China: Day 3, Part 2 - On Aimless Walking

China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.
- Charles de Gaulle

We were shocked when we walked onto the streets of Dali. We had imagined China to be like India, except with Mongloid features dominating the landscape. Well, we were at least right about the Mongloid bit.

Empty cobblestone streets

The town was beautiful. Comparable to most European towns, except with more interesting food. The Cangshang mountains towered over the entire town, snow-peaked and misty. The streets were clean, the roads were paved, and the houses lined in perfection. It was an urban planner's paradise.
The city is a new old town, and you can now see new and renovated "old" buildings and walk down cobblestone streets with views of the ancient (but renovated?) city gates.

We strapped on our shoes, and marched on bravely with a map, and an Android App with a few unpronounceable Mandarin words for support. The first thing we encountered were friendly Chinese. It was an observation we would make again and again - the Chinese in China are really helpful, and really apologetic if they are unable to help, even though they couldn't understand a word of what we said. Sign language, random sounds, and oddly enough words of Hindi that no one understood, got us through the city.

We took a while to figure out
that these were dustbins

A Local Buddhist Temple

Some buildings (the richer ones?) had sloping roofs with a sweeping curvature that rose at the corners, while the others had simple inclined roofs. Most houses were similar, line-after-line of cloned masonry, adorned by beautiful art. There was beauty in the midst of the conformity. Structured poetry.

We also encountered Dali food. It was for the main part skewers. A lot of it. Of everything. It is something the Dali-ians seem to enjoy more than anything else. Over our stay there, we found a lot of them - bananas, potatoes, tomatoes, all kinds of known meat, all kinds of unknown meat, green vegetables, etc. There is a sizeable Muslim population on Dali Old Town, and we found shops that exclusively sold skewers - halal meat cooked in a definite Arabic style.

We wandered the streets with with our maps shoved into the faces of willing Chinese, and found most of the streets quaint and beautiful, until we reached the central street - Fuxing Street that runs from the North Gate to the South Gate. Like old cities, this city has gates. Large ones. The Cangshang mountains are towards the West Gate and the Erhai Lake is towards the East Gate. The entire town gently slopes from the west to east. This allows for some of the most delightful waterways of pure spring water which the people use for all their daily needs.

On Fuxing street we finally saw the people. And the Chinese people were delightful. With their love for pop music and high heels, and their hordes of photogenic Chinese kids. This street intersected with the Foreigner's street, which oddly enough contained only Chinese domestic tourists and tour groups. The parallel Renming street held all the real foreigners - many of them dreadlocked white males, Goth Chinese girls, and hippie cafes that could have existed in any corner of the world. This was the least Chinese place in all of Dali, a backpacker's paradise. The perfect place for a nice English breakfast. In China. Ugh.

8 pm. Late by Dali standards, we decided to find ourselves dinner in the many grocery stores/restaurants that line the waterways. These stores sold fresh vegetables and fish/bugs/other crawling creatures and cooked quick food for anyone who could communicate with them. And this is where lay our problem.

We took a chance with one of the eateries. In the midst of their fascination with us exotic Indians, P's angular nose and henna, we blundered our way into ordering large quantities of food. We do not know what we had, but it was tasty and spicy. And we ate it, runny nosed and sweaty, watched by the curious Chinese owner and her family who tried their best to be as nice as they could possibly be.

And thus the day did end. We had met the Chinese. On their own turf. And no one had ripped us off. So far.

China: Day 3, Part 1 - On Using Chopsticks

When I'm at a Chinese restaurant having a hard time with chopsticks, I always hope that there's a Chinese kid at an American restaurant somewhere who's struggling mightily with a fork. ~Rick Budinich

The day began on a great note. We were treated to a pretty darn good breakfast spread that stretched all the way from Chinese cuisine to Western obsessions. They even had small labels in English, which meant that we actually knew what we were eating. The waitresses were eager and polite, and the food was mostly non-vegetarian.

