Picture Post 3: My Yunnan Exploration Project-- Xishuangbanna

The third entry in my exhibition of pictures from this semester. I've decided I'm going to keep posting only picture posts until I catch up to Liuku, where I haven't written yet. Then I'll be able to write doing both. After, once I get to Nujiang again, well, we'll see from there. But meanwhile, I present to you my trip to Xishuangbanna on the Laos/Myanmar border during our Yunnan Exploration Project. You'd think a person couldn't take a lot of pictures in six days, but you'd be wrong.

Front porch of the Dai-style bungalow I stayed in in Jinghong, framed by banana leaves


Misty countryside outside Jinghong


Monk robes drying at a lamasery in Jinghong


Temples in a park in Jinghong


The countryside Buddhist temple we ran across on Diana's and my bike ride near Ganlanba


Images of the Xishuangbanna countryside, featuring lots of greenery, flowers, and traditional Dai-style houses






Images from the Menghun market






Diana in front of the enormous, beautifully wrought Burmese Pagoda we hiked up a mountain to find


At the Dai wedding to which Lee, Diana, and I were invited


The famous Jingzhen octagonal pagoda, the end of Diana's and my wild good chase through the Banna countryside


The treehouse where I spent my night at Banna Wild Elephant Valley


Sunrise in the Xishuangbanna Jungle






The big tree swings that go out over jungle streams. So much fun to ride!


I didnt' see any wild elephants, but I did see... elephants kneeling!


A wild monkey hanging out, so to speak


One of the Valley's tame monkeys and a baby bear! Snuggling! So cute!


The baby monkey that stole my glasses

Vietnot Part 3: To market, to market, to Temple

Two pieces of business before I continue narrating my Banna adventures.

1) Ha! I finally got on blogspot again! I've been able to see blogs (China miraculously unblocked them, which means I have again been following the adventures of my abroad-ing friends) but the site from which one signs into blogspot has been horribly slow for the past week and hasn't allowed me access.

2) I would like to note that this weekend will live in infamy as one in which I bought 7 seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," 5 seasons of "Scrubs," 3 seasons of "Grey's Anatomy," 6 seasons of "Gilmore Girls," plus about 7 or 8 movies, all on DVD, for Y135 (about $15.) I love China.

So: More vietnot.

When we left off, Diana was throwing up wild river eel and I had never been so happy to take a shower and wash 15 miles of countryside dirt and grime off me. After she finished being sick, Diana felt much better and we caught a microbus back to Jinghong, just in time to watch the sunset over the Mekong as we wound our way through the twisting jungle-choked road. That night was a quiet one-- I took Diana and two of her tripmates who were also in Banna to the Mekong Cafe to visit Alex and Zoe (my Bulang friend, if you remember.) We were so exhausted from our trip that we passed out early, which was good because we got up at 6 AM to take an early bus to Menghun, a little town about 2 hours outside Jinghong where there is a notoriously good market.

The ride to Menghun was gorgeous, all terraced mountains and rivers running through valleys, hazy but filtered with sunlight. I was so tired that I fell asleep for part of the ride, but luckily it was the ugly part. The market at Menghun was a little disappointing, to be honest, not as bustling or as "authentic" feeling as the one we went to in Lunan. But still, Menghun's market is famous for the variety of minority peoples it attracts from the surrounding hills, and we did see our share of interesting and diverse costumes. Diana and I both bought strips of hand-embroidered ribbon to use as headbands as sashes, really beautiful and colorful. As soon as we stepped into the street, though, we were accosted by Aini women selling bags, jewelry, and hats. After a hard sell for 15 minutes, we finally gave in-- the bags were beautiful, if overpriced, and we hardly needed the money (which, really... $5 isn't that much) as much as the Aini grandmother-type that was harassing us. Diana only ahd a Y100 on her, and so the Aini woman grabbed her arm and promptly frog-marched her around town to find someone who had enough money to make change.

