Beijing II – The Great Crawl of China

Just try and get through now, Mongolians.

“People everywhere, heads on ‘em like mice.” I muttered to myself as I pushed against a thousand Chinese tourists at a Beijing bus station. Where I had heard that strange old expression and in what dank corner of my brain it had been hiding I have no idea, but it was apt. It was Mayday and it seemed that half the population of the biggest country on earth were squeezing me slowly towards a row of articulated buses. I felt stared at, claustrophobic and deeply uncomfortable. And I wasn’t even at the Great Wall yet.

 My time in China had stretched and stretched again. In Shanghai, lulled by a taste of domestic bliss and the comfort of a stable group of friends, I had stayed longer than planned. I had extended my visa but that extra month would be gone in a few days. I couldn’t extend again unless I got a job, and honest work brings me out in hives. I had to leave. I wanted to go to Mongolia but, true to form, I was cutting it fine to get my visa in time. On a cold Beijing morning at the start of May, I strode through the Russian quarter where Chinese merchants hailed me in Russian. “Nyet, comrade,” I replied in my best Bond-villain Russian. I soon reached the embassy district where white seeds floated down like snow and accumulated in drifts in the gutters. Behind them were high razor wire fences. Every hundred meters a straight-backed guard stood in front of an embassy gate. Cuba, Portugal, Vietnam, Algeria, the nameplates read. But all the guards were Chinese. Eventually I found the Mongolian embassy visa section –  a little hut outside the wire with faded signs and one glass window which only opened for a couple of hours a day.

            I waited for an hour with a group of Chinese businessmen and a young French couple and handed my photocopied, half-filled-out visa application form to a bored young Mongolian who stamped it without a glance and gave me a receipt and the address of a bank where I needed to pay an $85 ‘rushed visa fee’. I sighed again at the nonsensical stupidity of tourist visas and walked to the bank. I would get my visa a day before my Chinese visa expired – it would be a close run thing. But before then I had four days to kill. I’d better go to the Great Wall, and I knew the perfect day.

One of Beijing's surviving hutongs.

            China, in case you haven’t heard, is big. And crowded. Really crowded. In the 6 weeks I had spent on China’s east coast, I had felt continuously mobbed by teeming swarms of people. I grew up in a town with more cows than people –  even some of the people were more cow than person – and big crowds have always unnerved me. The sound of a hundred crossed conversations, the smell of a thousand armpits, the feel of eyes constantly scanning and flitting across me, the feeling of being trapped – it just freaks me out. And, maybe as an offshoot of this, I don’t queue well. Ask me to line up for more than, say, 3 minutes, and you’ll be treated to a particularly unattractive display of righteous indignation and agitation, peppered with uncontrolled outbursts of swearing, often resulting in new and interesting combinations. Once I accidentally said titting wank-whore, which cheered me up a little. So, in the interests of boredom and self-improvement, it was time for some exposure therapy – like the arachnophobe who puts his hand in a jar of spiders, I was going to the Great Wall of China on a public holiday.

Gulp.

            At the bus station ladies with high visibility vests, whistles and walkie-talkies channeled hundreds of milling tourists between steel handrails, gesturing and yelling at us to pack in tighter. Half an hour later as I shuffled onto an idling bus, I was reminded of cattle being prodded and cajoled into an abattoir. Happily the conductor was armed with an electronic ticket machine rather than a high-powered stun gun and I bought my ticket and pushed into a window seat. Outside the traffic was thick and the smog thicker. We jerked and swerved onto the 4 lane ring road that had been built where Beijing’s ancient and imposing city wall once stood. For two hours we crept north, past concrete buildings and concrete factories and though shallow valleys full of boxy towns and rice paddies. On the hill tops stands of trees faded into the brown haze. The valleys became narrower and the hills closer and the road twisted though scraggily forest. I got my first look at the Wall next to a crowded carpark where we stopped for ten minutes as dark-windowed tour buses bulled into the flow of traffic.

            Near Badaling, the most heavily visited part of the Wall, our bus joined a procession of identical buses which edged though a huge carpark nose to tail, each one stopping only long enough to disgorge their cargo of giggling, chatting tourists. Once off my bus I looked back and counted ten more buses before the road disappeared around a corner. Each one held around a hundred people and a new bus offloaded every two minutes. The broad street to the Wall was lined with souvenir stands, themed restaurants and ATMs. It was all concrete made to look like stone and plastic made to look like terracotta – like a grey, Chinese Disneyland.

