China Part 1 - Enter The Dragon....

We had heard a lot of bad stories about the land border crossing between Northern Vietnam at Lao Cai & Southwest China at the town of Hekou, so as we exited Vietnamese immigration & walked across the bridge that links the two countries we felt slightly apprehensive about the grilling we would get from the Chinese border officials. By some miraculous stroke of luck however, it turned out to be one of the easiest & quickest border crossings we had ever done, complete with very amiable helpful staff. We had gone to the lengths of hiding our copy of the China Lonely Planet book deep in our bags, as we had heard tales of the officials confiscating the books due to the fact the map shows Taiwan as a separate country – which of course, it is – though the Chinese government don’t accept this & claim it as their land, & as the Lonely Planet challenges their view they apparently aim to wipe out all copies. Not so for us though thankfully. Walking out onto the streets of Hekou & heading for the bus station the difference between China & Vietnam is immediately blatant. Apart from the fact that you move from all signs in Vietnam being written with English characters (albeit not actually in English), in China all signs etc are written in Chinese characters which are completely unintelligible to us. There were also a whole host of modified push bikes, fully laden with an unbelievable amount of cardboard boxes, waiting to cross over into Vietnam as part of their export trade. A little different to the rows of containers & lorries that usually wait at border crossings elsewhere in the world.

Hekou is in the Chinese province of Yunnan, in the far south west which borders not only Vietnam, but also Myanmar (Burma) & Tibet. It is a mountainous area, & certainly on the Vietnamese side of the border, road travel is a slow bumpy wind around the mountain sides. It was with this in mind that we boarded our bus from Hekou heading for the city of Kunming, some 8 hours north (barely noticeable on a map of the country, such is the size of China) – we were expecting a similarly slow & windy journey. Immediately we were given a glimpse of the vast scale of development that is going on all over China at the moment, not to mention the huge amounts of money that is being spent on it. For the first 4 hours of the journey which traversed the most mountainous section of the route, we were on a brand new toll freeway that didn’t cling to the mountain edge at all – it was either a series of very lengthy tunnels blasted through the middle of the mountains or a network of very high bridges that spanned the divide across the valleys between mountains. As we cruised our way along with barely another car on the road (an indication of the amount of locals that can afford to use the toll route, the slow windy bumpy cliff hugging route remaining the main road for the vast majority), in our luxury air conditioned bus we felt considerably more civilised than we had imagined. That is until we made our first of several toilet stops of the journey. What confronted us was quite possibly the most basic, disgusting & degrading toilet set up of anywhere we have travelled.

Toilets: The only saving grace of the toilets were the fact they had actually bothered to go to the lengths of separating a Male & Female area, though when inside, there were two open troughs down either side of the walls, with nothing more than a 3ft dividing wall between what would usually be cubicle spaces, no doors or anything on the front of these little sections, so people were just going about their business in full view of everyone else in the toilet and anyone who happened to walk past the entrance to the toilets. It was reminiscent of what can only be described as a cow byre both in smell and appearance. Obviously there were no actual toilet seats or anything, just squat & drop into the trough, which if they actually bothered to flow any running water through, would swim past each subsequent toilet goer in the line – but that was even too much to ask, so there were rather unattractive piles left behind, just being constantly added to. You would feel incredibly sorry for the poor individual who had the task of cleaning these cess pits out, but it appeared that no one actually ever cleaned these things out – hence there was no one to waste your sympathy on. It was like being swept from the 21st Century straight back to the middle ages in one incredibly foul swoop. It was from this point on that we carefully planned our pre-bus journey liquid & solid intakes to minimise any future exposure to the delights of the public toilets. We would find however that even in the tourist areas where new posh marble toilets had been built, it means nothing if you fail to educate the public on general manners and so they inevitably were absolutely devastated beyond anything you can imagine. I say no more except, animals are cleaner.

When we eventually arrived in Kunming it was about 10pm, we knew there were about 4 or 5 bus stations in the city, but we had no idea which one we had just pulled into as these things have a tendency to change at the drop of a hat, and the fact that we could not understand a single word on any sign & all that. We assumed that as per every other bus station we had arrived into, there would be a taxi rank waiting to ferry us to our hostel, & there would be at least a couple of people that spoke a few words of English to help us out – in Kunming however, this was not to be the case. The bus station also appeared to have no outside lights they were prepared to use, so we wondered around in the pitch darkness, not really having a clue where we were or where we were going, unable to find anything that resembled a taxi, or anyone who spoke English.

