Our route had to be changed a few times from the original itinerary for various reasons, mostly beyond anybody's control. Such is the nature of running organised tours into places where things can change at the drop of a hat. Our route followed broadly from Luang Namptha, Laos, into China at Boten, then to Mengla, and on to Jihong. No, I'd never heard of them either. On to Xiaguan, aka Dali, a large city on a large lake, with its famous Three Pagodas Shrine, in the background.
When I think of Dali, I think of the weirdo Spanish artist Salvador Dali, and I imagine clock faces draped over tree branches, and all the other whacky stuff the guy painted. I used to appreciate the artist and his work as a teenager, particularly when I smoked substances other than tobacco, but that's got nothing to do with this place. From Dali, on to Lijiang, parts of which are world heritage listed, then across the Yangtze and into Tibet. Tiger Leaping Gorge was the first stop. As gorges go, it was not bad (you know, deep and all that) but the water level was low. Following the Yangtze for a while, we finished up at Shangri La, which I always thought to be a mythical place, but not so. However, having now seen it, I didn't think it was Earthly paradise.
From here, we really began serious climbing up onto the Tibetan Plateau, but had to miss the lookout on Mount Kawa Karpo (6700m) due to the road being socked in by cloud, and had to be content with snow, rain, ice on the road and freezing wind. On via Dequen, to Cizhong, a village where we had our worst meals of the trip. I'll get to the food later. Hey, its still memorable! Then it was back the way we came, with a couple of slight detours, via Weixi and Shaxi. The former is at the confluence of the Yangtze, the Mekong and the Nujiang Rivers, while the latter is a famous stop on the old Tea Horse Road, and its Sideng Market Square is listed by UNESCO as being one of the 100 most endangered cultural sites in the world.
Not that it helps much. China could bulldoze it tomorrow if it felt like it, and nobody would dare to lift a finger. The Tea Horse Road, by the way, is the route by which tea was first exported from it's original home in China by pack horse to the outside world. I think it tied in with the Silk Road at some point, thence to points further West. The Chinese drink gallons of the stuff, but try getting any sugar in this country. Anyhow, on to Lincang, then to Mengla again, out of China through the chaotic Boten again, and on to Nong Khiew, Laos, which really is in the middle of nowhere, but it was not China, and that was good enough reason for everyone to party hard. From here, to Luang Prabang. Our boat ride with the bikes down the Mekong was cancelled due to low water levels (maybe because China Power is building a dam on it, in Laos, mind you!), so we detoured through a brand new road (but it was pretty tricky due to excessive fine gravel and a noticeable lack of anything to stop you plummeting for a considerable time to a horrible but sudden death, see photos below) to Pak Beng, then Hong Sa, and finally back into Thailand.
Yes, I know these are photos of a road in Laos and I'm supposed to be talking about China. Get over it.
Ok, I am already conscious of the fact that I am bagging China a fair bit, and this may be pretty obvious. It was fascinating to finally visit the country, at least parts of it, but I didn't really like the place. It had a bad vibe about it, I thought. It is a highly authoritarian society, ruled with an iron fist by a hard line central regime. Like the vibe I got in the Soviet Union in 1977, if you can believe that. I didn't get the impression that people were happy, they just seemed to keep their heads down and not draw any attention to themselves. I found that most of them were either just plain rude, indifferent or stand offish at best, and gave no consideration to anybody else. Maybe if Australia had 1.5 billion people, we would be that way too, I don't know. Clearly the China of old is vanishing rapidly, as old villages are razed to the ground and entire new cities are being built at feverish pace to replace them.
Thing is, they are all either cookie cutter high rise, or cookie cutter low rise 1-3 storey buildings in regulation grey and white, with tiled roofs turned up at the lower ends of the hips, Chinese pagoda style. No room for individual expression here, that would be reactionary and bourgeoise. Besides, if you get a free house, just be grateful, why should you care what it looks like anyway? "Yes, we are all individuals," they shout in total unison.
