Border Towns, Engineering Feats, Karst, and Tall Tales

ANOTHER BORDER RUN

I just got back to Kunming from yet another (visa time limit-driven) border run. In the past, I've always used the border with Laos for this purpose (my Chinese visa is good for a whole year, but I have to leave the country every 3 months). I liked the Lao border because it's in the middle of nowhere and the border guards never asked me questions, even when I re-entered China just minutes after leaving. Also, the Lao border post is a kilometer away through the rainforest from the Chinese border post. So I didn't actually have to officially enter Laos.

But the Lao border is considerably further away from Kunming than the Vietnamese border (12 hour bus ride compared to 8 hour bus ride). This time I decided to try the Vietnamese border. What I learned is that the money I save in the shorter bus ride, I lose because I am forced to purchase a Vietnamese visa (unlike the Lao border, the Chinese-Vietnamese border is on a bridge and you must fully cross into Vietnam before you can re-enter China). The price is essentially the same for the two routes. But the Vietnamese one saves time so I'll probably use it again in the future.

Long story short, I didn't go anywhere I hadn't been before on this most recent trip. But re-visiting places can be fun, too. Hekou (河口), the Chinese border town with Laos, was a happening place when I swung through a few days ago. In the past, I'd taken the night bus to Hekou and thus not appreciated any of the scenery along the route from Kunming. This time I took a day bus.

KUNMING TO HEKOU

The 36 seat bus only had about 8 passengers. The first two hours are spent on the expressway, getting out of the greater Kunming metro area, passing through a corner of the Stone Forest. The expressway then dead-ends, and the next four hours are spent on a crowded, two-lane highway. The new expressway, still under construction, is clearly visible paralleling the old road. It will shave several hours off this trip when it opens in the next couple years. In the mean time, it's slow-going down along the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau (云贵高原), past the grape vineyards of Mile, the old industrial town of Kaiyuan, and the on-the-rise town of Mengzi (new Ford and Chevy dealerships gleaming in the suburbs). At about the 6 hour point, the expressway suddenly picks up again, and carries us the rest of the way to the border.

It's the same way on the road to Laos. You get expressway for the first few hours leaving Kunming, then a horribly bottle-necked gap through Pu'er, where the expressway is still under construction and hours-long traffic jams develop as overloaded trucks grind their way up and down the old mountainous road. Then, as you hit Xishuangbanna, the expressway suddenly picks up and glides you straight to the border.

I've got a theory on why the sections of expressway furthest from Kunming (and Beijing) were completed first. It's both about national security (in the case of a war, like the one between China and Vietnam in 1979, you can get more troops to the border quicker this way), and about image (people traveling from Southeast Asian nations are immediately greeted with China's awesome engineering success). My friend in the transportation department said it's to facilitate trade. That could be too, but if that's the case I'd think the sections nearer to Kunming are just as, if not more, important.

IN WHICH MATT IS IMPRESSED BY CHINESE ENGINEERING

But more about the expressway itself. There's one section where the 4-lane expressway descends more than 1000 meters (about 4000 feet) in just about 30 kilometers. It is truly breathtaking. Outstanding engineering. Really nothing like this in the United States. Okay, there are some impressive freeways built over mountains ranges in the States - I-80 over the Sierras, I-70 over the Rockies. But those highways always follow the optimal topographic route of minimum resistance. No such topological towing the line seems to have hindered China's engineers, however. This expressway literally cascades down the face of these mountains, off the 1000-2000 meter high Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, and into the tropical, near-sea-level Red River Valley. There is no flat land underneath this roadway. It is entirely built on stilts, and in tunnels. It's one tunnel after another. Dozens of them. Some nearly a kilometer in length. Nowhere in the United States are there so many tunnels concentrated on one stretch of roadway. It's a thrilling ride.

It was my fourth time passing through Hekou, the slightly seedy border town. The weather was hot and tropical. The tropical fruit smoothie vendors got a lot of business from me. I sampled every item on the menu - papaya smoothie, mango smoothie, pineapple smoothie, coconut smoothie, even durian smoothie. I did my border business, and enjoyed my pho noodles and Vietnamese coffee on the opposite bank of the river.

Watching the Vietnamese traders queuing up to re-enter Vietnam with their rusty old bicycle-pulled carts loaded to the hilt with cheap Chinese consumer goods was amusing too. Definitely more goods going out of China than coming in (coming in mostly seemed to be foodstuffs, the markets full of interesting tropical items).

