August, 2006

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I’ve got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one

Friday, August 25th, 2006

Thomas and Huckleberry
(Thomas and Huckleberry, Huckleberry has the two different colored eyes)

This post was supposed to be a happy post about back to school and the two kittens my roomate and I got. Sadly one of our cats, Huckleberry, died yesterday. She had been sick for two days and yesterday her situation just got worse. We took her to our local vet that afternoon. The doctor told us she was on death’s door and that we had two options: put her to sleep or get an IV and hope for the best. We picked the IV. Her temperature was 4 degrees below what it should have been, she hadn’t been drinking and she vomited all the time. They finally found a vein, after 12 tries, and we brought her home. We tried to keep her warm and comfortable but she passed away that night with her sister next to her. Now the other cat is on antibiotics, but is doin fine.

Today my roommate, Caitlin, cut herself badly and we had to rush to the hospital. She has been whitling herself a full chess set and today she sliced her left hand. Chinese hospitals are great for this kind of emergency, thank God. We were in and out in an hour. Only had to fill out her name twice and paid $25, very simple.

Luckily school has been problem free. We all know our teachers very well and the shock of intensive Chinese class isn’t there like it was last term. Anyway I’m going to end this because I’m at the French Cafe with friends and they want to go. It’s movie marathon night at our apartment!

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Bored in Chengdu

Friday, August 11th, 2006


(HuangLongXi street scene)

Not that Chengdu is boring. It’s just that it is night here and I don’t know what to do but chill in the air-conditioned lobby of my hostel and surf the web. I spent today going outside of Chengdu to the small village of HuangLongXi (黄龙溪). It came highly recommended by my guidebook and I wanted to get out of the city. The town used to be the center of judicial control and a large trading area, it sits next to a river that flows through much of Sichuan, during the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China. It looks today much like it did a hundred years ago with wooden Qing style houses and cobble stoned streets. Many Kung-Fu films have been filmed there including Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and they display photos of the filming of every movie made in the town. Since it is a Friday the town was quiet and had few tourists. It was cool seeing what a prosperous Qing era town looked like and imagining the good ol’ days of China’s past, which is literally impossible in almost all of China’s cities.

Since I’m bored I want to point you folks towards some interesting reading on China that is presently online. I don’t pretend to add anything useful to China’s blogosphere by writing in this thing and truthfully you time is better spent checking out the blogs to the right.

Recently the Chinese government lifted its Internet censorship of Google’s English language blog hosting site Blogspot. This isn’t a change for those outside of China but is for me. I’d like to spotlight two blogs (there are more but I haven’t found them yet):

China Confidential – Harsh critcisms of the People’s Republic with interesting thoughts on China in the Middle East and US-China relations. I don’t always agree with the guy, but nevertheless interesting reading.

Asian Business Law Blog – As the site says this blog: “clarifies news of import for legal professionals in Asian business”. Some interesting thoughts on recent business news related to China and other more varied posts. Good stuff. Also, you can check out the great China Law Blog for more Chinese law tidbits.

Yesterday I took a late afternoon stroll through Chengdu’s DuFuCaoTang (DuFu’s Thatched Cottage), a park dedicated to Dufu (杜甫）one of China’s all-time greatest poets who lived during the Tang dynasty. I am a big fan of Dufu and have read a good deal about his history and his surviving poems. Seeing this park/shrine dedicated to his life and works was on my list of must see things in Chengdu. The park was beautifully landscaped with ponds, rivers, tropical plants, and calligraphy. I was really happy to see that so many Chinese appreciated their literary history and culture. Afterwards I was strolling around having absolutely no luck finding a taxi in the evening heat when I saw a string of bookstores. Now, I love Chinese bookstores….a lot. They are everywhere and always full of people and hold huge numbers of books. The Chinese seem utterly excited to learn everything, especially languages, and I respect them all the more for it. Bookstores are usually huge new department stores here but the neighborhood of bookstores I found in Chengdu was all small stores and almost entirely full of used books. These stores were like any good bookshop, or household, completely full of books. The floors were stacked with them, the walls filled to the ceiling and always that musty smell that made me want to carefully look through every pile and every shelf. I didn’t do that, but I did buy a book of DuFu’s poetry and an old propaganda poster of a young communist soldier reading Mao’s red book (perfect for any reading area!). Anyway, yesterday looking through the amazing Danwei Blog I found link to a post about finding Chinese used books online (here). The author mentions the book market near the DuFuCaoTang, which I thought was a cool coincidence.

I also recently found a cool blog about Shenzhen, the special economic zone that started it all, by a cultural anthropologist who has been living there for 12 years. Shenzhen Fieldnotes I discovered her blog from a Virtual China post (here)

So tomorrow I leave Chengdu and take a train back to Kunming. I will arrive on Sunday, just in time for my new semester of intensive Chinese, kungfu, brush calligraphy, and U.S.-China business relations. Should be a hoot!

