Casablanca

My decision to leave Kunming and get going towards Laos was losing conviction long before it surrendered utterly.

On the morning of my second last day in the city, I woke up early and started looking for a bank. On the morning of my second last day in the city, I woke up early and started looking for a bank. Despite endless holes in the wall proclaiming they accepted everything from Visa to cards from Monopoly saying, "Collect two hundred pounds", without fail my debit card was returned with the uniform platitude, "Sorry, unable to process...". I walked and walked while the few Kunming residents awake warmed up for some tai chi stretching. I found myself pacing past the Victory Palace, towards the yet to wake up Flower and Bird market - with a cold bolt I realised somehow I had begun retracing the same route Louise had taken me on the day she and I met... This spooked me enough to cancel my plan to visit some underground waterfalls, and I decided I needed to sit for a while and think about what I should do about me and her. Along the streets and in open air restaurants I thought and thought, but little resolution was forthcoming. I couldn't work out if I was a bigger fool to stay or go, or whether being a fool was a better option than being smart.

On my last afternoon in Kunming, Louise's mum goes a bit crazy making sure I will catch the bus, practically hauling my bags down the stairs before I put anything in them. Louise and I take a bus to the station, arriving with forty minutes to spare. She has been worrying about me, so I now have six little cakes in my bag so I won't go hungry, two cartons of milk so I won't be thirsty and two small metal tubs of tiger balm to cover all other eventualities. At one point I felt I had to remind her I had been travelling for a while now and one more town shouldn't faze me too much. I was sitting, she standing, so I pull her to me and rest my head on her stomach: "I'm not a baby after all". She replies, "I know, I know, but I feel like you ARE my baby and I have to look after you", looking down at me helplessly.
My plan is to visit the wonderous rice terraces at Yuanyang, then continue on into Xishuangbanna, close to the Laos border, for the last day of the water festival. But when we inquire at the station, Louise is delighted when her suspicion is confirmed: there are no connecting buses, I must return to Kunming before I head on. I think I had already decided I would return to her if only for a little while longer, after a short sightseeing break in Yuanyang, but this decides it. The atmosphere of our goodbye changes completely. We are planning our second time together, we will visit the underground waterfalls and the stone forest together, she is asking me what I want for a birthday present, I plan for us to watch the DVD of Casablanca (her computer has the tune of As Time Goes By frequently playing on loop). A sense of morbidity suddenly strikes me, this is starting to sound very much like some tragic black and white war film, "After all this madness is over, you and I can be together at last and grow cheeses in the Cotswolds"! (Cut to the hero's plane crashing to the earth in flames).
We stand holding each other while the many buses in the dark carpark crowd together like illicitly smoking school children. The sleeper bus waits petulently for the last bunk beds to fill up before it will leave and the bus attendants, hopeless romantics, keep telling Louise to come with me to Yuanyang - or perhaps they just wanted to sell another ticket. Despite the worst premonitions, my only problem on the twelve hour night journey is that my bed is far, far too short for me.

A shattered mirror of the sky

Yuanyang is one of those few sites that live up to every expectation. I had come firstly because Louise's photos of her trip here three years had left me bedazzled, wondering if these scenes were real. We later went to a photo exhibition in the Yunnan Provincial Museum, showing scenes from all over the region. It seemed like every fifth picture was of the rice terraces of Yuanyang.

The rice terraces are irregular shaped pools like watery steps running down each enormous hillside in this region. Close up, the individual terraces look like stagnant brown luxury apartments for mosquitos, but from a distance, their beauty is otherworldy. When the sky is overcast, they look like the green earth has melted and then fractured into hundreds of cracked shards. When the sky is clear, the pools turn white, reflecting the heavens, as though a enraged goddess had hurled an offending mirror to shatter on the Yunnan countryside.
Even after seeing dozens of photos, being in the area with my own eyes has been amazing. It is the only place on my travels so far that made me wish I had a camera as long as a baby's arm and the skill to point it in the right direction.

