China Vacation II: Yunnan

I arrived in Kunming mid-day and quickly made my way to the hostel, Cloudland. Kunming is not a town with a whole lot of worth to tourists. Like Guilin, there is a serious lack of restaurants and street food. Unfortunately, the hostel had very good food, both Western and Chinese. I say unfortunately, because I am sure I could have found somewhere to eat and explored the city to boot, but the hostel’s restaurant reduced my incentive.


Kunming was a nice spot to do my laundry. But while I was there, I headed out to West Hill, a big cliff overlooking the lake and the city. The cliff was nice, as were the various little temples carved into the high cliff face. The surrounding countryside is littered with half finished Chinese Mcmansion developments and tiny farms, leading straight up to the city limits. Then, pavement as far as the eye can see. The lake is an obscene bright milky green color, with so much crap in it that even the waves and splashes are opaque green. The whole lake looked like a green tea latte. A dock worker with five teeth was confident that the color is natural.


Hopped a night train out of Kunming. After an agonizingly slow approach into town, I arrived in Dali in the early morning. Dali is an odd town, in that many of its hostels and restaurants are run by expats and the focus of its tourism industry is backpackers. The “old town” sits beside Erhai lake, in a large valley surrounded by mountains. The Swedish guys and I took a gondola up into the mountains directly overlooking the town and hiked along the old road there. There were a bunch of Chinese tourists at the start, some of which decided that a 12k hike is a good thing to attempt in heels. Nearly every woman who reached the chairlift down the mountain at the end of the path was carrying her shoes.


Dali is a nice town, but I was on a tight schedule so I left the next morning for Lijiang. In Lijiang I stayed at Mama Naxi’s, a family-run hostel in the backstreets of Lijiang’s old town. Mama Naxi’s hostel is a tornado of good food and disorganization. Mama Naxi is happy to help you plan your trips to wherever, but sometimes getting her to do so involves chasing her around the hostel as she finds empty beds for new arrivals, cares for the multitude of cats and dogs that live in the courtyard, and critiques and criticizes the staff in their waitressing or food preparation. It is quite an experience.
At about 1pm, the crowds of Chinese tour groups arrive to Lijiang’s once-pleasant streets and transform it into Disneyland. One of the biggest draws of Chinese tourists to Yunnan are the minority groups that reside there. This creates an odd situation where most shopkeepers end up wearing decorative “ethnic” costumes that would not look inappropriate in Latin America over their jeans and t-shirts. The Chines tourists also seem to get a kick out of foreigners, and would try to take photos of any they came across.

One night I went out to the bars with a guy from Morocco and two Danish girls. We started drinking with some businessmen from Hong Kong, and watched the strange festivities at the bar. The music was kinda weird, and the dance floor was set up like a stage and was surrounded by cops. However, the oddest thing was absolutely the drink auction. The owners of the bar made a Bloody Mary, than held an auction for it. Not for a charity; all proceeds went to the bar. It was just a regular mixed drink. And it sold for $20,000 yuan. That is almost $3,000 U.S. Dollars. The guys we were drinking with said the auction winner gives the drink to his girlfriend as a gift. According to my expert analysis, the whole enterprise was freaking insane. Maybe I am just not a romantic.

Mama Naxi arranged a van out to Leaping Tiger Gorge, and since she runs the biggest hostel in Lijiang, about half the people on the trail at any given day come from her place. The van driver demonstrated the typical Chinese driving method; lean on the horn and pass everyone, at any time, in any place, regardless of incoming traffic. Now, make no mistake, the van did not drive especially fast. No one in China does. But everyone wants to pass regardless. It could be because of the little engine-drawn carts that get the peasantry from A to B. These three-wheeled boxes are powered by an exterior engine that Henry Ford would have scoffed at. They run at about the same pace as the bicycle or donkey drawn cards, but the pull loads of unrestrained bricks that occasionally fall off the back.

