Ken, Ellen and Bei in China

Entering Xinjiang

2007-01-10T06:18:00.000-08:00

Like a flash, six months have gone by and outside my window I see the snow of a Laramie winter instead of the clear blue sky of the dry season in Yunnan. Bummer! Instead of motivating to teach for two hours a day, I pack a lunch and head to my office for eight, a fact of life that I’m still not used to after our China year (will I ever be used to it again??). And instead of a half hour bike ride to work along with people toting butchered pigs and hauling baskets of vegetables, I walk to the gym at noon and ride the stationary bike while reading Newsweek. The transition has not been easy.

It gets harder to think back and remember what it was like to live in China, but this blog remains unfinished and we visited some incredible places in July 2006 – Xinjiang, Gansu, Jiangxi and finally Beijing, where we boarded a jet and emerged in the U.S. some 12 hours later to begin gaining weight. So I’ll post a few more entries to try to at least partly finish the year’s story. Probably I will mostly just add photographs from our travels with extended captions, but maybe a little commentary here and there.

We left Lijiang in late June, first giving away a small truckload of accumulated “stuff” (American consumerism is hard to shake) to a woman whose family runs a guest house in the little village of Yuhu, site of Joseph Rock’s former home at the base of Yulong Shuishan. In the pile to give away: pirated DVDs and a DVD player, mattresses, blankets, my industrial grade power converter (for charging my never-used rock climbing drill), kids books, kitchen wares, miscellaneous food, and our trusty “Beartrap” bicycles. To carry with us for the next month: a huge suitcase, a huge, heavy backpack and several smaller bags, all stuffed with things we either couldn’t mail or thought we might need. For the next month we would feel like pack animals, dragging this pile of luggage from plane to train to hotel and back again in the heat of a Chinese summer and stashing it whenever possible in “left luggage” rooms to be reclaimed after excursions. I always vow that on the NEXT trip I will travel light, but it never happens.

By the time we said goodbye to our friend Jacqueline, who rode with us to the airport, and boarded the plane to Kunming, we were too tired of packing and waiting for our last paychecks to be especially sentimental about leaving, though there were tearful goodbyes with our Naxi neighbors and Western friends and last looks towards Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

In Kunming we boarded another plane for the long flight to Urumqi, capitol of the Xinjiang, China’s vast, westernmost province where the high mountains of the Tian Shan and the Himalaya cradle broad deserts that are the lowest and hottest places in China. The flight from Kunming took us across the edge of the Tibetan Plateau and the Qinghai Province and high empty landscapes extended off to the horizon, a temptation for future travels. The mountains just north of Qinghai lake looked especially tempting in their emptiness.

Urumqi, our initial destination, was far from empty and we deboarded into a new world from the one we had left in Yunnan. Xinjiang is dominated by the Uighur minority—Chinese Muslims—and though the Han are making a stout effort to overwhelm this population with immigration, entering Urumqi feels like leaving China for the Middle East. Men wear Muslim hats, women are often covered and minarets replace Chinese pagodas in piercing the skyline. And it isn’t just a feeling. Like Tibet, the Uyghurs have historically been more linked to Central Asia than to China, and many long for independence, much as Tibet has tried to remain separate. And uprising have been crushed by the Chinese with similar overwhelming force. Peter Hessler’s recent book “Oracle Bones” explores the Uyghur’s at least superficially and is an interesting introduction.

We spent just a couple of nights in Urumqi and a night in nearby Turfan (Turpan), an oasis in the nearby desert. Here are a few photos.

Minarets signal a major change in cultural heritage from the Naxi world of Lijiang to the Uighur Muslim world of Xinjiang and Urumqi. These two were at the "Da Bazaar" or "Big Market" in Urumqi.

The Da Bazaar was also a new world of things for sale. No more Dongba script!

Oil lamps at Da Bazaar.

All of our students who came from Xinjiang and many others who had visited here raved about the famous fruit and everywhere we went there were melons, peaches, grapes, etc. for sale on the streets.

My fascination with manequins in China was piqued by this herd.

And by this counterpart to the "pycho bride" of Shanghai. Perhaps her long lost groom?

The desert oasis of Turpan (Turfan in China) is famous for grapes and raisins. We drove through a pass in the Tian Shan to get to this place which is the Chinese equivalent of death valley--below sea level nearby and extremely hot. But grape arbors provide shade and a peaceful atmosphere.

One of the common modes of transport in western China, the donkey cart.

Seman fried rice??!!

A crowd gathered in Turpan to watch a show and fireworks display.

Blue.

A thriving outdoor eating area in Turpan.

The desert outside of Turpan. Very dry and very hot, this desert gives rise to towns and vineyards by virtue of a huge network of wells and underground canals that have been dug and maintained for thousands of years.

The Flaming Mountains outside of Turpan.

Melons are everywhere. This man was carrying a few more to a vendor outside the gate of an ancient city called Gao Cheng that we were visiting.

Bei protecting herself from the hot sun at the ruins of Gao Cheng.

These kids work selling tourist stuff at the entrance to Gao Cheng. As is always the case, they were very interested in Bei.

This Uighur girl posed for us and then walked back to our van so that we could take her photo with Bei.

Bei with the Uighur girl from Gao Cheng.

We were able to get permission to visit a Uighur cemetary outside of Gao Cheng, thanks to our driver who was Uighur. This is a body carrier.

A typical Uighur (Muslim) cemetary in this area. This is the one we visited outside of Gao Cheng. The graves are expressed on the surface but often go very deep with multiple graves arranged within deep narrow pits. Wealthier families have big elaborate mausoleums, many of which were severely damaged during the Cultural Revolution. Human bones are scattered about in the dirt.

Adoption Issues: One-child Policy, etc. (Text only)

2006-06-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

I recently asked my writing students to produce short “memoirs” describing things in their lives that were important to them. Many of the resulting essays were overdramatic accounts of boyfriends, girlfriends or middle school teachers, but a few were considerably more substantial. I’ll share a few of them here without much interpretation since I think they speak for themselves. These essays mostly address the impact of the one-child policy in China though one (The Apple Tree) captures a sense of the loneliness of growing up away from one’s parents as many kids do in China. Out of a probably unnecessary sense of caution, I won’t provide the student’s names with these essays, since some of the opinions are critical of the one-child policy.

Born in 1983

If my parents didn’t tell me these things which I will never know, just like these stories I will tell you. Then you can know how hard life my parents lived through caused by me at that time.

It was 1983, a tough time in China’s history. At that time Chinese government called for One-child policy and punished the people who didn’t obey family planning. By my parents touched “the tiger’s ass.” When my elder sister was two years old, I, as the second child in my family, was born in 1983.

One month before I was born, my mother hided in home and never went out for avoiding being found by government. One month after I was born, my mother hided in a big mountain, being looked after by my aunt. The food was provided by my relatives. Being lack of sunshine and nutrition, my mother was very weak and I was valetudinarian [a person overly concerned about their health] boy when I was born.

Fire can’t be kept in paper, this is the reason why my mother hided in the mountain. At the same time, my father had been jailed in a small house. He even had been suspended on a tree for the cannot afford 700 yuan [fine]. One month later, my Grandpapa gave the money which he collected from everywhere to the government and my father was released. When my Grandpapa went to see my father in the house with a steamed bread, but he found that the house was empty – my father went to see his wife and one-month-old son immediately! 700 yuan equaled to my whole family’s one year’s income at that time!

At the same year, another child who was the second child in his family was born. His father handed out 700 yuan at once because my father was a living example. But the boy had a sonorous given name in my hometown – Seven Hundred (Qi Bai).

Birth Control

In the year I was five years old, my mother was pregnant. My Grandma told me I would have a brother or sister in the near future. On hearing that, how happy I was then. However I did not know it was against the One Child Policy. During I was looking forward to the baby’s coming, my mother was missing without letting me know why and where. I kept crying for the whole day and asked Grandma for Mum.

The next day, the local government came to my home and asked me where my Mum had gone. I was terribly afraid of them, because they all looked so fierce. In fact, they were appointed by the local government leaders as “dogs.” They shouted at my Grandma with eating the apples from the tree in our yard, and took our furniture away. I hated them, because they killed my loved dog which kept shouting towards them. Eventually, they put up a seal on our door in order to keep the family out. They fined my Dad 50,000 yuan. It was a large of money to our family then.

About one month later, my Grandma took me to the hospital to see my mother and baby brother. In the hospital, I saw two men waiting for their own baby’s coming. They were so anxious that they could not sit down but walking over and over again in the front of the delivery room. The nurse told a man of the two that he had got a baby daughter. The man was so sad and in total despair that he did not say anything but beating strongly on the wall with his fists. At this moment, the other man came to him and said, “Don’t be sad, brother, a daughter is as important as a son. Daughters are more lovely than sons.”

The nurse made a mistake, and the baby girl should be the other man’s. After he learnt the baby girl was his own, he looked as if he was crazy with the truth came like bolt out of the blue to him. “What went wrong? What did I did wrong? Why the God punishes me like this? It is my fifth daughter,” he cried. He forgot his words and did not say “a daughter is as a son” any longer.

Seeing this, I walked away with a smile.

In the adoption community we often speculate about birth mothers, but we seldom talk about birth fathers or birth siblings. The following story is an interesting one from the perspective of a sister to a boy that was given up (I’m not sure why the family gave up the elder boy and kept a younger girl).

Goodbye My Brother!

When I was in the junior school, a boy who elder than me often visited my home. At first I asked my parents who he was. My parents told me he was just our relative. But I thought our relationship were not easy day by day. Eventually, my father told me the whole story.

At a cold winter day, a beautiful boy was gives birth by my mother. When my parents saw this beautiful baby, they cried with happy tears. Then although our family were very poor at that time, they also led a happy life. But three years later, I was born. My appearance tousled my family’s peaceful life. Because of my appear, the responsibility of my family became bigger and bigger. My father told me that there was a little food to eat at that time and my older brother often didn’t eat full for me. But sometimes when my parents went out for work, my older brother took care of me carefully, although he was three years older than me. As time went by, we brought many troubles to our parents. But they did everything for us with no word.

But one day, a couple went to our family. I didn’t know who they were. I just played with my brother. But my parents were wiping tears. A moment later, that couple when out with my brother. I saw my brother and my parents were crying. I didn’t know what has happened. So I cried loudly with them.

I forgot my older brother day by day for my young. But I know my parents often sobbing at night. Until he came to my home again, my parents told me this story. I asked my parents why did thy gave my brother to other people. They said sadly: “We have no condition to bring up two children, the couple couldn’t breeding, so...We are sorry to him, but we love you!” They burst into tears. Now my brother went to abroad with his parents. I think they must having a happy life. Maybe I couldn’t see him again, but I will always remember him and love him forever.

Goodbye, my brother!

An Apple Tree

When I was five years old, I lived together with my grandmother in the countryside because my parents’ work were very busy and they had no time to take care of me. I could remember that there was a big apple tree in her garden. I had a good time on this tree. So, this tree became my friend when I was a child.

The trees leaves was so much that they could help me to cover sunshine. When spring coming the bird song on the branch. In those days, I always wanted to catch a bird. I couldn’t catch them because when they saw me toward to them, they flied away quickly. The branch was so big that I could sleep on its. When I felt tired, I slept on this tree as my bed. I often saw some butterflies surrounding me. In my dream, I always became a beautiful butterfly to fly into the blue sky.

My Grandmother loved me very much. I took my whole days in this tree, and she also did her housework under this tree. She didn’t know why this tree attracted me so deeply and what did I do in this tree? She often asked me: “Do you eat in there?”

“Yes,” I answered.

Then, she got into home and gave food to me. So, I sat the branch to eat my lunch. I thought this tree maybe was my heaven...

Now, I was far from this tree and my Grandmother to enter University. Many times I dreamed I was on an apple tree and my Grandmother did her housework under the tree.

Yubeng 2 -- The Tourism Dilemma

2006-06-08T22:06:00.000-07:00

First, let me say that things are getting a little busy around here with our impending departure. We finish teaching on June 23 and then will travel until the 19th of July when we fly to the U.S. We’re in the midst of finishing a semester, packing the formidable pile of stuff that we’ve accumulated, shipping things back to ourselves, trying to plan a lot of in and out of China travel and saying goodbyes to friends and students. All to say that blog entries are going to be sparse for a while. I’ll continue blogging here in China and after we return to the U.S. until I have worked through a long list of topics that I’d like to discuss (not the least of which is our planned orphanage visits). But it may take a while. For now, I’ll relate a trip back north to the Meili Snow Mountains and Yubeng that we did over the May holiday (WuYi).

Visiting a tiny, traditional Tibetan village huddled at the base of enormous glaciated peaks on the Yunnan frontier is a once in a lifetime experience worth repeating. And since Bei and Ellen hadn’t had the chance, we returned to Yubeng over the May 1 (WuYi) holiday, along with hordes of Chinese tourists, also eager to experience “nature” and “Tibet.”

Yubeng is beautiful and increased tourism is inevitable.

Tourists get their first glimpse of the Yubeng valley from this pass, where they can also buy bottled drinks and other trash-producing snacks.

Traditional villages anywhere in the world offer tourists the ever more unusual opportunity to glimpse ways of life quickly being consumed by roads, cell phones and the relentless onslaught of the growing global economy. We Westerners are especially drawn to places that are “untouched.” But the very act of observing changes the thing being observed in profound ways (just ask Heisenberg. Our return to Yubeng was a great chance to see a still-beautiful and largely traditional Tibetan-style village, but it was also tainted by the realization that the huge mobs of tourists (that we were a part of) who descend on this tiny place are rapidly changing the very thing they come so far to see.

Young boys ride a horse through Yubeng. What will life be like for them 10 years from now? And what will their children's lives be like?

Tourists crossing the pass into Yubeng.

An editorial published on May 12 in The New York Times described a tribe (the Nukak) from the jungles of Colombia that recently renounced their traditional ways to move from ancestral lands into a more modern village. The Times commented:

“We have no clearer idea what it would mean to live a subsistence life in the Colombian jungle than the Nukak have of living even on the fringes of the modern world. In one sense, there has never been a better time for a people like the Nukak to leave the wild. They'll find medical care, sustenance and a genuine attempt at cultural respect that would have been impossible years ago. Yet the fact that they're leaving suggests how much their world — and ours — has been impaired.

The Nukak have every right to make this decision for themselves. But it's hard to escape the feeling that their self-sustaining existence — which went almost entirely unnoticed by the rest of the world — was holding something open for us, something that has now been lost.”

Yubeng, of course, is not a tribal village in the Colombian jungle, but some of the issues are analogous. The village is small – it had 133 residents in 2001 and I doubt that the population has changed substantially in 5 years. Yubeng is isolated—there is no road access and the foot-trail to the village climbs steeply over a mountain pass that can be blocked by snow in the winter. The people of Yubeng, though not isolated from the outside world, still live a simple life—cutting timber, raising yaks and other animals and farming on the small areas flat enough to be plowed. And life has been hard here. Health care is difficult to access and other services are nonexistent. In a 2001 New York Times piece by Erik Eckholm, the author says:

"But if this is almost paradise, that "almost" contains a world of sorrows the people of Yubeng could do without.

Mr. Aqianbu [a Yubeng resident and guest house owner] matter-of-factly gave an example. He, his younger brother and the wife they share, in the polyandrous triangle common to the region, have watched three of their four babies die -- a result of the near-total lack of modern medicine, the poor sanitation and nutrition and, ultimately, the poverty and isolation of a village that is an arduous six-hour hike from the nearest dirt road.

They are proud of their surviving daughter, but they are not happy that to attend school beyond the third grade she must make that same hike over a high mountain pass, then stay at school for two weeks at a time, paying dormitory fees that are a terrible strain."

A woman carries a load from the Yubeng fields back to her house. Farming is hard work and the lure of a tourist economy is strong.

Our friends Scott Lehman and Bay Roberts visited Yubeng several years ago before it became so visible on the tourism circuit and Scott constructed the first outhouse (suitable for “western wide rides” according to Scott) in the village. Outhouses, along with visitors, now abound though they are often poorly constructed, thoughtlessly located, and overused so that raw sewage finds its way into the streams that run through the valley on their way to the Mekong several miles downstream.

Our guesthouse in Yubeng. One of many that are being built to accomodate increased numbers of tourists.

When I visited Yubeng alone in February, there were a few Chinese tourists in town and guesthouses were quiet. One could imagine the village as it has been for hundreds of years and could, with little effort, explore the area with only yaks and pigs for company.

But the May 1 holiday in China is like Spring Break for the entire country, and the scene at Yubeng had utterly changed. We hiked from the trailhead accompanied by an almost continuous stream of Chinese tourists (over 200 per day over the holidays, we were told), most on horses led by hard-working locals who sometimes make two trips a day over the pass to maximize their salaries (horse + horse packer costs 160 yuan per trip, which is about $20, a sizeable sum in rural China). Not only do the horsepackers rush up and down the mountain pulling often reluctant horses and mules, but they often do so while carrying the substantial backpacks of their clients. They are so fit that it is an endurance workout to try to keep up with them (Bei rode a horse, so we ran along behind).

The trailhead for the trip to Yubeng. The once sleepy place is a mob of tourists and horses, waiting to join forces for the trip over the pass.

For many Chinese, outdoor recreation is a new pastime—the emerging middle class I suppose – and they struggle with great determination to reach places like Yubeng. Those on horses often seem to be doing all in their power to insulate themselves from the “nature” that they came to see. Riding in the hot sun, they dress in full gortex suits, boots, gators and substantial sun hats. We passed one group of older tourists who added to this outfit a complete facial wrap of thin gauzy material and large sunglasses to prevent sun from touching any skin, so that they resembled Saharan Touregs riding camels across blistering dunes.

The disconnect between man and the environment among many Chinese manifests itself in an oblivious disregard for the effects of so many people. Trash is a big problem and the area along the trail, which climbs through fir forest and blossoming rhododendron stands, was littered with plastic bottles, food wrappers, toilet paper and other refuse. Above snowline while on a dayhike, I saw tree-wells where trash accumulated on melting snow. In the village itself, workers cleaning rooms tossed refuse off of balconies onto steep hillsides to contribute to terracing efforts in front of the buildings (making ever larger viewing platforms for tourists atop the trash). A picturesque stupa in the upper village sits beside a plastic bottle dump, where thousands of drinking water containers are sequestered in a small fenced area to slowly decompose in the sun.

This area near a stupa, though beautiful, is also right beside a large dump where plastic bottles and other refuse are tossed into a small, fenced area.

And the flow of people like ourselves also brings change by virtue of the money we pour into the local economy. If you were a villager, would you preserve subsistence farming and a “quaint” lifestyle or would you engage with the lucrative tourist trade?

There is much construction in Yubeng these days and many families have upgraded their traditional Tibetan courtyard homes into tourist guest houses (still rustic). And who can blame them? In 2001 Eckholm wrote that:

"Now the people of the region, especially in more pristine places like Yubeng, are facing a challenge that many other parts of China have already failed: finding a way to prosper, while preserving their unique environment.

To solve this problem, the people of Yubeng are engaged in an unusual dialogue about their future -- part of a collaboration between the Yunnan government and the United States-based Nature Conservancy, one of the largest private international conservation groups.

"The goal of the Nature Conservancy is to protect biodiversity," said Rose Niu, a 39-year-old member of Yunnan's Naxi minority group who has a master's degree in resource management and directs the conservancy's China project.

"But here, it's very clear that you can't protect nature unless you work together with local communities and preserve the culture too," she said. "We especially need to promote the traditions calling for harmony with nature.""

Houses in this area are built of rammed earth and huge timbers culled from rare mature forest. Though logging was outlawed in 1998, villages still have rights to use forest resources.

There are big trees around Yubeng--a rarity in our experience in Yunnan. But many of these trees are used for the enormous posts that are part of traditional architecture in this area.

A water powered sawmill for cutting logs into boards. This mill near Yubeng appeared to be abandoned.

Boards stacked to dry near Yubeng. I believe that these are milled using chainsaws or other gas powered tools, though I'm not certain.

After our trip to Yubeng in May, I’d have to conclude that at least in some important ways, the challenges expressed so hopefully by Ms. Niu are not being met. What Yubeng needs is a sustainable way to support the inevitable increase in tourism that has already been unleashed on an area too beautiful to remain secret, while giving the people there a chance to prosper without destroying the very thing tourists come to see.

At the end of his article, Eckholm quoted a man named Amu, one of two village chiefs when the article was written in 2001:

“Of course, all of us are looking forward to a better life," he [Amu] said. "We need a road most of all, and we need a bigger hydropower station to give us steady electricity for cooking."

“We see tourism as our best hope," Mr. Amu said. "We welcome more tourists here, but those that bring destruction will not be allowed.”

And although if I lived in a village where my daughter’s life was in danger because of the lack of accessible medical care, I too would wish for a road, I also have to hope for and wonder if there are other solutions – regular visits to the village by doctors, establishment of a clinic supported by tourism and conservation dollars or other creative programs. For is not just tourists who “bring destruction” to pristine places in China.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is one organization that recognizes the huge opportunities that we have in China to preserve both culture and an unequaled environmental resource. I have to hope that groups like this have the capability of making a big difference. TNC states on one of their web pages that:

"To meet the conservation needs of this area and its people, the Conservancy has completed a draft resource management plan for Meili Snow Mountain that places special emphasis on reducing the threats of future mass tourism projects. Moreover, the Conservancy will continue to work closely with Tibetan communities, government officials, and technical experts to implement the plan."

To be successful in places like Yubeng, these plans require an influx of money from outside (and inside) China and letters expressing the hope that solutions can be found that address the very real problems faced by local people while at the same time preserving what is left of this place and culture.

If any of you are interested, TNC has an excellent web site for their China program:

The Nature Conservancy China Program

And it is not too late. The Meili Mountains are still beautiful, the Yubeng valley is still spectacular and the people who live there still lead a simple life tied largely to the land. On our last day in Yubeng before joining the hordes for the hike out to “civilization” Ellen and I took turns walking through the upper village to a stream where the rhododendrons were particularly spectacular. On her way back through the village, Ellen was startled by villagers announcing excitedly to one another: “Feiji! Feiji!”

As one they turned their heads upwards to watch a single passenger jet pierce the Tibetan sky.

Ellen and Bei on their way to our ride to Deqin walk through "Old Town" Zhongdian. Much of old town has been constructed recently for tourists and much is still under construction.

Bei dances with the locals in Zhongdian. We were told that the dancing was original forced by the government to promote tourism but has since taken on a life of its own among both tourists and locals.

Things for sale in a Zhongdian market frequented by locals and tourists.

One of several "first bends" of the Yangze River. This is a standard stop for tourists on their way north from Zhongdian.

Bei and Ellen visiting with monks at a monastery near the town of Benzilan north of Zhongdian. Bei and the monks were mutually fascinated.

Bei and I in Xidang above the Mekong River.

A detail from a stupa in Xidang near the Yubeng trailhead.

Crumbling tower in Xidang.

Prayer flags on a ridge above Xidang.

Herders move along a dirt road above Xidang. The steep terrain in the background is typical of the country along the Mekong and access to the area is difficult as a result.

Bei leaving Yubeng.

A string of horses and mules carrying tourists and gear into Yubeng for the holiday.

The Meili Snow Mountains. Not only is the village itself beautiful, but it rests just below peaks like this. How can tourists not come here?

Rhododendrons in bloom near Yubeng.

The afternoon view across the fields and forests near upper Yubeng.

A bench near the upper village of Yubeng. Afternoon light highlights the trees that were flush with new leaves when we were there in early May.

Bei with a couple of the women that are part of the family that owns the guesthouse where we stayed.

Ellen in the dining room at the Yubeng guesthouse where we stayed. When I took this photo she was unaware of the backdrop lurking behind her.

Tourists and their baggage catch a ride through upper Yubeng in the back of a tractor.

Rhododendrons near Yubeng. Yunnan is famous for them and they bloom all summer long.

A view from the fields near the upper village of Yubeng.

Locals watching the steady stream of tourists pouring into the village below.

Bei preparing to leave Yubeng on her trusty steed.

Bei and Ellen on the pass above Yubeng on our way out.

Commuting

2006-05-22T20:00:00.000-07:00

Ellen doesn’t love my favorite 30-minute bicycle commute from Gu Cheng(Old Town) to the da xue (college). It has to do with her aversion to dust—dust that settles into your hair and sticks to your teeth as you bounce along through road construction behind a wheezing dump truck. But for me, the alternative route up the well-maintained but less direct Shangrila Lu adds minutes to my trip which I usually don’t have to spare, and offers less interesting, though by no means boring, sights. So several times a week, I eat dust and Ellen pedals on the pavement.

Ellen's preferred route follows Shangrila Street from town out to the school. The views are not too bad and the road is not devoid of cultural interest either.

"Stick" tree plantings along the Shangrila route to school. Ellen is flabbergasted that these miserable sticks, stuffed into the ground and given minimal water, eventually thrive and become trees. But it's true.

Our commute doesn't leave us looking quite a clean and perky as this shampoo model on a billboard in Lijiang.

To put this into perspective I should say that we’re already beginning to grieve (not too strong a word) our late July departure from this extraordinary place. It isn’t just the trips we’ve taken that we’ll miss. It’s also daily life; the glimpses of things simultaneously insignificant and remarkable. These glimpses will be remembered as fondly as sunrises on big mountains or shadows settling along the Yangze. The 30-minute bicycle commute each day is part of our mental landscape and on almost every ride, I see something that I want to remember.

Images like this are part of every day and every trip out of the house.

A typical teaching day for us begins at about 6:00 a.m. when we open our eyes and, from under the heavy comforter on our cobbled-together but comfortable bed (foam mattresses atop roughcut boards resting precariously on stacks of bricks constrained within a dilapidated frame), have a look through open louver doors into the courtyard, still in shadow, and to the sky, just growing light. If we sleep a little late the sun wakes us up, reflecting off the chrome tank that feeds the solar hot water heater which on a sunny day will produce plenty of water for dribbling gravity-fed showers. But we don’t worry as much about hygiene here as we do in the States, and showers can usually wait for hot afternoons, when the breeze that filters through the mostly open cinder-block bathroom doesn’t seem so daunting.

The courtyard of our house in Old Town. The pebble surface makes for wobbly trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night but it is a nice place to wake up in the morning.

Our solar hot water heater. "China's best brand" according to the decal.

Living in a courtyard house is a little like camping out. There is no heat unless you huddle around an electric space heater, light a charcoal fire in a brazier or leave the kitchen gas burners on a little longer than necessary after boiling water for coffee. But it’s almost summer now and mornings are warm—so the barefoot hobble across the pebble-paved courtyard to the bathroom is not so bad. And at night, from our bed, we can see the stars.

I get up and get dressed, putting on one of my two “nice” teaching shirts and a pair of Levi’s—all now threadbare after 8 months, but still more appropriate than showing up to teach in a t-shirt. When we leave China the shirts will be left behind, along with much of the flotsam we inveterate American consumers have accumulated here—pots and pans, pressure cooker, DVD player, stacks of pirated DVDs, English novels, day packs, bikes and our now rarely used electric space heater.

In the kitchen, I brew a cup of Yunnan coffee—spooned into my coffee filter from a plastic ice cream container that once every couple of weeks I get refilled at a local cafe for 40 yuan (about $5). The coffee isn’t bad, and it’s a lot better when I have real cream than when condensed milk is my only option. The cream comes from Kunming (10 hours away) via another cafe (The Prague) that orders it for us, and it’s a luxury that improves my morning immeasurably.

Bei in the kitchen. We have a two burner gas stove which doubles as a heat source on cold mornings.

If you miss breakfast at home, there are ample opportunities to eat on the street, where vendors sell everything from eggs to bbq.

Or you can stop for some "coffee language." Few Chinese are fluent.

Our bicycles were purchased in September from one of the many local bike shops. They are not the famous Giant® brand recognized here as the Cadillac of bikes (we went cheaper) and after a mere 8 months, like many of the things we’ve purchased here, they are beginning to fall apart. On my bike, the front derailleur no longer works and both plastic gear shift levers, weakened by sun exposure, have snapped off, one at the expense of my right thumbnail, to be replaced (25 yuan) with sturdier versions. My unbelievably heavy ride resembles a mountain bike only in appearance, and its model name—the Wangpai Beartrap—advertised by a decal on the blue and silver frame, attempts to make up for other shortcomings (I did not buy the fancier Wangpai Big Mac). Perhaps in an unlikely encounter with an even more unlikely bear (we’ve seen almost no wild animals in China except at the meat market), the bike could be hoisted and heaved, it’s formidable weight slowing the bruin long enough for escape.

