Day 4 - South, Sickness and Shangri-La

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Trip Start Aug 08, 2006 Previous
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  Lijiang, China
Thursday, August 17, 2006

Day 4 - South, Sickness and Shangri-La

Today started with a very, very early cab ride to the airport. We're almost an hour away from the Beijing airport, so with the 8:00am flight, and the "Be there an hour early", an hour long cab fare, and a little prep time to get all our stuff together and turn in hotel keys and stuff, it was pretty sickly early. But when we got outside Beijing was just stirring into wakefulness. There were plenty of cabs and work crews out already. Lot of pedestrians and bicycles roaming around on their errands to and fro. I guess this is normal for a big city... never really sleeping.

When we get to the airport, checking in is pretty easy. Then we get directed to our gate, which is way off to one side. This airport appears to be mostly for international travel

Waiting in the airport for our plane

. I was pretty concerned about flying with congested sinuses, so I went looking around the airport for some kind of Sudafed or decongestant stuff. Kept striking out. Tons of magazines and _fruit_ of all things... great big fruit stands selling melons and apples and Asian pears (go figure) and a couple of things that I've never seen before, but no pain relievers, no decongestants, no vitamins, nothing really that you'd _need_ last minute for travel plans. Rebecca eventually asked and the lady simply said "no medicines in airport, you have to get them elsewhere." Ok, so I'm kinda outa luck.

We found a little sitting place next to our gate. They eventually called our flight and huge mass of people swarmed into the little gate area. The typical Chinese "I don't need no stinking line" mentality. We sat and waited, and when it thinned out, we walked up, gave them our boarding passes and walked through the little door... into the outside... complete with full Beijing smog quotient AND all the nasty exhaust from a fully-functioning international airport. We had to walk about 30 yards (sorry, _meters_) to get only 2 little busses that already kinda looked like clown cars. A wall of windows with bodies and faces pressed up against the glass. A couple of overhead slit windows with arms and legs sticking out in random directions. There was a sliding open door in front of us and what appeared to be a wall of bodies

Waiting in the airport #2

. And I think to myself "How are we going to fit 2 people AND stuffed backpacks between that and the door?" Oh! And there are people behind us. Well, I take off my pack to get it in front of my so I'm not whacking people every time I move and we just jump in. The living mass of humanity just kinda melds around us, and I think about what an amoeba feels like living amidst 20 million of it's brethren. Movement impossible without kinda swapping places with it's neighbors. Anyway, we get packed in and we wait. Heat and pressure and stale air kinda stifling, and I say out loud to Rebecca "This better be worth it."

You see, we didn't really know anything about Lijiang, and here we were, getting ready to hop on a plane to fly there for 4 days. It's on the opposite side of China and the cost to get there is more than all of the rest of the money we will spent on the trip put together. All the food and lodging and cab rides and admission tickets and souvenirs and everything else. All that put together is less than the cost of getting to this place we'd only heard about. How did we hear about it? Well, before I ever left the states, when were planning this crazy adventure, Rebecca and I would sit on Skype and talk about things we wanted to do. We surfed around loads and loads of web sites looking for ideas and one day I found a single page written by some guy who had lived in China for 2 years and traveled all over the country on business

Wierd wares in Kunming airport

. He had all these self-titled awards on his page like "biggest surprise" or "worse than you'd even think". It took a little while to realize that every award he had (and there were about 12-16 of them) where specifically about air quality. He had one award, I don't remember what it was called, but it was essentially the best of the best, and he had this beautiful little picture of a lake and a pavilion and snow-capped mountains in the background. And it was simply titled "Lijiang". I saw this, sent the link to Rebecca and said "Where is Lijiang?" and she looked around on her map and said "Oh no... we're not going there." And I said "Why?" and she says "You know how I'm up at the top right corner of China? Lijiang is down at the bottom left corner of China, it's on the opposite side of the country!". Ok, so that blew that idea out of the water. But the pictures looked really, really nice. So we kept looking into it more, we both found web pages of people that had been there. The pictures always made it look stunning, and the all the stories were things like "My favorite place in China" or "Best part of the whole trip by far", "This was our favorite place to stay on the whole trip", "This place is breathtaking!". In fact, after several days of looking into it, I couldn't find a single story about the place that didn't absolutely rave about how great it was. Rebecca found the same and were intrigued. So she went and checked on prices. It was expensive, but doable. When I travel, I like to have a pretty big financial "cushion" in case something goes drastically wrong and you need to fly back early, or get emergency healthcare or you need a get-out-of-jail card

Fresh fruit in Kunming airport

. This trip would eat up the whole cushion, but we decided to do it, not really knowing much else about it. Not knowing where we were going to go, or what we were going to do when we got there. So here we were, sitting on a totally cramped bus, which was going to take us to a plane that was going to fly to Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province. And from there, we would take another flight to Lijiang airport.