Plus, Yuanyang is at a nice level of tourism development - built up enough that there is dormitory accomodation, public transportation and restaurants, unspoilt enough that I have my sightseeing largely to myself, and the Yi and Hani peoples coming to market look at me in amazement. It is a wonderfully cheap wonder, if one is willing to be flexible with time and use the local people's minibuses (five yuan each way for a 16km journey), rather than the mocking eyed taxi drivers (up to one hundred yuan for a return trip). So for around three or four pounds a day expenditure, I wander among stunningly verdant mountain scenery, take what I hope will be stunning photos of the terraces, and peruse Yuanyang and surrounding villages amidst the brightly dressed cultures of this borderland with SE Asia. I go walking out of town one afternoon, within twenty minutes I am utterly alone on my dried mud path, the valley preening itself for my eyes to my right, maybe only every several minutes passing one person hammering at the soil or carrying a vast weight on her back. Perhaps it is just a cityborn thing, but the intensity of being so physically alone is quite scaring to me. I come to a grove of tall trees just off from the path, the yellow ground around them strangely bereft of the usual lush grasses, the air is silent - and although I want to explore, something grips me and I turn back to walk on the dirt road man's hand has made. A remote village I came to.

I met some good people here. My roomate in the Government Hotel is a somewhat older than me Japanese man, an ex-teacher who six years ago started travelling the world. He is a quite admirable figure for me, relaxed and clearly focused on interacting with the local cultures rather than sightseeing. His hobby is making things with his hands (origami, sandals made from string etc) and gives them to the people he meets as gifts. He tells me he has learnt all kinds of techniques from different peoples for his handicrafts, locals often give him food or something they have crafted in return. He makes me a paper bird, which I decide to give to Louise, hopefully helping to improve Chinese-Japanese relations in a small way. We both have, I am amazed to find out, a love of Todosantos - he has been twice - we smile as we muse on the strangeness of Guatemala and our nostaglic hatred of the town's persistent bed bugs.
It was great to meet someone who had been travelling for a long time and still obviously had a love for it. Back in Xiahe, I had met a rather wearyingly intense Greek who told me he had been travelling in Asia for 15 years. Why he continued to bother, I wasn't sure, as everything seemed the same from his description. Sample dialogue between us:

Me, "So, where have you been in Japan"? Him, "EVERYWHERE"!

It amazed me that someone could, after 15 years on the road (though presumably a lot of that was working), still be reading his guidebook to find local sights like temples and markets - after only three months in Asia I was already feeling like I'd seen a lot of Buddhist temples.

But, getting back to Yuanyang, one night I go to a restaurant (which I had spent some of the afternoon typing in), only to find the boss and staff are already eating their post work meal. The boss, a twenty nine year old, bids me sit with them, tells me to choose any meat I like from the selection table and the cook will prepare me a meal, for free! It quickly becomes a very Chinese evening. I am cooked up (and then have spooned into my bowl) far more than I can eat and offered more or less unlimited baijiu and cigarettes. Plus, because the boss is honouring me in this way, everyone around the table treats me deferentially, such as clinking glasses always with their's lower than mine. I refuse the cigarettes, several times, refuse the baijiu as my stomach is acting up, but feel I can't refuse a beer, especially as I make a perhaps error of giving him some matches I happen to have in my pocket when his lighter doesn't work. He lights up, gives me back the matches, then offers me another cigarette, with a look in his eyes that I says have to accept something now, as otherwise I am embarrassing his hospitality by refusing his gifts while giving him something of mine. I continuously offer him food from the circular table's array of plates before I take anything, then offer to his father in law, then to the cook, then to all the other people - this courtesy seems to be received well. I tell everyone at the table I am feeling unwell, so cannot eat and drink as much as they are. This is interpreted as politeness, however, and they start advising me that if I eat up, drink up and smoke a lot, I will feel much better. One dish has strange, fantastically soft chunks of meat. I wonder if this is pig intestines, but when I mime the question, they smile and start pointing at their foreheads: I am eating brain for the first time. Once the surprise has passed, I don't feel uncomfortable eating it, although, given the rather grey flavour, I can't see what got H.Lecter so excited.
Finally, it becomes clear I'm simply not going to eat anymore (the worst thing you can do if full at a Chinese meal is finish your bowl, because someone will immediately fill it up again). The boss signals my trial by gullet is over, gives me his restaurant's card and walks me back to my hotel.

