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As one ages a natural hesitation to put oneself in harms way follows. Now that I am over 50 I occasionally must resist this tendency. During our visit to Yunnan, the southwest most province of China, along the Tibet border I found myself facing death and disaster at every turn, as Jonathan, Daniel and Roger accompanied me on many wonderful adventures. Foremost was the 5 missteps of death on the mountain. But lets start at the beginning.
We began the trip in Hong Kong having dinner with Andrew, our audio dealer, and Mr. Tan, the owner of the factory Daniel worked in. Then we were off to see Daniel, visit some wrought iron factories and make some contacts relating to bamboo shoots. All was predictable. We enjoyed hanging out with Daniel, meeting his friends and seeing the town.
The real adventure began with a 40 hour train trip to Yunnan Province. Two nights on the train, and eating in the dining car was a blast. Normally we go into the kitchen and point out what we want to eat, but on the train all we had was a chinese menu. Daniel had to work at it, and the food was usually not what we expected! We had a cabin to ourselves and loved seeing the changing terrain as we moved steadily westward, the full width of China.
We arrived in Kunming, the capital and immediately transferred to a bus to Dali, farther west. Dali is a tourist area for good reason -- a large lake surrounded by towering mountains, raging rivers and clean air, an old town, and lots of old temples.
We started down the street and Daniel stopped in a shop and asked about the location of a internet cafe. No luck, but in the shop next door he found a kid playing video games. He could not help, but got his sister Li Juam who spoke English to guide us. She is 16 years old and was very shy. She took us to a an internet cafe, and we checked out the area. Before she left we asked about renting or buying a motorbike but she said that such shops were very far away.
Ten minutes later while finishing up our emails, she is back, with her older sister, Li Mou Tan, aged 19. She lives in another Provence with her grandmother but was visiting for the summer break. Her English was even better and said she would help us with the motor bike adventure. As always in China, all the dealers are right in a row and all sell the same things. We were making little headway. Unlike Fuzhou providence were we could buy a small motor bike without a license, here it seems only electric bikes were sold without registration. These seemed very bad for our purpose. We did not give up and finally asked a few guys on the sidewalk about their old bikes. Sure enough, a deal was made. We would buy the bikes for 4300 RMB and they would buy them back 10 days later for 3900. We knew 400 was way too cheap so assumed we would be hit for more but went ahead. One was quite new with 4 speeds and semiautomatic (no clutch). The other was a scooter and was pretty beat. Within an hour we had managed to store our bags in Li Juam's room and were motoring out of town.
Sounds easy, but was actually quite a trial. Imagine this. Neither Daniel nor Jonathan has ever driven a two-wheeled powered device, and never driven anything in China. Of coarse the first thing that needed to happen was Daniel and Juam had to drive the motor bike back to the internet cafˇ to get some extra cash from Jonathan. So Daniel jumps on, with a significant crowd of onlookers, has to be shown how to work it, and puts out into crazy traffic with a strange girl on the back. Yikes. He was extremely terrified and all he can say is it was crazy. When he got back she leaped off the bike, wide eyed with fear and amazement that she survived. I then drove Mou Tan back to the shop, and we all went out to eat noodles (seven people fed for $4.00) and we all managed to drive away without embarrassment. We found a gas station, filled up and drove around the lake to Old Dali and nice walled town that is half interesting and half tourist trap.
The first problem was a police roadblock. A group of officers are along the road stopping drivers and checking something. We were motioned to pull over. I just gave a nod and drove on through. Happily, nobody gave chase. Next problem was the scooter. It had symptoms of a clogged fuel filter. Every 5 minutes going down the road it would die. Once pulled over, it would start again and off we would go. That night we stayed at a great hotel ($24) near the town and really enjoyed our freedom although the driving was still very tense, especially with us doubled up on the bikes, plus backpacks. The next day we looked over the town and found a repair shop. We had the fuel filter changed. Total charge, about 75 cents. We then headed up the mountain to find a mountain lodge we found on the Internet. The road was made of hand cut cobblestone and was in great shape. We climbed for hours and finally ended in an abandoned marble quarry. We explored until dark, finding a deep tunnel in the mountain, amazing waterfalls and such. With no more light and no hotel we decided we know the turn we missed, headed back down, found a hotel and decided to try again the next day.
We made the missed turn and the road instantly turned to dirt, loose rock and mud. We banged along in awful conditions for hours without seeing any other traffic on the road. Suddenly we came to a temple and a minivan on the road. With no idea how much further and fearing for out bikes with the load of two on each, two of us road ahead with the van. What a bone-jarring ride! He took us to a gate, which lead to a footpath and pointed down the path, and motioned that it was OK to take the bikes. With us back together, we headed down the very narrow stone paved path. The stone was about 1 foot wide, with a rubble type fill for another foot on each side. It was overgrown with weeds and ran along the hillside. With some apprehension we moved out.
Now by this time we had climbed to about 2600 meters (8500 feet). The hillside quickly became the mountainside, which soon became the side of a cliff. We encountered a landslide and had to haul the bikes over dirt and trees. Jonathan and Roger took a spill, slipping off the rock path. Fortunately, there was no injury so we decided to remove the passengers. Daniel and I rode, while Jonathan and Roger walked.
