Visit to Yunnan Province, China.   April 27 to May 11, 1998

        We arrived in Kunming, Yunnan Province, in southwestern China (via
Vancouver-San Francisco-Hong Kong), April 27, 1998. We had crossed the
International Dateline, gained a day, then subtracted nine hours, so we were
thoroughly confused about our time, but it was 7 p.m. Chinese time.
(Surprisingly, all of China, huge as it is, is on the same time.)

        We had planned a day in Kunming to explore on our own before the
others in our group arrived. Our hotel was at the corner of two major
streets, so we could observe the scene from our window above before we went
down into the fray. Both streets were six lanes wide, but only four lanes
were for cars, buses and trucks. Two lanes, one on each side of the road and
separated from vehicle traffic by metal barricades, were reserved for
hundreds and hundreds of bicycles. (Victoria, by contrast, just paints lines
and calls these narrow unprotected pieces of general roadway bicycle lanes.
Buses cross these bike lanes to pick up passengers, and cars cross to park
and turn right.) Men with red flags, stationed at all busy street corners,
made sure bicycles stop when the light changes. The flag people are
"volunteers."  To get a drivers license, they must fulfill a requirement of
a week on traffic detail.

        Armed with a city map xeroxed at the library from a Lonely Planet
guide, we set off.  We crossed streets very carefully by attaching ourselves
to local Chinese and doing exactly what they did. It is a good rule in
foreign countries where you don't know the ropes yet: only cross streets
with the locals. Even so, we had a few close calls. Traffic was especially
tricky because of the combination of bicycles, motorcycles, and cars.

        A Chinese street market flourished just a block from our four-star
hotel. It was our first chance to try spending yuan notes to buy oranges and
bottled water. We walked past tubs of live turtles, buckets of live fish,
live chickens hanging upside down by their feet, and whole buckets of
chicken livers in water. We practiced counting in Chinese without much
success.

        A truck going up and down the streets sprinkling water broadcast the
tune "Happy Birthday to You" on a loudspeaker.  In shops selling clothes, we
were surprised to see only white mannequins with Western features in the
windows. We don't know why the Chinese wouldn't prefer Asian mannequins.

        Coming from music shops up and down the streets and blasting from
amplifiers set up next to little sidewalk tables selling audio tapes, was
Celine Dion singing the theme song from Titanic. We heard this song not just
in Kunming, but wherever we went in Yunnan Province. Amplified loudly on the
main street in the rural town of Dali, piped into every compartment on the
train to Chengdu, Celine Dion's voice was everywhere. Theater after theater
featured Titanic, subtitled in Chinese. Charlie, our Chinese guide, had seen
the film four times; his wife has seen it ten times. When asked why Chinese
people would like it so much, he said they respond very strongly to a tragic
love story. For whatever reasons, Titanic is a phenomenal success there.

        Throughout our stay in Yunnan, we had excellent accommodations, lots
of hot water, nice bathrooms, even good reading lights. Beds were extremely
firm. In fact, beds were so firm, I could do my morning exercises on them as
if I were on a floor exercise mat. This is because all Chinese and Tibetan
hotel beds are solely box springs on a wooden frame. We never saw a bed with
a mattress on top. Furniture stores sold only box springs, no mattresses.

        One unusual feature in all the best hotels was the daily changing of
the carpets in the elevators. Each morning there would be a different color
carpet with the correct day printed on it in large English letters as well
as Chinese. The better hotels also included a buffet breakfast, with many
Asian dishes and a few Western foods, such as scrambled eggs and white
breads.

        We liked Trish, our 32 year old Canadian Eldertreks tour leader from
Toronto. She was conscientious, competent, fun and did a good job throughout
Yunnan and Tibet. Charlie, the local Chinese guide hired by our tour
company, ElderTreks, through the Chinese government tour company CITS, was
with us only in Yunnan. He spoke English extremely well, was bright, funny
and knowledgeable. He was twenty-seven years old, a university graduate who
taught school for a short time, then switched to a more lucrative job with
the tour company. We learned a lot from Charlie's formal talks as we drove
many a mile through the countryside and even more during informal,
one-on-one talks.