I strap my book bag onto the bike rack, plug myself into my IPOD, and get ready to ride.

An IPOD can go a long way towards easing the transition to another culture and at times, obliterating it. I joined the IPOD generation before we left for China, when I purchased our 20 Gb model at the UW Bookstore and then downloaded all of the songs we liked (including a substantial collection of songs for 4-year-olds) from our not-so-extensive CD collection onto it in the weeks prior to our departure. Total space occupied by all of the music I could cull from 50 or more CDs: 1 Gb. I use the remaining 19 Gb for photo downloads when traveling, but mostly I just enjoy being able to plug into music now and then to escape the relentless low-fidelity megaphone-broadcast Chinese pop that assaults you on the streets of Lijiang where stores blast bad music presumably to attract the attention of Chinese consumers (and to repel Western ones??!!).

Chinese friends in Zhongdian last winter listening to bad Chinese pop on their shared MP3. I use our IPOD to block out this kind of music.

Having an IPOD can create some strange juxtapositions. One morning I turned on Lenny Kravitz’ version of American Woman just in time to round a corner in our neighborhood where a beautiful little Naxi girl clutching a white lily was riding up the stone street on her aging grandfather’s back. Another time I mellowed out to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World It Would Be as a man peddled past on a 3-wheel bicycle cart full of dead pigs, heading towards the market. Sometimes the sound track is more appropriate. Bruce Cockburn’s version of the Monty Python classic, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (from “The Life of Brian”) makes sense as day after day you ride past men in the hot sun whose job is to hand chisel boulders into building blocks for a few dollars a day. And every day as I ride past they find the energy and spirit to wave, smile and say “hello” to the passing foreigner.

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...

Men breaking rocks. Some things in life are bad.

The steepest part of the ride to work is short and over quickly—up the stone-paved street in our neighborhood, past two small stores that sell everything from baijiu and cigarettes to milk and medicine and then past several abandoned mud buildings where the smell of sewage is noticeable.

If you get confused about directions as you ride, there are some helpful signs posted to orient the tourists in town.

I turn onto JinHong Lu—the asphalt road connecting our neighborhood in the farthest east part of Old Town to the bustle of New Town. A short and gentle incline on JinHong brings me to the top of the hill and I coast down the other side, helmetless along with all the Chinese riders (short of a full-blown motorcycle helmet, there is nothing to be bought here), weaving among taxis, buses and other cyclists, and passing little storage-unit sized stores selling everything from plastic pipe to live chickens. On the sidewalks, people wash their hair, catch up on the morning gossip, or walk their kids to school. On the street, vendors haul bike carts laden with the perforated charcoal cylinders used for cooking, their bikes too heavy to pedal.

The view down the hill on Jinhong Lu.

A typical 3 wheeled bike cart--used here to haul everything from charcoal to dumpling steamers (with the dumplings being cooked en route) to spouses or children.

Veering north onto Xin Da Jie, one of the main north-south avenues through town, I pedal past more shops, more people and more megaphones – the latter blasting Chinese pop so loudly that my IPOD can’t drown it out. Embarrassingly, I now recognize most of the bad Chinese songs, and secretly hum some of them when I’m not paying attention, in the same way one might hypothetically find oneself humming “Brandy, your a fine girl...” and then stop in horror.

The intersection of JinHong and Xin Da. Avoid those swerving taxis.

The view north up Xin Da Jie.

Chairman Mao watches peacefully over Xin Da Jie. The official line is that Mao was 70% good and 30% bad but he is still visible in 100% of the substantial towns in China.

Advertising is entertaining in itself. What IS that peak?

Soon though, I bear left, crossing traffic to enter a quieter street lined with new buildings, almost all unoccupied. I read that Ernst and Young (a U.S. accounting firm) recently withdrew their estimate that Chinese banks may be sitting on over $900 billion in bad loans—many for unviable construction projects. The company cited a lack of firm evidence for this estimate though from my perspective here in Lijiang, where they build wildly on almost every city block, and where many of the new buildings remain unoccupied, one has to wonder if the estimate is low rather than high. In Old Town, a successful restaurant recently opened a new outlet in a building that reportedly cost them over $100,000 USD to rent and several hundred thousand more to renovate. You have to sell a lot of rice and stir fry to recoup that kind of investment, no matter how popular your restaurant is.

A typically brand new and unoccupied building in Lijiang. Who paid for this? The Bank of China?

On my left, pasted across the entire width of the second floor of a modern building, a giant poster of a Medieval Amazon Dominatrix looms large, cleavage taunting and exaggerated eyebrows threatening a woman on her way to empty her mopping bucket into the alley. I round a traffic circle, alert to the many opportunities for car/bus/truck/bike collisions and pedal at last onto the small road that leads the last few kilometers to the college.

A warrior princess watches over Lijiang.

At last I turn onto the poorly maintained road leading directly from town to the college, and ride past a scrappy mix of traditional Naxi houses, small fruit orchards, ugly modern buildings and semi-industrial sweatshops where people manufacture cinderblocks, furniture and charcoal or amass dangerous piles of scrap material in all its sharp, raw, recyclable glory. Masters of simile and metaphor, we chose our words carefully when we renamed this road “the bumpy way” for its substantial potholes and cobbled stretches. It has become substantially more bumpy in the last several months since becoming a construction zone. The road is being widened—from a narrow two lane to a 4-lane divided highway that will offer tour buses a direct route from town to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

A view of construction on "the bumpy way."

Public bus number 3 bounces along through construction.

Though the road itself is a mess, farms and orchards line the route. In the spring, the fruit trees provided a nice break from dust and a great fragrance too.

An orchard along the route.

With the construction comes commuting inconveniences, like backhoes ripping trees out of the ground and suspending them from steel cables overhead as you cower, or dump trucks piled too high with boulders teetering through the potholes or Ellen’s favorite, thick choking dust, but it also brings a chance to see the Chinese economy in action. Workers swarm over the 3 kilometer long site, and the project progresses quickly by virtue of sheer labor. In the 2 months or so since the project began, workers have—by hand—built substantial stone walls on both sides of the new highway corner with stones shaped using hammer and chisel by men pecking away at them for 8 or more hours a day. The stones are held together with mortar, every bucketful of which has been mixed by hand and carried to the stone masons. The potential for productivity gains are mind boggling, as is the potential for unemployment.

More rock breakers pecking away at huge piles of boulders with a hammer and a small collection of chisels.

Stone walls like this one, that extends for miles, are the fruits of the rock breakers' labor. Each stone has been hand chiseled from big irregular boulders.

And then the commute is over – I emerge back onto pavement, stop at the little store by the college to buy a yogurt or a bag of bbq potato chips, pedal past students cowering from the sun beneath their umbrellas (they don’t want their skin to “turn black” and they certainly don’t want to look like people who do manual labor in the sun. They are the new emerging middle class). Finally, I ride through the school gate and wrestle with that pre-teaching pit in my stomach that comes from gathering the energy necessary to try to generate enthusiasm for learning English.

At 8:00 a.m., class begins.

Get those umbrellas out--the sun is shining.

Students ready for a 2-hour class.

Three Weddings and a Funeral

2006-05-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

In the prelude to his ballad “Better Off Without a Wife”, Tom Waits describes a not-so-blushing bride-to-be: “She’s been married so many times she has rice marks all over her face.”

Waits would have been right at home at the third wedding in less than a year for our waiban (foreign teacher handler) Ren Jing, the ultra-petite woman at our college who does everything from arranging our schedules to negotiating our work permits with the PSB to helping us with required and gripping medical exams at the Lijiang hospital to inducing a Pavlovian dread of her phone calls, which inevitably call for some unpleasant bureaucratic response—usually quickly. And she teaches English.

It’s a wonder she has time for all of those weddings.

But those of you inclined to pass judgment on this sort of thing should not be too hasty. All of Ren Jing’s weddings were to the same man, and as Ellen, Bei and I approached the doorway of the three-star Lijiang hotel where the day’s festivities would take place he stood, along with his very put-together and significantly air-brushed bride, holding a large silver platter draped with a red cloth and piled high with Chinese filter cigarettes.

Ren Jing and her husband greet guests with candy and cigarettes.

In America, the stress of just thinking about a wedding was enough to send Ellen and me quietly to the Laramie (Wyoming) Justice of the Peace, who was duty-bound to perform our nuptials with little fanfare. Not that we are typical. In more extroverted American social circles, the parents of the bride meet nervously with their financial planners to decide which assets to liquidate before hosting their daughter’s one (they hope) special day.

But in China, just one wedding is sometimes not enough. And in fact, weddings here may be self-sustaining—at Ren Jing’s 3rd wedding—the one we attended—arriving guests were unashamedly asked to produce red envelopes, traditionally enclosing at least 50 yuan per guest—a tidy sum in China. Body language and instructions from the envelope collectors, arrayed like well-dressed body guards near the cigarette-wielding groom, translated roughly to: “Do you have an envelope??!! Give it to us now or go home.”

We produce our envelope.

One thing that you can say about weddings in China if the one we attended was typical is that once in the door the celebrations are pretty sane—more so than many of their counterparts in the U.S., where endless toasts can go for hours, couples who should not be allowed near a typewriter recite their self-authored vows, and aging schmaltz-bands force horrified attendees onto the dance floor to devise jerky reactions to un-danceable mus-ak. At Ren Jing’s 3rd, we were in and out the door in less than 2 hours, stomachs full and dignity mostly intact.

Bei acknowledges the bride and groom.

The Chinese equivalent of the garter toss. Whoever catches the rose gets...thorns...and according to tradition, is likely to marry within a year.

Bei's-eye view of the wedding dinner. Photo credit: Bei Driese

The feast: a rooster with comb intact...

...and fish.

And before I move on, you must be wondering WHY Ren Jing had three weddings. The answer is simple: once for family, once for friends and, as Ren Jing would put it in her pretty good English, once for my colleag – gahs at the college.

The view from Wenhai toward Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (Yulong Xueshan).

A few weeks later we found ourselves attending a funeral in the small Naxi village of Wenhai. “What,” you ask, “is the connection between a wedding in Lijiang and a funeral in a small village on the flanks of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain?” It’s tenuous, but has to do with those filter cigarettes; this time walked around in a large basin to all of the men at the post-funeral dinner, much as a good New York host would deliver little bits foie gras or flutes of champagne. Cigarettes at a funeral—as if to insure that the deceased does not suffer alone for long the netherworld without the company of her male friends and family (few women smoke).

Cigarettes are part of the culture here and were handed out at both the wedding and the funeral. This man unabashedly enjoyed his.

A local man at the wake, cigarette in hand.

We became peripherally involved in the Naxi funeral by chance during a return trip to the Wenhai Ecolodge, where we have spent a few weekends in the past 8 months and where we traveled on this weekend to see the now blooming rhododendrons. A 57-year-old woman, who had lived in a house adjacent to the lodge, died of a chronic heart problem during the week before our arrival, reportedly while she worked in the fields. As we walked by her house on our arrival, we noticed a big dinner party in the courtyard, along with what Ellen thought looked like some guys building a boat (which of course turned out to be the coffin) but we gave it little thought, tired from our walk and assuming it was just a local get-together.

Rhododendrons along the trail from the valley to Wenhai. The mountains are thick with blooms right now.

Rhododendron blossoms.

Later, Bei reported to us, after returning from the dead woman’s house where she had been whisked by a covey of local women (to eat and play): “There were two people in bed there. And one of them was dead and the other one was crying.” She went on: “the dead woman was beautiful—she was wearing makeup.”

“Was the other woman dying?” Ellen asked (momentary visions of a bird flu outbreak fluttered through our heads).

“Maybe,” Bei replied, unperturbed, before running off to explore the Ecolodge and to invent fairy princesses to occupy its nooks and crannies.

Ellen and I looked at each other for a moment and then got the rest of the story in bits and pieces from villagers who work at the communally-run lodge. And we agreed that this was a good way for Bei to see death—something that in our society is held much more at arm’s length and regarded with much more fear and secrecy than it is here.

As it turned out, the other bed-ridden woman was a mourning relative and was not, in fact, dying. (Pass the chicken, please.)

I can offer little insight into the personal stories around the life of the dead woman and her family, since I don’t speak much Chinese, let alone Naxi, the language of the village. The locals were kind to include us in their eating and to invite us to watch the funeral procession, but we stayed mostly on the periphery, respectful of the passing of someone who had spent their life in this tiny community, and feeling like the superficial visitors that we were. But that weekend, as I enjoyed the beauty of the place—the quiet of the village, where kids still run home from school on dirt tracks; the aging herders, who still move their cows from adobe brick houses onto the broad meadow surrounding the ephemeral Wenhai Lake; the people at the banquet, laugh lines permanently etched by the sun at the corners of their eyes—I thought about what it would be like to be born, raised, and married; to raise children and to die, all with this place as the backdrop of your life.

How many more generations of people will spend their lives in such a simple way, sheltered from the rush of change that is sweeping over China? As we left Wenhai on Sunday afternoon, Bei on a horse for the 3-hour walk back to Shuhe, acquaintances of the family also left to return home, most to their houses in the village, but some in cars or on motorcycles, driving down the new dirt road connecting the village to the Lijiang valley where they now make their homes.

Kids running home from school on the weekend of the funeral.

An old woman watches as her not-so-young son (I'm guessing it's her son) takes cattle out into the meadows at Wenhai. What changes has she seen in a lifetime at Wenhai?

Horses graze in the beautiful green meadows around Wenhai Lake. At the end of the rainy season, these will be underwater, but during the dry season the lake shrinks and reveals perfect grazing for the village herds.

A shepherd along the shore of the now shrunken Wenhai Lake.

A Wenhai woman, etched by the sun.

A fence enclosing yellow blossoms at Wenhai.

Bei and one of her peers get acquainted.

Spring foliage and trees near the fields surrounding Wenhai.

The funeral. Family of the deceased woman wear white cloth wrapped around their heads. The men of the family line up and kowtow in anticipation of the journey of the coffin to the cemetary.

A new generation watches the passing of one of their family members. Will these boys live out their lives at Wenhai, or will they leave to seek a more compex life?

The coffin is passed over the heads of the men of the family.

Men carrying the coffin over the heads of family members. Note the cigarette. All of the funeral attendees follow the coffin up past the house and to the edge of the fields, where they bid goodbye to the deceased woman. Then the men continue on to the graveyard where they bury the woman. The rest of the people return to the house for a big meal, to be joined by the coffin bearers later.

A typical (old) grave at Wenhai. Newer graves are adorned with more elaborate monuments.

A boy from the dead womans family pushes his bike in front of the family house.

The gathering at the dead woman's house.

Two generations at Wenhai--a mom and her baby.

East meets west -- Bei with one of the local boys.

A boy from the dead woman's family wearing the traditional white wrap.

A girl at the post-funeral dinner.

Although living in a village about 5 miles from Wenhai, these Yi women probably attended school with Naxi kids from Wenhai. While walking to this Yi village, I passed an old woman walking towards Wenhai. On my return, I passed her coming back with about 10 kids who had spent their school week living at Wenhai and were on their way home for the weekend.

A man and a baby rest on the grass outside the house where the funeral dinner was finishing up.

Bei and Ellen talking with some of the Naxi villagers after the funeral.

We left Wenhai to return to our world--Bei on her horse and us on foot. The growing city of Lijiang occupies the valley in the background. Lijiang tourism and economic growth is quickly encroaching on previously isolated places like Wenhai.

Locals heading home from the funeral. Most are on foot, but a few friends from the valley leave in cars or on motorbikes to drive down the road, recently carved up the mountainside to connect Wenhai to the valley town of Baisha. Locals I asked say that they like having the road there. It makes life easier. But what will this quiet place be like in 20 years? Maybe the woman that died is part of the last generation to live a traditional life at Wenhai.

A Monastery in the Forest

2006-05-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

Imagine a lovely monastery deep in the mountains, shrouded in mist and surrounded by dark forest. Inside, fifteen young Buddhist nuns go about their daily routines, sometimes playful—giggling as they lose themselves to an impromptu pillow fight—but often serious, demonstrating their religious devotion at dark, smoky altars in rooms off the main courtyard. Their olive skin, delicate features and lithe, youthful figures straining against traditional clothing as they toil are at odds with their plain and simple surroundings where they wrest a living from this quiet, isolated place. Even washing their long black hair or bathing in the cold mountain pool behind their quarters is an adventure that elicits gasps as the cold water hits bare skin in the chilly air.

Life here is never without a measure of loneliness—in their early twenties and remarkably beautiful, they are at an age where living in innocence is both sweet and sour: sweet because their devotion to faith provides fulfillment that more earthly pleasures might not equal but sour because they are, after all, attractive young girls just beginning their road to enlightenment—a road that some may well choose to exit.

Many of these women have seen only a few men since entering the nunnery—the old gentleman who delivers vegetables, or the woodcutter who occasionally wanders by on his way into the forest—and none of them has seen a Westerner. The rare appearance of any man is fascinating, but the exoticism of a foreigner is almost more than these curious women can bear...

If this is your fantasy you’re in the wrong blog you sick man.

The Shibaoshan nunnery where we spent a night in April is indeed set among mountains in a forest, but the handful of nuns that live there were not spring chickens during the cultural revolution 40 years ago and haven’t gotten any younger in the intervening years. Nevertheless, they are beautiful in a wizened sort of way and Jacqueline, Ellen, Bei and I loved spending a night in guest rooms above the main courtyard.

We visited the mountainous Shibaoshan area in September (see 27 September 2005 post) but stayed in a small village nearby rather than at the nunnery, so we looked forward to our return. After re-visiting the main Shibaoshan temple area, where pagodas cling to an overhung sandstone cliff and monkeys lounge along the tourist trails, we asked our mini-van driver to drop us off at the nunnery for the night.

A feeling of great peacefulness permeates Buddhist shrines like this in China and elsewhere in Asia. I can remember years ago in Thailand stepping out of the mad rush of Bangkok traffic and into a temple complex where cows peacefully grazed among the buildings and a sense of quiet surrounded you like a warm blanket to muffle the frantic city all around. The situation outside the Shibaoshan nunnery is far from frantic, with forest extending up the mountain behind the buildings and a small group of guest cabins occupying the hillside below them, but you still feel the peace surround you as you climb the entry steps, pass the warrior Buddha statues at the door and enter the series of connected courtyards within. Incense burning on altars elicits an almost Pavlovian need to sit and do nothing, and that is mostly what we did, though Bei managed to keep herself busy befriending the residents and showing 70 – 80 year old Buddhists—to their great amusement—how to play fantasy games with Barbie dolls.

We spent what was left of our afternoon drinking tea, grading a few papers, exploring the premises and eating a simple dinner, before retiring to small but comfortable beds for the night.

Early the following morning, we were awakened by the nun’s call to prayer—a series of rhythmic gong reverberations followed by quiet chanting in the altar room in the courtyard, where juniper smoke drifted from a large stupa below our bedrooms.

At the first sound of the gong, Bei, who had been sound asleep, sat straight up in bed and announced, “I guess it isn’t so peaceful around here in the morning, is it?”

The mountainous landscape around Shibaoshan hides peaceful Tang Dynasty sites, many of which managed to escape the ravages of the cultural revolution.

Sunset from the entrance of the Shibaoshan nunnery.

One of the temple sites at Shibaoshan clings to a steep sandstone cliff above forested valleys.

Stay away from my nuns!

A reclining Buddha at the base of the cliff temple.

Characters decorate the sandstone behind the cliff temple.

A poem (I think) at another Shibaoshan temple atop a mountain near the nunnery.

A detail from a painted wall at Shibaoshan.

Wall detail at the cliff temple.

Light pours through a dirty window high in the cliff temple.

Cats in China are like cats everywhere--holes in walls are too good to miss.

One of the ladies at the nunnery enjoying a cup of tea in the warm sunshine that floods the courtyard.

A troupe of monkeys occupies the area around the cliff temple. This guy was unperturbed by visitors as he relaxed on some steps.

In China, large irregular rocks are routinely sculpted into smaller, generally cubic rocks by hand using chisels like these. Entire roads are paved with hand shaped stones.

Fresh tofu at the nunnery, waiting to be eaten.

Graves behind the nunnery mark the resting places of former occupants.

A broom rests against one of the graves. Every year in April the Chinese go out to sweep the graves of their ancestors and friends.

A doorway in the nunnery.

Characters in the shadow of a window grate in the Shibaoshan nunnery.

A detail from the vegetable garden behind the nunnery.

One of the men who help out around the nunnery (yes, there are men here) inspects one of Bei's Barbies.

Bei tries on a typical winter hat offered to her by one of the men at the nunnery.

Bei in her guestroom bed early in the morning, where she was awoken suddenly by the gong calling the nuns to worship.

This kind man, who helps with some of the heavier chores around the nunnery, is the father of 8 children. Despite this, he still had enough energy to entertain Bei with offers of food and play.

Steam from morning tea water in the cooking area of the nunnery.

Surprisingly, the men at the nunnery all like to smoke crack. Just kidding. I was offered this lengthy tobacco pipe just after breakfast and took a puff to the delight of the locals.

A shrine in the main courtyard of the nunnery.

Jacqueline brought work with her for the weekend and happily relaxed with her laptop in one of the rooms off the main courtyard.

Ellen and Bei relaxing in the nunnery.

The morning before we returned to Lijiang, I went for a walk and found myself eventually at a beautiful little temple at the top of a nearby mountain. This man cleans and maintains the area, where he lives by himself in a small room in the temple compound.

The temple keeper.

Bachelors are the same wherever they live. The temple keeper's room atop a mountain where he lives alone could use a little tidying up, but why bother if you don't have to?

I asked the temple keeper for his address, so that I could mail him some photos, but he misunderstood (imagine that) and instead carefully wrote me a Chinese poem wishing me good luck and good health.

Jinsha (Yangze) River Trek

2006-04-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

The finale of our Spring Festival travels was a four day trek in mid-February along and across the Jinsha (Yangze) River in the mountains north of Lijiang. We set out with a large group: the three of us; Tony, his son Devlin and Devlin’s friend Nicole; Jacqueline and our friend Brian Collins from Seattle. The lot of us piled into a local bus in front of the college for the ride north to the beginning of the trail in a small village above the west bank of the river. From there we walked through villages occupied by four ethnic groups—Naxi, Yi, Mosuo and Pumi--in terrain that ranged from wet rhododendron forest to dry badlands, and in weather that baked us on some days and snowed on us on others. In every way it was an exceptional trip and one that is perhaps best described with photos.

Bei, the intrepid traveler, on the 5 hour bus ride from Lijiang to our starting point. The hat was worn in anticipation of her 4-day stint as a cowgirl. Bei enjoyed the boisterous music videos that played on a drop-down screen at the front of an otherwise rattly bus as we bounced our way along winding dirt roads through the complex terrain of north Yunnan.

The bus stopped for a break in a small village along the road where a chaotic market clogged the streets. These four women were enjoying the scene and gossiping.

One of many pigs enjoying the good life in the streets of the village where we began our walk. As I've said before, right up until the point that they become dinner, pigs here lead a pretty enviable life. Their primary activites: sleeping in the sun, eating copiously and snorting at passers by. Something to aspire to.

Harvested branches against a basket in our starting village. We spent one night in this town before setting out and enjoyed wandering the narrow stone streets.

A typical Naxi village clinging to steep terraced slopes high above the Jinsha.

Ellen taking a break at the top of a pass on the first day of our walk. The trail climbed high above the river to avoid a precipitous gorge and by the time we reached this point we were knackered from the sun and the steep climb. Locals has blasted a 100 meter long tunnel through the very top of the pass to avoid a cliff that would have prevented further walking.

The Yangze River cuts a deep gorge through complex terrain. Jinsha means "gold sand" and is the Chinese name for the river here. Although this is the main upstream stem of the Yangze, I've also heard it referred to as a tributary.

Never call Jacqueline afraid of a little dirt. Here she plants herself face down on the dusty trail at the top of the pass.

A Naxi woman working in a winter wheat field near a village on the north side of the pass we hiked over on the first day.

Our group spread out along a typical stretch of trail on the first day. Bei is on our lone horse, happily chatting with whomever can keep up with her.

A woman in the late day sun near the house where we spent our first night. Each night was spent in a home guest house. This village was Naxi. There are about 275,000 Naxi people in Yunnan and they are concentrated around Lijiang, though Naxi villages are scattered throughout a broader area.

A wall at the bottom of the stairwell at our Naxi guest house on the first night.

Every bit of accessible land is subject to agriculture. Morning light on our second day highlights a small settlement atop a steep knob.

These two Naxi boys walked with us along the trail briefly on their way to some fields where others from their family were working.

A Naxi man on his way to work also shared the trail with us for a short while.

Bei on her horse during the second day. She joyfully rode for 8 hours or so each day without complaining.

Bei tests Jacqueline's sunglasses on our ferry ride across the Jinsha. The crossing point is destined to receive a bridge in the near future, which will change the nature of the villages on the other side. Although currently accessible by vehicle (from we know not where) the east side of the river here is still remote.

Crossing the Jinsha. Bei's horse climbed aboard the small, wooden boat with the rest of us and we set off, using eddies to minimize our downstream drift in the fast current.

A Mosuo boy in a village near where we spent our second night. The Mosuo are well known for their matrilineal society. Women own the family property here which is inherited by daughters rather than sons. The Mosuo people are also known for an institution known as "walking marriage" in which monogamous relationships are not required. A woman may have children by more than one man over the course of her life and marriage in our sense of the institution is not required. Many Mosuo do marry, but traditionally it has not been expected.

A one room dirt floored classroom near a small settlement high in the dry hills above the Jinsha on our third day.

Me enjoying the view high above the river on day 3. Our path began on the other side of the two small pointy bits of rock on the far side of the river on the distant skyline.

Ladles in the courtyard of a Mosuo house where we spent a night after our second day.

Farming paraphernalia on the roof of a Mosuo house where we ate lunch on our third day out.

The view south from our lunch spot on day 3. The Jinsha is in the steep gorge at center and our starting point was on the other side of the 2 pointy peaks in the far background.

Lunch on our third day. From left to right: Brian Collins (Seattle), Ellen and Bei, Devlin and Nicole (Australia) and Jacqueline Bishop (New Zealand).

A goat enjoys a rest in the courtyard of the house where we ate lunch.

Bei scoping out a baby goat playing on the roof of the Mosuo house where we had lunch.

After lunch we continued to climb away from the river, heading east towards a pass that would deliver us into the basin where our hike would end the next day. We stopped at a small store along the way where this poster decorated a door.

Our third night out was spent at a Pumi minority house. This was the most rustic of our accomodations on the trip--the weather had turned cold and threatening and we spent most of our time here in the kitchen, sitting on low stools around a warm fire in front of a Buddhist altar. Ellen traded English and Chinese with Mr. Mu, our guide on the trip, and with the couple that live in the house. I don't know a lot about the Pumi people, but the couple's daughter, who was away to study, left this note for visitors like ourselves:

"Welcome to my family. We are Pumi. Much to my regret many people don’t know Pumi. Pumi people are very kind, hardworking. We are Buddhist. Women aren’t allowed to kill animals. We respect God. Before meals, we should take the food we will get ready for eating to the God. If someone gives us sorrow, anger, trouble, etc., we will try our best to give his and her right way to treat others. We believe God will give us fairness. We have no written language. We should hand down custom, language, etc., from generation to generation by speaking and we know: In unity there is strength. We often help each other learn from each other and think of each other. Pumi Hangui culture is very interesting. What a pity I always study at school. I don’t know it all but if I have time I will study it and try my best to make more people know Pumi Hangui culture. My parents can sing all kinds of Pumi songs. You can listen to Pumi songs in my family. I will try my best to practice my spoken English. Next time I can introduce Pumi culture to you. If you want to make friends with me you can leave your address in my family. I hope you have a good time in my family." -- Helen Yang

Bei on the last day of the walk. It snowed up high during the night--just above where we slept, and we walked up into it the next morning, adding clothes as we went. Bei was the coldest, since the rest of us were working to climb the pass, and she happily donned Ellen's down jacket.

