After a bumpy 12-hour night bus from Kunming to Jinghong I had finally arrived in my last destination in China–the Xishuangbanna Region. My main reason for coming here was to see the ethnic minorities in the smaller towns. Jinghong, a ‘modern’ Chinese city, was my base since most buses originate from there. It’s streets are lined with palm trees and Dai women with headscarves selling grilled bamboo and pineapples. I decided that a traditional market would be a good place to catch a glimpse of the minorities that live up in the hills, since they only come into town on market days. Two buses and a lot of bumpy roads later I found myself in a little town called Xiding for it’s Thursday market. Because there are only two buses a day to Xiding I went Wednesday night and stayed at the only hotel in town attached to the bus station. A Belgian couple joined me, bringing the total number of tourists to three.

The night was very dark and completely still, we had to hunt down instant noodles for dinner at 7pm because all of the restaurants had shut down. Thursday morning we were jarred from sleep by loudspeakers that had been installed on the hilltop overlooking town. What I can only assume was propaganda continued for two hours. When I finally walked down the road to the public toilet I was surrounded by women in red and white headscarves and blue aprons–the market was in full swing.

Breakfast was a bowl of noodle soup across from an old Hani woman with no front teeth. Keeping it down was difficult when I stepped out into the meat section of the market where blood splattered the street and pig heads littered the tables. The market was entirely local, full of things locals need like shoes, vegetables, Chinese pop CDs and toilet paper. I walked around, noting the different groups of women with different costumes. The most surprising thing to me was that these woman were not dressed up for tourists, they regularly wore large, elaborately decorated headdresses to market. I took some wonderful pictures of the costumes and most people didn’t make a fuss about me if they noticed me at all. The women didn’t object to me drawing them but seemed unaffected when I showed them the end result.

It was refreshing to see the locals in their own environment, interacting with each other and having a good time. Traveling across China I have encountered large areas where the indigenous people are not Han Chinese. It’s sad to see how Beijing has ‘colonized’ these areas by injecting Chinese-style tile housing and tearing down all of their religious structures during the Cultural Revolution only to rebuild them for Han tourists now. I only foresee this forced integration getting worse in years to come as China continues it’s mad dash to become the next superpower.

I can now say that I’ve traveled by hard seat in China. Hard seat is basically the lowest class of travel by train. The seats aren’t terribly hard–they could be wood. But 7 hours sitting on a bench in-between two middle age Chinese men and across from a couple that fought the entire trip was something that I don’t feel the need to experience again. I didn’t want to call more attention to myself, I was the only foreigner as far as I could see, so I didn’t listen to my iPod of pull out my camera. At this point in my travels across China I’ve become so accustomed to long distance travel that I’ve been able to pass 6 or more hours with nothing to amuse myself. It’s almost as if you have to put yourself in a meditative state or you’ll go crazy. I know I was a constant source of entertainment for my seat mates–they watched intently as I ate my instant noodles and tried to engage me in conversation no matter how many times I told them I didn’t speak Chinese. After they seemed to accept that I didn’t speak Chinese they tried writing things out for me in Chinese characters. They were even more confused when I told them that I don’t understand Chinese writing. It’s just like all of the newspaper sellers and and people who hand me pamphlets–it doesn’t occur to them that I wouldn’t read Chinese.

Kunming is a big city where people go to get things done. You can get a Laos visa here or check up on the latest border openings to Myanmar. I went to Kunming to go to the post office. That may sound silly to most people but you really need to go to an international post office to mail anything bigger than a postcard and you might have to travel 25 hours by train to find one. I mailed postcards from the worst possible place, Xiahe, and a month has passed with no sign of them. I have intentionally avoided buying souvenirs because they take up space and usually aren’t something you’ll use or want when you get home. I once carried a saz (banjo-like instrument) all the way across Turkey and Greece for my brother and he never played it. This time I’ve been carrying two Mao propaganda posters around for a month and I was more than ready to get rid of them. Unfortunately, China has not yet discovered the practicality of mailing tubes so I was forced to carry around a water-damaged paintbrush box which became less sturdy with each bus or train I got on. By the time I got to Kunming its’ sides no longer formed 90 degree angles. China Post does a great job by supplying boxes and thermal bands that seal them tight. The postal woman was annoyed with me for filling the empty space of my box with newspaper and even more so when she realized that I wrote the address upside down. It really shouldn’t have mattered that I wrote it upside down–besides, that’s the way she gave me the box–but she went around and scribbled everything out while giving me the evil eye. (She really resented the fact that I wrote “up” on every side.) Hopefully my box full of posters, guide book, maps, Tibetan belt and so on will arrive at home in the next few months.

