So where we left off we had just arrived in Kunming and were very
happy to have arrived in relative civilization. Kunming was actually
very nice; our journey for better or worse got successively less nice
from then on.
We spent one day in Kunming just veging. We were super excited to
just sit back and watch movies for a day or something. It's nice when
you are in a foreign country and also happen to not be a missionary,
you can do lots of comfort activities, like sleep all day or watch
secular but familiar looney toons or disney. Doing something like
this proved way harder than we thought, though, since in China we
can't watch youtube because it's censored, and we can't download
movies on Nicole's Kindle outside of the US, we found out. We thought
we had some salvation in our Hostel's "movie room" but after spending
way too long drooling over the movie list trying to decide what we
would watch first, the front desk said that they had none of the
movies we had picked, but had a large selection of Kung Fu and Anime
movies. We finally found a dusty copy of "Stranger than Fiction" and
relished the ease of the television's glowing loving, loving glow.
Other than that we contented ourselves in walking around the nice
town, indulging on a Dairy Queen chocolate dunked soft serve ice cream
cone, and watching the Chinese masses wander around on their weekend.
The Olympics are usually on at the hostels we stay at and that has
been fun to watch. Like most countries, I suppose, the Chinese only
seem to show the clips where their athletes are winning, so we end up
watching the chinese destroy their opponents in Ping Pong and
Badmitton.
At length we figured out how to continue on our journey northward.
Our bus left late-ish in the afternoon the next day so we didn't get
to our next destination, Lijiang, till dusk. So we found out that the
summer time is heavy tourism time for the Chinese. Chinese tourism
has exploded the last few years, and Lijiang was packed with Chinese.
It's very unlike Thailand in that tourism there was dominated by
foreigners, and unlike India in that there were any tourists that
weren't religious pilgrims. You would have thought Lijiang was
Disneyland with the number of people that were there, and the number
of hotels that were full. Nicole and I felt like Mary and Joseph of
old as we lugged our enormous bags from guesthouse to guesthouse
begging for a place to stay after a long journey. Finally we went to
one place that said they were full, but they knew of another place
that had an open room. This other guesthouse even said they'd send
someone to meet us and take us there! It was a blessing. However,
the walk ended up being about 20 minutes and we were still totally
exhausted.
The streets got really crowded as we walked through the "Old Town"
where there is a lot of traditional architechture. We were pushing
our way through the crowds, probably knocking over inocent children
with our backpacks at every turn, when we came upon a street food
festival we refferred to lovingly as the smorgesbord. As soon as we
got a room at our new place to stay we threw our bags on the bed and
headed straight for the smorgesbord. We hadn’t eaten much other than
cookies and peanut milk on the bus, so we were basically to the
“crazy” hungry point. We got ourselves shishkabobs of 4 mystery
meats—we never found out what they were—dumplings, and fried rices
steamed in a pineapple bowl. It was delicious. After the food fest
winded down I started to feel really dizzy and faint, though, and by
the time we got back to our guesthouse, I knew something was really
wrong with me. My bowel movements have been like flood or famine
during our whole trip. I’d usually go 3-4 days without ‘going’, but
around the end of India up to Lijiang it had been about 3-4 times a
day and not pretty. We assumed it was a stomach bug and Nicole gave
me some extra antibiotics that she had and said a sweet prayer that I
would get better. Nicole continues to be my miracle girl like she was
before her mission, and we have been constantly blessed by miracles
that happen at her petition. True to form I woke up the next morning
feeling like a new man, so we went out to see the city, now that we
didn’t feel like the world was coming to an end.
Lijiang was beautiful. Our guidebook said that it has one of the best
collections of traditional architechture in the country. All of the
buildings have the terracotta tile roofs that slope down and scoop out
at the corners like you see on pagodas, and all of the shops and
guesthouses have wooden signs with golden characters carved on them.
The stone walkways are all too narrow for cars, so thankfully it’s
only foot traffic. The alleys are all lined with a small canal of
clear water and there are fun carved bridges over creeks running
through the middle of town. It was really a neat place that would
have been fun to stay for a bit if it wasn’t so crowded and thus
expensive. But that second day we were there we did get a chance to
see a lot of it.
