4/17-4/22: Weishan/Mt. Weibao/Dali/Xizhou/Mt. Shibao/Lijiang

Geez louise, it's been a whirlwind tour through Yunnan, with nary an internet connection in sight. Finally, now that I'm sitting in a cafe in Lijiang, I can update you on the goings on. I'm seeing some amazing things, although with the familiar stresses of travel (and the various unpleasant elements of group travel).

On Friday morning, we set off on a cramped bus to northern Yunnan. I have just about zero leg room wherever I sit, and our bus is driven by a highly competent driver with the worst combover you'd see pretty much anywhere, and a tremendously evident do-not-give-a-damn attitude. The roads to the big tourist sites in Yunnan from Kunming are very good, but the other ones, not so much. Think hours on a bumpy dirt road, gravel flying, dodging farmers, cows, goats, chickens and other cars on a windy mountain road built by the PLA, probably on the way to Tibet in the 40s. The scenery is majestic in Yunnan. The roads wind right through rice paddies, where farmers still cultivate and harvest rice the old fashioned way. April is the plowing season, and we saw a bunch of farmers driving water buffalos with plows through their fields. It seems like every road here chose the hard way instead of the easy way, built right into sheer cliffs, but on the other hand, that means incredible views of the towering mountains and valleys of Yunnan. This is one of the most naturally beautiful places I've ever been, hands down. It's not fun, however, to sit in a bus with no shocks for an hour and no soft place to lean your head against, as you go over mile after mile of bad road.

That first day was spent in the old city of Weishan, which has been probably my favorite old city of the three we've visited here, if only because it felt like a place where people actually lived and wasn't mobbed by tourists. You can feel the difference walking in a city built according to traditional Chinese principles, with courtyard houses and cobblestone roads emenating from a central square. Weishan felt nearly European, certainly cleaner and more humane than your average Chinese city. There's nothing really to see there, just a slice of Chinese life. I walked around the city, through a sort of run down park where the old Confucian temple used to be, through the series of gates along the main road on a north-south axis, and even got my first stinky glimpse of village life, walking through the city market (which included freshly slaughtered meat). I also bought a sweet Mao era comic books for children (about a comrade who gets a convoy of trucks through a snow storm with the power of communism...I think) for under a dollar. We ate dinner that night in a lovely courtyard restaurant.

As we drove up the winding road to Mt. Weibao, the Taoist mountain that towers above Weishan, we could see the whole medium-sized town of Weishan nestled between two giant mountains. It's been a continuing theme of this trip, seeing things like that. People seem to settle in the most improbable places, and you wonder just how in the hell they got there in the first place, and how so many of them decided to stay. We lodged the night near the top of the mountain, in a charming little hotel that only had us as guests in the offseason.

In the morning, we hiked the mountain. There isn't anything particularly special about Mt. Weibao, but it was lovely, a misty day in old, mossy, temperate pine forests, with the chirping of the birds as the only noise I heard. I really like walking alone on these mountains. It really calms me, and when I hike them, I feel like I've finally got all my ducks in a row, and that life will be alright. Taoist mountains (the two I've climbed, anyway) seem to have a special air about them. As I walk past the moss on the rocks, I suddenly start to see things from the moss' point of view, and think about living in a world so small and steady, where me walking by is probably the biggest event of its little life. Then I look at the mountains and see how small I am, just as small as that little moss, and what a strange thing it is for me to be so far away from where I was born. I really do think that the reason people build temples on these places is because these places do have a special air about them.

After a deliciously fresh lunch, we bussed out to the ancient city of Dali. Dali is another one of those most improbable places for human settlement. It used to be the capital of Yunnan, and beyond that, the capital of the ancient Nanzhao Kingdom, a kingdom of the Bai people that, at its height, extended from Sichuan to Burma. Even today, it has over half a million residents. Yet the whole of the city is enclosed in a mountain valley around an alpine lake. It's unspeakably gorgeous. The old city is enclosed within a set of old walls, and the streets of the old city are wide, cobblestone streets decorated with fountains and gates. The mountains surround the city on all sides, but the valley is so flat that if you climb one of the city gates (a scant three or four stories high), you can see the whole city, and the lake below it. The catch is that the Yunnan government is fully prepared to pimp the city out. It seemed like there was nothing in the city at all except cafes offering western food and stalls selling cheap trinkets. I enjoyed Dali despite it all. I had probably my weirdest food on a stick moment (a whole fish! on a stick! Sweet!). We also had a blast at a dance club in the city that night, where the DJ obligingly played "I Will Survive", succeeding in sweeping us all up on the dance floor along with some goofy looking middle aged Chinese men, and I led the crowd in a chant of "Go China!" in Mandarin.

