Lugu Lake,
China
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
The Book didn't say much about the lake, but it was on the way to Chengdu from Lijiang so after chillin' at Mama's for a few days, I headed up to rest and relax by the lake run by the Mosuo Tribe. The Mosuo are one of the few remaining matriarchal societies left in the world. They don't have the concept of marriage and the women seem to run the show. When a girl turns 15, she can choose her mate and invite him to come over to her room for the night as long as he returns home in the morning. There are no strings attached and if she tires of him, she just closes the door and the 'relationship' is over. These "Walking Marriages" sounded like a great idea. If there is a child born, she raises them and the baby belongs to the mother's family. The place I stayed was one such place where there seemed to only be women in the entire house. They did everything from cooking to construction work. As I walked passed, I couldn't resist the name of the hotel, The Goddess of the Girl Kingdom Hotel. They had some beautiful rooms there right on the lake and they invited me to have lunch with them. It's little things like this that really make me start to notice how different an experience I have in China than most western Caucasian travelers. It felt like almost half the time the locals would invite me to have lunch or dinner with them and I'd end up eating with the family. The farther away you get from the main tourist trail the friendlier the people got (at least for the most part which I'll go into later). I think it also helps that my Mandarin had progressed beyond survival Chinese and had moved on to very light conversational Mandarin. My favorite part of the hotel was the private internet room facing the lake and the AV room with a huge TV and full surround sound stereo system for Karaoke and movies. I managed to negotiate the price down to 50Y per night which was a real bargain for what you get. The first place I tried to stay in from the Book, Husi Teahouse was a real shit hole. The room itself was right on the water, but the shit hole was horrible and the showers were like a 5 minute walk outside and down an alley. Since I had been staying in 15/20Y dorms since my friend left, I figured I was due for a splurge and some well deserved luxury in order to recover. The lake was just what I needed. It was quiet, peaceful and had reasonably clean air. Unfortunately, the people that I met were part of the chain smoking team from Portugal getting training for the Olympic cigarette smoking competition next year in Beijing. Sara, besides being a champion smoker is also a photography student in Dalian and actually uses film in her camera. This is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen since the turn of the previous century. It was like something out of an old movie with Clark Gable or Greta Garbo in it. I had to take a black and white photo in honor of this ancient technology. People actually put a roll of light sensitive plastic into their camera to imprint images on them. But I've seen some of the results from her website and her pictures are beautiful and very candid. She gave me camera envy and showed me just how crappy my little digital 3.2 MP camera is.
The book says that there is no way to get to Xichang unless you are willing to hike it out, but I had heard of a bus that will take you to the main train line from Kunming to Chengdu. The trick is finding the 'bus' station in Lugu Hu. I must have asked at least 20 people where the "can go far" bus station (keu yuen zhan) was and got at least that many answers. After walking around for hours, I gave up and just asked the girls at my hotel to get me a ticket. She ended up walking me to the station well hidden inside a hotel on a side road. The bus was supposed to come about noon, but didn't get to Lugu Hu until about 1:30. It was supposed to take 8 hours to get to Xichang in order to catch an 8:45 train to Chengdu. I knew it would be close, but I figured there had to be other trains as well. So we were about an hour + late leaving, but that wasn't the problem. An old lady had some kind of stomach thing going on and stopped the bus every 30 minutes. Finally, the bus driver got tired of it and had an official meet her at the next town and took her off the bus, but we had already lost too much time to catch the train. The other problem was that my lungs were pretty much shot by this time and any air irritant set me off on a coughing spree that rivaled any SARS epidemic. Unfortunately, a local decided that he was going to smoke in an enclosed bus directly underneath the no smoking sign. If you look closely, you can see the No smoking sign in the window above his friend's head.
No Smoking
Through my coughing fit, I managed to ask him to put out his cigarette, but he refused. We got into a pretty heated argument until I almost threw up on him while coughing. He begrudgingly put out his smoke, but threatened to "kill" me. When we got off the bus at the next stop, he wouldn't stop shaking his fist at me. After trying to apologize for his inconvenience of not being able to pollute the air in a small enclosed space, I finally told him off amazed that my Mandarin was good enough to yell at him. Rosetta Stone really works!
Well needless to say that we missed the 8:45 train. We got to Xichang about 9:30, but the only problem was that the next 3 trains were sold out for sleepers so I had to wait until 5am for the next train. I met a couple locals from Chengdu that took me out to dinner and helped me secure a ticket on the 5am train. They were great and made an otherwise unbearable travel day into a more civilized journey. 27 hours later, I finally arrived at Sim's Cozy Guest House.
