First stop on our flash-of-a-flashback tour (or should that be Flash-of-a-Flashback Tour?) is a week after my return from Bangkok. And don't worry, that whole part where I get to Bangkok is forthcoming. Presumably.
In order to conduct research for the final paper for my one-on-one class (the topic of which is Yunnan's arabica coffee production), I traveled with my one-on-one teacher, Chen Rong, to Baoshan, a district in the west of Yunnan known for its agriculture and, well, yeah I think agriculture. Apparently there were some great hot springs too, but as far as I'm concerned that is just hearsay.
The bus to Baoshan is a ___ seven hours. The reason I leave that adjective blank is that it is truly a subjective characterization - I would be wont to say "grueling" and leave it at that had I not just, two weeks before, rode the previously mentioned "Kunming to Hekou, via Hell" bus. At the time, I'm pretty sure I found the ride fairly bearable, despite the best attempts of Hong Kong cinema. Getting into Baoshan around seven, the sun still hanging in the sky gave me a view over one of the flattest cities I have ever seen. Baoshan is located in a giant basin, and while China doesn't really have suburbs in the American sense, the residential outskirts stretched literally for miles, with nary a third floor to be found. The downtown wasn't much different, although it seemed to rather large in terms of square mileage. I was put up in a small hotel around the way from Chen Rong's house, and after a nice home-cooked meal with her parents, I took a stroll around the neighborhood. The area we were in was like, honestly, any small-time city in China. The little streetside shops selling spare parts, cheap knockoff clothing, and bootleg DVDs; the street food you buy but soon regret; the motorbikes. It didn't take long for me to get tired, and as I headed to bed I pondered the surprising fact that this city was making me nostalgic for Hekou.
The next day, Chen Rong and I met up with her mother's friend, a certain Mrs. Zhao, whose family owned some coffee land in one of Baoshan's satellite production areas, Lujiangba. Lujiangba is home to most of Baoshan's coffee production, and is a sprawling valley of alternating coffee and tobacco fields. I don't have any photos of the tobacco sections, but as I'm pretty sure you can guess, it all looks pretty much the same. Plants are plants, y'know? But for the sake of a visual, I'm going to hit you with a little shot of the coffee fields near the Zhaos' house, of which 3 mu (I think that's about half an acre) are theirs.
The taller trees you see are called longyan (or perhaps longan, in English), which translates literally as "Dragon's Eye", and is a kind of fruit that bears a startling resemblance to, well, an eye (the heavy importation of longyan could revolutionize haunted houses, and would do great harm to late-October grape sales). The tree has a symbiotic relationship with the coffee bush, and so the two are planted in alternate rows - at least for the Zhao family, coffee and longan sales bring in about equal portions of their yearly earnings.
All this information (and I, as the embarrassed author, realize there is no point I'm driving to) is making me think it's time for another visual. How many of you knew that a coffee plant looks like this?
Maybe more of you than I'd hoped. Well, them red fellas is (coffee) cherries. You break 'em open, and you get a couple of tannish coffee beans, which are of a much more familiar shape. Then you sort of suck on the cherry skin - it's sweet and almost spicy. Kinda makes you wish it really were more like a cherry. I mean, if there wre more fruit there, I’d be wont to dry it and put it in outmeal.
Anyway, after the plantin' fields we returned to the Zhao house, where I got to see where they squeeze out the beans from the cherries, and dry the beans in their courtyard for several days until they're ready for further processing.
In the picture they are sweeping up the dried beans because they were worried it might rain. You can see the kid clearly walking all over the beans – everyone walks on them, that's pretty normal. After all the little things were safely covered in baskets, I witnessed both that little boy and the family dog urinating all over the "drying zone". Now, before you spit out that mouthful of coffee, I can't say I ever saw anyone pee directly ON the product, and I'm also fairly certain there's a roasting step somewhere down the line. So you’re probably safe. Might just
AFter touring the local production facilities, which were of an absurdly small scale - only one roasting machine for a company, for example - I went back to the Zhao house and at a delicious local dinner. And then took this photo to commemorate my visit.
Point to anyone who can come up with the most fitting sitcom name and tagline.
The next weekend, I was off early Friday afternoon in exactly the same direction, although this time I was happily disembarking after just five hours. A short taxi ride and I was in the old city of Dali, one of Yunnan's major tourist sites, and deservedly so. I'm going to blaze through Dali because I'm already worried this post is going to end up as long as the last one.
Dali's main pull, besides its spectacular location beside the large Lake Erhai and ringed by sometimes-snowcapped mountains, is the traditional architecture of a type that is becoming harder and harder to find in China. Granted, a good deal has seen some renovation since an earthquake struck a decade or so past, but grass growing on your roof is generally a trump card in the "my house has more of a rich cultural history than yours" game.
I had planned to go hiking, so after wandering happily around the old town on Saturday morning, I took the chairlift up to a temple on Cangshan mountain, from which it is advised to start your climb to the summit. Unfortunately, it was past one by the time I started, and I had barely begun to get out of the heavy timber before the clouds closed in and it started to rain. I turned back and rushed down before the trail turned into a live-action game of chutes and ladders, minus the ladders. Instead of hopping onto the chairlift in the biting wind and rain – a decision that would have no doubt left me in the grip of some particularly vivid “Wildcat Mountain Flashbacks” - I stayed in the small but friendly "Highlander Inn", one of only two guests. Over dinner I managed to hold my own in a lively Chinese conversation, but I retired to bed early – even though I was only a few hundred meters above Dali, which is the same elevation as Kunming, the altitude was getting me to feel like a sailor on Sunday.
