Kunming

From Beihai, we went to Kunming. We took a bus from Beihai to Nanning, milled around for the day, and took a night train to Kunming. We got second class sleeper tickets, and our beds were next to two other travelers from England. One was a student in Shanghai, and the other was his girlfriend who was just visiting. After chatting for a while, they pulled out some Havarti cheese as part of their dinner which we stared at lustily. The only cheese we had eaten in China were Kraft singles, so just pulling out good cheese for dinner on a train seemed like an incredible luxury to us.

Kunming is a wonderful city. The weather was warmer and sunnier than anywhere we had been, and there was much less air pollution that other large cities. The streets are relatively clean, and the downtown is filled with shiny, new skyscrapers and shops. The food is diverse and delicious. The highlight of Kunming cuisine is the fried bread made by the large Muslim minority in the city. We were so impressed with the city that we contemplated moving there with Marc and Sven for the second semester, but ultimately I decided I didn't want to leave my job in Harbin because I didn't know if I could find work after breaking a contract.

There aren't that many tourist sites in Kunming. There are two tall pagodas in the newly restored old town that have many upward sloping tiers that look unlike those elsewhere in China. We spent an afternoon at a temple watching people venerating the Buddhas in Western clothes and wondered why they were appealing to the Buddhas. Were they seeking enlightenment, solutions to social problems, or a new cell phone? In addition to the Chinese temple, there was a Thai temple in the back of the complex donated by the Thai government.

The most interesting part of Kunming was the Yunnan Museum. There were extensive English captions for all the exhibits, and they revealed the dynamics of cultural judgment within China. Most the exhibits focused on the Dian Kingdom, its culture, and its regional dominance in Southeast Asia and compared these achievements directly to those of the mainstream Chinese. One of the captions said, "This proves that Yunnan Province was not the cultural backwater it was once thought to be." Clearly the museum was out to address the cultural dismissal of the rest of China. If that was the goal, then it succeeded in persuading me; I was impressed by the art and artifacts we saw there.

Everywhere in China, there are frustrations, and this stop was no exception. We were trying to get to a particular bus stop, got on a bus, and asked the driver if the bus went there. She told us it did, so we got on. After riding the bus for an hour out of the city to a lake and never hearing our stop announced, the route ended. I approached the bus driver and asked her why she had told us that we could get where we were going on this bus when we clearly couldn't. She had no answer and just told us we could get there by going back into town to where we were going on another bus and making a connection. However, most of the frustrations were caused by the Lonely Planet in this case. Once it led us to a restaurant that no longer existed, and on another occasion our destination was misplaced on our map in the book. We began to become distrustful of the the Lonely Planet especially after it so highly recommended traveling through those minority villages that we found lacking in sights and entertainment and inconvenient in getting to.

We saw some very interesting beggars in Kunming. There were many people out on the street bowed with there face on the pavement and stories in front of them. Their stories said that they needed money for university, their family was sick, and so on. It was like a voluntary welfare system. Also, we saw a man sitting in a basket on the sidewalk who had no body below his ribcage. Surely it was no hoax; he was right there on the sidewalk with nowhere to hide his legs. There are many child beggars in the city; no so much out of necessity but more as a form of child labor. These children are very clean and well dressed and are playing with toys when they aren't begging. Grace said that she had seen one playing with a toy makeup kit. We were told that they are from minority villages outside the city, and when get money, they take the fruits of their labor back to their mothers who are waiting nearby. Several times when we were walking around, these children approached me and grabbed on to my legs. I told them to go away or forcibly removed them, and nothing came of it. The Chinese generally dropped them a few coins, and the kids would go away satisfied.

One night, we were walking back to our hostel through a busy square, and an older child of about seven approached me and latched on to my leg. The techniques I had used before were unable to get me out of this situation; his grip was too strong to peal him off. I just started walking away with him attached to my leg, but I had to stop when I realized he was just going to hang on there all night if thats what it took. I stopped and told him again to go away and I wouldn't give him any money. He started to loudly fake crying; the performance was terribly unconvincing, but I didn't want to draw that much negative attention to myself. I asked him if he was hungry; he said yes. I told him that I would by him food but would give him any money. He took that as an acceptable agreement, and I went to a nearby vendor and bought him a half kilo of candied peanuts. Our hostel had a balcony overlooking the square, so we ran up and looked for what was happening to our peanuts. The child had brought the food to a group of three mothers who were eating the peanuts and distributing them to the children as they saw fit.