The next day, we got a lecture at the brand new Dali University from a Bai Professor who studies the culture of the Bai people. Dali is interesting in that the city has never really been considered "Chinese" for the vast majority of its history. Dali is a city of the Bai people, who have a different ethnicity, culture and language. For one thing, as our guest professor unfortunately spent a lot of time on, the Bai believe in free love before marriage, and hold a bunch of Bakhtinian style festivals throughout the year where people have sex with whoever they want to, and commoners and nobles mingle. The facilites at Dali University, btw, are insane. This is a beautiful college campus by any standards, with lovely faculty housing, great manicured lawns, and a breathtaking view of Dali and Erhai, the lake around which Dali is built.

After the lecture, we headed out to the Bai village of Xizhao, where we met a Bai host family. It's a surreal thing to walk around a minority village and see people walking around, going about their business in the elaborate Bai traditional dress. We visited a dye factory, where the Bai make Dali's famous blue tye-dyed batik fabric. After that, I headed to my host family's home. They had a twenty two year old daughter for me to talk to, so it was really quite pleasant. Honestly, their home probably has more square footage than my place back home, and a view to die for. A weird thing about a village home in Dali: Dali is China's main source of marble. In fact, the word for marble in Chinese is "Dali Stone". So, in and around Dali, it's the cheapest building material outside of concrete. As a result, this house, which didn't even have a toilet connected to a plumbing system, was covered in marble: marble tables, marble floors, marble everything. It was like spending the night in the Parthenon.

I took a nap in the afternoon, and then watched TV with my host daughter. There was a great show on set in the Qing Dynasty. The main villain was a Chinese guy with a ridiculous moustache and powdered wig. I couldn't tell whether he was supposed to be an actual Westerner or just a turncoat Chinese, but he would occasionally punctuate his eeeevil chinese statements with odd english phrases and wicked laughter: "That's great" "Of course" "I'll pay cash" "Two birds one stone". Pretty much the best TV I've seen since I've been to China.

I also, unfortunately, spent a lot of time on the toilet. I'm not going to go into great detail, but bad traveller's diarrhea, with almost constant stomach discomfort, hit me for about a week this week, the worst possible time, since it meant going repeatedly in the most awful bathrooms in China. I threw everything I had at it, pepto, immodium. My host family also gave me a ridiculous cocktail of pills, a weird orange drink and a tablet that worked for about a day, and then the nightmare returned. The Chinese, btw, are not shy about diarrhea. In fact, whenever I tell them, oh, I have stomach problems, they straightaway ask me, oh, do you have diarrhea? Finally, faced with going in some of the most nightmarish bathrooms I have ever been in on Mt. Shibao (basically, just a damn trench), I gave in and went for the big guns: a course of antibiotics. Although I feel bad about not beating this on my own strength, I have to say, the antibiotics worked pretty much immediately, and I'm up and at 'em again.

After that, we went to a market and shopped for dinner. Let me just say that I know that the pork we had that night was fresh, because I saw the pig it was carved out of. I helped out in the kitchen when I could (I have no idea how to cut up a slab of pig), and took notes as they threw together a delicious meal I unfortunately couldn't really enjoy because my stomach was wrecked. I do, however, have to say that one dish, my host family dad's favorite, didn't really appeal to me. For whatever reason, they didn't keep leftovers in the fridge, but just put them under a fly hood on the dining room table. There was a congealed bowl of pork, pickled vegetables and fat sitting under there, and the host family dad took it out. I assumed he was going to throw it out or do something with it. Nope. He threw it right back in the wok and cooked it. The result was the same disgusting white goop that had been sitting there before, and he insisted I try some. Well, what could I do? It wasn't awful, but it also was pretty much as bad as you might imagine.

We went that night to see a bonfire party that the Bai villagers had organized for us. The Bai women, in full costume, did an amazing elaborate circle dance with batons to a band of horns, drums and gongs. It was an incredible thing to see, something you'd never expect to see in China of all places. I've been seeing a bunch of stuff like this in Yunnan, and it strikes me that I've never thought I'd ever see something like this in my life. It's seriously straight out of National Geographic, a whole other world, and I'm so grateful for the chance to see it.

The next day, we travelled out to the Buddhist mountain of Shibao, first making a stop at a collection of caves containing Buddhist statues and reliefs. These statues and reliefs are remarkable pieces: layers of elaborate relief work, intricately posed Buddhas and monks dating back to the Tang dynasty, with that familiar Tang simplicity. It got me pumped for visiting the Longmen caves next week. However, Shibao has a bunch of interesting features besides just the stunning pieces of statuary. First of all, the statues show signs of western influence (including stunningly realistic portrayals of foreign monks). Also, the art work is evidence of the fact that Yunnan never used to be part of the Chinese sphere: it contains a relief that depicts the Nanzhao court, as different from the Chinese imperial court as you can imagine. Finally, Shibao was a Buddhist appropriation of a site that was formerly the center of a Bai fertility cult. As a result, there is one shrine that has as the central idol a stone pudendum, surrounded by Buddhist iconography. Really quite amazing, to see mother worship that open and that integrated into mainstream religion.

