Towns (Tibetan names in brackets): Sichuan Province - Chengdu, Ya'an, Kangding (Dartsedo), Luhuo (Drango), Garze (Kandze), Manigango, Dege (Derge), Baiyu (Pelyul), Dorkho, Shiju (Sershul), Litang, Xiangcheng (Chaktreng), Derong; Qinghai Province - Yushu (Jyekundo), Huashixia (Tsogyenrawa), Xining; Gansu Province - Lanzhou; Yunnan Province - Zhongdian (Gyeltang), Lijiang, Qiaotou, Daju, Dali, Ruili, Baoshan, Jinghong, Menghan, Kunming.
The first and longest section of this account is a slightly edited version of my diary; this is followed by lists of travel expenses, details of accommodation etc. One yuan/kwai/RMB equals about 19 Australian cents or about 12 American cents. References to the Lonely Planet guidebook are to South-west China, November 1998. Names of most other travellers have been changed.
Another journey, through Tibetan areas of northern Sichuan (Aba
County), southern Qinghai (Jiuzhi County) and southern Sichuan (Muli County),
and through Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi Provinces to Macao, Hong Kong and
Singapore, is described at
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~dawa/china00/htm.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------
When I set out on a journey I have learnt to suspect that the probability will actually be the opposite of the expectation, so that if I am expecting something to be unpleasant it is for that reason likely to turn out the opposite, and vice versa.
That can be true in quite small ways. You come to a hotel, remembering the happy times you have had there with good friends on other occasions; but this time the friends are not there, the place is full of strangers, and you are a stranger to them. And so you move on quickly. If you had had different expectations, you might have gone out of your way to make new friends, and things might have been quite different.
Stress and sickness can limit what you try to achieve or even notice. You can drive through towns without trying to find out their names, and not bother to take photographs of many things that you will be amazed later you did not photograph.
This time, I was much more conscious than I expected to be of two kinds of ugliness. Firstly, there was the rubbish - almost everywhere, in towns, in monasteries, on river-banks; the people of western China have been overtaken by the packaging revolution, but seem to have no idea of what to do about the discarded packaging, and are drowning in it. Secondly, there were the Ugly Buildings everywhere - the white-tiled monstrosities, the inside-out bathrooms, whether single-storey roller-shuttered shops, two-storey farmhouses, or the ubiquitous four-storey apartment and office buildings, erected by a people that seems, if its architectural predilections are a guide, quite oblivious to any heritage; or perhaps, mesmerized by elements of western culture, they must behave as though they hate their own.
This time, I sometimes felt frightened of being trapped in some wild-west dump, in one of those raw frontier towns that you find in western China, unable to reach in time a place where I could get a visa extension. At the time, it can be alarming to hear that the road you relied on is closed by a landslide and will not be open again for weeks. Afterwards, you know how things turned out, and it seems silly to have felt like that. It would be useful to remember the old cliche - There's always a way.
So much for the negative things. They were greatly outweighed by the positive things.
This time, my sixth visit to China in seven years, I was more confident in speaking my very limited Chinese, in trying to buy bus tickets, get accommodation, hire a bicycle, and so on. Although I only know a few words, communicating in Chinese, helped by body language, has often been an enjoyable experience, and not the alarming one it once was. It helps not to be self-conscious about the tones; they are an essential part of talking. I have slowly learnt how travellers in large measure manufacture the responses they get, and that a relaxed and friendly approach to even the most officious or harassed ticket-seller usually gets a helpful response; think of her in her family situation and you'll start to get the idea. I have learnt that the weakest, self-deprecating joke can break down barriers instantaneously, and that the serious, reserved traveller is perceived by most of the locals as unfriendly - an interpretation that is true enough, and deserved.
Time and time again, the journey was punctuated by small miracles - the right person, the right vehicle in just the right place at the right time.
So here is how it happened, with just less than six weeks in China, a hurried journey.
The rough plan was to travel, mostly by bus, from Chengdu through
Garze to Dege in north-western Sichuan province, down the Jingsha (Yangtzi)
river to Baiyu and then back to Garze and up through Shiju to Yushu in
Qinghai province, then to Huashixia on the road to Xining. Since I was
last there a year ago, north-west Sichuan had opened to foreigners. From
Huashixia I hoped to travel down through south-east Qinghai through the
Aba prefecture of Sichuan, to Chengdu, and then to Kangding again before
heading for Litang and north-western Yunnan province. I achieved all this,
except for the run from Huashixia to Chengdu; in its place I travelled
to far south and south-western Yunnan.
The next morning, Ben comes with me early to the bus stop, and I catch a regular bus to the airport - much cheaper than the air-conditioned special airport bus, but slower. When passengers are allowed out of the building for boarding the flight to Chengdu, there is at last clear evidence that the airline does exist, the one no one had heard of - Angel Airlines, the name painted on the aircraft, a possible if unlikely reference to Psalm 91. Ben told me that if I fly on a different aircraft when I come south I shall have flown on the entire fleet.
The flight is mostly cloudy, but I get a few photos from the window, mostly approaching Chengdu. Coming to Chengdu is routine, an arrival repeated many times, although after a year there are always a few surprises. I know the routine at the Jiao Tong hotel - breakfast included, the kind of room I want and expect to get. The two other beds are occupied by first-timers, an American and a curious bald Australian with a foreign accent who will not answer personal questions but proceeds in the next few hours to divulge all kinds of confidence because, he says, he likes me.
Down to the street, and along to see Mr Chen, in his unmarked office-bedroom behind the army clothing shop at the bus depot next to the hotel. Yes, of course he remembers me (and proves he does by telling me things from the past). His English is good, and he understands how foreigners work, and talks straight. Now that he has an Honourable Mention in the Lonely Planet, he is happily pleased with himself. I quiz him about the current arrangements for getting to Lhasa and central Tibet. He knows how to get me a bus ticket for Kangding for the day after tomorrow, and he knows how to get me the 45-day People's Insurance Company travel insurance policy that I will need for that and may need for subsequent bus trips. I am happy to pay the modest commission he charges for this little luxury; there will be plenty of opportunities to do my own ticket-buying later.