A Yi child above a poor village on the last day of our trip as we descended from the snowy pass back into dry country in a broad basin. Nearby this child's mother hacked at scrappy, sparse wood with an axe, a small child bundled on her back. Villages in this part of China have rights to cut wood in certain areas around their villages, and the forest near this village was decimated. Less than 50 years ago the Yi still raided villages of other minorities to take slaves. Though Yunnan ethnic groups coexist peacefully now, the Naxi still express some animosity towards the Yi.

Bicycles on the road to Yongning, the mid-sized town that was our end point. From Yongning we caught a minivan to Lugu Lake, and after a night there in a small hotel with wonderfully hot showers we rode a small bus back to Lijiang. A couple of weeks later Tony's brother and his friend Jenny did the same trip. On their return to Lijiang in a minivan, they sat in the back and several other people crowded into the front. Partway home, the front windshield of the van exploded into pieces and the woman in the front passenger seat began screaming. A football sized rock bouncing down the mountain had, against all odds, crashed through the windshield and landed on her lap, breaking her femur. Eventually, she was transported to the hospital in Lijiang.

Boats lining the shore of Lugu Hu. Lugu Hu until recently was remote and sparsely populated with small Mosuo villages. A new road and Chinese tourist development has reduced much of its appeal, though the lake itself is still pretty. If you are interested in the area and the Mosuo matrilineal culture, "Leaving Mother Lake," by Yang Erche Namu, is an excellent and very readable memoir about a woman who grew up here and went on to become a well known Chinese singer. In the book she describes her childhood in area around the lake and her family's history, including the effect of the Cultural Resolution even in remote parts of China like this.

Yubeng Trek

2006-04-18T19:52:00.000-07:00

My pathetic Chinese and the steep, complex terrain along the Mekong River conspired to make my trip to the small Tibetan village of Yubeng circuitous. In other words, I got lost. The landscape here is sculpted by the Mekong, which rushes past the Meili Mountains on it’s way from the Tibetan plateau to Xishuangbanna, then Thailand, and eventually to the South China Sea. A single mistake in this complex terrain can lead you into huge drainages, and once you are in them, it’s easier to go with your mistake than to climb back out. And as is often the case in China, getting lost can be the best part of a trip.

Steep terrain along the Mekong River in northern Yunnan. Although crossed by many trails, huge gulleys often erase them unexpectedly, making travel engaging.

The Meili Xueshan--sacred, ice plastered and mostly unclimbed--guard the arbitrary boundary between the Tibet Autonomous Region to their west and the Yunnan Province to their east. At the base of these mountains, huddled on a small terrace at the confluence of two mountain streams and confined on every other side by steep, forested slopes, lies Yubeng. A few adobe brick homes cluster there, surrounded by meadows and fields.

The village of Yubeng, at the foot of the Meili Xueshan.

Though accessible only by foot or horse, the village has become a popular trekking destination for both Chinese and Westerners, in part because the spectacular Meili Mountains, including Mt. Kagebo, the highest peak (6,740 m or 22,113') in the range (and in Yunnan), explode skyward just a few kilometers beyond the village, and in part because it is on the path to a sacred waterfall flowing over a granite cliff just below one of many glaciers. Buddhist pilgrims travel from all over Asia to pay homage.

Sunrise on one of 13 main peaks of the Meili Range. This peak looms above Yubeng and the sacred waterfall is at its base.

A pilgrim on his way to honor Mt. Kagebo and the sacred waterfall. This man, I was told, had traveled all over Asia with no possessions of his own, surviving on gifts from others.

Anxious to see the mountains from a closer vantage and intrigued by photographs I’d seen of Yubeng, I said goodbye to Bei and Ellen (they headed back to Lijiang) on a crisp February morning and dropped off a steep ridge from Feilai Si where we had spent the night and witnessed a classic Meili sunrise.

The problem was that I dropped off the wrong side of the ridge, and I spent my day descending and then following a small stream that led eventually to the Mekong. Huge eroded gullies sometimes obliterated the trail, requiring technical dirt climbing to navigate; or alternatively, steep descents on hardscrabble slopes sparsely vegetated with plants that were proud of their ability to produce huge thorns in such rocky, dry terrain where other plants had given up and died.

Bei at Feilai Si, before she and Ellen headed back to Lijiang for a short break from traveling.

As dusk settled into the deeply incised valley and a warm evening wind whipped up, I arrived at the Mekong, far downstream of my intended destination, a town called Xidang where the most-used Yubeng trail begins. A boy in dirty, tattered clothes herding a small collection of goats understood my Chinese well enough to assure me my that Xidang could not be reached in less than a day’s walk. (“Bu keyi” -- not able).

But, he indicated, if I walked downstream a kilometer I could cross the river and find villages where I might be able to stay. Disheartened, I set off again, passing a young woman on her way home for dinner, driving her horses up the steep path, and I soon reached a dusty, lonely, boulder-strewn terrace above the Mekong with no sign of a bridge. I contemplated sleeping in the shelter of a boulder. I could build a fire and get water, but I had no food or sleeping bag. It was getting dark and I’d spent worse nights out in the open—the wind was warm. Loathe to commit to a bivouac yet, I wandered further and, surprisingly, just south of where I had been looking the promised footbridge appeared, suspended by cables over the deep green Mekong. I crossed the bridge and drank the last of my water before turning back north towards a small settlement perched on a knoll above the river terrace.

Passing an outlying house, I waved to a man in its courtyard tending his horse and continued toward the village. Five minutes later he caught up to me on the path, panting from his sprint, and invited me to join his family for dinner and to stay for the night. This generosity and kindness is common in China, and I believe one could walk across Yunnan (or Tibet? or China?) with no food or money and never want for shelter.

The man led me through the courtyard, filled with straw for his horse, and into the family room where three generations—grandmother, parents and children—sat around a low table, getting started on a hot pot meal of pork, potatoes, vegetables and broth. At one end of the table on a small wooden stand, a TV surreally played a DVD of ethnic Yunnan people dancing in mountain scenery to bad traditional music (why were they watching this!!??). Behind me a Buddhist shrine decorated one wall beside a kitchen area where a low fire burned in a sooty woodstove. To my left, the wind moved old curtains in an open window that faced out on the Mekong valley. A few stars popped out in the clear sky, visible through the window. Before I knew it I was supplied with a hearty meal, a glass of Pepsi (the bottle carried from the closest road 10 km away), baijou, a beer and a cigarette, all consumed with gratitude and/or duty.

Part of the family that so generously put me up for the night on my way to Yubeng.

Before I went to bed, my host led me by the hand though the back door and across a small garden patch to the a grassy area at the edge of the compound which, he indicated, served as the bathroom. I didn’t need to go, but I thanked him for showing me. Then he took me to a large, dirt-floored room containing several single beds, piles of horse tack, a stack of grain sacks and miscellaneous agricultural implements. As he closed the door behind him, I was left alone in a very quiet, very comfortable bed, where I read “Tibet, Tibet” (an excellent book by Patrick French) for a few minutes by headlamp before falling deeply asleep.

An hour later I awoke, bladder full. Groping in the dark for my headlamp I shuffled to the bedroom door, discovering to my dismay and rising panic that it was locked—from the outside. How could this be??!! How could I pee??!! I found my way to the single bare bulb hanging from a wire in the middle of the large room and after turning it on, surveyed my options. The room was oddly devoid of empty vessels and I was loathe to use my water bottle, since it was nearly full of carefully iodized water and I was dehydrated from the day’s walk. My eyes settled on a window above my bed and I calculated trajectories. Clambering unto a small wooden box below the window, I threw open the sash and awkwardly propped my knees on the broad sill, wedging myself so that I could direct my pee outwards while looking at the stars, hoping against hope in the darkness that the window did not face into the courtyard and that I was not peeing on the poor horse; or worse, that the ladies of the family would burst in.

Later, two of the brothers joined me in the room, taking their places on the other cots, and for the rest of the evening the door was unlocked. The next morning, as I headed on my way, I was relieved to discover that my window indeed faced outward onto the dry terrace above the river.
An easy walk on a little-used but beautiful trail mapped out for me by the family delivered me to Yubeng. I arrived under a hot sun and found a room at a modest guesthouse (Analu’s--spelling uncertain) above the village, where a large group of Han Chinese from Beijing soon arrived on horses. “Frank,” their leader, was a tech-nerd to the core and boasted the latest cell phone (he spewed the meaningless model number to me), a GPS, and 2-way radios so that the group of about 10 people could keep in constant contact with one another should their horses become separated by more than a few feet. But despite the noise and commotion that arrives with large Chinese groups, they were very friendly and accommodating, and several spoke excellent English, a relief after a couple of days of simple sentences and hand gestures. For the rest of my stay, I joined them for meals and I ended up traveling with them back to Lijiang at the end of the trip.

The next morning, several of us set out under perfectly clear skies for the waterfall, a 2-hour stroll first passing along small stone paths in the village and then through the largest trees I have seen in China, occupying a pretty valley descending from the mountains, which sparkled above us in the morning sunlight. As we walked, one of the women in the group who spoke some English befriended me, teaching me the Chinese words for some of the trees, lamenting how poor much of Yunnan is, and noting that she and her husband, through donations, support some school kids in the province, which is largely rural or mountainous.

The view from Yubeng as I passed through on my way to the waterfall, an hour or so up the valley towards the mountains.

As we approached the mountains, what had been a small puffy cloud just below its peak, grew and descended, eventually overwhelming the blue sky and producing graupel and then snow, which for me lent an appealing atmosphere to the path which by now was adorned with prayer flags and offerings as we neared the falls. Stopping for a short break, the group laughed among themselves and the woman translated for me. “There is a joke,” she told me, “that if a Japanese tourist arrives at Deqin (the closest big town), the weather will grow terrible because the Mountain God hates the Japanese.”

It’s perhaps hard to understand how an offhand comment like this can taint an otherwise brilliant day (it certainly didn’t ruin my trip), but if you witness the lockstep hatred that many Chinese express towards Japan for atrocities committed in the 30’s and 40’s--over sixty years ago--it will begin to sink in. I recently did a unit on “describing personality” in my oral English classes and I asked the students to list personality words to describe countries: China -- orderly, mature, traditional, polite, friendly, industrious; The United States -- powerful, self-important, open, independent, overbearing, imaginative; Japan -- cruel, extreme, pugnacious, nasty, impudent, obscene, lecherous (“Yes”, they explained. “Japanese men like to go after young girls.”). You get the idea.

And despite the kindness that my companions showed me, I couldn’t help but marvel that they could be blind enough to imagine a Tibetan God joining them in their hatred of Japan rather than grumbling at the imposition of Beijing tourists into what had once been the edge of a free Tibet. Though the roots of Chinese anger towards Japan lie in terrible atrocities, and have been exacerbated by recent insensitivity on the part of Japan, the edge of Tibet seemed a poor place for complaining, even if in jest.

The group was slow on the trail and eventually I left them behind to enjoy the atmosphere of the waterfall alone. Though better described after the unusually dry winter as a sacred wet spot, the “falls” still evoked an aura of reverence, and I sat at its base for a while enjoying the silence, the falling snow and the faded prayer flags draped on every available surface. Above me Mt. Kawegabo rose into the clouds and its glaciers shifted and rumbled high above. Later, my friends arrived, chatting on their radios, consulting their GPS units and literally blowing referee’s whistles to advertise their arrival to one another. I greeted them and made my way alone back to the village from which I would hike to the road the following day to begin my return to Lijiang.

That night, after a boisterous dinner at Analu’s, the Beijing woman pulled me aside to tell me earnestly, as if letting me in on a secret that only the Chinese are privy to. “You know,” she said, “on the trail we joked about the Japanese, but you should realize something. What we said is true.”

Ellen and Bei in Zhongdian before our trip further north to the Meili Mountains. Searching for a guest house in the re-built "old" town.

Steep terrain along the road from Zhongdian to Deqin. Between the two Tibetan-esque towns, you cross the Yangze River (Jinsha) and then quickly climb and descend into the Mekong watershed. If one continued further west you would soon encounter the Salween river. All three major Asian rivers flow in parrallel from Tibet within 100 km of one another.

Stupas along the road to Deqin.

Prayer flags at Feilai Si, near Deqin.

A view of the Meili Xueshan from the road to Deqin.

The Meili Mountains from Feilai Si.

A carved stone near a stupa at Feilai Si.

I watched as this yak systematically made his way along this line of stupas, stopping at each to devour whatever offerings had been left there, typically oranges. Perhaps he is the reincarnation of an old climber, fondly remembering a former life scarfing uneaten food from tourists in the Yosemite cafeteria.

Mt. Kagebo, the highest peak in the Meili Range at 6740 meters or over 22,000 feet. The peak is unclimbed. In 1991, 17 Chinese and Japanese climbers were killed attempting an ascent.

An empty building in a side drainage that led to the Mekong. I passed this early on my first walking day, still unaware that I was in the wrong watershed.

A Tibetan-style window at Yubeng.

On my walk from the house on the Mekong where I spent a night to Yubeng, I passed an abandoned farmhouse in an isolated valley. The remains of a workshop greeted me in the main room of the house--including a handmade wooden plane and a sawhorse. I left them where I found them, unsure if the owners might return in the spring.

Mani stones left by pilgrims on their way to the sacred waterfall near Yubeng.

Yubeng horsepackers prepare to transport a load of Chinese tourists from Yubeng back to the trailhead. Some of the horse guides were as young as 7-years old, and they led tourists up and down the trail by themselves each day.

This 6-year old girl was a daughter of one of the brother's that owned the guesthouse where I stayed in Yubeng. She worked hard to help the family manage their business--hauling wood, serving food and collecting dirty dishes. And she had a determined set to her jaw that made me laugh every time I saw her.

The deck at Analu's guesthouse above Yubeng on my last day there. I arrived in hot sunshine and left in 2 inches of squeaky cold snow.

The upper part of Yubeng, under a thin blanket of new snow.

The top of the pass on the trail between Yubeng and the nearest road. A small shack here offered hikers hot butter tea, snacks and a warm fire. It was here that I met the one pilgrim that I saw on this trip--on his way to visit the waterfall in the cold season.

Offerings draped on a boulder along the trail to the waterfall. Huge boulders here were covered with small bits and pieces of people's lives--from beads to photographs of dead loved ones to tags that guaranteed the quality of goose down fill.

Birds flying over a glacier at the base of the Meili Xueshan.

Our ride from Deqin to Zhongdian at the end of the hike. My Chinese friends offered me a place in their Land Cruiser and I happily took them up on it. The drive can be interesting, even in dry conditions. On our way to Deqin (before the hike) we were stopped at a "checkpoint" where the driver was offered a healthy shot of 100-proof baijou by a man in traditional dress before a prayer flag was tied to our mirror and we were sent on our way. Do prayer flags counteract bijou-shots in highway accident statistics?

My Chinese companions enjoying dinner at Feilai Si after our return, under the watchful gaze of The Great Helmsman.

The Meili Mountains and stupas from Feilai Si.

Sunset from Feilai Si before we headed south to Zhongdian.

Xishuangbanna: The Horror, The Horror

2006-04-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

After dinner Mr. Rush, our guide, led us down the dark stairs from the elevated Jinuo shack where we were spending the night, onto the damp, cluttered ground underneath. An annoying dog yapped as we bumbled through the gate in the dark. The sun had set hours before and there was no moon, so we picked our way carefully through the village along a wide muddy path that also served as a toilet. There were no established bathrooms here, except for a decrepit two-holer behind a sheet of corrugated tin near the village schoolyard where we were headed.

But elimination was not our purpose. Instead, Mr. Rush promised a taste of dancing and singing with villagers gathering to celebrate the coming lunar New Year. Though tired from the day’s walk, we were anxious to see traditional Jinuo culture emerge from what otherwise seemed a trashy and charm-less village hacked out of the surrounding rubber tree plantations.

We had hired Mr. Rush to lead us on this two-day trek that Orchid, an owner of the Mei Mei Cafe—a well known traveler’s hangout in Jinghong—had described as “passing through rice paddies, ethnic villages and jungle.” This combination and the potential for some exercise was appealing after two days of travel from Thailand to Kunming to Jinghong and a couple more days in the city getting re-oriented to life in China. Jinghong itself, though situated in pleasantly hilly country along the Mekong River in the heart of the Xishuangbanna region of southern Yunnan, has little appeal, having succumbed to the fondness of the Chinese for monolithic white tile buildings and blue-tinted glass windows, but it serves as a popular jumping-off point for exploring the area. We were anxious to get out of town. But, we were told, the trek we had hoped to do, south of Jinghong, had recently become a road construction corridor (a fate, we would discover, not unique to one trek).

Mr. Rush was born in Wuhan but moved to Xishuangbanna in the mid-90s to escape the big cities of the north. He and his wife, a local Dai minority woman, worked as tour guides; she for Chinese groups visiting popular urban tourist stops and he mostly for westerners on jungle treks, which paid less but offered the opportunity to indulge his “love of nature.” Mr. Rush, a thin and twitchy, but kind man, was outspoken and eager to exchange cultural information in English with foreigners. His knowledge of Chinese policy and history was impressive, and he openly criticized government programs, longed for democracy, and was not hesitant to suggest that Mao and his Cultural Revolution had been a disaster for the people of China, a fact widely understood but seldom discussed. Like many Chinese, he felt that ethnic groups in China received preferential treatment, especially financially, and as evidence he pointed to new houses being built in isolated villages along our trek with money provided by the government. “Because of the money,” he told us, “they support the government no matter what they do.” This information was delivered with more than a touch of bitterness.

Our small treking group just before lunch on the first day (Mr. Rush in red hat) along with one of our tiny local hosts.

In the village, the rhythmic pounding of a bass drum penetrated the damp tropical darkness as we neared the schoolyard, where a bare electric bulb dimly illuminated a very strange scene indeed. Hanging horizontally from a metal bar was a large drum that was being whacked energetically by a very drunk, very tiny, very old woman wearing traditional Jinuo clothing and a headlamp, and enthusiastically puffing on a cigarette between beats. With each blow she recoiled as the reverberation traveled up her arms to her tiny, wizened body. Surrounding her were a half dozen similar crones, all smoking or ineffectively trying to light each other’s cigarettes as they convulsed to the beat, chanting like maniacal Druids and downing serial shots of bijou--the local moonshine--poured from a filthy five-gallon plastic Gerry can at the edge of the clearing.

A typical Jinuo imp-lady. This woman supplemented our lunch with nuts and...bijou. While we sipped, she downed 2 or 3 shots.

A smoky fire burned just outside their circle and we crept towards it, trying to remain inconspicuous. Mr. Rush, who was friends with the villagers, disappeared immediately, and the rest of us (a young Midwestern couple that had joined us for the trek, along with Ellen and I) crouched nervously at the flickering boundary between light and darkness, hoping we wouldn’t be noticed. Bei, on the other hand, was soon wandering around, blatantly attracting the attention of the dancers.

We were noticed almost immediately, perhaps because of Bei or, more likely, because we were white and twice as tall as the local residents. The rowdy, drunken old women began to drag us, one by one, into their dance circle. Unlike us, Bei succumbed without a struggle and danced energetically, to the hilarity of the ladies. The rest of us, trying pathetically to maintain our dignity, were more dutiful and stiff in our movement which was also noticed, leading to the pouring of large cups of bijou which were then emptied from some distance in the general direction of our mouths by the ancient ones, who by now could barely stand and were cackling uproariously as they simultaneously waved their arms up and down to the rhythm of the drum.

While not tossing bijou in our general direction, the demonic grandmothers also engaged in another ritual that I surmise is not an ancient Jinuo tradition—the stuffing of large, chewy globs of white candy into our mouths with filthy, wrinkled fingers. I looked across the drunken mob towards Ellen, whose eyes said “escape!” as she mimicked the ladies’ arm waving from the center of a tight cluster of bellowing drunks.

I gyrated towards Bei, fending off bijou with limited success—not that bijou is that bad; in fact, sometimes it can be pretty satisfying—but I was afraid that even 100 proof liquor was not enough to kill the filth on the cups. Bei was now a member of a large circle of the dancing elderly, and I feared that she would soon be smoking cigarettes and downing shots with her new friends. To my horror, one of the women lurched towards her, a cup of the clear liquid extended in her claw. I lunged into the group and intercepted the dirty cup just as Bei reached out to accept it, only to discover that it was water and not bijou. In fact, water may have had more long lasting intestinal consequences than a harmless little Dixie cup full of grain alcohol swallowed by a 4-year-old.

Outstretched arms grasped at us, like the Zombies groping through jagged broken windows in “The Return of the Living Dead” as we backed away and made our semi-drunken escape into the muggy night, happy to have gotten away but worried about our digestive systems.

Later that night, as we tossed and turned on thin sleeping mats spread over the hard wooden floor of our sleeping shack, we heard an escalating argument from the hut next door, culminating in screaming, glass breaking and, we learned the next morning, a trip to the hospital for the unfortunate wife involved in alcohol-enhanced domestic violence. We were not sad to pack our packs and hike away the next morning for a day’s walk through miles of rubber plantations to the town of Galanba, where we enjoyed an oily lunch before catching a bus back to Jinghong.

Though amusing in hindsight, the entire Xishuangbanna experience for us signaled our low-water-mark in China, brought on by culture fatigue, enhanced by the contrast with what had been relatively easy traveling (and good food) in Thailand, and exacerbated by the fact that the Xishuangbanna that we saw was, despite its reputation, a trashy combination of tacky tourist sites, vigorous road construction and monotonous rubber plantations occupying every square meter of what had once been pristine tropical forest. Even the Han Chinese who once flocked to the area during their holidays had abandoned ship, and once thriving hotels now deteriorated into filthy dives.

The trek, which we had hoped would improve our attitudes, was a disappointment too, though the Jinuo ladies injected some interest. Ironically, given Mr. Rush’s “love of nature,” the first walking day he had unapologetically taken us directly along an active road construction corridor where workers are building what will eventually be a superhighway from Bangkok to China, via Laos. We walked for miles through what amounted to interstate highway construction, sometimes climbing over rebar infested concrete or traversing around piles of gravel and sand. Finally escaping the construction, we made token forays into tiny patches of hammered jungle, all that remained in the sea of rubber plantations, before finally descending into the alcoholic Jinuo village.

Hiking through road construction on the first day of our "jungle trek." The horror.

The day after returning to Jinghong we bought plane tickets back to Lijiang where, after regrouping for a couple of days, we headed north into the mountains along the Yangze and Mekong rivers for two treks that would rekindle our love for Yunnan and wash away our fatigue. I think in the end we were just hungry to escape big cities, after traveling through Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Kunming and Jinghong. And we were hungry to find places that felt peaceful and ancient. China is developing so fast that remote country disappears almost before you can find it. I’m sure that Xishuangbanna has beautiful treks to offer, and the people are inarguably interesting, but our patience wore too thin to search further.

It’s often the mountains that pull you back.

Around the city of Jinghong and within the Mekong River valley, all flat land has been divided into rice fields and plots for other crops. The surrounding mountains are planted in rubber trees, which are quite profitable for their owners.

The agricultural Mekong River valley gives way to mountains that extend southward into Laos.

Bei enjoys some hashbrowns at the Mekong Cafe in Jinghong, where we had lunch upon our arrival and tried to sort out where we should trek.

The Ace Hardware of China. Stands like this are common in every city I've visited, and the proprietors can do anything from fixing flat bike tires to making keys.

In Jinghong, a night market occupies a seedy area along the Mekong. BBQ is abundant. You choose your kabobs and they are thrown on the grill for you.

The Mekong night market beckons. Restaurants, a second-rate carnival, and a series of seedy bars lit the tropical night on the edge of Jinghong.

Our venerable Lonely Planet guide described the Rui Feng Hotel as "modern" with "spotless, carpeted rooms with nice bathrooms." This was hands down the most disgusting dive I've ever stayed in. The bathroom door was rotting, the "spotless carpet" was wet and filthy, and we spent an uncomfortable night trying not to touch anything with our bare skin. This "Directory of Service" shown here and then opened in the following picture, says it all.

A pretty accurate list of services at the Rui Feng Hotel in Jinghong.

We spent the Chinese New Year in Jinghong. On the streets, there were many red things for sale, and on New Year's night, we were bombarded by the continuous explosions of some of the loudest fireworks I've ever heard. The noise was accentuated and amplified as it echoed down the canyons of tile buildings that line the streets of the city. The following day, the streets were littered with bomb debris and I saw more than a few locals wearing fresh bandages.

A bird (chicken) market in Jinghong.

Bei and Ellen on a rented bicycle exploring the countryside near Jinghong.

A village house along our trek. The house in the foreground is "shingled" with the lids from 55-gallon drums.

A palm.

Drum sticks at a temple near Jinghong. The sticks the Jinuo women used to beat their drum were considerably less refined than these, but just as effective.

Ladies avoiding the hot sun in a village near Jinghong.

Market goods in Jinghong.

This guy, crouching in a Jinghong market, was not drinking water.

The sign at the Jinghong bus station sums up traveling by bus in China. We took some short bus rides to nearby towns.

A bus driver lashes a bike to the top of his rig. In Xishuangbanna, you can rent bicycles and then take buses to good riding areas.

This kid, in a primitive village along our treking route, was remarkably good at hauling ass through cluttered village streets on this bike that was several sizes too big for him.

A storage shed in a village along our treking route where we stopped for lunch. The long boxes stored underneath the shack are coffins. And the things piled in front of them are asbestos shingles. Coincidence?

A lady gets water in a typical village on our trek.

Bei enjoys a selection of lunch items on the first treking day.

This little guy avoiding becoming lunch. His day will come.

Rubber trees in the hills near Jinghong.

A little Thailand nostalgia? Perhaps.

Yes We Work Too (Teaching)

2006-03-29T20:00:00.000-08:00

29 March 2006

Alone with a frightened student in a cold stark classroom under flickering fluorescent lights, an encouraging smile pasted on your face, you grasp desperately for a limited palette of simple, understandable (and boring as hell) oral exam topics. The too obvious choice is “tell me about your hometown” and you fall back on it over and over again. Your body tenses in anticipation of the inevitable answer, delivered in an accent so thick that you strain to understand:

“My hometown is very beautiful!! The food is delicious!! The people are friendly!! Welcome to my hometown!!!” (though the student’s home is at least 36 train hours away).

Mixing that “conversation” with weak Chinese beer on evenings after exams produces satisfying revisions. In a recent e-mail I teased our friend Tony, who until two weeks ago taught here with us but bailed to his native Australia in part to fulfill a 50th birthday resolution to “avoid jobs that feel hopeless”:

...Ironically, the Oral English students reported today that they previously had been "taking the piss" out of the foreign teachers when in truth they "speak a refined formal English that is a hybridized but jaunty combination of American, Australian and British dialects with an occasional naughty Sino-English twist of phrase" (in their words). The students went on to say that "now that we've 'weeded the garden' of less committed foreign teachers [Tony] we are ready to get down to business and engage in a discourse from which a real cultural and international understanding can be reaped, much like the local peasants reap winter wheat from their verdant fields."

We all had a good laugh together about their ingenious use of tired clichés as tools for driving foreign teachers to distraction. "The food in my hometown sucks and the people are real bastards," one student reported, laughing. "And there's so much friggin' pollution that you can barely see the mindless sprawl of white tile and blue glass communist-style buildings." He went on: "If my mother could cook, maybe I'd go back, but she can’t even boil water. I'm outta there for life. Welcome to shit!"

Second year English majors taking a vocabulary exam.

Teaching at the Lijiang Culture and Tourism College. This multi-media classroom features...a blackboard. And chalk that breaks every time you try to write. The blackboard itself is a rough piece of slate that was painted black to make it look more like a blackboard.