Beihai

Grace and I completely changed our plans for the trip at this point. We chose to forgo traveling through Guizhou Province, one of the least developed provinces in China, and went south to Beihai. Beihai is the second choice in China for beaches to Sanya in Hainan Province. We opted Beihai because it was much closer and more accessible. Nonetheless, it took three bus routes and a day of travel to get from Chouyang to Beihai. Along the way, we passed pretty close to the Guangzhou/Shenzhen/Hong Kong metropolis, and we saw a crate strapped to the back of a motorcycle stuffed beyond full capacity with about ten yellow dogs headed towards the city. Presumably they were for eating because there are puppy markets in the cities for pet dogs.

We intended to just sit on the beach and relax for a couple days in relative comfort, and we accomplished this goal. However, the little hassles in business transactions while we were there were more numerous than I had come to expect. When we arrived, it was already late, and we wanted to go from the bus station to a hotel near the beach. We asked a taxi driver how much it would cost for a ride, and the price was exorbitant for the distance we needed to go. We walked away, but the taxi kept following us for about 20 minutes while we tried to get directions. We finally found another taxi that would give us a ride at a reasonable price.

The taxi driver took us to a hotel that he thought would be in our price range. It was low season; nothing was happening there at all, so we had a good position to bargain. The hotel he took us to was much nicer than we expected. We got the price down to a quarter of what it was when we walked in the door, but it was still too expensive for our budget. We had to walk a long way down the beach past many nice hotels in order to find an acceptable place.

We also had some problems with restaurants. One place gave us twice as much food as we asked for and tried to charge us for it. Another place tried to charge us for tea that we didn't ask for and is generally free everywhere. A little discussion when the bill arrived resolved these issues.

Another inconvenience that is more troubling when I look back on it involved a tricycle taxi. Grace and I were searching for a restaurant, and we couldn't find it. We received directions back and forth in the same area, and eventually we decided to give up and get a ride from one of the bike taxis just to get us there. I asked a guy on one of the taxis if he knew the place and would take us there for two yuan, and he hurried us and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on." While we were riding, he was talking to the other bike taxis drivers about giving a ride to foreigners and laughing. The ride took about ten minutes, and when we got there, our driver told us that it would cost ten yuan. I told him I would give him two because thats what we agreed to. The driver and I bantered back and forth in decreasing value: ten...two...nine...two...eight...two... and so on all the way down until we arrived at two. The doorman at the restaurant got involved and argued in the favor of the driver. I only had a ten, so I made him swap my change at the same time.

I think this situation was the peak expression of my bitterness, contentiousness, and paranoia about being taken advantage of. The service provided was worth more than I gave him by any standard in China, but I was too blinded by my desire for price equity with the locals and to have the agreement upheld to be fair to this man. I lost perspective that I had given him a quarter. And to make him swap money at the same time, how offensive! I'm very ashamed that was unable to continue to treat people with dignity under the stresses of China.

There is a restaurant called Tommy's in Beihai run by an Australian by the same name. The food was excellent and very reasonable for Western food; it was so good that we went twice. We got to meet the man himself and have a long conversation. He is in his sixties and married to a Chinese woman twenty or thirty years his junior who is runs the restaurant. He told us about the different work he had done in China and his farm in Australia. He talked a lot about the benefits and detriments of doing business in China. At one point he was talking about violent crime and made a funny comment about crime in the US. He said it is really safe in China especially compared to the US where everyone is carrying guns and shooting each other every time they get angry. I didn't want to contradict him and tell him that it wasn't exactly like he imagined it.

The city itself is very clean and attractive. It was the southernmost stop on our trip, and you could tell in the lush, green trees around town, the diversity of produce available in the markets, and the comfortable weather. There is an old town in the city that looks very Western, so it is possible that the city was once a colony. The buildings in the old town are very attractive with high windows and broad arches over the doorway. However, the Chinese were remodeling and restoring some of the buildings, and they replaced the old facades with bathroom tile and squared off the arches. I wonder who though it was an improvement.

Grace celebrated her twentieth birthday while we were in Beihai. She had always had large themed parties for her last couple of birthdays, so our festivities were significantly different than what she was accustomed to. We went to a nice Chinese bakery and picked out a cake in advance. Trying to figure out what was inside the cakes in pictures was challenging, but we eventually decided on a chocolate cake. When we got the cake, it was big and full of mousse. We enjoyed eating the whole thing ourselves over several days, but at home, we probably wouldn't have been so excited about it. All in all, it was a good couple of days for rest and relaxation.

