Thursday, January 1, 2009

#36: Into the Belly of the Beast



Week 36 - Yunnan Province, China

CHINA IS: everything you think it's going to be. It's loud, it's dirty, it's smelly, it's smoggy. It's crowded, it's beautiful, it's utterly frustrating. It's: scratched kung-fu movies on sleeper buses, it's: old communists sitting calmly with a cigarette watching the dream die, it's: young women on tiny mobile phones in expensive boots and scarves. It's: plump middle-aged couples playing mah-jong in the park, it's: grim-faced men spitting on the street, it's: families huddled around outdoor tables hosting a gargantuan banquet of every edible thing known to man. It's: neon lights. It's: traditional temples with endless whirrs and clicks of cameras. It's: stunning mountains and streets lined with cherry blossom trees.

What I didn't expect, though: it's all happening at once, one massive enthralling mashed-up stir-fry of cliches and surprises.

Our last few days in Laos passed in a rush - from beautiful Luang Prabang north to Luang Nam Tha, past innumerable villages of bamboo huts staring out across the valley. In Nam Tha we paused awhile to sit by the river and smile at the young children who approached cautiously with shouts of "Sabai-dee!" and then ran screaming when we turned and replied. A couple of nights in a Chinese-run guesthouse graced with large portraits of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin while I overcame a stomach bug, then onwards. From the jungle we caught a rumbling bus over a Chinese-built road that had completely collapsed in some areas, leaving gaping holes that tumbled over nerve-wreckingly high clifftops.

At the Chinese border I expected trouble - a bag search, a bribe, a full-body inspection. Instead, the official quizzed us endlessly on what each part of the Australian coat of arms represented - not because he was suspicious of us but just because he was interested. We made some stuff up - "Um, I think that thing represents our greatest poet, Banjo Lawson..." - and then we were in China.

From the border town of Mohan on to Jinghong in an air-conditioned minibus cloudy with cigarette smoke (I have never seen a people as determined to smoke in every place they can possibly dream up as the Chinese - and that's coming after "Of course you can smoke in the cinema" Cambodia. Adam reports that one can still light up on some Chinese planes.). We crossed the Mekong - the fourth country in which we have sat by that river - into Jinghong and wandered around town, taking in the smells of hard work and industry and then coughing it up later in black snot and phlegm. It's certainly odd being around people who are constantly working after the "Maybe tomorrow" countries we've been living in for the last eight months. China seems absolutely full with things and people doing things. Erin and Adam, hyper with the excitement of a new country, buzzed about the streets exclaiming "Look at that!" "No, wait, look at that!" while I dragged along behind, tired and cranky and struggling to breathe in the smog.

From Jinghong we took a seventeen-hour sleeper bus - a delightful cornucopia of smells and sounds, let me tell you - to the old city of Dali, towards the northwest of the province. To give you some vague idea of the size of China: we have been travelling in modern buses, on modern highways: we have had more than twenty-two hours of straight travel: and we're still only halfway through the lowermost province.

After a long period of travel you can feel like you've been living on a constant diet of spicy squid-flavoured potato chips and sleeping pills, so here in Dali we shall rest up for a few days. It is a beautifully-preserved old town, strung with restaurants churning out stunningly-good food and criss-crossed with canals and lines of cherry-blossom trees. It's surrounded by mountains and is perched on a large lake - the air is crisp and cold and the spectre of winter has kept it empty of non-Chinese tourists. But it is freezing - we've bought some cheap thermals, and gloves, and a second layer of jackets, but I don't know how well they'll last us - and it's only going to get colder from here.

Our Mandarin is coming along much more rapidly than I had supposed it would; after three days we seem to have most of the essentials covered - introductions, bargaining, ordering food, and locating toilets. Though the latter is something we try to avoid, since Chinese toilets are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the worst toilets I have come across anywhere in the world. Papua New Guinean toilets were generally nothing more than a hole in the dirt, but at least most people seemed willing to aim for that hole. Going to the bathroom here is like running into a burning building to save a child: cover your face and get in and out as fast as humanly possible.

But in both its good and bad aspects China is absolutely captivating. A lot of people I know - including myself, up until a couple of months ago - have no real desire to travel to China. It seems crowded and dirty and pushy and polluted, and whatever seems beautiful about it one can find elsewhere - in Nepal, say, or Mongolia, or Vietnam. But that misses the crucial element that one only finds by coming here, which is that you simply cannot take your eyes off the entire dirty, noisy, perfect mess. This is a mammoth country, larger than you can imagine, and yet it's entirely filled - things are constantly happening or on the verge of happening; there is always something to see or to do or to have done to you.

From here we travel north to Lijiang, from where we make the crucial decision to take the hard road through Shangri-la, across icy roads traversing the snow-capped mountains of Szechuan to Chengdu; or whether we retreat to Kunming, to the comfort and convenience of the Chinese railway. Are we mice or men? I'm hedging my bets.

Lachie

ps, Episodes 1-6 of Ping Pong Ka-Pow are all uploaded; we'll try to churn another out over the next few days. pingpongkapow.wordpress.com