Eventually an opportunist individual noticed our plight & decided to offer us a lift into town for an extortionate price (relatively against what it should have been), our attempts at any sort of negotiation on the price were completely futile, as neither sign language, written numbers or speaking English very loudly & slowly, as per your typical Brit abroad made any difference. Eventually deciding we had no other choice we decided we would jump in this complete strangers car in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, & just hope that he wasn’t some dodgy Triad member, whisking us away for a life of torture & pain. Thankfully after a rather convoluted route around the city in a vain attempt by our driver to justify his ridiculous price, we arrived at the door of the hostel we had pre-booked – the Mingtong Guest House. Free at last we thought, into the comfort of a trusty old hostel where there were a few English speaking staff members & fellow guests...yet again, this was not to be. None of the staff spoke any English, there were no other international guests staying there, so once again we began the uphill struggle of trying to make ourselves understood.

After our first night in China we all awoke to something that would become a common theme – aching hips & backs from the beds, where the definition of a mattress is pretty much a plank of ply wood covered with a sheet. Voila – what more comfort could anyone ask for! Kunming is a city on the move and quickly, apparently there are something like 500 new cars that hit the roads every day. As we sat & ate our breakfast of a very tasty mixture of a pancake/omelette blend done by a local street stall opposite the hostel, we were amazed at the hoards of brand new cars flooding past us. Audi, VW & Toyota seeming to well & truly have the lion’s share of the market cornered. Even the French brands seeming to be more prevalent than Ford, & we didn’t notice a single Jag or Land Rover at all – come on chaps, get a showroom or 5 set up in Kunming asap!

Moving on from Kunming we took another 8 hour or so bus journey up to the ancient walled town of Lijiang. Passing through some stunning remote mountain scenery en route – naturally all via the comfort of our air conditioned bus on a brand new toll highway that had been blasted through the landscape & remote mountain communities. These communities are sustained purely by farming, & it was quite a contrast to see these farmers that live pretty much on the poverty line walking along the hard shoulders of the highway wheeling their crops from A to B, yet again lavish modernity side by side with the basic traditionalism of the vast majority of China.

Lijiang is a beautiful traditional old town, a vision straight out of some Chinese movie set in the time of the Ming Dynasty or something. The town is set within the confines of a walled boundary & has been preserved & restored in keeping with the original feel. The cobbled streets are largely pedestrianised, with the exception of a couple of streets that allow minor traffic at certain times of day, making it a nice place to have a relaxed amble about. It is however a very touristy place – incredibly popular with Chinese tourists, Western tourists are still in the vast minority – making it far feel less touristy to us than it actually is.

We stayed at a place called Mama Naxi’s Guesthouse – a traditional Chinese ‘Naxi’ house, run by the very sweet, highly eccentric & slightly insane Mama Naxi. Being up in the mountains, Lijiang gets very cold at night & what we didn’t realise about the traditional Naxi Houses is that they don’t actually have any glass in the windows just a wooden lattice style carving to prevent people from actually getting into the rooms. Mama Naxi thankfully provided electric blankets on every bed which proved to be worth their weight in rice.

China is obviously renowned for its tea and so we thought it appropriate to try some here in a proper tea shop. Unknowingly we ventured into a tea shop in Lijiang and ordered a pot of tea, then somewhat embarrassedly had to make our excuses and leave when we were presented with a menu of teas, some apparently hundreds of years old and priced like vintage wines. The cheapest tea on the menu was around £15 for a small 2 cup pot. All we wanted was a cheap cup of builders tea!

One of the big draws for the Chinese tourists to Lijiang is the fact it sits at the foot of the Jade Dragon Snowy Mountain, on the Eastern edge of the Himalayan mountain range, considered a holy site to many Chinese people. During Michael Palin’s BBC series, ‘Himalaya’, he visited the area, & in particular the small neighbouring village of Baisha, where he paid a visit to an old Chinese herbal medicine doctor known as Dr. Ho, at his clinic/house ‘Jade Dragon Mountain Medical Centre’. Following in Michael’s footsteps, we made our way out the rustic traditional mountain village of Baisha & popped in to say hello to the famous Dr Ho. Stood outside his ‘clinic’, we were unsure whether we should actually go in, but before our minds were made up the decision was made for us, when a very amiable 87 year old, dressed in Doctors whites came out to greet us & insisted we come in & join him in a few cups of his specially developed herbal tea.