Because the views the day before had been cloudy and obscured by pines, I got up in time for sunrise and watched from the temple below the Inn. It was pretty breathtaking. I also still wanted to sleep.
The rest of the day I rented a bike and rode around Dali's surrounding villages, getting lost in a warren of twisting residential lanes not wide enough for a single car. Oh, and seeking out all the made-specifically-for-this-purpose photo opportunity spots.
I stayed in town until evening, and caught the 11:00 night train back to Kunming. I got in at six AM, in time to stumble to class on about four hours of sleep. Having not even had a chance to prepare our readings, it's safe to say there were trials. There were tribulations.
Wow. Week two done, and we’re speeding up.
Athough the next week had me more exhausted than before (why does it have to build up like that?) it was the date of our group trip to Jianshui and Yuanyang, two of Yunnan’s countless tourist destinations. Jianshui is this old town, sorta like Dali, or maybe not like Dali (is the old town hidden in the new town, or somewhere outside? I’m still not sure!). In my lonely planet I was told there were caves of swallows. In my experience, there were no swallows, but Jianshui was your average semi-developed Yunnan town, with scattered historical sites (a well so old that centuries of use has worn deep grooves for the rope, an old Confucian temple, a bridge.) Check it out, it’s the bridge.
(Can you dig it?!)
Jianshui was fun, what with KTV and a delicious local beverage featuring purple rice, but the most welcome aspect was its distance from both Kunming and Yuanyang – resulting in a four hour bus ride each day, with ample time for naps.
Yuanyang, however, was by far the more spectacular of the two destinations. Located across a series of mountain ridges in southern Yunnan, Yuanyang is, from my experience, eternally wreathed in fog. Given that I was there to see (and not be prevented by weather conditions from seeing) what is hailed as one of Yunnan’s most spectacular sites – expansive hillsides of glimmering rice terraces – this may seem like a negative aspect. I assure you it was not. True, I never got a picture like the ones on Wikipedia, but the fog gave the whole place an ethereal feel unlike anywhere else I’ve been in China.
Although the first impression was all too typical. Stepping down from the bus, we were accosted by a gang of Hani (the local ethnic minority) women, eager to sell us necklaces, postcards, and the ubiquitous little red books. They were also laden with traditional Hani garb, with they pushed upon us as we huddled in the cold mist, unsure of where to go. Unable to refuse the lure of a bedazzled black vest that was thrust around my shoulders, I soon found myself Hani’in it up with my classmates.
Eager to get on to the main event, we returned the clothes, paid the bills, and crept down a mist-shrouded walkway. I say crept because, literally, I was creepin’ – these guys were hanging out overhead, and I was taller than most.
I once saw some children using long sticks to pull these spiders form their webs in some high bushes. It was pretty brutal, but my feelings were definitely mixed. On the one hand, any sort of needless cruelty is never welcome, but when it has a direct negative impact on the spider population in my immediate vicinity, I’m usually willing to let a few things slide, ethically. What really pushed it over the edge was the fact that these spiders were bright red on the inside – as if they really were the mythical bloodsucking, eight-legged freaks of my nightmares and numerous Hollywood flops.
When we got to the viewing platform, however, we were met by a flat white wall – the fog had closed in completely.
We returned to the town of Yuanyang with our spirits slightly the worse for wear, and the announcement that we were to wake up at 5:00 am for a sunrise that was likely to face the same conditions as today did nothing to raise morale. However, walking the two blocks to the nearest restaurant (it was cold) that night, I couldn’t help but feel Yuanyang was a mystical place, and our hotel something of a benevolent younger brother to that of The Shining. It made me think I would like to spend a significant period of time in a fog-shrouded mountain town.
The next day, dark and early, we rose to the rings of our wakeup calls and dozed in the elevator to the lobby. Picking at “breakfasts” of dry, plastic-packaged bread and Chinese milk – which tastes far too cheesy to not convince me it has all gone slightly bad – we arrived at another of Yuanyang’s viewing points, thankfully one with a noticeable lack of arachnids.
The sun had yet to rise, and as we watched the clouds tumble around the surrounding mountains and roll back to reveal silvered terraces, I was truly moved. It was so beautiful. In Chinese art there is a repeated motif of mountains above the clouds – mountains so high that you can’t see the bottom through the clouds – and I was finally realizing that it is no myth. I felt as though I were looking at a vast sea of clouds, broken by occasional the islands of the highest thrusting peaks. In a land whose people are constantly criticized for destroying what natural and historical beauty remains (a criticism I have frequently voiced, I must confess), there are still places to rival any in the world. And Yuanyang, wrapped in clouds, is one of them.
As I finish writing this, it is now almost two weeks since Yuanyang. I have just finished all of my classes for this semester, and have but a handful of tests left before I am through with my studies here. It’s passed all too quickly, but that’s the subject for another time. For now, I’m going to enjoy Kunming for at least one more weekend.
Oh, and as for last weekend: my reckless brinksmanship with exhaustion earned me a few days sick in bed. At least Chinese bootleg DVDs only cost about $1.50
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