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.

Kunming – of Poo, Spew and Goo

For this entry I need to get a bit graphic – I figure I may as well get it all off my chest in one hit – so if you are squeamish, bad luck.

Kunming, China.

Chinese people are gross, there’s really no way around it. They’re decent and hard-working with a complex culture that dates back thousands of years and anyway we’d better be nice to them, they’ll be running the world in a few years – but on a flight from Mandalay in Burma to Kunming in south west China, I struggled to come to grips with their attitude towards bodily fluids. The plane was full of suited Chinese businessmen with hacking coughs who hawked up litres of mucus from somewhere deep behind their noses and spat into plastic sick bags. Throughout the one-hour border hop all I could hear above the engine drone was a cack-ophony of rasping and gurgling. These same men had elbowed me aside at the check-in counter and lit up cigarettes in front of the no smoking signs in the waiting room. No one spoke to me or even looked at me on the flight and the change from the friendly, curious Burmese was complete.

I tried to block out the snot concerto by looking out the window as we flew over green cloaked mountains high and steep and remote. Far beyond the Eastern horizon, these became the same mountains I had ridden over in Vietnam. To the east was Everest and farther, much farther, was Afghanistan. On the Burmese side I could see no sign of civilization in the undulating, bottle-green carpet, but as we crested a spectacular ridge line the mountains fell sharply into China and immediately the jungle gave way to the lighter green of terraced rice paddies. Dirt roads followed deforested ridgelines and drew thin brown loops as they descended to a plateau and joined thicker ribbons of black highway. By a green lake a town laid out in a twisted concrete grid spawned a larger highway which fell away gently below us as the land lost elevation and the air became hazy.

            The scale of China is hard to imagine. There are 1.3 billion people in a country geographically not much bigger than Australia, which has a population of 23 million. Our puny human brains are not designed to grasp big numbers so think of it like this. Imagine you had to shake hands with everyone Australian and then every Chinese person, and say you could shake one hand every second. If you didn’t sleep, eat or pee, it would take you a bit under 44 years to shake every Australian’s hand. It would take over 2,480 years for the Chinese. Either way you’d die of a burst bladder or a broken hand. With a population of 6.5 million, Kunming is the 47^th (!) largest city in China, although it is half as big again as the biggest city in Australia. As we banked around a low hill, I could see hundreds of identikit concrete apartment buildings rising skinny and white at the end of a large lake. We aborted our first go at the airport and swung around in a loop to try again, swooping low over more boxy buildings and touching down. While we were still taxiing with the seatbelt light on my fellow passengers tied their soggy little bags closed and threw them on the floor, before standing up all at once and jamming the aisle. We were still minutes from disembarking but they elbowed each other out of the way and stood awkwardly with their heads jammed under overhead lockers. The flight attendants made some half-hearted attempts to reseat them but were ignored. When the door opened the pack surged forward. I stayed in my window seat and watched men elbow in front of women and squash each other into seatbacks. It was all silent, no one apologized, no one protested, no one made eye contact. The whole process took at least twice as long as it does in any other country I’ve been to.

            By the time I got through immigration and claimed my bag it was early evening but still light. The whole of China, despite spanning a fifth of the globe east to west, runs on Beijing time so despite flying nearly straight north I had lost two hours. I was the only non-Chinese at the airport and a friendly man with an ‘airport official’ badge approached me and offered to help me change money and drive me to a hotel. I figured it was a bit of a scam but without a word of Chinese or a guidebook I had little choice. He took a small commission on the exchange and charged a little too much to drive to a hotel where they overcharged me slightly but it was all done politely and as I chained my bags to an exposed water pipe I remembered that these people had 3,000 years practice at fooling foreigners – I never stood a chance.

Hungry I walked through canyons of blocky buildings, weaving through a crush of pedestrians and electric bikes. In scruffy old Burma everyone had worn traditional long skirts and painted their faces with thanaka and wanted to know where I was from but here girls in heels, short skirts and thick make-up giggled into mobile phones while boys stood around in tight jeans swinging their arms. People either stared or ignored me, no one returned my smile. It felt good to stroll at random, anonymous in this busy city of billboards and taxis. All around me I heard the now-familiar sound of snorting and growling that proceeds the anticlimactically dribbly Chinese spit. Under my feet great gobs of yellow-green mucus pockadotted the concrete. Most had been turned into dull stains by footfalls but many were still fresh and bubbling.  

In the morning I walked along a six lane expressway into the middle of town and checked into The Hump youth hostel where I celebrated my return to the world of banana pancakes and two-for-one happy hours by jettisoning my digestive tract. It was obviously a big job so my body decided that it needed to employ all available orifices to complete the task as quickly as possible. I moped around the hostel eating nothing and never straying beyond a desperate, bum-clenched, hand-over-mouth scurry away from the toilet. After two days I felt slightly better and began exploring Kunming, happy that I could satisfy my craving for pizza and burgers. This is my body’s usual reaction after a bout of travellers’ sickness and I could hardly have been in a better place. The city centre was full of huge shopping malls selling polo shirts with crocodiles on them and enormous handbags for the price of a car, between them were pharmacies stocked with traditional medicine and stalls selling pink mobile phone cases with bunny ears. And everywhere were western fast food joints – Burger King, maccas, Pizza Hut, KFC, the whole gang was there. From behind my Big Mac I could see the golden arches of the next McDonald’s restaurant 200 metres away.

I may have overdone it and on a long walk to the train station one afternoon I felt familiar rumblings and stabs of cramp. The marks of civilization, I think, are public rubbish bins and public toilets and Kunming has both in abundance so I ducked into the next public convenience where a lady charged me a few cents and pointed to the correct door. The smell of shit stopped me dead and I looked around. Half a dozen cubicles lined each wall, their doors either open or missing completely, a carpet of toilet paper squelched under foot. Inside each cubicle was a tiled floor with a hole in the middle. There was no water and no way of flushing so each cubicle was piled so high with shit that it rose above the level of the floor, curling into little peaks like the McDonald’s soft serve ice cream I suddenly remembered eating earlier. In two cubicles, men squatted, pants around ankles and elbows resting on their knees, doors wide open. One stared at me and the other chatted loudly into an iPhone. I chose the least disgusting toilet with a door that closed. I hung my bag on the door handle very carefully – I would have to burn it if it fell – and concentrated on not toppling backwards as I added to the collection.

Back at the hostel I took a long shower and decided it was time to leave Kunming.