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.