Our college, the Lijiang Culture and Tourism College of Yunnan University (try writing that in Chinese and you’ll understand why the college doesn’t sell many sweatshirts) is an unusual product of China’s changing society in that it is a privately managed business with only loose ties to the public Yunnan University in Kunming. Students here have had the misfortune of failing their college entrance exams and therefore losing the opportunity to attend first- or second-tier colleges in bigger cities. Many of these students failed for reasons like 1) extreme slacker-ness, 2) refusal to study while getting their hair puffed up, 3) unwillingness to give up their hobbies -- watching TV and sleeping, or 4) devotion to attaining personal-best scores on their favorite computer games. These are the students who come from beautiful, delicious, friendly hometowns—the ones who sit in the back of the room, talking to each other or looking at their ever-lengthening fingernails while us teachers try to find a way to give the other 30 - 50 students a chance to learn something new about using English.

As one slacker wrote last semester:

“I like to learn English, but I’m always lazy to increasing my English vocabulary. I think it’s very difficult. But I’ll try my best in learning English. And I hate cockroach very much.”

Others, in response to an exercise where I asked the students to close their eyes and sit in silence for 1-minute and then write about their thoughts, provided this scintillating window into their lives:

“Just now I closed my eyes for one minute. In this moment, I found one minute is a really long time. You can think a lot of things.”

“I just counted numbers from one to seventy-eight. Nothing to think only taking a rest of my eyes.”

“I think nothing but count the seconds when I close my eyes.”

“When I closed my eyes I found myself in a dark world that is so lonely.”

Honest, but not terribly encouraging in terms of getting students to be creative, though perhaps the last one has possibilities.

In fairness, other students were somewhat more interesting...and psychotic:

“When I closed my eyes I imagine I was in a very beautiful world. In the world a river run through a bridge and to a grand castle. I was stood on the edge of the castle and looking to the end of the sky. Suddenly, a very huge and horrible devil was flying to my land, I picked up my sword and fight with the devil.”

Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) at a school like this is a little like trying to get George Bush to use big words correctly. Even a well qualified team of “handlers” can expect a lot of repetitive exercises, some serious screw-ups and no shortage of “misunderestimated” frustration.

The system itself is self-defeating. As Tony put it only half-jokingly before he left: “student grade sheets have three columns—the student’s academic mark, their parent’s income and their final grade.” Cynical, but not far from the truth. Students who pay the tuition do not fail no matter how poorly they do academically. Students who never attend class and fail are given the opportunity to take a 5-minute makeup exam (oral) by a different teacher from the one who failed them, and if they survive that they pass the entire course. If they fail this makeup exam, the school still has the ultimate last word, and the kids are almost always passed. The system amounts to a pay-for-a-degree program requiring 4 years of tuition. Merit is not crucial. As a teacher, it can make you crazy.

In China failing the college entrance exam usually means not only no college but also a bad job...unless you can find a school like ours that, though not high on the academic totem pole, accepts students who cobble together the extravagant tuition and buy their way in. Ten-thousand yuan a year (about $1250 USD)–a small fortune for many Chinese—is the cost for one year at our school, compared with much lower fees at academically better, state-run institutions in big cities like Beijing, Tianjin or Nanjing.

Not all of the students here have rich parents. Some come from poor farming families who struggle immensely to send their kids to this college. It is to protect these students that we come down harder on the insolent kids that don’t apply themselves because they have never had to. I have kicked kids out of class in China for misbehavior, something I have never done in the U.S. It is necessary if you want to give the hard workers a chance—ones like the students who wrote these passages about their home life:

“In 2002 my father leaved home and drove a bus in a village. He began to live by himself with no good friends, no TV and no normal power. I think he often felt alone. He always went to bed at eight if the bus needn’t repair. He didn’t enjoy the Spring Festival with us for four years.

During this time [this year’s holiday] my sister and I went to the village. We accompanied our father to spend more happy time. I always help my father to wash the bus. If he will repair, I would help him at any moment. I didn’t talk a lot with my father [before this holiday], but we talk far more in Spring Festival. We talked about my future, the farm work, and the others. We changed different ideas, had a good talk. We are believed each other. We are understand each other. I think that was very important for this winter vacation. I have a good time in this Spring Festival because I spend more time with my father and help him do more work”

"First I miss my mother. She is very warm hearted even though she has the hot temper, but she loves me very much. She often told me something about what I should do. I miss her everyday. I miss my father too. There are four children in my family. My brother sister and I are students. Every day we cost so much. In order to let us study, my father work day and night. I think he is the great man in the world. I love and miss he very much. I can use word to express my feeling. Every day he told me study hard."

Also, unlike George Bush, many of the students are genuinely nice and it’s often the poorest students, the ones whose families are living hard so that their child can get a better education, that are the most generous and motivated. These are the students that make it worth trying to do a good job and these are the ones that say “welcome to my hometown” not to fill dead air, but because they are desperate to show you how they live and how generous their families can be.

“I was born in a poor village, 1980s. My family was poor, too. One day, it was dark but my parents still working hard on the farm. My sister and I couldn’t stay at home because there was no lights (our countryside was no electricity at that time). We were sitting at a corner of the ground of my house and crying. About half an hour past, my parents came back. They lighted the oil lighter. I saw their clothes was so broken, then I went to the corner and crying again. I pledged to be a useful man in the future. I must study hard.”

The educational system is much different in China than in the U.S. too (though increasingly we Americans also ‘teach to the test’). To some extent, one understands the predisposition for coasting among students who, as children, attend primary school from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. and then stay up until 9 or 10 at night doing mandatory homework. College for many of these kids is a time to relax and have fun, far from the pressures of senior middle school (though they are often homesick).

My understanding of education in China is that students struggle through primary, junior and senior middle school in anticipation of the feared college entrance exam which is taken during their senior years. The entire system focuses on preparing the kids for a battery of standardized tests that they take periodically throughout their school years. It’s no wonder that kids are sick of study by the time they reach college. As one of our Chinese friends here put it (while her 10-year old studied), “nobody here likes the system but nobody changes it.”

One student described school life like this:

“Many years ago when I still studied in primary school, I lived through a very ‘hard life.’ Because my mother was a severe person and my father was more severe than her.
Therefore, they told me the first thing when I back home from school is study. I must have good scores on the exam, otherwise I would be blamed. So I had few time to play with my friends.

One day, my father taught me Chinese pinyin. I read it ‘p,’ but my father said the opposite so he thought it was “b.” So he yelled to me. ‘So fool mistake.’ I was so sad and cried. Fortunately my mother found the reason and told my father. After a few minutes silence, my father told me: ‘you can play all day.’

That day was one of my happiest days in my childhood.

China’s educational philosophy hinges on the importance of rote knowledge frequently at the expense of individual problem solving and critical thinking. We jokingly refer to “the collective brain” in our classes where correct answers can be dredged out of the class as a whole, but few individual students do well on, say, a simple vocabulary test.

I read an article recently (I can’t recall where and I don’t have copy of it in my notes) that said that although Chinese students often excel at math and science in school, they fail to achieve a proportionate level of success in their careers (for example publishing in prestigious journals, winning Nobel prizes, etc.) because, the article surmised, on the whole they lack the creativity and independence in their thinking that leads research in new directions and bears professional fruit.

Peter Hessler, in his book “River Town” describing his experience teaching in Sichuan in 1996, was frustrated by the lack of individual thought regarding the then impending return of Hong Kong to China. Paradoxically, he discovered that uneducated people in Fuling, where he taught, were more likely to have an original point of view than his better educated students:

“Two or three times a week I stopped to chat with Ke Xianlong, the forty-seven-year-old photographer in South Mountain Gate Park, and the more I got to know him the more I was surprised at his political views. He was completely uneducated but he had interesting ideas; sometimes he talked about the need for more democracy and other political parties, and these were views I never heard on campus...

I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.

It wasn’t the sort of revelation that inspires a teacher. The more I thought about this, the more pessimistic I was about the education that my students were receiving, and I began to feel increasingly ambivalent about teaching in a place like that...”

There are blackboards outside of the classroom buildings on our campus where each semester students from different classes (students pass through college as a member of a single class of 35-60 students that take all of the same classes together) paint or use colored chalk to express themselves on whatever topics they choose (and they choose some odd topics). Ironically this semester, outside of the main classroom building, a class insightfully (or randomly??) chose the lyrics from “Nowhere Man” for their board:

He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his nowhere land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

After a hard day in class trying to get students to actually debate two sides of a topic, this message brings a bit of wry comical relief.

The Nowhere Man class chalkboard outside one of the classroom buildings.

Sometimes the lack of critical thinking can be infuriating. In response to a midterm exam question asking whether students thought that gay marriage should be allowed in China, one of my students wrote (unfortunately, I don’t have the exact quotation) that China is very susceptible to fashion trends and that since being gay might be seen as fashionable, if gay marriage were allowed all Chinese might decide to become gay, thereby ensuring the demise of China since there would be no next generation (because gays can’t have children).

I’m not kidding. That was from a 20-something-year-old second-year college student on a midterm exam.

Hessler, who usually had an admirably optimistic attitude about his teaching, wrote:

“...I realized that I was not teaching forty-five individual students with forty-five individual ideas. I was teaching a group, and these were moments when the group thought as one, and a group like that was a mob, even if it was silent and passive.”

So teaching here is a daily struggle between a sense of ineffectiveness and frustration on the one hand and responsibility to the twenty percent or so of the students who are motivated to learn on the other. For Ellen and me, being here is enough of a reward and teaching is the price we pay, so we make of it what we can. There are good days and bad days. As students have said in "position" papers: “every sword has two blades.” (??!!)

Ellen writes on the blackboard with self-destructing chalk. In a two hour class one typically uses 10-15 pieces of chalk.

And in truth, though it’s fun to wax cynical, I’m not complaining. Really. Each foreign teacher at our college is responsible for 14 classroom hours per week. For me that means five two-hour Oral English courses for non-English majors and two two-hour writing courses for English majors—altogether about 350 students. The writing courses are fun, and I feel like I accomplish something with the students, who are more motivated than the non-English majors. In the end, it amounts to only a 20-25 hour work week with lots of free time. Not at all a bad way to reside in a place like northern Yunnan, where a 2-hour bike ride can take you through villages that people fly halfway around the world to see.

And when we feel the most cynical, we go back and read what these nineteen to twenty-year-old kids write, sometimes for the humorous mistakes but more often to remind ourselves about how amazingly comfortable our lives are in the U.S., while much of the rest of the world still struggles.

Dear Ellen,

I’m Kid. Glad to write to you.

I’ve come [been] here for one month. I thought everything [would be] here, including my future. But the fact make me feel intimidate.

I come from a small village. You know, most of villages in China are not very well. As many students, I used to work on the farm for few years. There are only ten boys got access to the college for their future education in our country [region] this September. As a lucky dog, I felt very happy. But after a month’s classes I found that many students were not very serious with the study and their English was very poor. What a bad luck! Luckily, I am not the one in them. After a six years study I have learned most of the basic grammar, words (few) we use everyday.

You know, learning a foreign language is difficult for a foreigner. Like you and me. But now I think I have hope. Because I meet you. The God is great. He arrange us meet here.

So I will not quit.

Railay Beach, Thailand (Brief nudity)

2006-03-22T20:00:00.000-08:00

22 March 2006 (Looking back to late January)

When the tsunami of December 2004 swept into the Railay Beach area, climbers scrambled up cliffs and sunbathers ran for the jungle to escape the surge. Unlike many areas, Railay was partly protected from the worst of the waves by islands and reefs, so there was less damage and death there than elsewhere. Nevertheless, the official Thai tsunami website reports 721 dead in the Krabi area and includes an eerie list of unidentified victims (with descriptions) as of a year ago when the site was last updated. Sam Lightner, a Jackson (Wyoming) friend who authored a climbing guide to the area and lives there part of the year, wrote that although few climbers were apparently killed at Railay, many may have perished snorkeling or visiting nearby areas like Koh Pi Pi, which was devastated. Sam tells (in his guidebook) of finding a climber’s t-shirt at the base of an island cliff that received a direct hit from the wave. Another climber (in Boulder) told me of barely escaping the wave while on a snorkeling trip, thanks to his alert boatman who managed to push his longtail boat at full throttle, just ahead of the wave, to the shelter of an intervening peninsula.

We arrived at Railay just slightly more than one year after the tsunami and for us it was difficult to see any residual damage. In fact, there is so much new building in the area to accommodate the returning hordes of tourists that the construction has overwhelmed any obvious tsunami debris. A few damaged longtail boats abandoned on the fringes of some of the beaches and a broken sailboat keel in the shallows between Railay and Tonsai were the only signs I saw of the chaos of a year earlier. It feels a little odd to be a hedonistic tourist in an area that so recently suffered natural disaster and loss of life, but the economy of the area depends on people visiting and so perhaps our tourist dollars contributed. Sam Lightner reported that, to their credit, climbers were a strong part of the small subset of tourists that stayed in Thailand after the wave to help with the recovery.

We spent two weeks at the Railay/Tonsai/Phra Nang Beach area climbing, swimming, eating, lounging and socializing. Despite our shockingly poor climbing fitness after a workout-less semester in Lijiang, we had a great time groveling up easy climbing routes on the stunning limestone cliffs that rise directly out of white sand beaches. And Bei had a great time reacquainting herself with water, which she loves. It was all we could do to pull her from the ocean or the pool, where she quickly regained and then surpassed her previous swimming skills. By the end of the two weeks she was happily paddling all over the pool by herself without the need for parental support.

On the hedonistic side, we found that we could still excel at luxury eating after a half year of Chinese rice and stir-fry. I’m certain that we gained weight at Railay despite constant sweating in the relentless tropical heat. For me, Thai cuisine is as big an attraction as any other aspect of the country, and I stuffed myself daily with fresh fish (red snapper, marlin, king), curries (coconut, green and red) and milkshakes (coconut, chocolate, vanilla). We spent what little time remained after meals and pool sesssions with Bei wandering the area in search of obscure cliffs with easy climbs so that we could feebly ascend in quiet anonymity, far from the judging eyes of younger, fitter climbers.

Here are some photos:

Bei reveled in water. After months in Lijiang, where swimming is limited to ineffective splashing in the bathtub, she attempted to stay wet for the entire 2 weeks that we were at Railay. We forced her out for meals, sleep and our occasional attempts at climbing.

Ellen and Bei on Tonsai Beach, just around a point from the main Railay beach area. Tonsai has become a climbers village (ghetto?) due to the high concentration of great cliffs there, but the beach is not bad either.

Railay is accesible only by water. The local "longtail boats" are the primary mode of transportation to the area from the nearby towns of Krabi and Ao Nang. They are as much a part of the scenery at Railay as the beaches themselves.

And the beaches. Though longtail boats are attractive, they aren't always the most distracting visual. Europeans come to Railay to tan all parts of their bodies despite the Thai distaste for public nudity. Bei uses a prop to illustrate, though Barbie's famous proportions do not tell the whole story. Portly German men in thongs also explosed themselves the sun and our heads snapped quickly back to the longtails, which had more pleasing craftsmanship.

When I lived at Railay for 2 months in 1996, Tonsai supported one small set of bungalows--primitive bamboo affairs hugging the boundary between beach and jungle. In the intervening 10 years, it has become a climber's mecca, and roads hacked deep into the once pristine jungle now lead to more bungalow complexes than I could count, along with restaurants, climbing schools and convenience stores. Although we are all part of the pressure that leads to this kind of development, most of the climbers I talked to who had visited Railay in the past lamented the changes. Here, climbers mill about beneath the main Tonsai cliff where perfect steep routes emerge from the sandy beach.

Bei enjoying one the beaches at Railay West.

Vendors rest in the shade at the entrance to Phra Nang Beach at the end of the Railay Peninsula.

Boatmen unload bundles of Bird-of-Paradise flowers to be used for decoration in one of the expensive Railay resort hotels. Each morning Thai workers ride the boats from Krabi and Ao Nang--the two closest towns--to Railay and march across the muddy tidal flats to their jobs in these hotels. Many work hard unloading boats in the hot sun while others cook or clean or greet guests. Amazingly hospitable, the workers seemed to have an almost inhuman ability to smile in the face of sometimes classically rude foreign tourists. In the evening they load back into the boats for the trip home.

The rock at Railay is nothing if not striking. Limestone cliffs dripping with huge stalagtites hang over green jungle, white beaches and turquoise water. It's no wonder that climbers are drawn to this area, where the climbing routes can be as incredible as they are beautiful. This cliff looms above the jungle behind Tonsai Beach.

Luckily for us, not all of the climbing was this steep, though it was fun to watch locals scamper up brutally difficult routes. Diminished by age and by months in China with no climbing, we could only watch and wish that we were strong enough to pull up onto these overhung routes. Instead we puffed and sweated our way up easier climbs on less public cliffs where we were less likely to be laughed at. The tsunami would have submerged this climber, about 20 feet above the beach, when it hit a year ago.

The upper portion of the climb shown in the previous photos. Difficulty and unrelenting steepness are only part of the story here. Remember that all activity takes place in 90+ degree temperatures and high humidity. Just sitting by the pool at the bungalow can sap your will to slog to the store for a soda.

A climber rests on the rope while looking for holds on the rock above. We struck similar poses on rock that was vertical or less.

Monkeys are a big part of life in southern Thailand. At a Buddhist temple complex called Tiger Cave about 10 km from Railay this monkey and others like it brazenly swoop out of the forest to steal ice cream from startled visitors. Bei cried for 15 minutes after a monkey that we had naively watched in delight as it watched back from a nearby perch suddenly dove headlong onto our table, spilled a bottle of gatorade onto her lap and snatched her ice cream before dashing back into its tree. Later we saw an entire family of monkeys contentedly licking ice cream bars.

I'd feel this way too if I ate 10 ice creams a day.

Even after ice cream these little monkeys can outclimb even the fittest young human.

The monk and the monkey. This old monkey had long ago given up the bad karma of its ice cream stealing ways and befriended the monks at Tiger Cave. From what we could tell, his biggest joy in life was having his furry belly scratched by whomever would succumb to big, pleading monkey eyes.

We were among the succumbers. After I scratched and rubbed the old man's belly for 10 minuted it reciprocated by picking through the hair on my legs in search of nits or whatever it is that monkeys search for on one another. Disturbingly, it seemed to find some, which it ate to Bei's delight.

Climbing was not Bei's favorite activity at Railay since it required her to be out of the water for several hours at a time. We tried our best to maintain peace by dragging Barbies and food to the cliffs. Bei usually managed to engage whoever she could in Barbie fantasy play--women climbers were the most common victims.

Longtail boats at Tonsai beach.

A lizard along a jungle path behind Tonsai beach. Lizards in southern Thailand range from little ones like this to huge water monitors that can be many feet long.

Yes, we did it again. We rented a scooter for a day trip to the Tiger Cave temple area. But to our credit, the traffic in this more rural area was not scary like in Chiang Mai and there were three of us on the bike, so Bei was safely pinned between two adult crash pads. And the helmets fit better than the Chiang Mai helmets we had used.

A scene from the Reclining Buddha cave near the town of Ao Nang. A large Buddah statue rests comfortably in a shallow limestone cave looking out onto the nearby highway. We stopped to have a look around on our way to Tiger Cave.

Small stuppas in front of a plantation of rubber trees. Rubber trees occupy much of the accessible land along the roads of southern Thailand.

A Buddha at the Tiger Cave temple complex. Monks live in shallow caves along a cliff in the jungle.

A painting on the limestone at Tiger Cave.

Even monks need to make phone calls. What! No cell phone?

Bei and Ellen exploring in one of the deeper caves at the Tiger Cave area.

Huge jungle trees have been spared from harvest by their location in this Buddhist sanctuary. Although logging is illegal in this part of Thailand now, it is uncommon to see such large trees, at least near roads. Perhaps there are many in the deeper jungles, but one would have to risk wrestling with cobras to find them.

Another big tree at Tiger Cave.

Roots adorned with silk sashes in the jungle.

And a final shot of the ubiquitous longtail. We trundled our considerable luggage back into one of these boats at the end of our stay to begin our journey back to China via Bangkok. A 15- minute ride across the placid Andaman Sea deposited us on a concrete pier that led to a waiting van which whisked us off to the airport.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

2006-03-13T18:34:00.000-08:00

15 March 2006 (Looking back to early January)

From a window of the new 3-story Starbuck’s I watched the chaotic rush of Thai traffic hurtling along concentric roads that circle the crumbling remains of the old Chiang Mai city wall. Like ancestral beltways, the ring roads were a tangle of cars, trucks, motorcycle taxis and bicycles, with potential conflicts miraculously mediated by honking horns. Less than an hour before, Bei and I had been in that traffic on a rented motor scooter experiencing what I had thought sounded like a fun way to get out of town to see a little of the famous hill country surrounding the city. But acclimating to driving on the left side of the road where you can’t read the signs in serious traffic on an unfamiliar motorbike with a 4-year-old pinched between your knees is neither relaxing nor especially fun (though there were moments of exhilaration).

After a token stop at Wat Jet Yot (a temple) on the outskirts of town (Bei: “Papa! Can we ride some more??!!), where we shared an ice cream and a soda (and a walk), Bei and I headed back into town. I was beginning to feel comfortable on the bike just as we found our way back through the maze of streets to the rental shop near the Midtown Guesthouse where we were staying. On another day, we saw two western women picking themselves up off a road after crashing their motorcycle. Apparently only abraded, and with bike damage limited to cosmetics, they were lucky. I read later that many Westerners meet more serious fates riding rented iron on the twisting back roads of northern Thailand, where blood transfusions might not be the most desirable option (though I think the big city hospitals are good). For one thing, it’s difficult not to revert to instincts cemented by decades of driving on the right side of the road. With harrowing results. Anyway, Bei and I got off easy and I acknowledge a less than insightful parental decision.

Chiang Mai is the second largest city in Thailand but much smaller than Bangkok. Established in the 13th century (according to a web source), it is thick with old temples and remnants of times past. But the biggest draw for most visitors is the famous northern Thai hill country that surrounds the city and is home to ethnic groups, including the Hmong, Karen (a subgroup of whom are the long-necked tribes that use metal rings to push their shoulders down so that their necks appear longer), Lahu, Akha and Yao tribes. My ambition in Chiang Mai was to see some of these tribal villages and to do a little exploring in the hill country, but our time was limited and I had promised Bei that when in Thailand we would ride elephants, an activity that can be had for the price of a day tour. So time for ‘off the beaten path’ exploration didn’t really exist.

In the end, we spent a scripted, touristy (but mildly fun) day taking in made-for-visitors hill country sites and accomplishing an elephant ride and some minor bamboo rafting on a small stream, both to Bei’s delight. And we dinked around the city for half a day (sampling real pastries at the Starbuck’s, for one thing) before heading back south to meet Ellen in Bangkok. Chiang Mai is nicer than Bangkok in some ways (less urban) and with more time one could have some good adventures. Perhaps we will return someday, though the lure of southern Thailand climbing is stronger for me.

Here are some photos from our brief visit...

Pushing the envelope: this crumbling temple, called Wat Jet Yot (which in Thai means "at the edge of the death traffic zone"), was as far as Bei and I got on our rented scooter and I thanked the Buddha that we were halfway through our riding adventure without serious abrasions or loss of life. We sat in the shade eating chips and ice cream and then wandered around the peaceful grounds while Bei lobbied for more traffic adventures and I wrestled with my blood pressure.

Temple architecture at Wat Jet Yot.

What could I tell a monk in a "monk chat"? That I'm a bad dad for taking my 4-year-old daughter on a scooter ride in Chiang Mai traffic? That I won't do it again? That I'm sorry??!!

Temple trees in Thailand are often wrapped in silk to show reverence. At Wat Jet Yot these white-painted, forked sticks were also common and were propped around the huge old trees that provided the only shade for monks and tourists.

Our nod to motorcycle safety. In a high speed collision, at least our heads would have been intact.

A typical temple statue. Often there were long rows of identical stone carvings like these, or collections of people and animals.

On the first stop of our hill country tour, we descended from the road into the jungle to walk for half an hour to a Hmong village. In the past, the Hmong were notorious opium growers, but have since switched to legal crops. Bei enjoyed the swinging bamboo bridge along the way to the village, which was not pristine, having succumbed to the lure of the tourist dollar offered by people like us trying to catch a packaged look at life among the tribes.

These Hmong boys offered a glimpse of pre-tourism village life as they played a game that involved setting a conical stone spinning by quickly unwinded a long leather cord (much as you would start a lawn mower) and then running back to a line in the dirt from which they hurled other stones in attempts to hit and topple the spinning stone.

Our next stop was at a Karen tribal village, also tainted (economically uplifted?) by the constant stream of Chiang Mai tourists. This woman worked on traditional weaving for our benefit as we traipsed through the small village which consisted of a collection of decrepit wooden huts and a lot of modern trash.

The highlight for Bei, and our primary goal during our stay in Chiang Mai, was the promised elephant ride. Northern Thailand hill tribes have traditionally used elephants as beasts of burden, though their burden now is people like us rather than tropical hardwoods (most logging is outlawed). Bei and I rode this small bull elephant for about 40 minutes through the forest and across a small river, much to Bei's delight. The drivers were friendly to us and kind to their animals, though I do not envy the life of the elephants whose fate is to slog along the same forest circuit each day.

An elephant-riders-eye-view.

Crossing a small river on our way back to the tourist loading dock.

Bei LOVED being on the elephant's back. Along the "trek" were elevated stands where old tribal women sold small bundles of elephant food--bananas and sugar cane--to the tourists atop the elephants. Bei couldn't get enough of feeding our mount. The procedure is to lean as far forward as you can from your platform and gently tap the elephant on his ear with a banana--the signal that food is waiting. In response his trunk snakes backwards as far as he can reach to gently receive the offering, which is then devoured with a loud grinding noise from below.

A trunk seeking sugar cane.

The elephant drivers wore hats folded from leaves. Our driver made one for Bei.

Back in Chiang Mai, food stalls offered mouth watering treats, here displayed on banana leaves in the Thai tradition.

More Chiang Mai food.

We were only in Chiang Mai for a couple of days before heading back to Bangkok to meet Ellen on her return from the U.S. These train station phones reminded me of 50's era cars with their soft curves and retro styling. I happily photographed them while our comfortable sleeper train pulled out of the station on its way south--I had casually read our departure time as 6:30 p.m instead of 1630. So after a longer than anticipated wait at the station I endured a long night on a non-sleeper train to Bangkok (12 hours) while Bei slept comfortably on my lap, dreaming no doubt of floating through the forest on the back of an elephant.

Bangkok, Thailand

2006-03-05T17:00:00.000-08:00

5 March 2006 (Looking back to January 2)

Bei and I emerged from the airport in early January into the hot, steaming city of Bangkok, Thailand as our bodies tried to adjust after having left a considerably chillier Yunnan two hours before. We trundled our ridiculously heavy baggage (loaded with climbing gear and everything else we might need for an anticipated 7 weeks of travel) onto the taxi stand just as the big orange orb of the sun began to set behind ornate Thai rooflines visible from the elevated freeway that takes you from the airport to downtown. By the time we reached the Khao San Road area where I had stayed 10 years before it was dark but still oppressively hot and I trudged through crowds of young tourists with a tired Bei in tow trying to find my way to the guesthouse that I had frequented in 1996. The thought occurred to me, as I acknowledged the huge increase in tourist traffic during the intervening decade, that Bei and I might find ourselves sleeping in some alley. What kind of parent was I—flying into Bangkok with a 4-year old and no hotel reservation? But after a surprise encounter with a Laramie (Wyoming) friend on the street (see my February 9 post) we managed to find our guesthouse (the New Siam), which miraculously had a room available, and we settled in for a sweaty night atop clean sheets and beneath a ceiling fan that churned the hot air ineffectively.

For me, after 5 months in China, the most appealing aspect of Bangkok, aside from the opportunity to warm up my chill-blain plagued toes, was the huge variety of available food. In the one day that Bei and I spent there before heading north to Chiang Mai, I enjoyed Indian and Mexican food and a truly good western breakfast complete with toast, bacon and coffee. And the Thai food in Bangkok isn’t bad either. Imagine the culinary delights if one were to stay in a more upscale part of town.

Collectively during our time in Thailand we spent little more than a couple of days in Bangkok, but here are some photos from our outings up and down the river, to Buddhist temples and into Chinatown and Indiatown.

