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Saturday, December 31, 2011

China: Day 1 - On the Art of Packing

"I travel light; as light, that is, as a man can travel who will still carry his body around because of its sentimental value."
- Christopher Fry
Packing is a hard job.

In an ideal world we travel light. We toss compact backpacks onto our strong shoulders, and march into exciting new worlds of adventure. But shoulders are easily burdened by reality and an intense desire for random luxuries. It was the ordeal of packing that convinced us to move ourselves from the category of backpackers to a more generic category of travelers.

The exercise of packing was an entertaining dialogue of bargaining, with liberal doses of vitriol. Of wanting to wear the same shirts for days against the need to look good on the camera. Of wanting to survive the cold Chinese winter with a smile against shivering in style.
There were debates where we pitted the best-case scenarios against the worst-case scenarios. Worst-case scenarios ranged from being stuck sans luggage at the Chinese airports to being stuck in sparse vermin-infested hotels. Best case scenarios had us returning home in a single piece.

Some battles were won by me, the others by P. After many hours of animated conversations and failed attempts at optimizing suitcase space, we realized on an eternal truth. Packing is an art that we learn with time, and we still needed a lot of time to get there. This time we landed in Kunming, Yunnan with 2 large strollers, a backpack and a duffel-bag. Not really inconvenient, but we thanked our luck that our hotels were booked before hand. It meant we didn't need to move around a lot, and could safely stow our luggage in our brightly lit rooms while we pretended to be carefree travelers.

In our many pieces of luggage were lessons -
  • There will always be a temptation to pack 14 pairs of clothes for a 2 week trip. Don't. While you are traveling, you will end up wearing your best outfits again, and the second-best outfits will come home with you completely unworn.
  • Bring toiletries in small bottles or trial sizes. Good hotels give enough toiletries to last you for months. (My personal advice is to forget about toiletries. There is no better adventure than to hunt for local toiletries. But that's just me.)
  • You need a collection of medicines. There is no worst case scenario than to be stuck in your hotel room writhing in pain even as the world around you fails to understand your language or pain. (Every man is an island...)
  • Do your research on the weather and the terrain. And the allowed baggage sizes.
  • Don't bother with books or electronics. Make life convenient. Buy new books, and forget your laptops and Ipods behind. A smart phone should suffice for most of your needs.
  • etc, etc.

So anyhow we set out to China with the rather inconvenient fear that our luggage might exceed the maximum weight allowed in planes. We had already rehearsed our speech about how small scrawny people like us deserve more cargo space than the relatively larger rest of humanity. Luckily our luggage stood within the maximum, and Thai Airlines threw in an extra 5 kilo bonus to make life simpler. We smiled. And so it was.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

China : Day 0 - On matters of choice

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. - Paul Theroux

We began brainstorming places to visit months before the actual trip. Places were considered and discarded; victims of our many eccentric whims. Sri Lanka was too Tamilian. Borneo was too wet. Sicily was random and costly. Japan was too weird. Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were too 'deserty'. Thailand, Bali and Mauritius were inundated with honeymooning couples. Africa was too big and sometimes too dangerous. Backpacking in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was deemed too unsafe for small little us.

Our list of requirements were something of the following - Not too poor. Not too expensive. Cheap enough to survive for atleast 2 weeks. Not America. Not too cold. Not too hot. Not too wet. Not too dry. No Indians. etc. etc.

So in our moments of indecisiveness we turned northeast to China. A massive country which has been flooding the world with cheap knockoffs and uncontested aggressiveness. P diligently went through random travel blogs and forums to find an area in China that met all our above criteria. Turns out most of China was too cold. Other places were too urban. Some were too expensive. Others too poor. But out of the entire selection process, we had an uncontested winner.

And so it was.
Yunnan, China was our destination.
Yunnan is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the far southwest of the country spanning approximately 394,000 square kilometers (152,000 sq mi) and with a population of 45.7 million (2009). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. - Wikipedia
So now we had a rough idea of the direction we were heading. But we didn't really know what the place would be like.

For years we have heard that India and China were future superpowers, a by-product of a new age world where population is considered a valuable asset, and the intellectual prowess of Asians is an accepted stereotype. Our country India had formerly been friends with China, then become enemies in a war, and at the moment we seemed to be poised in a rather uncertain face-off. Chinese products compete in our marketplaces, and their businesses compete with ours. And yet we realized we knew so little about the actual country. Communist countries have always been good at cloaking themselves in iron curtains of disinformation. We had obscure travel blogs and Lonely Planet guides to give us the perspectives of rich Western backpackers, but nothing on the internet can ever prepare two cautious Indians as they venture into communist territory.