China: Day 7 - On Loving Dragons

"Eats its victims... burns its victims... buries its victims, chokes its victims, turns its victims inside-out... Extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous... kill on sight, kill on sight, kill on sight..."
- Hiccup, How to Train a Dragon

Advice of the day
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Especially when it is complimentary in your hotel. Eat it. Eat it well.

Post breakfast, we decided to walk to the Black Dragon Pool at the north end of Lijiang Old Town. Built during the Qing Dynasty, it offers some of the most spectacular views of the region's tallest mountain, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. With names like that, I saw now reason to not visit it. Have I mentioned that dragons are my favourite animals? Well they are.

Our walk to the Pool took us through Lijiang Old Town, south boundary to north . Cobble-stoned roads, waterways and bridges gave it a certain charm, and an indication of what kind of water systems have existed in this part of the world for centuries. We reached the main square called the Square Street.
Four roads radiated from the square. 
And sorry I could not travel all four. 
And be one traveller, long I stood....

At the Square we were treated to a 'spontaneous' burst of Naxi expression, an act which is repeated day after day for the past many years. Someone starts a song, and the old people dance in their native costumes for a few minutes. The tourists join, and then it stops. And we move on.

And then it repeats. I was amused at how forcefully constructed this event was. And how bored the local Naxi women looked.

And then I finally noticed - a Naxi woman picking garbage from a trash can. I had found the poor people of China. There were the original inhabitants of this region, now forced into a corner.

The Black Dragon Pool was exactly what it promised to be, except without any black dragons. There might have been a legend about them, but we didn't find any. The park is called the Jade Spring Park, because the water supposedly sparkles like jade on a bright spring morning.

The tourist places were clean and efficient, except for the toilets. The Chinese toilets are odd, because they offer no privacy of any kind. Squat toilets are ok. They exist all over Asia. But to not give a place to hide is shameful.

We returned to Lijiang Old Town and found ourselves gravitating towards Qi Street. It is here that we discovered street food. Tonnes of it. We felt like pirates stumbling upon treasure. We broke lose on the food like rabid dogs, salivating all over.


And so on, and so forth... It's what I loved about Chinese food. They ate everything. Everything edible. And it was all so tasty, and good-looking.

China: Day 6 - Lijiang - On Cooking Pots of Meat

“If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?”
Pink Floyd, 'Another Brick in the Wall, Part II (1979)

Mornings are the most pleasant part of the Yunnan winter. The sun shines on you and warms your soul. With mountains enveloped in soft white haze gazing down at us in the distance, we wandered through Shuhe Town.

This town is designed for tourists. The town seems to have no other occupation but to cater to the needs of ignorant tourists such as me and others.

We followed the waterways upstream towards the clear water springs. These waterways, like the ones in Dali, are used by all the shopkeepers for all their domestic purposes. I did wonder about the ones who lives downstream. Classic problems to keep economists busy.

In the midst of all the touristy stuff, we found little indicators of the communist regime. Absolutely no propaganda. And trust me, I did hunt for it.  That was until I found beautiful life-size statues of workers in the act of working, paying ode to, well, the workers.
It was heartening and inspiring. Communist symbolism has always touched my heart, and this did too. Of course these were right in the middle of the busy market place, and did get me wondering at their intended purpose. Maybe they were just yet another prop for the cameras. That would truly be ironic. Like the man who painted himself black, held a gun and pretended to be a (painted?) soldier or the Bai women who wore their traditional dresses, all for us, the tourists, and a few extra bucks.

We tried the local food - dumplings and fried cakes of noodles, found them unappealing, and ended out short stay at Shuhe. I repeat my sagely advice - stay away from tourist towns like Shuhe. They are boring.

Bruce graciously offered to drive us to our hotel at Lijiang Old Town. Now Bruce had been the perfect host. They ended their hospitality by writing on a slip of paper the words 'hot pot - 1/2 kilo lamb meat) in Chinese. It was their noblest act, one that we shall remember for the rest of our lives. I still have the slip lying with me, just in case I land in China again.

