All Aboard for Yunnan

Alright, so we’re going to interrupt the broadcast to bring a special report about a place called Yunnan. Afterwards, I will return to the schedule of events from Korea, as I want to try to write them down to assist my own memories anyway.

First, an introduction of sorts is necessary, I think. The lowdown of this place, and my adventures there, is that I went with a group of 14 people including myself. Most of the people who went with me are also college students from California studying in Shanghai, at Fudan University, just as I am, but a few are from other parts of America, one person comes from Spain, and another is Chinese born and raised. Our group, plus or minus a few people, were originally planning on going to Tibet, for a one week break in China known as Golden Week, which runs from October 1^st to October 8^th. 

October 1^st is the celebration of the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party taking power in China, for what its worth. During that one week break, all hell breaks loose in the transit systems of the country, supposedly. Most people tend to either go home, or go to the main coastal metropolises. We instead were going to go to Tibet. However, it didn’t work out. The travel agency we were working hand in hand with had to cancel all our arrangements, as we were informed that the Chinese government had shut down the Tibetan borders in anticipation of civil unrest coinciding with the coming week off. This particular October 1^st (this day is known as National Day) was rather special, as it’s the 60^th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s ascendance. Thus, there was concern that there might be special protests coinciding with this momentous occasion.

If it that did come to pass, I didn’t hear of it. Of course, news is filtered to a dramatic extent here in China, so, who knows. Regardless, we definitely still wanted to go somewhere, and somewhere far different from Shanghai. I quickly settled on Yunnan, the southwestern province of China that lies just east of Tibet. In fact, the northern part of Yunnan is still on the Tibetan Plateau.

At first, the plans of everyone else were pretty hazy. Within a few days, though, the consensus was to follow me to Yunnan. I spent the next 7-10 days researching the province, researching transportation, arranging lodgings, and so on. It was pretty exhausting, and I think it took a toll on me, but that’s a story for later.

Before getting into the rest of it, let it be said that Yunnan is a very compelling place. It has wildly varying scenery, ranging from the aforementioned edges of the Tibetan Plateau, with the jungles that line its border with Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, as well as lush farmlands to the northeast, and a smattering of other microclimates in between.

Like its terrain, the people are also incredibly varied. The Chinese government officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups within the country. Of these, 26 can be found in Yunnan, sometimes exclusively so. They each have their own languages, traditions, modes of dress, etc.

These two things were a big draw for me, and rather than explaining it all in one go, I’ll explain how it drew me to various locations as I go through the chronology of the trip.

So, we decided (re: I coerced everyone) to take a train from Shanghai to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. To put that in perspective, it would be roughly equivalent to taking a train from New York City to El Paso, Texas. It took 44 hours.

To stay on the cheap side, we got what are known as “hard sleepers”. Hard sleepers are not at all hard, and in fact the mattresses were more comfortable than those which some people were provided in their dorms here in Shanghai. However, they consist of triple decker bunks, with two sets to a room, making a total of 6 beds to a room. And when I say room, I don’t mean room, I mean a tightly confined area barely divided by a few fake walls here and there. The space in between the sets of bunks was almost wide enough for you to stand facing the window and not have your shoulders touch either bunk, but only almost. Outside the rooms was enough space to accomplish that task. A single aisle ran down the length of each car, straddling the windows on one side. Small flip down seat cushions allowed you to have a window view if you so chose.

To say it was a fixer upper would be an understatement, and certainly some people in the group were not accustomed to these sorts of accommodations. However, the entire place was surprisingly clean. I was a bit worried, personally, about the condition of the beds themselves, but they were certainly up to par, in my estimation.

Our train took off in the afternoon, sometime around 4pm or so. This mean that we’d have two nights of sleeping, and that we’d arrive at something like 10am-noon two days after. We left on October 1^st, a Wednesday, and after passing through half of China or more, arrived the morning of October 3^rd.

If I could, I’d include the testimonies of a few different people on the experience. Certainly mine was dissimilar from others’, but that will remain true throughout this entire trip, for better or for worse.