While I was spending a few days in the cleanest hostel in China I spent my time seeing King Arthur (in English!), eating sandwiches (with bread!), trying on more clothes (that don’t fit) and getting a blind massage. The traditional massage in China is done by blind people, as they are meant to have a better sense of touch. I’m not especially fond of strangers touching me but I decided to give it a chance and see what the fuss was about. You lay on a bed with all of your clothes and covered by a sheet or two. I’m not sure how much they can feel through so many layers but I was really happy to have it there when he proceeded to give both of my arms what felt a lot like Indian rug burns. I was in dire need of a back massage and although the elbows digging into my muscles hurt it did help to get some of the knots out. The worst part was when he massaged my face and temples, I would have told him to stop if I had thought of a nice way to say it in Chinese without offending him. At 20 yuan an hour ( a little over $2 U.S.) you can’t complain too much.

I decided to go straight to the Xishuangbanna region near the Myanmar and Laos borders instead of trying to visit the Western Dehong region as well. The main reason for this was the 40-hour bus ride between the two. The small gauge railway between Kunming and Vietnam is shut down for repairs and the roads in the region are mostly rock and mud, resulting in some really long bus rides. It seems as if anywhere off the main rail lines travel is slow and I need to figure out how I’m going to get from Jinghong (in Xishuangbanna) to the border crossing with Vietnam.

Dali wasn’t somewhere I really wanted to see but it seemed like a good enough place to stop. Only 3 hours from Lijiang, the minibus passed large fields with people working, picking crops by hand. The actual town doesn’t have much to see, only a few town gates which are being recreated (along with the city walls) for tourists. small, rounded mountains flank one side of the town and a large lake dotted with small nondescript villages. Like Lijiang, there were plenty of English menus with pizza and pasta. I even splurged on a ‘milkshake’ even though I should have known better. In all of my travels I have never found a good milkshake outside of the United States. Even the ice cream here is a bit… off. The ‘milkshake’ turned out to be chocolate milk that was shaken, no ice cream.

Aside from eating and looking in awe at the shops with imported hip hop clothes and music I finally found a deck of the cards I’d been looking for since Chengdu. From Chengdu to Kunming I saw everyone playing a card game with long, thin cards. They had symbols or characters on each side and they were held in one hand like a Western set of cards. I have no idea of to play but wanted them for their graphics. I asked a girl working in my hotel in Lijiang to write the name down for me but when I went to the store I was shown everything from paper cups to an electrical outlet. Once I figured out what type of store sells them (stationary and sports/games stores) I found plenty of cards. The sales girl probably wondered why I was so excited over a pack of 4 yuan cards.

On my first full day in Dali I had planned to take the chairlift up the mountain and walk around the top between a number of temples. I soon found out that the paths on the mountain were closed so I took a local bus up to a town on the lake with an English girl I met at the hostel. We were at very different places in our trip–I’m just starting out and she’s heading home in just a few weeks. My map showed the town right on the lake but we couldn’t find it anywhere. Little kids we asked around town pointed us around in circles until we finally came upon the water’s edge a few villages away. It was pretty, but not much of a destination. We wound our way through more villages with surprisingly no tourist stands and were greeted with genuine smiles from the farmers. Because I had no intention in getting in a boat on the lake I decided to leave Dali before I ate too many french fries and got spoiled.

Lijiang is a smaller town dubbed “the Venice of China” because of it’s many canals, stone bridges and cobblestone alleys. The journey here was interesting–a 12-hour train ride from Emei into the Yunnan Province followed by a breathtaking and often terrifying 8-hour bus ride over the mountains. The usual bidding war over me, the only Westerner to get off the train, occurred at 5:30am between a female taxi driver, chain-smoking mini bus driver and various old ladies selling dumplings. I eventually got to the bus station after a very long taxi ride where I wondered more than once if I was being kidnapped. The woman had shown me a note in English with the distance but I still haven’t bothered to learn just how far a kilometer is. The bus should have been an opportunity to catch the sleep I didn’t get on the train because of my snoring bunkmates but it started with loud Chinese ballads over the speakers and ended with even louder techno accompanied by a video of exotic dancers.