After we had finished exploring the market, Diana and I decided to try and find the gorgeous Burmese temple we had spotted up in the hills on the way into town. We started asking everyone where the "da miao" (big temple) was and they gave us directions. After wandering and correcting our path for about half an hour we found our way up a small mountain to find the temple huge, painted in gold leaf, and deserted. It was amazing, with views of the whole valley and not a soul to be seen, not even monks, who were lunching outside the gates. The whole thing felt very special because we had simply decided we wanted to find the temple, high and remote-looking in the mountains and then we did. Desire, action, results. It was very empowering.

As we walked down the mountain with Lee, who was also in town for the Menghun market, we were hailed by some Dai people who, as it turned out, were celebrating at a wedding reception. They invited us in, feeding us sweet sticky rice with peanuts and other less appetizing delicacies like raw cow stomach (...pass.) The men all showed us their tattoos, all self-made-- some of Buddhist symbols, temples, or just cool designs. They got Lee drunk on beer, try as he might to refrain, and we met the bride and groom. It was an exciting affair.

Alas-- I have to go to class now. When we return: The Southwest Chinese Amazing Race and the night I spent sleeping in a treehouse in the middle of the Chinese jungle.

Vietnot Part 2: The Olive Plain

As I write I'm back in Kunming, having hopped a 50-minute airplane flight (as compared to the 11 hour bus ride...) with Lee the day before yesterday. We've moved into our homestays and everything seems to be getting back in gear. But that subject matter is for another time-- I still have 5.5 action-packed Xishuangbanna days to tell you all about.

My first two days in Banna were sort of "warm up" for the rest. I made friends with Zoe and Alex, as previously mentioned, discovered the traditional Dai village hidden inside Jinghong, walked Jinghong's palm-fringed streets exploring, and tried some traditional Dai food (sticky rice in a hollowed out pineapple, SO good; pork and fried banana flowers, intense but excellent.) Diana was scheduled to come meet me on the second day, so I took my time relaxing, planning, and eating breakfast, and then rented a mountain bike from the shop down the street from my hostel. They gave me a map of a good places to bike in the surrounding countryside, and I set off.

I didn't really go where I tried to-- the map was outdated and my sense of direction is famously terrible-- but the ride was great nonetheless. I discovered another Dai monastery (my Bulang friend, Alex, told me that a small period of monkhood is compulsory for all boys in Banna, kind of like the army) and headed out of town, ultimately ended up on a dirt road winding ominously down into empty rice paddies. Before I got too lost I started asking for directions, unfortunately forgetting that they don't call the Mekong River by its Vietnamese/American name in China-- they call it the Lancang. Therefore, asking where the Mekong was was no help to me. I ultimately retraced my steps, but not before enjoying some beautiful countryside views. I next stumbled into a large park on the very south tip of Jinghong, a park filled with flowering trees and more Buddhist temples. My favorite of these temples involved a Buddha whose head was flanked by a flashing neon halo. Taking pictures of Buddha is forbidden (something about pictures stealing souls or taking away hallowedness), but if I could have taken a picture of this crazy collision of tacky modernity and exotic religiousness I would have.

I ultimately tired myself out and took a rest before Diana arrived in Banna at 5 PM. I had been incorrectly informed that there was only one bus to Ganlanba (roughly translated as "Olive Plain" during the day and had thought we would have to invest in a pricey taxi ride, but we successfully purchased bus tickets and, with some difficulty (again, bus stations in China are incredibly confusing and chaotic) found our way onto the minibus (really more like a van) going to Ganlanba.

A word about public transport in China: real busses only go to the largest and most significant Chinese cities. All other public transportation is in mini-buses, essentially shortened and mini-fied, or micro-buses, glorified mini-vans. These busses often take very rural routes and peasants and farmers can stand out on the roads and hail them at any time. It's... unique.

The minibus to Ganlanba was about 45 minutes, and it followed around directly down the Mekong (Lancang) River, as both Jinghong and Ganlanba are Mekong ports. The view during the ride was breathtaking, and we barely noticed that our butts spent more time in the air than on the seat. Getting into Ganlanba, I actually turned to Diana and said, "You have got to be kidding me." The place was way more South Asia than China. Swarms of people ate at roadside stalls, traditional Dai houses lined the street, the air was warm and humid, and palm trees stood everywhere. I decided then and there that a better name for Banna is Vietnot-- It's not China, and it's not South Asia so.... I'm so clever. I know.