The next day is the only time on this trip when I shall actually participate in the "free" breakfast at the hotel. Despite the use Eddy, Edwin and I made of the "suggestion" slip last year, the toast is still not crisp, the butter still far too little, the fried egg hours out of the pan, the restaurant-operators slow learners.
I hire a bike at the hotel and head off to seek out Mr Meng of the Sichuan Holy Love Foundation. I got the address in western Chengdu from Pam Logan of the Kham Aid Foundation, which has an office there, but the location is a bit vague, and no one understands street numbers. So when I reach the general locality I must ask innumerable times which way to go. I want to buy some kerosene ("mei you", with tones of the right kind), and go to a kind of service station, which does not sell mai you. "Mei you" with different tones means "not have", and the man enjoys the joke I make about "Mei you mei you". Of course the real joke is that it is a long-nosed foreign devil who is making such a pathetic joke about a language he doesn't understand; but it is nice to make the joke anyway. Then more to-ing and fro-ing. I am put off by the fact the main road where Mr Meng's place is supposed to be ends at a brick wall, almost right across the road, and for a while I refrain from going past the wall. But when I eventually do that (there is a bumpy hole through the wall, and the road continues, unpaved, beyond it) I find almost immediately, in English characters, the sign, "Sichuan Holy Love Foundation". Asking for Mr Meng by name gives me immediate entry past the kind of informal guard at the compound entrance. There is a large Chinese inscription on the building inside with, in English, the reference Mark 12:30, but I can't decipher the Chinese or recognize the reference. Inside, there is a good atmosphere, teachers and children moving from room to room, a school preoccupied with its business. Xu Bin comes up to me, a young woman with glasses who speaks a very few words of English, and tells me that it is OK for me to wait until Meng ChangShou returns. She explains, I think, that Pam Logan is in town, and has just gone out but will come back, and that I can wait for her too. So I sit in the courtyard with my guidebooks. A few people who go past, come to collect children, say Hullo, and smile. Some older children carry small children about. The business of this place is education of disabled children - autism, cerebral palsy, and so on; such children in China are often hidden away. Despite the huge obstacles to setting up any NGO in China, Mr Meng has managed to get up this one.
After a couple of hours, Mr Meng returns. He is exactly as Pam described him - lanky, energetic, and friendly. Whether he speaks any English I'm not now sure, but if he does it is very little, perhaps almost as little as my Chinese. But he shows me his office, and photos, and computer equipment, a donation from a protestant church in Norway. It turns out that Xu Bin is his wife.
The orphanage project he was said to be planning for Sershul town he in fact knows nothing about. The only project apart from the school is his desire to get funding to help some people afflicted by serious disease in south-central Sichuan province. He has recently returned from a trip to the United States, where he did not have much success in getting the support he wanted.
Mr Meng and Xu Bin insist on giving me some apples, and then on taking me to dinner at a restaurant next door, where I meet some of their friends, including some Chinese people from Singapore. Afterwards I try to pay, but that is out of the question. Then I ride "home" in the dark.
I collect my bus ticket and the insurance policy from Mr Chen. The insurance is only about 90 yuan for two months for the whole of China - much less than people in Australia told me to expect, and about the same rate as I paid in previous years.
The next morning, Tuesday, I am at the bus station by six for the ride to Kangding in the "aircon" bus. After an early lunch at Ya'an we begin the ride over Erlang Shan, the high mountain pass. A tunnel is under construction through the mountain, and perhaps for that reason the road over the top has received minimal maintenance. It is rough and narrow, so that traffic is one-way, for several hours in each direction. Guidebooks speak about danger, but the road never seems frightening to me. The ride is spectacular and the climb never-ending, so that the longest climb in Australia is only a tiny fraction of the climb here. A ride over Erlang Shan seldom occurs without delays. Our main delay is four hours or so, a few miles before the pass, where scores of trucks are banked up; there are other, shorter, delays. Everywhere along the road there are humpies of scrap wood and woven plastic awning, perched beside the abyss, selling supplies, bases for people with baskets to go out to get sales from stranded travellers. We do not reach the pass until just before dusk, and after that the main descent is quite dark.
We reach Kangding at about 10. There is a guesthouse above the bus station, but at the reception a woman who is knitting brushes me aside rudely, just as she will do the next time I arrive in Kangding; clearly this is not a place permitted to take foreigners. I know that the guesthouses which the guidebooks say take foreigners are far away, probably difficult to find at night, and inconvenient for getting to the bus station before it opens at six the next morning. There are the usual groups of motorbike taxis and people outside the bus station, and after a bit of enquiry someone kindly agrees to escort me to the foreigners' "binguan". It turns out to be only a few hundred yards away, friendly enough, and cheap.
Up at 5:35, there is the usual routine of waking a sleepy concierge so that she can unlock the front door and let me out into the courtyard, and then another one to be found to unlock the gate to the street. Back at the bus station when it opens, I get a ticket for the two-day run up to Dege (Tibetan Derge). I meet Mike and Pete, two young Americans who have lived in Beijing for several years, Mike working for the Peace Corps. Pete is planning to hike into the hinterland behind Dege, doing research for some writing he plans for the Wall Street Journal. Not until long after I return to Melbourne will I recognize him as Peter Hessler, the author of the excellent series of three articles I read in the Atlantic Monthly early this year, "Tibet through Chinese Eyes".
The bus leaves Kangding at about seven, just as it is getting light. Almost straight away, the countryside seems purely Tibetan, with substantial, almost castle-like bluestone two-storey farmhouses everywhere; the farmland seems prosperous, or at least contented. Mid-morning, we stop at a village where Mike, Pete, and I look at some Tibetan houses with very ornate windows with painted glass, and a house with both Tibetan and Chinese decorations on the door. How proud Tibetans are of their culture when they are allowed to follow it! We stop for lunch at Bamei (Tibetan Garthar).
