Yunnan Report and Happy Boxing Day

That is a late Merry Christmas to all our dear friends and readers. We had a very strange Christmas in a very strange place. We only returned a few hours ago and are blurry with the lack of sleep and general sensory overload that comes with travel. We have been to Yunnan Province in the far southwest of China. We flew into Kunming and traveled by bus to Dali, where we spent most of our time before heading north to Lijiang and back to Kunming (and Shanghai) just this morning.

The weather was glorious with full sun and the bluest skies we've let into our lungs in months. Temperatures were in the high 60s and low 70s, which was a real treat for December. When we flew into Kunming it looked gray and concrete, which is what we had just left, so we got on the bus and went straight to Dali, a small traditional town in a setting like Salt Lake City with a giant lake to the east and a long front-like mountain range shadowing over to the west. Dali is China's backpacker paradise with many ex-pat run bars and cafes serving up pancakes and burritos and all the comforts of home. It's also the traditional home of the Bai--one of China's minority groups, who entertain foreigners with their colorful tie-dyed outfits and outrageous headdresses. The hippies love it there with all that color and the cheap marijuana that traditionally dressed older women sell out of beaded fanny packs. We couldn't help but get sucked in with all the good coffee and English menus, so we stayed at the Bai Family Inn--a nice family-run place with rooms set around a courtyard with a lovely collection of potted camelias--for three nights at just over five dollars a night. We also got hooked on an Indian restaurant, where we had a great Christmas Eve feast of daal, chicken masala, veggie pakoras, and plenty of naan.

The Chinese seem to think that Christmas Eve is the actual holiday we celebrate and Dali has its own special tradition, where children in Santa hats run through the streets after dark attacking people with silly string and cans of Christmas tree flocking. No one seems to know where this original take on Christmas tradition came from, but we joined in with retaliating cans of foam we hid in our sleeves, so when kids came up to us yelling "foreigners, foreigners" and sprayed us point blank in the face with flock, we could surprise them with some spray of our own.

We eventually left Dali and spent Christmas day in a bus for a beautiful four-hour drive north through the foothills of the Tibetan plateau north toward Lijiang, another traditional village (this one inhabited by the Naxi minority group). Lijiang is a beautiful town with a maze of traditional slate-roofed buildings and a 20,000 foot glacier-clad (including the southernmost glacier in the Northern Hemisphere) monster of a mountain backing it. The town is unfortunately overrun with Chinese tourists (yes, it is their country after all, but the Chinese have a very different way of traveling--think Disneyland, senseless photography, megaphones, and matching ballcaps--that doesn't suit the Western sense of adventure). We got out of there after a few hours and took the sleeper bus back to Kunming.

This is becoming more of a travelogue than I intended, but I have to talk about the sleeper bus as it was a lowlight of our trip. Having had positive experiences in sleeper trains in China, we thought the sleeper bus would be just as pleasant, but we were definitely wrong and spent the night snuggled up to three Chinese men in the equivalent of a king-size bed with nothing to separate us from their greasy jackets and rotten-teeth bad breath. The bus had forty bunks in two levels and that added up to 80 stinky feet, 80 hacking lungs, and about 40 cigarettes. The smell was unbearable and I slept with my dust mask on (little help) and Peter hung his head out the window almost the whole time (pretty damn cold on those mountain passes). The worst part (well, hard to say what the worst part was) was that the advertised 12 hour ride was several hours shorter, and we ended up in Kunming at 4:30 in the morning. We were allowed to stay on the bus and sleep until 8:00, but without air moving through the window, we couldn't handle it and decided to head out into the city. Well, the city was of course dead and we were too, so we took a cab to the airport and got on the first flight to Shanghai we could (with a three hour pit stop in industrial river-town Wuhan).

Shanghai never seemed so clean and orderly and we're happy to be home, though the clean air was undoubtedly refreshing and the naan and espresso soothing to our souls. It was certainly our strangest Christmas but since we couldn't be with our families this year I'm glad we had an adventure.