Toe jam, rats and minorities

(Yunan, Guang Xi Province)

Xi Shuang Banna, southern Yunan
The flight from Beijing to Kunming (capital of Yunan province) was delayed SEVEN HOURS. Luckily, we had entertainment while we waited - watching a little kid take a DUMP on the floor of the one-room airport.

As if arriving two days late weren't bad enough (typical China time), we then had to spend the night in some ramshackle motel under pee-infested blankets that wreaked of mildew. We then endured a 24-hour sleeper bus (a double-decker bus with pairs of beds instead of seats) to get from Kunming to the south of Yunan. Twenty-four hours of tossing and turning as the bus traversed windy mountainous roads. And if you are the lucky one of the pair sleeping on the outside, hang on for dear life. Fitful sleep, bathroom breaks only when the male driver feels like it (y'all know me and my weak bladder, PLUS the fact that, as a girl, it takes me about twice as long to pee).

After each two-minute pee break (where I have to find my shoes that've been tossed to the furthest corner of the dirty bus, run to the stall, and wait in a women's line, whereas the men pee anywhere it's convenient), the driver takes off without bothering to check if everyone's on board. Common scenario - me zipping up jeans while running and hopping onto a moving bus. After twenty-four hours of lying prone on our back side, constipation set in.

We spent almost two weeks in Xi Shuang Banna (southern most area in Yunan province). Known affectionately by us as BannaLand, land of tropical rain forests, banana pancakes, warm balmy weather, and a vast array of ethnic minorities (13 of the 56 minorities of China live in this area). Relaxing vacation in paradise, right? Yeh, right - this is China we're talking about.

We made our homebase at a cozy little hostel/dorm for $1.20 USD/night. Rooms were a bit lacking in sunlight and fresh air (it looked like a prison cell with four cheesy floral print Chinese quilts covering 4 wooden platforms for beds) but hey, what'da expect for $1.20? Eventually, I became quite comfortable using the outhouse squatholes (cement gutters that you pee and poo in). I also became quite comfortable taking ice cold showers in the
cold night air (outdoor cement shower stalls - just walls, no ceilings). Eventually, taking a shower became an almost sinful luxury, but we'll get to that later.

We made several interesting short excursions - two to three days max for each excursion then returning to our homebase to take showers after each excursion.

Ganlanba
According to the Lonely Planet (our trustworthy American travel "guide"), the village of Ganlanba & Dai minority villages was a LEISURELY 2 hour bike ride from our hostel. Well, the Lonely Planet writers must've been Tour de France bikers because we just about DIED riding up and down, up and down the steep mountainous roads leading to Ganlanba. For over three hours, we biked under the radiation of a tropical sun, pedaling through lush green valleys dotted with banana trees and wooden houses on stilts. Every so often, we (on our 10 speed bikes) would get passed up by little minority men (on ancient, rusty
0-speed bicycles) carrying tons of sugar cane, pineapples, or some other
huge harvest on their back - embarrassing indeed.

After burning all our body fat plus lactate in our muscles, we arrived, exhausted and somewhat disconcerted. For Ganlanba was not the promised Paradise of colorfully dressed minority women and children, quaint bamboo village homes, verdant foliage and waterfalls of tropical fruit that we had imagined and expected. Ganlanba was an uninspiring dirty, dusty one-lane town.

After asking around, we found out that we had to ride another 1 km out to the Dai villages to see our promiseland of minorities. At this point, we were hungry and hungry for some ethnic minorities! In Ganlanba, we met Dai families, ate Dai food, relaxed the next day by the river, played bullshit and ate coconut cookies under a straw hut in the middle of a field, watched peasants farm the sandy, rich soil along the Mekong River.

Riding back to our homebase was even MORE HELLISH than the ride there. We started out at the hottest time of day, again, and after the first half an hour, I pedaled on sheer will power, focusing on 'coffee and banana pancakes' (specialties of a western-style cafe near our hostel that caters to foreign backpacker types) to bring me home. An hour into the ride, my friend got a bad case of diarrhea from all that spicy minority food we had eaten the night before. Needless to say, we ate heartily that night and thoroughly enjoyed in the comfort and luxury of a cold shower in the chilly night air.

Menghun
We ate dinner and spent the night in a monastery with forty little Buddhist monks in-training. They range in age from seven to nineteen years old and live in the monastery, which acts as a boarding school. They were so cute! Village families send their boys to live at this monastery and it's considered an honor for the boy and his family.

The head monk and teacher broke all sterotypes of the ascetic, strict Buddhist persona. He smoked (to keep warm at night, night time temperatures approach freezing and the monks only have their flimsy orange robes and orange blankets that acted as coats), he played the guitar, he rented American movies for the little monks to watch.

We went to a market in town the next morning and were groped by aggressive minority women pushing their hand-made wares on us. And of course, we were suckers for it and bought all sorts of useless bags and hand-made crafts. We saw an old minority woman, dressed in the beautiful robes of her traditional costume and standing with one foot on the rocks, piss a strong and straight, steady stream of pee, right in the middle of the crowd, without flinching an eye, without moving a limb. At this point, we felt a little minoritied-out.