We found a clean hotel with bathroom for Y60 for both of us (a little skeezy, though, with rooms available by the hour, special in-room pink mood lighting, and refillable condom dispensers) and set out to explore the town. We had some more traditional Dai food at a restaurant recommended in the guide book, and relaxed. A party was going on in the restaurant, and everyone was already drunk when we got there. As expected, men from the party started coming over to chat with the foreigner and her translator (Diana was, of course, not my translator, but seeing a Chinese face everyone assumed.) We were toasted with bai jiu and asked about American life continuously. One man informed me that "Americans have no love in their heart. Oh, but you do. Everyone else though, they don't." Soon after, he decided I had no love in my heart after all, and then he informed me that Chinese people don't get fat because they drink soup, and that Americans should drink more soup. Diana and I spent an hour or so wandering around nighttime Ganlanba before we turned it. It was awash with spotlights lighting up outdoor pool, poker, and majiang tables; flickering TV sets surrounded by children from the neighborhood; and shifting shadows of palm trees blowing in the slight breeze.

The next day we got up bright and early to find breakfast at a traditional food market, after which we rented bikes and found our way to a ferry point across the Mekong (an amazing minute and a half.) The guidebook had said to go up the hill, turn left, and ride, and that is exactly what we did. From 11:00 until almost 5 we road through the countryside. We passed through many villages, banana plantations, rice fields, watermelon fields, and stopped for a lunch of peanut butter and biscuits in a stand of rubber trees with a fantastic view looking out over the plain. We went through entire villages of traditional Dai Houses, discovered resevoirs coming from tributaries of the Mekong, and saw pigs so huge gray and wrinkly that they looked like baby elephants from the back. My favorite part was the country Buddhist temple we ran across, entirely by accident. I recognized the water serpents ubiquitous in Buddhist temples in Thailand and Banna, and we automatically got off our bikes to investigate. The temple was simply built but still breathtaking, and it felt like a true treasure, a discovery, something just ours.

I was starting to get really tired, so we headed back to the ferry, but on the way we were hailed by some Dai people eating lunch in a lean-to by a watermelon field. They asked us to eat with them, serving us the freshest watermelon I will ever eat-- I watched them use a machete to hack it off the stalk and serve it to me, dripped with juice and cool inside. They also gave us rice-- which I ate, figuring it was safe-- and offered us some of their meal, wild greens and water snake from the local stream. Diana ate, I declined. I did assent to some Guo Jiu (liquor made from watermelon), the strongest liquor I've ever tasted.

Diana's meal was probably not the best idea-- she began feeling sick not long afterwards, but we still had to make the long bike ride back. We had checked out of our hotel, but on the way back we decided to check in to a room for one hour so Diana could rest and I could shower. It was a wonderful idea, well worth the Y20-- I became clean, and Diana had a place to be sick.

Next time: the Menghun market, the temple, and our own personal South Western Chinese Amazing Race.

Going Banna-nas

Take that, China's internet censoring system, I have triumphed again? Little buggers think they can up and block blogspot on me (well, the truth is they can and now Emily's, Janie's, Dan's, Annalisas's, and Cedric's blogs are inaccessible to me.) However, after some extended finagling I found a loophole in the system that allowed me to write in my blog. Score.

So, we left off at my adventure in Lunan, which seems silly to write about now since I'm in Xishuangbanna at the moment and, despite an unfortunately timed gan mao (catching of a cold) I am pretty psyched.

So, Lunan in brief so that we can get to the good stuff. At least, the beginning of the good stuff because the good stuff is also right now and I should probably get back to letting it happen.

So, the whole program went to the Stone Forest last weekend. I'd been before with my parents but this was still as amazing as I remembered. The Stone Forest (Shilin in Chinese) is this unique geological phenomenon that happened because Yunnan used to be an enormous sea. This tall rock formations, some of them hundreds of feet tall, were under that sea, but when the basin the sea was in rose during a time of a lot of earth quakes the sea disappeared but the rock formations stayed. It's truly something that you need to see to understand. I can't post pictures because blogspot is a loser, but I urge you to google it yourself.

