To Xichuangbanna and Back

My first truly solo trip. I've done lots of traveling by myself before, trips to Hong Kong and to see friends and what not, but in terms of actually backpacking by myself with no real set itinerary and no plans to meet up with people - well, this was the first. And it was amazingly good fun.

For the most part. I like to think of myself as a brave China traveler, fazed by nothing. That's not so much the case. Traveling alone can be really hard, harder than most people think. It can be really lonely, especially when I go to the type of place where I really am the only foreigner. It is hard not having anyone to talk to. And it was hard wrapping my mind around the fact that if I got lost or injured, there wouldn't necessarily be someone else who could help me.

At the same time, it can be nice to not HAVE to talk to anyone besides occasionally using my Chinese for getting a hotel room, ordering food, asking directions. There is a certain sense of solitude that is really easy to go an entire life without ever experiencing. What is the longest amount of time you have gone without having a single conversation with someone beyond "please bring me a cup of tea"? It is different, that's for sure. One of the benefits of traveling alone is that it gives you time to be just with yourself - you are experiencing the places that you visit as well as experiencing yourself.

I started off with a night bus from Kunming to Jinghong, the capital of Xichuangbanna. Chinese night buses are somewhat of a miracle and I am both shocked and saddened at America's lack. A night bus is basically a bus of bunk beds - two high and three across. The beds are very skinny and a bit on the short end of the spectrum (not too many obese or tall people in China), but aside from that, not too bad. My backpack went underneath the bus and I fell asleep hugging my purse to fend off night time robbers. You don't want to get on the bus with too full a stomach or having drunk too much because stops are sporadic and sometimes non-existent. There are no seatbelts and bus drivers are notoriously frightening; your best bet is usually to just try not to think about it. And I've never seen a night bus leave on-time, nor do they have any sort of predictable arrival schedules. All that aside, places that cannot be reached by plane or train and are some 10 hours away by car can be reached in your sleep. Amazing! And for all you who have tried to fall asleep in the upright position on various other forms of transportation, you will really appreciate the godsend that it is to have a whole bed all to yourself.

I arrived in Jinghong early Sunday morning, somewhat rested and happy to stretch my legs after 11 hours. Jinghong is a surprisingly nice city situated on the Mekong River. For being out in the middle of no where, the city has clean streets, high-end shopping, and even a few restaurants offering western food. This is almost unheard of for a city of its size in that kind of location. After checking into a somewhat sketch Dai minority guesthouse which I would later discover had communal showers but no hot water (so unfortunate), I took to the palm-tree lined streets. I walked all through the city and along the perimeter. Even though Lonely Planet only mentioned 1 disco, I found a handful more, one called "YES" and another called "Funky Music". One thing they all had in common was that they advertised on the outside what the inside supposedly looked like, and it was always the same: a classy bar with beautiful, trendy looking foreigners sipping cocktails and looking like they were generally having a fantastic time. I also found a restaurant called CALIFORNIA SUNSHINE that served coffee more ways than Starbucks and at higher prices. It was completely deserted.

After lunch, I headed in the direction that Lonely Planet claimed would take me to a bridge and a temple. No such bridge existed. I did walk down the street which took me through Jinghong and into the villages around it. It was incredible how quickly the scenery changed from clean, well groomed city to not so clean village. I liked the villages better because the people were friendlier. Every one was hanging around outside, playing cards or talking or drinking and they all wanted to say hello. I eventually left the village and my paved road turned into a somewhat muddy road, which then turned into a very very muddy path through fields. I never did end up finding the bridge, though with some off-the-path searching I did find the river that the bridge was supposed to cross. After a few hours of beating my way through fields and mud, I gave up and returned home looking like I'd been caught in a typhoon. No worries, I assumed after a nice, hot shower all would be well. Haha.

If my first day on my own was somewhat a success, my first night was decidedly not. Xichuangbanna (not to mention Yunnan as a whole) has the highest malaria risk in China, which is still pretty low. I hadn't seen mosquitoes all day, so I didn't bother with bug spray or Malarone (malaria medication). I had a somewhat restless night as the bed had no mattress and woke the next morning to two lovely surprises: 1) mosquito bites. Apparently they come out at night. 2) My cash was gone. Apparently thieves come out at night as well. Fortunately, my electronics and passport and credit/bank cards were all left untouched. Still, the thought of someone in my room rummaging around in my purse while I slept, scary.

This was about the point that I started seriously considering bagging the whole thing and heading back to America. I had, after all, done quite a bit with my gap year. But I had been waiting all semester to travel alone and who knew when I'd be coming back to China. In short, I couldn't justify passing up the opportunity, no matter how lonely or miserable or scared I might be. And so the next morning I hopped on a bus for Ganlanba, a small town South of Jinghong known for its Dai minority Water Splashing Festival. Though the festival is supposed to take place in mid-April all throughout Xishuangbanna, in this town you can witness it performed by 100 beautiful Dai women every single day from 4:30-5:30 in the Dai Minority Park. The park is simply a part of the town (which is in the whole Dai minority) that has been fenced off and costs 50 RMB to enter, but as a bonus you get to take your picture with peacocks. Incredible! Chinese tourism at its best. The funny thing is that domestic tourists really go for it. No Chinese family vacation is complete without seeing a minority park, not to mention corporate outings. It is a phenomenon that I am at a loss to explain.

