New stuff

Another long absence from blogging. A lot to catch up on. I'll start with the most recent events and move backwards.

Biggest news is probably a couple of purchases I recently made. I'm not usually one to get worked up over consumer purchases, but well I guess this time there are two exceptions. Both were pretty expensive (the most expensive things I've spent money on in China other than rent and air tickets), but both are things I use every day.

The first is a new phone. An android. I've never had a smart phone before. This is a lot of fun. It is world's better than my last cell phone, which could only make calls and send texts. It's got the full touch screen and tons of features which I use often: internet, GPS paired with Google maps, chat clients, a 5 megapixel camera with flash, mp3 players, Chinese-English dictionary. One little device replaces at least five different devices I used to carry around. Probably my favorite function is the GPS. Being the geography nerd I am, and doing as much travel as I do in China, I'll never again get lost, never again wonder where I am. It's especially useful when paired with my other big recent purchase:

A new bike! I can't believe it took me so long to get around to buying a good bike. I've always liked bicycling. I biked a lot growing up in Marin. I biked in college. I biked in grad school. And I've biked for the last two and a half years in China. But I always biked on crappy bikes. My justification was that most of my biking was around the city, where bikes frequently get stolen, and I didn't want to risk getting an expensive bike stolen. But I would also sometimes go on longer rides, and for that the crappy bikes just sucked.

So now I've got a nice hybrid mountain-road bike, strong, sturdy, smooth, fast. I also loaded up on accessories - mostly importantly, a rear-mounted bag for carrying supplies and luggage when touring. I've met so many long-distance cyclists recently that it inspired me to do the same. All of my travel in Yunnan these last couple years has been by bus. Now I can travel by bike for extended periods of time. You can see so much more by bike. And I can take the wheel off and put if in the bottom of a bus if I ever need to.

I went on my first semi-long distance ride this past weekend, kind of a test run. I rode 200 km in two days. From Kunming, I rode south along the shore of Dianchi Lake (滇池) to a town called Haikou (海口). From there I headed up a steep mountain road to get to the next valley over. The road started out paved, but then turned to dirt. The mountain was a giant phosphate mine and with dirt roads criss-crossing the whole mountain I would have become very lost if it hadn't been for my GPS-equipped Android. Actually, I did become lost at one point. The beacon on my phone indicated that I was straying from the main road and I ignored it at first because I assumed it was an error either in the Google maps base map, or the GPS. But it was actually right and I was wrong. With its help, I backtracked and resumed on my way. The bike is not the best for dirt mountain roads; it handled them alright. But it really excels on the highway, which is where I plan to use it most of the time. I've already ridden mountain bikes before, so riding a hybrid road bike on roads is a lot of fun - you can go very fast seemingly effortlessly, even glide up hills.

The next valley over was a beautiful valley, very green and very fertile, full of pear and apple orchards, lotus ponds, and vegetable farms. An old railroad line runs down the valley, but a local said it hasn't been in operation in 20 years. My bike covered in mud from the mountain road, I stopped at a carwash station and asked them to wash my bike. The friendly owner washed my bike for free, said he was happy to welcome foreigners to his valley. At this point I was only about 50 km outside of Kunming but it felt like another world, very far from the hustle and bustle of the city. I rode down the valley 20 km, and spent the night in a down called Bajie (八街). The town only had one guesthouse, and I forgot to bring my passport, so the guesthouse proprietor told me to go to the police station to register. The police station was staffed by a bunch of raggedy looking 18 year－olds. They followed me back to the guesthouse, had me sign my name and fake my passport number, and that was that.

Next morning started out heading west through the fruit orchards on a good quality rural road. Hit the next mountain range and climbed to the top quickly, this time on paved road. The next valley over was considerably lower in elevation because the descent was much longer than the ascent. I hit the county seat of Yimen (易门), the northernmost corner of Yuxi (玉溪) prefecture. It's famous for its wild mushrooms. I had some for lunch. Then I started the 100 km ride back to Kunming, all on main roads. A fair deal of climbing, a couple more mountain ranges. Then I hit the main east-west expressway of Yunnan, the one that runs from Kunming to Dali. Being on my bike I took the old road which runs parallel to the expressway. This was not fun. The old road is in bad condition, parts torn up and turned to dirt. Furthermore, the scenery sucked. I was riding through industrialized outskirts of Kunming. Finally hit the town of Anning (安宁), one more mountain range to cross, and then back to Kunming. I'm looking forward to future, longer, rides with my new bike.