Khao San Road, 2006. Emerging from an airport taxi into this scene on a hot and humid Bangkok night after spending 5 months in a relatively repressed Chinese culture was, well...stimulating. And Bei and I, laden with luggage, lacked a room reservation. Miraculously, we found our way through the crowd, traversed a monastery and secured a simple but clean room at the New Siam Guesthouse in a somewhat quieter alley. I had stayed at the New Siam in 1996 when things were a wee bit less busy (though not quiet).

Khao San Road is the inevitable endpoint of "backpacker tourism." Souvenir shops multiply and specialize, restaurants devolve from local kitchens to Starbucks and everyone (including Bei) gets their hair braided or rasta-ized before heading to urban techno-bars or one of the tropical beach resorts further south. The result is a cultural microcosm found only on the travel circuit and in U.S. spring break towns. Need some beach sandals?

Or some 'Drum n Bass' CDs to burn onto your IPOD? Come to Bangkok!

Is she mocking me??!!

Along Khao San there is an opportunity every 20 meters to get your hair braided or to get pre-made dreadlocks attached with some black sticky goo that apparently provides a semi-permanent bond between the artificial hair and your head. Bei was fascinated as apparently was this little girl whose parents, like me, relented at least enough to allow braiding. I drew the line on dreadlocks though, fearing the reaction if Ellen arrived a week later to find a dreadlocked daughter with her hair mired in tar or wax or whatever the hell that stuff was.

Travel is exhausting, even for a 4-year old with seemingly boundless energy. Bei sleeps in the lobby of the New Siam as I engineer an escape to the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

The sign (We Buy Anything) says it all in Bangkok, where I've never experienced less than 90 degree tropical heat with humidity and snow is an obscure 4-letter word. But can they sell anything? I suspect that one could make an excellent deal on skis if so inclined.

Later in our Thai stay and after Ellen's return from the U.S. the three of us explored markets near the river. Fresh seafood (not represented here) was a great treat in Thailand. In Lijiang, the fish of the day is always small and requires more calories to remove the bones than are gained by eating the 3 grams of resulting flesh. Thai fish are larger and less skeletal, in general, though dried fish (and other fauna) like these are sold everywhere.

A woman tends her wares on a Bangkok street.

A Bangkok business--open to the street as are many in a city where it never gets cold.

A scene from Arun Wat in central Bangkok. Spectacular Buddhist temples are everywhere in this huge metropolis and throughout northern and central Thailand. In the far south of the country the influence becomes Muslim.

Offerings at an altar in the Arun Wat temple complex. Unlike in China, where religion is present but not ubiquitous, in Thailand there are temples and worshippers on almost every city street and in every small village.

Even Ronald MacDonald nods to Buddhism in Thailand, as he promotes the enthusiastic eating of cows in his namesake establishment.

Bei was taken by the Buddhist faith and enjoyed making of offerings--here draping flowers over a temple statue.

But for her, temples also offer large, carpeted areas in which to run as fast as she can...

before resting.

This Buddha keeps watch under a temple thermostat.

A sleeping truck driver props his feet up on the dashboard, beneath a mirror adorned with religious paraphernalia.

Bangkok is full of surprises, like this beautifully painted flower above a sink in an otherwise stark alley leading to the water taxi dock.

Bei ascending stairs at a Bangkok temple.

A stone statue at the Arun Wat.

Monks in Thailand are everywhere and the river taxi displays signs giving seating preference to them as they make their way up and down the river.

Ellen and Bei explore the crowded Chinatown markets in Bangkok.

Pigs await the grill in Bangkok's Chinatown.

Fish processing in Chinatown.

Bird flu in Thailand? Don't worry about it!

Soup's up!

The seafood market is rich in dried fish...

and crabs.

A Bangkok train stations (one of several) where Bei and I caught the night train north to Chiang Mai for the next leg of our Thailand travels.

Kunming, Yunnan

2006-02-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

21 February 2006

For those of you counting the weeks since we last worked, the answer is seven. But illogically given the reluctance of all concerned (faculty, students and administrators), school has resumed. So rather than conscientiously plan a course of study for this semester, I’ll catch up on the blog with a series of posts beginning here with a description of our brief transit through Kunming, and finishing eventually with stories from our latest trek along and across the Yangze River north of Lijiang (the highlight of our holiday).

It’s been a great vacation and I hope all of you can be so lucky as to have the time and resources to explore a piece of the world as interesting as this. It occurred to me as I daydreamed in class today (while the students generated lists of study topics) that Asia is a cultural and geographic fractal—at every level of detail one finds something interesting to explore. From the striking differences between Thai and Chinese society and culture, to contrasts between Chinese provinces, to the diversity of ethnic regions within the Yunnan Province, to a closer focus on villages, families, and individuals and the surprise of finding a deliberate splash of bright blue paint on a brown adobe wall, there is something interesting wherever you look.

Kunming, the thriving capitol of Yunnan, was our travel hub for the first month of the holiday. Ellen flew through Kunming on her way to the U.S. (where she spent a busy week). Bei and I flew through Kunming on our way to Bangkok. All three of us jetted in and out of Kunming on our return from Thailand, our trip to Xishuangbana and back, and finally, on our dash north to Lijiang to stage for our final weeks of mountain treks.

All to say, if you need something to eat, don’t go to the airport in Kunming.

I don’t have a lot to say about Kunming except the following:

1. For a medium sized Chinese city, it’s not a bad place to spend some time.
2. Although called “the spring city” for its year-round climate, in January don’t be surprised to find locals huddled around burning bits of plywood and trash, trying to stay warm beneath leaden gray skies.
3. There are restaurants in Kunming that know how to make bread.
4. Try not to make your plane reservations at the airport.
5. Don’t go to the zoo.
6. You can buy Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (the cheesiest!) at Paul’s Store near Yunnan University.
7. The bread tastes great after months of Chinese “bread.”
8. Get some of the bread and eat it.

Here are some photos:

While Ellen was in the U.S. (Denver, Boulder and Laramie), Bei and I spent a day in Kunming on our way to Thailand. Our first order of business was to visit the Bamboo Temple (Qiongzhu Si), famous for elaborate statues of Buddhas surfing big breaking waves on "surfboards" including all manner of sea and land creatures. The Tang Dynasty temple was burned and rebuilt in the 15th century and then restored in the late 1800s at which time the Buddha sculptures and sculptures of 500 stylized nobles were created by a Sichuanese sculptor named Li Guangxiu along with his helpers (all of the above historical information is from the Lonely Planet China guidebook and is not my own research!). The sculptures are amazing but photos are prohibited. This Buddha statue is not part of that collection. Note the swastika, a common symbol used in Buddhism and elsewhere. It does not mean that the Buddha is a skinhead, but rather symbolizes plurality, eternity, abundance, prosperity and long life. It's hard to shake our more modern reaction to the symbol, but one sees it everywhere in the Buddhist world (and associated with other Eastern religions).

Incense sticks offered at the Bamboo temple.

Bei scans for approaching visitors in a stairwell at the Bamboo Temple. We were quietly exploring areas that we weren't sure we were allowed to visit. Bei's job was to occupy the authorities with small talk about Barbies and princesses while I made my escape.

A truckload of stone supports for wooden pillars which are also used as stools around stone picnic tables. The monastary was undergoing some renovation and these were awaiting placement.

Stone steps in the lush forest behind the temple.

Bei posing in a storage area for stone paraphernalia.

Slates slated for use in the temple restoration collect moss and leaves behind the temple.

A chalkboard in a back room of the bamboo temple.

The same chalkboard and a cooking pot. It's important to be able to cook while one writes on the board, and I for one am hoping to get stoves installed in the classrooms here at the college so that I can fry pork while I teach English.

Bei on her way to a Buddhist public bathroom. She made it in time.

You've seen this before--the photo of Alan Greenspan caught my eye both because of his retirement and because the familiar power figure of American capitalism seemed oddly out of place as a window covering at a Chinese Buddhist temple. I assume he is still in place, fading in the sun.

Who holds the most gold--this Buddha or Alan Greenspan? I suspect the two shall never meet.

Back in the city of Kunming, this boldly painted house stood out among more traditional architecture.

A carrot seller on his way to market in downtown Kunming.

You've seen this photo as well. Downtown Kunming is a thriving shopping zone and salespeople were commonly seen lined up like this, apparently receiving pep talks for the day's retailing. The number of cell phone stores in China is especially remarkable -- although these salespeople were outside a general department store, entire city blocks are devoted to cell phones.

A man in an alley enjoys a little sun while watching a card game. I suspect he also plays blues harmonica. Or saxophone.

Along with this woman. Note the poker face. I think she's a card counter.

Midwinter Wandering -- Travel Overview

2006-02-09T18:00:00.000-08:00

9 February 2006

We've been traveling for over a month now, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, and now are in Lijiang briefly before heading out on our final excursion before classes start (yes, we will have to work again). Eventually, I'll post in detail on our adventures but for now here is a collection of photos from along the way and a little sense of where we've been. We're off shortly on one last trek and will start posting regularly once we return and get class preparation under control.

As Ellen jetted to Denver/Boulder/Laramie for a week's visit, Bei and I began our holiday journey with a quick (45 minute) flight from Lijiang to Kunming, the capitol of Yunnan, where we took advantage of the availability of western food and the dubious charms of a big city. Kunming is thriving and these salespeople were receiving a morning pep rally as Bei and I wandered by on our way to find a ride to the Bamboo Temple.

Alan Greenspan's legacy goes far beyond his accomplishments at the Fed. Here, on the eve of his retirement, his photograph, along with the newspaper that it is printed on, is taped to a temple window to protect busy monks from the distracting glare of the sun. You are not forgotten, Alan.

Kunming was but a waystation on our way to Thailand and Bei and I were soon airborne again for the two hour flight to Bangkok. We arrived after dark, hot and tired, and made our way to Khao San Rd. to find our guest house which was nearby but not on Khao San proper. As I struggled through throngs of dreadlocked "backpacker tourists" carrying a large climbing pack and a smaller pack and towing a tired Bei behind me, I heard a voice calling my name. Matt Williams, a Laramie climbing friend, is in Bangkok shooting photos at an AIDS hospice for children and happened to see me as I lumbered by. We met for dinner later in our stay. You can see Matt's excellent photographs at http://www.photoshelter.com/user/mathewphoto. The following day, Bei catches up on her sleep in the guesthouse lobby while I make arrangements for our travel north to Chiang Mai (this time by sleeper train).

Chiang Mai lies in the heart of the hill country of northern Thailand where I had promised Bei elephant rides. Elephants have been a traditional work animal in this part of Thailand and they are still used, though their value as a tourist attraction probably surpasses their ability to carry logs. To fulfill my promise we signed on for a tourist tour of the area near Chiang Mai and enjoyed a rather pedestrian day of elephant riding, bamboo raft floating and visits to small ethnic villages converted to centers for tourist sales. But it was fun and Bei was delighted by the elephant, which gently accepted sugar cane and bananas from her after she alerted him to food with a gentle tap to his ear as we rode.

Boldly, I took a stab at escaping Chiang Mai using a rented motor scooter. Riding in Chiang Mai traffic with a 4-year old is less than ideal and I was soon in a cold sweat despite the heat as I imagined Ellen's horror had she seen us hurtling down chaotic highways in a land where, disorientingly, they drive on the left side of the road. By the time we reached this temple on the edge of town, I'd had enough and stopped to chill out and regroup for the trip back into town. Bei was unperturbed and looked forward to the next leg of our journey. I wandered around the temple grounds sweating and figuring the odds of our returning the bike and ourselves unscathed to the rental place. Later I saw foreigners, scraped and shaken but otherwise ok, picking themselves up off the street after crashing their substantially larger machine.

Painted forked sticks apparently have religious significance and these were common on the temple grounds where they were arranged around trees that were themselves wrapped in sashes.

Back in Bangkok to meet Ellen after her whirlwind trip to the U.S., we found that Ronald MacDonald also has religious sensitivity in Thailand where he implores travelers to enter and pay homage to the quarter pounder.

Ellen arrived late at night at the Bangkok airport, where Bei and I met her, tired from a whirlwind week of socializing in Denver, Boulder and Laramie. The next day, we visited, of all places, Chinatown, where these pigs awaited conversion into Chinese food. Later we found our way into India-town where we enjoyed our first truly good Indian food since leaving the U.S. in July.

These fish decorated another area near Chinatown.

A typical Bangkok business, seen from the street.

Another short flight (1 hour) took us south to Krabi and a short longtail boat ride deposited us at Tonsai/Railay beach, our primary Thai destination for two weeks of climbing and swimming. I'd spent 2 months here in 1996 and Tonsai has changed. Once empty but for a small group of bamboo bungalows, the beach is now lined with restaurants and fancier bungalows and overwhelmed by throngs of climbers seething over everything from steep rock to espresso bars. Despite the changes, we had fun climbing easy routes (all we could manage) and swimming. Bei reveled in the availability of water (there is no pool in Lijiang) and swam almost continuously in the warm Andaman Sea and in the pool at our bungalow complex.

The climbing at Tonsai and Railay is unique in the world and though difficult routes were beyond us after 6 months away from rock, we could at least watch hard climbing while we sipped coconut shakes on the nearby restaurant patio. This local climber is working on one of the steep Tonsai routes. The tsunami a year ago surged higher than the climber in the photo (we are told), but this particular area was fortunate to have been sheltered by islands and reefs and damage was not severe (though people were certainly killed). Other nearby areas (e.g., Koh Pi Pi) were devastated.

Hanging on the rope was a regular posture for us as it was for this climber at Tonsai, though we managed to hang on much less difficult terrain.

Warning parents: brief nudity. The beautiful white sand beaches of southern Thailand are a magnet for vacationers from all over the world with a high concentration of European tourists used to the relatively liberal bathing suit norms of the Mediterranean Coast. Although Thais are offended by nudity, it is tolerated/ignored on the beaches of Railay, in part because this area is an isolated tourist area accessible only by boat. Though I refrained from pointing my telephoto lens at topless bathers, in the photo below Bei demonstrates the swimming scene at the beach.

A rest day adventure took us, again by motor scooter, though in sparse rural traffic, to the Tiger Cave temple area near Krabi where we explored beautiful forest, interesting monastic caves and an associated temple. Here Ellen and Bei check out one of the huge buttressed trees.

Another tree with religious sashes among the roots.

You parents will be relieved to see that riding motorcycles in foreign countries is perfectly safe for children. Here Bei demonstrates her safety equipment which nearly fit.

And here we are on our "big iron" returning from Tiger Cave with local/fellow "bikers" raucously showing their respect and comraderie. Photo by Ellen.

All tropical things must come to an end (or be consumed by decomposition) and with mixed feelings we left southern Thailand, returned to Bangkok, flew back to Kunming and then hopped by plane to the city of Jinghong in the Xishuangbanna region of southern Yunnan. Xishuangbanna had been described to us a "beautiful" and "interesting" but, though we did not spend enough time here to fairly pass judgement, the image of Marlon Brando muttering "the horror, the horror" as he sweated in his jungle kingdom kept echoing in my mind as we stumbled from road construction to village wife beatings to alcoholic ethnic ceremonies. Jinghong sits beside the Mekong River and the night market below was a hybrid of a carnival, a food market and a collection of seedy bars.

The food looked good, though I had already eaten by the time I wandered this market.

We rented bicycles (in China foreigners don't generally rent motorized vehicles) and rode through some nice countryside across the river from Jinghong.

The countryside around Jinghong is dominated by rice paddies in the flats and rubber tree plantations in the hills. Little original forest remains in this part of Xishuangbanna, though I read that further afield there is more to be found. A road connecting Bangkok to China is under construction here, and the construction follows the route of several popular treks as we were soon to discover.

We spent the Chinese New Year in Jinghong, where gifts like this fine coffee sampler were for sale. If any of you out there in Peets/Starbucks/Green Mountain-land are hankering after some fine instant Nescafe, just drop me an e-mail and I'll see what I can ship you. My best description of Chinese New Year is that it evokes the feeling one must have had in London during WWII when the German's were bombing heavily.

Escaping the city and getting out on foot is always the solution to travel weariness and we set off with enthusiasm and a local English-speaking guide (who told us that he "loved nature") on a two-day trek that promised "rice paddies, jungle, and ethnic villages." Here we are on day one of our trek, enjoying the heavy equipment of the Bangkok to China highway. The horror; The horror.

This kind lady, who reminded me of the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz (which we were reading to Bei at the time), welcomed us onto her patio for snacks and the local moonshine, called baijou (a "wine" typically made from sorghum or corn with an alcohol content of about 50%). She could toss back some of the latter with a grimace and an impish laugh and she was a good sharer.

Here we are with our baijou friend and our fellow trekkers--an urban couple also teaching in China--who had "never hiked before" and who thought that "it's really interesting to see this highway construction." The Horror.

So we got the hell out of there and in two short flights were back in Lijiang from which we headed north to the mountains of the Yunnan-Tibet border. Here Ellen and Bei search for a place to stay in Zhongdian, about 4 hours north of Lijiang by bus. It was a joy to be back in the mountains, and at times we wondered why we ever left.

From Zhongdian we piled into a hired van with other foreigners for the 7 hour trip north to Deqin and its environs in the shadow of the incredible Meili Snow Mountains. Although not in Tibet proper, this area is dominated by Tibetans and is separated from the Tibet "Autonomous" Region by these mountains, some of which are unclimbed. We spent a night at Feilai Si, from which one famously views sunrise on the peaks (along with a host of other photo snapping tourists). From here, Ellen and Bei returned to Lijiang and I embarked on a 4-day hike into and around the small village of Yubeng at the foot of the mountains.

This yak systematically offered his thanks to Buddha at each stupa for the offerings that it then ate.

Yubeng is an incredible place--a tiny village huddled on a flat terrace beneath the glaciers of the sacred Mount Kawegabo. A waterfall at the toe of the glacier near the village draws pilgrims from far and wide, though I saw only one on this midwinter trip. This window is typical and decorates an equally beautiful home in the village.

A typical village house with the typical satellite TV dish found in the smallest villages throughout Yunnan (and undoubtedly throughout China). The unclimbed Mt. Kawegabo sparkles in the background under perfect skies soon to be replaced with short-lived snow squalls.

Yubeng, despite its small size, is a popular hiking destination and these horsepackers shuttle visitors in and out. I walked to Yubeng via an alternate route under my own power but met and socialized with a large group of Chinese from Beijing who rode horses for the 18 km standard approach. Village kids as young as 7 years old lead the horses up and down the mountain trail regularly.

A flock of birds near the sacred waterfall at the foot of Mt. Kawegabo.

Sunrise on Mt. Kawegabo from my guesthouse in Yubeng. Still unclimbed, this peak is said to be guarded by Gods and many climbers have lost their lives trying to gain the summit.

Sunset on Kawegabo from Feilai Si after my return from Yubeng and before returning south to Lijiang.

Next trip: hiking from Baoshan Stone Village to Lugu Lake. We leave on the 12th and return here around the 19th. Blogs should get more regular again after that...

Christmas in Lijiang

2005-12-25T14:00:00.000-08:00

25 December 2005

Merry Christmas!

It’s hard for us to believe that we’ve been here for 5 months and that Christmas has arrived. It does so in China a half day earlier than it comes to the U.S., which is handy for Santa who needs a head start on China’s considerable population of visitees. You’ll be relieved to know that the Big Man did arrive, enjoyed the cookies left by Bei, and headed on his way, motoring west pulled by reindeer sustained with locally grown carrots, also left by our very excited daughter just before she went to bed.

With our semester coming to an end, 300 students to evaluate, and a 7-week vacation starting in a week, it’s been tough to keep up with blogging and even local travel. So I’m sorry not to have anything more interesting to post than a few photos of Christmas around Lijiang and our apartment. We’ll soon be on the road again to take a breather from English teaching and collect fresh material before the Spring semester begins.

Christmas in China is refreshingly low key compared to the advertising hype we’re used to in the States and we’ve enjoyed the difference. A month from now all of China celebrates Spring Festival, the Chinese equivalent of our Holidays, but for now a few decorated windows and some strange manikins dressed like Santa are the primary reminders of the season.

Last night we enjoyed a meal in Old Town and witnessed some quirky hints that it was indeed Christmas Eve. Highlights included: 1) a small and lonely group of Chinese Christians, dressed in robes, lit by candles and singing Christmas carols in Chinese while occasionally darting out of the group to proselytize to disinterested Chinese tourists, 2) a moderately drunk and disarmingly happy man wearing a Santa hat, smoking a cigarette and shouting the season’s greetings at passersby and 3) an enthusiastic group of Kentucky Fried Chicken employees dressed in Santa suits leading children in a lively dance in front of the chicken outlet to the delight of onlookers. All of this in a 10 minute stroll from cafe to taxi. It was the perfect evening.

So...we’re soon off and postings may be few and far between until mid-February, when we return from our vacation. Ellen flies to the U.S. for a week starting next Thursday. Bei and I jet to Bangkok next weekend and then head for Chang Mai where we hope to ride elephants and trek in the jungle before meeting a jet-lagged Ellen back in Bangkok on the 8th. After that we all hop down to Railay Beach in southern Thailand for a couple of weeks of rock climbing, swimming and relaxing before heading back to China to explore in the Guilin area, southern Yunnan and finally the mountains near Lugu Hu on the Sichuan border where we hope to do a 5-day trek.

We’re told that school will begin again here on February 13, but we don’t believe it for a minute and have contingency plans in place for an additional week or so of traveling beyond that. As I’ve said in the past, scheduling is not part of the national character here. In any case, I’ll post when I can from the road and stay in touch with some of you by e-mail as we wander around Asia.

We miss all of our friends and family and hope you are enjoying yourselves over these holidays. It's also been great hearing from some of you that we've met only through this blog. Take care of yourselves and enjoy the New Year.

The Sakura Cafe in Old Town, my source for better than average ground coffee and an occasional western-ish meal, took a nod at the season with these decorations.

Ok., what is it with manikins here? Does this display outside a grocery in Lijiang evoke Christmas for you or the vague dread of an arthouse film shrouded in cigarette smoke and punctuated by hysterical nervous breakdowns? Yep, me too.

Christmas colors in Old Town.

Two pharmacy workers in Old Town Lijiang on a December day taking a break from crafting herbal potions.

Pumpkins are still in season here and we've been enjoying delicious pumpkin soup thanks to Ellen's skillful ways.

Bei and I took a break from Christmas shopping to rest beside two older Naxi women shooting the breeze with each other and ignoring the tourists. One of the women rested her capable hand on a fire hydrant as she chatted with her friend.

And finally--a few shots of our Christmas, celebrated happily in our campus apartment around this small plastic tree. The tree was obtained from the local office supply and carried home like everything else we buy--on the crowded number 11 bus.

Bei posing with our tree, decorated using all local materials. That's a good thing.

Bei on Christmas morning with her new earmuffs.

And in her princess dress (thanks Auntie Em and Uncle Joe) and high heeled shoes (thanks Santa Claus).

Happy holidays!

Recent Events (mostly text)

2005-12-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

18 December 2005

On December 6 a group of villagers from a small town called Dongzhou in the Guangdong Province of southern China were protesting against what they felt was inadequate payment for land needed by the local government to build a coal-fired power plant. In the events that followed, Chinese security forces fired into the crowd, killing somewhere between 3 and 20 villagers depending on the source. As this story unfolded in the Chinese and foreign media, I followed it attentively, both because of my personal obsession with news and for the value of the events as provocative teaching material in my reading and writing classes here in China.

The coverage and the continuing developments have been interesting from the perspectives both of China’s control of in-country media and the West’s interpretation of events seen through the prism of our own notions of China.

I don’t know how many of you have followed this story. It was front page news in the New York Times and other Western papers (e.g., The Washington Post and The Times of London) soon after it occurred (links below), and follow-up stories have also appeared every day or two since. The China Daily published a small official government release on Sunday, December 11 (text included below).

New York Times, December 9: Police Fire on Protesters in China, Killing Several
New York Times, December 10: Villagers Tell of Lethal Attack by Chinese Forces on Protesters
The Times (of London), December 11: ’20 Shot Dead’ in Chinese Land Fight
China Daily (Xinhua), December 11: China reveals report on violence in South (see full text below)
The New York Times, December 12: China Detains Commander in Killing of Protesters
The New York Times, December 14: Beijing Casts Net of Silence Over Protest
Washington Post, December 15: China Waivers on Police Shooting
The New York Times, December 17: Chinese Pressing to Keep Village Silent After Clash

Protests in the news are the tip of the iceberg here (I believe) and most happen well out of the spotlight. According to some of the articles above, China experienced 74,000 significant protests in 2004, most of which did not involve violence and most of which were not reported in the press. The reasons for these protests are many, but the underlying tensions are tied to the growing imbalance between Chinese rich and poor and widespread corruption in a system that offers little opportunity for recourse, especially for the rural poor. A few courageous Chinese lawyers and others work hard to change this (also reported in the NYT recently).

The Chinese government is well aware of these problems and their potential for introducing political and social instability in this huge and diverse country where the poor are a majority. Consequently, shootings by police, like the ones that just occurred, are simultaneously taken seriously by the government and, to the extent possible in the information age, kept quiet. The strategy seems successful in the short term (my students knew nothing of this recent episode) but it can be argued that the discontent and awareness of it by some Chinese are forcing long term changes to the current system. For example, in response to the Dongzhou incident, a group of dissidents and intellectuals here and abroad have signed an open letter calling for the government to conduct an independent inquiry into the shootings and they have posted this letter on the internet, though it is currently blocked in China (to the best of my knowledge).

I was curious to discover what my students might think of the news and I put together a lesson plan with the intent of offering conflicting reports in a somewhat neutral way as a means both to examine bias in journalism and to motivate the students to do some reading and then English writing in unsigned opinion pieces. The results were interesting and sometimes unexpected.

My students are men and women of college age (18 – 21) from all over China, and though they are not top tier, most of them can speak and read English well enough to communicate. All of the students have access to the internet here on campus though almost none have computers of their own. Most are internet savvy, and many do have computers in their family homes that they did not bring with them to Yunnan. Also relevant is the fact that the internet, while partly restricted here, is more open than you might imagine (though I can’t access this blog!). Using the high speed access from my apartment on campus, I can read all of the newspapers that I’ve listed above including the full texts of their reports on China and other places, even when these reports contradict official accounts. The students have the same access.

I introduced the lesson and asked the students in three of my classes (about 120 students) if they had heard of the Dongzhou shootings. To my surprise, none of them had heard of it though nearly a week had passed. I dove in, presenting to them both the Xinhua (government controlled) account (full text included below), the New York Times account from December 10 and the Times of London account from December 11 . I read the former two to my writing classes and handed out all three to my reading class for them to read and discuss. Afterwards, I led a discussion about journalistic bias in which I suggested that both the Xinhua account and the December 10 New York Times account showed bias or at least slanted the story, albeit in opposite directions. Read the articles if you are interested and draw your own conclusions about objectivity and truth.

Below is the official account of the incident published in the China Daily on December 11. My apologies for not just posting the link, but I have been unable to find the article on the web since it was removed from the current China Daily website (it may still be available but I can’t find it).

China reveals report on violence in South

Xinhua (China) Updated: 2005-12-11 09:15

SHANWEI, Guangdong, December 10 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of villagers incited by a few instigators violently attacked a wind power plant on December 6, and assaulted the police, the Information Office of the city government of Shanwei in south China's Guangdong Province said Saturday.
In an investigation report of the incident, the office called the armed assault a serious violation of law. According to the official recount, the instigators led by Huang Xijun engineered and organized some villagers in Dongzhoukeng and Shigongzhai to illegally besiege and attack a local wind power plant at noon on December 5 and December 6.
The first assault on December 5 caused a seven-hour suspension of the plant's power generation. In the second onslaught, over 170 armed villagers led by instigators Huang Xijun, Lin Hanru and Huang Xirang used in the attack knives, steel spears, sticks, dynamite powder, bottles filled with petroleum, and fishing detonators.
Police moving in to maintain order were forced to throw tear shells to break up the armed besiege, and arrested two insurgents. However, Huang Xijun mobilized over 300 armed villagers to form a blockade on the road to Shigongzhai Village to obstruct the return passage of the police, in attempt to threaten the police to release the arrested insurgents.
For a moment, many besiegers intended to quit following the persuasion shouted by the police. However, they were forced to stay in protest under the threat reinforced by the instigators, according to the report. Instigator Lin Hanru shouted through a loudspeaker that they would throw detonators to the police and blow the wind power plant, if the police refused to retreat.
It became dark when the chaotic mob began to throw explosives at the police. Police were forced to open fire in alarm. In the chaos, three villagers died, eight were injured with three of them fatally injured. Concerned government departments are still investigating in the exact cause of the death.
The Information Office said that the instigators with Huang Xijun at the core had incited villagers to join in armed protests since June, using villagers' discontents over a land requisition of a coal-fired power plant in Dongzhoukeng Village as the excuse.
They frequently formed armed protests in the construction ground of the coal-fired power plant, blocked public traffic, attacked government offices and even illegally detained people and vehicles passing through the village to threat the local government to approve more compensation fund in land requisition.
In order to magnify the effect of their protests, the instigators hatched the assault of the wind power plant in Shigongzhai Village, which had no relations with their former request for fund concerning the land requisition in Dongzhoukeng Village.
The provincial government of Guangdong pays great attention to the December 6 Incident. A special work group has been established to investigate in the incident, according to the Information Office.