Posted in Internet, Photography, Reading, Travel | 3 Responses »
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More from Sichuan

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

I’m back in hot ‘n humid Chengdu. I’ve been busing around western Sichuan on the Tibetan plateau this past week and its nice to be somewhere that has food that goes beyond boiled Yak. Plus Chengdu has a wonderful laid-back atmosphere that is as good as any massage.

On Monday I took an early bus from Chengdu to Kanding. Kanding is the capital of Sichuan’s large and lightly populated Dazi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. The bus ride was nice, except for my childish middle-aged Chinese seat partner. We traveled through deep rain forested gorges next to crystal clear rapids. Kanding is an odd place. It is where Tibetan culture begins and there are many Tibetans in their traditional garb and religious jewelery but the Han Chinese and People’s Army soldiers clearly out number them. The city is located along a river on a thin flat strip of land between large rocky mountains and you can see the tall Daxue snow-capped mountains towards the west. I got there in the afternoon and bought tickets to leave for Litang the next morning. I looked at a small Tibetan monastery and wandered around the city before eating a large wonderful Sichuan dinner.

The next day I woke up at 6 to catch my bus to Litang. My guidebook had told me that this ride was extraordinary and they were not kidding! Kanding was already pretty high up; I had a perpetual headache since I got there, but the road to Litang keeps on going up and up and up. The bus ride was nine hours long and entirely on roads that snaked back and forth up and down mountainsides. I really felt like I was in the Himalayas. The mountains were either forested with stunted pine trees and hardy bushes, fields of alpine prairie land with yaks roaming around Tibetan tents or rock strewn desolate places with nothing growing on them. The road kept rising through this amazing scenery over many mountain passes until we hit the big mountain pass at 4700m and entered a plateau of rolling green hills of short grasses and little yellow and blue flowers, nothing else grows this high up. This was Tibetan land for sure. Black woolen tents and large hairy yaks speckled this land while bearded vultures circled the clear blue sky. We drove around through these fields before descending slightly into a valley with Litang sitting in the center.

Litang is extreme in every way possible. The city is at 4014m above sea level, 350m above Lhasa, and is cold all year long. It has the feel of an old western town from the 19th century, except that is populated entirely by wild looking Tibetans. The Tibetans have nappy black hair tied up into thick buns, wear traditional woolen clothing and furs and have Buddhist amulets hanging all over their body. I’ve never been in such a religious city. Almost everyone was carrying around prayer wheel things that they always spun or had prayer beads that they were always rolling through their fingers. Litang is basically a trading post and monastery town. Tibetans, who live herding yaks in the nearby mountains, come to Litang to buy supplies: iron stoves, mattresses, posters of Tibetan Buddhist leaders, no Dali Lama though (his photo is banned in China), big copper pots for making yak butter tea, motorcycles and every other thing one would need to live the harsh Tibetan life.

I found a room in a small empty Tibetan hotel that was intricately painted like a temple and proceeded to walk around the city. There isn’t much to see there, basically there is just a huge monastery that the Tibetans send their children to. The Changqingchun Ke’er Lamasi Monastery is huge. It holds around a thousand monks in training and was built by the Third Dali Lama, who had come from the area. . It was a pretty piece of Tibetan architecture, which means that it was made of stone and wood and had been painted with bright colors. The monks were nice kids for the most part and wore red woolen clothing. I saw many and chatted with some but never took their photo, didn’t seem like the right thing to do. The Chinese had destroyed the whole thing in the 1960s and the complex had all been built since then, and was still being built. This bullshit destruction of Tibetan culture is partially why most of western Sichuan past Kanding, including Litang, was off limits to foreigners until 2000

Afterwards, as the sun was setting, I made the tough (the altitude made any walk tiring) hike up a hill near the monastery and watched the sun go down behind the mountains. Having seen the sites and not really enjoying the harsh un-inviting life of Litang I bought a ticket back to Kanding for the next day.

My ride back to Chengdu from Litang was a long, painful, uncomfortable and exhausting day. First I made the beautiful trip back to Kanding in a seriously overcrowded van (25 people where there should have only been 19). We left at 6:30. At 3:30 we arrived at Kanding where I bought a 4:00 ticket to Chengdu. I finally arrived in Chengdu at 12:30 AM and got to my hostel. Chengdu felt extremely hot after life on the Tibetan plateau. It was also much more relaxed. After I bought a bed, 30 RMB ($3.60), and took a shower I went outside to the quiet gingko tree lined road that my hostel is on. Apparently it is earmarked for restoration to Qing dynasty glory, the few buildings are all in classical Chinese style, but right now it is mostly empty lots. There are many teahouses and bars on the street though, which at night fill the dirt road with tables. I sat down and ate steamed soybeans with chili peppers and drank some beer. I had a great chat with the shirtless local Chinese and we all smoked cigarettes together and laughed until it was too late and everyone had left. Nice way to end such a tiring day of travel.