The area around Ganlanba is absolutely beautiful and I spent the day walking to a neighboring village and back. That night, I took my Chinese books to a restaurant and plopped down for a serious study session. Time to relearn my characters! There were two other tables in the restaurant filled with loud, happy men who all seemed to know each other. A few tried to talk to me, even sat down with me, and announced excitedly to their friends "ta hui shuo zhong wen!" (she speaks Chinese!). Eventually, the lao ban (boss) approached me carrying two shots of bai jiu, one of which he handed to me and toasted me. He was so delighted that I accepted the shot that he insisted that I come sit at his table and pulled up a chair right next to his. And so the night turned from studying to drinking, though in all fairness my Chinese was given a run for its money. They continually filled my bowl with food and my glass with bai jiu. Everyone wanted to ask me questions and to toast me. After a few toasts, the boss told me that I didn't have to drink the whole glass every time, that I should only drink a little bit. The next time someone approached me for a toast, he gestured "only a little!" and I laughed. As a foreigner and a female, I'm not expected to drink as much as the Chinese males, thank goodness. The night was getting along quite well and I was all but hired by one of my new friends as an English teacher for his 14 year old daughter when two more foreigners walked in the door. My Chinese friends were convinced that these foreigners were my friends (they're white, you're white, certainly you know each other!). They decided that they wanted the foreigners to join us and sent me over as the ambassador. Turned out the two men were from London and taking two weeks to travel around Southern China. One had been living in Beijing for 4 years teaching English and had incredible Chinese. I invited them over for food and drink and that's how I met Will and Julian.

Will, Julian, and I ended up traveling together for the rest of my time in Xichuangbanna, so it turned out not to be quite as solo a trip as I had planned. It was, however, amazingly fun and restored my faith in wonders of travel. We spent the next day quietly mocking the Dai Minority Village and hiking along the Mekong River from one village to the next. The area is with out a doubt one of the most beautiful in China - lush and subtropical and warm and unpolluted. When we got back, we wandered around town until we found the market place where you could buy all sorts of body parts of all sorts of animals. In front of the market was xiao kao which is what we dined on for dinner. There were several women with grills and different types of raw food on skewers and you'd point to what you wanted and they'd cook it and bring it over to you. We had beef and chicken wings and legs and snake and tofu and veggies...mmmm. Great ending to a great day.

The next day, we hopped on a bus for Jinghong where we had a huge, western style breakfast before getting on yet another bus for Damenglong, a very small dusty town 3 hours south of Jinghong. The town was a bit confusing at first - there is pretty much nothing there, the entire town exists on one street, and yet there were a fair number of people there who spoke very good putonghua (Mandarin) and not some heavily garbled southern dialect. And there were lots and lots of prostitutes. Turned out to be because Damenglong is a border town (right on the border of Myanmar) and so the government sends down lots and lots of guards from the north. Hence the good Chinese and the abundance of female escorts. We, however, we not there for either the good Chinese or the female escorts; we were there for the temples and the hiking. And hike we did. Most of the temples and pagodas were located at the top of steep hills - unfortunate in terms of getting there, but always provided a great view from the top. One awkward temple required us climbing through someone's backyard and up a ladder to get to. On the way out, we thought we'd try a more conventional exit and found ourselves lost in a rubber plantation. The way we tried to get out took us through someone's outdoor latrine, and, yes, someone was using it at the time. Woops! That poor guy. I can't imagine taking a leak and seeing three foreigners, the first of which was a girl no less, pop out from behind a corner. Even if I had the Chinese to try to excuse myself, the words just weren't there.

That night, we wandered into an area labeled "Market Place" but what actually served as a pool house by day and a xiao kao restaurant by night. The colorfully dressed monks that we had seen there earlier taking full advantages of the day time opportunities were now sitting around tables, drinking bai jiu, talking on cell phones, and generally making merry. Drunken, pool playing monks. And they were the real thing, too. In touristy towns, I sometimes ran into fake monks pretending to be pious and begging for money. I could never quite be sure what was real and what wasn't. But no one actually goes to Damenglong, there aren't people there for the monks to trick, nor were the monks remotely interested in me or my money. Interesting that the real monks don't appear nearly as pious as the fake ones.

The following day we spent making our way slowly back up to Jinghong. We first took a bus to Xiaojie (which, spoken with different tones, can mean prostitute. One must be very careful what one asks for.) in search of the hot springs. Turned out we got off the bus one village short, and so had to walk along the road and cut our way through fields. Even after we got to the right village, we found out we still had another 3-4 km. After somewhat of an effort, we managed to flag down a car to take us the rest of the way. It was quite the endeavor. When we finally got there, we found out that not only were the hot springs not open for several more hours, but that they were absolutely disgusting. Not in favor of acquiring a raging vaginal disease, I voted to head onto the next village, Dongfeng, which was also a considerable trek away. After walking along this dirt road for a while, we flagged down a passing truck and convinced the drivers to let us ride in the back. Now that is true traveling - everything you've got on your back, sitting in the back of a dusty pickup truck, bouncing your way over unpaved roads in the Chinese countryside. Turned out Dongfeng wasn't so much a large village as a small town and a nice one at that, complete with a resort/activity area. After the morning's adventures, we gladly took to the shade and had a long, leisurely lunch next to a man-made pond before getting on a bus that took us all the way back to Jinghong. That night, I took another night bus back to Kunming. After a much needed shower, I gladly retired to my real bed in my safe, secure apartment where I didn't have to fall asleep hugging my purse to fend off thieves.

It's good to be home.