The first night was relatively charmed, and we ran around exploring the train, invading other people’s privacy, and ultimately settled down in a dining car in the back end of the train. We hung out there reading, studying, talking, playing cards, and just generally horsing around, much to the chagrin of some staff. We stayed up until fairly late, but we paid for it. At 10pm, maybe 11, the people in the dining car informed us that if we wanted to stay, we had to pay for a special arrangement to do so. At first people were skeptical, thinking that they were just trying to screw over whitey, or whatever. But they had official receipts that were used as a sort of meal voucher, showing we had paid for the special late night meal situation, and for that we got one meal, a couple of drinks, and some snacks, as well as the privilege of staying within this car.

A few people bailed, but probably 8 of us were in for the haul. It was kind of fun. I ended up having a long conversation with three older Chinese men, starting with a Chinese police officer. He joyously showed to me a stack of American one dollar bills, asking if I could check to see which were real and which were fake. In fact, according to him, all but one were fake, and he ate up the fact that I couldn’t tell. We ended up chatting for the next hour or two, and a couple other Chinese guys joined in. One of them was kind of a creep (actually both of the guys who joined in were sort of creepy), but ultimately harmless enough. He kept emphasizing how, if I ever bother go to this one other province, Guangxi, which we passed through on the way to Yunnan, I shouldn’t bother going to Guilin, a famous natural location there, but rather that I should go to his town, which is one train stop after Guilin. For what it’s worth, it seems like Lonely Planet corroborates this idea. The third guy who joined in was just . . . ashy. Like, literally, he smelled of cigarettes, and he sounded of it. His ratchety old voice made it damn near impossible to follow along with what he was saying easily (of course these people were all speaking Mandarin), and he seemed frustrated with my inability to do so from time to time, although this eventually morphed into a desire to make fun of it; the irony was that he would frequently say “ta ting bu dong” (he doesn’t understand what I’m saying) to his friends at precisely the moments when I understood him quite well, but just had little to say about it.

Anyway, this situation continued on into the wee hours of the morning, and one by one people dropped out. The police officer was one of the last people to give up, and I think he retired for the evening at around 3am or so. That left a few of us awake at that point, and one by one we gave in also, and I think I checked back into my bed at around 5am.

For various reasons, I wasn’t in the best of moods the next day, so I dug into a book, called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathon Safran Froer, who also wrote Everything is Illuminated, and read it cover to cover over the course of the day. That still left me with some time to kill at the end of the night, but I just mostly kept to myself, lacking much of a desire at all to talk to anyone for the course of the day. I’m not going to do a book review, but Extremely . . . was a pretty interesting read. If you’ve read the other book by Mr. Froer, you’d not be surprised to encounter some of the same themes. I’m happy to have read both of those books, but if he writes a third and it follows similar guidelines, I think I’ll have to opt out. By all means though, if you haven’t read either of his books, check this one out. It uses a few very unconventional storytelling methods that are . . . well, eye-catching, to say the least, and if nothing else will pique your curiosity to see how its used.

The next day, I got up. There’s really not a lot more to be said about the end of the train ride. I watched through the window, I did a little writing, and I waited.

After gathering all of our things, and arriving at Kunming Railway Station, we piled out, and moved towards the exit.

My day was brightened immediately when my eyes discovered Chen Jing. Jing is a Chinese girl I’ve known for a couple of years by now, but never met in person. We met online as language exchange pen pals, and we actually clicked. For those of you (all of you, pretty much) who haven’t ever been involved in such a thing, its not nearly as sketchy as it may at first sound. Indeed, when you’re trying to find language partners, the going can be rough, and it can be very difficult indeed to find anyone worthwhile talking to, for various reasons, but when it works, it’s as bright and clear as day. After knowing one of these people for two years, in this modern era, it will only naturally come to pass that you use Skype or some such thing to actually see each other while talking, and you can come to feel as if you know the person in just the same way as anyone else you see in your daily life.

And so it was with Jing. She’s about the same age, a year younger if I recall correctly, as myself. She graduated last year as an English major, and has hopped around a couple of jobs since then. She’s an incredibly kind-hearted person, and has a sort of child-like playful quality that everyone in the group recognized quite quickly. Some of the people travelling with me were fairly skeptical of this situation as well, but as was the case in almost every other situation where I was doubted, I was ultimately vindicated, and Jing shortly had no trouble being one of the gang.