            At the top of the street the Wall itself loomed and I was swept along in a crowd that bottle-necked at a gateway through the pale stone. On the other side, hundreds of people mobbed the ticket counter. As I pushed my way to the front, a fat man with a scowling baby face pinned me hard against an iron railing and screamed a question at the ticket seller. Surrounded by thick stone walls, my heart fluttered and I fought a deep urge to punch the sweaty folds at the back of his neck.

            On the far side of the metal turnstile, the crowd spread out onto a viewing platform bordered by low crenellations on three sides with the Wall proper at its back. I walked to the edge and leaned into the void, peering down a long valley. I breathed deep, enjoying the brief respite from the crush of flesh. To my right the Wall zig-zagged and climbed steeply before turning at right angles, running along a high ridge and dissolving into the brown smog haze behind me. It was amazing to think that this wall, stretching 8000km from the ocean to the desert, had stood for a thousand years, keeping Mongolian marauders at bay. Except that it didn’t and hadn’t. The Great Wall is, in fact, a series of unconnected walls built over centuries, often many miles apart. This part of the Wall, the one you see in tourist brochures, was built in the 16^th century and had been extensively rebuilt in the 1950s. Most of the stone from the Wall was nicked over centuries by locals who used it to built their houses which in turn were bulldozed to build highways and factories. And anyway, the thing didn’t work. Mongolians were always getting though, over or around it. Oh, and you can’t see it from the moon. Sorry.

            So what I was standing on was a copy of a wall that, frankly, was never so great anyway, built around the time my Granddad was building his bungalow in the Melbourne suburbs.

The Wall.

            Still, it was impressive. Twenty meters high in places and ten meters thick at the base, it tapered to a paved path broader than an English country lane fenced by low walls. Made from massive blocks of irregular grey stone, it at least looked like it had stood for a thousand years. Every few hundred meters the path ran through a square tower peppered with archers’ slots. I rejoined the press of polyester t-shirts, cameras and chatter climbing the steps to the top. There’s nothing like an Asian country to make a man of 5’10” feel tall and I peered over an unbroken river of heads which snaked up the hill and disappeared into the smog half a mile away. I’m rubbish at judging crowd numbers but we were ten abreast and hard against those in front and behind. There had to be 100,000 people. I shuffled along in the pack, fighting back low shivers of panic and wondering how many legs I would break if I launched myself into the scrub below. After I while I decided to enjoy it and abandon any idea of personal space as I shamelessly held up traffic taking photos of the ghostly, grey-brown landscape. By the time I got off the Wall three hours and two kilometres later, I had a full SD card and an empty stomach so I ate at a traditional Chinese burger joint and looked for a bus.

The crush for a berth on the last train to Beijing.

            The line for the buses made the scrum on the Wall look like the mosh pit at an Enya concert. It was 400 meters long, five people wide and grumpy. By my calculations it would take around a decade to get to Beijing. At Badaling train station a ticket seller waved me away and said something which may have translated as, “Not likely, son.” I joined the crowd anyway and darted inside just as a pair of guards closed the doors. An hour later I hid in the middle of the queue as we shuffled past three overworked ticket inspectors and flashed an old receipt I found in my wallet in place of a ticket. A couple of hundred people filled the platform in the late afternoon gloom. I battled my way onto the next train, mercilessly elbowing in front of children and grannies and generally acting very Chinese. After 90 minutes wedged between a bicycle and a toilet, I was back in Beijing.

By the time I got back to my hostel and fell into bed, I figured I had given my fear of crowds and queuing a good licking. Although I am now terrified of public holidays and tourist attractions. You win some, you lose some.

Beijing I – Flash Mob

Why do Chinese McDonald's need armed guards? Let me explain...

One of the delights of traveling to far-off, exotic destinations is the chance to experience cultural performances and sample the food. In Beijing, capital and grandest city of the most populous country on earth and repository of three thousand years of unbroken cultural history, this is especially true. So as we stumbled out of a Grand Master Flash concert, lurched in front of a speeding taxi and bellowed “McDonald's,” at the startled driver in drunken five-part harmony, I imagined a Lonely Planet contributor sneering disdainfully though his dreadlocks and stupid Tibetan beanie.

“Fuck you, Starshine Dylan Oakencock or whatever you fucking name is,” I laughed – possibly manically –  to the uncomprehending cheers or the four Englishers I had met earlier. Because, and let’s be honest for a moment, traditional music and dance – with the exception of Irish and Pirate – is crap. Especially so in most of Asia where it’s all puppets and screeching. But Grand Master Flash had been fantastic. Sweaty, old, hopefully drug-addled, he had made us dance like it was 1983, to mis-paraphrase Prince. This is the man who had simultaneously invented one of my favourite types of music – turntableism, and one of my favourite words – turntableism.