First, recall that this is the Chinese government’s authorized version (Xinhua is the official news agency) of what happened. The first line sets the tone:

Hundreds of villagers incited by a few instigators violently attacked a wind power plant on December 6, and assaulted the police, the Information Office of the city government of Shanwei in south China's Guangdong Province said Saturday.

Clearly, the aggression of the villagers towards the police is the focus of Xinhua, and the police do what they can to keep the situation under control in the face of this misguided aggression. Only well into the account do we learn that:

It became dark when the chaotic mob began to throw explosives at the police. Police were forced to open fire in alarm. In the chaos, three villagers died, eight were injured with three of them fatally injured. Concerned government departments are still investigating in the exact cause of the death.

The New York Times, after publishing a balanced account of the incident by Joseph Kahn on December 9, presents the previously untold perspective of the villagers in the article from December 10 by Howard W. French. The NYT story begins:

Four days after a lethal assault on protesters by paramilitary forces, a village in southern China remained under heavy police lockdown on Saturday.

In this account, the protesters were assaulted by the paramilitary forests, rather than vice versa as described in the Xinhua account. The article details stories about the events, told by the villagers who relate first and second hand descriptions, many horrifying, of killing and brutality inflicted by the security forces. This article provides a few excerpts from the Xinhua account, but concentrates on the villagers depiction. Both accounts (Xinhua and NYT) were clearly slanted (though certainly the villagers stories needed to be told by a free press).

I asked my students if they thought the stories were biased and most said that yes, they clearly were. Surprisingly though (to me), many (though certainly not all) felt that the Xinhua (China Daily) story was more biased than the NYT account. In fact, students suggested that this was typical and that they were rarely able to get the real story in China.

I include below some anonymous student comments on the articles to provide insight into their sentiments. Of the 66 students who wrote for me, most felt that both Xinhua and the NYT were biased and most also felt that the police actions were unjustified in this situation. But not all students felt this way as you’ll see.

Interpretation of the student’s opinions wasn’t clearcut, but about 35 felt that the police shootings were not justified in Dongzhou, 11 felt that they were, and the rest were neutral or uncertain given the lack of clear information about the circumstances.

The following student’s opinion and the one after, it should be noted, are the only two among all responses that take a strong anti-villager stance and so are the tiny minority, but they are disturbing to say the least. I’m including them first so that the majority represented by the rest of the students are given the last word. Again, these first two are not representative, but they are two students of 66 (3% in this unscientific survey).

This first one is carefully hand-written on a piece of notebook paper that includes a watermark showing an overly cute little girl holding a baby chick:

In my opinion, the truth was just like what China Daily says. For I am Chinese. I know deeply that many of the villagers are not educated and more important is most of the uneducated villagers are very brutal. Sometimes they would do which is against the law. Once I saw on TV a local programme reported that many brutal villagers killed two reporters just because the two reporters wanted to report that they had done which were against the law. So through this case, it makes it clear. Most of the village in China are not civilization enough. If the police didn’t shooted out them it could be believed that the police might in dangerous or even be killed. Always for the land payments I can tell you that most of the case like this happened in Guangdong Province. The government will give the villagers equitable payments. Sometimes more than the land can be made for the lifetime of its owners. If we want to develop maybe sometimes we have to use force though it isn’t a good way to solve things like that. But things can get better, more modernization and more civilization.

And this one is similar:

After I read this news from two areas [newspapers] = Xinhua and New York Times. In my opinion, it’s good for police to shoot protesters. Because I had read the same news in Hebei Province in June this year. It cause of the land payments. The government wanted farmers to sell their freedom land to country, but farmers didn’t want to sell and rise the land price. So some of police talked to the farmer and wanted them to sell the land. Then some protesters had bad action, the police shot them. You know, in China, most of the farmers have no culture and always barbarism. They don’t know how to live rich and good. They don’t know what is better for the country. They are selfish! The province of them is so bad, they wanted to break a chaos.

The rest of the students that I’ll quote here generally have more balanced views or at least are more reasoned as they speak to many of the issues that play a role in Chinese politics.

This student addresses the corruption problem:

In this case, there must be enough money for this land. Now, why do the villagers say the price is too low? Only because there are some official governor of the local government make some money as their own. The “eat” part of the land payments! So the final price is lower than the bargaining. The villagers don’t know this for fact maybe, so they want to ask the local government to give them a suitable price. The local government certainly don’t want to “throw up” the money they had “ate.” So a fight broke out! I don’t know how to explain this clearly, but some official, some local governments really very disappoint. I think this fight case must has some relationship with the local government!

After our class discussions on news bias, many students tackled it in the context of this event.

This person’s response addresses censorship in China:

I hate China has covered up this event. I think China government has more responsibility to solve this event. It can not ask for a help from media. Every person concerned tried to cover up the truth. The truth need the law to expose. I don’t want the media of all of the world say some bias. I want China government bring the truth to light quickly. I think this case is China’s humiliation. China government is not only didn’t report this event, it also didn’t take strict way to solve this event. Could it be said that China government don’t take care about the people but only the economy?

As does this:

Every Chinese people know that Chinese government is always controlling the media, so we have reason to doubt the news from China Daily. But we don’t totally believe in the New York Times. From the NYT we can know more about this event and the truth. Police should not use deadly force except that when they are in danger of death. Police don’t have the right to use deadly force whenever they like. This event show the defective of the government. Some government leader corrupt and don’t do things to serve the people. I support the Chinese people to do things like the Guangdong peoples do. That will promote the government to solve the exist problems.

Many students wrote about differences between the NYT account and Xinhua:

The event is small but it has relate some political effect. Both China and the United States have reports about this. Each of them must support their points. The villager protect their plants [crops] and this they must live that depend on the plants. If you deprive their foodstuff everyone would know the result and government give them so little money. So I think the event is necessary. Another aspect, this event was reported on New York Times and same date are different from Chinese. That worth thinking for us. Nobody knows the truth. Why did the NYT say 20 people died and it is so much more than Xinhua report. It is obvious bias. Several years ago many events were happened such as BeiYue. WangWei died in NanHai...from these events we can realize that Americans and China are not very friendly in fact. And maybe there are many American think so. We can avoid the fact that some American has some biased opinion about China deeply! That’s terrible between American and China.

This student also speculates about the NYT story and expresses the student’s view that the U.S. government must influence U.S. news reporting:

I think the NYT is very famous in the United States. It also shows some opinion of some high politician. We can’t distinguish between China Daily and NYT. I think every country has their own position, every country has their own benefit. So we can’t compare China Daily with NYT. Maybe neither of us know its truth, after all we can’t know the detail except police and villagers.

From another student:

For this violent event, I think both the China Daily and the NYT are bias. China Daily represent the government’s right, and it supports the police more. Overseas’ newspapers may be bias to the Chinese government, and they support the villagers. But it is sure that they can’t compare this event with Tiananmen event in 1989. They are not the same thing. And in my opinion, the most probable reason is that the local government don’t benefit the local people. They expanded land to build factory and didn’t give enough money to the farmers. They can’t live with so little money. So they are angry and protest.

This student also speaks to bias and also to the events:

I think that the police should not use deadly force the villagers. According to the law, the Chinese people have equal rights. Everyone has not rights to kill others. China is a legal system country. It should use the law to run the people but it’s not too be run by someone. In the fact of Dongzhou the policies absolutely encroach on the village’s rights. It’s bad. China Daily record this fact. Maybe it is a little bias for the government or police but it tells us that a fact. NYT record about this fact. I think that it has a bias serious. Maybe it has exaggerated about this fact. For the newspaper, first of all, they must tell people the things is truth or it is a fact. Chinese government be built no long now. It has many problems.

This student was more offended by the NYT account:

The countries fight each other in the world just like the chicken fight for the food. I hate what the NYT said. It is obviously a action to attack the Chinese government. To be frank, the police should not kill people in this case. The land is owned by the villagers and they have the right to own or sold them. Maybe the villagers showed an unreasonable way to them, but the police should follow the law to respect the life right. The police have the right to kill a person only when he against our country’s law and harm our country’s benefits and safety. Otherwise it is a behavior of tort. I think neither the police nor the villagers would tell the truth, but it is true that the police kill the villagers. This must bring some bad effects to China, not only bring fear to Chinese but also be fighted by the world political. This will supply a chance for other countries.

Most student addressed the question of use of deadly force by police.

This explanation was well-balanced:

It’s not only a sad story but a serious problem that we should concern. The complicated event made me confused. Like everyone here, I want to know the truth. Both the Chinese newspaper and American newspaper are bias.
For my part first of all villagers should be paid enough for the land using. The investigators should invest if it was true that the payment was too low. Then if the villagers were violent and attacked police. In any case, police shouldn’t shoot someone. It was a conflict that should be solved in another way. Maybe the villagers were too angry and did this illegally. Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t want to add my feelings to this event. We should be objective. In China, there are too many people, too many villagers. Chinese government should look into such a case seriously and give everyone of all the world a truth. We must fact it because there are actually problems in villages.
In overseas countries, many of them showed different viewpoints. But for China, the government’s obligation is to invest the case and develop awareness of solving village problems.
Different countries have different situation. In China, it’s special and it will develop a high awareness of protecting and gaining rights. Laws are important, so the case taught a lesson for us. Everybody, both villagers and police are equal. They should obey the laws. Anyone who break it will be punished. Of course, the laws must be suitable and reasonable for the country.

And though most students could see both sides of the story many came down on one side or the other:

I don’t think the police should use deadly force because the villagers didn’t break law which can cause their dead and the police don’t have rights to kill them. Maybe the government gave a little money to the villagers but villagers shouldn’t threat police. I think they should have a communication with the government on peace not violence. American shouldn’t interfere this case, they should keep in the middle situation. Because they didn’t have rights to bias the Chinese government or villagers and maybe the news they heard was not fact, it was hearsay.

Another student:

The villagers were forced to threaten the police. They were the owners of the land. The have the right to decide how to use the land. Government had no right to interfere. I think the government should responsed [responsible?] for this matter. I know the villagers didn’t take legal measure to solve this matter. The government forced them to choose an illegal way. The police opened fire to the villagers. This behavior just like bandit. They killed several villagers and didn’t public the specific numbers. The police can use deadly force towards terrorists but not villagers! It’s very silly action. I think the government leaders of Dongzhou are stupid, silly donkeys. They ignore other people’s rights and benefits.

This last account suggests that things like this are blips on the road to a better China and urges that people should turn the other cheek and let the country evolve:

Yes, of course the police could use deadly force. Because police are also human. They also need human rights. If there is a difference, it must be that the police and the villagers have different jobs and responsibility. But police couldn’t use deadly force whenever they want. In China’s law, there is one note say ‘One people could kill another people just a the point that the people wants to kill him or hurt him badly.’ But I don’t know what really happen in the village. I was shocked when I heard the news. And I am not willing to say anything according to just two accounts on newspapers. Honestly, this is not the first time in China that this kind of thing happens. But it is a big news and maybe has a nationwide sensation. But you know Chinese government, sometimes, I want to say, it is really a little autocracy. Something that will be bad effect will be covered and dealt with stealthily. I just wondered, if some terrorists or some bad person spread the news and exaggerate it China is in danger. It is so frightening to think about the results. So most of time Chinese government is good, but sometimes it is brutal. It may because China is just developing and isn’t perfect. Let’s forget this thing just like we forgive a naughty boy who did something wrong. Don’t put too much pressure on China, he will grow up and he will be strong and calm to deal with all kinds of things. It just needs time to see the promising future.

The news articles and the students speak for themselves, and all of us can interpret the situation without further commentary. It should be said though, that the students here may not be typical. All of the foreign teachers here are painfully aware of a lack of worldliness and even strong curiosity among many of these students which may not reflect the attitudes of the young in more top-tier, urban universities in China. Remember that Yunnan is considered a frontier province and that this college is not at the top of the academic hierarchy in China. But, the students are from all over the country, including many big cities, and their views may reflect those of many Chinese.

Finally, a NYT article from December 17 describes an escalating cover-up and continuing brutality by authorities in Dongzhou. The story is still developing and I suspect the students here are not following it.

Dali

2005-12-06T19:00:00.000-08:00

6 December 2005

The menu at the Sunshine Cafe in Dali excited me. It’s not that I don’t like Chinese food—I do. And I eat more than my share of it with real enthusiasm. Especially spicy pork dishes. But imagine going to your favorite Chinese restaurant every morning, noon and night for 4 months...

“I’ll have the tikka chicken,” I told the friendly waitress, with barely contained anticipation.

Ellen followed my lead, ordering an Indian mushroom dish, and Bei went enthusiastically for macaroni and cheese, all rare treats.

Fifteen minutes later my chicken arrived and the subtle meaning of “culture fatigue” seeped into my psyche, coloring the rest of my weekend the same muddy brown as the pitiful flakes of overcooked, under-flavored chicken which looked very small, lonely and un-tikka-like, hiding in a sea of lettuce. Crushed and hungry, I stared out the window of the cafe onto the stone street lined with small shops selling Chinese “antiques,” pirated CDs, Bob Marley posters and bus tickets to other tourist areas. And I thought to myself; “Dali sucks.”

But don’t let me get you down. Dali probably has some redeeming features. Just ask the zillions of Han Chinese tourists marching through the streets behind tour guides who wave their little tour flags while describing the scene through their megaphones. Or the young western travelers parked in front of computers surfing the Yahoo web sites and reading their e-mail. Or the touts that chase you as you dart from restaurant to hotel in a futile effort to avoid them.

The Lonely Planet travel guidebook (itself a blessing and a curse) describes Dali as:

“...a perfect place to tune out for a while and forget about trains, planes and bone-jarring buses. The stunning mountain backdrop, the lovely lake of Erhai Hu,the old city, the cappuccinos, pizzas and the herbal alternative to cheap Chinese beer make it, along with Yangshuo in Guangxi, one of the few places in China where you can well and truly take a vacation from traveling.”

Which begs the question: Why would you travel halfway around the world at considerable expense to “tune out” and “take a vacation from traveling?” And why didn’t this question occur to me before we headed south for a three hour trip on a local bus last Friday?

Despite my ranting cynicism, even in its most tourist-riddled places China is interesting, and we did have pleasurable moments in Dali. But this is not a place that I would move very high on your list of must-sees. Head north instead—to Lijiang or Zhongdian or Deqin, all touristy but all somehow more real, and stop in Dali only to grab lunch on your way past. But don’t order the tikka chicken.

San Ta Si (the three pagodas) are perhaps the most famous features in Dali. The tallest was built in the middle of the 9th century. I woke up before dawn on Saturday morning to walk 2 km to the site in hopes of capturing a peaceful sunrise. Instead I found tour buses pouring into a large parking area and disgorging tour groups. With some reservation, I paid the 52 yuan entry fee (why 52 yuan??!!) and joined the crowds as my plan evaporated. Despite the chaos, the towers were still compelling.

Another view of San Ta Si. Erhai Hu is the lake visible in the distance.

Handprints on the tallest of the 3 pagodas. Were these left by worshipers or by travelers trying to escape the tour groups?

Clouds over Dali at sunrise on a December morning.

Ellen and Bei were immediately captured by these funny and industrious Bai women who led them into their lair where they traded their goods for our money. One is demonstrating a traditional child carrier which Bei reports is very comfortable.

The town of Dali resembles a shopping mall installed in a construction zone. A short walk from the former in any direction leads to the latter, where dust and stone quarries rule the day. Dali is well known for its marble, which is quarried from the surrounding hills and cut with huge noisy saws into slabs and sellable knick knacks.

A storekeeper in the transition zone between the western tourist area and the construction zone.

Our transport around Dali was accomplished on local buses, horse-drawn carriers and 3-wheeled motorcycles like this one that Bei enjoys just after it hauled us from the bus to the town of Xizhou where we spent an afternoon.

Xizhou is a Bai minority town on the shore of Erhai Hu. This scene is from a part of the village away from the main tourist market.

Xizhou appeared to be obsessed with fire. Murals like this one were found in many parts of town. The predominance of the English is inexplicable, since few people here speak it. At least we knew what to do if a fire were to break out (call 119!).

Hmmm. Could this explain some of the preoccupation with fire?

Street dentists are not uncommon in China and this practice was thriving in Dali on a Friday evening just before sunset. In their office against the stone gate on the north side of town, a dentist pecks away at a local tooth. Expertise and experience are obvious in the deftness with which he avoids burning the patient's eye with his cigarette. I wonder if he is on the Delta Dental preferred provider list?

Erhai Hu is a huge lake where fishing is reportedly part of the culture. But there is more money to be made taking tourists out for cormarant fishing demonstrations than in actually catching fish. We had hoped to see fishermen in action, but instead found only empty boats.

The view from Xizhou looking south towards Dali.

Hot chilis and a vendor's scale in the Xizhou market.

Spices for sale at Xizhou.

The people in Xizhou were friendly and the market there was fun to explore, though it folded up at noon for the afternoon rest. This man was delighted with his baby.

The Xizhou market.

A Bai woman in Xizhou. The Bai minority settled this region around 3000 years ago and today number about 1.5 million, according to the Lonely Planet guide.

More Bai women in the market. It's unusual to see women smoking in China, but in Xizhou the older women weren't bashful about it.

Nor were the local men, who smoke with vigour.

This 87 year old woman approached us in the main square at Xizhou selling little green seeds from a large tub. I purchased a small bag of them in the hope that she would then allow me to take her photo, but she refused, demanding an additional kuai (about 12 cents) for the privilege. Upon inspection, the seeds turned out to be pot, which is itself a well-advertised crop and tourist attraction in Dali.

Parenting Moments and Miscellanea

2005-11-30T14:08:00.000-08:00

1 December 2005

It's been another busy week here in Lijiang frought with nasty head colds and a lot of teaching, so collecting new photos for the blog fell to the wayside. On the other hand, parenting continues despite illness and work, and Bei provides a near constant stream of material that suffers only from not being regularly recorded. As a 4-year old, she is thinking hard about all kinds of things, many having to do with fashion or Barbies (to our horror), but some with more import. And just being here in China raises issues that maybe would be less pressing were she surrounded by her friends in Laramie. One night this week as I put Bei to sleep we had a particularly interesting conversation that I'll reproduce here. I'll follow with a few miscellaneous photographs.

Bei dressed and ready for school on a typically chilly Lijiang winter morning.

Bei: I'm mad Papa.
Ken: What are you mad about Bei?
B: I don't have any friends in China that speak English and that's hard for a kid.
K: I know that's hard for you Bei, and you've done really well here. What about Esther? [a little girl at Bei's kindergarten who speaks English]
B: She lives far away. That's why I need a baby. A twin.
K: But Bei, you can't have a twin. A twin has to grow in your birth mother's stomach and have the same birthday as you.
B: How do they get out of the stomach?
K: Well, little babies are kind of like bars of soap. They're really slippery so that they can come out.
B: You mean they just pop out?
K: Sort of.
B: Where do they pop out?
K: (Gulp). They come out of the "popo" [Ellen's family euphemism].
B: So do they go into the toilet??!!
K: No, the birth mother usually lies on a bed so the babies come out onto the bed.

[pause while Bei thinks this over]

B: Why couldn't my birth parents take care of me?
K: We don't know, Bei but sometimes birth parents in China can't take care of their babies.
B: I wonder if they are sad about it?
K: I think they must be sad.
B: If you and Mama were my birth parents would you not be able to take care of me?
K: Even if we were your birth parents we would take care of you.
B: When my birth parents left me at the hotel they had to be quiet about it, right?
K: Your birth parents didn't leave you at the hotel. They left you where you would be found and taken to the orphanage so that people could take care of you there. The people from the orphanage brought you to the hotel [where Bei was delivered to us in 2002].
B: But they had to not tell anyone, right?
K: Right. They probably didn't tell anyone.
B: Why?
K: Because in China they might get in trouble for that.
B: By a policeman?
K: Yes.
K: It's late, Bei. You need to try to go to sleep now.
B: Ok, Papa.

[5 minutes or so of silence as we both settle down and process information]

B: Papa?
K: Yes, Bei.
B: Can I ask you one more question?
K: OK Bei, but then we need to go to sleep.
B: Does "Blupiter" rhyme with "Jupiter"?

And so goes parenthood.

Here are a few miscellaneous photos from around town:

A calligraphy school in Old Town Lijiang.

Remember, you are innocent until proven guilty. Or is it the other way around?

A street scene near the Old Town market.

For God's sake! Had I arrived earlier, what would I have witnessed?

Cloth bags full of unidentified materials for sale in the market.

A street scene in Old Town.

Wenhai 2 -- A Bad Day for Pigs

2005-11-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

22 November 2005

Late fall is a bad time for pigs in the mountains of northwest Yunnan. Ever so slowly the rains stop, crops are harvested and leaves change color. Mountain villages grow sleepy as the growing season ends. Groups of Naxi or Yi people sit around tables in courtyards playing cards, sipping beer, laughing, talking, eating whatever is at hand...and butchering things. The faint sounds of goat and cow bells compete with the braying of donkeys, the shouts of kids chasing each other between mud brick houses and the thud of axes hitting meat and bone. It’s a nice time to be a human.

After surviving two weeks of midterm-exam-grading-hell, we escaped into the mountains for our second weekend at the Wenhai Ecolodge (see September 5, 2005 post to read about our first trip). The lodge is a convenient getaway for us “foreign teachers.” A short taxi ride to the trailhead and a 3 hour walk deliver you to the ephemeral Wenhai Lake, which occupies a broad basin in the foothills of Yulong Xueshan. Several small Naxi settlements populate the area around the lake and can be explored on short excursions. Or you can relax at the lodge where hot showers and cold beer are available and where a small deck affords views of the entire basin to the south and of the mountain to the north.

From Wenhai Lake, several Yi villages are accessible. The Yi people are less common than the Naxi in the area directly around Lijiang but are very prominent as one travels north through the mountains and into the Sichuan Province. They generally settle at higher elevations and wear more colorful clothing than the Naxi, whose muted blues and whites are common even in the big city of Lijiang. Over 5 million Yi live in China and they have had a fierce reputation even in recent history, raiding villages and taking slaves up until the 1950s. Relations are calm now and Naxi and Yi coexist peacefully in pastoral mountain valleys.

On our last Wenhai trip I stayed at the lake with Bei while Ellen and Tony hiked to a nearby Yi village. This time Ellen and Bei hiked near the lake and Jacqueline and I walked the two hours to the Yi village, a small and simple settlement in a valley that descends eventually (a 6 or more hour hike) to the Yangze, upstream from the Tiger Leaping Gorge.

This is where the pigs come in. Three things conspire against pigs in autumn: first, like many animals, pigs are made of meat; second, the amount of meat in each pig increases considerably during the summer months and plateaus in the fall, and third, the drop in air temperature is sufficient to preserve meat in the absence of refrigeration.

We entered the Yi village on a chilly Saturday afternoon and our attention was immediately drawn to two large pigs being aggressively butchered in a courtyard just below the main path through town (this activity was also happening in other houses and other villages throughout the area). Our interest was not unnoticed and we were invited by the Yi family to watch, which we did with some fascination as axes and knives made quick work of the two large animals which were laid out on tables in the courtyard.

A Yi woman with strong, ropey forearms and simple blue tattoos invited us into the kitchen where children deposited pig parts into basins beside the fire and an old musket hung on a sooty wall. We were asked to join the family for lunch, an invitation that we declined both because we didn’t want to eat their hard-earned food and because we were uncertain about exactly which pig parts we might be served.

The generosity of relatively poor mountain families and their open friendliness is both common and remarkable in China. Where in the wealthy U.S. would we invite strange passing foreigners into our kitchens for lunch? This is not to say that Americans are greedily hording their food, but that our culture just doesn’t work this way. China offers a refreshing glimpse of a different way to view community and humanity.

Below are a few photos from the weekend. Some are similar to our first trip, but many are different. The change in scene from the rainy season to the dry season is substantial, with lush greens and cloudy skies replaced by dry fields, sharp contrasts and snowy mountains.

Here's Bei on her trusty steed, ready to head up the trail to Wenhai. After riding through Tiger Leaping Gorge in October and now to Wenhai and back, Bei has become more than comfortable in the saddle. In fact, she can fall asleep there if you don't keep an eye on her.

Yulong Xueshan from the Wenhai Ecolodge.

Another view of the Wenhai valley and the Snow Mountain. In the foreground, locals move cattle up the road towards the village.

Wenhai Lake is ephemeral. It grows during the rainy season and disappears in the dry season. Many channels and side streams like this one wander through the grasslands around the lake.

The Snow Mountain created strange clouds that we watched as we walked towards the Yi village. Eventually the clouds coalesced onto something more substantial, but precipitation is rare this time of year and we didn't experience any.

Another view of Yulong Xueshan from just behind the ecolodge.

Turnips are a major crop in this valley and every house was draped with them. We don't know if they are eaten by people or fed to livestock, but we were never served any. The quantity is impressive. Turnip pancakes? Turnip upside down cake? Turnip casserole?

More turnips. I'll have the pork and turnips. Without the turnips.

A closer view.

The fences in the Wenhai valley are beautiful and simple constructions of sticks and vines.

A detailed view of fence construction.

The kitchen at the ecolodge. We waited expectantly each morning for the fire to be built and the water to boil so that we could brew our Yunnan coffee, carried with us from town to supplement the tea that is offered everywhere. Coffee is not commonly drunk by the locals but of course is a requirement for our western metabolisms.

Smoke darkened light bulbs in the kitchen. Smoke from open fires finds its way out through vents in the ceiling after leaving a residue on windows and walls.

An old musket and powder holder in the Yi family's kitchen where we were invited to share the newly butchered pigs.

Yi men cheerfully working on one of two pigs that were slaughtered in their courtyard.

The pigs were butchered and cleaned by both men and women from the Yi family. Children carried various parts into the kitchen where they were deposited in basins or to a nearby spring where they were washed.

Yi women cleaning pig parts at the spring.

A wooden plow in the Yi village. These plows are common all over this part of China and are usually pulled by cows.

A collection of beer bottles stacked against a wall in the Yi village.

Another view from the Wenhai valley across fields now cleared of summer crops.

Leaves are changing slowly in the mountains, mostly to yellow. Many of the trees here are evergreens--long needled pines but there are also some oaks and some poplar species.

A senesced fern along the trail on our hike back down to the valley on Sunday afternoon.

Bei with her horse driver and Ellen during the walk down from Wenhai.

A view south towards the Lijiang valley as we hiked down into it at the end of the weekend.

Odds and Ends

2005-11-17T18:00:00.000-08:00

17 November 2005

It's been hard to put a cohesive blog together for the last couple of weeks. Our jobs suddenly interfered with our recreation and forced us to apply ourselves to teaching. We're finally catching up after administering 300 midterm exams each and then grading them. All of the teachers here at the Lijiang College of Culture and Tourism have been huddled over stacks of papers, looking wistfully toward the sunshine streaming through our apartment windows, as we corrected grammar and interviewed oral English students one by one. But we have emerged (!!) and plan to head into the mountains this weekend for a fall hike. In the meantime, I've thrown together some miscellanea from the last month or so to keep the blog from getting too stale.

First, so as not to mislead, this is what it really looks like around here.

