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.