Today I slept in and am now going to visit the Tang poet Dufu’s Chengdu hut. Tomorrow I go to a village outside Chengdu, which is still in pristine classical Chinese style. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was filmed there, should be nice. Also, I’m still uploading more photos from Xishuangbanna (I took 350), so there are more at my Flickr account now.

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From Cheng Du, Sichuan

Sunday, August 6th, 2006

I am, at the moment, chilling out in Sichuan’s capital city Cheng Du （成都）. I’m doing some solo travelling before I have to head back to Kunming for another term of Chinese learning. I had always wanted to visit Sichuan. This province is famous for it’s spicy food, semitropical climate and wide range of cultures (a lot like Yunnan when you think about it).

Tomorrow I head west into Sichuan’s “wild” mountainous area that borders Tibet. I will start in Kanding, where Tibet (Tibetan culture) actually begins. Tibet is not limited to the borders that the Chinese government has given the Tibetan province and is found in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Qinghai. It should be an interesting trip with long exciting bus rides through the beginning of the Himalayas. Can’t wait.

I’m also uploading more pictures from my Xishuangbanna trip while I’m here in Cheng Du:

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My Trip to Xishuangbanna

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

IMG_2569.JPG
(Mekong River, Jinghong)

I am back in Kunming, chilling out with my friend Dave and his classmate. Dave and I just got back from a week of travel in Yunnan’s most southerly prefecture: Xishuangbanna (西双版纳), Banna for short.

Xishuangbanna is a tropical mountainous area covered in virgin rainforest that borders Laos and Burma. The name Xishuangbanna is a transliteration of the Dai people’s name of the area and means: the twelve beautiful basins. These twelve basins are the large flat valleys that are filled to the brim with rice paddies and which also contain all of the large cities, including the laid-back capital Jinghong. The Dai people, northern cousins to the Thai, used to rule this area and are in the majority, especially in the cities, but once you leave the few small lazy cities you can find a multitude of more rare tribes, some not even recognized by the Chinese government. Two years ago, when I was studying in Beijing, my exchange group visited Yunnan and spent three days hiking along the Mekong River and around Galanba. We had such a great time that Dave, who studied with me two years ago, and I decided to go back for another visit. We had an unforgettable trip that has permanently cemented a love for Xishunagbanna and its people in me.

Day One:

We arrived in the Jinghong （景洪） bus station sleepy and unrested at 6 AM. Later that day we woke up and proceeded to walk around the bright tropical capital city. Jinghong has little resemblance to other provincial capitals. The Han, which make up about 93% of China’s population, are a minority here. Signs are written in Chinese, Pinyin, and Thai. Palm trees, coconut trees, and banana trees line the streets. People’s schedules are dictated by the weather, which is so hot during midday that people just sleep and wait until nightfall to go out.
Dave and I walked down to the Mekong River, called the Lan Cang Jiang (澜沧江) in China, which flows through Jinghong. We ate some very very good Thai food and asked the local cafes about hiring a guide to take us on a 5 day hike. No one thought that they could do a five day hike. Three or four days, maybe, but five, no no no. It is the rainy season right now in Southeast Asia; the time of year when it rains every day, but not every hour. Roads turn into red muddy messes and trails completely grow over with grasses, all of which make hiking difficult and dangerous. Not that we cared about any of this at all.
It was just our luck that in the early evening while trying to find the Xishuangbanna Explorers Club that we ran into one of our old guides from two years ago. Jinghong really is a small city. Then at the Xishuangbanna Explorers Club we found another one of our guides from two years ago. We asked if they would be willing to take us on a long hike. Of course, they replied. And then we had two new friends: Lao Fang and Lao Li. We met up later that night for drinks and discussed our plans, which were open and could be four or five days long depending on what we wanted. We started the next day.