By 5 in the afternoon, the bus stops for the night at Luhuo (Tibetan Drango), the driver telling us to be back for departure at 5 a.m. The three of us go to a new hotel where the tariff seems reasonable, but where Mike and Pete take exception to the proposal that we pay five yuan each for registration forms; we shall later conclude that this is not an extortionate photocopying charge, but an imposition by the PSB. A short expedition leads to the conclusion that there is no alternative accommodation nearby, and so we return and, after a brief difficulty over the insufficient number of forms on hand, book into a room. Mike and Pete head off for some exploration. I head down the main street in light drizzle, making for the great monastery on the hill across a river. After trudging up through the monastery to the main temple I am attempting to negotiate entry to the locked building through a side door when Mike and Pete turn up. Soon we are joined by a young monk, a Chinese wood-carver and a Tibetan carpenter, and look over the inside of the building, identifying from my guidebook statues in the various shrines, and meeting an old monk. Upstairs, we are shown to the apartments that stand ready for the Panchen Lama and for the Dalai Lama - the latter never having been used, but decorated and furnished as though he were coming tonight.
We all talk for a long time, or communicate somehow, and we are all enjoying everyone else's company. There are a number of images of the Dalai Lama, and one in the windscreen of the monastery truck. Clearly there is no effective embargo against such images here - yet: the re-education teams have not yet arrived, although they have been purging monasteries a few hours away.
After some photos, I wander back to town, looking for some "street food", cooked on sticks over charcoal burners, and usually delicious. I find a vendor, order my food, sit down, and am surrounded immediately by curious people, all of them Tibetan women. They are teasing me, and telling me to shout them to a meal. My response is to pick on one, certainly not the prettiest, and make that if only she will sit beside me I shall buy her all the food she wants. This is an excellent joke, and with a coy but willing subject of attention can be played out for at least as long as it takes stick food to cook. And so to a wander through the streets, and an early night.
The next morning Mike and Pete hear the bus manoeuvring well before the scheduled departure time, and so we go down early. It is just as well, because it leaves at 4:50. Would it have waited for us until the scheduled time of 5 a.m.? I expect it would.
After a mid-morning stop for half an hour at Garze (Tibetan Kandze), the bus stops at Manigango for a late lunch; this is the junction where the Dege road leaves the main road, which continues to Shiju and to a tenuous connection with Qinghai province. Robert, an ethnic Chinese whose ancestors settled in the West Indies 160 years ago, introduces himself. We shall travel together for a few days.
Beyond Manigango, the scenery is wonderful. The whole circuit from Manigango through Dege, Baiyu and Garze back to Manigango will contain spectacular scenery all the way; this is bound in the future to become a celebrated tourist route, but that is not yet.
Xinluhai lake is blue, surrounded by jagged mountains and glaciers. The circuit around it would be a wonderful walk, and is a celebrated religious kora (circuit). For many miles before Dege the road runs through the colossal gorge of the Zi Chu, but it is impossible to take any photos from the bus.
At Dege, Mike, Pete and I look at a horrible, damp, guesthouse room at eight yuan (about $1.50) a bed, and decide we can afford to go up-market to the main hotel, at 42 yuan each. I wander through the town, join Mike and Pete for dinner in a restaurant, and we are joined by Robert. He writes travel articles for a newspaper in the west. He would like to join me in trying to hitch down to Baiyu (Tibetan Pelyul), but tomorrow we shall spend exploring Dege.
After I breakfast on Melbourne muesli and (powdered) milk, Robert and I walk down the main street. TV cameras are filming the opening of a new shop, with a deafening chorus of fire-crackers and much smoke. An old monk (no more than ten years younger than me) introduces himself, and wants to be friendly, but is bad at communicating much without a common language.
We walk past the great Dege printing press building, the one great Tibetan printing press to survive the Cultural Revolution, and visit the temple of the Gonchen (Sakya) monastery before climbing the steep hillside behind it. At an assembly of prayer-flags, we stop to rest and take in the view of town and river far below.
On the way back, we call in at the cloister quadrangle of the monastery, ablaze with masses of cosmos flowers. At the printing press, Robert refuses to pay the fifty-yuan admission charge, and goes off elsewhere on his own. Like some charges in other remote parts of Tibet such as Tsaparang and the road to Everest, it is a charge that depends on most people having come so far that they will pay almost anything. I have an escorted tour, guided by a Tibetan who speaks no English. The building houses a huge library of intricately carved wooden printing blocks, with six lines to a page. Men are scurrying about, taking stacks of blocks to and from the printing shops. At the main printing shop there are eight pairs of men printing, using the same methods I have seen at Ganden and Lhasa. There are smaller groups in other rooms printing mandalas and thankas. Photography is not permitted, although in a corner of the library my guide waits for a long time for others to disappear so that he can allow me to take a photo. But he indicates that he will be punished severely if he is caught, and I decide to refrain.
The tour ends rather abruptly, and when I am out in the street I realize that I have not seen the temples and chapels inside the building. But there are other things to do, and I go off in search of a small temple, the Tangyel Lhakhang. I come upon the new-looking three-storey Tibetan hospital, and go inside. A number of people in white coats look busy, but there is no sign of patients or any medical work going on.
Eventually I find the way to Tangyel Lhakhang, along a winding narrow alley that leads off the printing press street, downhill and from the other side. I persuade a monk to let me look inside what I think is the building, but it turns out to be a rather run-down residence. Tangyel Lhakhang is locked. I sit and talk for a while to a monk and a pretty Tibetan girl who get some amusement from my Tibetan and Chinese phrase-books. After a time I realize it is late, and go off to the PSB office to seek an extension to my thirty-day visa. There I am told that I must go to Chengdu; the prefecture capital, Kangding, is not mentioned.
I meet Robert and go in search of kerosene supplies. Eventually I am led through a shop, down a totally dark passage, followed my several curious children, to a room with large drums, including one of kerosene: "You mai you" - "Have kerosene". After dinner in a restaurant with Robert we watch a "tour group" arriving at the hotel. There are many dark-windowed four-wheel-drive vehicles disgorging a mixture of Tibetans and Chinese, most looking as though they are dressed for dinner. It looks like some kind of government mission.