I have already mentioned the spending on infrastructure like roads, bridges and tunnels, communications etc which is astonishing. Also, the number of new vehicles on the road, including the high end of the auto business- Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, Lexus, etc- defies belief. Seeing as how China now makes just about everything on Earth, and is raking in the foreign exchange as a result, they have plenty of dough to throw around to those of some importance, or perhaps I should get all Orwellian and say to those who are more equal than others. Pity none of the bastards can drive. And nobody knows what a rear view mirror or indicators are for. I'll say more about that later, but as far as I'm concerned, the Chinese should still be driving ox carts, they are completely hopeless and incompetent out on the road, and this made for a high degree of concentration, many near misses, and high anxiety levels for the group as a whole. As for communications, State run TV is just a hoot, but you can't get Google, and Google Maps doesn't line up with any adjoining countries. But you can have a mobile phone. In fact everyone has one, mostly used while walking on a footpath or driving a vehicle. This does a lot of the surveillance work for the State automatically!
Out on the road, the number of overhead gantries fitted with multiple cameras defies belief. These things constantly flash at 2-4 second intervals as photos are taken rapidly all over the roads we used. They can only be for surveillance purposes, but the amount of analysis required to process or sort the information would be phenomenal. Whoever does this analysis will get a bit of a surprise when the see my middle finger raised on quite a few photos, till even I got sick of doing it. We went through numerous police checkpoints. Ok, they have these in plenty of other countries, but they almost invariably wave foreigners straight through, in my experience. Not here. Every single time, the entire group was stopped, and required to produce passports, and/or bike registration and licensing details.
As if anybody could actually get that far into the country without passing border controls and all the other stuff they want. As far as I'm concerned, once you get admitted to a country, nobody should ask you to produce a passport until you leave. Not here. Sometimes the younger cops were friendly and polite, just doing what they had to do. But more frequently, they were swaggering arrogant pricks. If you wanted to go, they would make you stop. If you wanted to stop, they would make you go, with a dismissive wave and a mouthful. Just because they could. They were right into the power trip, and left us in no doubt who was in charge. As I said earlier, the locals seem to just accept it, but it hammers home the point to all on a daily basis that the individual is just an insignificant speck, of no importance, and it's the State which makes and enforces the rules. It reminds me of the way an ant colony operates. At a couple of police checkpoints, they were probing trucks carrying bulk goods like rice with long metal rods to make sure the cargo went all the way to the bottom of the truck. At others, there were high surveillance towers containing an officer with an automatic weapon, just in case anything might go down. It was highly visible and in your face the whole time. Tell me the knock on the door at 3 am, followed by being dragged to the cells in your pyjamas then beaten up doesn't happen here. You could take that to the bank, for sure. Now who's getting paranoid?
And if all that isn't enough, the air quality is abysmal. A few times, you could see bits of blue sky, but nearly the whole time the sky was grey, the visibility murky at best, the smoke or other pollutants in the air often made the eyes water. You could hardly see any mountains or hills clearly, to the point it was hardly worth taking a photo anyway. And after a week, I was coughing up stuff in the mornings that I hadn't seen since I was a smoker. Well, that's not strictly true. Just about all 1.5 billion of the buggers smoke. Restaurants, hotel rooms, lifts, shops, temples, anywhere you can think of, stinks of cigarette smoke, and people hack, cough, wheeze and spit 24/7, so the footpaths are covered in gobs of dark coloured mucous. Nice huh?
But let's not end on a churlish note. As always, there are moments you just can't buy. At one point we had stopped for a photo where rice was being planted in a paddy field. There were probably about 30 people involved, and it was quite fascinating to watch. Obviously its a job that needs to happen fast, so maybe these folk were contractors, or maybe the whole village was putting in to get it done.
Whatever. Once we had been spotted, they were all busy looking at us and talking and laughing among themselves. Then one old bloke wandered up for a closer look, then went and fetched a bottle of clear liquid out of the back of a truck. It wasn't water. He poured out a shot glass full and offered it around, while smiling and yabbering away. Sadly, nobody took him up on it as we had enough problems riding the bikes anyway. On reflection, it seemed a bit rude to refuse, and I now wish I had taken a sip in the interest of international relations. But my liver has enough problems.
On another occasion, we stopped at a road junction for a short break. There was a small industrial building nearby, and we soon attracted attention. A bunch of blokes came over for a look, including a hard bitten scowling character who I assume was the foreman. I threw in one of only three things I can say in Chinese, that being "nee how" (hello). He cracked a broad smile and replied nee how, then pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. Again, it is now an automatic response to say no, but now I wish I had taken him up. After all the other crap I was breathing in China, one more fag wouldn't have hurt. But it wouldn't have been much of a conversation, because all I had after "hello" was "thank you" or "Happy New Year".
