China is Chinese

I crossed into Laos across the Mekong River and stayed the night in Huay Xai where many travelers hop on a boat to go south to Laumprabang. I was heading north to Laung Nam Tha, the last city before the Chinese border, and in the morning there was only one other traveler taking the minibus with me. The driver rectified the situation by picking up Laotians who stood by the side of the road– charging them far less than us Westerners. My bus-mate was a guy name Filip, from Belgium. Luang Nam Tha is a sleepy town surrounded by rice fields and small villages.  Filip and I rented bikes and wandered around.

 

 

China was next.  We caught a bus that would take us across the border and to Jinghong, in the Yunnan province. A winding road took us up the hills, past large swaths of new construction, and to a brand new customs center. Clearing the border was surprisingly easy given what I’d heard – my bags weren’t even searched. The customs officials did take turns feeling our passports, page by page, and asking questions like, “Is this your passport?”

The road to Jinghong was new and mostly smooth, winding around green mountains and often straight through them – we must’ve gone through twenty tunnels. The road is so new that google-maps doesn’t even show it connecting to Laos. Construction is everywhere in China. The roads are all being widened and paved, cranes and raw concrete buildings are to be seen in almost every city, and seemingly half the traffic on the roads consists of ubiquitous blue trucks carrying rocks or gravel.

One of the first things you really notice in China, especially away from bigger cities, is the trash and the spitting. Everything is thrown on the ground or floor.  I jokingly wondered if there was a word to distinguish “trash” from “ground” in Chinese. Piles of trash and debris clump in corners of streets and in restaurants often there are no ashtrays even though everyone smokes – the butts are just swept out into the street. You can smoke anywhere in China – in your hotel, in a restaurant, and even on the bus (if you’re neat you throw the butt out the window, otherwise you just smash it on the floor of the bus along with the plastic wrappers, fruit peels, and peanut shells). Oh, and you can spit on the floor of the bus too if you should so desire – the need of some Chinese to hawk and spit continually still mystifies me. In general, personal space is nonexistent in China – you simply must bump into old ladies to get on or off a bus or risk never getting anywhere.

The toilets can also be quite an experience – at least the public ones. A bus-station toilet in The States is no rose garden, I know, but usually if you have to take a piss you don’t need to see a turd dropping from the ass of a guy talking on a cell phone while another guy makes a guttural sound and spits a huge loogey between his legs, the only reason you’re seeing any of this is because there are no doors on the toilets and they are all squatting toilets, and you quickly turn away to find a place to piss but the first toilet you look into is grimy and dirty and vaguely slimy so you opt for the next one, letting the guy behind you take the slimy toilet, but lo and behold, in the the toilet you choose there are two huge piles of crap, neither actually in the toilet, and as you grimace and piss you can’t help but wonder about the guy who took the second shit. I can sort of understand that one guy missed the toilet, but what about that second guy? Was there really no option left to him but to squat next to someone else’s crap and dump another pile of crap not-in-the-toilet? Anyway, thank God I only had to piss.

Public toilets and personal space issues aside, though, I love China. Besides having a lot of natural beauty so far it is also so… so – well, so Chinese. I don’t know how else to say it. You cross out of South East Asia and suddenly almost no one speaks English, cars and trucks and televisions are Chinese, and almost everything is written in Chinese. I know that sounds stupid, but when you’re in Southeast Asia, they use the Roman alphabet and you don’t realize how much easier that makes your life, even if you don’t speak the language, until you walk into a restaurant in China and they hand you a menu in Chinese and you just look at them stupidly, say “thank you”, and walk back out to find a place where you can point at pictures like some sort of retarded man-child. And many of the Chinese seem wonderfully ignorant of English or any other language other than Chinese. Filip and I got into a confusing conversation trying to get a room at a hotel – we were unsure if she was giving us one room with two beds or two rooms with one bed – and finally the woman put her hands up to stop us and pulled out a pad of paper. Ah, I thought with relief, she can write a few English words or a picture or something. But she simply started writing in Chinese. Perhaps she thought we were from Hong Kong and spoke Cantonese, I don’t know, I just laughed and so did she and we finally sorted things out.

Not to sound trite, it feels so culturally rich here – there’s 1.5 billion people here living and working and building and destroying the environment all at once and all in Chinese and aside from the big cities of international business and some tourism they really don’t need the English speaking world at all. It is another world and I feel giddily insignificant.

After a few days in Jinghong, Filip and I went for a two-day walk to some outlying villages. We took a bus through Damenglong, where at the market  I saw some bats for sale.

From Damenglong we took a bus to some other small town and then walked a few hours to a village where we spent the night.  The next day we walked about seven hours to a small town and the next morning took a bus back to Jinghong.

It was beautiful landscape and the beers in the villages were shockingly cheap (640ml for about 40 cents). The villages are remote – old women still go out into the woods to gather firewood, the bathroom is ledge off the side of a hill, our host cooked dinner over a fire – but they do have electricity and mobile phone offices. So, you might see a woman with a basket of produce strapped to her back talking on a mobile phone and at night you can hear televisions in almost every home, or western pop-music. Its a strange mix.

After Jinghong we headed to Jianshui, then to Yuangyuan, which is well known for it’s beautiful high altitude rice terraces.

 

 

 

The further north I went, the colder it got, but it wasn’t until Yuangyuan that I was truly freezing. Not only was it cold, but often the mountain town was shrouded in fog.

 

 

I only had a thin hoodie with a broken zipper as a jacket and it didn’t help any that I would play poker with fellow travelers at night while drinking cold beer. Patrick, another Belgian, who was heading to Vietnam and points south gave me his coat when he left. “It’s a cheap Chinese coat,” he said, “and I was planning to give it away to someone anyway.” It is a bit flimsy, but quite warm.

I spent a few days in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, where Filip left back to Southeast Asia.

 

 

I made the mistake, sort of, of getting a double-entry visa to China. This means I only have a month here before I have to leave the country (have to be gone by the 23rd). When I re-enter I can extend the visa for at least one extra month. I’m planning to spend Christmas and New Year’s in Hanoi and then head back into China.