After three hours of windy mountain roads, we arrived at the town by the beginning of the gorge, had lunch, and started on the trail around noon. It was hot. There is next to no tree cover until you get to the high point of the gorge, about the “28 turns” or switchbacks of the ascent. Along the trail are farms and villages, plus about seven or eight guesthouses. It is not too hard, but the sun is strong and because of the trip from Lijiang people end up doing the hardest part of the trip at hottest point of the day. I got to the guesthouse around 4:30. The guesthouse was cheap and clean, with a mountain view room for about $8. A Norwegian guy ho had been hiking with me sat and drank beer and bet how long it would take everyone else to reach the way-point.
When traveling on the cheap, you deal with a lot of things that make life harder. Long bus rides, crap food and accommodations, questionable hygiene, etc. At a certain point, you convince yourself that the difficulty of the trip makes you tough. I met some people that completely dispelled this notion, by comparison. In Lijiang, I met an orthodox couple from Israel,who kept kosher. Vegetarian food is almost non-existent in China, mind you, so this meant they cooked everything for themselves. Vegetables, mostly. With them, they carried their own miniature kitchen by necessity. But they were traveling easy compared to a Dutch couple who were on a bike trip. From Amsterdam. By bike. They traveled through Germany, the Balkans, Turkey, to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, to China. They said they were traveling to Melbourne. In Leaping Tiger Gorge, I met a friendly Brit with one leg. He did all twelve kilometers of the trek, with mountainous elevation change, on crutches. Planned to see Tibet the same way.
As I noticed the last time I was in China, one of the most frustrating things about the country is how the locals treat you like walking wallets to be plundered at every opportunity. You pay about $50 Yuan to enter the gorge. But then the locals set them selves up in little pissant toll booths at every scenic spot. The most aggravating example of this is the decent to the river, at the end of the trek. You pay $10 Yuan to take the trail down. But then, you have to pay another $10 Yuan to get back up. I don’t mind paying $20 Yuan (less than $3USD), but being nickle-and-dimed at every corner is not fun.
After finishing the hike, the next step is finding a ride back to Lijiang. After waiting for the prerequisite number of weary hikers to fill out the van, we headed back down the gorge via the low road. Decades ago, the low road was a different hiking route. Now, it is a partly paved, avalanche-prone vehicle road. In fact, an avalanche happened mere minutes before we embarked, and a large part of the hillside had been deposited onto the road and over the cliff on the other side. Trees and the remaining embankment hung precariously about a hundred and fifty feet above the road. The driver, along with every other person in the van, kept a very nervous eye upwards while driving over the gravel-covered section of the road in the fall-zone.
Mama Naxi gave me a hug and a good luck charm on my way out of Lijiang, which I hung off my daypack. I took a night bus to Kunming, arriving at 5:30. After buying my train ticket ticket, I went back to Cloudland Hostel to wash up and eat breakfast. I found a couple of British girls to go with me, I hopped on a bus for a short visit to the Stone Forest. The Stone Forest is a series of stone pillars and narrow canyons and boulders jutting naturally from the rolling hills.
Anyone who thinks America’s national parks are too disneyfied, too accessible and commercialized, should contemplate China. China’s geographically convenient wonders are ruthlessly exploited, and set up for the inevitable crowded busloads of flag-following tourists from the coastal cities. In the Stone Forest, tour groups wearing “indigenous” fake-leather cowboy hats or ethnic costumes shout and spit and point their way through the central labyrinth of paths and view-spots. At times, they seem like a nasty caricature of tourists from any country, simultaneously herded moneypots to be leeched off by the locals and shameless exploiters, gawking and mocking the local culture and people.
Luckily, Chinese tourists by and large are a tame lot, not likely to stray from the beaten, paved, railed, flag-led path. This left decent chunk of largely unoccupied park to explore, and explore I did. Deep in the back of the (not that large)park, there is a trail leading off the map to the “Eternal Mushroom”. Remembering the Chinese penchant for grandiose names for unassuming locations, I was skeptical. However, with time to kill and a desire to avoid the camera-wielding masses, the girls I was with and I headed out to see that fungus-like rock. The mushroom was predictably a non-sight, but on the way we saw pagodas, fields of corn and rice growing out from among the otherworldly rocks, and dilapidated shacks perched on the edge of muddy ponds. Really beautiful stuff.
After getting back to Kunming, I hopped in a sleeper train back towards Guilin.
Next, Yangshou!