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The Land of Elephants and Tigers
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I never thought I would say this about China but...sometimes it's terrifying to walk on Chinese streets late at night. Like when hundreds of little children are setting off fireworks and firecrackers with reckless abandon and there's no adult in sight. Welcome to the Chinese New Year.
As I walked along the streets of Jinghong, the unbelievably sleepy capital of Yunnan's Xishuangbanna region, during the Chinese New Year's Eve, I experienced for the first time legitimate fear of walking around at night. Not because I thought I would be mugged or attacked, but because I was afraid that one second I would turn a corner and the next second my head would be burning. For the first few hours after I arrived in the city, I was constantly on edge and jumpy as families passed time till it was dark by setting off rings upon rings of firecrackers. The fire would chase around the ring, exploding as it hit every canister, making machine gun sounds as smoke poured from the fuse. The city felt like it was under attack for most of the afternoon and I could not get used to the gun shot-like sounds. I kept running into small children running loose from their parents, chasing their friends with sparklers and firecrackers, and then tossing the still smouldering sticks over their shoulders as the spark and pop left.
The adults that were around were store owners sitting outside their shops in plastic lawn chairs, wearing sarongs and smoking cigarettes as the fluorescent lighting reflected off of their greasy, slicked back hair. They would lazily blow the smoke out into the air as they watched their children set off fireworks in plastic bottles on the sidewalk. I would duck and dodge the burning bits of paper falling from the sky as groups of children would stand on the roadside holding giant sticks aimed straight up, where every five seconds loud pops and cracks would shoot out of the end as fire and sparks licked out the side. As midnight steadily approached, the fireworks increased in intensity. I didn't think that the concentration of fireworks could have gotten any more intense, but as usual, China proved me wrong. Once it hit midnight, there literally wasn't a single second for twenty minutes where you couldn't hear fireworks exploding above you. Looking outside, the sky was a veritable mix of oranges, reds, greens and yellows as family after family banished away the demons and brought in the New Year. The year of the Rat had officially begun.
When I woke up the next morning on the actual day of the New Year, the city had completely changed. There were no more firecrackers, no more fireworks.
The only sign of the burning craziness from the previous night was the lingering smell of smoke, the heaps of red paper from burnt explosives, and the CCTV New Year special blaring on all televisions throughout the city. The city returned to its habitual state of slumber, as people sat underneath trees, being tickled by the fingers of sunlight shining through the branches, playing card games on the street or smoking angel tobacco through a special bong found in Yunnan. I was plenty happy for the machine gun sounds of firecrackers to be gone so I could explore Jinghong, a city I quickly fell in love with.
Jinghong, and the Xishuangbanna region, felt like a different country from the moment I stepped off the bus from Kunming. All signs were written in Chinese, Pinyin, and Dai - a Thai-script language of the area's largest minority. The architecture paid homage to the region's mythical status in China as the Land of Elephants and Tigers, as the Southeast Asian buildings with statues of tigers, elephants and ethnic Dai designs, dominated over a landscape practically devoid of ugly modern Chinese architecture. Ethnic Han Chinese also were losing the battle in dominance as ethnicities from all over Southeast Asia - Burmese, Thai, Dai, Lao, and then even Indian - all jostled together on the street and in living spaces, wearing sarongs and flip-flops. There wasn't a single thermal underwear store to be seen!
The pace of the city was also defiantly non-Han. During the day, stores, restaurants, buses, taxis - everything was all closed as people hid from the sun to curl up on mats in shady areas for their afternoon siesta. During the afternoon, the only people to be seen in the city are the laowai who are walking around because they don't know better. But as soon as the sun sets, the city completely transforms as store owners throw up their gates, restaurants spill out onto the streets, and the Jinghongren pour from their homes to flood the streets, the parks, the stores. They are everywhere and taking care of business at a time that most people in Kaifeng would be heading to bed. The violent change in schedule was completely unexpected. So was meeting up with Rose and Steve.
I met Rose and Steve, a German couple finishing up their masters in Shanghai, when we were hosted by the same Couchsurfing host in Hong Kong. We parted ways after Hong Kong, but as I walked down Manting Lu, one of the more popular streets in Jinghong, I spotted Steve inside of MeiMei Cafe. And then Rose ended up messaging me because they knew that I was going to be in the area. So the three of us ended up spending the rest of our time in Xishuangbanna biking around the countryside in search of Dai villages, discovering the local hot springs (I got to be 19th century decadent for the second time in two weeks!) and playing "Name that 80s song" while biking along the roads and fields in the land of tigers and elephants. And for the longest time I didn't think Steve was German because his English was perfect. No accent, nothing. Finally I asked him why he spoke so well.
"Oh, well I spent a year in the United States. I lived in Michigan," he told me.
"What?! You lived in Michigan! Where? I'm from Michigan!" I told him, completely shocked. "I guess that's why I don't think you have an accent."
I found out he lived outside of Muskegon and we quickly got into a talk about Michigan and how it's changed during the eleven years he's been away. It was really bizarre to be talking to a German in Xishuangbanna about Michigan things, like Big Boy and how his host family almost took him to the Mint Festival - my hometown's annual get-down of all things mint, the city's largest produce.
But as soon as we could, the three of us bolted out of Jinghong. The city had jacked up its rates to exorbitant prices because of the New Year so everything was ridiculously expensive and over-priced. What was worse though, was that all of the buses and modes of transportation out of the city stopped working during the New Year, leaving us stranded in an over-priced city for a few days, bleeding our funds dry. So, as soon as buses started running again, I jetted out of there to more southern destinations so I could head into Laos, leaving Steve and Rose to hop on a boat on the Mekong River to take them to Thailand. I was almost to Laos and I couldn't get there fast enough.
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| 32. | The Land of Elephants and Tigers - Jinghong, China Feb 06, 2008 (  5 ) |
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