The only testing thing about Yuanyang is getting transportation around the area. The scenic highlights of the rice terraces are 15-20k from the town, the taxis feel too expensive (and the look in their eyes reminds me too much of the Songpan horse trek cartel), leaving the only option the anarchic local minibuses, whom I am growing to love. There is something delightfully "travellery" about Yuanyang's minibuses, the way it seems utterly unpredictable when and where they leave or return from, the way the driver with loud urgency shepherds me to a seat even though it's quite obvious we aren't going anywhere for a while (until he's accumulated a full load of about seven passengers), the way the minibus stops for people to run in and out of buildings, or stops halfway for the driver to go off and buy a huge selection of multicoloured puffy popcorn tasting sweets, which he then affixes to the roof rack, offering one bag around to his passengers, perhaps as a recompense for the delay, the way the minibus seems to be perpetually almost murdering a loitering dog or a duck casually crossing the road. They make me smile and go, "Yeah, I must be a traveller if I'm using these things to get around, boo-sucks to you big coach escorted French tour group"! That isn't to say I have mastered the essentially incomprensible patterns of these vehicles. One evening, at the really very beautiful spot, Lao Hu Zui, I sit as the last of the sun is rubbed out by a titanic dark cloud. Across the valley, I am able to watch the rain and darkness pull itself at a crawl towards me, the landscape falling to what seems an implacable evil. The nightmare grey finally upon me, I retreat to one of the houses (wooden walls, concrete floor) that exist to sell tourists refreshments, to realise all the men are indicating there are no more minibuses back to Yuanyang tonight. As time wears on, the storm unabating and no vehicles are responding to my waving arm, the prospect of sleeping on some families' harsh floor starts to appear more and more likely. A blue truck finally stops, the men are trying to get him to take me back, he is highly reluctant, they are suggesting it will cost me big money - then suddenly a minibus draws up, as if obeying the daily schedule to a tee, I jump in and am charged the usual price as if nothing is amiss. Shaking my head in bemusement, we weave back through a world turned to mist, mist split only by haunting white reflecting rice terrace pools by the road side.

--

Well, yesterday's storm has left a blanketing cloud of fog all over Yuanyang - so sighteseeing and hiking haven't really been possible today. If the weather hasn't markedly improved by tomorrow morning, heading back to Kunming. I envisage staying in Kunming with Louise until around the 25th, then heading into Laos as my visa for China expires. After that, well, I've just had some really good news that has required a change in plans: it looks I will be meeting up with my brother in Malaysia! His girlfriend, an aspiring singer/actress, has landed a role in the chorus of Annie in Kuala Lumpur for three weeks around the beginning of June, so Mark is planning to come out with her, which will also be an opportunity to meet up with me. So I will travel through Laos, skip through Thailand and get on a train to Kuala Lumpur. If anyone has a guidebook handy and can tell me how long it takes to get to KL from Bangkok by train, that would be very helpful.

PS: Using only the latest technology

I've been thinking of setting up an Instant Messenger chat with anyone reading who'd like to have a talk with me, probably some time around 23rd or 24th April. Don't know if that is interesting to anyone, but if it is, email me or leave a comment and I'll work out some times to be online (I'm eight hours ahead of the UK and I think around 15-16 hours ahead of the west coast USA). I do really appreciate people reading and leaving messages, so it would be great to "talk" to any of you out there who would like to.

Best wishes,

Daniel, 16 April 2004, Yuanyang