Jade Belt Cloud Trail
Trip Start
Oct 19, 2007
1
10
70
Trip End
Ongoing
Dali,
Yunnan,
China
Monday, February 11, 2008
Something I ate, some stomach bug, or maybe all that dust I consumed when I got knocked over in that field (see Blown Away post) hit me hard that night. I had been feeling a bit off before I hit a cafe for a bite to eat late afternoon. I sat there for a couple of hours writing, too distracted with by a sudden flow of ideas (mental diarrhoea?) to pay attention to anything else. When I got back to the guesthouse I had chills, muscle aches, a headache, a rebellious tummy and a truckload of dust in my hair. I curled up in a shuddering ball for an hour or two. Finally, reasoning that I could at least do something about the hair, I had a shower then turned on the heater and electric blanket and contemplated taking some Chinese medicine cure-all I had picked up in Kowloon the last time I went to Hong Kong. The pack claimed it could crush, kill and destroy almost all of my symptoms. Unwilling to take medicine (especially not of the crush, kill and destroy variety) on an empty stomach, I ate the emergency mini-snickers I had in my bag (the next morning when I was no longer feverish I took another look at the medicine box and it said to take before eating...oops). When it is possible that I might go gallivanting up a mountain, or just wander far enough to get hungry (note: when I get hungry I become extremely tetchy) I generally have an emergency supply of chocolate in my bag to keep me going until I can find real food, which, when one is near Chinese tourist attractions, is never more than an hour (thus the "mini" snickers). That I ate the emergency chocolate for dinner, despite the fact that there was a restaurant one floor below my room is testament to how vulgar I felt. The medicine was also vulgar, but 2 hours later, after being tormented by fever dreams heavily influenced by the crappy drama/soap on TV, the shivering and nausea stopped.
Mum's response to the forlorn text message I sent her, was that given my "no fear" attitude to food, it was bound to happen sooner or later. OK it is true, I am not at all particular about hygiene and other such considerations in my choice of dining venues... I like street markets and little hole in the wall vendors. That extra layer of grime in the wok makes the food that much more tasty. One of my favourite eats in Wuhan is a place affectionately dubbed "The Rat Place" because we have heard rats scuffling and fighting (or perhaps something more x-rated than a little rodentesque tiff) in the ceiling on more than one occasion. Mum herself is a big fan of the Rat Place. As are Tanya, Petra, Em and John. Mum also became a practitioner of what is known as the 5 second rule (I don't know who was responsible for this, but I suspect it was Petra, who would consider the waste of good food a sort of blasphemy). It goes like this... if you drop something on the table (no matter how icky the surface of the table may be) you can still pick it up and eat it anyway, as long as it is within 5 seconds. We decided nasty germs would not possibly be able to jump on the tasty morsel in such a short space of time. Hurm. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger?! But the thing that annoyed me with the whole fever/nausea thing that night was that in Dali, I had been eating entirely at nice cafes and restaurants. Except for some "baba" bread I bought in Xizhou and some street snacks in Kunming, I'd been eating at respectable joints in Yunnan!
The next day I felt delicate enough to refuse eggs at breakfast and severely regret the cup of coffee. I walked up to the chairlift for Zhonghe temple (on Cangshan mountain behind the old city of Dali). On the way there, a motorcycle taxi guy followed me, continuously nagging me to get in the cab. Finally, feeling slightly woozy, I turned around and told him I was feeling sick and if I did get in his cab, as he was insisting, I would almost certainly puke all over the interior, so please just sod off and leave me alone. He did. I felt guilty about taking the chairlift up the mountain, instead of hiking up but I figured I'd better take it easy. Besides, I'd been moving pretty slowly all morning so I'd arrived too late to do the hike anyway. Turns out it was a good thing too. The views from the chairlift up to the temple were fabulous. I forgot about my stomach for a bit while gazing up at the snowy peaks, across the valley to the lake (which look way better from a distance than it had the day before when I'd stood on its shore) and at the tops of pine trees just metres away to the accompaniment of cheerful (had flutes and stuff playing in the background) warnings in Chinese not to light fires unless you want to spend the rest of your life incarcerated, which were blaring out of loudspeakers connected to the chairlift.
I went on a short walk to a stream trying not to be bothered by the big slabs of rock on the path. It appears the signs warning of falling rocks are not there for nothing. Indeed there was a part of another trail where you had to climb over a tree that had fallen onto the path from a cliff top far above, leading me to wonder if they ought to add some more signs warning about falling trees too. I even got yelled at by a soldier at one point for stopping to take a photo of the valley. I considered reasoning with him that the likelihood of getting whacked in the head by a falling rock where I was standing or getting whacked in the head by a falling rock 10 metres away while walking, was probably much of a muchness, but thought better of it deciding he might well whack me on the head for being cheeky, making the rocks a moot point.
After a lunch of spicy oily noodles that I prayed fervently would not cause me trouble later (this obviously begs the question "Why eat them, if I was worried about the repercussions?" to which I can only reply I was hungry, they were the local specialty, I'd never had noodles like that and, most importantly, it really is beyond me to say no to spicy food) I headed off on the Jade Belt Cloud Trail over to Gangtong temple 12 kilometres away. I made it half way, to a place called 7 dragon maiden ponds, where a police officer informed me the Gangtong temple chairlift had stopped for the day due to strong winds. After my run in with Dali's winds only a day ago, I was not surprised. I have a great deal of respect for any wind capable of toppling me over in the middle of a field. Those winds were as strong as what I've felt when I've ventured out during typhoons in Kaohsiung.
The 7 dragon girl ponds (actually a 7 storey set of waterfalls) reached by scrambling like a nitwit over a whole bunch of huge boulders, were beautiful. Actually all the scenery up on the mountain was beautiful. I was surprised to find that the people there were in general far more courageous/foolhardy than the people I'd come across on hikes in Taiwan. They were trying to climb over stuff that I balked at. Admittedly almost all over them ended up turning back too, but fear of slipping on wet rocks while perilously high up and falling to my death in a stream bed a hundred metres below lead me to seek an alternate route up long before them. It was quite a change for me. I was used to being warned off doing silly stuff by others in Taiwan.
I made it back to the chairlift and down it just before it closed for the night. But something disastrous happened on the walk back. I was desperate to go to the toilet. The spicy noodles were trying to find an express lane out. Two blocks away from the guesthouse, I was already doubled over in the street with stomach cramps. When I got back, the guesthouse door was bolted from the inside (a precaution no doubt necessary to keep it from getting ripped off by the wind). I banged on the window frantically (thinking there was no way I had crawled the last two blocks back there, only to poop my pants on the front doorstep) and would have kissed the French guy who came to my rescue and wrenched the door open for me, had I not been in far too much of a hurry. Darn spicy noodles. Chilli is the bane of my existence. Why do I have to be addicted to the stuff? Why God, why?!
Despite the near poo disaster at the day's end, the scenery and the smells (pine and moss) made it a blissful day nonetheless. I wandered around mostly in a beauty-inspired daze and a high caused by yet another day of blue, blue skies. I was most displeased, disgruntled and disappointed to have to fly out the next day. Spending a week in Yunnan was exactly what I needed to recharge. But recharge for what? More of the same? I sincerely hoped not.
