Down and out in Shangri-la and Xishuangbanna

I have been taking many, many pictures but haven't been able to upload them to my Flickr account. I didn't realize how hard this would be while traveling. I'll upload a select few the next time we find a place with wireless.

We went to Lijiang, which, although over-touristified, even more than Dali, and we arrived at the beginning of the Chinese tourist season so crowds were stifling, is still quite striking. It is a labyrinthine town full of courtyards, gardens, staircases, flowing water, a handfull of towers, bridges -- in other words, most of the elements of the Utopian city.

We hiked the Tiger Leaping Gorge with a group of young travellers we met on the minibus there. So I got to touch the mighty Yangze river near its headwaters. It was really quite an awesome place, with mountains rising vertically into the clouds thousands of feet above the coffee-brown river.

We continued on to Baishui Tai, a very strange place where 'Over thousands of years, the high carbonic acid content in the water sculpted steps, reminiscent of rice terraces, out of the limestone rocks.'

And then to Zhondian, or Shangri-La at is has recently been re-named by authorities anxious to build the tourist economy there. Nintey percent of the people here are Tibeten, but they speak a dialect of the Cham dialect, so it's probably not close to Lhasa Tibeten at all. Not that definitely heard anyone speak it -- I heard people speaking something that didn't sound like Chinese, but it could just as well have been a weird dialect of Chinese. It was neat, but weird, in Shangri-La -- in a way that is hard to explain. We saw a few fights. We went to a monestary and a handicrafts center where they showed us how to make tsampa, tibeten butter tea. Fucking delicious stuff!

So far, we've passed through the lands of several of China's 56 recognized minority ethnic groups:

The Yao (who are called Mien in Laos?) and the Zhuang (related to other 'Tai' peoples) in Guangxi.

The Bai in Dali.

The Naxi in Lijiang, who traditionally are followers of the Dongba relgion, related to the Bon religion of Tibet.

We will leave China soon and enter Laos. I should record a few notable things I've observed about China:

Chinese people love to play cards. Everywhere you go you see people, young and old, playing card games.

Girls wear dresses that Joe describes as "dress-up clothes," because they are reminiscent of the frilly, thin, ridiculous dresses we used to have in the "dress up basket" and Lily used to make us wear when we were too young to resist. No girl in America could get away with what Chinese girls wear.

Old people have street-based social lives in a way you never see in the US. They exercise in public places in droves. They sit around in groups and play cards or other games or smoke or just hang out. When I'm old, I want to be Chinese.

Dali

I realize I haven't written in here for two and a half weeks. It's hard to blog and travel, what with spotty internet access and always something to do. But I promised you better, so I'll fill it all in, soon enough. But right now I'm in Dali, an ubertouristy town of steep staircases to second storeys and old Bai women who mercilessly try to sell you weed. (We met one of them -- not telling how -- whose weed-seed-eating mother is a partner in her drug dealing operation.). Dali's in a valley between a lake full of odd delicacies and the Cang Shan mountains. It's raining hard now and we're getting on a bus to Lijiang. My scrambled eggs and ginger tea have been served, so I gotta go.

Free and Easy Wandering

Free and Easy Wandering, Chuang Tzu

The weather has been either extremely hot and humid, or raining, so it has been difficult to do anything, but I've been wandering around a bit on foot, by bike, and by bus -- West Lake, Longjing (Dragon Well) tea village, Lingyin temple, and the Botanical Gardens.



Last Saturday night we went to "Dream Party," a Chinese art-hipster shindig with live music and an open bar. They had canvases and paints so you could make paintings. Then we went to Coco club where we've been going a lot. It's an international fiesta led by a absurd Nigerian who's always trying to heat up the party by, for example, getting people to take each other's shirts off on stage. Outside, a massive Ecuadorian, passing out, smashed his head on a taxi, making a large dent. A hilarious fracas ensued, which we watched while drinking cheap beers from the convenience store right outside the club.



On Monday I chatted with a Chinese guy named Steven Yu who I met on the internet. It was cool. He's from a peasant family and a lot of his relatives are migrant laborers. He was very smart. We talked about sustainability, peasant short-sightedness with regard to ecology, holistic medicine, agricultural policy, migrant labor, The Art of the War, the I Ching, taoism and Chuang Tzu. He practically filled a notebook writing each word he spoke down, drawing diagrams, making lists, doing math. We drank 2% snow beer and flower tea and I ate something Taro-like but he said it wasn't, in a restaurant that was under construction.