I arrived in the rain but the next two days were beautiful and clear. The old town must have been truly stunning before it was sterilized for tourists. As it stands now every single building in the old town is either a hotel, restaurant or souvenir stand. It’s too bad really, because the cobblestone streets combined with the rushing water in the canals and red lanterns at night combine for a magical atmosphere. I’m not embarrassed to admit that my decision to stay for three nights was a bit influenced by the many restaurants with good Western food. For a town so far out of the way it really has embraced Western tourists, even if we are outnumbered drastically by Chinese tour groups. I’ve managed to eat warm apple pie, an omelet and buy two **good** English-language books.

As you can tell, Lijiang has allowed for splurging. My first hostel was only 20 yuan a night (a little over $2) but I decided to go upmarket and found myself a single room overlooking a canal with a TV for twice that. Aside from wandering around the old town alleyways there’s not much to do in Lijiang. I walked up to a beautiful park north of town with a lake, temples and bridges with a great view of the snow capped mountain outside of town. Today was spent biking out to a smaller town called Bai Sha where I met with the local celebrity, Dr. Ho, who mixed me some herbs for the cold which has stayed with me since Xiahe. The townspeople were out in their fields harvesting corn and carrying the husks back to town in the baskets on their backs. The minority group in the area is called Naxis and is the last surviving matriarchal society–the woman did appear to be doing all the work.

Although I wanted to see Tiger Leaping Gorge I’ve decided to skip it. A lot of people have said it was their favorite part of China but I’ve heard drastically different reports on condition. Some people have told me that it’s difficult and if it rains the path gets washed away by waterfalls. However, some people have told me that it’s very easy and completely safe. My legs are still aching from my one day stint on Emei Shan so I’m going to head on down to Dali and get some information on possible routes to Xishuangbanna and on to the border crossing with Vietnam. I’ve heard the train line from Kunming is not longer running but I’m not quite sure if it’s possible to head East from ‘banna or if I will have to backtrack 17 hours on the bus to Kunming.

It’s not really getting any warmer as I head south. I’m still carrying around the coat I bought in Xi’an and the scarf and hat I bought in Xiahe.

My first short stop from Chengdu was Leshan, a town which is overpriced and moving as fast as it can toward Westernization. Towns like Chengdu and Xi’an are already very Western with McDonalds and skyscrapers but they still have a few pockets of traditional buildings. Leshan consists mostly of large tile-covered ‘modern’ buildings. The town has one tourist attraction–the largest Buddha in the world. Since it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site prices have doubled and it’s nearly impossible to see the Buddha through the swarm of Chinese tour groups. I took the ferry to the far island and made my way through the temple complex to the other island where the Buddha is. The tourist literature proclaims “The mountain is the Buddha! The Buddha is the mountain!” Which is true in a way because the Buddha is the entire height of the mountain, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a mountain–it’s more like a large hill. Still, it is impressive when you get up close to it. A small path has been carved into the side of the hill so tourists can walk from the head down to the feet. I fought my way through the tour groups to the first viewing platform but couldn’t get any further. People were shoving each other to get to the railing and I decided that although eventually I may be able to fight my way down I may get hurt in the process. I waited back at the top for the tour groups to disperse but they just kept coming. After a while I gave up, went back to town, ate some dumplings and caught a quick bus to Emei Shan.

