China Travelogue

2 sept 2002, Lhasa

Hey hey hey! It's time for another update from Asia... this episode includes Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in Southwest China. Photos are available at:

http://draves.org/curtis/asia/9China/

From Vietnam we took a train into Yunnan province in Southwest China, and spent a few days in the capital Kunming recovering from travel sickness, buying some supplies, and marveling at the wonder of modern China. It's an amazing combination of mysterious old traditions, disgusting old habits, smart new efficiency, and tacky new sensibilities.

For example, I'm very impressed by the traffic and bike lanes throughout major cities. By far the best in Asia we've seen, and the bike lanes and sheer numbers of people using bicycles (instead of motorbikes like in SE Asia) are way better than in American cities. On the other hand, almost all the new construction is quite boring and often hideously ugly. The Chinese have a reputation throughout Asia for being the most business-minded, and here in China you really get a taste for the way materialism has taken hold.

Then you walk into a public bathroom, and the modern transportation and telecommunications seem like a shiny new giftbox with something dug up in the junkyard inside. I mean, the standard chinese toilet is a square trough cut out of the floor, running along one side of the room. Usually with small barriers that block your view (only while you're squatting), and usually without much running water, i.e. no flush. I'll leave the rest up to your imagination.

Anyways, when we arrived in Yunnan I was instantly happy to be able to practice what little Chinese I remember from classes at city college last year. And with the help of a phrasebook/dictionary we mostly avoided the difficulties everybody warns about travel in China. We quickly learned the ropes of the hard and soft sleepers and seats on trains, and how to successfully order vegetarian food. Actually in many local restaurants, we just go into the kitchen and fill a plate with veggies, which are all laid out on a table in baskets, and they fry it up while we watch.

WU WEI SI

Outside Dali we went to check out a Buddhist monastery called Wu Wei SI, where the monk runs a little Shaolin kungfu school. Shaolin is the original organized martial art in China, and it was started by Buddhist monks in order to be physically fit for many long hours of meditation. (Taichi, incidentally, was invented for the same purpose by a Taoist monk who had studied Shaolin.) There are both Chinese and foreigners studying at the monastery. Some foreigners stay just a week like us, but several were studying for many months. There were less Chinese kids, and they were all studying seriously. The master (shifu) occacionally strolled into our workouts to observe and make pointers, but his three disciples taught us and led the workouts -- two per day for a total of five hours, and one hour of independent excercise before breakfast. It may not sound too strenuous, but you've got to see the kicks, stretches, calisthenics and acrobatics we did! (or tried to). We were extremely sore all week.

The food was decent vegetarian, but there just happened to be a much bigger group of foreigners that week and we ended up eating a lot more rice, proportionately, than we would have liked. (So you'll understand why when we got back to Dali we gorged on pizza and brownies!) Before going to the monastery we'd heard rumours that the monks are so strict they make you eat any food you've dropped on the floor. It turns out one of the monks, a very nice guy, actually did enforce this rule, which is particularly harrowing if you've been in China and seen how the Chinese all spit and throw garbage on the floor, indoors or out. When I had the bad luck of dropping some food on the floor while sitting next to this one monk, I was so nervous I failed several times to pick the food up with my chopsticks, and he finally had mercy and let me leave it. Compassion is, after all, a very important element of Buddhism.

The monastery, like most throughout China and Tibet, was completely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The master had spent many years since childhood traveling and studying Buddhism and the martial arts, and in the 80's adopted the ruins of Wu Wei Si and started building.

The monastery is in a beautiful secluded spot up on the mountainside overlooking a lake. We woke early to the sounds of gongs and chanting, and we got to see a ceremony one afternoon with local villagers. During our afternoon break the younger Chinese kids practiced writing characters while the older students practiced calligraphy. Since the master is an obsessive Chinese chess player, many of us westerners acquired a bit of a taste for the game, which is quite similar to regular chess but with a few different pieces and rules. During my second game with a german, we started to accumulate a crowd of spectators, visiting Chinese men who gladly helped me with suggestions. They really get passionate about their chess!

