A Brief Exploration of Yunnan Province

            Between our two semesters of teaching, the foreign teachers at Qufu Normal University have almost two full months of vacation.  Many of my fellow teachers set off for two full months of travel around China and southeast Asia.  Though it sounded appealing, as someone with a pretty low tolerance for nonstop travel and also far more paranoid about dipping into my American bank account, I decided to opt for a simpler plan.  I decided to spend about 2 ½ weeks traveling in the south of China with my friend David, who was familiar with the area and knew enough Chinese so that we could get around fairly well without worrying too much about getting hopelessly lost.  A shorter amount of time traveling also made me feel much more justified in spoiling myself, something I definitely took advantage of as we traveled throughout the south.  Our original plan was to check out three cities in Yunnan: Kunming, Dali, and Lijiang.  Unfortunately, the crowds of people traveling for the New Year holiday meant that we weren't able to get bus tickets to our third city, Lijiang.  Still, we made the best of our extra time in Dali and all in all things turned out great.

            I don’t have quite as many interesting stories to share this time, and most of my friends and family seem more interested in what I saw during my vacation than what bizarre things I managed to do, so I’ll mostly be sticking to a brief summary of the more interesting places I visited.  I may cram a story or two in there, but there sadly aren’t too many this time.

#1: Green Lake Park, Kunming

            This was, aside from the restaurants, my favorite part of the city of Kunming.  The park is very large and beautiful.  In the mornings it is mostly quiet and peaceful, but in many areas you can find various exercise classes—tai chi, fan dancing, some sort of very fascinating sword dance, and even waltzing.  By the afternoon it becomes crowded and lively but is still great fun to explore.  This time of the year there is also an astoundingly large population of Russian gulls that have migrated south for the winter and who are extremely bold when it comes to getting food.  So bold, in fact, that you can pay to have your picture taken with a gull eating bread crumbs out of your hand.  We passed on that bit, though.

#2: The Bamboo Temple, Kunming

            This particular temple is situated in the mountains and is famous for its collection of 500 clay sculptures of arhats.  An arhat, as I understand it, is (in Buddhism) anyone who has attained Nirvana.  I believe there are some variations on this, but that is the basic idea.  Anyway, apparently a sculptor created these life-sized clay figures in the late 1800s during the restoration of the temple.  Today, they are lined up on enormous shelves in a series of dark rooms and protected by glass.  Unfortunately, we were forbidden from taking photos so I have none to share with you.  But I can tell you that, while the ability of the sculptor is impressive, I found the sculptures themselves highly disturbing.  They are incredibly lifelike, but have a brightly colored, cartoon-like quality to them that makes them just a little bit eerie.  I had the distinct impression that at some point one of them was going to climb quietly down from his shelf and grab me when my back was turned.  The fact that many of them were crouched in vaguely menacing positions did not help.  I even managed to yank a similar opinion out of David, my travel buddy, though he was still determined to view them purely as a cultural relic.  The rest of the temple, though, was gorgeous, and we also discovered upon further exploration near the residential section that Buddhist monks enjoy satellite TV as much as we do.  Who knew?

The biggest incense burner I have ever seen

The temple kitties

#3:  The Flower Bird Market, Kunming

            This market apparently began selling just what the name describes, but is now filled to the brim with vendors selling everything from snacks to pet rabbits to jade.  It is overwhelming, crowded, and somewhere to bargain heavily, but a blast to explore.  We saw live maggots being sold (yes, for consumption), beautiful scarves and wall hangings, and one stall with the most impressive collection of pipes I’ve ever seen.  This was also where I discovered the fascination the southern Chinese have for cowboy hats, something that I found highly entertaining.

Lunch, anyone?

Trying out my Chinese cowboy hat

#4: The Western Hills, Kunming

            The western hills are a section of the mountains just outside Kunming filled with various pagodas and temples.  This was where I decided that the Chinese tendency to attempt to organize and tame nature had gone too far.  I had already seen my fair share of parks reduced to stone pathways and benches with a few scrubs of trees, but stairs up a mountain?  Really?  As if hiking wasn’t hard enough already.

            Aside from the stairs, though, the mountains were a blast.  The most interesting section was the Dragon’s Gate.  I’m not sure of the origin of the gate, but apparently there is a legend that if a fish from the water below the mountain jumps all the way to the top of the mountain and passes through the gate, it will turn into a dragon.  Visiting the Dragon’s Gate requires passing down a very intimidating flight of stone stairs in a dark, cramped tunnel.  But it is definitely worth the experience.

We made friends with a tour group on our way up the mountain

#5: The Golden Temple, Kunming

            Another up-the-stairs-on-the-mountain experience, the Golden Temple was fun but very confusing.  We managed to find what we were looking for—the 4^th largest bell in China that it costs only 2 RMB to ring as loud as you can with the help of a giant log—but after that only succeeded in getting incredibly lost.  The signs posted all over the sprawling trails and roads are mostly contradictory and unhelpful.  Go here for a good session of exploring, but make sure you have enough time to get lost and then get found again.  This is also where my camera ran out of battery for the first time, so I sadly wasn't able to get any pictures of the bell.  But I promise that once David gets his own photos online I will steal one and post it here.