China has I don’t know how many several minorities all over the
country, and the local tribe in Lijiang are the Naxi. It’s actually a
female dominant society where family name and inheritances are passed
along through the female, and the villages are/were run by female
elders. Traditionally, the ladies wouldn’t get married, but would
have “walking” marriages. When a girl turned 13, she didn’t have to
sleep in the common room any more, and she got her own bedroom. She
would then be able to have as many lovers as she wanted for the rest
of her life. Her current lover simply had to “walk” to her place in
the evening, then “walk” back to his mother’s place in the morning.
When the child was born, no effort was made to determine who the
father was, and the child would live with the mother and her family,
and so forth. Pretty strange, and I guess less and less common—we
didn’t seen anything like it—but Nicole and I thought it would be kind
of a bummer to grow up without a male role model that a father should
be. Likewise a man should have a chance to raise his child. Oh well,
the more we see, the more grateful we become for the gospel.
We did however stumble upon a Naxi cultural center of sorts, and
watched some ladies in their blue aprons and blue sort of flat caps
doing a traditional dance. We also bought some sweet potatoes that
they sell here as street fare from an ancient lady shaped like a box
sitting in her traditional garb under an umbrella on an alleyway
corner.
We tried to find an internet place before our bus departed, and
finally managed to wander into a cafe that had computers in booths
with curtains for privacy (gross!). The kid at the front desk didn’t
really know what to do with us for some reason and then didn’t end up
charging us when we left. We found out later that you need to give
them you chinese government issued ID to use public internet. I guess
they like to keep really close tabs on whos doing what on the web.
Since we don’t have chinese IDs, we can’t use the cafe’s unless the
person behind counter happens to be a confused teenage boy. The
government is weird here. That’s one of the reasons (besides just
shortage of technology in general in the places we have been) that we
haven’t been able to write.
Nicole let me have my first ticket-buying-in-Chinese experience in the
bus station, and the girl behind the glass smiled as I waded through
one of few full sentences I’d said in Mandarin up to that point. But
she told us there was no bus to our next stop Qiaotou (Tchow-toe). We
were devastated. But Nicole, with her infinitely better language
skills, was able to get us seats on a bus going to Shangri La, which
passed through Qiaotou. Yay!
We got on the bus and got our first taste of windy mountain roads on
our way. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous. We climbed quickly on
switchbacks and soon we were looking at steep, green mountains, huge
canyons at the bottom of sheer drops just off of the road that the
40-person was carreening on at high speeds. We Utah people like our
mountains, but I honestly have never seen mountains like we’ve seen in
central China. The busses honk as they go around every curve just to
make sure whoever would know they were coming. Still way more honking
than we do in the US. In America, the horn is sacred, only to be used
on very special circumstances. Not to sound incessantly every time
you overtake someone on the sidewalk just make sure they don’t all of
the sudden decide to jump out into the road as you pass. Oh well, not
a big deal.
We told our driver that we were getting off at Qiaotou just in the
nick of time. He apparently had no idea we were going there and
wouldn’t have stopped. We got off the bus and a taxi cab driver told
us he could take us to our hostel for just over 3 dollars (a fairly
big price for a taxi). Luckily we had a map in our guidbook and knew
that the guesthouse we were after was about 50 feet away. Tricksy
taxi drivers. False! They wants our money, preciousss. However, I will
say that taxi drivers here are practically saints compared to the ones
in other countries we’ve been to.
Qiaotou is a little, tiny one-street town that sits on the beginning
of the trek along Tiger Leaping Gorge. Nicole and I had read about
the hike before and thought it sounded like a lot of fun. It was a
chance to get out in nature, exercise a little bit, see some beautiful
scenery besides museums and temples. We definitely got all we
bargained for. The town itself is surrounded by towering mountains
and has always the crash of the river below as backround music. It
actually reminded me a lot of camping in Jackson where you’re never
out of earshot of the Snake River (wish we could have come with you
guys this year! One of my life dreams is to get Nicole out of the
boat at Octopus, hehehe…) The guesthouse we stayed at was really
quaint, we got some soup and talked about the upcoming trek while two
mangey kittens jockeyed for room on my lap.
We started out early-ish the next morning and the day was beautiful.
