By wink of water

We’ve been traveling around the Yunnan province, in southwest China. Some observations:

Rice terraces in Yuanyang

The food is amazing. We have a guide and he orders for us, but our one day on our own we had an equally good experience. Dishes are quite spicy. The meat is not always of the highest quality, but usually seasoned well. The vegetables a another thing all together. Fresh, crisp, tender, unbelievably flavorful. In the US or in France, too often veggies are overcooked, soggy, and totally bland. Here they are cooked perfectly.

Meat market in Yuanyang.

Sanitation leaves a lot to be desired. The hotels have flush toilets, though often with a strange smell that suggests the composting variety. On the road it’s nothing short of disgusting. The best version is a tiled hole to a landing spot four feet below. It’s not an outhouse; in fact, it’s much dirtier than that. You can see sunshine and what others left before you. There is definitely no toilet paper. You squat over the hole and each hole might be separated by a 3 foot wall to protect your privacy. In the worst case, it’s a ten hole hall that you actually have to pay for. Instead of a hole, there’s a trough running the length of the hall, of a depth of a foot. The leavings just sit in this tiled trough for god knows how long. One assumes that said trough is sprayed down periodically and the waste washed into some sort of receptacle, but one doesn’t think this happens very regularly. Women’s bathrooms have the additionally lovely detail of used feminine hygiene products just sort of laying out in the open. The stench is overwhelming.

The conjunction of old and new is one of the most interesting and confounding things about China. On the one hand, there are spanking new highways, high speed rail systems, and a billion people with cell phones – including those living in primitive conditions. On the other hand, the water is not safe to drink, sewage systems are often nonexistent, and farmers graze their ox on the shoulder of the road. Nothing brings this home more clearly than the mess of driving. Sharing the road are brand new Toyotas, BMWs, and Fords; overloaded and unstable dump trucks that travel very, very slowly; motorcycles with helmetless riders (including two year olds gripping the handlebars); tractors or motorcycles that have been modified into three wheel vehicles with a covered bed that can carry goods or people; bicycles; and horses pulling carts. This on four lane roadways as well as smaller village streets. C’est un bordel, c’est clair.

Having the guide has been a life saver for travel. These no way we could have driven ourselves, and the bus ride to Yuanyang would have left me a trembling mess. The terraces were worth the voyage – hard to imagine the centuries work it took to transform mountain upon mountain into sculpted farmland. They are breathtakingly beautiful. We have also seen many interesting markets with the minority villagers doing their daily shopping, heavy baskets resting on their backs and tied around their foreheads. Our guide brought us to a lovely restored Qing house that is now a hotel that we never would have found otherwise. It had 42 courtyards, a gorgeous garden, and intricate carvings on all the doors and awnings. Unlike some other examples of Qing architecture, this house wasn’t destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, as the state used it as a hospital and government offices.

We are off to hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge, the deepest in the world. I think we’ll see a lot of European backpackers.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2011 at 1:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.