I tried, I really did.  It is too fucking long.  I gotta split it up. 

A)I don’t feel like writting all night again and I want to get another blog out.

B)All my hommies are ADHD like me so I better keep it short and sweet.

Here’s the Second part: Yunnan

2/15/07

Well, Ok, so This part of the blog doesn’t actually start in the Yunnan province, it just sort of winds up there, it actually starts where the whole trip winds up in the Guangxi.  If this is confusing hopefully it will make sense soon, or maybe it will just never ever make any sense one way or another, in which case bear with me.  If I had a student who wrote non sense like that I would have a fit.  Here we go.

The over night boat took us to Beihei, the southern most tip of the Guangxi.  After another early morning wake up call, this time in the form of a deafening ship horn; baroooooooooooooooooograhhhhhhh, we were shaken out of bed. 

Beihai might well be a swell town.  The 15th by all rights should have been a great day, but it wasn’t.  It was sort of a waste of time which I  now wish I could trade in for one more day in Yangshou, but we’ll get there. The big problem was not with the city but with the rain.  It was still dark when we climbed off the boat and meet our connection at the pier and already the rain was spraying in large thick drops.  We got in his car, which was a four door sedan of Chinese make with curtains hanging on little curtain rods covering all four windows and the rear windshield. 

The first stop was a sea food resturant which hadn’t opened yet across from silver beach.  We sat under the awning in the shop front for fourty minutes waiting for the rain to let up just a little.  The front of the place was lined with tanks brimming to the hilt with fish, some of which you’d expect, a couple of which were down right bizarre.  There was a spikey blow fish with huge eyes, eels, shrimp, some turtles.  We sat there and watched the rain.  Our Baihai connection and Xiao Yin chatted away pleasantly while I sat quiet. 

Eventurally the sky blessed us with a slow misty drizzle so we went across the street to silver beach.  We didn’t stay long, it was cold and rainy, like I said.  The sand was sparkling white, which was nice.  I later learned that Xiao Yin had been looking forward to this beach, he had heard tell of its white white sand.  Had I known that then I would have tried to stay a little longer but at the time I figured he wanted to get out of the rain like me, so we left pretty fast.  Xiao Yin and I have since conspired to try to make it back to Baihai for another trip mainly just to do this beach.  We’ll see, so many places to go.

The rest of the morning we went from one pearl shop to another.  This is a little more awkward when it is just 2 of us and not a whole bus load.  We politly walked around as the shopkeepers showed us everything they had, they all looked at us hopefully, we didn’t buy anything.  One place took us into a small room and sat us at a table and tried and tried to sell us pearls.  I didn’t want pearls at any price, even though they did have the cheapest pearls, and at this point I would know. 

Around noon we escaped, Xiao Yin wanted seafood because Beihai has a rep as being seafood city.  Our connection took us to a place that had tanks outside, just like the place we had killed time in front of that morning.  The thing was that the really really good fresh still in the tank shit was going to cost us.  Han Xiao Yin being Han Xiao Yin, we hung around arguing and bartering and dickering with the guy until the price dropped to almost where we wanted it.  Xiao Yin prides himself on his price debating skills, and it is so cool to watch the argument go back and forth with no idea what they are saying.  I often try to guess, I flatter myself into thinking that my guesses are usually spot on, but honestly, not always.

So we ordered the food; shrimp, muscles and clams.  Oh and tomato and egg, Xiao Yins all time favorite dish.  No sooner had we sat down when they showed up with a plate of the shrimp I had seen swimming maybe 2 minutes before.  They had taken the little guys, dumped them in the boiling water and bam.  Right on the table.  Oh, they were good too, so fresh and Yummy.  This was the best meal we had had thus far on the trip.  It was just the 2 of us there eating and I can’t help but think this had something to do with the fact that just at the begening of our meal the background music switched from Chinese traditional to Micheal Boltons ‘When a man loves a woman’.  It was certainly a nice thought on their part, but the truth is that I hate Micheal Bolton and believe his mullet to be the living earthly embodiment of uncool personified.  Micheal Bolton was followed by Whitney Huston singing ‘and I will always love you’.  “Madonna” said Xiao Yin, “no, Whitney Huston” I corected him.  This lead to an argument which ended with Xiao Yin conceeding that I was right but I don’t think he was convinced.