Chouyang

Grace and I were off the next morning. We hopped on a bus from Longsheng to Sanjiang from there we would head to the village of Chouyang. The bus ride to Sanjiang took four hours alongside a road that was under construction. The road we traversed was a muddy dirt road with crater pot holes. The seating was hard and cramped and came with all the extra cargo we were coming to expect traveling through rural China. After stretching out on arrival, we took a blue box, three-wheeled, motorcycle taxi to another bus station in Sanjiang where we could catch our next bus to Chouyang. The ride to Chouyang was shorter and much more comfortable.

Chouyang is a village of the Dong minority. The attraction there is the Chouyang Wind and Rain Bridge. The roof of the bridge forms five peaks each with three tiers. Their buildings are similar to the Yao architecture we observed at the Longji Rice terraces, simple, yellow wooden buildings with black roofs. The most interesting thing about the village is the engineering of the water wheels. In order to get water from the stream into their rice terraces, they built water wheels that alternate between paddles and bamboo tubes arranged at such angle where they would scoop water out of the river, and when the tube full of water reached the top of the wheel, it would dump the water into a large wooden bucket. The bucket is connected to bamboo pipes that run to the top of the rice terraces. Water would run from the highest terraces all the way back down to the river filling up all the paddies on its way.

We checked into another wooden hotel and ventured out into the village to take a look around. We snapped a couple pictures of the bridge and encircled the village in a few minutes. Later on there was a dance performance in the center of the village. Group of about twenty men and women danced, played instruments, and sang while in their traditional clothing. The men played what looked like giant, freestanding, bamboo bassoons. Tiny old women slid through the crowd selling lucky, minority 'danglies'. The Chinese tourists readily purchased these souvenirs. One of the dances was a hopscotch through bamboo poles being bounced together. There was an audience participation part during this dance, and I couldn't handle the pressure and jumped through the poles awkwardly.

After the show, Grace and I took another stroll through the village. While we were walking through one of the vegetable gardens, we saw the master of ceremonies going home. Her attire was marked different than during the ceremony. She wore a stylish pink, plaid blazer with trendy jeans and high-heel boots. Clearly the the minority clothing she had sported during the performance wasn't her choice of attire.

That evening we ate dinner at our hotel with another group of people. It was a guided tour from Hanoi to Hong Kong of mostly English tourists. The guide was an American girl who had gotten the job after living in China for a couple of years. Some of the tourist were on around the world trips, and one couple was taking out loans to fund their globe trotting. After a while, Grace and I got tired of their company and retired to drink some beers by ourselves. We talked a lot about our general dissatisfaction with our travels to that point. Our plans had been to continue traveling through Dong minority villages into southeastern Guizhou Province per Lonely Planet's recommendation, but the idea of more bone-jarring bus rides to villages where we could see everything there in a matter of minutes didn't seem very appealing. We resolved to head south to the beach and recharge. That night I asked Grace if she wanted to leave China and go home. I don't remember how the conversation went, but we resolved to stay and bedded down for another freezing night.

Longji Rice Terraces

Foreword: The last couple of post are going to be made from notes I made while traveling. I didn't write the narrative as it occurred, so the events that are described are more or less as I remember over a year later which may not be as they actually happened. I hope to abridge these posts for my sake as well as your's because you've surely found the amount of detail in my writing tedious, but it probably won't happen. Without further ado...

The next morning we got on a bus back to Guilin to retrieve Grace's visa and check on our stolen bikes. As we pulled back in to the Guilin city limits, traffic slowed. There was a small bus stopped with all its passengers standing outside. Pedestrians had gathered around as well to see a man sprawled in front of the bus, surely dead, and surely a daily occurrence across the country.

We return to the visa office and got Grace's passport without any hassle. We then stopped by the hostel where we rented our bikes so briefly before they were stolen. They said that they weren't recovered, but I could never be sure if that was true given the stake they had in the bikes not being recovered (or at least not letting us know that they had them back). Relatively unfazed, we hopped on another bus bound for the Longji Rice Terraces.

To get to the terraces, we had to change buses in Longsheng. The road to Longsheng wound along the steep slopes beside a river, and the ride was slightly stressful given the general driving standards. When we arrived in the city, I asked around for a bus to the terraces and Pingan, the village where we planned to stay that night. We found our bus, and women in traditional minority garb immediately approached us trying to get to stay at the hotel of their choosing. They kept pointing to themselves saying "Yao people" to advertise that they were in fact minorities. After declining there offers several times, the lady who attempted the most communication with handful of English words kept inching closer to Grace and invading her "personal space". Exasperated, Grace said to her quickly, "You people are so rude. Leave us alone." Confused by the onslaught of English, they looked at one and other, and the ring leader looked back to us with comprehension and said, "Yao people".