Mount Emei, a holy Buddhist mountain, is only 40 minutes from Leshan. A lot of people hike the entire route to “The Golden Summit” and back down again over the course of 2-3 days. However, I decided that one day of hiking was enough for me and took a bus halfway up the mountain to start. The mountain is covered with temples interconnected with stone steps. There are very few flat surfaces, you spend most of your time walking up or down steps. I started at a nice but overcrowded temple called Wannian Si. It had some interesting statues of Buddha riding an elephant and distinctive architecture. I watched in amusement as the Chinese tourists were taught how to pray and bow with incense by their tour guides for their photo op. Following the crowds I walked down toward another small temple sitting over a waterfall and further on to the “joking monkey zone.” Mount Emei has a lot of indigenous monkeys. They’re quite small and harmless but tourists find them extremely entertaining for some reason. I quickly headed back up the mountain to a small Monastery called Hongchunping. Along the path I only saw a handful of people and I was finally able to enjoy the trees and streams. The monastery wasn’t especially impressive but I was happy to get away from the crowds. Just below the site was a small shack where a friendly woman cooked me fried noodles with vegetables while I watched a Chinese soap opera on her satellite TV. She seemed very pleased with me and my interest in her little white dog named Toto. Walking back down the steps wasn’t as difficult but when I got to the path that could lead me down to a bus or across to more temples it started to rain. Apparently I was very lucky because it appears to rain here most of the time. Overall the mountain was unimpressive but worth a day if you have the time.

I am not sure which route I will take over the next few weeks. I have a 12-hour train tonight followed by a 6-hour bus ride to Lijiang in the Yunnan Province. After that I may head north to Tiger Leaping Gorge if I’m feeling athletic. I would like to see a number of areas in the South and Western areas of the province but am torn between spending a lot of time there and heading into the northern area of Vietnam or heading all the way out to Yangshuo near Guilin.

Chengdu isn’t somewhere where there are a lot of sites to see, but it’s a large city on my way South to the Yunnan Province. From Xiahe I took the same 6-hour bus ride back to Lanzhou followed by a train ride that lasted over 20 hours. On the bus I sat next to a traditional Xiahe woman who smelled like yak butter and threw up into little baggies. A little boy and his grandpa, wearing his traditional blue government-issue jacket, slept in my section on the train. The little boy was completely terrified of me.

The Sichuan Province is mostly known for it’s spicy cooking and giant pandas. Although I’m pretty sure I’ve seen pandas in a zoo in the U.S. I thought it would be interesting to see a large number at once. China’s breeding center in Chengdu is considered a “national treasure.” It’s a bit better than foreign zoos but not nearly as advanced as a similar facility would be in the Western world. In the video we were shown the workers didn’t even use gloves when picking up and treating newborns. In the section housing young pandas a worker teased one panda so they would beg on their hind legs for food–I don’t see how this is helping with reintroducing pandas into the wild. In any case, the pandas were awfully cute.

Chengdu also has a large number of tea houses. A temple I went housed hundreds of people talking and drinking tea. When I wandered around the complex I saw people singing in a small orchestra, lots of older people playing board games and checkers and women dancing in unison to an accordion. It seemed as if people really were enjoying the last sunny afternoon of the national holiday.

Tomorrow I plan to take a bus South to Leshan and Emei Shan before heading South into the Yunnan Province.

Hopefully nobody was too worried that I was somehow “detained” in China. I am now in Chegdu and it has been a bit more difficult than Japan to connect to the internet (and upload files) so it has taken me a while to post new entries. I am backdating them so please check out entries before this one. The gallery should also get an updating soon as well. Thanks for reading!

After Xi’an I headed West again. Another sleeper train took me to Lanzhou, the largest city in the Gansu Province, where I immediately caught a six hour bus to a small mountain town called Xiahe. The town has a large Tibetan influence because of the Buddhist Temple founded there which has a famous pilgrim’s walk of prayer wheels and stupas. The town’s population includes 1,000 monks, Tibetan nomads, Chinese Muslims and Han Chinese. The weather had been getting colder since leaving Beijing and I was able to pick up a jacket in Xi’an but I was unprepared for a few days at 3,000 meters. Mornings were 30 degrees feirenheight and afternoons only reached into the 50’s.

The town was quite small but it did have a modern section where the Han lived. Every day the townspeople walked around town wearing long sheepskin coats, guiding yaks and donkeys. The woman wear their hair in two braids fastened at the bottom, a lot like Peruvian woman around Lake Titticaca. Mixed in with the traditional townspeople were monks with shaven heads and long maroon and dark pink robes. Interestingly, the monks acted like anyone else in town, talking on cell phones and watching TV in restaurants. While I was drawing at the large temple a monk took great interest and invited me back to his living quarters. We ate bread and drank a strange salty tea and saw his English lessons and sketchbook. When I asked who he talked to on his phone he told me that he talks to his monk friends in town. I also figures out why men’s pinky fingernails are so long–the better to clean their ears.