Then I headed back up the plateau, towards the east, hugging the international border. Gained 1000 meters, this time considerably more slowly, in a county bus. Destination Maguan (马关). I'd been there once before, during Spring Festival 2010 with Sean and Thomas. That time, we'd met a couple girls and exchanged QQ numbers. I'd talked with one girl, He Shuang (贺霜), a few times over the last year, and took her out to dinner when she was living in Kunming last spring. Hadn't talked to her in a while and was curious what she'd been up to this last year.

REVERSE MIGRATION - FROM CITY TO COUNTRY

Turns out she'd had quite a year. As a 20 year old high school graduate, she left home last spring and moved to Kunming looking for work. She found low wage work in a clothing store in the distant suburbs of Kunming. She left after a couple months and moved to Guangdong. There she worked as a laborer in a factory, assembling office furniture for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

She could earn more money than selling clothing doing this, but it took a toll on her physically and mentally. She had no free time, her factory was in the middle of nowhere, and it was hard to make friends. She picked up and moved again, this time to Zhejiang, the province south of Shanghai on the east coast. She worked in a clothing factory for two months. The boss was an asshole and only paid her for one. Chinese bosses pull this all the time with migrant laborers, apparently.

Finally she gave up on being a migrant laborer and returned to her home town. When I saw her she looked happy and healthy. She even insisted on treating me to dinner (what would have been my wages for 40 minutes of work was probably the equivalent of her several days of work, but she still insisted). Now she works 5 days a week, 9 to 5, in a government office. Money's not great, but living at home she pays no rent, and expenses in Maguan is cheap.

She's not the only example of "reverse migration" in China. Millions of nongmin gong (young people who leave the countryside to work in China's booming south and east coasts) have made the decision, like He Shuang has, to return to their home towns after stints in the big city. They inevitably cite the environment (particularly the "fresh air"), the familiarity of friends, family, and home, and the mental toll that factory work took on them.

KARST MEANDERINGS

My second day in Maguan I took the local county bus thirty minutes outside of the county seat city, and got off in a small town called Renhe (仁和). From there I went wandering randomly through the countryside for several hours. I had no map, but I knew generally which direction I was heading in, and that as long as I didn't wander too far away from the main county road, I could always catch the county bus back to the county seat when I tired of hiking.

The topography in this part of Yunnan is incredibly. The landscape is dotted with thousands of miniature mountains of varying shapes and sizes, but rarely more than 100 meters high. There are other famous spots in China with similar landscapes. Guilin is probably the most famous. Miniature mountain spire rise up from the river-inundated plains like gumdrops. These are the landscapes you've seen in classical Chinese watercolor paintings. What I like about the Maguan landscape is that the underlying topography from which the gumdrop karst formations rise is not an even plain like it is in Guiline. It itself is an undulating terrain. The result is that everywhere you turn there is something interesting geologically happening. In between the gumdrop mountains are miniature valleys, and they are made the most of by the local residents who farm them.

Since everything is on such a miniature scale, you feel like you cover a lot of ground. In one hour, you can walk the length of  a "valley", climb a "mountain pass", and explore a village. In five hours, you can do that with five valleys, five mountains, and five villages. It never takes too long to get from one to the next. But it's exciting because you never know what's around the next bend.

I've seen lots of farmland by now in my various travels, but one thing in Maguan I'd never seen before. Large farms covered entirely by shade structures built of pine needles. Intensive labor required to build such shade structures. I figured the crop underneath must be something special. Indeed it was the famous sanqi (三七), a medicinal herb prized in Kunming and throughout China. And this here is its base.

FOLLOW UP ON HUIZE

Back in Kunming I ran into a few notes I'd made in Huize (会泽) the week before and neglected to include in my blog entry on that place. So I'll add them in here.

I described Huize as one of the smallest, least modernized places I've been to. And yet, in the town's one general store, I still counted several American brand name products. Among them: Oil of Olay, Head and Shoulders, Johnson and Johnson, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Minute Maid, Tropicana, Nestlie, and Wrigley.

Sha Sha said Huize is home to many mining industries. She named three main ores and minerals that are mined there. Two of them I recognized - iron and copper. The third I had to look up in my dictionary - molybdenum!

Sha Sha and her father were full of tall tales. I mentioned the amulets the father treasured, claiming to have dug up from under the mountain and possessing hundreds of years of history, when they looked like plastic trinkets to me. Sha Sha also claimed that the reservoir near their house is home to a giant man-eating monster. That the Phoenix bird (a mythological creature) used to live in a village hear her house. And that the dam on the reservoir is the largest earthen dam in Asia. Okay, that last point I actually verified, and it's true. But the others seem a little more far-fetched.