The fresh seafood was a welcome relief from Chinese tour group food, which was almost the exact same in every city.  Breakfast would be a bowl of noddles and a rice ball (a soft thing with the same taste as a rice cake,) and proidge.  When we were in Kunming they included dumplings in the mix and I thought I was in heaven.  Lunch would have five dishes, always a couple of vegetables, a plate of whole (head and all) shrimp, always a smattering of some stuff I didn’t understand, and a whole fish which people would rip at with chop sticks like predatory animals huddled around the kill in the sarengeti.  It was amazing how much meat one fish would produce, ten to fifteen people were feeding on one carcus.  And in the end, just a tail and a spine and the boney parts of the head.  The Chinese tour group and I were like pirannas.  I would slop the food all over my little area trying to get to any of it close to my mouth.  Sometimes one of my companions would tell Xiao Yin who would tell me something good or bad about my chopstick skills, I would always smile and open my mouth while pretending to stab myself in the eye with a chopstick.  This would always make everyone laugh.  It is so easy to make Chinese people laugh, and I totally love that about them.

And so after lunch we got on yet another bus full of yet more people, none of whom I have any memory of.  We rode for ever.  I told Xiao Yin about race relations in America, about the N word and why he should never, never, never ever use it.  I taught him the rhyme about I before E except after C.  At some point I used the expression “I’m not just a pretty face” which I had said with intended irony, I don’t remember in regard to what.  He demanded to know how to use this gem of a phrase and he laughed endlessly about it.  This was the funniest thing to him, and he kept repeating it incorrectly until days later when he finally got it.

“I am not pretty face!”

“I am pretty face!”

“I am just pretty face!”

I just am not pretty face!”

and so on.

Needless to say, “I’m not just a pretty face” soon became one of the catch phrases for the trip.

Eventually the bus let us off at a train station is some city, and we got on a train and hunkered down for the night.

2/16/07

The train had 9 bunks per section, 2 triple bunk beds facing each other.  I found sleeping on a train relaxing, the rocking motion while sleeping.  Very nice.  I had wicked crazy dreams on the train too.  One I remember was my friend Carson showed up in China.  He told me that people in China had no one to fix the TV sets.  His plan was we go into buisness as TV repairmen and corner the market and be assured fabulous riches.  In the dream I thought about his idea and told him that I would help on one condition.  I wanted to use eyeball men.  I pointed to an eyeball man who was now in the room suddenly.  His entire body, head to toe was covered in eyes, all looking around and blinking.  Carson shook his head and said, “no, I think they may be too indestructable”.  “No ears!”  I said in argument, and Carson agreed.  The funny part is that if you know Carson, this is just the kind of crazy scheme he is liable to come up with, and I am just the kind of sap who would go along with it.

The train took us to Kunming in the Yunnan province, which is a rather large, although charming city.  Once off the train we hooked up with our connection who took us to meet the next tour group on the next bus.  Seeing a pattern?

They took us to Shilin rock garden, which was touristy but still very cool.  Legend has it that Gods smashed whole mountains to pieces and left a maze for lovers looking to find privacy.  The rock formations themselves are believed to have at some time been underwater, this plus the erosion of time has left a vast labyrinth of sharp rocks sticking straight up to the sky.  Pathways and stairs wrap around one another, up and down and all through the rock formations.  At one point we walked by a thin rock that made a bell sound when slapped.  Each member of our group slapped the rock once or twice as if in thurow  inspection of the rock and its sound.  Me being me I played the solo from wipe out.  It is so easy to make Chinese people laugh, I seriously love them for it.  They are the laughingest people.  I took many many pictures of the rock garden, many of which are now posted on this very site, blog believers.  (See photo page)

On the way back they took us to another shop, this one was a whole complex.  I stayed in my seat on the bus which seemed to irk the bus driver.  He kept giving me diaproving glares from the rearview, I ignored him and focused my attention to the Lonely planet china book.  I found a museum in downtown Kunming that really looked cool, just a few short blocks from the train station from which we would depart later that night.  It seemed to perfect to pass up.  