Our hotel was good. Really good. Naxi-style architecture in a modern setting. Beautifully decorated. And warm. Sooo warm. We stood under the air-conditioning, soaking our cold toes and fingers in warm air.

It was late afternoon. So we head out to have the complementary tea which consisted of cold 'English tea' and cold 'coffee'. And fruits and nuts. We do not know the names of anything we had.
But there is a rule that most people on low budgets know about  - Everything free tastes good.

So we ate. And then we ate a little more.

Lijiang Old Town was once again a reconstructed old new city. The town has a history going back to more than 800 years, and has been declared a UN Heritage city.  Most of the architecture is reflective of the Naxi style, a rather unique design not found anywhere else in China .

The place itself had waterways and bridges, and mostly just inns and restaurants, and tourist shops, and music shops. It was a hippie paradise, with music flowing through every street.

The main Lijiang city is outside the Old Town, and is like most towns in China. Smooth beautiful roads with rows of identical buildings, and government run monopolies. Our dinner adventure at night consisted of roaming around these roads with Bruce's slip of paper and hunting for a place that sold hot-pots. We found ourselves the friendliest place we could find, and began our culinary adventure.

So this is how I figured a hot-pot works (explained by a helpful Chinese girl in slow Mandarin, and many laughing waitresses) -

Take a large pot and throw in meat and water. Watch it boil in front of your eyes. You shall receive a tray filled with vegetables. Look around to see what the others are doing. Give up when no one offers to help. Toss the vegetables that suit your fancy into the pot, without realizing that every vegetable you use will cost extra.

There shall be many spices on your table - one that shall look like bean curd and another one that shall make your pee change colour. You need to then awkwardly take the boiled vegetables from the hotpot using the chopsticks, dip it into the spices, put it in your mouth, and love the taste. The boiling water is a soup that you shall keep drinking. When the meat is cooked, you eat the meat similarly.

After an hour or so, you would be done. The pot shall now contain many pieces of intestines and other parts of an animal that didn't look edible. You, on the other hand shall be full and ready to pay the rather moderate amount they charge for such a complete dish.

With this meal we ended our first night in Lijiang.

China: Day 5 - Shuhe - On Frozen Moments

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
- T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Bus rides in China were always comfortable and mostly cheap. We left Dali in the morning and arrived at Shuhe by noon. The roads, as mentioned before, were smooth and left us feeling in awe of the totalitarian regime's infrastructure. Again. Of course, we again found little evidence of the poor people. They HAD to be hiding somewhere.

At Shuhe, we were greeted by Bruce, the owner of  the rather conveniently named inn - Bruce Chalet.  Bruce was a pleasant young man, round and cherubic. He used to work in Hong Kong, but left it all to buy this place in Shuhe and construct his hotel. He and his girlfriend run the place, and it certainly was beautiful. Quaint and charming, and amongst the better  hotels I have stayed in for a long time. But the clincher was that Bruce spoke English. We suddenly felt even more at home.

Unluckily for us, a homely inn also meant that it lacked the only feature that allowed us to survive the cold Yunan winter - An internal heating system. Air conditioning. The beds had a metal rod which warmed it over many hours. So this is how our ordeal went -
Leave the bed to warm for a while. Sneak into bedsheet without disturbing anything, lest the warmth escapes into oblivion. Now contort your body till it lies exactly over the warm region. Do not move. Lie inert for many hours, refusing to come out of bed.

And so it went.

Prior to the bed ordeal, we had roamed around Shuhe Town. This was a town built for tourists. It had nothing but trinket shops and food stalls. Every few meters you would find random puppies, which seemed to have been thrown around to entice the tourists. The food seemed a little more exotic, albeit a costlier than the food in Dali. It was here that I had my first taste of grilled insects; a crunchy grasshopper like creature found its way into my mouth along with a deep sense of awe at our ability to eat without discrimination. Meat or no meat. If something is edible, it will find its way into the belly of our race.