My four new BFFs and I sat in the still-stationary taxi, four in the backseat. I have, of course, forgotten their names but they were mildly posh so I’ll use suitable pseudonyms.

“Don’t worry,” yelled Chauncy Fobrent-Gleeb, “I speak mandarin. Ma don ards.”

“That’s not Mandarin, you bender,” opined Frosgoat Dimply-Nipples, “you’re just saying McDonald's in a racist accent.”

It seemed to work, however, and we were soon speeding through the night. Far, far away he dumped us in front of the golden arches.

“You all owe me 10 Yuan,” said Stephen Thumping-Bumtrot once he had paid for the cab. To the consternation of our little group, the restaurant was closed, so we did the only sensible thing and broke in to steal a menu.

“We can show this to the next taxi driver,” exclaimed Sodomy Feswick-Hyphen. So we did, and lo the next one was open, although it was getting light by then. We all ordered an obscene amount of terrible food, some of which we even ate. The rest we threw at each other.

At 6am, furry-mouthed and covered in gherkin, we called it a night and retired to our hostel, secure in the knowledge that we had acquainted ourselves thoroughly with China’s rich cultural heritage.

Shanghai to Beijing – Smog and Concrete

The sleek Shanghai-Beijing high-speed train

'309kmh’, the LED screen above the toilet read as we shot out of a long tunnel somewhere between Shanghai and Nanjing. I rested my head on the double-thick, sound-insulated glass and watched concrete pylons flash past, cables dancing violently up and down as they looped between. The neighbouring tracks ran straight and smooth. Every ten minutes an oncoming train would blur past, the 600kph combined speed squashing it short and buffeting us sideways. Apart from that the train was rock still. Twin cooling towers straight out of The Simpsons belched grey steam into the drizzly sky. Near the cities – Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou – skinny, black and concrete apartment blocks, some half finished, rose and closed together until we slowed into a clean, glass station. At one city, I forget which, I glimpsed a copy of the Empire State Building flitting between the office buildings and blocky tenements. Away from the apartment towers, rows of factories – the biggest I had seen – sat empty with smashed windows. I couldn’t tell if they were being built or pulled down. Between them barges further greyed the sky as they belched and chugged mounds of lime up canals to cement plants. The lime was uncovered and piled so high that the rain eroded poisonous white rivulets into the water.

At Zhenjiang a man got on and stood beside me, looking at my seat number. I moved back to my allocated seat. Neither of us spoke or looked at the other. North of Nanjing, we crossed the Yangzhe river – half a kilometer wide and choked with barges and boats big and small. I counted 50 as we flashed across the bridge but there were many more half visible through the drizzle and smog.

The enormous waiting room at Shanghai's high-speed train station.

The entire journey between Shanghai and Beijing – 1200km, halfway up China’s east coast – I saw hardly any agriculture, a handful of trees, no animals and few people. Just factories, high-rise housing, highways and mud. And over it all an unbroken pall of brown smog. It was the ugliest place I had ever seen. I was glad it was a high-speed train. 

Mao and Friends.

In Beijing I caught the Metro to Tiennamin Square. The square is huge. On a bad smog day – and this was definitely a bad smog day – from Mao’s mausoleum, the gate leading to the forbidden city is just a brown shadow. As I neared the gate, the massive portrait of Mao himself became clearer – fat-faced with too-smooth skin he looked smug, his eyes focused far above and beyond the crowds of Chinese tourists posing for photos. The air was Chinese greybrown, as I had come to think of the colour and it was impossible to say where the sun was. I shouldered and photo-bombed through thousands of camera-toting tourists into the nearby hutongs, or alleyways, looking for a youth hostel I had heard about. For half an hour a rickshaw driver dogged my steps, “You, tour, cheap. You, tour, cheap.” He chirped as I ignored him. When he could, he parked his rickshaw across the footpath, front wheel hard against a wall, completely blocking my path. Eventually I found an alley too narrow for his three-wheeled machine and hid.

Chilling out on Tienanmen Square.

 When I found my hostel, down yet another twisting alleyway, it had been knocked down. All that remained was a faded sign on a pane of broken glass. I wandered for hours until I found a hostel a few miles east of Tiananmen. From a concrete terrace I watched the sun set while an old man exercised his pigeons. They flew in tight, fast loops around and through a twisted tree. The old man in his flat cap and blue suit stood in a courtyard of a cracked red brick house. Their wings beating overhead drowned out the traffic noise and the dying sun shone dimly on the leaves. The old man and I stood still, only our eyes followed the birds as they cut inside each other and swooped and soared. It was strange and beautiful.