It began with the salads, where the Chinese thumbed their nose at the vegetarian minorities by including duck meat in the midst of fresh green vegetables. We encountered fresh fruits, some whose names we still struggle to remember (deathberry, was it?) There were dumplings with and without stuffing, and fried noodles. Fried rice and bacon. Sausages and vegetables. Noodles in meat broth. Rice congee with mushrooms. Soya milk and other porridges. All of this, and the conventional fare of corn flakes, muesli, beverages, frozen yoghurt and so on and so forth.

Every morning saw two Indians sitting in the restaurant, attempting to figure out how to use chopsticks, and loading enough fuel into our bodies to last most of the entire day. We did master the art of using chopsticks every morning, only to forget it by the time we went to bed. 
For the uninitiated, using chopsticks involves gripping two twigs in a single hand. You then move them around like you know what you are doing, while you gently curse the food that inexplicably remains at the bottom of your bowl. Then you quietly use your other hand and a fork.
P of course insists that she has always been master at using chopsticks, and in tournaments she has always been the fastest at picking grains of rice, and if the wind was right, even pluck flies out of thin air.

After gorging on enough complimentary food to substantially recover our hotel rent, we head out to discover Dali Old Town, also know as Yu Town. The weather was pleasant, a fine 15 degrees celsius with a hint of sunshine. The streets were clean and empty, the roads cobbled and building beautiful. The Cangshang mountains towered over the town, while on the other end of the city was the Erhai lake.

So off we marched, map and camera in hand to discover life in a renovated ancient Chinese town.

China: Day 2, Part 2 - On Discovering New Food

He was a bold man who first ate an oyster. - Jonathan Swift.

Sitting in an air-conditioned bus, and watching the beautiful Yunnan countryside pass by us, we were struck by two very pertinent questions:

1. Where were the bad roads and crowded places the western backpackers blog about?
2. And where the hell have the Chinese hidden their poor people?

The Gaokuai buses we traveled in were large and comfortable. Costing around 100 yuan a ticket, they were worth the money. The bus ride was smooth, as smooth as a bus ride can possibly be. Dustbins placed at regular intervals and mineral water provided to us by a polite driver in uniform. The sunset compelled P to collapse into her habitual state of unconsciousness, while I found myself watching Chinese films without subtitles.

Our first bathroom break was when we finally had out first taste of true Chinese food, and Chinese toilets. One was pleasant, the other not so much. We stared in awe at the efficiency of the Chinese to utilize every part of an animal. It was the same ruthlessness that we saw on the roads and the cities, and building the Three Gorges Dam. Beaks, wings, claws, necks, all fried and ready to be dipped in spices. Costing a couple of yuan a piece, this was to be our first foray into tasty Chinese territory.

Now, not knowing Mandarin made lives a little scary out there, but more importantly we would have absolutely no idea what we were eating. Our food stories would never have names, just vague descriptions. But on a positive note, we would be forced to never judge a food by its name and ingredients, thus theoretically making us a little more adventurous.

So we packed up steamed dumplings stuffed with strange meat (probably duck) for the rest of the journey, and ate grilled sausages dipped in some spicy brown powder. The powder had a rather unique smell, a smell that I would soon associate with China, a smell that seemed to pervade even my sweat glands and bathrooms.

We got back into the bus for another few hours of journey through darkness. I watched a Jet Li film with pretty visuals, over-exaggerated action sequences, and a bad storyline. Straining my eyes to read the miniscule English subtitles, I sat nervously in the bus, waiting for Dali to arrive. I didn't want to be stuck in a situation where we missed out Dali and found ourselves in a strange Chinese town, in the middle of the night, with no Mandarin on our tongues, a wallet full of yuans and 4 pieces of heavy luggage. Luckily, my imagination would be the most dangerous part of the entire trip.