Dr. Tan
We randomly met a friendly Singaporean doctor who took us on his "rounds" to the southernmost villages of China (right on the border of China and Laos) where we tagged along with him to inspect and check-up on several village clinics he had helped set up. He was part of a Christian organization working to improve basic medical care in rural areas.

Naban, Lahu Village
As messengers of Dr. Tan, we were tasked with delivering medicine to the village doctor of Lahu village. Transportation into the heart of the mountains was done in this order - bus, motorcycle, bus, tractor. Now that was an experience - standing in a bent-knee skiing position, holding on for dear life, trying not to fly off the platform of the primitive tractor. Three hours later, we arrived at a tiny, minority village of forty families.

Although they had no phones or outhouses (their bathroom was a plot of land fenced off and away from livestock and houses). They had electricity, water, TV, a stereo system and cheesy but modern plastic furniture. the family of the village doctor made us dinner and invited us to stay with them for the evening. We slept in one of the bedrooms with a half open 'ceiling' (wooden rafters covered with cardboard). In the middle of the night, guess what we hear? Little scratching, scuffling noises of RATS. Rats scurrying back and forth, back and forth across the half open ceiling, all night long. I had nightmares of huge rats falling from the ceiling rafters. Another sleepless night.

Dali, western Yunan
Another sleeper bus, another twenty-four hours of the most pungent, acrid, raunchy, rotten, nasty odor I have ever smelled - rural Chinese TOE JAM. The couple sleeping next to us wreaked to high heaven of a combination of rotten ketchup, rotten fish and the stinkiest of stinky BO. The worst part came in whiffs at intervals of ten minutes, opening the windows just made the odor worse because the wind would bring in stronger wafts of odor. This was utter and complete suffering let me tell you.

These people probably never take showers and that's no exaggeration. We hoped that eventually our noses would adapt and habituate to the pungent odor, but alas, we could not habituate to noxious stimuli.

Dali is an old Bai (another ethnic minority) town, with cobble stone streets and century-old Bai architecture, exactly what I had imagined old China to look like back in the days of emperors and Chinese scholars with flowing robes. We visited more villages, met more minorities, went to another market. By wandering around and accidentally stumbling into the courtyard of a family home, we managed to get invited to New Years Eve dinner with a Bai minority family! Needless to say they fed us well. We went with them to the village temple to light huge sticks of incense and pay respects to family ancestors. We hitchhiked home that night.

On New Years Day we wandered around Dali, exploring the back alleys and narrow streets, and stumbled upon a Bai temple where all the grandmothers of the area were congregated. They were dressed in their traditional blue costume and sitting around, some playing majong, some cracking pumpkin seeds, and some just hangin' out shootin' the shit. They motioned for us to join them so we sat and cracked seeds and shot the shit with 'em.

They fed us lunch and then we watched then perform a religious, cultural ceremony of singing, chanting, bowing and ringing of small hand-held sceptors with bells. For over two hours they chanted a series of songs in the mother tongue and at the end of each set, would kneel and bow to the statue of a god in the center of the temple. It was surreal and meditative.

Li Jiang, western Yunan
After rats at night, toe jam in the sleeper bus, no regular showers, consecutive sleepless nights, freezing cold rooms (in southern China, there's no heating inside during the winter months and it's DAMN cold), and noisy Chinese women trying to kick us out of the two lower levels of bunk beds in a dorm-style hostel, we finally found luxury in the form of western food and lots of veggies, COFFEE (a rare commodity in China), milk tea (specialty in western cafes), and this yummy yogurt, fruit and muesli combo.

Li Jiang was another old town with winding, narrow cobblestone streets and alleys and ancient Chinese architecture. All of this is set against beautiful snow-capped mountains.

Our last sleeper bus back to Kunming was an easy fifteen hour ride. We decided that toe jam wasn't really toe jam, but rather the pervasive and omnipresent body odor that resulted from a complete lack of hygenic training amongst Chinese country folk. This time, we came prepared with the power of Tiger Balm rubbed under our noses to fight the stench.

Yangshuo, Guilin
After Yunan, I left the group and took a thirty hour train ride to meet up with another friend in Yangshuo, near Guilin. Yangshuo is another western backpacker's paradise, replete with an entire street of western-style cafes serving coffee, banana pancakes, pizza, burgers, pasta, and showing two American movies every night. We frequented these cafes at night, more for the heat and warmth provided by burning tubs of coal than for the Hollywood blockbusters, a much needed respite from the freezing night temperatures and our equally freezing rooms. We might as well have slept on the street because it was the same temperature inside and out.

Set against magnificent mist-covered Karst mountain peaks and the jade green Li river winding through the valley, Yangshuo is the China conjured up in Chinese paintings - majestic mountains, each layer receding into the mist, dwarfing the poet, farmer or scholar standing in the foreground.

We completed our journey with another thirty-hour train ride back to Beijing.