One last little tidbit of interesting news. My friend Deng Sheng Chun (邓声春) used to work at Polar Bear, my favorite drink shop making milk tea, smoothies, and whatnot. But she left Polar Bear because the pay was too low (just 1000 rmb, $150, a month, and she worked 10 hours a day 29 days a month). Deng Sheng Chun just opened her own drink shop, with her own brand name. It's a joint-venture with her friend. I went to visit her new shop on its opening day. When a Chinese shop opens they light fireworks and set up big red banners and bouquets of flowers. I hope she's successful in her new business. She's from a poor rural family. She must have saved a lot of money to be able to invest in her own store. Polar Bear occupies prime real estate downtown. Her shop is in the far suburbs of Kunming, but next to a university campus, so hopefully business will be brisk. Her prices are a lot lower than Polar Bear's, for basically the same products, so her margins can't be very high, she must be planning to make up for that in volume. Anyway, I thought it's a nice little case study of development in progress at a very individual level. Polar Bear is a successful small chain store with about 6 branches throughout Kunming. But they exploit their workers with low pay and long hours. So workers like Deng Sheng Chun save money, and maybe borrow money, and try to make it on their own. There are a million people (well, probably several millions, this is China!) of people just like her, opening their own small businesses. I don't imagine they're all successful. But I admire their entrepreneurial spirit and drive.




Uploading pictures on blogspot is such a pain, I'm not even going to bother. If you want to see pictures of everything I write about here, go to flickr.com/photos/matthartzell

And now for a couple of posts about trips taken last month:

TENGCHONG

At the beginning of June I went to Tengchong (腾冲), a small city in a lush green geothermally active valley near the Myanmar border.
I had actually been to Tengchong once before, almost exactly five years ago, on my first trip to China in 2006. At that time, Tengchong received about a half page of coverage in my travel guide book and was billed as an off-the-beaten-path alternative to the heavily touristed destinations of Dali and Lijiang further up the road. Indeed it had been, and since that first visit had stuck in my head as one of the highlights of my first trip to China. During my time in Kunming, the name Tengchong would come up from time to time amongst travelers. I was curious to see what changes might have taken place in the intervening years.

The Tengchong I discovered in 2011 did seem larger than the Tengchong I saw in 2006. Or maybe I just didn't get around enough the first time. I saw several things this time I didn't the first time. An "old town" area of the main city. And a historic village called Heshun (和顺) a few kilometers outside of the city that seems like it's trying to be the next Lijiang. It's a charming village of entirely old buildings perched on a hill surrounded by rice paddies and mountains. Every house in the village is a guesthouse or cafe or souvenir shop, just like Lijiang. But the place was near empty when I visited on a summer weekend, not a good sign.

I remembered in 2006 spending a day wandering in the villages and rice paddies east of town. I went back there this time only to discover a huge construction site for a massive "tourist resort center", complete with conference center and golf courses.

One of my Kunming friends is from a county neighboring Tengchong. She put me in touch with her childhood friend, who has lived in Tengchong for many years. Xiao Yu is a year younger than me, but has already been married seven years and has a five year old daughter. She is the manager of a restaurant. Her husband is a jade merchant. Jade is big business in Tengchong, since it's so close to Myanmar, which is where most of the world's jade actually comes from. There are hundreds of jade stores in this small out-of-the-way city. Xiao Yu told me about the process of selecting jade. It's quite expensive for the better pieces, which are more luminescent and have darker strands of green. I bought a couple small, comparatively inexpensive pieces because being the friend of a jade merchant's wife I was able to get me a discount. One of the more interesting items for sale in the jade shops is "mystery jade", an unpolished rock with some unknown amount and quality of jade inside it. You can wet it and shine a flashlight into it to get some idea of its contents, but you won't know for sure until you buy it and the guy slices it open using a special blade.

HONGHE

In mid June to Honghe County 红河县), where I'd spent Chinese New Years with Sean, Mao Xian, A Fei, and Li Wei a few months ago. That time I went to Mao Xian and A Fei's home towns. This time I went to Li Wei's home town. The occasion was the Hani ethnic New Year. Took a night bus to the Honghe County seat, then a local bus to Yangjie (羊街), the town where Li Wei lives. Yangjie is on top of a mountain range which spills down several thousand feet to the Yuanjiang River below. My visit was pretty similar to my previous visit to Honghe. Lots of sitting around with the family, playing cards, eating big meals. Some walking around and hiking in the hills. One unique feature of Yangjie is the giant see-saw they built every year on this occasion from a massive tree log. It is several times longer and several times higher than any see-saw I have ever seen, and in addition to see-sawing up and down, it can rotate 360 degrees. We had a great deal of fun playing on it; it's actually quite nerve-wracking when it reaches its highest height.