For lunch, we found ourselves eating fried yak meat, Baba (a Naxi bread) and noodles. Overpriced, compared to Dali. And as explained to us by our helpful innkeeper, this was because Dali is less touristy than Shuhe. The yak meat, Bruce explained to us, was most probably fake. And the baba was the worst thing we had had since the time we stepped onto communist soil. The next morning we would have a better baba at the Bruce Chalet. Today, we just chose the wrong restaurant.

Note  - Avoid these touristy places. They are a trap. Meant for the western 'backpackers', they are now ironically exactly what the 'backpackers' had hoped to escape from - crowds and fake constructed cultural experiences.

And so we survived a day in Shuhe. After the bed ordeal, we head out to Shuhe in the night. We were assured that it was safe, and that the crime rates were close to 0. We believed them, and wandered into the night to find dinner. Here we met more friendly Chinese who offered us cigarettes and a share of the warmth around their fire.

We ended the night with another bout of shivering under the blankets, and cursing our decision to come to this part of the world in December.

China: Day 4 - The Cangshang mountains - On Elements of Nature

“If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.” – Ronald Reagan

I was never too keen to go up the mountains. I have an aversion to watching nature in strange lands. Strange lands are strange only because of the strange people who occupy them and their strange cultures. Nature often ends up uniting, rather than dividing. A common denominator that is often shared between multiple nations and cultures.

Case in point - ALL mountains are colder than the plains. Everyone of them. Without exception. Throw in a couple of trees, some waterfalls, a lot of tourists with cameras, and you got yourself how most mountains in most countries look. And here it wasn't any different.

But P insisted on seeing the Cangshang mountains, from her deeply entrenched desire to not have any regrets in her life. So we went up the mountains. Dali was cold and we assumed the mountains were colder. In our zest to trek to obscure locations on the mountain, we bundled ourselves up in multiple layers of clothing.

Five is the magic number. It is the maximum layers you can wear without feeling uncomfortable and still be warm in single digit temperatures. It is the number of layers that can make scrawny little me actually looked rather muscular. It is also the number of layers which make trekking impossible. The weight pulls you down, and when the sun comes out late morning, you wish you were somewhere else. The cold ice-capped peaks of the mountains seem inviting.

So we didn't really trek. We watched the Chinese tourists and the enthusiasm with which they pose for the cameras. And then we attempted to mimic them. We could never pull it off, the Chinese enthusiasm far exceeding even the Gujarati tourists we see in India.

Many of the Chinese were fascinated by us Indians. The ones who spoke English ventured to take photographs with us, and we graciously agreed. Our photographs probably lie on some Chinese's albums with the tag 'Strange Indu People'.

We came back early, tired and a little bored, buying a cheap wooden Bai sword on the way back for AG. The back-story for this purchase went some thing like the following -

Me : So would you like something from China?
AG : A Samurai sword
Me : That's ****ing Japanese
AG : Then get me a cheap Chinese knock-off

And so it was.

We head out to the Erhai lake across the city the afternoon. We stood there, pretending to be in deep contemplation, as we watched the clear waters and the many ducks.  The lake is supposed to lie next to many historical places. But we didn't really care for that. P stared into the distance with a look of profundity, while I took photographs of ducks. The highlight of this lake, which we never took because we were too lazy to care but hope others will, was a boat ride to a Bai village.

We head back to Dali Old Town for the rest of the evening. Here we were finally cheated by a taxi driver who left us at the 'Cultural Building' when we wanted to go the 'Wuhua Building'. We couldn't complain. It didn't really matter. This building looks as gorgeous as any other building.

We arrived back and walked through the local streets, stared at goth Chinese girls, and 'sign language''d our way through the market place. Here we sat amongst the locals, and clumsily ate spicy, oily cup noodles with chopsticks. Then overpriced fried rice. Then skewers. Then fried bananas and grass.

Post-binging on street food, we retired early. Sat back in the hotel room drinking Dali beer and watching melodramatic Chinese films and documentaries without subtitles.

And so ended our last night in Dali. I do miss the place. *Sigh*.