We were still amazed at how much we packed for a two-day trip (it
wasn’t a ton, but we still had other hikers ask if we were carrying
everything we brought for our 2 months of travel), and our excitement
for some exercise quickly faded as the trail got steeper and the
altituded started setting in. The hike goes along the gorge that
claims to be one of the steepest in the world, in terms of mountain
peak to river level. The trail we hiked was about in the middle of
the height/depth/whatever of the gorge and the view as we looked at
the sheer but green face of the mountains on the other side of the
river was staggering. I found myself getting vertigo just by trying
to take it all in. The first day of hiking was the toughest. Luckly
we brought plenty of water and goodies to keep us fueled along the
way. The hardest part of the day was at the 29 Bends (isn’t that just
a perfect Chinese name? It’s like the stuff of legend) We got passed
by a really nice couple from the US who hired horses to take them up
the trail. Jerks. J/K. We took a lot of pictures, and I imagine
they’ll end up all looking like the exact same picture, but it was
pretty cool, and hard to capture with a camera.
There are guesthouses all along the trail, but we took our halfway
stop at the Tea Horse Guesthouse. I don’t know how any of these
villages exist so far up the mountain, but Nicole and I took some time
to wander around the town of about 8 houses to see what was going on.
The guesthouse ended up being the biggest thing, but we did get some
good views of traditionally built houses with pigs, cornfields, dirty
kids chasing each other around their yards and wrinkly bent grandmas
yelling at them harshly and then smiling warmly in the next instant.
We had dinner with a couple probably in their 60s from Quebec. She
was studying Chinese in Shanghai just for the heck of it and they were
doing some touring after havind been apart for 3 months. They were
really nice and we had a good time with them. We noticed the room was
kind of stuffy before we went to bed, but there must have been some
serious mold in there or something because Nicole and I both woke up
having had nightmares of claustrophobia and being extremely congested.
Mine was something like hocking taxi drivers running around on narrow
paths with cliffs on either side threatening to push me off. To our
dismay it was only 1 in the morning, so we walked out in the light
rain that had started to the outhouse to pee and not be in our gas
chamber of a room. We ended up resorting to our old standby sleep
strategy of taking some benadryl. We woke up the next morning feeling
great!
After some breakfast we hit the trail again, still sore from the day
before but encouraged that the rest of our route would be mostly
downhill. The second day’s hiking was more beautiful that the first.
The peaks of the mountains on the other side of the gorge were jagged
like a giant saw blade that cut into the fluffy clouds hovering around
them (ya like that simile? I’ve been reading a lot on this trip, the
most recent auther being especially flowery). We also passed several
waterfalls and really interesting parts of the trail along the way.
Towards the end of the trek, with way more walking than we were used
to doing and the last of our goodies reserve used up as lunch, we were
feeling a bit gorged out. We hit the trail’s end at about 3:30 and
hung a bus back to Qiaotou where we had stored our bags for the trek.
We rode with some Spaniards in a minibus who said there was some
problem with the canyon road we would be traveling on, but didn’t know
exactly what the deal was. The deal ended up being boulders as big as
houses that had come loose from the caynon rock face and smashed about
100 feet of road to smitherines. So the process was that a van took
us to where the road stopped, and we got out and scrambled across the
boulders and loose dirt and rocks that had been part of the landslide
to where the road started again and there waited cars to take us the
rest of the way. It was a bit precarious, and one of the Spanish
girls had a panick attack the whole way across, but we made it through
our last mountaineering challenge of the day without major incident.
Once we were back in Qiaotou, we didn’t quite know how we would get to
our next destination, but as happened many times on this trip, we were
just walking on the road and someone ran up to us yelling the name of
the city that we wanted to go to. This meant that they had a car or
truck or van heading that way and were looking for people to pay
passage. We got some dinner and our luggage and jumped in a minivan
with a group of joy-riding Chinese twenty-somethings. The next stop
on the journey was Shangri La. Eventually, the van driver lady
stopped the van in the middle of nowhere. When Nicole and I got out
and looke at the 3 buildings within walking distance, we looked at
eachother and said “Is this Shangri La? Definitely different that we
were expecting”. We found out that the Chinese guys we were riding
with thought it would be a kick to get really into the Western China
experience and ride some horses. Nicole and I were not excited about
waiting around for the kiddies to go for their pony ride, so driver
lady said she’d take us to the real Shangri La while they giddy’d up.