Mike and Pete have gone, and I have taken a room in the cheaper wing of the hotel, off a balcony beside the roaring river.
On Saturday (4th September), as agreed Robert and I set off at 6:30 in the dark, and walk past the south edge of town before perching at 7 beside the road. Apart from a few bicycles, there is no traffic. I have breakfast of muesli beside the river. At 8:30 a truck stops. The driver says at first that he is going to a place whose name sounds like Ruili, but when Robert says we are going to Baiyu, he assures us he is going there, and that the fare is fifteen yuan - cheap enough.
The back of the truck is overflowing, and it is difficult even to stand. The road is good, but slow. The truck stops for an hour at a village whose name sounds like Larujo where the gardens are full of flowers and with fruit-laden apple trees. A pretty Tibetan girl whom I call Pinkey creates great amusement by flirting with me - an entertainment that clearly is intended to go nowhere.
The scenery is stupendous, especially after we join the Jingsha (Yangtzi) river and pass the bridges to Chamdo - both the one that is in use and the old suspension bridge which was used for China's move into central Tibet. There are some paths and ruins of forts on the other side of the river. The river is so huge that the other side seems utterly remote, inaccessible, a different world.
Just before one o'clock, the truck stops, and the driver says he is turning off, and not going to Baiyu after all. Robert and I and two Chinese youths get off. Robert and I walk for a kilometre or so, trailing the youths. Then we find them sitting in the shade of a bush beside the road. They say they are waiting for a truck that will come soon. It is not apparent how they know it is coming, but it does come, although it doesn't stop.
We leave the youths at the turn-off to Horpa. Knowing now where we are, I estimate the distance to Baiyu from where the truck turned off at a little less than 30 kilometres, although later I will think it turns out closer to 35. I did not expect a long walk, and am poorly prepared for it. The going is painful, my two packs heavy, my smaller pack awkward, my thick synthetic socks the worst kind for walking, blisters forming. Robert and I pass each other many times. With the exception of an over-full army jeep, no vehicle passes in our direction, although several pass the other way.
At 6:15 I stop for my first break, estimating we have ten kilometres to go. Robert does not appear, and eventually I walk back for half an hour or so to find that he has slept for half an hour and feels exhausted. We decide to camp, and do so on flat ground by a choeten, high above the road.
Robert has been trying to travel like a Chinese, with light clothing and with only a small shoulder bag. He thinks that he can travel unnoticed that way, to places where otherwise he might not be permitted. It rains all night, and Robert is equipped only with a large raincoat. In contrast, I have a thermarest, sleeping bag and Goretex bivvy bag - which, as it turns out, leaks badly; I have used it before in frost and light snow, but never in the rain. My hip hurts, and I sleep very little. When we get up at 7:30, parts of my sleeping bag are wet, and a lot of water has got into my backpack.
We walk down the road for over an hour, to the second ninety-degree bend of the river, where we find an apparently non-operational sawmill and a Tibetan house and family - the first house we have seen since the truck left us. The people ask us in to a warm fire and black tea; an unregistered wreck of a truck is standing outside. Some of the people are watching a horrible sinicized-Tibetan video. Robert doesn't want to walk any further, and so we arrange an expensive ride in the truck to Baiyu, negotiating down from fifty to forty yuan. We do not know the distance: our map shows Baiyu as standing beside the Jingsha, but it turns out to be about seven kilometres away.
We check into the Baiyu guesthouse. The clerk insists that we must go to the PSB and register. We try to do so, but the staff at the PSB tell us there is no such work on a Sunday. We find out that there is a bus service to Garze every second day, and that the next is on Tuesday, the day after tomorrow.
After lunch at a restaurant, we climb up to the great monastery that covers the hill above the town. We inspect a dukhang (assembly hall), but it is clearly not the main one. A monk introduces us to Lama Tenzin, a young monk who is in his cell and speaks good English, having been to India. He says that the monastery has about five hundred monks but no geshes (learned lamas, a designation sometimes said to be equivalent of doctor of theology), having begun teaching again only eight or nine years ago. He says he is happy with the administration. Novices are supposed not to be less than eighteen, but younger ones attend the monastery school and do not wear the novice habit. There is a limit on numbers, but it is not regarded as onerous. He says that the Panchen Lama controversy does not impinge on them because they belong to the Nyingma school, the Panchen Lama belonging to the Gelug school. The visitation of monasteries by "political correctness" teams that has occurred in central Tibet has not happened here. Children who do not attend the monastery school attend regular school where instruction is in Chinese, but they have the option of learning Tibetan. He emphasizes that the tough repression that has occurred in central Tibet has not happened here. Naturally I can hardly expect such a person to be entirely frank with a stranger, but it is clear that this monastery is prospering.
Several monks take us to the three-storey Dorsem Lhakhang, and take us into every level. Afterwards, we visit another lhakhang housing an enormous gold Padmasambava before returning to town. As we have dinner in a restaurant, we watch a bus arriving from Garze, and are told that this is the bus which will return there on Tuesday.
On Monday morning, Robert and I go searching for the bus ticket office, walking well beyond the town limits in the direction we came from yesterday, passing a hydro-electric station on the river. Eventually, on the way back, we find the bus parked in a walled yard; there is no sign to indicate it is a bus depot. We buy tickets for the 7:00 a.m. departure tomorrow from a room on the ground floor of a two-storey building in the compound.
Robert goes off on his own, and after lunch I go to the PSB to seek a visa extension, but the police tell me I must go to Kangding to get it. I have to pay a thirty-yuan registration fee, and am asked about the "other" man who came with me yesterday. I say I am alone, but go off to find Robert, and eventually spot him in the town. I am concerned that if he does not register he could be prevented from boarding the bus tomorrow. We return to the PSB, and he registers.
I walk up a track into the steep and dense forest south of the town. At the edge of the forest, and wherever there is a small clearing, there are many edelweiss flowers and brilliantly blue gentians, both prolific throughout much of western Sichuan. Afterwards I return to dine with Robert in a restaurant we have patronized before. Two bottles of beer prevent me from sleeping well.
