Warsaw to Bangkok

When I arrived in Central Asia, I arrived under cover of darkness. I awoke the next morning to a whole new world. When I left Central Asia, I was in the Chinese part, and it seemed a watered down version. Leaving China, I passed into Chinese Southeast Asia under cover of darkness and awoke to a new world. I presume it to be as watered down as Chinese Central Asia, but going in the other direction it is a delightful aperatif.

The key, as I’ve said in the past, to Chinese cities is the little differences. In Jinghong, the massive palm trees lining the streets is a good start. But the two things that distinguish Jinghong from other Chinese cities I’ve visited are the local Dai culture and the food.

Yunnan is filled with minority groups. The Dai (not to be confused with the Bai, from Dali) are the most prevelant in Xishuanbanna, the prefecture of which Jinghong is capital. I rented a bicycle and headed south to get a taste of Dai life.

In just a few minutes, I hit the edge of town and the first wave of traditional Dai houses. These are built on pillars so that the family lives above ground, while on ground level the livestock, vehicles and firewood are kept. The roofs are massive and cover the house so that it looks like one big roof on stilts. I never thought I’d find a cool suburb, but I liked the Dai one south of Jinghong. I then passed through farms growing all sorts of crops. I came upon a river and was taken across in a wooden longboat. I took the coin from under my tongue and paid the ferryman.

I cruised through more fields on the other side and popped into a Dai village. There was a golden stupa near the entrance, a reminder that the Dai are indeed Southeast Asian, not Chinese. The village roads were wide concrete sidewalks lined with palms, and every house was the same wooden square on pillars. The women wear colourful clothing and everyone seemed very relaxed about life, a refreshing change in China.

The grips on my handlebars were especially nasty and painful blisters on my left hand forced my early retreat back to Jinghong. Before I returned the bike, though, I went to the bridge over the Mekong, a river I’d come to know quite well over the next few weeks. I took the opportunity to explore the town.

Mostly, I focused my efforts on the culinary scene. Dai food is everywhere and utilizes the full range of local ingredients. A popular street snack is rice that is stuffed into a bamboo stalk and baked over hot coals. Barbeque is popular here, but like the ubiquitosu skewers of Chinese night markets, it is not a light snack they serve. Large portions of meat are grilled over charcoal fires between two sticks of bamboo that act as tongs. One of the more interesting variants consists of patties made from ground pork, shredded bamboo shoots and lots of chile.

Other Dai dishes include fish with lemongrass. This is not nearly as greasy as Chinese food, and the lemongrass is used in conjunction with garlic, green onion, ginger, cilantro and chile. Dai food emphasizes freshness and allows the ingredients to each stand out, as opposed to Chinese food where the ingredients are intended to blend together to form a unified flavour. The Dai way of thinking is more in tune with my own, so I took to their food immediately. Another specialty is fried river fern, a change from the usual spinach and bok choy I’d been eating for the past couple of months. Other Dai specialties, which sadly eluded me as Dai food was lacking from the next day’s town of Mengla (near the border), include black rice baked in a pineapple, and green papaya salad with peanuts.

The Myanmar Jade Market
I went to the Myanmar Jade Market. It is a well-kept secret, even to the Chinese, that China has precious little jade. There are jade-bearing streams in the southern Taklamakan Desert, near the market town of Hotan in remotest Xinjiang, but that’s about it. The overwhelming majority of “Chinese jade” is either a) fake or b) Burmese. The former is apparently quite prevalent in Hong Kong and in tourist towns, but the latter is what you get in Jinghong, a major jade-trading centre.

I came across a fun game in the market. It is played on a square wooden board. There are holes in each corner, as on a billiard table. There are 19 small chips and one large chip, which acts as the cue ball. Two to four people can play, and whoever puts the most chips in the holes wins the round. I really like that game, though I was taken to school by my Burmese opponents, one of whom was about three years old.

At the other end of the market was a Burmese restaurant. I poked my head in the door to see if they had any Burmese beer but they started giving me free samples of food so I stuck around even they they were beerless.

Myanmar is mainly a southeast Asian country, but its western edges are subcontinental. The patrons and proprietors of this restaurant were from the latter part of the country, near Bangladesh. This makes them Muslims, hence the no beer. They did, however, have shrimp pakoras, coconut jelly and chick pea curry. The latter has a southeast Asian twist in that lime juice is squirted on top before eating.

I thought back to my previous curry, at the Pakistani restaurant in Kashgar, and how friendly the people there were. The Burmese were just as friendly. I will definitely need to cut a wide swath across the subcontinent at some point. Heck, I’d go after Thailand if I thought I could afford it.

Laos at Last
There is a palpable sense of excitement, and a proud sense of achievement, when you arrive in a new country, especially when you arrive overland. Your senses sharpen and evaluate every aspect of your surroundings with new vigour. You take nothing for granted anymore. Even the air feels different, although in this case that was the morning fog burning off in the course of the 3km tuk-tuk ride through no-man’s land to the Lao border post. A laid back passport check, some travel tips from the guards and I was in Laos.

