than in the US. Rather than being maintained as a wilderness area, this National Park is literally a park, with mown grass, cultivated flowerbeds, paved walkways and the odd pavilion. A number of the rocks are decorated with carved, red-painted Chinese characters. Men and women from the local Sani minority group sell their embroidery, but with plenty of Chinese customers around I was left alone.
Another “point and stir fry” place just outside the park border provided a good, cheap meal: baby fava beans, cauliflower and mushrooms, along with shredded pork. Breakfast, as usual, was less memorable: so after returning to Kunming and checking back into the Camellia I indulged in scrambled eggs and hash browns at the City Café.
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