Day Two:

We met our new friends early the next day. Lao Fang (lao is a term of respect for those older than you) is a English teacher in Jinghong who has a voracious appetite for women. Lao Li was our real guide. He works at the Xishuangbanna Explorers Club and hikes the many trails of Xishuangbanna for fun and knows a number of the locals, which made our hike all the easier. Anyway, we boarded a small bus headed to Damenglong (大勐龙) and began our journey. The bus ride was the bumpiest ride I have ever taken. The roads were in horrible shape, all red mud and large stones. Massive DongFeng trucks crowdes the roads and our bus often had to wait while drivers figured out how to get around each other. Damenglong is a small city, in another one of the twelve basins that produces lots of rubber and rice. We ate a simple lunch there and got into a very overcrowded bus to Mengsong (勐送), which curved around mountainsides and pushed up through rainy forest roads. I spent my time between watching the scenery and the leather-skinned couple next to me drink cheap Baijiu liquor (白酒). From tiny Mengsong, which is a scant 2 kilometers from the Burmese border, we started our hike. We followed a small forest road and watched the sunset over the cloudy forested peaks around us.
The village we slept in was a Hani village, though two Auke villages sit next to it (the Chinese government does not recognize the Auke as a minority nationality). We were literally on the Burmese border. When we arrived some men were eating wild boar (that had been illegally killed the day before), bitter tomatoes, and mountain onions while drinking large amounts of Baijiu. We sat with them, quickly ate the wild boar and onions, drank some liquor and passed around cigarettes by the fire.

Day Three:

After waking up in the raised Hani house we ate breakfast and looked around. At this point I did the dumbest thing of the whole trip. To get up to the house you had to go up some treacherous steps which I had hurt myself on the night before. So, while going down them wearing my heavy pack I decided to jump the last three steps. Bad idea. I sprained my left ankle, fairly badly. I was in pain for the next few days. It also turned out that that day of hiking was one of our hardest. Steep slimy clay paths, overgrown jungle paths full of leeches and dangerous muddy downhill slides through tea fields. After eight hours of hiking we arrived tired and dirty to the large village of Weidong and stayed in a house that had an amazing view of a valley of rice paddies ringed by forested hills. We ate another great meal and washed it down with homemade liquor and cigarettes.

Day Four:

The next day we stayed in Weidong for the morning. We all took a hike to a series of three beautiful waterfalls in the forested mountains surrounding Weidong’s valley of rice paddies. Due to my ankle I skipped the last two waterfalls and walked back to the village through bamboo forests and the gurgling waterways of the rice paddies. That afternoon, after a lunch of freshly killed chicken, we made the relatively easy hike to Bulanshan. Bulanshan is a one street town where young Dai monks roar through on motorcycles. Though very primitive it was the largest city we had seen a days, we even stayed in a hotel! For the rest of the day we relaxed and played cards.

Day Five:

Instead of opting for the bus ride to Menghun from Bulanshan we decided to hike for another two days through the bush. The day was long, very long. We hiked through Bulan and Lahu settlements, fields of hemp, muddy cow pie filled grassland and a long road mutilated by many landslides. We all ran out of water and by the end of the day were extremely tired and a little crazy. Finally we arrived at a poor Bulan village right in the middle of nowhere. The family we stayed with had no electricity and cooked canned “pork”, eggs and beans for us.

Day Six:

This was our last day of hiking, another long day of bad trails, never ending mud and villages full of children and orange robed monks. We rested in one village that was very poor and reminded me of an African refugee camp. The boys didn’t know how old they were or what America was and crowded around us to stare. Our last few kilometers were through the beautiful valley around Menghun. The valley was filled with bright green rice almost ready for harvest. When we hit the main road we threw away our dirty belongings and waved down a bus to Jinghong. We were exhausted and ready to leave the jungle. The bus ride felt fast and modern as we sped past farmland and deadly car accidents.
Back in Jinghong we instantly went to a Thai restaurant and ate our fill and I drank cold beer. By 9 at night Dave and I had finished some well deserved chill time and decided to check out Jinghong’s night market on the banks of the Mekong River. The guidebook said that this night market is the best in Yunnan and it was certainly not lying. Jinghong, due to its hot tropical climate, comes alive at night. The market was part sprawling restaurant area, part amusement park and part nightclub district. We went into a Chinese haunted house through a door shaped like a demon’s mouth. Inside were various scary exhibits that depicted evil leaders of China’s past sawing bodies in half and devils praying to evil spirits. It was a very Chinese experience and all together amazing. The rest of the night market was buzzing with techno and young and old eating, drinking, dancing, roller-skating and shooting balloons with pellet guns. The Jinghong night market is by far the greatest night market I have ever been to.

This trip to Xishuangbanna was an unforgettable experience and the greatest hike I have ever taken. The people were so nice and they showed us a life completely different from the Han dominated cities of the east. I know that I will return and I highly suggest everyone to visit this amazing wild land on the fringes of China’s control.

Right now I am chilling in Kunming but tonight I will take a train to Cheng Du (成都) in Sichuan province north of Yunnan. I took a ton of photos while hiking but due to the slow connections here in the cafes of Kunming they will not be all loaded by the time I post this. They will soon though!

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