My first order of business was breakfast. Noodle soup, yes, but distinctly different on this side of the border. Chile paste and soy sauce share the table here with fish paste, oyster sauce, lime juice, and fresh herbs. It’s a self-customizing soup and I did it hot and sour with mint.

Then I needed to take a minibus to Muay Xai, the important transit point in northern Laos. All the seats were taken so I rode “semi-shotgun”, in the cargo space between the driver and navigator. Thought it’s a bit dangerous, it was fine, in no small part due to the lack of oncoming traffic.

The way to Luang Prabang (my ultimate destination) is around 8 hours of tropical forest, hills, and Lao villages. Lao live on raised houses. These are a fair bit smaller than the roomy Dai houses. Lao keep oxen, chickens and pigs, with only the occasional cow. Women generally wear sarongs but the men stick to worn-out shorts and t-shirts. Whereas the Dai houses were wooden, the Lao houses can also be made from belts of straw and the roofs are sometimes thatched, rather than made of wooden shingles.

The land is not farmed as extensively here as in China. Even across the border in Xishuanbanna, where mainstream China fades away into SE Asia, there is more farming. But then, Laos has a lot fewer people. Boten, at the border, is on most maps for example. But it’s a village of barely 1000 people. In Laos, that gets you on maps, kind of like how Churchill is on most maps of Canada.

Being after dark when I arrived in Luang Prabang, I didn’t quibble and ended up in the white part of town. Nothing in China, not even Yangshuo, could touch this area for whiteness. The only Laotian people are the ones serving you your dinner. I planned to find a more Laotian neighbourhood the next day in which to stay.

I did manage to eat Laotian, though. I had fried Mekong seaweed. The Dai in Jinghong apparently eat this also well, though I never saw it on any menu there. It looks like crisp nori coated with sesame seeds, chiles and garlic slices. Tastes as it looks. I also had bamboo shoots stuffed with savoury pork. The drink was of course Beer Lao. I pretty good as mainstream lager goes, so I won’t be suffering as much as I did in China.

I left Lijiang to continue my big backtrack to Kunming before heading south. I’d returned to my old guesthouse and as I left, the old grandma gave me a good luck necklace. Well, my first order of business at that point was to get lost trying to exit the old town. What I found, though, was interesting. Strolling through the souther perimeter of the old town, I came upon an entire section of newly-constructed buildings in a more Chinese, less Naxi style. These looked like some sections of the touristy part of old Lijiang. This area was not yet inhabited, but the intent is clear – surround the beautiful tradiditional Naxi old town with a Chinese tourist-trap.

I boarded a spiffy modern bus to head back to Dali. This proved less comfortable and slower that the old rattler I took on the way up. The windows wouldn’t open, so if got very stuffy. They showed a typically silly Hong Kong comedy and took two rest breaks during the “grueling” three-hour odyssey. Sadly, the comedy was subtitled in English, or I could have avoided it.

Back in Dali, I visited my old guesthose. To my utter amazement, my towel was still hanging on the clothesline, right where I’d left it the week previous.

But I was exhausted, and I headed for a hotel that had been recommended to me. I needed to splurge on a little luxury after two straight weeks in dorms. The cost was only $10 CDN. The Yunnan Hotel is a new place, still a work in progress, but I was quite happy with the “living room”. This was built on a glass floor above the hotel’s expansive fish pond, and features free Internet, big stereo and DVD. I was pretty much the only guest so it was my own personal living room.

That I was the only guest speaks to something I’ve seen in China. These tourist towns seem built for peak season, and so many of the hotels and restaurants are largely empty for most of the year. They’re mainly family-run operations, and I do kind of feel bad picking one over the others.

By the time I was leaving Dali, a sense of urgency was developing. I actually needed this, because the past couple of weeks were filled with dawdling. I spent four nights each in Dali, Lijiang and Kunming, double what I really needed to. This was especially bad because two of these towns had little to offer me and because earlier on the trip a four-night stand anywhere was rather monumentous.

Finally, though, I was on the move and loving it. Within a week, I’d be in Laos, starting the southeast Asia leg. It was going to be weird I thought. In China, you can live a pretty good lifestyle for almost no money, including dirt cheap fast Internet. I’d been quite connected for seven weeks, and was becoming only a part-time traveller, as preparations for my return have begun in earnest. I have some publishing projects in the works I am really look forward to getting home and getting started. But travelling also holds great appeal and I needed to push forward.

Will I Ever Get To Jinghong?
I was forced to spend an extra day in Kunming to attend to some errands. Getting dollars in China is difficult work, but not quite as difficult as using a bank card in Laos.

Tuesday morning arrived much earlier than I’d hoped. I trudged zombie-like to the bus station and grabbed some dumpling soup with cabbage for breakfast. I’m quite used to eating fiery soups in the morning at this point.

I got to my bus, destination Jinghong. Departure time was 8:30. At 8:20, the passenegers were looking at me and giggling. At 8:25, I thought they’d mistaken me for David Beckham or something they were staring so intently. I dug out my pen to sign a few autographs.

At 8:27 they were hustling me off the bus. They told me that particular bus was only going to Simao. The sign, of course, said Jinghong, but they didn’t know I could read it. Another bus, they said, was for Jinghong. Sure enough, a sleeper bus was pulling in.