Then there were these guys, who made a genuine effort to be friendly.
And this nice old bloke, who was riding his bicycle up hills that would give a yak a heart attack.
When I think of Dali, I think of the weirdo Spanish artist Salvador Dali, and I imagine clock faces draped over tree branches, and all the other whacky stuff the guy painted. I used to appreciate the artist and his work as a teenager, particularly when I smoked substances other than tobacco, but that's got nothing to do with this place. From Dali, on to Lijiang, parts of which are world heritage listed, then across the Yangtze and into Tibet. Tiger Leaping Gorge was the first stop. As gorges go, it was not bad (you know, deep and all that) but the water level was low. Following the Yangtze for a while, we finished up at Shangri La, which I always thought to be a mythical place, but not so. However, having now seen it, I didn't think it was Earthly paradise.
From here, we really began serious climbing up onto the Tibetan Plateau, but had to miss the lookout on Mount Kawa Karpo (6700m) due to the road being socked in by cloud, and had to be content with snow, rain, ice on the road and freezing wind. On via Dequen, to Cizhong, a village where we had our worst meals of the trip. I'll get to the food later. Hey, its still memorable! Then it was back the way we came, with a couple of slight detours, via Weixi and Shaxi. The former is at the confluence of the Yangtze, the Mekong and the Nujiang Rivers, while the latter is a famous stop on the old Tea Horse Road, and its Sideng Market Square is listed by UNESCO as being one of the 100 most endangered cultural sites in the world.
Not that it helps much. China could bulldoze it tomorrow if it felt like it, and nobody would dare to lift a finger. The Tea Horse Road, by the way, is the route by which tea was first exported from it's original home in China by pack horse to the outside world. I think it tied in with the Silk Road at some point, thence to points further West. The Chinese drink gallons of the stuff, but try getting any sugar in this country. Anyhow, on to Lincang, then to Mengla again, out of China through the chaotic Boten again, and on to Nong Khiew, Laos, which really is in the middle of nowhere, but it was not China, and that was good enough reason for everyone to party hard. From here, to Luang Prabang. Our boat ride with the bikes down the Mekong was cancelled due to low water levels (maybe because China Power is building a dam on it, in Laos, mind you!), so we detoured through a brand new road (but it was pretty tricky due to excessive fine gravel and a noticeable lack of anything to stop you plummeting for a considerable time to a horrible but sudden death, see photos below) to Pak Beng, then Hong Sa, and finally back into Thailand.
Yes, I know these are photos of a road in Laos and I'm supposed to be talking about China. Get over it.
Ok, I am already conscious of the fact that I am bagging China a fair bit, and this may be pretty obvious. It was fascinating to finally visit the country, at least parts of it, but I didn't really like the place. It had a bad vibe about it, I thought. It is a highly authoritarian society, ruled with an iron fist by a hard line central regime. Like the vibe I got in the Soviet Union in 1977, if you can believe that. I didn't get the impression that people were happy, they just seemed to keep their heads down and not draw any attention to themselves. I found that most of them were either just plain rude, indifferent or stand offish at best, and gave no consideration to anybody else. Maybe if Australia had 1.5 billion people, we would be that way too, I don't know. Clearly the China of old is vanishing rapidly, as old villages are razed to the ground and entire new cities are being built at feverish pace to replace them.
Thing is, they are all either cookie cutter high rise, or cookie cutter low rise 1-3 storey buildings in regulation grey and white, with tiled roofs turned up at the lower ends of the hips, Chinese pagoda style. No room for individual expression here, that would be reactionary and bourgeoise. Besides, if you get a free house, just be grateful, why should you care what it looks like anyway? "Yes, we are all individuals," they shout in total unison.
I have already mentioned the spending on infrastructure like roads, bridges and tunnels, communications etc which is astonishing. Also, the number of new vehicles on the road, including the high end of the auto business- Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, Lexus, etc- defies belief. Seeing as how China now makes just about everything on Earth, and is raking in the foreign exchange as a result, they have plenty of dough to throw around to those of some importance, or perhaps I should get all Orwellian and say to those who are more equal than others. Pity none of the bastards can drive. And nobody knows what a rear view mirror or indicators are for. I'll say more about that later, but as far as I'm concerned, the Chinese should still be driving ox carts, they are completely hopeless and incompetent out on the road, and this made for a high degree of concentration, many near misses, and high anxiety levels for the group as a whole. As for communications, State run TV is just a hoot, but you can't get Google, and Google Maps doesn't line up with any adjoining countries. But you can have a mobile phone. In fact everyone has one, mostly used while walking on a footpath or driving a vehicle. This does a lot of the surveillance work for the State automatically!