Despite everything – the ugliness, the rudeness, the coldness, the inhuman scale of the place – I was falling just a little bit in love with China.

Shanghai – Monsieur Tortue, mon sauveur!

On the floor in a Chinese Metro station. If you're laughing now, you're a racist.

Before I saw Tortoise Man – or Monsieur Tortue, it sounds funnier in French – I had been left a little cold by Shanghai. It’s the name, I guess - exotic, dangerous, sleazy, Eastern Shanghai. So why did it look and feel so clean and safe and sterile? In a couple of weeks in China I had understood absolutely nothing – the language sounded like a Tuvan throat singer raping a duck, the food all tasted like toenails and phlegm dipped in MSG, the people were all unfriendly, closed-faced mucus factories. It was wonderful – just what China should be. But Shanghai seemed different, or rather, not different enough, if you catch my drift. I spent my first week ordering burgers and quesadillas from English menus and chatting to friendly, engaged young people with good English. I kept expecting someone to tell me that I had caught the wrong train and was in fact in Singapore. I should say at this stage that friendly people in Shanghai are hardly the norm. In fact Shanghaiese on the whole are the most fantastically rude people I have met, but at least they’re actively rude – pushing, sneering, eye-rollingly rude –  rather than the blank, apathetic coldness I had encountered in the rest of China.

            So it was with a happy mix of relief and confusion that I saw a middle-aged man in a yellow hard hat holding a walking stick with a medium-sized tortoise balanced on top. Both of them, tortoise and man, blinked slowly and gazed impassively at the steady stream of high-heeled women and speeding taxis on the busy inner-city intersection. I perched on the seat of one of a thousand scooters parked on the footpath and watched for a good 15 minutes. He didn’t appear to be selling it for food, as I had suspected. He just stood there, as immobile as the tortoise.

            “What the fuck is that about?” I asked myself sagely. Why was it balanced on a stick? Was there some significance to the hard hat? It couldn’t be that dangerous, could it? None of the locals even looked twice. I was definitely in China.

            Once I had established that fact I spent the next month completely ignoring it. Instead, I lived the expat life – Singaporean beer, Mexican food and Irish pubs. I moved into my girlfriend’s flat, an anonymous but cozy concrete box halfway up a concrete tower surrounded by other concrete towers so similar they had giant numbers painted on them, for a too-brief but very sweet taste of domestic bliss. In the mornings I hung out of the window and watched the heads of a dozen pensioners moving in synchronized slow motion as they practiced Tai Chi. A couple of times a week men in suits let off fireworks to celebrate a new business venture. The rockets screamed up between the apartment buildings and rattled windows and set off car alarms as they burst and sent sizzling sparks bouncing through 12^th story windows. The businessmen would duck behind trees and benches and slap each other on the back, giggling until their supply was exhausted. Then they would pass around packs of imported cigarettes and go and get drunk. Or drunker. If Alicia wasn’t working we wandered down straight, broad roads lined with hole-in-the-wall restaurants and convenience stores and through underpasses over which even broader, straighter highways ran. Occasionally we caught glimpses of the Shanghai that was – an old man in a blue suit mending shoes next to an ancient single-speed bicycle or a row of wobbly houses with swooping roofs of cracked tiles. But mostly it was straight lines, concrete, glass and traffic.

Laundry day.

Twice we caught the Metro to The Bund where we pushed past the ‘mother tigers’ – middle-aged women, short and stocky with gravity-defying hair and hard elbows who love to storm onto train carriages the moment the doors open and have generally taken rudeness to a whole new level – to get off the train and walk to the river front. On one bank an unrelieved row of stern Victorian sandstone monsters wraps around the river. Across the river, beyond the chugging barges and tourist cruise boats, Pudong rises. With its spires, curved glass and primary colours, it looks uncannily like the city where TV’s The Jetsons lived.

Pudong. Meet George Jetson..