        Our group of eleven travelers together at last, we began a series of
day trips to see the sights near Kunming. One trip was to the Stone Forest,
a series of huge, unusual natural rock formations, with paths skillfully
threading through them for about two kilometers. Along the way, one ten mile
stretch seemed to be the place for open air cooked duck outlets, so we
stopped to see one of these in operation. Fifteen uncooked plucked ducks,
heads attached, hung on a long wire right next to the road. The woman lifted
a freshly cooked duck out of  a round oven as tall as our shoulders. It
looked deliciously brown, similar to those we see hanging in windows of
Chinatown restaurants at home.

        Another trip was to a temple high in the Western Hills. Our entry
into this area was bizarre. Uniformed guards stopped us at the gate, saying
there were too many busses in the park. The guide paid, however, then our
bus turned around and retraced our route down the road until we were out of
sight. After a few minutes, Charlie ducked down and the driver drove quickly
right past the guards into the park. The guards turned their backs while we
did this and thus we could enter without our bus being recorded. (The
entrance fee money couldn't be recorded then, either.) Steps up to the
temple and along a cliff made it immediately obvious that some people in the
group were terribly unfit, particularly a guy named Sydney, who talked about
his physical problems nonstop. After this day, I always waited to see where
he would sit first at meals, then sat at the other table. Luckily, he and
his wife left the tour early and flew back home.

        One good thing about Chinese food: it comes quickly. In total, over
the entire trip, the group ate 78 meals together. There aren't very many
people on Earth I would choose to eat that many consecutive meals with, so
it was a blessing that almost as soon as we sat down, the dishes would
arrive. (A digression here. On a previous trip to Indonesia we often
wondered why it took so long to be served. After all, how difficult could it
be to make Nasi Goreng for the millionth time? At least one time we knew
why. In a remote restaurant in the countryside, we saw pineapple juice on
the menu and ordered it. Soon after, we saw a man pedaling top speed down
the road on a bicycle. An hour later, he came into view again, still
pedaling top speed, returning with two pineapples. Pineapple juice was
available. It just took a while.)

        In Yunnan, the tradition is to serve the most special dishes, the
best things, first. Toward the end of the meal, the rice would come (so you
can't put all those tasty sauces on rice). And, at the very very end, even
after the rice, comes soup. All dishes are placed in the middle of the
tables and shared communally. There was ample time during the trip to ponder
how three well fed American men in our group could be unabashed food hogs,
grabbing dishes first, even standing up in order to do so, and taking half a
plateful of the best ones, while in Eritrea, emaciated people politely
waited in line for a daily bowl of gruel at famine relief stations.

        Throughout the trip, if the restaurant was of questionable
cleanliness, our guides would go into the kitchen, get boiling water and dip
every dish we were going to use. I don't know if this helped at all, but it
was a gallant gesture. I suspect it would have helped more if they could
have forced the cooks to wash their hands. However, our digestive systems
seemed to do fine. The food was usually very good.

        We left the big city of Kunming for our next destination in a medium
sized bus, luggage piled high in the back seats (the suitcases were passed
through a back window in the bus, even huge heavy ones unwisely brought by
some in our party). It was a hard twelve hour drive to Dali, some of it on
the old Burma Road. It was our first taste of driving amidst hundreds of
huge government-issue blue trucks hauling rocks and materials for many
construction projects everywhere. The most impressive project was a
replacement highway scheduled to open in October. We had excellent views of
rice fields, corn and wheat, as well as huge fields of ripe watermelons.

        Our next stay was in the town of Dali, on the shores of Erhai Lake.
Our hotel was right downtown, across from a speaker blasting Celine Dion's
song until midnight. On the other side of the hotel was an illegal gambling
operation that ran until 2 a.m.. Every thirty seconds the caller yelled
something that sounded to our ears like "un bateau." After two nights, the
police closed them down, though, and we slept better. On the inside of our
hotel door in Dali was this reminder in English to put on the night latch:
"Please button up the steal defense." A delicious sweet bread, the shape and
size of large pita bread, was made and baked right on the street in front of
our hotel. The guides called this "pie" and it was the best bread on the
trip.