Out on the road, the number of overhead gantries fitted with multiple cameras defies belief. These things constantly flash at 2-4 second intervals as photos are taken rapidly all over the roads we used. They can only be for surveillance purposes, but the amount of analysis required to process or sort the information would be phenomenal. Whoever does this analysis will get a bit of a surprise when the see my middle finger raised on quite a few photos, till even I got sick of doing it. We went through numerous police checkpoints. Ok, they have these in plenty of other countries, but they almost invariably wave foreigners straight through, in my experience. Not here. Every single time, the entire group was stopped, and required to produce passports, and/or bike registration and licensing details.
As if anybody could actually get that far into the country without passing border controls and all the other stuff they want. As far as I'm concerned, once you get admitted to a country, nobody should ask you to produce a passport until you leave. Not here. Sometimes the younger cops were friendly and polite, just doing what they had to do. But more frequently, they were swaggering arrogant pricks. If you wanted to go, they would make you stop. If you wanted to stop, they would make you go, with a dismissive wave and a mouthful. Just because they could. They were right into the power trip, and left us in no doubt who was in charge. As I said earlier, the locals seem to just accept it, but it hammers home the point to all on a daily basis that the individual is just an insignificant speck, of no importance, and it's the State which makes and enforces the rules. It reminds me of the way an ant colony operates. At a couple of police checkpoints, they were probing trucks carrying bulk goods like rice with long metal rods to make sure the cargo went all the way to the bottom of the truck. At others, there were high surveillance towers containing an officer with an automatic weapon, just in case anything might go down. It was highly visible and in your face the whole time. Tell me the knock on the door at 3 am, followed by being dragged to the cells in your pyjamas then beaten up doesn't happen here. You could take that to the bank, for sure. Now who's getting paranoid?
And if all that isn't enough, the air quality is abysmal. A few times, you could see bits of blue sky, but nearly the whole time the sky was grey, the visibility murky at best, the smoke or other pollutants in the air often made the eyes water. You could hardly see any mountains or hills clearly, to the point it was hardly worth taking a photo anyway. And after a week, I was coughing up stuff in the mornings that I hadn't seen since I was a smoker. Well, that's not strictly true. Just about all 1.5 billion of the buggers smoke. Restaurants, hotel rooms, lifts, shops, temples, anywhere you can think of, stinks of cigarette smoke, and people hack, cough, wheeze and spit 24/7, so the footpaths are covered in gobs of dark coloured mucous. Nice huh?
But let's not end on a churlish note. As always, there are moments you just can't buy. At one point we had stopped for a photo where rice was being planted in a paddy field. There were probably about 30 people involved, and it was quite fascinating to watch. Obviously its a job that needs to happen fast, so maybe these folk were contractors, or maybe the whole village was putting in to get it done.
Whatever. Once we had been spotted, they were all busy looking at us and talking and laughing among themselves. Then one old bloke wandered up for a closer look, then went and fetched a bottle of clear liquid out of the back of a truck. It wasn't water. He poured out a shot glass full and offered it around, while smiling and yabbering away. Sadly, nobody took him up on it as we had enough problems riding the bikes anyway. On reflection, it seemed a bit rude to refuse, and I now wish I had taken a sip in the interest of international relations. But my liver has enough problems.
On another occasion, we stopped at a road junction for a short break. There was a small industrial building nearby, and we soon attracted attention. A bunch of blokes came over for a look, including a hard bitten scowling character who I assume was the foreman. I threw in one of only three things I can say in Chinese, that being "nee how" (hello). He cracked a broad smile and replied nee how, then pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. Again, it is now an automatic response to say no, but now I wish I had taken him up. After all the other crap I was breathing in China, one more fag wouldn't have hurt. But it wouldn't have been much of a conversation, because all I had after "hello" was "thank you" or "Happy New Year".
Then there were these guys, who made a genuine effort to be friendly.
And this nice old bloke, who was riding his bicycle up hills that would give a yak a heart attack.
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