Kunming is meant to be a relaxed city (if that's possible of a Chineses city of some 5,000,000), but we probably didn't see it in it's best light, with only a night's stopover in the rain. It was a landmark for the tour, however, because we were losing 2 people here and gaining 4 for the next leg down into Laos. We lost our Belgian accountant Kevin to be replaced by Vera, a Belgian logistics consultant and we lost Emma, our English educational psychologist, to be replaced by Amanda an English psychiatrist! In addition, we gained Fred a surveyor from Sweden and Ralph, a giant carpenter from Frankfurt.
We had an enjoyable dinner in a local restaurant, where we were greeted as we entered, by cowering chickens and pheasants in wicker cages, awaiting their fate. The food and atmosphere were great, though we were saddened to note only one chicken and one less pheasant as we departed - at least we knew our food was fresh!
The next morning was an early start. After a pre-dawn breakfast, we found Amanda missing, with a note saying that she felt she couldn't cope with the demands of the trip. In the driving early morning rain, it didn't feel like a surprising decision. We headed 3 hours out of the city to the Shilin Stone Forest, an area of limestone rock that has weathered over millions of years into huge stalagmite-like pinnacles. It was cold and wet when we arrived, though this didn't seem to have deterred the Chinese tourists and there were hordes of them at the entrance, tightly knitted around their guides: instantly identifiable by their dual authority symbols - flag in one hand, megaphone in the other.
Sue and I, still fresh from our Yangtse experience, ran (metaphorically) for the hills. The area around the park proper gave us a flavour and we looked out through the rain from a great local restaurant where they served us a delicious meal of spinach soup, rice, sautéed vegetables and spicy shredded pork, washed down with endless cups of jasmine tea.
Annoyingly, the truck headed pretty much all the way back to Kunming before starting south again and there were a few dissenting voices as to why we had spent most of a day on this detour, but at least the sun had started to emerge again - just as we were starting to despair of ever seeing it again. That night we camped by the shore of Dian Chi, a 300 square kilometre lake to the south-west of Kunming. Finding free spots of land is a challenge in China (every available space seems to be used for housing or cultivation), so here the best we could find was a small area of woodland at the end of a narrow road that ran down to the lake. It was pretty liberally scattered with litter and the whole truck spent the best part of an hour filling rubbish sacks before it was fit to camp on. By the end of this period, the entire local village seemed to have come out to watch in utter amazement: twenty westerners descending en masse in a bright orange truck, cleaning up their land and pitching tents. There was much laughter and clicking of photo shutters as we set about our work.
As the sun set, the same villagers came back with their ghetto blasters and some of us joined them in their line dancing, again much to their amusement. Between us, we managed to cook up a pretty tasty vegetable curry and rice washed down by some Chinese red wine (which was just about drinkable, though I'm not sure it's ready for the ready for the export market just yet!). As night fell, we got a roaring fire going and it was an enjoyable evening, though our patch of land was too gravelly to allow much sleep.
Reading up about Lake Dian Chi later, we found it is one of the most polluted lakes in China, largely due to the majority of Kunming's sewage having been pumped into it for a number of years and the water is now considered to be unusable even for industrial purposes and more than half of the fish have perished, though we did see a couple of locals patiently leant over fishing rods.
We had two more stops in China before getting to the border. The first was just an overnight stop on Pu'er, a fairly anonymous town that has grown as the centre for tea in the region, the second in the much more pleasant city of Jinghong. As we headed south from Kunming, into the province of Xishuangbanna, the road started to descend steadily and the climate and topography changed dramatically to the sub-tropical. Now, we drove through much lusher scenery with tea and then coffee, rubber and sugar-cane plantations, with trees full of banana, coconut, dragon fruit, persimmon, lychee and other exotic fruits.
Our final stop in China, Jinghong, felt like a tropical holiday city with blue skies, coconut palms and colourful buildings and was easily the hottest place we had been on our journey to date. We had a free day here, which we spent mostly at a peaceful botanical gardens and finished with a cold beer watching the sun set over the Mekong river. We mused that the Mekong starts its journey in the mountains of Tibet and from here meanders on through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia before draining into the South China Sea in Vietnam. It had been almost 18 years since we had seen the Mekong, but we would follow it for a few weeks now on our journey south.
The next day our China Oddyssey would be over. It was hard going at times and as a result we were not sad to be leaving, but at the same time, we knew that we had an amazing and privileged experience and that time would change our perspective. Over 4 weeks, we travelled more than 4,000 kilometres through several provinces in the most populous country in the world, which most predict will be the world's next super power. Yet how little most of us in the west know of it!
Maybe we know a little more now than we did before, but as with knowledge generally: the more we know, the more we realise we don't know. China is a country that is changing rapidly and it beguiled and confused us in equal measure. In Leishan, we saw the largest Buddha in the world that stood proudly and enigmatically at the confluence of 3 rivers. This strikes me as a metaphor for where China is right now: the rivers represent their ancient traditions; the paternalistic spectre of communist rule which dominated and suppressed it's people for several generations and the emerging sugar-coated river of capitalism and the outside world. The Chinese people (and in particular the emerging middle classes in the big cities) are clearly entranced by the material riches of the developed world, whilst the government (like a parent wary of unleashing their child into the big-bad world) use all the powers of the state to maintain their control. The poor river of ancient traditions, sometimes seems to be in danger of drying up, but travelling here one senses that it will never disappear completely and that as people see through the initial attraction of western culture, that many Chinese will look back to their old traditions that were suppressed in the Communist era.
The way in which the Chinese river flows will clearly be of huge importance to us all. We saw such energy and confidence in the Chinese people to suggest that the current will be strong, whichever way it flows. Despite all of the noise and pollution and voracious consumption on display at times and the corruption that is widely reported, we also saw enough in some of their ancient traditions, to show that they have the potential to add much needed wisdom to the future direction of the world. The principle of harmony between nature and humanity that underpins Taoism is an inspirational example of this.
In our next post, we will tell you about our time in Laos, but in the meantime, we sign off with a few photos from our last few days in China.
Andy, been very busy so not had time to comment, but all looks great. Be sure to bring back some black goat skewers (I'm sure they'll keep for 9 months). Sorry to hear Sue was ill. Helena and Gabs asked if you can smuggle out a Panda.
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