Another day a few people I had met and I rented a minibus to take us out into the grasslands and more traditional villages. We stopped at one monastery that turned out to be a big cave surrounded by prayer flags. None of the monks or pilgrims spoke English so we blindly walked into the pitch black cave. We would stop, thinking we were at the end until we saw a flicker of a candle or heard voices. The path got increasingly slippery and narrow until we came upon a small opening. We all decided that we wouldn’t go in until a young monk came along and dragged me into the opening. The others stayed behind and I found myself in complete darkness following a monk through mud-covered tunnels and climbing up large walls of rocks into the darkness–not knowing if I would hit my head or drop 14 feet. After every new opening I told the monk I didn’t want to go in Chinese. He would insist that I follow him. After what seemed like a long time with no carvings or light in sight I started to get worried. He was even more insistent that I go on and I broke down saying “I don’t understand” and “I don’t want to” in Chinese–the only phrases I knew. After a small panic attack I heard the voices of the the others and I had apparently gone full-circle. There were no carvings or statues in the cave–only mud and a lot of slippery rocks. We could only assume it was another pilgrim’s path that had some spiritual meaning. I emerged with only a few scrapes on my hands and covered in a lot of mud. Below is a picture of the cave opening.

I originally wanted to travel from Beijing to Pingyao, a small city with original city walls, but all of the trains were full. October 1st–7th is China’s national holiday, a time when everyone in the country has the week off work. Because everyone wants to travel at once there is a tremendous shortage of tickets to just about anywhere within China. Technically, you can book a hard sleeper class ticket four days in advance but whenever I tried, either through a travel agent or the train station, all tickets were sold out. Most tickets are hoarded and given away as favors to friends or influential people. Eventually I gave up my plans to go to Pingyao and went ahead to Xi’an, home of the famous terracotta warriors. I had to book a soft sleeper at double the price of the standard ticket but I feared I would never get out of Beijing.

I had fairly low expectations of the terracotta warriors based on what I’d heard from other travellers. Apparently they are the most publicized site in China, which astounds me when you think about the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. I arrived from my 12 hour train ride in the morning and immediately booked my ticket out of Xi’an–I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened. The public bus line wound around itself four times and for once I wished that there was the usual pushing and shoving to get to the front. After a 45 minute wait for the bus and hour bus ride I entered the museum. It was a madhouse. Crowds of Chinese tourists were being lead around by tour guides with flags, people pushed in to the railings 5 people deep and everyone took flash pictures of themselves in front of anything they could find. There are two buildings housing the majority of the dig as it was discovered but I was shocked to see only a few hundred warriors altogether. I saw posters and photographs displaying more warriors but they were either on loan or never existed, I’m not quite sure. After throwing a few elbows around to get on a bus back I felt I had seen enough.

Xi’an surprised me though. I had heard it was horribly polluted and just another big city to get out of. Instead, I found a bustling city with lots of students and young people out flying kites, shopping and enjoying their holiday. The main shopping district was very modern but it was full of people to watch. I helped a college student with her English assignment and watched a group of kids attempt to breakdance in front of McDonalds. I also spent some time in the Muslim quarter of Xi’an, where one of the first Chinese mosques was built. The mosque was a beautiful mix of Muslim flourishes and traditional Chinese architecture. I don’t think many people realize that there are many cities in China with large concentrations of Muslim residents. I certainly didn’t expect to see any evidence of religion in China but that hasn’t been the case. Overall, China doesn’t feel communist aside from the giant monuments to Mao and the old men wearing blue jackets and matching caps.

A group of us piled into a tiny minibus at 7am for the four-hour ride to the Simatai section of the great wall. The rest of the group were dropped off at a different site and walked 10k on the wall to reach Simatai. I was content with walking the area around Simatai and not risking the narrow unperserved sections of the wall. Simatai has a large number of watch towers left which provided shelter from the intense winds threatening to blow us off the wall. The wall is not complete so there are many sections you can visit, all in different states of preservation. Quite honestly, I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s one of those things that everyone should see, once you start walking the entire thing is even more unbelievable. It was the first time in China that I had that feeling that I was really seeing something amazing, something I’ve been waiting for all of my life.