I think, ultimately, they wanted to put me on a sleeper rather than the old, seats-only bucket I was booked for. The catch was that the sleeper wasn’t departing until 10:30, and my first bus was long gone by the time I determined this little fact. They had my backpack stowed already, so I really couldn’t go anywhere, but at least I could lie down. However, I’d be arriving in Jinghong quite late, and I really don’t like doing that.

Amazingly, they attempted to give me the worst seat on the bus, yet again! Actually, this time I think to them it was the best seat, middle row with the TV in front of my face. Being that I expected to be the only one more interested in staring out the window than staring at hyperkinetic Cantonese comedy, I insisted on the window. And so there I was, beginning the longest day left on this trip, already tired and confused.

And then upset. The bus was delayed, from 10:30 to 11:00, and then from 11:00 to 11:30. The trip is twelve hours long, and I was getting quite concerned. Pretty much everything in China starts to shut down around 11 and by midnight the streets are often deserted. I could easily be stuck without a place to stay or food to eat. Their answer to my complaining – put some music on. I complained some more, so they put on a video. Just to add to my burgeoning confidence that I’d never see Jinghong, I noticed that the driver has his own little TV.

The program began with a really good movie, actually. It was Cantonese, but rather western in style. The plot revolved around a slightly repressed office shmoe. He reminded me of Homer Simpson, but living in the Office Space world.

There were no English subtitles, so I didn’t quite get everything, but the guy had a really bad day, and needed money but couldn’t get any no matter what he tried. There were always cops around to give him a hard time to. At the end he jumps off a bridge and tries to swim across the harbour, and the next thing you know a policeman is swimming behind him. I thought the film was very funny, and I probably missed half the jokes.

This was followed by Tom & Jerry, dubbed into Mandarin. But wait, you say, there’s no dialogue in Tom & Jerry cartoons. Well, there is in China. Nobody’s lips are moving, but they’re talking nonetheless.

No, I Shall Never Get to Jinghong
Our first stop was the town of Yuxi. I was given a meal ticket for lunch. The selection at the bus depot canteen was grim – greasy things cooked beyond recognition. I made out like my hesitancy in ordering was because I was an ignorant foreigner, but really I was having trouble determing which items would be the least inedible.

At one point we crossed what was billed as the highest bridge in the world. Naturally, the only statistic provided was its length. It was high, but I swear I’ve been on higher.

At Mojiang, a town populated by the Hani minority, I crossed the Tropic of Cancer again. The cold, fog and rain of my last night in Kunming was almost nostalgic because I’d be spending the next six weeks in the tropics.

At Simao, problems took over. Our ten minute stop stretched over half an hour. Then the bad news – the bus is broken, we must go to another. Me not speaking the language, I was the last to put this together and got no choice of beds on the new bus. This bus was a tangle of metal bars inside. It was dark, cramped, and prison-like. I was filled with the noxious product of twenty chain smokers. The only spot left was in the back ghetto with the riff-raff who couldn’t afford a reserved bed.

One generous man offered up his bunk. At first I declined, but in China this is merely considered “part of the game” so he refused to get back in his bunk and I eventually hopped on board, quietly grateful. It was quite a bit smaller, though, than my previous bunk and my shoulders were too wide to properly fit in the thing. With winding roads and sharp turns aplenty, I sustained a lot of bruising on my arms from the metal bars on each side of the bunk.

Worse yet, we were late. They managed to stretch a 165km journey into four and a half hours. At the beginning of the day, ETA in Jinghong was 8:30. We pulled in at 1:30 am. My “backpacker’s choice” guesthouses were closed up for the night (welcome to China) and I was left with the one across from the bus station. This was not the cheapest in town.

At 1:30 am, who has the negotiating power? They thought they did, but I’d seen an all-night Internet cafe. That made it academic. I WORK ONLINE – I could blow off six or seven hours on Ratebeer just doing my job. So I was going to get my price at the hotel or walk. They, on the other hand, know they’re not going to see too many other visitors. They’ll just lose whatever money they might have gotten from me. So a 180RMB room became a 60RMB room and I got six hours of snoozing in.

A couple hours north of Lijiang is the Tiger Leaping Gorge. At 16km in length and 3.9km in depth, it is one of the most spectacular pieces of landscape I've ever seen. The river is none other than the Yangtze, ... [Continue reading this entry]

Travellers I'd spoken with almost unanimously indicated that they preferred Dali to Lijiang, which is three hours north into the mountains. Lijiang is too touristy, they said. They are all on crack. There are a few key differences between Dali ... [Continue reading this entry]

Four days in Kunming is beyond plenty. I arrived Saturday morning, which was probably not the smartest thing since my main business was visa acquisition. Kunming is the most Westernized of any Chinese city I've been to. There are a ... [Continue reading this entry]

I was pretty excited to get rolling to Nanning. First, I was reinvigourated by my four days of R&R in Yangshuo. I'd biked 80km in two days so I was feeling quite fit. With a full variety of Western and ... [Continue reading this entry]