        The ethnic group living in the Dali region is called Bai (which
means white, and the womens' clothes are predominately white). Charlie says
he can only understand about ten percent of their language because it is
very different from Mandarin. However, there is a Yunnan dialect that all
Chinese speakers can understand. Yunnan is noted to be the area in China
with many distinct ethnic groups, at least twenty-four. Charlie, a Han
Chinese,  said the "ethnics drink a lot" (though we never saw this) and they
"shoot all the wildlife." As one of the dominant Han culture, he seemed to
view ethnic groups as inferior and backward. Except for a few individuals,
these rural ethnic groups do have less education and do not fit into the
more sophisticated, consumer city culture. However, it seems that China is
catching on they are a great tourist attraction.

        A forty-five minute bus ride from Dali brought us to the most
outstanding market of the trip. Dai people were marketing in distinctive
costume, oblivious to foreigners. In addition to colorful stacks of
vegetables on display, there were tools, clothes, live chickens and pigs.
Hundreds of pounds of dried lake shrimp formed impressive red piles. Men and
women ualed gigantic sacks full of these shrimp around on their backs. My
favorite sight was the "dentist." His  little table was set up among the
vegetables and pots and pans. A pile of teeth in the center of each table
served as a come-on, with a few metal tools around the edges. A foot-powered
drill stood next to the table. A little farther on, another "dentist" had
little piles of crowns on his table that could possibly be jammed on top of
a "fixed" tooth.

        One morning, on our way to take a boat ride to the large, inhabited
island in Erhai Lake, we came upon a road entirely covered with harvested
butter bean plants. Walking and driving on top helps shake off the beans, so
we crunched our way to the boats on top of these plants.

        Another day, we went to a different part of the shore to see if we
could watch cormorant fishing. Leaving the unfit and the complainers of our
group behind to rest or shop, we walked several miles and took advantage of
the opportunity for an extended private talk with Charlie. I was interested
in his perspective on the government directive that each couple may have
only one child. In the West, this policy is generally viewed as draconian.
The Chinese government is usually castigated for denying people their right
to choose and often accused of murdering children.

        Charlie reminded us that China has one billion two hundred million
people right now. It is not an aged population, either, but a young
population capable of producing many children. He thought  it might take a
hundred years to gradually educate and convince everyone to have fewer
children. By then, the numbers would be astronomical. China would have no
room for these people and no food for them. What is the alternative to an
aggressive campaign to limit families to one child? Nothing realistic I can
imagine.

         Charlie married the month before our trip.  He and his wife (she
works as a secretary) went to a government office to register the marriage
and are now eligible to have one child whenever they choose to do so. He
said he recognizes the importance of reducing population growth and wants to
comply with the one child rule for this reason. Also, as a city dweller and
a person ambitious to get ahead financially and buy many consumer goods, he
knows children are expensive. He says educated people and city dwellers are
generally in agreement with the policy, and it fits in well with their life
style and expectations. In the rural areas, where farmers have long depended
on having more children to work in the fields, there is much less
enthusiastic compliance.

        What happens if people do have a second or a third child?  Charlie's
answer is that nobody is dragged to the hospital for an abortion against her
will and no children born are killed. Instead, penalties and incentives are
used. The penalties can be very heavy. The second child is not allowed to go
to school, and will never receive any services from the government. The
parents can be fired from their jobs. If they live in government housing,
they can be evicted. Life with more children might still be possible in
farming areas, but it sounded like an almost impossible choice in cities.

        The harsh time of the cultural revolution also came up for
discussion. Charlie said most educated Chinese admire Chou En Lai much more
than MaoTse Tung. In his opinion, Mao did about 70% good and 30% bad, the
bad part being the cultural revolution. Chinese lament that period now,
recognize the terrible errors made, and the setback it was to development in
every area of Chinese society. Charlie's parents were among those forced
into the countryside during that time. Charlie indicated Mao was led astray
"because he married an evil woman." That seemed a gross over-simplification,
and I challenged him. He seemed surprised and nonplussed. I wondered if
blaming Mao's wife for everything is a common unexamined explanation.

        We lucked out with the cormorants. Charlie negotiated with the
fishermen to take us out with them in two boats. About twenty five
cormorants sat on a horizontal pole near the shore. The two fishermen
unhooked their tethers and tossed them into the water. The birds kept trying
to jump up on the boat for food, but the fishermen waved or pushed them off.
As any child who has heard The Story of Ping knows, fishermen place a ring
around the trained cormorants necks, then send them diving for fish. The
birds can't swallow the larger fish they catch, so they bring them to the
men and are rewarded with chunks of fish small enough to swallow. These
cormorants swam excitedly all around us and under the boat. Each bird was
rewarded with chunks of fish, and when the exercise was finished, the men
grabbed each bird by the beak, pulled it up into the bow and poured huge
handfuls up shrimp down their throats. The men could tell which birds had
been filled up, because their lower throats bulged.