On Tuesday, Robert and I rise at 5:45 to be at the bus station by 6:30. The bus leaves almost empty, but fills up in the centre of town and beyond. About fifteen or twenty kilometres from town we come on a landslide, with several vehicles waiting on each side. We wait for several hours. Some four-wheel-drive cars manage to get through the deep mud, but it would clearly be too dangerous for the bus, with a steep drop to the river on one side. There is no sign of any road workers. At perhaps 11:30 the bus returns to Baiyu, and we are told it will leave again at five tomorrow morning.
After lunch in town with Robert, I go for a walk south of town, past the PAP (People's Armed Police) prison. Dinner with Robert is in a rather good, but cheap, restaurant at the south end of town.
Up at 4:15 on Wednesday, we walk to the bus station. The bus leaves town at about 5:30. The journey is spectacular. We stop briefly at Barong, a decaying sawmilling settlement with no sign of current sawmilling activity. Throughout my time in western Sichuan and Yunnan I will see hardly any log trucks or signs of current sawmilling, and even the few logs seen will appear well-weathered; nothing I will see will indicate that the restrictions on timber-harvesting introduced in response to flooding are not being enforced.
At Dorkho we stop for an early lunch. This town centres around a Sakya monastery, and there are few signs of the modern world. The central building of the monastery is well-worn, but the first floor is being refurbished, with new statues and a carpenter making new cabinets. Behind this building and another temple, there is a large new timber residential building, apparently part of the monastery.
Beyond Dorkho, the scenery is some of the most beautiful I have seen. In high, rolling heathland scattered with granite boulders, we pass several blue lakes, and very occasionally a nomad's tent or a few yaks. This would be wonderful walking country. Later we suddenly cross a small pass and see a wonderful view of distant snow mountains - a view that my photos will only capture poorly. As we roll down towards Garze we pass close by those mountains.
Arriving at Garze at 4:50 p.m., Robert says he has decided to travel on his own; I am not sorry to be alone. At the bus station, the clerk tells me that the bus to Shiju (Tibetan Sershul) goes at 1:00 p.m. tomorrow, and that I should buy tickets then. I am very concerned that the bus, which comes from Kangding only every three days, may be full, and I am anxious to get a ticket as soon as I can.
I explore the town, post letters at the post office (for the exorbitant rate of Y8.50 each), and find a guesthouse where my guidebook map places the Post Office Hotel. The clerk asks me many incomprehensible questions in Chinese, not comprehending himself that they are incomprehensible, but eventually accepts payment for a bed in a two-bed room, with an additional five yuan for "registration".
I stroll around the town. Nearly all the shops and shop signs are Chinese. I have dinner of beer and skewered meat at a street stall, and only with great difficulty persuade the stall-holders to take any money.
On Thursday, I am up at 7:30. I walk through the town and then through the Tibetan quarter, alive with activity as people bring in the harvest and place it on roofs to dry. Climbing the long flight of stairs through the Kandze monastery I come to the assembly hall. I see the ground floor and photograph debating monks in the treed terrace below. I return to the bus station by a different route, and prepare to buy a ticket or to ask questions. Unexpectedly, I do succeed in buying a ticket well before the bus arrives at 1:10, and in the meantime chat to Tibetans in the bus yard. One is named Drolma, and she is interested to know about the Drolma chapel at the Jokhang in Lhasa. After the bus arrives, some people buy tickets from the driver outside the bus, and some appear to pay inside the bus. It leaves at about 2:15.
The road passes the walled town of Beri, beside the Yarlung river and later Dargye gamba, through idyllic rural scenery - farmers harvesting and ploughing, and later, nomads in tents with yaks. The weather at this time of year is at its most benign.
The bus stops for half an hour for some mechanical work. Nearby, two women are repairing the road, carrying sifted material in baskets and spreading it over the whole of the road surface, slowly advancing along the road.
We arrive at Manigango at about 5:30, and everyone stays at the Manigango Guest House, whose yard is the bus station. We are shown into a room where an almost ritual-like washing procedure takes place, with hot water being decanted from large vats into individual bowls. I go for a walk to the other end of the very dusty town, trailed for a while by some larrikin, bored, early-teenage boys who have learnt some foul language from TV or video: what a place to live if you are a teenager fascinated with western culture! A restaurant quotes high prices, and I cook my own dinner. Later I find that there was a cheap restaurant at the guesthouse.
On Friday (10th September), the bus was expected to leave at 7:00, but leaves half an hour later. My seat is by a window on the right-hand side near the back, with good leg-room. After an early lunch stop 10:30 to 11:25 we pass Dzogchen town on the left. The famous Dzogchen monastery is in a hidden valley behind the town. If I could stop for a day I would, but cannot afford to lose at least three days until the next bus; in any case, I am wanting to keep as many days of my visa as possible for travelling through Qinghai and back to Sichuan.
We reach Shiju at 3:00. There is no bus service any further. In case I can get a lift to Xiewu in Qinghai, I walk quickly through town, remembering the familiar buildings, and perch on the far side. People tell me there will be no transport, but I remember hearing the same thing at the same time of day at the same spot a year ago, before I did get a lift; so I am happy to try, although not very hopeful. This time they are right. I find accommodation in a "hotel" that is the upper floor above a row of recently-built shops, with the small river behind, full of rubbish. The people who run the hotel also run a restaurant in one of the shops, and persuade me to eat there. But as soon as I am eating the meat dumplings, I realize they have not been heated nearly enough to kill germs, and I suspect I shall be ill. Later that night, I do develop diarrhoea. The hotel has no toilet of any kind. Because of the altitude, I continually gasp for air just as I am beginning to go to sleep, a problem I dislike intensely. It rains all night, and I am very anxious that the road to Xiewu will be impassable. I have not experienced trouble with rain in China before, but this year the wet season must be finishing late.