As the path continued, the ordeal became quite terrifying. The path was literally cut into the rock face, about 4 foot wide, with low projecting rocks above and a shear drop below of several hundred feet to a raging torrent. The rocks were loose and slippery and occasionally missing. The scenery was unbelievable, but we on the bikes saw nothing but terrifying glimpses down the cliff. Around another turn and the path widened into a nice walkway with a railing. We waited for the pedestrians and resumed the trip. Seems as though we had entered some kind of park, a natural reserve with far too many warning signs, overlooks and benches. Where was a little of that concern when we really needed it a few miles back! Our hotel was just a few miles further on, but an ugly encounter with the park police ended our perfect day. Seems our motorbikes were not allowed in the park! We paid the entrance fee, dropped our bags and passengers at the hotel and hotfooted it back out the way we came. Where the trail went from nice to unmaintained, we ditched the bikes in the bushes under a rock overhang and hiked back. The only down side was that the police had confiscated our bike registrations. Could not quite get the story but we were unable to get them back. Oh well.
The mountain lodge was amazing, We enjoyed a family style dinner of Bai food ( a local minority) with couples from New Zealand, Holland, France and Canada. As usual, the locals are not into roughing it in the mountains. There were very few foreigners in Dali. Yunnan is being set up as a major destination for Chinese tourists and the facilities are clearly not targeted to foreigners. So only in the crazy high mountains did we connect with any other english speaking outsiders.
The next morning we took off up the mountain for the top. We started with a huge breakfast, three breakfast sets number 2 (omelets with tomato and onion, and huge English muffin type things, plus four pancake breakfasts, plus two hash brown breakfasts! We ate like kings. They provided us a sort of bag lunch for the hike and we were off. The peak was at about 14,000 feet so we had a pretty mean climb ahead. We passed through a band of bamboo at about 12000 feet that was amazing, all clumping bamboo about 6 to 8 feet tall with leaves as small as half an inch. Looked like our Fargisia's and Himinocalimis Bamboos. This band was shared with a strange pine tree similar to the monkey puzzle trees we saw in Chile.
Toward the peak the trees ended and we had just rhododendrons and wildflowers. We ate lunch at a small pond near the peak. It was identified as a pony washing pond. The kids took a swim in very cold water. Then the rain started. There was absolutely no shelter. We made a dash for the peak, but with the elevation, did not really dash. The rain turned to hail, and freezing and wet we reached the peak, fully shrouded in clouds, took a fast picture and headed down as fast as we could.
That is when I had the five encounters with death. I was so cold my fingers were blue. We were soaked and the path had become very slippery. Each time I slipped and skidded forward but somehow managed to catch myself I had to realize that a fall would have been not only painful, but perhaps deadly. We were 4 hours up the mountain in short sleeves with no cover and no hope of a helpful rescue. Our handy brochure at the hotel made it perfectly clear that we hiked at our own risk and that no rescue would be possible. Jonathan hit a slippery rock and had both feet shoot forward, landing with an earth shaking crash on his back. Fortunately he kept his head from crashing into the rock, and fortunately the rock was flat and smooth. He recovered in perfect shape, but gave us all a scare.
As we dropped elevation the rain stopped and we wrung out our clothes (literally) and arrived back for a most welcome hot shower and dinner. The next morning we were so sore that we could hardly walk!
Our final adventure was to head away from the tourist area on our bikes. We went west, toward Burma and explored the next valley North toward Tibet. Again we had some wild adventures, with a flat tire miles up a mountain road. A crazy drive down with the bike stuck in the side of a 3-wheeled taxi.
We showed up at a motorbike shop at dinnertime, and they invited us in to eat with them. It was by far the best food I had eaten yet on the trip. While we finished eating, they fixed the tire and would not let us pay anything for dinner or the repair. You meet very nice people when you get out of the tourist beat. We stopped in and toured a local hydroelectric plant, observed a 14 km train tunnel being dug, stayed in a local "truck stop" hotel for $4.40 per night, our best bargain. In town we spent $7.40 per night!
Having traveled China from one end to the other the most striking thing I have seen is the land use. Every possible square meter is used to grow food. Every space along the roads, between houses, on hillsides is used to grow corn, squash, greens or something. But what is really amazing is that Yunnan Province produces about 1/3 of the Gross National Product of China and this is almost entirely agricultural. And from what I saw, 100% is planted, cultivated and harvested by hand. The plots are all small and form a patchwork across the land and terraced up the mountain slopes. Amazing numbers of people work to produce the food for the country, many very old, as the children go to the city to work in the factories. Change in China is not yet finished.
With time running out, we boarded a train and headed back. Daniel continued on to Xiamen to catch his flight, and we jumped off at Guangdong, spent the night and headed by bus to Macau. This once Portuguese enclave is now part of China but still separate. We ignored all the casinos - it looked just like Las Vegas - in order the see the Lou Lim Lok Garden, and excellent 4 acre garden built in 1904 in the Chinese style but with a hint of Europe. Other than that Garden I would certainly not recommend Macau. A ferry back to Hong Kong, more business meetings and we are heading home.