Entering the Golden Temple

I'm not sure what the camel was there for, but it seemed very comfortable

#6: Cangshan, Dali

            This is one of the more popular mountains of Dali, where you can spend an entire day (again, mostly up and down vertical staircases) exploring gorges, waterfalls, and spectacular views.  We also made friends with a woman named Feifei and her family, who were in Dali to celebrate New Year’s.  Feifei’s husband is French, so she and I bonded over our slightly broken French and some casual mocking, while David tried out his Chinese on her parents.  We took a cable car about halfway up the mountain, then walked up, across, and back down to Dali Old Town.  After a few calculations David and I added our walking/hiking distance up to about 13-15 kilometers in roughly 3 ½ to 4 hours.  We had a spectacular time, but our calves were definitely not happy with us the next morning.

#7:  Old Town, Dali

            Thanks to New Year’s (a holiday that in China only ends when you run out of fireworks and other explosives), cancelled travel plans, high tour prices, and one case of food poisoning (for once not me!), we didn’t do that much sight-seeing in Dali.  However, Old Town is somewhere I would be happy to explore for months on end.  It is filled with market streets selling beautiful hand-crafted items (mostly made by the Bai, a Chinese minority that is a large part of the Dali population), almost every kind of food you can imagine, and tons of shops to explore.  One of my favorite sections of the town is a little park where I could hang out in the sun and read for hours, occasionally peering over the top of my nook to people-watch.

            I think perhaps the biggest lesson I learned on my vacation to Kunming and Dali was the importance of choosing the right traveling partner.  For some people this might mean finding someone with a similar sleeping schedule or budget, but I discovered that perhaps the most important thing to consider when deciding whether or not to travel with someone is your respective tourist personalities.  This was somewhere where David and I fell down flat and it caused a considerable amount of trouble for both of us during the roughly 2 ½ weeks that we spent traveling together.

            David is a cultural tourist.  He studied anthropology and religious studies in college, focusing a lot on China.  David’s interest lay in things like temples, pagodas, monuments, and interacting with the locals in Chinese.  David is, in my opinion, the more admirable tourist.  He takes time to learn about the history and culture of the place he is visiting and has a deep respect and sense of awe for everything he sees.  For David, being a tourist is a serious business.

            I am not a cultural tourist—or a serious one—by any means.  The best label for me would probably be something like an environmental or nature tourist.  While most people are looking at the temple, I’m hugging the trees that surround the temple or petting the temple cat.  I prefer the hike up the mountain to whatever it is we’re hiking up the mountain to see.  While receiving a lecture on the importance of a building or street, I’m usually nodding along and pretending to listen while looking in the other direction hoping to see something like a playground.  For me, an interaction with a local is usually asking them what the best hiking trail is or if I can play with whatever animal is nearby (a question which often attracts strange looks in China since pets aren’t really a big thing).  I want to be a serious tourist, and I’ve tried several times, but I can’t help it.  I don’t know how many of you ever watched the PBS show “Arthur” when you were kids, but I remember that I always identified with D.W. in the episode when the Read family took a vacation to Washington, D.C.  At the top of the Washington Monument D.W. points out, “We were down there and we looked up here.  Now we’re up here and we’re looking down there.  What’s the point?”  I remember feeling similarly when my own family went to Washington, D.C.  Why were we here when just a short drive away in Maryland or Virginia there were horses everywhere?

            To sum up, David and I clashed quite a bit when it came to our interests, although we tried to do it as politely as possible.  I happily followed along to look at temples and pagodas, although as the weeks wore on I became increasingly convinced that there is only one pagoda in China and it jumps from location to location in order to drive tourists mad.  I listened as David explained the historical and cultural significance of buildings, food, clothing, and language but rarely came up with a response more creative than “uh-huh,” “wow,” or “that’s interesting!”  I tried to ask intelligent questions, but usually I retained no information whatsoever so it was a fairly useless endeavor.  Still, I did my best to be a willing participant in the required tourist activities.

            David, in turn, politely didn’t notice when I was clearly not listening to or understanding a word he said, and chose not to ask questions when I seemed to be forming a deep relationship with something like a patch of woods or a boulder.  He also would sigh and wait patiently whenever I stumbled upon any form of animal.  Dali especially must have worn him pretty thin.  Dali, a popular hiking and cultural destination, was filled with ex-pats.  And where there are ex-pats, there are pets.  David would stop several times a day to notice that I was no longer following him obediently down the street but instead had bolted into an alleyway to cuddle with someone’s golden retriever.  After a few days, I’m pretty sure he started scouting for dogs and steering me down side streets in order to avoid them before I was able to notice their presence.  In fact, my attraction to dogs—and theirs to me—was something that by the end of our trip David had started to make fun of me for.  I managed to find them everywhere, and he found it highly amusing when the dogs in our last hostel at one point started following me around.  I give him great credit for not taking offence that I could barely hold an intelligent conversation with him but was reduced to a cooing, baby-talking puddle at the sight of anything furry.

One of the many dogs I formed a friendship with in Dali

            Dali was perhaps the best of the two cities for our opposing personalities, as it combined what I loved—beautiful nature and lots of hiking—with what he loved—anything culturally significant.  There was still the trouble of my preference for a silent communion with nature and his for a conversation about whatever historical relic we were exploring, but we managed.  The differences between our personalities are actually, in my opinion, more likely to cause the greatest problems when we go back to the states.  When we go home at the end of our respective teaching experiences in China, David’s friends and family will be able to ask all the questions they like about his pictures.  He’ll be able to tell them exactly what everything is, when it was built, and everything interesting about it.  My friends and family will be treated to a shrug and a response of, “I dunno, some temple on a mountain.  But they had a camel!”