A pair of young monks move into the room at 8, and at midnight another monk, on his own. The two monks are heading for Yushu (Tibetan Jyekundo), and I explain that I am looking for transport. To my delight, in the morning they get seats for themselves and me in an ancient Chinese four-wheel-drive vehicle. The rain has stopped, and the vehicle eventually sets off just before 8, crowded with ten occupants and their bags. Just before 9, we stop at Sershul Gompa village, and I photograph from a distance the great gompa that I explored last year. The village looks primitive and depressed, with single-storey pressed-earth buildings on either side of the muddy main street. The traveller who does not stay overnight will not discover that there is a theatre capable of seating perhaps fifty people and where the local citizens watch videos on a large screen.
Beyond the village, I photograph a famous mani-stone wall beside the road, one of the longest in Tibet. We stop several times, including one prolongued stop to help a bogged passenger truck that left Shiju at about 8. I suspect that this may even be a daily service.
Last year there was virtually no road between Sershul Gompa and the
provincial border, but a new road had been marked out and work begun. This
year, the new road is already very badly potholed and rutted, and north
of the checkpoint often nearly impassable.
The hill above Xiewu is dominated by the Drogon monastery, its buildings painted in the distinctive colours of the Sakya sect, the same as those of Sakya monastery itself in central Tibet. Arriving at Xiewu at 1:00, we find that the Yushu minibus is undergoing carburettor "repairs". It leaves at 2, but the carburettor has not been fixed and the bus breaks down repeatedly. Eventually the battery is flat. The driver leaves for a long time, and eventually a four-wheel-drive van, which he appears to have arranged, arrives and takes the few remaining passengers on to Yushu, where we arrive at about 6.
It is windy and starts to rain. The two monks want me to join them for dinner, but when I say I want to go off to arrange accommodation take me to a Tibetan guesthouse on the first floor of a building on the south-east corner of the main intersection, where I book in. I have dinner in a Moslem restaurant at the same table as a pair of monks and a Tibetan who is a nuisance and insists on talking to me in Tibetan. At the end, he actually pays for my meal, and it is only after strong protests from me that he reneges. As I walk the streets, a jeep-load of police ask me into their jeep for a few minutes' camaraderie.
The guesthouse is very noisy, the altitude affecting me, and at 1:30 I take, stupidly, a sleeping pill. Inexplicably, I do get some sleep, despite the combination of sleeping pill (which reduces breathing) and high altitude.
On Sunday I am up at six. It is raining lightly, cold and dark; there are no street lights, and walking towards the bus depot is almost a matter of walking blind. From time to time, shadowy figures emerge on the road. One asks where I am going, and I tell him I am going to the bus station. He says that there is a second bus station, and he is going to it. I follow him along dark, muddy alleys to what does indeed turn out to be another bus station. I am told to sit down in the "office", where a number of people are warming themselves at the stove, or getting up, or still asleep. I am having great trouble working out which of several buses will be going where I want to go, and indeed whether I am in the right place at all. But eventually I am shown onto a bus bound for Xining, which moves out to the main street. I still do not have a ticket, and it was impossible to get one at the bus station. After the bus has stood for a long time in the main street, the window of a small kiosk opens, and one of the drivers is able to get me a ticket. My seat is one of the tiny fold-out seats that fill the aisle, with a very low back, and very uncomfortable.
The trip is uneventful, beginning at 8 and reaching Huashixia (Tibetan Tsogyenrawa) at about 5:50. Perhaps because I am not well, the country strikes me this time as monotonous. My diarrhoea is no better, and I eat little. Huashixia is a dump, a "wild west" town populated by sullen-looking people or desperadoes. If I was feeling more bouncy I would be able to break through that rather negative impression, but I am tired. The guesthouse is a large, three-storey building, with room for more than 200 people, all apparently in bunks. It seems to be occupied in part, and to be managed by, the PAP, and I seem to be the only guest.
I am feeling negative about the altitude, and frightened of hitching south. Banma is 360 kilometres away, and I realize that if I disappeared no one would ask any questions until I failed to appear in Melbourne five weeks later. Later I shall wish I had not been so negative and timid.
On Monday morning, after a night of poor sleep and diarrhoea, it is snowing, but quite still. I cannot find anyone to open the compound gate, but manage to slide underneath it. I have decided to chicken out, to head for Chengdu via Xining and Lanzhou. There is a boom-gate at the town checkpoint, and I perch beside it to look for a lift. As I wait, a few Tibetan women emerge onto the street, and sit on steps, sometimes saying a few words, sometimes silent. It may be snowing, and to me this town may be a dump, but to them it is home; it is not cold, and the snow is harmless.
After half an hour snow has covered my bag, and the operator invites me into the checkpoint office, another room full of a several people, some up, some getting up, some still asleep. I suspect that this is a bottom-level guesthouse, of the kind where "normal" travellers stay but unavailable to foreigners if there are any police nearby; it is instructive to consider that the patrons of this establishment would regard the rough accommodation I occupied as extravagantly unaffordable. I have chosen the checkpoint because, reasonably it seemed, it is a place where every vehicle must stop. But soon a minibus passes through without stopping, and deposits the boom-gate fifty metres down the road; the bus is a mess, the driver bemused but unhurt. Now that there is no gate, vehicles drive through without stopping; the intended function of the checkpoint is unclear.
Eventually a truck does stop, some distance along the road, and I arrange a lift to Xining, riding in the cabin with the driver and a young man. After a couple of hours, at the next town the truck stops, and we all have a meal in a Muslim restaurant. Then the other two are joined by more people, and begin some inexplicable procedures in the truck station opposite, manoeuvring trucks, decanting fuel, and towing a truck that does not work. Then our truck goes back along the road beyond the town edge and drives off the road, backing up to an extension of the built-up road that serves as a kind of loading dock. The disabled vehicle drives over this loading dock onto the back of our truck, and is secured. But now our vehicle is badly (and predictably) bogged. The position seems hopeless, but This Is China, and the people responsible have to resolve the problem, difficult or not. For about six hours the two drivers and the young man work to jack the truck up and place stones under the wheels until finally it is extracted.