Every night we went out and lived large in the expat Disneyland that is Shanghai. We were joined by a veritable posse of Alicia’s English teaching mates as we hit the best value burger and beer joints, buffets and smoky local dives. It was marvelous. Most nights someone would decide it was a good idea to go to a club. And they were right, because Chinese clubs are fantastic. Young, hip people dress up and sit at high tables that occupy the space where the dance floor should be. They drink warm beer and play nonsensical dice games and scream conversations at each other over ear-splitting Korean screech pop. By the end of the night paralytic couples dry hump each other on couches while fat men with soft hands chain smoke and watch them intently. Our favourite club was a strange, curving place reached by mirrored tunnel. Think of the Starship Enterprise if it had been designed by Liberace and captained by Elton John. Like that only less restrained. The music was routinely awful and every night we were kicked off the dance floor for an hour while an odd little man in a white suit and enormous sunglasses mimed songs that none of us liked. But it had a big round bar in the middle and the $8 cover charge included all drinks. Most nights at around 4am someone would sit up abruptly.

            “Shit, guys. We’ve got class in 4 hours.”

            Everyone would sigh and finish their drinks and stagger outside. The best Mandarin speaker, or if it was a really heavy night just the person who could still speak, would hail a taxi while the rest of us pretended to have sex in a garden bed, or gave each other piggy back rides, or sang obscure 90’s pop ballads. After the taxi ride home, those of us who lived near each other would eat armfuls of grilled chicken skewers and oily fried rice served in a plastic bags before stumbling home.

The crew

Many thanks go out to Adrien, Stu, James, Sean, Dave, Marquia, Dorothee, Greg, Matt, Chris, Claire and especially and always to Alicia for showing me a ridiculously good time and for being my surrogate Shanghai family. After yet another tearful goodbye to Alicia, I boarded a train to Beijing – alone again and armed only with an out of tune ukulele and my native wit and charm. Oh dear.

Shangri-la to Shanghai – Tiger Limping Gorge

An Idiot in distress at the end of Tiger Leaping Gorge

At 2,500 meters I stopped on the trail to re-bandage my knee and wait for the anti-inflammatory to kick in. A cold wind wrapped me in damp mist and I reflected on my first day’s trekking through Tiger Leaping Gorge. It hadn’t gone well, if I’m honest. Before dawn I had trekked the few kilometres through a pre-dawn snow shower to Shangri-la’s bus station. It was very pretty I had enjoyed the novelty but after years of summer-hopping around the globe, I had completely forgotten that snow is made from water. On the bus my top half shivered damply as the heater roasted my feet, but the reek of burning ankle hair couldn’t compete with the distinctive musk of the fat Chinese gentleman who used me as pillow. I stared into cloud and swirling snow that turned to sleet as we descended. At a grubby village strung along the base of a sheer cliff where a mountain stream joined the Jinsha river I leapt off the bus gratefully and walked across a busy bridge to where a small sign marked the start of the Tiger Leaping Gorge walking route in English and Chinese. I had paid my $10 trekking fee at a toll booth near the bridge so when, after three hours of climbing steeply, a local mimed that I was not actually on the path and indeed had not been for some time, I felt a bit cheated. I retraced my steps on narrow winding roads through picturesque villages nestled on steep hillsides full of early spring blooms and thought I’d cheer myself up by getting a few photos. I pulled the heavy camera out of my bag, framed a scene of bucolic, cherry-blossomed perfection and hit the button. Nothing. A horse posed perfectly in front of a misty mountain peak looked at me. “Sorry mate, can’t stand here all day, you know. Got stuff to do,” his watery glare seemed to say. He walked to the edge of frame to have a giant poo. The moment was lost. Battery dead.

Camouflage Idiot on the precarious path.

            By the time I found the path again I guessed I had walked 3 hours and 10km extra. Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the deepest on earth and the narrow pony path clings stubbornly to the edge of steep mountainsides. On the left of the deeply-grooved, rocky path snowy peaks soar thousands of meters while a steep and uncomfortable bounce to the river hundreds of meters below awaits anyone who takes an ill-advised, rocky-horror-picture-show-style jump to the right. Across the gorge another steep wall of mountains rises, shrouded in mist and snow. Alongside the river is the new road. Until it was built in the ‘90s, this precarious pony track had been the only access to dozens of tiny villages dotted on the steep slope. For centuries caravans of ponies loaded with tea had ground this path deep into the rock but now there were only a scattering of Chinese and western tourists and the occasional weathered local walking between villages. I pushed hard all afternoon and eventually crested the 28 steps, a series of evil, rocky switchbacks which leads to the path’s highest point. As soon as I started to descend, I felt a twinge in the back of my knee and within a hundred meters sharp stabs of pain shot up my right leg whenever I put weight on it. As soon as the path levelled out I was fine but any downhill sections became hell. By the time I reached Tea Horse Guesthouse, I was not having a good time. Luckily the restaurant was well stocked with yeast-flavoured, liquid ant-inflammitories served in large green bottles so I medicated myself thoroughly while smashing my first meal of the day. For a few dollars I got an empty dorm. I nicked the blankets off the other beds and lay in the unheated room while a light snow fell.