This time the poor suckers in the shop were gone close to an hour, another deal where they were forced to sit through an endless lecture.  When they got back I showed Xiao Yin the museum in my book and he seemed really into it. 

The problem was this.  The tour guide (who sternly told Xiao Yin to lecture me about not going into the shops, which made me snicker at her involuntarily) told us that the tour company could not have us wandering off on our own because they still weren’t sure what we would be doing that night. 

‘Well what are you talking about?’

Well, they had neglected to get us tickets for the train we would be taking later in the evening.  So they were now trying to last minute us a pair of train tickets two days before the biggest travel holiday in the biggest country in the world.  This on top of the fact that because we spent over an hour and a half at the shop which nobody wanted to go to we got back to Kunming right when the museum was closing.  This drove me up a tree.  The whole tour thing was set up so that in order to get to the next place we had to sit through all their bullshit or risk getting left behind in the wrong city or province.  As nice as the rock garden had been I can’t say that was the only or even close to first choice of things I would have liked to have done in Kunming.  And here we could have almost made it but instead we get shanghai-ed (pun intended) at some god aweful tea/marble/candy/pearl/nick-nack store in the middle of nowhere.  It seemed that my path was clear, it was me vs the tour company.  If we were going to have a groovy time on this junket we would have to take matters into our own hands.

When we got back to Kunming we waited for a while in the tour office for them to figure it out with the train, then we went down the street to a place called ‘The Brothers Jiang’ which specialized in a local famous dish called across the bridge noddles.  Across the bridge noddles is awesome.  It comes in a huge bowl along with an endless amount of side things to dump in there.  We found out later that there is a specific order in which to dump in the stuff which we bumbled, still we thought were so great.

When we got back to the office we learned that we would take a 5 hour late night bus trip to get to Dali instead of a nice, kushey train. 

At this point I would like to point out that it had been Hainan since I had seen a shower or an actuall (not just a hole in the ground) toilet.  I was stinkey and nasty and sick of doing my thing while squatting in midair over holes and I longed to sleep in a real bed that was in no way touching a train or boat and certainly not another seat on a bus.  These were my concerns.

It was on the night train that I first met Francis, my Info man in the Yunnan.  Francis is a very very smart highschool kid who wanted to speak english with me.  Most of the time he taught me Chinese history, a subject which he has an avid knowledge of.  Did you know that the Chinese were growing gardens on ships for long voyages all the way back in the Han Dynasty?  The Han dynasty happened around the height of the Roman empire, European sailers were still dying of scurvy for lack of vegetables and fruit in their diets on long trips in the 1700’s.  My info man in the Yunnan told me all about it.

The ride was uncomfortable and endless, a speaker blarred the music from the tv and the temperature droped.  The bus drove us north into higher and higher altitude and colder and colder air.  I passed the time talking with Francis into the night. 

We got to Dali around 1:30 and checked into our hotel.  This was a classy place.  There was no elevator and we were on the fifth floor.  If the hotel had toilets they neglected our bathroom, another hole in the floor.  The end table between the beds had condoms.  The room had no TV.  This was a classy place.

There was no heat and only a thin useless blanket to cover the bedsheet.  I was so tired.  I tried my best to sleep shivering fully clothed with a jacket on and a ski cap pulled down over my nose.  I was so tired I managed to pass out after a while. 

A few short hours later we were up and dressed and at breakfast.  Francis asked if we were cold in the night like him and his family were.  Two ladies at the table next to ours were screaming at each other so loud I was sure they would fight and one would die.  The hotel manager came and seriously accused myself and Xiao Yin of stealing the missing TV from our room.  I laughed and patted my backpack and said “oh sure, its right here.”  Xiao Yin and I lost it laughing about this and the hotel manager stood there for a second like a fool before he gave up and walked away.  This was a classy place.

Coming soon to the willsanderschinaadventure…

Mountain climbing to reach a Buddhist temple!

Spring Festival!

Lots and Lots of loud explosions that go BANG!

Fist fight!

Snow! 

Public drinking!

And much more!

Stay tuned Blog Believers!

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