She waited just outside the exit gate of the train station, and was already so energetic that it looked as though she had downed an entire pitcher of coffee or something. She had done a bit of research on how to get to our hostels from the train station ahead of time, and led us to the two different bus stops we needed to use; for this first city, our group would have to split into two for lodgings, as no one hostel had enough capacity for all 14 of us. 6 people went to a place called The Hump Backpacker’s Hostel, and the other 8 of us went to Kunming Cloudland International Youth Hostel. Kind of a mouthful, eh?

All of the reservations were made in my name, as I was the one who made the arrangements, and I worried that it might be a problem if I wasn’t present at the Hump to check in with the others; it turned out to not be a problem in the slightest.

Both of the hostels were pretty much what I’ve come to expect from hostels in Asia with good reputations; the other people I was with, however, had by and large never stayed in hostels anywhere. A few had been in hostels in Europe before, but those are quite different, apparently; only one person other than myself had been in hostels in Asia before, and he was in fact my roommate from my first two nights in Shanghai, when I was staying in a hostel while figuring out my long-term living arrangements. In case you couldn’t detect a running theme, there was some doubt in people’s minds about the anticipated quality of these hostels; however, it seems like pretty much everyone was thrilled with the actual conditions of them.

We settled in, some people took showers, some people got food; I collected everyone’s money and passports, as I would every single day of the trip for various reasons, and got things processed and taken care of with the staff at the hostel itself. After things were taken care of at my hostel, we skipped over to join the others at the Hump. The Hump was located in this place:

It was pretty cool, and when I got there, I immediately started conversing with an Australian guy, named Jimmy. I don’t really know why, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Turns out the guy had just come back from spending time in north Yunnan, which is where my group was headed shortly thereafter; he had a recommendation for a hostel in Shangri-la within which to find lodgings, too; that caught my attention, as Shangri-la was the one location we had no arrangements for. He said he’d pass a line along to the people running the place; it went by the name of Barley. Jimmy also made a point of getting us to come inside the bar of the Hump, as “grandma” (or was it “auntie?” I can’t remember) was making fresh dumplings! And damn they were good. Like, really really good. She made a big batch of ‘em just for the heck of it, and offered them to all of us, even though we a) weren’t guests and b) weren’t paying.

After networking and partaking in dumplings, the group gathered together in full force and went out for lunch, just across the way. It was pretty unremarkable; we ended up meeting some Swiss kids that were studying in Kunming, but we didn’t exchange info or anything, just chatted. Afterwards, we headed out to do our first bit of real touristing, to a temple in the north end of town that’s pretty old, or old in the way that anything in China is old, considering pretty much everything’s burnt down 50 gazillion times. The temple was originally built about a thousand years ago.

And a few pictures here:

I kind of wanted to hit up one other location before the night came, but it seemed like we wouldn’t have enough time. There’s a decent number of things around Kunming to see/do, but we had an issue that particular day, as the last two members to join the group, Mindy and Julie, were coming in later that night, via plane, not via train as the rest of us did, and I wanted to make sure they got to the hostels alright and everything.

The way things ended up working out, though, was thus: I decided I wanted to try to go out to an area called West Hill, which was about 45mins-one hour out of town, and had to take a bus to it. A few people didn’t feel up to it, so they stayed behind and ended up being the welcoming party for Julie and Mindy.

With that taken care of, my group was composed of several people: David, Ariel, Jill, Christine, John, Jing and myself. We hitched a really crappy mini-bus out to West Hill, in my vain hope of catching the sunset from there.

Thing was, clouds rolled in and it rained.

The bus took us to the bottom of the hill; we had the option of walking as far as we wanted up, or taking other transit up, but we opted for walking. The walk was mostly uneventful, with a few “Scenic” spots here and there, including the tomb of the musician Ni’Er! I know you’re excited. There was a path just for pedestrians at one point, that involved a million stairs, that I was quite eager to take, and I’m pretty sure Jill and Ariel despised me for doing so. It ended up taking us to this place, some random temple that was closed up for the day anyhow:

Afterwards, we kept walking, with the idea of getting to a place called Dragon Gate in mind; Dragon Gate is the end of the path, and close to the top of this mountain, so it seemed fitting enough.