Chinese toilets are a challenge with a busted knee. At least the view from this one was good.

            In the morning my leg was swollen and sore but by the time I had limped the 10km to the end of the trail, it had improved. After lunch I got a bus back to Lijiang and caught the night train to Kunming where I wandered around for most of the day before catching another train to Shanghai. My ticket said the trip took 36 hours and as I waited with several hundred other people in an airport-style departure lounge, I felt a familiar queasiness. I tried to talk myself out of it but just as the sun set two hours out of Kunming I bolted for the filthy train toilet where I spent large portions of the next 12 hours vomiting into a swaying, jerking hole in the floor as southern China passed outside, presumably. I guess there are worse places to be ill than a Chinese train, but I can’t think of any. Every time the train got near a station, the stern young conductor locked all the toilets, and I leaned my head against the cool mirror next to the door until she deemed us far enough away from civilization. She also locked them at 9pm after the lights had been turned off but seeing my distress she kindly left one open. Twice late at night, she and another man woke me with a flashlight glare to check my ticket. Between bouts of sickness I dozed in my bunk, glad I was in China where people were unlikely to make conversation, and dreamed of the sweet release of death – I tend to get a bit melodramatic when I’m ill.

            Whenever I looked out the window all I saw were muddy concrete towns drained of colour. The hypnotic flash of scraggly trees and rusting poles flashing past the rain-streaked glass triggered more nausea so I closed the curtain and retreated to my bunk. I guess it was just the weather and the way I was feeling but eastern China looked grim and ugly. I wished I was anywhere else.

            Before dawn the next morning the compartment lights woke me and I was well enough to have a banana and some hot water. We pulled into Shanghai station in the cold, grey light and I felt weak under my bags on the platform. Alicia was waiting for me and I limped over and tapped her on the shoulder. It was great to see her and we hugged for a long time before she pushed me away.

            “You stink, you know. And look how skinny you are.” She had a point.

            We walked past huge shopping malls and Metro stations. Everyone was well-dressed in the morning rush, walking quickly to desks in the looming glass towers high above. I felt like a bum in my dusty hiking boots and when we got to Alicia’s tenth floor apartment, I had a very long shower. That afternoon I bought new clothes and felt well enough to devour a huge burger. I was glad to be off the road and in no hurry to go anywhere. For a while, at least.

A different kind of canyon. The view from Alicia's apartment in central Shanghai.

Shangri-la – Yakky Goodness

The road to Shangri-la.

Twenty years ago the town of Zhongdian in northern Yunnan province, China was just another sleepy mountain town on edge of the Tibetan plateau, but then the local government had a brainwave and changed the name to Shangri-la and now it’s a booming tourist town. Of course the town has nothing to do with the fictional paradise that it’s named for but as my bus climbed into a thin blue sky past snow-capped mountains, I was glad I had fallen for their clever marketing gimmick. The road wound through passes nearly 4,000 meters high and this early in spring snow sparkled on the verge and the air that snuck through gaps in my window felt frozen. At a pee stop next to a lonely petrol station, a brisk wind quickly sent me back to my seat. A week ago I had been sweating through Burma and I wasn’t prepared for the cold. The road was an amazing piece of engineering that either clung to mountains or tunneled through them and from my window I peered down sheer drops to rushing rivers of spring snow melt hundreds of feet below. My bus-mates were all Chinese and many of them screamed into phones or hawked and spat into plastic bags but I had started to tune this out as part of the background noise of Chinese travel and gazed out of the window in heated comfort enjoying the view.

            At Shangri-la’s bus station I dug in my bag for the ski jacket I had lugged through the tropics for months. I was glad I never chucked it away – I had come close – as I walked into the biting wind toward the old town. A divided road ran dead straight through the middle of the new town and I walked for an hour past low-rise office buildings, shops and restaurants. None of it looked more than 10 years old. The town stretched along a wide valley floor and behind the ugly concrete buildings, snow-covered mountain ranges rose on three sides. Dirty snow sat in drains and hid from the sun behind bins and lampposts. On the edge of the old town I checked into Kevin’s Hiker Hostel which I shared only with the friendly Tibetan owner and her enormous shaggy dog called Captain.