Anyway, I read about a cool market town 10 km away from Shilin and so John, me, Mike, Tania, Diana and some other Duke kids took the early bus down, which was an adventure in itself (Chinese bus stations = pure chaos). I had a wonderful moment on the bus looking down from a mountain into a valley below and seeing two horses galloping playfully on a village path-- I wrote my next Argus column about it, and I'll post that when I'm back in Kunming. From the bus station we took a minibus (shockabsorberless box on wheels) a terrifying 8 km into the Chinese dustbowl, then wandered around town garnering stares until we reached the Sunday market, one of the most foreign feeling places I've ever been. Minority peoples from the whole area come there to do their shopping, the place was teeming with brightly dressed people in silver jewelry, bright headdresses, the works. We took a LOT of pictures.

There's more, but really, let's get to the good stuff. Our 5-day Yunnan Exploration Project is in full effect, and Lee and I caught the overnight sleeper bus to Jinghong, approximately 10 hours south of Kunming, last night at 8 PM. I'm not sure what we were expecting (My tripmate Sophie described her idea of a sleeper bus as "very Harry Potter") but that was not what we got. It was more cattle car than boy wizard. Picture a regular-sized tour bus-- now picture it with three columns of 4-foot by 2.5-foot berths and two aisles, a moving set of bunkbeds gone horribly wrong. There was a whole to-do because they thought I was too wide to be in the top birth (hearing everyone say 'ta ne me pang, ta ne me pang' ("she's too fat") didn't feel so great) but in the end I got a better berth so it wasn't a huge deal. Lee, on the other hand, seemed like he was going to have a coronary. His berth was even smaller than mine, and he's a pretty tall guy. In the end we both got comfortable enough to sleep at least a little bit. I also watched a really terrible horror movie that they showed, with hilarious English subtitles. The bus didn't have a bathroom, but we made a few stops during the night to stumble out and pee. I didn't drink much water.

We got into Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna Autonomous Prefecture, at about 7:30 AM, just as the sun was coming up. Exhausted, I caught a motorcycle taxi to the road where I thought I might find a hostel I saw in the guidebook, but once I got there no one knew what I was talking about. I started walking again, feeling more tired by the minute, and incredibly conspicuous with my big suitcase and complete lack of Asian ethnicity. Just when I realized that I was looking at the wrong part of the guide book, it started to rain (wah wahhhhh.) I pulled out the poncho I brought along and started walking again, finally giving up and getting a taxi whose driver promptly cheated me out of money driving me for about 2 minutes and demanding an exorbitant Y5. I didn't care, though, I found the hostel and, with some trouble, opened the gate, found my room (it's supposed to be a dormitory but there's no one else staying there at the moment), and collapsed for 4 hours.

The hostel seems pretty wonderful. The rooms are in Dai-style bungalows, all bamboo and wood, with banana trees in the courtyard and a solar heated communal shower (I didn't bring a towel though... that might be a problem.) I'm moving on to Ganlanba tomorrow, but I'll probably come back here to stay one more night during my travels around Banna, as the locals call it.

I've done some exploring today, as well. I made friends with two kids about my age at a backpacker cafe, when I realized I hadn't eaten in 18 hours. Over an omelette and coffee (I'll try Dai food tonight) they told me about the various things to do in the area. I ended up giving them an overview of American history while showing them some American change, and gave them both English names, which they were very excited about. Aixin became Alex, Zhuang became Zoe. I'm supposed to come back and hang out with them tonight at 9.

After returning to the hostel to get my poncho (it started raining again, natch) I did some wandering in the neighborhoods around Manting Lu, a very traditional Dai village. It was enchanting. At one point I wandered into a monastery, completely on accident. The monks all bowed to me (there's a better name for that that I'm forgetting) and I got some wonderful pictures. Now: back to exploring. Hopefully this loophole will keep up, and I'll update you all soon.