Although you can't tell, this is a picture of us looking at Dragon Gate, those gates on the hill in the distance.

The only problem was that it WAS starting to get dark out, and we weren’t sure how that would pan out. Well, when we got to the entrance to the part referred to as Dragon Gate, some people who were trying to press us into their vans to go back down the mountain told us it was just about closed. I didn’t entirely trust them, and with good reason, as it turned out this particular day, Dragon Gate was open until 11pm, instead of the normal 6pm. The reason for this was that it was a very important holiday in China, the Mid-Autumn Festival.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a big family holiday; the main components are eating mooncakes, and sitting with your family, and maybe watching some fireworks. Mooncakes are little cakes that have some sort of filling in it, the most common being red bean or green bean (not like greenbeans in the states, totally different), but also a variety of others. I particularly like red bean moon cakes, though green bean ones aren’t half bad either; for extra luck, you should eat the ones with egg yolks in the middle, but I don’t personally care for those much.

Anyway, so we scaled up these crazy narrow stairs to go as far as we could up the mountain. Most of the path was lined with lights so you could see the way, even though it was dark; at one point, however, those lights just weren’t there, and it was a bit dangerous going up. I charged ahead anyhow, and enjoyed the view from the top, but eventually some security guards shooed us down; here's a picture of us taken at that point:

We went down to a place that was maybe about halfway between the top and the entrance gate to the area of Dragon Gate. Here, there was a recess of a few buildings, including a small museum dedicated to the regional history and mythical importance of this West Hill.

Mildly interesting though that was, it couldn’t compare to what came next. A group of old women sat outside at a table with tons of boxes of mooncake and various sundries, and they looked absolutely delicious; no sooner than I had asked Christine whether she thought the old women would share than the old ladies actually beckoned us to join them. Then, for the next couple hours, the seven of us were huddled at this table with these old women, and their family members eventually joined also. All told, there was probably about 15 of us, eating their mooncakes, apples, oranges, drinking tea and alcohol.

They chatted with us as best they could, but really mostly talked with me, David, and Jing, as the others’ Chinese levels aren’t that high; nevertheless, they were happy to have all of us “waiguopengyou” (friends from other countries) and were showing us off to everyone they had the ability to do so with. Other Chinese people walked by, staring longingly at the feast that had been granted us, but were not offered the same invitations; clearly, we were VIPs.

It was a fun time, they took pictures, and so did we (of which, here’s one of the ladies):

We also watched fireworks over the lake that lay just beneath West Hill, and just generally had a really pleasant time. It was a totally unexpected, yet extremely welcome, way to spend one of China’s main traditional holidays, and the other half of the group that wasn’t with us really missed out.

We eventually took our leave, wanting to at least try to meet up with those others, and walked down the mountain. We would rather have gotten some transportation down, but it was too late, and there was almost no buses available, only people who were more extortionists than bus drivers. It was a long walk, so we weren’t so psyched about that, but it seemed we had little other choice. Until, about halfway down, we end up being honked at by a random car (which happened plenty, followed shortly by cries of “America!” “Hello!” or whatever else they knew of English, as half of us stood out even in the pitch black of night as not being from around that area). We didn’t pay it any attention, as we figured it was just more of the same, but it turned out to be that same family we had spent the evening with at the top of the mountain; they felt bad for us, and squeezed us into their cars to give us a ride back down the mountain and secure fair priced transportation for us back into town from there.

The fair priced transportation wasn’t exactly high quality service, and we didn’t exactly get the door to door option. Our aim was to hit a park where our other friends were apparently at, but it turns out that park has a bunch of different entrances, and our van driver just dropped us off somewhere randomly and told us to walk in some direction or another.

We did get to our friends eventually, and most everyone joined in a massive bumper car war, as shown here:

After that, we ended the night on a simple dinner and some drinks, and returned to our hostels, having little idea just how insane the next day would be.