The real name of the town is actually Zhongdian, but somebody in a
tourist scheme decided to claim that it was the fabled Shangri La. It
kind of worked, cause we found another bustling mass of Chinese
tourists when we got there. We actually didn’t find too much
interesting about the city itself, but there is an enormous monastary
just outside of town that we got to visit. It was enormous and
beautiful from afar. I kept telling Nicole that we had arrived at
Lhasa, the sacred city (capitol of Tibet, center of Tibetan Buddhism,
watch Seven Years in Tibet to get the joke). The monastary was kind
of its own city, with alleyways, lots of buildings, stores selling
prayer wheels and Buddha sculptures, and prayer flags and burning
incense sticks everywhere. There were several mini temple things on
the complex with huge elaborate murals. Tibetan architechture and art
is fabulously colorful; you should just google it as your reading so
you can get what I mean. But Nicole and I found the murals painted in
the mini-temples to be totally horrifying. I don’t know all I should
about their religion, but I do know they have good and bad gods. I’m
guessing what we saw in the monastary were bad variety, engaged in
such activities as trampling humans and other animals, eating people,
eating brains out of the tops of human skulls like a bowl, and always
wearing a face with the expression of “I just smashed my thumb with a
hammer” or “I’m passing a kidney stone.” It will be nice to go to
church again.
We’ve also noticed that monks tend to be conspicuously well off. I
went into a little souvineir shop on the complex wanting to get a bit
more of the lowdown on what this Buddhism thing was all about. As
seems to be the case in general, the monks running the cash box were
pretty much unable to explain anything to us, not even what their
mentras that they mumble hundreds of times a day even mean. Maybe its
just a language barrier, but Nicole speaks Chinese, you know? This
whole exchange went on with one of the monks while the other played
Bejeweled on his iPad 2. I don’t know what downside there is to
monkhood, but they’re definitely not going hungry. Again, I don’t
know everything about their religion, but it made us think about the
purpose of devoting your life to God. We’ve had the chance to talk
about the church and our missions with many people we’ve encountered
traveling, and I love talking about how we dedicated our lives to God
for the duration of our missions so that we could TEACH people; so we
could HELP them. Everything we learn in the Gospel is about making
the world a better place to live; about sharing knowledge; about
serving; about bringing peace. Again, I’m not trying to be closed
minded or arrogant—there’s a lot about these people’s beliefs that I
don’t know—but I have really grown to appreciate the Kindgom of God as
predicated by revelation. It just makes so much sense!
So it was also in Shangri La that we started freaking out about
various elements of our journey. First, Nicole’s guidebook is 6 years
old, and in China that’s a long, long time when it comes to prices.
Prices have in many places doubled and we had to do some serious
recalculation. Secondly, one of the DVDs we burned in India had
gotten some serious scratches and we had deleted many of our pictures
on the camera’s memory card. We don’t know exactly what we’ve lost,
but it was a bunch of stuff from Thailand Hopefully we can get it
back some how. Thirdly, we had both been feeling sick for the past
few days. We repacked the DVDs so as not to get so damaged, ate a big
brownie a la mode at a western cafe (food is always our comfort) and
replanned the budget so that we’d be a little comfortable. But Nicole
was still feeling extremely sick, and we couldn’t find the drugs or
the chinese words to even talk about it with the pharmacist. Things
were feeling pretty dire, and our options seemed few (TRAPPED, trapped
like rats!!) I gave her blessing that night in our room, and she
experienced one of several miraculous recoveries that we’ve had on
this trip. God is really looking out for us, even though we are often
putting ourselves in these stupid situations. He sure loves us.
After two nights in Shangri La we got on a bus to Xiencheng, our last
stop in the Hunnan province. The trip’s windy roadness, dangerousness,
mountainness, and crappy roadness was bumped up a notch, coupled with
most of our fellow passengers being chain smokers. Maybe I shouldn’t
have been, but I was amazed at how they just smoked any time and no
one around seemed to mind. “Get on the bus, light it up!” “Oh, my
neighbor’s smoking? I should smoke too!” “Hey we’re stopping to take a
pee? Pull out a ciggy!” “Hey now that we’re back on the bus, let’s
smoke some more!” “Uh oh, there’s no one smoking on the bus. Better
fix that!” Basically Nicole and I took turns riding with our heads as
far out the window as we dared and I’ve never been so car sick in my
life. We’ve had to take all of the China part of our journey city by
city because there is no railroad and no buses going long distances
(meaning longer than 10 hours or so). It makes sense since the roads
are so crappy; they probably don’t trust the busses to last longer
than that kind of a stretch. A super nice lady snagged us as we got
off the bus and led us to her wildly colored tibetan styled
guesthouse. There we met a Romanian couple who kept inviting us to
drink with them. They were really nice and ended up travelling with
us to the next few stops we went to. Xiangcheng was nice and clean
and Nicole and I celebrated we don’t really know what by going to a
Hot Pot restaurant. It was my first real china hot pot, and very
exciting. It was even within our newly prescribed budget!