The bus quickly filled up with people, giant sacks of rice, rebar, and everything else. I ended up standing for the first leg of the ride. People periodically hopped off and eventually we arrived at the village with a few remaining minorities. There was a small group of minority women waiting. They met us with greetings of, "Hello; money." They offered pictures of lodging and motioned that they would carry our packs for us for a fee. These women certainly did not receive all the nutrients they needed with their strict diet of rice. They were all five feet tall at best, and our packs were already a bit too heavy for our toned American bodies. We walked away up a hill and negotiated a very low price for a room. It was low season. We were probably the only foreigners in town at the moment, and whatever we offered was better than the nothing that they would get otherwise.

The next morning we got to see the village in daylight. The buildings were made entirely of blond wood in a style of architecture totally unlike that of the concrete block buildings of most of China. The first story of these buildings were generally smaller than the second creating an overhang going to the door. Unlike concrete, the wood didn't prove to be a good insulator; our previous night was freezing. I had been making a habit of getting colder in the south than I had ever been in Harbin. People were up and about, and there was a gathering around an unfinished building. Men were standing on top of the building throwing trinkets in a Mardi Gras of sorts. The women and children on the ground were dressed in traditional clothing for the occasion and gathered up the far flung prizes. There were many other unfinished buildings, presumably more lodging for the next high tourist season.

At sometime in the morning, we realized that we were not in Pingan but another smaller village, Dazhai. Since our guide had told us that Pingan was the larger and and more impressive village, we decided to hike there. We asked around for directions, and instead we received offers to carry our packs or walk with us as our guide. Eventually, we just set out by ourselves, and encountered some people working on a building outside the village that pointed us in the right direction. Again, these people were in traditional clothing, and considering the dearth of tourists, they were probably wearing the clothes for their own sake instead of trying to be a show.

The Lonely Planet told us our hike would be four or five hours. It took us eight with our heavy packs going up and down steep hills on dirt paths. It was exhausting, but there were plenty of great views. The sides of the large hills were covered in an elaborate pattern of rice terraces. Longji means dragon's backbone, and it would be easy to picture these terraces as the scale armor sharply running down the back of the giant dragon of the hillside.

Finally we arrived exhausted in Pingan. Pingan was much larger as the result of being the center of tourism for the terraces. Most of the building were built in the same traditional style as hostels or bars for tourists. We decided that there was no point in staying another night here, so we decided to immediately take the bus back to Longsheng. From Longsheng, we could catch the bus to our next destination the next morning. We walked down through the village, past the hostels, bars, and souvenir vendors down to the bus stop only to find that the last bus into town had already left not long ago. It was time to sit down and rest.

As we were sitting at the bus stop, we noticed another bus. I went and talked to a women working on the bus about taking us back. She said that this bus already finished running, but they would take us half way to town and drop us off in another village for twice the price of a normal ticket. After haggling to no avail, we decided it would be best to stay in village that night. We assumed our position at the bus stop again to continue resting.

A group of Chinese tourists approached and one of them told us that the buses we no longer running. I told them thanks and that we knew. Then she ran back to her group, asked them a question, and ran back to us. She asked if we wanted to ride with them. After looking to Grace for approval, we decided to take the free ride. As we were walking to their car, the woman that was working on the bus took note of the tourists giving us a ride. She approached the driver of the car, and a long, heated argument ensued. The argument was too fast and aggressive for me to understand, but I assume that the woman felt that the tourists were taking money out of her pocket by providing her under the table service to us for free. Ultimately, it was the driver that backed down and told us that he could not give us a ride. We refused the bus ride once again and assumed our seats at the bus stop to continue resting.

About fifteen minutes later, another group of Chinese tourists walked by, and a woman in the group told us that there are no more buses. Emboldened by our first experience, I asked if we could get a ride to Longsheng with them. She asked her group and told us that they could. We threw our bags in the trunk of a mid-sized Kia and slid into the back set. Never has a mid-sized sedan with cloth seats seemed so luxurious. We sat in perfect comfort listening to a very interesting Chinese singer-songwriter on CD, and chatting with our gracious hosts. They were from Nanning on a weekend trip, and they were on their way to a thermal spa in the area. They dropped us at the bus station in Longsheng, and we quickly found a good hotel for the night.

You may be asking yourself, "Why did you take a ride from complete strangers? Don't you think that is dangerous?" I think the context of hitchhiking in China is very different. In the US, any old ax murder owns a car. In China, you are in the top ten percent if you can afford a car; we were just kids with backpacks. They had very little to gain from us in the situation, and that to me is the ultimate factor to judge whether to trust someone or not in China. Furthermore, violent crime is extremely exceptional across China. There was certainly a risk, but we judged it to be a very low one.