We stayed that night on the monastery on Mt. Shibao, which is an incredible sandstone peak with a set of temples and giant Buddha statues built on the edge of ledges. Unfortunately, Shibao does not recieve the visitors or the revenue that some other sacred sites do, and as a result, the upkeep of the buildings has suffered. The giant statues of the Amitabha Buddha that overlook the monastery are just stunning, however, and I climbed to the peak to get some breathtaking views of the surrounding countryside, all the way to Erhai. We had some delicious vegetarian fare for dinner, and after dinner, got to ask the old layman caretaker about Buddhism and the monastery, which was pleasant. We stayed the night in the monastery itself, which was incredible. However, it was also cold and we were all crammed in one room. I went to read and write for a while, and came back late. I went to what I thought was my bed, set my stuff down, and started to climb in, only to hear my classmate Nick ask, "Dylan, what are you doing?" It was so dark, I had got the bunks confused and almost got cozy with him. Staying in the monastery was really incredible. It was a beautiful place, and I started to have weirdly vivid visions of the Buddha. On the other hand, a rooster crowed for a full hour starting at 4 AM, so that wasn't so fun.

We drove that morning to Lijiang. Our hotel here is pretty much the worst rathole I've ever stayed at anywhere. It's got all the greatest hits of a bad hotel room: weird stain, awful smell, broken toilet. Luckily, I get out of here tomorrow. Lijiang itself is a nice old city, winding alleys framed by towering mountains, including the glacial, Himalayan giant of Jade Snow Mountain. Lijiang, like Dali, is not primarily Han Chinese: it's the center of the Naxi people, an ethnically Tibetan people numbering about three hundred thousand. The Naxi people have an elaborate animist religion called the Dongba religion, and also use the only living ideographic language in the world (in a nod to tourists, all the signs are translated into Dongba, although Dongba was traditionally mostly used for scriptures. We got the wonderful opportunity to witness a few Dongba priests perform a ritual to Su, a nature spirit who, the Dongba religion teaches, was the half-brother of mankind, and was given the natural world. When man takes from nature, he therefore must appease Su's wrath. This is done through an elaborate ceremony involving calling Su out of the trees using drums, ram and conch horns, bells, and dancing, and offering him flour and a chicken (whose life was spared this time for our sake). Again, another one of those incredible, can't believe I'm here experiences. I really find it interesting to see these sort of lost, premodern spiritualities in action. The Dongba belief is that there is a world beyond this world but located right in this world, and that if you have the right knowledge and perform the correct rituals, you can access it. This is something that has a lot of power for me, or at least a lot of interest. Their conception of the spiritual world just seems so different than ours.

Unfortunately, Lijiang is pretty much totally mobbed by Chinese tour groups, so I don't find it all that pleasant, even though it is really gorgeous, and nice when not packed. It's also another one of those cities that the Chinese have engineered entirely to focus tourism. I don't see evidence of any other sort of economy here. It's also really disturbing to me how much the Chinese exoticize and objectify their minorities. The Naxi are part of the scenery here. There was one disturbing video I got sucked into that advertises having your honeymoon in Lijiang. The honeymooning couple are dancing around, singing, and the Naxi are smiling knowingly at them, while doing their work. Finally, the Naxi say, oh shucks, the heck with it, and just start dancing - as if they really have nothing better to do than entertain the Han. This is really the Han attitude towards ethnic minorities, and it makes me kind of queasy.

Today I walked around Lijiang, to a great overlook called Lion's Hill, where you can see the whole city and Jade Snow Mountain in the back. Jade Snow Mountain is really incredible: eerie, even, a testament to how much bigger the world can be than us, a jagged peak towering high into the sky. I also visited the Mu family mansion. The Mu were the native chieftains of the Naxi, lords of Lijiang and suzerains of the Ming Dynasty. They built a mini-Forbidden City in Lijiang, a lovely little spot with great views of the city. It also contained some Tibetan murals, that are unfortunately badly damaged, but must have been remarkable back in the day. I finished the day off with a Naxi sandwich, which was pretty much the best thing ever: a local bread called baba (think a fried, thick naan), a fried egg, Naxi-style goat cheese and pork. It was the kind of greasy, heart-stopping treat that Elvis would have flown to him if he were still with us. Damn good.

Well, I've written my fingers off tonight, but it's been a busy week. Tomorrow, I head to the Tibetan town of Zhongdian, renamed Shangri-La for the tourists, to spend my birthday weekend. I'll keep in touch!