Shangri-la

            In the morning I hired a bike and spent the day cycling through Tibetan villages complete with fluttering prayer flags and grazing yaks. The roads were steep and crowded with trucks which belched smoke as they struggled to draw breath in the thin air. I wasn’t doing much better and as the highway climbed a steep pass that must have been around 3,500m, the cold air hurt my lungs as I gasped and pushed on the crank. On the far side I was rewarded with a view of ranks of stark white peaks marching ever higher over the horizon towards the Himalayas above a broad valley dotted with villages. The road dropped sharply and I whizzed into the valley in an aerodynamic crouch, wondering how fast I could go before my Chinese wheel bearings exploded and, presumably, sent shards of metal into my groin before painting my face onto the road. I had not been offered a helmet. At the bottom I rubbed my frozen hands and tried not to think about the ride back up as I pedaled through a distinctly un-Chinese scene. On the valley floor large rammed-earth houses tapered toward steep wood-shingled roofs where rows of triangular prayer flags flapped brightly in the pale sun. In the bleached fields, great shaggy yaks sat eyeing me off from under short horns. Structures like outsized deck chairs made from rough poles kept stock feed away from the last of the spring snow.

            I pedaled down a farm track though a village and followed a sign to Napa lake. In the village a group of men dressed huge logs with a double-handed draw knife, slicing off knots and small branches. They smiled and waved and I wondered where the wood came from in this high, barren place. Further into the valley 40 people were building a rammed-earth house. Four big poles stood at each corner of the square-ish house, leaning slightly inwards. On one of the long walls, a dozen men used heavy sticks like crow bars to pound damp earth between two thick planks which acted as formers – when the compacted earth reached the top of the planks, it would be left to dry and the planks would slide up the poles to form the next course, a bit like laying wall-length mud bricks. The women wheeled barrows or manned shovels. Everyone was stocky and red-cheeked and wore traditional Tibetan clothing. A finished house stood close by. It was covered with mud render and painted with pale designs. The shorter front and rear walls were wooden and recessed under a deep eave. I climbed a hill behind the construction site and watched for ages, listening to the men sing in time to their pounding sticks – a guttural, repetitive tune. My rocky hill formed the edge of a wide brown valley floor, very flat and dotted with shallow pools. Behind the village, a range of snow-covered mountains soared almost vertical. The sky was incredibly clear and I could see dozens of enormous Tibetan Eagles circling high above the plain. Occasionally two or three flew low and fast across the valley, passing so close that I could hear the whoosh of air over their wings as they pitched back and rode the thermal to their holding pattern high above me. Their mottled brown wings stretched maybe six feet across. On the valley floor herds of shaggy ponies grazed and pigs rooted in the peat under the watchful eye of a Tibetan Mastiff the size of a bear.
             As I sat snapping photos, a line of clouds appeared behind the mountains and the wind grew colder. With no sun, the 15kms back to town was cold and I walked stiffly back to my hostel slapping my frozen face like somebody you don’t want to sit next to on a bus. Shangri-la’s old town was a smaller version of Lijiang’s, with traditional Chinese bow-roofed houses lining skinny cobbled streets crammed with tourists. In a freezing restaurant the rosy-cheeked owner ushered me over to her table where an electric bar heater created a welcome bubble of warmth under the table. I ate fried yak and doughy Tibetan flat bread with endless refills of tea. On the street I bought a knitted hat and a packet of yak jerky – I was rapidly developing a crush on Tibet and part of me wished I could take the mountain road north to far-away Lhasa. But the Chinese government wouldn’t let me and – more importantly – neither would Alicia. I had to get to Shanghai.

Very little house on the prairie.

Kunming to Lijiang – Taking to the Hills

View of Snow Mountain from Elephant Hill. Who knew China was so pretty?

Travelling as an English speaker (well, Australian speaker anyway) in South-East Asia makes you lazy and arrogant – even in countries like Cambodia or Vietnam there is usually a translation or a helpful local who’ll call an English-speaking friend to interpret for you – but China soon slaps that out of you. At the huge new train station in Kunming, a city with a thriving tourist industry, I stood in front of a wall-length poster of characters and numbers which I guessed was a timetable. There was no translation and the official I tried to ask ignored me. Eventually I spotted an information desk. I waited for ten minutes while people pushed past me and yelled questions over my shoulder at two ladies behind a Perspex window. I muscled my way to the front and asked if they spoke English. They shook their heads and waved me away with a backhand flick but I stood my ground.

            “Lijiang?” I asked.