Yulong Xueshan (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain) at sunrise from our apartment window. The mountain dominates the valley were we live and the town of Lijiang. Every morning I wipe the condensation off the window and look north to see if the mountain is out. Now that the rainy season is over, it almost always is.

Another sunrise shot taken from our living room window.

New town Lijiang is much less charming than Old Town, but the mountain lends some atmosphere. The road sign conveniently identifies the feature in case you aren't sure what you are looking at.

Just throw a couple of things on your bike and head into town.

Bei and I decided to head up the Xueshan last Sunday. A tram carries visitors from the base to 4,600 meters (about 15,000 ft.) where one follows a boardwalk along a fractured glacier to eventually gain a view of the cirque below the main peak, which is over 18,000 ft. high. Chinese tourists stumble along the boardwalk huffing oxygen from little aerosol cans that they sell at the base. Bei and I opted to make the trip "without O's."

Extreme alpinist Bei relaxes along the boardwalk.

But...the altitude turned on her and put her to bed. Thanks to my alpine experience I knew what to do...descend. I carried the sleepy Bei from our high point (4680 m) back to the tram and successfully descended to base camp where Bei quickly recovered. Our mission now: figure out how to reduce the atmospheric pressure in Bei's bedroom at 8:00 p.m. every evening.

The snack bar menu at the base of the mountain. Anything look good to you (if you click on the photo you get a higher rez version up that you can read)? They were out of hot dogs.

Fall lingers here for a long time. At least by Wyoming standards. It's mid-November and still far from feeling like winter though we huddle around our electric space heater. This view is looking south from the town of Shuhe just east of our campus.

The highway that heads west from Lijiang towards the first bend of the Yangze River.

Yunnan is famous for it's plant diversity. This flower (What is it?) is common in the hills around campus.

The Lijiang markets are eternally interesting. This woman steams baozi early one morning.

A technique that would make Tim Allen (Home Improvement) proud. Cooking with a blow torch. Actually, burning the pesky hair off a pig leg with a blow torch. Scenes like this one warm the hearts of carnivores like myself.

A scene from the market in old town. All around these guys, meat was being chopped and singed by busy vendors, but nothing could disturb their cool as they maintained their poker faces.

An older customer makes his way home from market back when the rainy season was still sputtering.

Blues Brothers watch out. When this gentleman wraps his waxy brown hands around the neck of a guitar and plays the baddest blues this side of Earl Johnson, the competition shivers...well...maybe not. In reality he was content to watch the comings and goings in the market through a remarkably stylish pair of mirrored dark glasses.

And for you climbers out there--yes there is potential here. This cliff is in a canyon that extends for several miles north of our apartment. I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of my new Bosch drill and wondering how, after 3 months of virtually no climbing, I'll ever be able to haul myself up a piece of stone. Stay tuned.

Happy Halloween from China.

Any advertising gurus out there? Can you think of a slogan for this company?

DVD shops flourish here and all over China. Bei just watched this film as I worked on the blog. Any chance that it might not be a legal copy?? Whose the fairest of the mall? [sic]. To find out just view this "Latinum Edition."

And finally--at risk of censor, the bird flu issue looms. A recent rumor of 2 bird handlers from a nearby lake dying in the Lijiang hospital had everyone talking, but to the best of my knowledge this was never a confirmed rumor. It certainly never appeared in any news that I could find. But does that mean anything in China? Our attention is focused on the issue though and, like many people here, we've (regretably) eliminated fowl from our diets.

The recently opened KFC in Lijiang has suffered from the rumor. It was absolutely packed with customers two weeks ago and now is sparsely visited.

Baoshan Stone Village

2005-11-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

7 November 2005

One unusual thing about the village of Baoshan is the utter lack of mechanized noise. That’s not to say that it isn’t noisy. During the two nights we spent in a Baoshan guesthouse (the Mu Family GH), pigs grunted about in their straw below our window, a rooster anticipated the dawn well before any light was in the sky, and donkeys brayed in courtyards around the village. Ellen wore here earplugs to sleep. But the only road to the village is a rough dirt track that ends a mile above town, and one can sit in the narrow stone-paved alleys in the evening and imagine that the sounds are much the same as they’ve been for the 750 years since the village was built.

The Naxi town perches on a limestone erosional remnant high above the Yangze. It is surrounded on all sides by steep slopes that plunge into the river, which just upstream emerges from the Prince Gorge—only slightly less spectacular than the Tiger Leaping Gorge and with none of the tourists. All available land on the slopes that is less than vertical has been carved into terraces that cut the landscape into a huge contour map, and by day the local farmers work hard to haul the fruits of their labors up to the village. We were in Baoshan at the end of October and the harvest was nearly finished.

It is a rare pleasure to visit a place as yet largely unaffected by the crush of tourism and we fear for the future of such a spectacular place. We spent our short time there walking to the river, exploring among the terraces and talking with the guest house manager whose family has lived in Baoshan for generations and who has taught himself functional English. We look forward to returning.

The village of Baoshan is perched on this limestone remnant high above the Yangze River. Upper and lower gates are the only access to the small town though a larger settlement occupies the saddle just outside of the upper gate.

Children working on their homeork use an opening in the stone wall that surrounds the town as a desk.

Terraced fields along the road to Baoshan. The entire region is steeply mountainous and famers have carved every available valley into plowable fields.

Terraces on the hillsides surrounding Baoshan.

A farmer working among the terraces. According to the manager of the guest house where we stayed, each family maintains its own terraces.

A Baoshan septic field and fertilizer factory. The pipe leads from a toilet inside a courtyard house out to this bucket.

Pigs enjoying relaxing lives in the streets of Baoshan. The harvested pumpkins that were being carried up the hill this October weekend are apparently used to feed the pigs. And the pigs are used to feed the pumpkin harvesters.

Bei watches as the guesthouse manager's son works on homework.

Farmers taking a break.

We walked down to the Yangze and found this ferry boat shuttling goats across the river. The goat's feet were bound to prevent them from getting into trouble on the boat and the goats were pissed off. There was a lot of butting of heads when they were finally freed on the sandy beach beside the river.

Characters on an adobe wall in Baoshan.

A wooden door in Baoshan.

Farmers flood their terraces to help them work the soil. The crops had mostly been harvested by the time we visited on a late October weekend. Apparently there can be conflicts over water, but in general it didn't seem to be in short supply.

Terraces on the hills near Baoshan.

More terraces.

Sorghum drying in a courtyard home. The sorghum is used along with corn and water to make bijou, a kind of moonshine that is perfectly clear when made correctly and that packs a significant punch. Our bus driver stopped along the way home and picked up a 5-gallon jerry can of the stuff which sloshed around and leaked a bit as we bounced down the dirt road back to Lijiang.

The pumpkin harvest was nearing an end on this pre-Halloween weekend. But Halloween isn't recognized here and pigs happily eat the uncarved pumpkins.

A pumpkin and drying sorghum in the windowsill of our guest house.

A farmer turning over one of his fields after harvest.

A woman and boy in a small settlement across the valley from Baoshan where we walked on Sunday morning before heading back to the big city of Lijiang.

Ken and Bei on the trip back up the hill from the river.

Ellen and Bei just outside of Baoshan.

Adoption in China - Revising Life Stories

2005-10-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

27 October 2005

Bei (then Gan Feng Jie) at the Social Welfare Institute in Feng Cheng City in late 2001 or early 2002 (photo taken by the SWI).

Bei (back right in pink shirt) with other kids at the Social Welfare Institute (photo taken by the SWI).

Part of our motivation for coming to China this year was, of course, that China is our daughter Bei’s home country. The Chinese are immensely curious about Bei and they are surprisingly confused when they see her with us—two obviously white parents. There is little shyness in China about staring, and people stand on the street looking back and forth from Bei to Ellen to me in confusion. If it is just one of us with Bei they may ask if the absent parent is Chinese. The relief of understanding a mystery leaps onto their faces when we tell them that Bei is adopted (“Ta shi shou yang de.” – “She is adopted.”) and the reaction is always a thumbs-up or an expression of how lucky Bei is, to which we reply that we are the lucky ones.

Curious kids crowd around Bei in Feng Cheng after her adoption to inspect a Chinese girl with obviously foreign parents.

During our train ride from Shanghai to Kunming we passed directly through Bei’s hometown just after dawn on a dreary Sunday morning. Feng Cheng is a small, nondescript, typical southeastern Chinese city, with concrete apartment buildings and stores surrounded by rice paddies and, in this part of the Jiangxi Province, coal mines. Evenly spaced trees line the highway that follows the railroad tracks, and a few trucks and bicycles moved along it in the early morning. I snapped some blurry photos through the train window to save for Bei, who was still sleeping.

Feng Cheng City at dawn on a rainy day, viewed through the train window.

In one field I saw a man with a little girl about Bei’s age and, as we passed, he hoisted her onto his shoulders for the walk back into town, much as we often carry Bei when she is too tired to walk. I couldn’t help but think about how easily Bei could have been that girl, living an utterly different life in China, instead of sleeping through the dawn in a soft sleeper train bed with two American parents. And I couldn’t help but imagine that somewhere in that town, maybe even within sight of the rail line, Bei’s birth mother was busy making breakfast, unaware that the one-day old girl she had left at a Feng Cheng school gate in 2001 was passing through town and dreaming four year old dreams in English.

It is not just foreigners who adopt children in China, and it has been interesting to learn that adoption here is viewed quite differently than it is in the U.S. One of the most surprising things that we have discovered, initially through conversations with our friend Wei Hong in Shanghai (the wife of our American instructor there), is that in China adoption is often a huge secret kept from the adoptive child for as long as possible. In fact, it isn’t a stretch to imagine adopted people living their entire lives here without ever knowing that they were adopted. And remarkably, according to Wei Hong, who has an adopted cousin, everyone else in the family and in the family’s social circle except the adopted child knows the truth.

Of course our philosophy in the U.S. about sharing the adoption story (domestic or foreign) is quite the opposite—we start talking about adoption and birth parents from the earliest opportunity so that it isn't a big surprise for the child. Our thinking is that if the child is aware of adoption from the beginning, they integrate this identity as they grow up with their adoptive parents and they avoid dealing with an unanticipated sea change in the context of their lives upon discovery of their history. And of course there is an implicit understanding by us that adoption is not shameful or something to be hidden away.

So why do the Chinese take the opposite approach—hiding this enormous truth, a huge elephant in the closet?? I can speculate based on a few conversations, some reading and the results of an assignment that I gave my second year writing students here in Lijiang.

An obvious hypothesis is that there is a sense of shame in China about adoption—aren’t big secrets often related to a need to hide something shameful? But if this were the case, why would everyone except the child be let in on the secret? This suggests that perhaps the parents are not themselves ashamed, but feel that the child’s very history might be shameful for the child. To them, keeping the truth a secret may be a design to protect the child.

One could imagine that protecting the child from shame by keeping the secret may have something to do with trying to save “face” for the adopted child. The concept of face in China is more important than it is for us in the U.S. (though we have it), and perhaps there is a belief here that an adopted child would experience a loss of face upon finding out about her history. This does not seem a huge stretch. In the book, “Encountering the Chinese – A Guide for Americans,” the authors (Hu and Grove, 1999) put it this way:

As people grow into adulthood, they gradually adopt certain claims regarding their own characteristics and traits, and they learn to make these claims, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to others. People also learn to recognize other individuals’ implicit claims about themselves and to accept (or in some cases to appear to accept) those claims…This set of claims, or line, of each person is his or her face.

Face is important in China because of the nature of society here (according to Hu and Grove). In contrast to the relatively transient social relationships in the U.S. and some other western countries, the Chinese are strongly tied to their families and social groups for their entire lives, with relatively less mobility than us. As a result, it is critical to maintain these relationships, which means maintaining a stable self image – “face.” In a sense, losing face means losing status in your entire social support group – almost like being exiled.

But does this really apply to the dilemma of whether to tell a child about adoption or to keep it a secret? It seems to me that if a child’s identity includes early knowledge of adoption, then there is no issue of “face” since there would be no catastrophic change of self image (loss of face) for the child within the child’s family and social group upon revelation of her story. So maybe this concept doesn’t explain the issue after all.

An explanation offered by Wei Hong for the secrecy in her family was that the parents feared that if a child knew she was adopted, she might love her parents less. This viewpoint is supported by at least some of the students in my classes who, aside from representing the relatively rare slice of the Chinese population that goes to college, come from all over the China and offer a geographic cross-section of Chinese thinking among their generation.

Ying Zhou Na, a writing student, explains it like this (unedited):

If I adopt a child, I won’t tell her that she is adopted. I think it is not necessary to tell her who are her birth parents. I also can give her a warm family, as good as her birth parents could do. I’m afraid that she will be sad at hearing the news that she is adopted. She may keep silent to us later. To keep secret to her is better than to tell her the truth, I believe. Personally speaking, I don’t want to tell her the truth either. As I consider that it may affect our close relationship.

The writing is a little clumsy, but you get the idea. And this sentiment was expressed by many students in my classes. But other students refute this and suggest another reason for keeping secrets that seems to come closer to the heart of the issue for the Chinese I’ve talked with.

Wang Hai Lian writes (again, unedited):

By tradition, Chinese parents always not tell their adopted children who are adopted. It is not because they are afraid the adopted children loved them less, but it will be hurt the children’s heart and do harmful of children’s growth. In my opinion, if the family have several children who are birth children and adopted children, the parents should not have to tell the child who are adopted. If the family have only adopted child, maybe they have lots of adopted child, the parents should have had to tell the children. Even if the children and parents were become close friends maybe child could keep touch with birth parent but they always loved and close with their adoptive parents. I known my uncle have two daughter. So he give his little daughter to other people who haven’t child. After fourteen years, my uncle went to her home and wanted her called him father. I don’t know when her adopted parents told her that she were a adopted child, but her only told my uncle: “I only have one family and one parents. I never know you and never wants to know you.”

Many students shared this opinion. To tell a young child the truth about adoption would break the child’s spirit and taint their view of the world. All children should see their world as a beautiful and happy place with no lurking shadows to darken their days. To these students the illusion of a perfect world for a child is the most important thing. This central philosophy of a sacred happy childhood was repeated in paper after paper as well as in class discussions. When a child is young, their ability to cope is low and adoption truth could be catastrophic.

This, of course, implies that the truth about adoption, while fundamentally devastating, can perhaps be swallowed when a person grows to maturity with the strength built upon the foundation of an idyllic childhood. The majority of students felt that eventually, an adoptee should be told the truth. When pressed, they surmised that “eventually” meant when they were fully mature adults.

Sui Shanru summed this view up like this:

I think adoptive parents should tell their child that she is adopted when she is old enough. After all, the adoption is a fact that they must face. So, we must tell them. But we must choose a suitable time at the same time. Because, in my opinion, they are pure when they are young. They should live happily. We should make them believe that the world is wonderful. The persons around them are kind and love them. I also think a little child don’t have the ability to distinguish right and wrong. They are easy to do something wrong. If they know the fact early, they may be self-abased. And they will think, “Why my birth parents abandoned me?” So they will give up themselves. They can’t understand even though their birth parents had some difficulties that they are reluctant to discuss or mention. So, as for this question, I think the adoptive parents should tell their child that she is adopted when they grow old enough to think deeply.

Hou Jun Ping from the Gansu Province agrees:

For my part, I think adoptive parents should tell their child the truth. The child has the right to know everything about himself. If I were a adoptive mother, I would tell my child he is adopted. I won’t tell him when he is young. One of my aunt’s daughters was adopted at 2 years old by another aunt. My aunt is kind to her and kept the secret for a long time. At last, my aunt told my adopted cousin the truth. My cousin said, “Mum, I knew I’m not your birth daughter early, then I was unhappy. Now I understand you. I’m your birth daughter and you are my birth mother.” Now my cousin has two [sets of] parents. She lives a happy life. The adoptive parents should tell their child that she is adopted.

But an adopted girl, Peng Yan, from one of my writing classes, refuted many of the arguments of her peers:

In my opinion, adoptive parents should tell their children that they are adopted. Because when they grow up to be a teen, they must think lots of things that making them very sad. But if they told their children the truth when they were a small child, it might be a habit: [become internalized] they know they are adopted but they don’t care.

It is just my opinion, because I am a adopted child, too. I was very young. I learned the truth by my mother. Although sometimes I am sad that I was adopted, I knew that my adoptive parents love me very much, especially my mother. She makes me very happy and I don’t feel different with others. I appreciate her of course. I love them as if they are my birth parents.

Zhang Lu Yan supports this idea but describes a more ambitious course of moral and political development for her future adopted child, a “brave boy”:

If I had an adopted child, I would tell him that he was adopted. I said “he” because I had a wish that one day I could adopt an African boy. I want to adopt an African boy because there are many kids homeless and ill or starve to death everyday in Africa. I want to adopt a boy because I think boys are more brave than girls. I will teach him everything when he is young. I want him to be tough-minded. I want him to be responsible. I want him to have strong self-respect. So I teach him at his youth. When he grows up he should be prepared to face himself, to face his country and to devote to his country. Thus, I will tell him that he is adopted with no hesitation. It’s my choice to adopt him, but it’s his choice to decide what he can do to the world when he can rely on his own effort.

As westerners steeped in individualism we have confidence in the strength of our children and in their ability to grow strong in the shelter of our love, with full knowledge of their adoption histories. Life books, adoption stories, heritage camps and early musings about birth mothers are part of our roadmap. And of course for us, this system feels like the right path. And I think it is. But as I glimpsed the little girl and her father, walking home between rice paddies outside of Feng Cheng in southeastern China, how could I to know what her life might be like? For me and Ellen and Bei, the train left Feng Cheng on it’s way west to a different life.

Bei in Tiger Leaping Gorge.

October Holiday 3 -- Zhongdian (Shangri La)

2005-10-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

22 October 2005

In the Tibetan language our third holiday destination is called Gyelthang. In Chinese it is Zhongdian and, in the language of capitalist tourist-mongers, it has been crowned Shangri La because of it’s alleged proximity to the setting of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. In fact, Shangri La (or Shangri Li La as the locals call it) seems to be migrating south. The Lonely Planet travel guidebook pins the name on the smaller town of Deqin further north and closer to the Tibetan border, but everyone else we’ve talked to both in Lijiang and in Zhongdian itself, affixes the name firmly and officially to Zhongdian.

In any case, Zhongdian (as I’ll call it) has characteristics of all three names. It offers a first taste of Tibet for those of us who have not yet traveled closer to the “autonomous region”: yak carcasses litter the sidewalks and large Buddhist temples occupy the surrounding hills and villages. Zhongdian also has a bustling and nondescript Han Chinese “new town” where concrete and tile buildings line wide, busy streets. Finally, a significant investment in tourism (Shangri La) is evident in the renovated but still small and attractive “old town,” and in new hotels and roads in and around Zhongdian.

Overall, Zhongdian feels more like a frontier town than other places we've been. Sprawl is limited (for now) and there is high, open country all around. Tourism, though certainly significant, has not yet overwhelmed Zhongdian, and as soon as you are outside of the town proper, you are among herders moving yaks and goats through beautiful green valleys and pastures.

We spent a couple of days here and visited a large monastery complex just outside of town (Ganden Sumtseling Gampa), a smaller but older temple (Dabao Si) near a Tibetan village, and a third temple a short walk from our old town guesthouse. And we enjoyed the best chocolate brownies with ice cream that we’ve had since Shanghai. Maybe this really is Shangri La.

The driver collecting bus fare on the ride from Baishuitai to Zhongdian. The cigarette is standard. Bus drivers smoke while they drive, doctors smoke while they examine you, and basketball referees smoke while they run up and down the court, removing their cigarettes only to swerve, make injections or blow their whistles, respectively.

A yak boneyard on a sidewalk in Zhongdian. As one gets closer to Tibet, yaks become a more common menu item and restaurants serving yak pile up the unused parts out front. Some of the displays are much more impressive than this one, but I neglected to get a shot until we were on our way out of town, so I had to settle for a couple of skulls and a backbone. Yak meat is delicious, by the way. And boiled, sweetened yak milk is good in coffee.

The biggest monastery in Zhongdian is just outside of town and apparently resembles the Potala in Llasa. This monastery is called the Ganden Sumtseling Gompa and is occupied by 500 - 600 monks (and overrun by about 6000 tourists, including us). It's a beautiful place (despite the tourists) and it's possible to find hidden corners and stupa courtyards where there are no people. One is left longing to go to Tibet.

A building at the monastery. The grass roofs serve three purposes. First, they symbolize closeness to nature and life; second, they keep animals from climbing into the interior walls and third, they protect the adobe walls from eroding. I'm not entirely sure how a grass roof accomplishes all these things, but that is what we were told.

A scene near the living quarters of some monks.

More cooking paraphernalia near the monk's quarters. For monks, as for many of us men, cleaning the dishes after meals is apparently less important than creating aesthetically interesting piles of debris.

The monasteries are rich in altars as one would predict. Some, like this one, are simple, while others feature elaborate and complex collections of offerings, carvings, textiles and photographs.

This scene was inside a portion of the Ganden Sumtseling Gompa where no women are allowed. That must be because the monks don't want the women to see where all of the golden ladles went. The room was dark and sooty and focused around a wood stove where the monks could relax, secure in the knowledge that if anyone offered them soup, they'd be able to serve it right up.

Noodles are apparently another big part of a monk's diet. These were stacked at Dabao Si, the old monastery further outside of Zhongdian than Ganden Sumtseling Gompa. Are monks typical bachelors? In my youth I ate noodles for hundreds of consecutive meals despite no strong religious affiliation.

I awoke early one morning and walked up a hill behind old town Zhongdian where I discovered a small monastery. I was lucky to be there for the sunrise, and although prayer flag pictures have become trite, the morning light was too pretty to resist. In fact, it was perhaps my nicest experience in Zhongdian--sitting quietly high above town as locals walked up the hill to worship in the morning chill. From below, the sounds of the new city waking up seemed far away and the mountains leading to Tibet on the skyline seemed close.

A worshipper hikes up the hill from new town Zhongdian.

These prayer flags at the Dabao Si (temple) covered a hillside so thickly that one had to stoop and crawl for hundreds of yards to pass beneath them.

Bei makes friends easily. While several of us milled around near Dabao Si talking about lunch options, Bei befriended this kind soul who seemed pleased, if slightly self concious, to have been selected by her.

Tibetan houses feature huge wooden posts and beams. Where they come from is a mystery, since large trees in China seem to have been thoroughly removed. Apparently some can still be found. There was a lot of construction around Zhongdian using posts and beams that were up to a couple of feet in diameter. Bei took a rest on this pile near Dabao Si before we went across the field to see some goats and feed them peanuts.

This little girl was sitting with a crowd of adults near Dabao Si during a lunchtime meeting.

And these three came to see us off as we left in our hired mini-van.

Though evocative of Tibet, the enormous prayer wheel in the center of old town Zhongdian is really just a gaudy tourist attraction. But apparently local Buddhists also like it and climb the hill to spin it using big cables that dangle from the wheel to the ground. Prayer wheels are always spun clockwise (at least here in the northern hemisphere).

Crop drying racks on the outskirts of old town Zhongdian at dawn. It's autumn and these racks are everywhere loaded with root vegetables, corn, and other crops that we can't identify.

October Holiday 2 -- Baishuitai and Haba

2005-10-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

17 October 2005

Between the northern end of Tiger Leaping Gorge where the Yangze emerges into a broad valley and the Tibetan-esque city of Zhongdian (a.k.a. Shangri La), a road wriggles relentlessly through steep mountains and valleys as it climbs onto the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. A five-hour bus ride takes one past small villages, terraced fields, pine forested ridges and finally, across high rolling plains into Zhongdian. We traversed the road twice after finishing our Gorge hike. On the way north en route to Zhongdian we spent a night in the small village of Baishuitai (White Water Village), famous for its travertine terraces. On the way south, returning to Lijiang at the end of the holiday, we stayed in a guesthouse above Haba, south of the slightly smaller Baishuitai.

Both villages cling to the eastern flanks of the Haba Snow Mountain, the high, glaciated peak whose southern slopes plunge into the Tiger Leaping Gorge. By appearance, neither village is prosperous, with run-down adobe buildings, a few hotels lining the highway and local men shooting pool, cigarettes dangling, on tables huddled beneath tarps rigged to keep out the drizzle. On both sides of the road, where steep mountain terrain has been carved into terraces, cornfields lush with mature stalks rattle in the fall breeze. Farmers worked the fields to extract corn between the rain showers (some of the corn is ground in water-driven mills and the rest stored in the stone and wood barns forming part of each courtyard home in the villages).

We stayed in Baishuitai for one night and in Haba for two. Baishuitai, though not without redeeming qualities (the old village below the highway is nice), is an example of how tourism can destroy the very thing that drew the tourists in the first place. Locals on the highway gesture frantically as you pull into town, desperate to lure you to their guest house or restaurant. The travertine terraces (the main attraction) above town are guarded by a ticket booth where alert employees watch hawkishly for dishonest customers, and crowds of people, selling everything from walnuts to photo opportunities, surround you as you fight your way towards the entrance. From the ridge above town local enforcers scan the hills with binoculars and communicate by radio with roving guards to prevent anyone from (God forbid) sneaking around the ticket booth and dodging the 30 yuan entry fee.

Once you’ve paid and begun your walk up to the slightly trashed, Yellowstone-like flowstone, you are accosted by 1) men offering to take you up the short trail on their horses, 2) men offering to carry you (king-like) up the path on wicker chairs crudely bound to stout carrying poles, 3) outhouses requiring additional payment should you be so unlucky as to have to pee, 4) women dressed in traditional clothing asking for money to photograph them posing unnaturally and 5) “Buddhist” shrines where one is asked to purchase incense sticks as offerings (to the God of capitalism??). After a night in a guesthouse where a narrow, dark and slippery path led to the only bathroom, a filthy wooden outhouse, we gratefully boarded the bus north the next day.

Haba, on the other hand, was considerably nicer than Baishuitai, even in the rain, probably because it was not blessed with anything so unusual as travertine flowstone. At the recommendation of Jacqueline, who had stayed there before, Ellen, Bei, Susanna, Ned and I lodged at a guesthouse above town at the edge of the forest. There is a significant population of the Hui minority—a group of Chinese Muslims that are scattered across Yunnan—living in Haba and the guest house itself was run by a Hui family. Really for us it was like staying in a farmer’s bed and breakfast, and aside from a half-day hike partway up Haba Snow Mountain before the clouds dropped, we occupied ourselves by huddling around the cook fire (the weather was cold and damp) in the kitchen and exploring around the farm. Ellen’s Chinese allowed her talk quite a lot with Assamei, the woman who ran the guest house. They exchanged English and Chinese lessons and learned about family trees and the details of daily living. In the background megaphones on the roof of the nearby schoolhouse blasted out Muslim prayers perhaps with higher frequency than typical since it was Ramadan.

The bus from Baishuitai to Zhongdian. We traversed this route twice staying first at Baishuitai on the way north and then at Haba on the way south. Bei's behavior on buses is variable--sometimes she is relatively calm, other times she struggles mightily against some unknown foe (us?) in her boredom. It's funny how adults can be fully entertained looking out of a bus window and kids have no interest.

Finally freed from the bus Bei helps out by hauling my camera bag to our guesthouse in Baishuitai.

Baishuitai's claim to fame: travertine terraces perched on a hillside above town. One has to contort oneself to find a photograph free of touts, signs and fences at this tourist destination.

Another view with the valley in the background. The valley was beautiful with terraced fields extending down steep terrain towards the Yangze River to the south.

A brave wildflower that has survived the feet of passing tourists.

Terracing in the valley below.

The village of Baishuitai was nicer than the tourist area by far. Here tobacco dries in a barn.

The ubiquitous eave decorations on a house in the village.

A detail from the entryway to a courtyard home.

From Baishuitai we headed north to Zhongdian for several days (I'll post pictures from that part of the trip soon) and then returned south to Haba on our way home. Here Bei helps Assamei, the guesthouse manager, with some work in one of the food storage buildings.

The uncle with his bull. Earlier in the trip at Baishuitai, we saw a large bull tethered along the trail to the terraces. Bei asked, "Is that a boy cow or a girl cow?" "That's a boy cow," we replied. "What is that thing hanging down?" Bei asked. Ellen and I looked at each other as we formulated our response to a classic parenting moment. "Well Bei," replied Ellen bravely, those are called testicles and all boys have them." "All boys have those things in their noses??" Bei responded with concern.