Dali was the last stop for the bus and we quietly found a moderately over-priced taxi that took us to Dali Old Town, and dropped us at the hotel. At 8pm, we drove through empty roads. Many half-shut eateries and a dozen dancing Chinese later, we got to the Old Town. The town seemed to shut down pretty early. The only store we saw open was the Adult Store.

The kind taxi driver chose to not scam us, and when lost called helpline numbers, and was able to drop us at the nice Dali Regent Hotel. We had a overpriced dinner at the only open eatery around us, which was the hotel restaurant. We made our next discoveries at the end of our dinner -  the Chinese seem unable to grasp the concept of a tip, and no hotel staff seemed to know English, something they were rather apologetic about.

And so we retired to bed in our rather comfortable rooms to wake up to Dali Old Town. It had been about 20 hours of traveling at this point. We needed the rest.

China: Day 2, Part 1 - On Arriving to a Cold Reception

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be – Douglas Adams

So we landed in Kunming via Bangkok, a long trip aboard the rather pleasant Thai Airlines. We did have our share of inconveniences, mostly with regards to airline food. By default, we were handed 'Hindu' non-veg meals. 'Hindu' probably translates to sweet pumpkin in Thai, because that's what we got. And dessert that tasted like mud. Sweet mud. But mud, nevertheless.

The Suvarnabhoomi airport in Bangkok is large, and incredibly beautiful. A reminder of the influence Hinduism has had in the predominantly Buddhist country. But more importantly about the importance of shopping to our lives and the Thai economy. By the time a person arrives at their terminal, they find themselves going through enough duty-free distractions to last their wallet.

To escape the temptations, we chose instead to collapse on a some comfortable chairs and pass out for many hours. Escape we did, though food took a significant portion of our daily quota of thriftiness.

The trip from Bangkok to Kunming was in a rather empty flight, where the stewards and hostesses were awfully nice and we got sufficient refills of red wine. What was striking was the rather conspicuous absence of Indian faces. I had never before been to a place where I saw no Indians. It was certainly a new experience for the both of us.

We reached Kunming early afternoon; the cold weather hitting our faces as we gasped for breath. There wasn't any appealing sight ahead of us, no faces plastered in artificial smiles as we had seen at Bangkok, only uniform-clad men and women staring down at us. We walked slowly through the immigration counters, a deathly silence around us.

You often see people attempt to smile at airport officials in an attempt to not look suspicious. Out here most passengers had dropped the pretense.It didn't matter. The Chinese official does not care and smiling might just single you out for being unusually happy on a cold drab Kunming morning.
It was an intimidating walk through bureaucratic hurdles. Especially with signs every few meters about how smugglers could be sentenced to death by law.

We have no photographs of the interior of the airport partly because I was too scared to whip my camera out. (I imagined a dozen armed uniforms coming down at me as I screamed incoherently and took photographs of my imminent captors.) But mostly because the absence of English disoriented us. We had a rough idea of where we were going, but no idea what the Chinese called it. We walked around making conversation with random officials in the hope that one of them would understand us. Some scowled, others smiled apologetically. We finally did find one polite lady official, who scribbled the address in Chinese. We thanked our luck, as we would find ourselves doing repeatedly over the next many days.

We dodged the various touts who promised us 100 yuan taxi rides, and caught ourselves a licensed taxi, driven by a nice burly woman.
This was our first experience of a Chinese city, and we were impressed. We had read a lot of negative reviews about the traffic in Kunming, but as I sat in the taxi that I realized how differently Indians viewed the world compared to the West. Having survived most of my life in crowded cities with minimal urban planning, where single flyovers takes years to build and we learn to adapt to inconveniences, Kunming was an urban heaven. We almost never touched the ground as we smoothly criss-crossed the city on the many flyovers.

Later, after having watched our taxi driver fight away a lot more touts on our behalf and guide us into the bus terminal, we were finally happily settled for our next stop Dali.