We then drive through the night, almost without interruption to Xining. There is no back to the passenger seat, but an unavoidable projection in the bodywork where it would be fixed, just where I need to lean. The drivers play loud cassettes for long periods, and I sleep very little. At Xining I expect just to snooze on the station steps until it opens and I can get a ticket for Lanzhou. The truck takes me right to the station, and immediately on alighting a man who is sweeping the footpath produces a sign and is transmogrified into a tout for a hotel. The prospect of nearly three hours' sleep for twenty yuan is irresistible, and I follow him down an alley beside the station to the hotel. Showing no consideration for my (Chinese) room-mate, the concierge startles him by turning on the light at 3:20 a.m. I feel like one of those PSB officers in the habit of breaking into hotel rooms at only slightly less uncivilized hours.
I rise at 6:40, am farewelled in good humour by my short-term room-mate, reach the station by seven, and get a ticket without difficulty for a hard seat on the first train to Lanzhou. In the station forecourt I photograph a group of about two dozen people practicing Tai Ji - against the misty atmosphere of early morning a scene that somehow catches the essence of China. There is time for a short walk. The relatively cheap Yunfu Hotel across the bridge from the station is the only one I have stayed in before but was closed last time I was here; now it has re-opened, as the Kunlun Hotel. The train to Lanzhou is full, the passengers subdued in the manner of regular commuters anywhere.
On arrival at Lanzhou, I know where to find the ticket office to buy a hard sleeper to Chengdu tomorrow, but it is rather crowded with a queue at every one of its many windows, each window apparently for a different purpose. I cannot work out which one is for hard sleepers to Chengdu, and everyone seems too busy to help until a young man, Zhang Bo, asks if he can do so. I offer five yuan commission if he can buy me a ticket, he asks for ten and I agree to that, but in the end, after getting me a ticket, he refuses to take any commission at all. In China, you never jump to conclusions. It is now just after midday, and he explains that tickets for tomorrow's Chengdu train only go on sale at midday the day before: my timing has been impeccable! Zhang Bo is learning English at Xi'an International College. He is with his girlfriend Han Juan-Juan and her mother, who looks no more than 35.
I go to Yingbing Fandian, recommended by the Lonely Planet guidebook, but they will not sell me a dorm bed and have a minimum charge of one hundred yuan - that is, I suspect, for foreigners. After some difficulty, I find Lan Shan Binguan, whose entrance is on the east side of Tianshui Lu, a few metres from the corner of the T-junction facing the station, and take a good single room at twenty-eight yuan - excellent value, and a very convenient location.
To see the sights of town, I catch trolley bus number 31. I search for the PSB visa office, but am looking in the wrong block. After several directions and misdirections, I ask at a station of the Economic Police in Wudu Lu, and eventually a young policeman takes me a considerable distance to the visa office, where I get a thirty-day extension for 200 yuan - double the cost last year at Dunhuang in the same province, and double what is charged in some other places. The policeman refuses a tip and farewells me warmly. Who can tell? - perhaps he got some of the proceeds of the high visa fee.
I walk to the cable car across the Huang He (Yellow River), take it to Baita Park, on a high hill above Lanzhou. From the top station I walk to the "White Pagoda" (Ming Dynasty), with splendid views over the city. After crossing back I walk to nearby Bayun Guan, a peaceful Daoist temple surrounded by ancient trees. Extensive renovations are underway, including elaborate wood-carving. A few monks with topknots and navy blue habits are about.
I walk to Baiyi Si in the central city with its Ming Dynasty pagoda, but it is nearly dark and the police at the door will not let me in. My clever Canon Z135 camera takes a photo that will actually show more than I could see with the naked eye. I walk back to the hotel, past a big, grassed city square (as usual, walking on the grass not permitted) where there is an open-air pop concert with a foreign, English-speaking compere. Later I stop for a meal of metal-skewered meat and beer at a street stall, and near my hotel I pay to have my boots polished by a very energetic young mother of one. In my room, there is a lot of noise from activities in the street.
On Wednesday morning I am at the station before 9 for the train due to leave at 10:13. The train is very slow, not reaching Tianshui until just before 6 - two or three hours longer than the same trip last year. I have a big early lunch from the train service, am suddenly exhausted, and lie down for several hours in the afternoon.
The next morning the train stops for an hour or two for no evident reason. On almost every occasion it is our train which stops for the other, for perhaps half an hour. For a change, I photograph some typical, run-down residential and industrial buildings, all grey concrete, scenes of a kind which, because they are ugly enough, I usually fail to photograph, thereby producing a set of pictures that omits a big part of reality. Ugly as they may be in their own way, their offensiveness does not approach the hideousness of the white-tiled, blue-glazed concrete boxes that have become ubiquitous in recent years throughout China.
We arrive at Chengdu about 4 p.m. At the station, bus number 16 will not pick me up because it is still technically on its run north, and I must walk to the adjacent bus station to catch it; This Is China.
At the Jiaotong hotel, I share a room with an uncommunicative
Japanese. I have a long-overdue shower and wash my clothes before going
to see Mr Chen, who tells me that there is a bus to Litang tomorrow, but
not the next day. I had looked forward to a break in Chengdu, but ask him
to get me a ticket for tomorrow; since the bus station is closed, I must
collect it from him early in the morning. I have an over-salty meal at
the hotel restaurant and retire; it was obviously designed to be eaten
with rice.
On Saturday, I am up at 5:25 to get to the bus station before 6. The bus is not there. Although I have my doubts, bus station officials assure me that another bus will take me to Litang, and sit me down in the warm office. A bus does turn up, and eventually leaves, at 6:55. As I board, I notice a fair-skinned foreign girl who reminds me of Joanna Wall, my secretary in a different life long ago.
We stop for lunch at Yajiang, which the map indicates is about half way to Litang. As it turns out, the distance from Yajiang to Litang seems much further than from Kangding to Yajiang. After Yajiang, there is much climbing and several passes. At about 2:30 the bus breaks down, terminally. I talk to the foreign girl I saw at Kangding, discovering that her name is Rebecca, that she is from Melbourne, and a tour guide working for Intrepid, doing a research trip on her own. When I find out she works for that company, remembering how she had reminded me of Joanna, I say "In that case perhaps you'll know Joanna", to which she replies "Do you mean Joanna Wall, yes of course I do, she's working for the company in Vietnam ...". Rebecca will be a delightful travelling companion for several days.
