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.