Our little sardine bus eventually took off, and it dumped us off next to the squat little 727 airplane that had probably been in service longer than I've been alive. We walked up one of those rolling stairways you always see in the movies, but never in real life and we sat in the very back 2 seats of the plane. People kept getting on behind us, and there were some people that missed the bus, so we had to wait for them, but when all the passengers were on and the doors closed, I found that once again the seat to my left was vacant. Score! That meant that Rebecca and I could spread out a little during this 3 hour cruise. That turned out to be pretty nice because I was able to lie down sideways and put my head in Rebecca's lap for a little while. The combination of dry airplane air and lying down and stretching my neck out kinda cleared my sinuses for a little while. Long enough that the landing wasn't excruciating anyway.

What kind of fruit is that

We landed in the Kunming airport and had to hop off, even though it was our same plane connecting through to Lijiang. We wandered around the airport for a little bit and found a huge stall of herbs and teas and such. It seems that the Chinese people will put just about anything in hot water and call it tea. I'm very curious what all those things were, but I don't really want to try while I'm feeling so nasty. And more fruit stands too, I got pictures of one this time. Oh! The other thing I noticed while on this little break. The air in the Kunming airport, complete with airplane exhaust, it already a hundred times better than the air in Beijing. At this point, I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like at the end of the trip.

Back on the plane and on the Lijiang. A short little flight this time, 30-45 minutes I think. And we get out at Lijiang. The air quality is even better than Kunming, plus a little bit of that crisp bite you get in mountainous regions. We're already loving it. It's clear blue sky, plenty of light clouds and you can see the mountains in the background. Rebecca is vibrating with a contained excitement of being back in a place that is so natural, clean and clear. It's already looking like this was the right decision.

We get out of the airport, and there is a big white charter-like bus going into the city

On the bus to Lijiang

. Only 30 quai, we're a little skeptical because there is almost always a scam somewhere, but there seem to be a lot of people from our flight taking it. So we get our seats and hop on. Again it is a 45 minute ride into town. The bus crawls up hills it is really under-powered to take with a full load, not to mention it's fighting against other buses, taxies and these crazy exposed-engine tractor things. We seem to have mountains on all sides and it appears that the majority of the fields we pass are growing _sunflowers_ of all things. I've never seen so many sunflower plants. We pass through some small villages, and the architecture in general already seems more ancient. We approach the city and it quickly turns into the bubbling metropolis. Lots of people, lots of cars, lots of little cultural differences we'd read about, but now we're seeing. Like the Naxi women walking around with their baskets strapped to their backs. (more on them later) The city is already larger than we expected, but the environmental quality is so nice, we don't care. It's quite possible this city is as big as Portland. If not geographically, then definitely population-wise. So we drive through lots of little intersections, the driving is just as crazy as Beijing. Nobody seems to care about lines or rules or right-of-way, and it makes them all very aware and competent drivers. At this point I'm starting to form the opinion that American drivers are really pretty lazy and unskilled. We drive on auto-pilot way too much. I've met too many people that consider it ok to read the paper, put on makeup, text message on your cell phone, _talk_ on your cell phone (guilty!) and whatever distraction while driving

Loony Lijiang Lorrey

. We all meander around on auto-pilot because everything is so predictable. And while there is a certain order to that that is comforting, one of the most dangerous things in driving any vehicle is complacency and unawareness. And those are two of the things you see endless amounts of on US roadways, but you'll never see on Chinese roadways. Some of the craziest driving stunts I've ever seen in a car have been while in cabs or busses here in China, and never have I seen an accident. I gotta get a video of this at some point.

