Yunnan Provence (June 2007) - Part 1 Kunming to Lijiang

Nine Days in Yunnan Provence (Southwest China) - Part 1 Kunming and Lijiang

Because my first contract has been cancelled here in China and I had worked a lot of overtime and had vacation still coming to me, I was able to take a week off work to explore a bit more of China. I headed out for a week of adventure in the extreme south west of china, Yunnan Provence. This area is really beautiful and inhabited by many minority tribes. China has over 50 minority tribes. These people live in their own villages and mainly speak their own ancient languages. They have many unique customs, costumes, celebrations, food, song and dance, etc... Seeing these minority cultures is really special. They will disappear soon as China becomes more modern.

I have been living in china for 10 months and trying to learn to speak chinese. It's time I start speaking chinese. I wanted to have a true adventure in China and prove to myself that I could do it on my own. I still had a lot of help from friends, but I'm getting more and more independent.

From train window. Water buffalo in a rice paddy

I set off on my adventure by train from Liuzhou to Kunming. Ray's dad helped with the sleeper train tickets again. Apparently it can be pretty hard to buy the sleeper tickets. I haven't tried that on my own yet. The train was pretty comfortable and even though it was delayed 2 hours, 17 hours went by pretty fast.

In Kunming, I was met by Liu Yang (a friend of a friend of my friend Qiufeng) and later by Vivian or Wang Hiayan (Ray's friend from college). Liu Yang and his friend Han Huan showed me around their college and Kunming for a few hours. It was a nice introduction to Kunming. Then we had dinner with Vivian and her boyfriend Yang Han. We had "Cross-bridge rice noodles" which are famous in Kunming. Every city or region in china has it's own version of noodles. I have had som really really good ones. I think my favorite are still the spicy snail noodles in Liuzhou. But Ray took me for some dry noodles with beef in Chengdu and I really like those too and in Liuzhou you can get Gan lao fen which is dry noodles. I like those a lot too.

After dinner I caught a night bus to Lijiang. It was my first time on a night bus. I had heard nightmare stories about night buses, but this first one was pretty comfortable. Night buses have no seats, just three rows of narrow beds with one by each window and one in the middle of the bus. Two levels high. This bus had television and my neighbor was a nice student from Hong Kong. Her english name is Carrie (from the TV series Sex in the City). We talked quite a bit and ended up going to the same hotel in LiJiang and sharing a room and going hiking together the next day. Nice girl.

Lijiang is becoming a very touristy city. Especially at night. It has cobble streets and lovely old houses with beautiful roofs. Walking around the old town in the morning, I was approached by a tour guide and convinced to go hiking in the mountains nearby to see local "Yi minority" villages.

Carrie and I went together. The scenery was beautiful. A big lake, a mountain with snow on top, and wild flowers (azaelias and rhododendrons grow wild here). It was a very sunny hot day for hiking and I got a sunburn. But it was really nice to see the villages and how the people live.

We had tea with them and the women of one village made us potatoes which they cook by throwing into the fire.

An old Yi woman working in her potatoe field.

Potatoes are a staple of their diet. You see potatoe farms everywhere on the mountain.

I the second village we met a really lovely old man who was 76 years old but looked like 100. He had very dark skin probably from working very hard in the sun all his life. He had a great smile and didn't mind us sitting in his house and having tea with him and telling us about his family and life on the mountain. And in the next village we met an old woman wearing the traditional black hat and clothing. She also had the traditional tatoos on her arms (first picture in this blog post).

These are some of the village houses. The first one is a traditional Yi house on top of the mountain. The second is a mud brick Naxi house in the village at the base of the mountain.

In one village on top of the mountain we saw some small children. They were playing in a shed. They were all dirty and grubby. They were a little afraid of strangers, but allowed us to take pictures of them. Heigene is not great in these minority villages. They often don't have toilets or running water and many humanitarian aid groups go to these villages to help them understand things they can do to reduce illness and death from disease and give them a better quality of life.

On the way down the mountain, we met about 20 school children. The children go to school on Sunday and live there all week. Then they come back up the mountain on Friday to live with their families. Some of the children have to walk 5 hours to and from school. It was Sunday evening and they were headed back to school at the bottom of the mountain in another village which is actually a different minority "Naxi zu". The children seemed very happy to be going to school.

Their school looks pretty modern and clean compared to the living conditions in their villages. It was good to see a few older children still studying. There were 2 older boys and an older girl all probably high school age. I tried to talk to them in Potong hua (mandarin Chinese) but most of them did not understand me. Our guide said that they only speak their local language. No teachers want to go to these villages to teach mandarin.

In the evening, I strolled around the touristy streets of Lijiang thinking about the differences to what I had seen in the mountain villages that day.

There are many bars in Lijiang. There is one street with a small stream running down the middle of two rows of bars. The drinkers in one bar sit on the balcony drinking and singing and competing with the drinkers across the street to see who can be the noisiest! Not my cup of cha (tea), but an insight into chinese life none-the-less.

The next day I headed to Qiaotou to hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge. - See Part 2