We discovered a new way of travel the next morning, which is basically
get up around 6 am, go to the bus station, and pit the ever present
crowd of minibus drivers against each other till you get a price that
you want. With the Romanians going the same way we held some
bargaining power, and eventually we were on our way in a dingy minibus
to Litang.
Litang, which was our first stop on the Sichuan-Tibetan Highway is
described in our guidebook as a “paradise abounding in photo
opportunities, nestled among grassy meadows and snowcapped peaks.” We
found it to be a dusty, unaccomodating, hell hole that I only wish we
could have skipped in our town hopping. Our original plan was to go
north over Tibet among these small cities, but we scratched that when
we revised the budget. We assumed, just by being close to Tibet that
Litang would be just as enchanting, but we were sorely disappointed to
find it like a mean Chinese version of Fillmore. I’m sure I sound
over dramatic, but this is how it played out. Our guidebook’s “Top
Pick” for the town looked promising from the outside, but the rooms
were diabolical. The first the bed actually only had 3 legs and the
mattress and bedding were smashed up in the corner on the broken side,
another room had nasty sheets on a cot – by then we had pretty much
seen what we needed to. Nicole and Laura the Romanian waited on a
street corner while Adrian and I hoofed it around town looking for a
decent plact to stay. After about an hour of looking, we settled for
a pretty cheap guest house that had okay beds, but a nausiating
bathroom. It was the only one in the price range. Since we quickly
found there was nothing to do, we looked around our guesthouse for
services, tours, anything. Not finding any at ours, we went to the
first dingy place we had looked at. Nicole found the girl who had
shown us around behind a computer and asked in chineses if they had
any homestay programs or something. The girl told her that they
didn’t have anything for us, that we weren’t customers, and so they
wouldn’t help us. We said okay and went to the lobby to regroup after
her assault, when Brat 2 came over and told us to get out, that we
weren’t welcome there. Nicole was totally blown away and said that we
weren’t there looking for freebies or anything, but they just kept
telling us to get out. It’s really frustrating being told off in
another language because you can’t ever really stand up for yourself.
We went to our hotel to lick our wounds. Nicole was feeling the
effects of the altitude (Litang is at about 15,000 I think) and so I
went out to see about bus tickets for the morning. I managed to find
out with my rudimentary chinese that the only bus out of town in the
morning was sold out. Having been rejected in so many ways, and faced
with the prospect of stay in that place another precious day weighed
heavily on me. I went back to Nicole as a failure and snuggled up to
her. Time and time again, just as my strength peeters out, Nicole gets
up and puts me back on my feet. She suggested we go just walk around
town to see what was out there with renewed vigor. I was very
doubtful that we’d find anything interesting, but I’m sure Nicole had
a prayer in her heart that we would. We walked out of the front door
of the guesthouse and saw a tibetan grandma filling a big jug of
water. We watched her for a moment, and when she saw us we offered to
help. She refused, but motioned for us to come with her. She barely
spoke any chinese, but we communicated with spares words and gestures.
She struggled with her jug of water carried in a basket on her back
up the hill, refusing help all the while. People who saw us walking
with her would make jeering comments or something, we of course didn’t
understand, but she eventually lead us to her house. There she gave
us some yak butter tea (hot water with a huge chunk of yak butter and
some herbs blended up and boiled – Nicole was able to make pretty sure
it was word of wisdom approved), yak cheese that was hard as a dirt
clod, and tibetan flat bread. We sat on her floor as she served us
and we tried to find out about her family and life. It was so
special, and such a huge blessing when we were so depressed. She just
invited us in to her home and fed us, not even being able to
communicate with us in words. Seriously, a tender mercy. It turned
our whole experience in that town around. An angel!
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