Anyway, the bus eventually drops us off in this little hot white courtyard where several busses and taxies are parked. We sit in the shade for a second to figure out what our next move is, and *poof* all the people vanish. It's like a finely tuned machine. Everybody else knew exactly what they were doing and where they were going, and they hopped in their cabs or cars or bikes and were off. Within about 5 minutes, we were sitting in this courtyard all alone. Rebecca got out her book to call a hotel and make arrangements, but we didn't know which one to call. She wanted me to make a decision, but I was still recovering from flight/bus nausea and getting pretty sick again on top of that. I didn't really care and definitely could do any critical thinking like I usually do. I eventually pointed to a little cafe called "Packer's Cafe" that is purported to be friendly to foreign travelers and have internet

Sunflower fields forever

. So my suggestion was to go there, get online and recover Rebecca's old email to find this one hotel I discovered before I left. That was agreed upon and we flagged a cab, pointed to the address and she (the first female cab driver on the trip) was off!

After a quick ride, she dropped us off at a big intersection and pointed "in there." Lijiang is divided into "new town" and "old town". Old town is the original city that goes back thousands of years. It is unique for an ancient city in that it had no walls. Almost all ancient cities from the time had walls and motes and stuff to keep off invaders. As far as I understand it, Lijiang was a big of an economic center and didn't really need to fight off foreign invaders so much because that is where they went for trading. It's either something like that, or the local people (the Naxi, pronounces "nashi") were do laid back, they didn't really care when occupied. Anyway, there are no cars allowed in Old Town, so the taxi driver took us to the main opening of old town and dropped us off and said go in there a little ways and you'll find it.

There was a swarm of people already milling around the big square. There is a beautiful carved 30 foot cliff-face at the entrance as a kind of welcoming. And a big functioning water wheel, and a big square with inlaid stonework and trees and stuff. We walked up to a police hut-like thing and asked for directions and they pointed us down one of the main walkways and we headed that way. There was so much going on all around, in all directions, that it seemed like we were a ways into the city. Now that I'm writing this at the end of the day, I know that we were pretty much right on the doorstep. Down from the police station, next to a little babbling brook, which there are dozens of in this Old Town..

The entrance to Old Town

. we crossed a little wooden bridge and entered a cafe a little larger than my living room. The walls were covered with photos from various expeditions, notes from previous customers and plants and knickknacks. There were 3 computers against a wall, 5 quai per hour (that's about 75 cents) for internet access. Rebecca sat down to get her email and I just sat down to rest. I was feeling pretty wiped out, but the fresh air and adrenaline from the amazing new environment was keeping me going. Rebecca found the place I'd located before leaving, it's called the "Zen Garden Inn." It supposedly had free WiFi, antique furniture everywhere and a reasonable price. We spent a great deal of time getting directions from the employees at Packers Cafe. They were a bunch of younger kids, probably in their 20's or 30's, running this little cafe, playing online games, and making up a decent fair of food. After the ordeal yesterday with my "bad medicine" house, I was a little scared off from Chinese food. So they had a Hawaiian pizza on the menu. I decided to give it a try. While they were cooking it, we pulled out our maps and such and they tried to show us where the Zen Garden inn was. Only one of the staff spoke any English at all, and our map had mostly English names on it. I kept trying to figure out why it was so difficult, I thought maps were pretty universal... that was before I got an idea of what this town is really like. We eventually got an address so Rebecca could ask for directions and then our pizza came.

Inside Packers cafe

You can see some pictures in my pics for this day. It was a little strange looking, but very VERY hearty tasting. Imagine a kind of super-sweet whole wheat pizza and your getting close. The crust was very dense and solid, which wasn't so bad, it had actual chunks of ham on it, and pineapple, which is pretty common in this country, so that part of it was pretty standard. The cheese on the other hand.... well, lets saw that the Tillamook cheese factory is on the other side of the planet and it's probably never been heard of by anybody within in a thousand miles. But who puts cheddar cheese on a pizza anyway? That's not really the point I was trying to make, I was more trying to get at the idea that the kind of developed flavored cheeses we're used to in western countries is completely foreign here. I think all the cheeses in Lijiang, and probably the whole Yunnan province are hand made... with actual cheesecloth... from either goat milk or yak milk. So, add the previous heartiness to a bunch of handmade yak cheese, then poor some kind of sugar syrup over the whole thing... to the point that touching it gets you all sticky like grabbing a half-eaten jawbreaker. Then you have our nice little Hawaiian pizza from packers. It wasn't like home, but it wasn't half bad either.