The uncle watching from the barn where the bull spends the night. Ellen reported that each time she was alone with the uncle around the fire in the kitchen he would launch into a pantomine of a violent interaction he had with a bull that Ellen thinks left him without his hearing.

I hiked partway up Haba Snow Mountain behind the guesthouse hoping to achieve treeline. Before too long I was stopped by rain, fog and a diffuse trail that faded into thick cloud forest. But the hike was nice. This area had been logged off and supported grazing yaks and woodcutters. Most of this part of China it seems has been logged--big trees are nearly nonexistent.

A man carries a load through the rain to his cabin high above Haba.

A basket and harvested corn in the barn at the guesthouse.

This guy lived in a tiny stone hut near the guesthouse with his wife. As I walked by exploring he emerged and let me take his photo.

We spent a lot of time in the family kitchen/dining room. The room was focused on an iron hearth and cook fire and was otherwise dark but for light that came in through a dirty window or the roof vents that allowed smoke to escape. Here the grandmother works preparing breakfast.

Baskets on the kitchen wall lit by morning light from the window.

Assamei's son warms up by the fire before heading off to school for the day. We spent a lot of time sitting on low stools around this fire as it rained outside.

This is the local Muslim schoolhouse. Assamei gave us a little tour of the Hui settlement and we got to poke our heads into the school.

October Holiday 1 -- Tiger Leaping Gorge

2005-10-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

9 October 2005

If the legendary namesake of Tiger Leaping Gorge (Hutiao Xia) were to make its impossible leap across the raging Yangze River (Jinsha Jiang) now rather than in times of old, it would be to escape the hundreds of tourists pouring from noisy buses above the leap point, rather than from hunters in chase. The recent addition of a road, cut into the steep southern flanks of the Gorge, provides access for tour groups that disgorge, march to the river, snap a photograph, and then slog back to their buses to be whisked to the next point of interest.

Luckily for us and for other moderately ambitious tourists, the upper trail through the Gorge, while popular, remains far above the masses, noise and exhaust. We set out for Qiatou, the start point, on the first day of our October Holiday and spent 3 days walking across steep slopes and relaxing in the comfortable guest houses that are scattered along the route. The hike could be done in a day, but why hurry when there are such nice places to sleep and eat? It’s hard to beat sitting on a deck perched high above the river, sipping a cold Dali beer and trying to pick out an imaginary route up the complex north face of Yulung Snow Mountain as bits of it are revealed through the swirling fog.

Tiger Leaping Gorge is a 16 km long canyon pinched between the Yulong Xueshan on the south and the Haba Xueshan on the north. Between the Yangze River raging through rockslide debris in the canyon bottom and the glaciated summits of the two peaks are 3900 vertical meters of complex limestone and marble buttresses, crashing waterfalls, thickly forested slopes, talus fields and bamboo stands. There are probably many other places in Yunnan that are as spectacular, but few that are as logistically easy to enjoy.

Our trip is probably best described with photos. We are at the tail end of the rainy season and clouds still obscure the views and dull the light, but these pictures may give a taste of the trip.

The trip started at the bustling little town of Qiaotou (chow-toe) up a small tributary to the Yangze at the western end of the hike. Our first order of business, after fighting our way to the trailhead through the tangle of tour buses, was to hire a ride for Bei, since long walks are not yet part of her repertoire. The going price for a day -- 100 yuan ($12.50 U.S.) and we quickly tapped into a group of donkey drivers who were eager for the money. So eager that they fought among themselves until we threatened to just leave. Somehow that solved the problem and we set off.

The trail is popular, especially at holiday time when all of China is on vacation, but it is not SO popular as to be unpleasant. Things were a little busy near the start of the gorge but soon the hikers spread out and one could enjoy the walking. This shot was taken near Qiaotou as we entered the canyon. Bei is on the second to the last donkey.

We stopped for a late lunch at the "Naxi Family Guest House" where we enjoyed a good meal and a break from the rain. Jacqueline (New Zealand) has her back to the camera. Susanna and her son Ned (Wales) are on the left, Tony (Australia) is to the right of them and Ellen and Bei are on the far right. Later in the trip we met up with some of our friends from Shanghai (Charlie and Skye were with our group there in August) but here it was just the Lijiang crowd.

The fall harvest is in full swing and corn drying in lofts and on wooden racks is common. There are lots of beautiful red chilis drying in the valleys along the roads, but we saw less of them in the Gorge.

Bei contemplates life in the saddle. She rode happily for two days and on the third, in the absence of a donkey, she walked was carried the short distance to the road at the end of the trip. She's absolutely comfortable riding through exciting terrain--a far cry from the timid pony rides she took at the children's park in Fort Collins only a year ago.

The Yangze settles into the Gorge before being stirred into a frenzy by landslide debris further downstream.

Bei at our lunch stop on the first day. People enjoy decorating her hair with flowers and she enjoys being decorated.

These Chinese hikers from Kunming (Yunnan's capital) followed us all through the route. This is early morning, just after crawling out of bed after an active evening of beer swilling. The guy in the foreground was smoking his morning cigarette through the bong, though he was no stranger to the other smokables that grow in abundance along the route. His group was funny and friendly though and we enjoyed their company.

Here he is setting out for a days walk, obviously well-provisioned for the trip. Bei loved these guys and had fun dancing with them in the evenings: "Do you disco?" they asked us. We declined ("We don't disco") but Bei was enthusiastic.

Bei on her donkey along the trail. The cliffs in the background are the lower flanks of Yulong Snow Mountain. From our apartment in Lijiang we contemplate the other side of the same mountain.

A goat herder minding his herd of goats that graze on the steep slopes below.

The vegetation was lush and diverse all through the gorge. Spring is reported to be beautiful here when the flowers are all blooming. Even in fall there are lots of flowers.

Ellen and Jacqueline on the deck in front of our rooms at the Halfway Guest House (2nd night). On the second day we hiked only a short distance since this guest house was so appealing.

A flower along the trail.

Morning coffee on the deck of the Halfway Guest House.

The rest of these photos are shots of Yulong Snow Mountain from different vantage points along the trail. It's spectacular to view nearly 12,000 feet of complex vertical terrain in any weather, and though the clouds prevented alpenglow and nice sunsets, they swirled around the peaks and added to the immensity.

At the end of the hike we caught a bus north to Zhongdian via Baishuitai. I'll describe those places in separate posts to follow.

Put That In Your Pipe...

2005-09-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

28 September 2005

Don’t worry Division of Family Services watchdogs, neither Bei nor her parents have succumbed to reefer madness. Yet. But this parent admits that the vision of a mellow Bei, giggling quietly in her room with a can of Pringles, listening to kid’s songs at full volume on our IPOD or puzzling delightedly through an audio recording of Yurtle the Turtle has some appeal. How much harm could it do??

And for you old time climbers out there, this shot taken along the trail at the local Lijiang climbing area might get your attention. It’s a wonder that anyone managed to find the ambition to actually drill 6 difficult climbing routes here. Or maybe this explains why there are only 6 routes in all of Lijiang despite the limitless limestone.

So in case you haven’t figured it out, Cannabis grows wild in the Yunnan Province although few, except foreign English teachers, seem to pay much attention to it. In Liming (see earlier post) we saw lots of cute and wizened old women happily puffing away on their pipes, and in the markets of Lijiang pipes and hukas are not rare, although cigarette smoking (tobacco) through enormous bongs is a common sight on the streets and may explain some of the paraphernalia.

Remember this happy lady from Liming??

And do you recall this "psycho bride" in an August post from Shanghai? Perhaps her bachelorette party included a trip to Yunnan.

I’ve asked a few people about the legality of cannabis in Yunnan, and I’m told that it is illegal but only if one is a dealer. And in that case, the consequences are dire. A horrifying bit of news from a web report by Kevin Nelson (Alternet.org) reports that on June 26, 2002:

“China marks a U.N. international anti-drug day by holding rallies where piles of narcotics are burned, and 60 people are executed for drug offenses. Chinese authorities have executed hundreds of people since April in a crime crackdown labeled "Strike Hard" that allows for speeded up trials and broader use of the death penalty."

"Thousands of people attend a rally at a stadium in Kunming, capital of southwestern Yunnan province, where 20 suspected drug traffickers are sentenced to death, then executed at a separate location, with a bullet to the back of the head.”

Yikes.

A more thorough report by Robert C. Harp of the International Hemp Association (The Netherlands) suggests that:

“...there is very little consumption of Cannabis products for recreational purposes by either resident Chinese or visitors. Despite these facts, the Yunnan provincial government has instigated policies that confuse drug Cannabis ("marijuana") with industrial hemp. Since the spring of 1998, the growing of Cannabis for any reason has been prohibited, although Cannabis still flourishes in most parts of Yunnan. Confusion continues.”

Reading further:

“There is only one location in Yunnan where Cannabis is used in a drug-related context. Feral Cannabis grows abundantly throughout the hills above Dali town, a popular tourist destination in western Yunnan. During the early 1990s, when the first backpacker tourists on the Dali-Lijiang-Tiger Leaping Gorge route saw feral hemp growing, they harvested small amounts, which they dried and smoked. The local Bai minority market women soon realized that they could harvest as much as they wanted of the naturally growing "marijuana" in the autumn and sell it to tourists all year long. The Dali Bai have no tradition of recreational Cannabis consumption and they do not have a recent history of hemp cultivation, although they were active opium producers before the founding of Modern China. The Bai market women also sell "hemp" clothing to tourists which is made from cloth imported from the commercial hemp producing areas of Yunnan and other provinces. Although hemp is not a traditional part of their culture, they realize that hemp sales are good business, as is selling "marijuana" to tourists. Small amounts of dried Dali Cannabis leaf and flowers are occasionally taken to Kunming and other areas of Yunnan by tourists, where they smoke it.

Eventually, Dali gained an obscure international reputation as a source of marijuana. Both High Times (1994) and Cannabis Culture (1999), recreational Cannabis magazines, spread the image of Dali as an attractive tourist destination for Cannabis smokers. In actuality, Dali and other feral Yunnan Cannabis contains very little psychoactive THC (less than 2% dry weight) and so is of very low potency compared to Western drug (2-25% THC) Cannabis (Clarke 1998). The perceived "high" of feral Yunnan hemp is induced more by wishful anticipation, combined with an exotic Chinese set and setting, than by its actual potency. It is truly a pity that misled Western travelers couldn't have enjoyed writing about one of their more characteristically Chinese experiences, rather than misinterpreting both Cannabis botany and Chinese culture.

Tourism is among Yunnan's most important and fastest growing industries, and Dali is one of Yunnan's most popular tourist destinations. Arresting tourists for marijuana possession would not assist Yunnan Province to bolster tourism. It will be interesting to see how the Dali situation is handled.”

So there you have it. I imagine that with time the novelty of seeing lush marijuana plants growing on the College campus or along sidewalks right in downtown Lijiang will wear off, but for now it still turns the heads of us westerners.

BEI! turn down the IPOD! You'll ruin your ears!

Shibaoshan Excursion

2005-09-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

27 September 2005

Next weekend is the start of our October break for National Days celebrating the birth of "the New China” in 1949. We plan to head out for the week to hike and travel north through the Tiger Leaping Gorge and onwards to Zhongdian, which marks the edge of Tibetan culture. All to say that there may not be any new posts for a couple of weeks after this one, though I will try to put up one more later this week.

Last weekend we celebrated the “Old China” with a trip to Shibaoshan (sure – bow – shan), a temple complex two and a half hours southwest of here that includes rare remnants 9th century Tang Dynasty stone carvings. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of modern China is the thoroughness with which over 5000 years of history was erased during the several years of the cultural revolution, so it is unusual to see incredible undamaged carvings like the ones at Shibaoshan. The area also includes Buddhist temples that are well-reconstructed versions of the old ones and, of special interest for Bei, large troupes of monkeys that scamper over the cliffs and temples en masse.

We spent Saturday afternoon exploring the three main temple sites and then slept in the small ancient village of Shaxi, nestled in a mountain valley below the temple mountain and surrounded by rice paddies. Sunday we explored Shaxi and then caught buses back to Lijiang in time to get our class preparations done.

The area is probably better shown with photos than with descriptions and here are some from our weekend:

This is the main temple site, built into this sandstone cliff overlooking a mountainous area dotted with shrines and other sites. A long stone staircase led through deep mossy woods to this place where monkeys outnumber people.

These Buddhas keep watch over monkeys and visitors.

Ellen keeps remarking that it feels like fall here. The weather is warm, the leaves aren't changing and at 25 degrees north latitude the sun isn't very low in the sky, so I think it must have to do with all of the red chilis hanging on people's balconies, the corn stalks drying in the fields and the last blooming sunflowers nodding their seed-laden heads. This is a typical sight here--ristras hung to dry. One forgets for a moment that this isn't Santa Fe.

Bei was delighted to have the chance to ride a horse up to the temple. We were told that it was a 1-hour hike and the thought of carrying Bei led us to the horses. The walk turned out to be a short 15 minutes but Bei had a nice ride and the horse owners made an hour's wage in a quarter of the time. In the end we were all happy.

The monkeys were all over the place. The males kept a cautious watch while the mothers showed us their babies.

One of the 9th century (or older) stone carvings. The characters on either side are apparently by a 15th century poet.

The grand views of the temples and statues are interesting but it is the details hidden in abandoned rooms or behind buildings that always capture my attention. This scene was off to the side of the main temple area.

And this is an adobe wall in Shaxi, the village where we spent a night.

This linen hanging was in a room in the main cliff temple. I think the characters mean to keep seeking.

This idyllic doorway was in the old part of Shaxi.

A wall in Shaxi.

Another wall in Shaxi -- layers of plaster peel away to reveal old plaster and faded characters.

A seldom used table saw at the temple.

A strange arrangement of brick, wall and stick near the stone carvings.

Dr. Ho, International Man of Mystery

2005-09-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

20 September 2005

Dr. Ho during our visit to his home in Baisha.

Reluctantly I concede that no visit to Baisha, the small Naxi town about 10 km north of Lijiang, is complete without meeting the famous (infamous?) Dr. Ho, denizen of main street. This is born out in countless travel pieces on the web, in magazines, newspapers and books (e.g., The Lonely Planet China guide), on television and in film, all describing meetings, planned and otherwise, of travelers with the aging doctor.

You’ll recall (see earlier post) that several weeks ago Tony and I tested our then new bicycles with an afternoon ride to Baisha and a brief tour of the town and it’s environs. Because our tender butts were feeling the pain of bumping down the traditional stone main street, we dismounted and paused to have a look around with an eye towards cold beers and soft chairs at the Buena Vista Café—a well advertised restaurant catering to tourists in “midtown”.

As we stood gathering our wits about us and flexing our aching butts (to the extent that old butts flex), we were hailed by a funny aged man in a white lab coat gesticulating and chattering as he emerged from a shady enclave beside us, much as an ant lion would emerge from its sandy pit to collect unwitting ants that had slid into its trap. By the time we realized what was happening, our fates were sealed.

Dr. Ho is an eccentric and frantic man, with a manic son of boundless energy and a self-perpetuated reputation as the herbal medicine expert of Yunnan (and perhaps the world). Words like famous, distinguished, remarkable, and miraculous comprise much of his self-taught English vocabulary and are repeated rapidly as the Doctor leads you first across his patio and then into his house, both of which are wallpapered with newspaper clippings, testimonials, letters and business cards providing detailed proof of his importance in the world beyond Baisha.

Bruce Chatwin, the well-known British travel writer (In Patagonia; The Songlines), owns responsibility for the elevation of Dr. Ho from small town herbalist to international man of mystery. Chatwin described the doctor in a 1986 article in The New York Times as “the legendary Taoist Doctor of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain”, to the consternation of Tan Wee Cheng who wrote in a November 2002 travelogue that Ho is “a medical doctor [period] and there isn’t anything Taoist about him” perhaps alluding to his less than humble demeanor .

Once in Ho’s sitting room we are offered his traditional cup of tea (John Cleese, the Monty Python actor, reportedly commented after a visit, “Interesting bloke, crap tea.”) which we sipped quietly as Dr. Ho presented us with more testimonials describing the gratitude and curiosity of western medical doctors examining patients previously suffering from serious maladies, including cancer, who were cured as a result of the doctor’s herbs.

Although Dr. Ho’s English is functional, he soon runs low on vocabulary and passes us to his son, who springs into action like the animated Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons of my youth. Tony and I sip our tea and steal concerned glances at each other as the son presents further evidence of his father’s fame and prowess and dives headlong into a description of a visit from Michael Palin, the well known British humorist and travel documentarian (Palin has a television series that follows his global adventures). This includes repeated acting out of Palin appearing at their door, knocking politely and asking if he could come in. How (for God’s sake!!) could a person as famous (!!) as Palin be so low key (??!!), the son clearly wonders as he does push-ups and jumping jacks on the floor in front of us (I’m not exaggerating). He dashes behind a glass display case and mimics Palin on a toilet—apparently one with an excellent view—by crouching so that only his perky head appears above the glass, chin up, looking smartly from one side to another, to see the imaginary sights visible from the “number one toilet.” Much laughter all around as Tony and I take advantage of the noise and confusion to nervously forge an escape plan (can’t be late for dinner, family at home, looks like rain, etc., etc.) and eye the door, entertained but fearful of the open-ended nature of the monologue.

Ego pathology aside, Dr. Ho has had an interesting life. Jade Dragon (Yulong) Snow Mountain, according to Michael Palin’s travelogue, supports over 600 species of medicinal plants on its slopes and in the surrounding hills, and Dr. Ho has made a career of collecting and applying them first to local cases and then, as his fame spread, to visitors from all over the world. He or his family do all of the collecting, and the plants are processed in a courtyard behind his sitting room and stored in and adjacent room. I’d love to know more about them but the language barrier and our urge to flee stifled further questioning. Ho practiced in the area until the Red Guards smashed his practice and his home during the Cultural Revolution. He resumed working in 1985 and continues to work to this day, though it was unclear to us what proportion of his time is spent on medicine versus tourist entertainment. In either case, he has become a fixture in Baisha and a person that people come to see from all over the world.

One has to wonder though, what the typically self-effacing Chinese think of his frantic self-promotion, and whether he is lonely as a result. In the end, he and his son seemed like good-hearted people driven mad by fame (are you listening Tom Cruise?), and like other visitors before us, as we said our gracious goodbyes we marked the experience as positive. These ants though, blessed with partially developed reasoning brains, will be careful not to slip into the doctor's pit a second time.

Dr. Ho "working" while his son gyrated in front of us -- though he looked deep in thought, careful examination reveals that his brush is poised above a laminated news article about himself and any perceived intention to produce Chinese characters is purely theatrical.

Liming Trip

2005-09-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

13 September 2005

We heard about the Liming (Laojunshan Mountain) area from an Israeli woman who has been in Yunnan for some time as a freelance writer and teacher. The trip from Lijiang to Liming, depending on whom you asked, was between 2 and 6 hours on roads that were good, impassable, fast, slow or dangerous. With a weekend beckoning and the freshmen students still not here to clutter our schedules, how could we resist. Our excitement rose as we read the description on the back of a ticket stub to the Laojunshan reserve:

“Laojunshan landscape fully embodied in variety of geology, biology and landscapes of “Three Rivers Coming Together” because of his mountain lakes in picturesque disorder, his splendid Dangxia landform, the well-protected biological system and the varieties of rare animals and plant resources.”

Reading on, one’s anticipation grows:

“It is the richest place with different astronomical phenomena in the early morning of the sun rises and falls three time a day. [!!!]”

And then, having successfully tempted you down roads of unknown length and danger, the ticket writers close the trap:

“Laojunshan Mountain is so mystical, magnificent, fluctuate, illusory and fantastic…Laojunshan mountain is waiting for YOU!”

On Saturday morning we were off – me, Ellen and Bei, Tony, Jacqueline, Suzanna and her son Ned. The first order of business was to find transportation and Jacqueline had negotiated a ride in a mini-van by the time we all arrived at the bus station (there is no bus to Liming, but vans for hire queue outside the station to look for riders). The driver reported good roads and a 2.5 hour drive, so we were off for the weekend with her and her 9-year old son. Total cost: 450 yuan (about $60) split between the bunch of us. As it turned out, she was not too far off and we arrived at the Liming entrance station about 5 hours later including several bathroom stops and a long “hot pot” lunch that included an entire cut up and boiled chicken (feet, head and all), some pig blood pudding and a few vegetables to soak up the animal protein. Ellen nibbled at rice and tomatoes.

Liming exceeded our expectations in many ways and, Chinglish aside, it is a remarkable place in a magnificent, fluctuating kind of way. The area is famous for its red sandstone cliffs and it’s reminiscent of a lush green Zion, but without the National Park Service or the crowds. The cliffs are a little smaller, but spectacular and extensive and the valleys are occupied by the Lisu ethnic group and some Yi people rather than by a parade of motor homes that you would see in our Zion. I know little about the Lisu. The Yi women, once they become mothers, wear elaborate square headdresses that perch above and behind their heads decoratively and to block the sun. Both groups appear to have a well-developed sense of fun and a keen ability to relax. The place is so nice that one could envision buying or renting one of the beautiful sandstone farms nestled in a perfect green valley rimmed by sandstone, and then hiking, climbing and exploring until even the thought of a career was a distant tickle inside your Western cranium.

Anyway, we spent Saturday and Sunday wandering around, eating good food and feeling a little heartbroken that the place was so beautiful and that we had to leave so soon. Here are some photos from the trip…

This is our van to Liming. It gets good mileage but it's a small space for us large westerners and for the noise created by a 4-year old and a 10-year old. This was at our lunch stop at a hot pot place outside of Shigu Town, near the Yangtze.

Baskets are everywhere here and people use them like we use day packs (and SUVs)--to carry things around. These old ones were stacked on a woodpile where we stopped to eat.

Here's the village of Liming at the downstream end of the main canyon.

An early morning view of the main canyon from above the village.

For you climbers out there--any interest in a Zion National Park with no routes established yet?

We went on a walk up the main canyon after getting set up in our Liming hotel. Bei helped keep these doggies movin'.

One has to watch for precariously swaying stones when you are in a fluctuating landscape like this one.

People love to give Bei fruit and this lady provided some fresh apples from one of the many trees that grow on people's farms.

Detailed eaves are common everywhere that we've been in Yunnan.

More baskets. These were stacked under a shed roof at a farmhouse in the main canyon.

Sunday is a festive market day in Liming. These boys were enjoying a swim in the cool stream that flows in from a side canyon.

Market day in Liming is busy. We noticed that men were wandering into town at 10 a.m. and were already well into their beers. By afternoon Tony remarked that "I think the whole town is pissed", and I think he was right.

Bei and Ellen inspect a pig head on it's way to market (This little piggy went to market??). Bei seemed unperturbed.

Suzanna, the Brit, bought a teapot for herself and a chain for Ned's bicycles at the Liming market on our way out to hike. The heavy metal overtones were unmistakable.

And this is my favorite. An old woman in Liming that we stopped to "chat" with. Like many of the people we saw, she's enjoying a good smoke, and it isn't tobacco. More on that when I blog on the medicinal plants and botany of Yunnan.

Wenhai Lake Hike

2005-09-05T16:56:00.000-07:00

5 September 2005

The other day while we were having lunch in Baisha at a café run by a trekking guide, we read about a short hike to an “ecolodge” at a place called Wenhai Lake in the mountains forming the west side of the Lijiang valley. The lake is on the southern flanks of Yulong (Jade Dragon) Snow Mountain, the big peak to our north, and is currently part of a Provincial Nature Reserve that the Nature Conservancy is helping to upgrade into a National Reserve. We stopped into the TNC office in Lijiang and got a crude map of the area (it’s impossible to get good maps here) that was better than any other maps we have, and decided to take advantage of our still light schedules (freshmen classes start next week) and take a lazy three-day weekend trip. The hike up is about 4 hours and you can do sort of an open loop to avoid backtracking on the way down. Tony, an Australian teaching here (he teaches comparative religion at a university in Australia – studying Aboriginal religions) and Suzanna and her 10-year old son, Ned, from Wales, decided to come along.

Friday, after Bei got home from kindergarten, we all piled into a taxi and headed for the trailhead, about 6 or so miles north of here. After a bit of conflicting information on where to start, we found ourselves slogging in a slow, middle-aged sort of way, up a paved staircase that tunneled through pine trees and rhododendrons in a beeline for the valley rim 1500 or 2000 feet above. I carried Bei in the kid carrier and Ellen hauled our stuff in my climbing pack—thankfully we didn’t need to carry a lot since it’s consistently warm here and our target was a lodge where food and beds are provided.

After that first day, the weather was about as good as it gets during the rainy season (hardly any rain and quite a bit of sun) and we had a great time exploring around. Here are some photos from the trip.

Here we are, part way up the staircase in the rain. All of us got soggy. The hike was strenuous and raingear just made you sweat more.

This is Tony, the Australian. He's a good guy and fun to explore with. He worked in academia for many years and wrote 4 or 5 books on aboriginal cultures in Australia before burning out and taking time off to live in China. He only started smoking recently, but enjoys it.

Here's Ellen carrying Bei after we topped out above the giant staircase. It continued to rain, though the rain tapered off and it got nicer.

Trails, horses, cows, goats and the rainy season are perfect for Ellen's Keen sandals. At least the mud oozes out of sandles rather than staying inside.

We ran across this goatherd moving his herd back into the village of Wenhai Lake when we were almost there. First we passed him in a field at the top of the last hill down into town. He looked a little like Darth Vader in his black cape and we weren't sure whether he was friendly or not. Then he caught up to us and, from beneath the cape, produced a handful of sugar crystals for Bei and Ned to ease the last part of their journey.

This was taken from an upper deck at the Wenhai Ecolodge looking south towards Yulong Snow Mountain. The lodge using solar heat to make hot water and has a biogas generator as well. It was written up in the New York Time in December (I think) 2004 and listed as one of the 10 best ecolodges in the world by Outside Magazine in 2003. We found it to be quiet and rustic with no other guests. The food, cooked by a cooperative of Naxi locals, was great--freshly harvested mushrooms, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and other greens along with fresh chicken eggs and pork. Total cost for food and lodging: $12.50 USD/day.

Here's our room on the second level. The view out the back window was toward Yulong Snow Mountain.

The lodge provided plastic sandals for wearing into the bathroom -- these were one of the strong points for Bei. If you want 4 year olds to come to your establishment, just provide a variety of large shoes for them to wear and, ideally, to scrub.

The standard Chinese broom collection.

The fences are made of vertical sticks woven together with long thin sticks. This view is through a fence towards the mountain.

The Wenhai Valley is dominated by Wenhai Lake which is apparently ephemeral--it grows to full size in the rainy season and then drains into the Karst in the dry season. There is lots of water in general in the valley--these channels are near the lodge. In December something like 70 species of migratory birds stop at Wenhai. We'll have to head up there then to see. There are also huge forests of rhododendrons to see in bloom in the spring.

I walked up to have a look at a limestone cave above the valley. Excellent climbing lines were everywhere, but the cave was seeping and mossy in the rainy season.

A Naxi woman taking a break. The village of Wenhai Lake is Naxi, but there are also Yi (another ethic group) villages around. Ellen hiked to a Yi village on Saturday with Tony while I hung out with Bei at Wenhai.

Bei, Ned and I went for a hike around the lake while Ellen and Tony were hiking and Ned's Mom was taking a break. The flats around the lake are lush with grass and grazed by horses, cows, pigs and this solitary yak that we approached for a photo. It was the first yak I've seen.

He charged! Ned jumped about 5 feet in the air and took off running. With Bei on my back, I stood my ground, waved my arms and made a loud and intimidating noise that apparently worked since I don't have any horn wounds.

On Sunday we enjoyed a gentle and beautiful walk out (4 hours) to Shuhe, the village near our apartment. It stayed dry the whole day for us.

Grazing pigs near the lake.

A short rest near the "Little Sea", a small lake beyond Wenhai Lake on our trail.

Lunch about 2/3 of the way down.

And finally, back to the restaurants and tourists (and hungry dogs) of Shuhe.