Once inside & enjoying our tea, Dr Ho regaled us with his tales of how he started out life a very poor farm boy, who was stricken with an illness that no Doctors at the time that were available to him could treat, he decided to learn about the plants & herbs that grew in the foothills of the Jade Dragon Mountains & treat himself. Miraculously finding a way to completely cure himself & provide the knowledge for a life of good health, he decided to make his life’s mission helping others, who could either ill-afford conventional medicinal treatment, or who had failed to find cures for their respective ailments through conventional wisdom. He's a remarkable man who even mails parcels of his herbal treatments to Leukaemia patients in North America as they find that it is the most effective course of treatment. Very proud of his association with the BBC & Michael Palin, he was very excited to discover we too were also from England. ‘Do you know Michael Palin’ he asked us, ‘well, we know of him’ we replied – which clearly translated as – ‘yes we know him very well, Michael & the Monty Python boys regularly come round our houses for dinner, or sometimes we just meet up down the local for a few pints & a chin wag’ – as he was keenly asking us to pass on his regards to Palin & co the next time we had one of our little soiree’s.

After packing us off with a bag of herbs for general good health & a positive ‘Chi’; the Chinese life force, we made a small donation to his onward cause (he takes no actual payment from anyone for any of his treatments, merely the odd donation), & bid Dr Ho a fond farewell, promising to say hello to the Monty Python boys for him & tell them to pay him a visit again soon. A very special experience.

Having our final breakfast at Mama Naxi's place, she saw us off with a little good luck charm as a gift along with a bag of fruit (?) and we head to the bus station for what we hoped would be a similar standard of bus to what we had experienced so far. It wasn't to be, back to the crapped out old shankers again unfortunately, the good news was the bus left on time and there were only about 10 of us on it, the bad news was 2 of that 10 spent the majority of the next 9 hours being sick, firstly directly onto the floor as it apparently caught them unawares (?) then into the plastic bags provided.

The journey itself though took us through some spectacular mountain scenery, giving us a few snapshots of some of more rural lifestyles as we passed through small mountain communities. Huge areas of the hillsides given over to terraced tea plantations; the act of tea drinking being a very important ritual in Chinese life.

Half way through the bus journey we stopped off for lunch at some roadside restaurant and low and behold the two lads that had spent the last few hours making a right mess of the carpet in the bus, not only got off the bus continuing to throw up, but immediately afterwards went and ordered themselves a big plate of noodles and some suspicious looking chicken. To say we feared for the next few hours on the bus was an understatement...with iPods at full volume to block out the sound of retching and eyes aimed firmly out of the window to minimise any chance of witnessing any more puking (if we don't know it's happening then surely it's not happening...) but of course it was happening, and the one thing you can't do anything about is the smell...

This journey gave us our first real exposure to the sheer amount of mining and coal powered power plants there are dotted all over China. Once beautiful mountain vistas now resemble a polluted industrial wasteland, entire towns completely blackened with coal dust and the roads ruined beyond repair by the volume and weight of the trucks that are constantly pouring through these towns ferrying raw materials around the country.

We were en-route to the city of Chengdu in China's Sichuan province, the province that was hit very hard by the huge earthquake a few years ago. First though we had to change from bus to train in the city of Panzhihua, an industrial mountain mining town, apparently not even deserving a mention in the lonely planet, but actually home to some 1.2 million people... We had planned to take a 13 hr sleeper train up to Chengdu, but arrived at the station to find there was nothing but standing room left available for the entire journey. The really brilliant thing about Chinese public transport is that you have to book everything in advance to stand any chance of getting a seat or bed, but there is no way whatsoever of buying your tickets from anywhere other than the station you will be departing from and you have to do it in person. With millions of people constantly on the move it is rarely a straightforward transaction.

One of the more disgusting traits of the Chinese is their insistence of hoking their guts up and spitting huge globules of phlegm absolutely anywhere and everywhere. While we were queuing in vain to try and get our tickets, a whole host of the people also in the queue were spitting all over the floors directly behind and in front of us, vile.

That said, we managed to get 3 sleeper berths on a train that was leaving at about 2am. Choosing not to spend the next 8 hours standing around in pools of spit surrounded by people that constantly chain smoke even in non smoking areas, we booked a cheap hotel room across the road for a few hours to wait for the train and hopefully get some rest. When the time arrived we made our way back across to the decidedly dodgy train station and waited in the no smoking area, surrounded by people chain smoking, for the train to arrive. We joined the train to find not unlike the 3 bears, that someone had been sleeping in our beds...now if it had transpired that it had been Goldilocks or someone equally as delightful we probably wouldn't have been that bothered. Dodgy, puking, smoking, spitting China men however didn't really fit that bill...13 hours later after miraculously getting some sleep and enjoying the scenery during the daylight hours that we passed by along the way, we finally arrived in Chengdu.