After the crazy sticky pizza, we set off to find out hotel. We walked for awhile, and every little while a street or alleyway would go shooting off the current street at random times and in random directions

Outside Packers cafe

. We stopped to ask for directions and discovered that Chinese don't really take directions seriously. Or maybe we westerners take them too seriously. When we ask for directions, we kinda expect someone to help us sort out at least the next leg of our journey. But here in china, they pretty much just give you a direction. And if your lucky, that direction will line up with the street your standing on. So we stop, ask a shop keeper, they get all confused, then point down the street and wave their hands around. I ask Rebecca what they said and she says "pretty much just said go this way awhile." So we eventually got on top of that and asked again _after_ every major intersection. Then if we passed it, they would tell us to go back. Aha! 2nd grade logic deduction finally pays off!

We walk past hundreds of shops, past houses and hostels and restaurants and bridges and rivers and people dressed in local outfits and butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. We make lots of wrong turns, but we keep plodding on. We eventually find a little alleyway with "Zen Garden Inn" posted on the side. We walk down, find the entrance and go inside. Rebecca asks about a room and.... they are full. Oh man! After that trek I'm pretty wasted and need to rest. We ask "What are we going to do?" and from standing outside the door of Zen Garden in, I can see another place, just 50 feet away, called the Moon Inn

Hawaiian pizza at Packers

. We walk up there and ask for availability. They've got lots of rooms open. So we take the nicer one that has beautiful picture windows and intricate woodwork everywhere. Only 400 quai a night, which is exactly $51.28. So roughly the same price at a motel 6. But the view.... It's like something out of a movie. I tried to take a panoramic shot and when I get back home and use a real computer I'll try to stitch it together and present a decent facsimile of the view.

Now that we were all settled in our first room in Lijiang, we both thought it was a good idea to go out and see what we'd gotten ourselves into. The problem was that with all the traveling, hiking and deliberating over arrangements, I wasn't in too good a shape. I had a fever, I was coughing pretty consistently, and was constantly blowing my nose. So I decided I needed to take a nap. I flopped on top of the bed, and Rebecca said "Lets make you a taco" while she wrapped all the bedding around my nearly-sleeping body. It was a very pleasant temperature outside, but we both remembered "Starve a cold, feed a fever" saying, so I decided to nap in a super-warm environment hoping the fever would break. A couple of hours later, it did... I think I just needed the sleep. While I was sleeping, Rebecca went out and tried to find a pharmacy-like thing. Turn out there is one in Old Town kinda near Packers Cafe. She did her best to explain the problems (here I am, giving her ample opportunity to practice her Chinese) and they gave her two boxes of pills

Traveling in Old Town by horseback.jpg

. When she got back and I woke up, we opened one of them supposedly for "congestion" and it had 2 lines in English:
Acetaminophen
Sudaphedrine
I think spelled those right. Anyway, it was Tylenol and Sudaphed! Score! I took 2 got ready for some dinner and some adventure. It was approaching dusk by this time and we took another look outside our window and it was just as stunning as daylight. I tried to get a panoramic shot of that as well. We locked up our room and headed out to explore this new city.

Once we got out of our alleyway, the streets were just as lively as before, actually more so. There were people everywhere, some foreigners, but mostly locals. It seems that Old Town is the happening place to be for all the people in New Town as soon as the sun goes down. We just turned randomly at each junction we came to and eventually ended up in a big square. There was small tower there as a gateway to a steep path up the hillside which we will have to checkout in the next couple of days. There was one walkway very populated by people, it was divided by a small stream and there was a high road and low road element to it. There were fully hopping open-air bars on both sides of this little thoroughfare

Beautiful rivers in Old Town

. All the bars had 2 stories, and we noticed something that seemed completely normal for this place: One group on the 2nd story of a bar on one side of the street would start chanting a song, we're talking a whole table or more. Then a group on the other side of the street would either repeat it or chant one of their own, I couldn't tell which. As far as I can tell, this went all night until the whole place shut down, which seems to be about midnight. I'll try to get video of it tomorrow night.