            The older lady wrote the train number on a scrap of paper. She pointed to a booth marked 15 and shot me a rare smile. A line of twenty people waited between steel fences designed to curb the Chinese instinct to queue jump. As a foreigner this system didn’t apply to me and after five minutes in line, three middle-aged women clutching identity cards had pushed past me and I was no closer to the front. I stood with a hand on each rail and positioned myself like a racing driver blocking faster cars. After 20 minutes I reached another lady behind Perspex. She said something into a microphone and I handed over my piece of paper with tomorrow’s date, written year first in the Chinese way, the train number and time. “Lijiang.” I said.

            I handed her my passport and some Yuan and got my ticket. So many people had told me that travelling through China without speaking the language was impossible and I was glad that this seemed, as I had suspected, complete bullshit.

On the outskirts of all Chinese cities is a zone of new construction and the bleak view of earthmoving equipment kicking up fine dust around bamboo-scaffolded concrete skeletons stretched for miles out of Kunming before the train abruptly entered dry rice paddies and dying trees. Yunnan province in southern China, of which Kunming is the capital, was experiencing a drought and as the train climbed towards Dali, I didn’t see one farmer working the barren fields. People have been moving off the land and into cities in China for decades and a couple of bad harvests will no doubt speed this process, giving rise to more ugly high-rise construction. At Dali, we veered north along a section of recently opened track. We followed the edge of a lake for a long time and I wondered how much this new railway had cost as it alternated between long bridges and tunnels along the steep shore. China has the most extensive rail network in the world and it is growing fast – the Maglev line to Shanghai airport has recently become the fastest train in the world at 430 kph.

Lijiang is 2,400 metres above sea level and the mountain air was cold and thin as I walked out of the station and squeezed into a crowded minivan. At the entrance to the old town, the driver waved me out of the van. I wandered between traditional houses with swooping tiled roofs and over worn cobblestones beside small fast-flowing canals. The steady stream of Chinese tourists thickened to an ambling horde and the houses became souvenir stalls, restaurants and snack stands as I neared the town center. I squeezed past chatting families and stern men with cameras dangling around their necks, trying not to push anyone into the open canals. I knew Lijiang was a tourist town but I had never seen anything on this scale. It was the middle of the week and peak season was months away but there were tens of thousands of people crammed into the ancient streets, arguing over prices at souvenir stands or slurping steaming bowls of noodles. We were on the edge of the Tibetan plateau and in the sloping town square two Tibetan cowboys charged  parents a few Yuan to photograph whiney kids sitting on their shaggy ponies. An old man with a leathery face kept an enormous eagle tethered to his wrist while the bird perched on the shoulders of young men giving thumbs-up to their camera-wielding girlfriends. Locals with battered DSLR cameras shot tourists in front of a backdrop of illuminated eves and artfully lit trees that stretched up the hill behind a grand old town hall which had been turned into a night club. I found a room in the top floor of a 500 year-old wooden house at the edge of the old town run by a friendly Tibetan lady with good English. The room was unheated and I buried myself under a mound of blankets to stay warm in the crisp night air.

A traditional medicine shop in Lijiang.

The morning dawned pale blue and cool so I hiked out of town and up Elephant Hill to get a view of nearby Snow Mountain. At the base of the climb was a sculptured park around a small lake and as I walked through the ornately carved entrance a lady asked for my ticket. I didn’t have one and she began to write one out. I saw on the sign that it was going to cost a ridiculous 80 Yuan, around $12, just to get into a park so I made my excuses and left. I had noticed before that every tourist attraction, whether it was a park, a historic town or a mountain, had a hefty admission fee. Rather than be put off by these fees, Chinese tourists flocked to them, the rationale presumably being that it must be good to cost so much, but I was buggered if I was paying money to walk up a hill. 50 meters to the side of the ticket booth I jumped a low fence and found the trail. 100 meters into the climb a lady sitting at a desk stopped me and pointed to a sign. “The people to climb this mountain must be no less than four,” it read. Three Chinese guys came up the path and I pointed to them and myself, counting to four on my fingers. The lady looked at me blankly for a second and then grinned, amused by my inventiveness. Our new group of four was made to write our names in an exercise book – I wrote Reinhold Messner – before embarking. The climb was steep and by the time I arrived at a small viewing pagoda on top of the hill, I guessed I was close to 3,000 meters. It was the highest I had been and I breathed deeply and snapped photos of the stunning, snow-covered mountain. After a year in the tropics, the clean mountain air felt great and I wanted more. That afternoon I booked a bus to the enticingly named Shangri-la.

Double prosperity jade luck idiot.