Since there were usually just one or two teachers, none of whom spoke English, we had to resort to more advanced students to learn our forms. Pato fell in with a couple nice French qigong teachers who helped her with the taichi form, and I managed to get the basics of the shortest shaolin fighting form. In the end we didnt learn all that much in one week, of course, but we got a good taste for Shaolin training (intense) and the monastic life (serene).

After the kungfu we spent several days relaxing in Lijiang's old town, indulging ourselves with great western food (the best in Asia I think) and one DVD after the other. Like Dali, Lijiang is a huge tourist destination, and the charming cobblestone streets are packed full of Chinese tourists and lined with souvenir shops. But we didn't mind, we were gearing up for the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek and waiting for the weather to clear up.

TIGER LEAPING GORGE

A few hours north of Lijiang there's a section of the Yangtse river that rushes through an extremely steep gorge, which is now lined with guesthouses. We spent four nights in the gorge: two days of great weather, followed by one day indoors watching the mist repeatedly cover and reveal the awesome Snow Jade mountain across the gorge. And then one more day on a wild goose chase (or goat chase, I should say) looking for "the high path through the bamboo forest", which shows up on all the maps but nobody seemed to be able to find. We climbed some dizzyingly steep goat paths up to a ridge overlooking a waterfall that feeds into the Yangtse. No bamboo forest, oh well. The fourth day we had to hurry past a couple landslides, dodging falling rocks, to get to our waiting taxi. We were hoping to hike several more days north from the gorge (thanks for the tip Monte!) but alas we just couldn't muster the courage to face it in the rain.

On our journey to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, we ended up spending an extra day and night going around roads blocked by landslides. Chengdu itself is just as boring as Kunming, and I suppose most other big modernized Chinese cities as well. But outside town there is a Giant Panda research center, where we got a closeup at these endangered cuties and their cousins, the red panda, which looks more like a raccoon than a panda. Then we headed up into the mountains again to Songpan, a standard stop for backpackers for its organized horsetreks.

SONGPAN HORSETREK

We spent four days and three nights in the mountains on horseback and muleback (my trusty mount was actually a mule), for me one of the most beautiful treks I've ever done. There are large areas of Tibetan countryside that are actually in the provinces bordering Tibet, and we passed through several Tibetan villages and a monastery along the way up to "Ice Mountain". We had two wonderful guides, one of whom didn't stop smiling and joking and singing at the top of his lungs for four days. We also had the luck of trekking with a most excellent Scotch/Spanish and Portuguese couple, who caught on almost too quickly when we taught them Truco (the Argentine card game in which you win by distracting and bluffing your oponents, hence the name, "trick"). Gonzo the Portuguese Nomad and I took a dip in the lake up near Ice Mountain... good for the blood!

Our guides cooked for us and never let our bowls or our teacups get half empty. We wore traditional tibettan coats at night, which also served as extra blankets when we went to sleep on beds of pine branches and needles. We had to be extra careful to cover up our skin, because even a half hour of exposure will turn just about anybody fluorescent pink!

I was particularly impressed by the Tibetan farming villages we passed through. Their houses were gorgeous, made of local stone and beautifully carved and sometimes painted wood, and with slate rooves. The villages and fields had an organic but efficient order, and were totally immaculate, unlike all the other countryside villages we've seen in Asia.

China is a huge and diverse country, and we only got to see a small part of the south west, which outside urban centers is mostly not Han (the ethnic majority, for whom Mandarin is the native language). Many visitors complain that almost all of china's amazing cultural heritage is gone, destroyed by the red guards during the cultural revolution. And it's true, what little there is left to see is often reconstructed and packaged in a horribly tacky environment, and constantly flooded by busloads of tourists from the rich eastern cities. But we managed to get a taste for the culture and history on our treks in the countryside, visiting monasteries and temples -- especially in the Shaolin kungfu monastery. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to return and spend some time studying chinese language, calligraphy, and taichi. Neither one of us is particularly enamored of the dominant chinese culture, but I'm still very interested in the Taoist tradition.

Look for an email and pictures of Tibet in a few weeks!

Much love and peace ~Wally and Pato

Pato & Wally in Asia 2002