We randomly stopped at a little restaurant with open walls on both sides. The menu had "Naxi hot and sour soup" Being sick and all, soup was sounding nice, and I figured the local Naxi cuisine might add and interesting spin on one of my favorites, so we decided to go in. Well, about 4 feet inside the doorway we walked into a spice cloud. I don't know if anybody has ever made blacked red snapper. But you take your snapper, absolutely coat it with blackening spices, which is mostly cayenne pepper, and then blacken it on a super-hot griddle with no butter or anything. It's really quite good, but it will kick your ass with spiciness if you aren't ready for it. The other problem is that cayenne pepper smoke attacks your lungs the way the spices attack your taste buds, so it's really hard to breathe. This is what happened to us when we walked into this restaurant. We should have known from that and the fact that the place was empty

Is this heaven? no it's Lijiang

. We should have just turned around and walked back out. But I wasn't really thinking clearly and the idea of hot and sour soup was really appealing. Well, we sat down and ordered the soup, and Rebecca got some Chinese dish and "fruit salad". Ok, the fruit salad sounded pretty good... until it came out. There this mound if white-ish "blah" sitting on a plate. I really honestly didn't know what it was when it got put on the table. I kinda avoided it and tried the soup. Which was A) really really hot, and B) really really boring other than that. It was pretty much just a bunch of lettuce and some carrots in a super-hot broth. I ate a couple of carrots and tried to nurse a non-existent hunger. I saw Rebecca dig into the pile of white blah and I asked "What the hell is that?" and she said "Why, fruit salad!" and I'm like WTF? Then she explained that it was pieces of melon, banana, pineapple and tomato (?) all buried in a soup of mayonnaise. Uhm.... GROSS!

We eventually decided we'd had enough of that and decided to leave. Rebecca had the "fruit salad" packed up to go. She said he plan was to go back to the hotel room and rinse it all off. So we carried it around for awhile and wandered up and down the streets some more. We got the end of Bar Row and realized we were back at the main entrance. So we turned back to the only street we really knew... the one that Packer's was on and we started walking back towards our hotel

I'm carrying a lot of stuff

. We got lost a couple more times, but walked past a little place called "The Well" which had a couple of signs outside the door advertising "apple strudel", "chocolate cake" and "ice cream." We looked at each other and both said "apple strudel sounds good!" So we went inside and ordered strudel and ice cream. The strudel was a little different. Imagine a giant crepe, about 4 inches tall and 6 inches wide and about a foot long, made with pie crust so thin and tough that it has the consistency of notebook paper, and the whole think is stuffed with barely-cooked apples. Now cut out a 2 inch cross section and sprinkle a little powered sugar on top. That is what came on our plate. The apples were great, the cinnamon was good too, but it was the ice cream in the other bowl that captured our taste buds. The strudel was "meh", but the ice cream was pretty amazing. It was very light and creamy, and sweetened in some way I've never tasted before. It was definitely vanilla, but not like Bryers brand back in the states. It was smoother than that, and the sweetener wasn't direct and powerful like white cane sugar, and it wasn't overly flavored like honey. I wasn't earthy like brown rice syrup. Hmm, I suppose it could have been white rice syrup. But whatever it was, it has this wonderful smooth non-standard sweetness to it. It was really pretty amazing ice cream.

While at the Well, we saw on the menu "Muesli, fruit and yogurt" for breakfast

Panoramic out our window

. For the 2nd time that night, we looked at each other and said "That sounds good!" and we decided we were coming back in the morning to try it for breakfast. After we finished up, we walked out the door, turned left and started the process of "Could you tell us how to get to this address?". I think that time we only had to ask about 3 times, instead of the 9 or 10 the 1st time.

We eventually made it to our hotel, which was mostly quiet and asleep. We made it up to our room, which was right over a major walkway in the town, so it was moderately noisy even at that hour, so we closed the windows and blinds and hit the hay for a much needed rest. Tomorrow will be another adventure in this wonderful place.

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Bathroom at Moon Inn	Radio Tower at night	Naxi Wood Carving	View out window at night
Nighttime shopping in Lijiang	Naxi candle girls	Gate off the square at night	Kirby & Rebecca getting ready for dinner
That's a big teapot!

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