           In Yunnan Province (and probably in many other areas of China),
most of the population has chronic upper respiratory tract infections. This
is a major reason for all the spitting and coughing. By this time in the
trip, seven out of the eleven in our party on the Yunnan portion of the trip
had this severe upper respiratory tract infection, including Norm and I. It
seemed to be the worst cold of our lives. We didn't want to eat for two
days, an unusual event for us, and when we still felt badly on the fifth
day, we decided to take antibiotics we brought from Canada. It might or
might not help, we reasoned, but we wanted to be healthy for Tibet. Later,
my doctor claimed it was the wrong kind and couldn't possibly have helped.
Whatever, we got better.

        During our move to the next town, Lijiang, one of the bus springs
broke and we were delayed five hours, but our leaders did well solving the
problem. Lijiang was a picturesque spot with a unique "old town" of winding
cobblestone streets. The ethnic group in this area is the Naxi. The women's
daily costumes are blue and they wear a strange flat black hat, similar to
graduates' mortarboards. Our hotel was a nice one, and featured a classical
Naxi orchestra, quite similar to a Indonesian gamelan, playing in the lobby
every evening.
        The next day we took a long, dusty, bumpy day trip to Tiger Leaping
Gorge, a spot on the Yangtze River where the muddy water is funneled through
a small canyon. The physically fit (of whom there were only four, including
us) climbed down 360 steps to view this. The Chinese claim this is the
deepest gorge in the world. I don't think so. It was o.k., but  we have seen
lots of great rivers and gorges, so weren't properly impressed and thought
it wasn't worth a five hour bus ride.

        The last long bus ride of this portion of the trip was through
spectacular mountains and canyons, some of the best scenery we have seen
anywhere. Even extremely steep mountains were terraced. Charlie said rice
and wheat are alternated in the same fields here. We reached the train
station and boarded a "soft compartment" car for an overnight train ride to
Chengdu. We slept in our clothes, four to a compartment. It was very hot and
the couple with us had a huge amount of luggage, which was jammed in
everywhere. Not our best sleep.

        We never witnessed people spitting on the floors of restaurants, as
many other travelers report. The loudest and longest demonstration of
spitting we saw was in the morning on that overnight train. There was a
small room separate from the toilet with three metal sinks. As part of what
seemed a morning ritual, the Chinese took turns hawking and spitting into
those sinks. I was very tired of Celine Dion by then, but it was one time I
wished the volume on her singing was higher.

        As we pulled into the Chengdu station, about forty red and white
uniformed female train attendants with matching caps and shoes were lined up
in formation on the station platform giving the incoming train a salute. We
were so surprised at this spectacular sight that nobody got a photo of it.

        Chengdu is an awful city with nothing good about it whatsoever. We
were only there to fly from their airport to Lhasa. However, the farewell
dinner with Charlie was a real highlight. Hot Pot Restaurants are the
specialty there, so we took rickshaws to one of these restaurants, and sat
at a long table with huge pots of boiling oil inset in the middle, burners
underneath. Some chicken broth was added to the oil. Then, one by one,
Charlie dumped in the meat and vegetables which cooked until we fished them
out with chopsticks. Some of the special ingredients he selected for us were
cartilage of pigs ears, water buffalo throat lining, water buffalo stomach
lining, eel, carp, rabbit kidneys, lotus root, potatoes (we were very happy
to see those familiar objects), melon and greens. The plan was to grab a
piece out of the boiling oil with chopsticks, then dip it immediately into a
small personal bowl of room temperature duck fat, then into your mouth.
Several of us got the duck fat changed to soy sauce and enjoyed the meal
much more after that.

        I recommend Yunnan as an easy and worthwhile travel destination. It
is well set up for tourists, the scenery is beautiful and varied, the people
welcoming, the ethnic peoples especially interesting. In Yunnan, one can
avoid industrial Chinese cities and see plenty of rural areas and mountains
instead.  We had no hardships and many pleasant experiences.


Janis Ringuette <jar@islandnet.com>