By three o'clock, all the passengers get on another bus that was half empty but now becomes badly overcrowded; I do not get a seat, but sit on bags near the front. We reach Litang at about 8:45, in a totally dark bus yard, trying to catch bags from the roof before they fall in the mud. Rebecca and I turn left from the bus station, and walk a few hundred metres to a hotel, the Bei Ta Binguan, on the opposite side just before a corner. I have a comfortable room. The hotel staff are very friendly. One man on the staff wears a peaked army hat, and serenades us with music on a traditional Chinese fiddle. Litang is often said to be the second-highest town in the world, and is certainly high, but by now I have nearly acclimatized.
On Sunday morning, Rebecca and I leave the hotel at 9 for the bus station, wanting to buy tickets for the run south to Xiangcheng (Tibetan Chaktreng). There are colourful cloth shops just outside the hotel, and many Tibetans dressed in traditional clothing, friendly and full of smiles. This is a town with the usual Chinese infrastructure - institutional buildings, mostly two-storey - but there are many large and prosperous-looking Tibetan stone houses. Unlike so many, it is not a town which gives the feeling that Chinese migrants are drowning the local Tibetans. At the bus station, the clerk tells us there is a bus for Xiangcheng at 2 p.m. today, and that the next bus is not until Tuesday. We decide that we can see enough of Litang this morning, and buy tickets for today's bus before heading back past the hotel to visit the monastery.
En route to the monastery we pass a large herd of yaks, and just outside the gate a tiny child, no more than five years old, wearing a monk's habit and sporting a toy machine gun. Inside the compound we meet more children in monks' habits, some of them with musical instruments and others at their lessons. We inspect some of the temples and smaller shrines, in one of which we find a large picture of the Dalai Lama, and a monk asks us into his cell. This seems to be a contented place. The view over the town from above the monastery is endless.
Rebecca goes off to do some research while I have a meal of stick food, choosing from vendors on three corners of the main intersection, before returning to the hotel to meet Rebecca and collect our bags and reaching the bus station at 1:45. There is no bus, only a handful of people who seem to be waiting for it, and some uncertainty about when it will come. This, we gather eventually, is because it is the bus from Kangding to Xiangcheng, and of course its time of arrival is uncertain. It arrives at 3:20, a comfortable aircon bus, less than full.
The drive south is, once more, spectacular. At first it passes through rolling, open mountains, then granite-covered mountains followed by deep forested and rock-cliffed gorges before dusk. We reach Xiangcheng at about 9:30, at a scruffy bus station with no proper office. We enquire about onward transport at the bus station, and then walk towards the centre of town where we find a very fancy-looking Chinese hotel, with dark-windowed Landcruisers in the forecourt and a marble reception lobby with a very helpful receptionist, an amazing establishment in this remote and inaccessible town. [Nine months later, my son Ben will stay at this opulent hotel, reporting the tariff at 25 yuan and that the toilets are foul.] What we discover is that the road to Xiangcheng is blocked by a landslide without prospect of being opened soon, and that the only transport by the less-travelled and longer route to Yunnan through Derong is by truck to Derong, from where there is a bus service down to Zhongdian.
A young Chinese, Qian Tau, speaks some English and tries to help. He helps us to book into a three-storey, tiled-concrete Tibetan hotel opposite the bus station. The hotel has no toilet, and attempts to find out what people do who have a need of one are not understood. Qian Tau says he will come back and meet us at 6 tomorrow morning, to help us get transport.
Up at 5:45 on Monday morning, we go to the bus station, where Qian Tau introduces us to a truck driver in his room; the driver says he can take us to Derong and that we should come back at 7:30. Qian Tau is on a business trip from Kunming, and has brought his girlfriend. They want to travel north but are worse off than we are, because today's bus is full and there is no other for two days. We have noodles for breakfast at the bus station restaurant, served by a rather taciturn, or perhaps just sleepy, operator. After a few delays the truck leaves just after 8, with Rebecca, me and the driver in front, two passengers squashed behind the front seat, and others in the back.
We travel along the side of a valley with Tibetan farmhouses below, and up into the mountains, forested except on the highest slopes. An early lunch stop is at a rough village called Reda, with timber buildings along the main street. After a few short stops, we diverge left onto a long stretch of very rough road through Tibetan settlements, at one of which we stop for a break. There are several wash-outs across the road where the truck tilts alarmingly; we are not reassured when we see the driver drinking beer continually, and later a bottle of spirits. Eventually we join a better road, possibly the one we left earlier, and later reach Derong.
Derong is a compact town of concrete buildings in a narrow valley, with Tibetan houses on the steep slopes beyond the town edges. The truck driver takes us to a guesthouse by the bridge, but it cannot accept foreigners. We walk over the bridge, turn right, and to the Derong Binguan on the left hand side - a concrete building of several storeys. The hotel has plenty of hot water all day in a clean bathroom; for a bed as single occupant of a three-bed room, the charge is sixteen yuan - the best value I have encountered. After showering and washing clothes and a short walk by Rebecca, we meet for dinner, but can find little variety and have stick potatoes and beer on the street.
On Tuesday (21st September) we are at the bridge by 6, in the dark. A few people are about, and by 6:30 we spot a bus depot hidden away at the town end of the bridge, with a minibus and several trucks parked in a locked compound. It soon becomes clear that many people want to get on the bus. As the gates open, the bus manoeuvres in the yard and later moves towards the street; a considerable horde positions itself around the bus door at each stage. As the door eventually opens, the crush is unbearable, and seems dangerous; no less than fifty people are struggling with all their strength to get on, the struggle made worse by heavy fumes from the bus. If we can't get in, it is my plan to offer some money to buy a place from someone who does. Miraculously, I manage to get in, although not to get a seat, and somehow Rebecca gets in as well, getting something like a seat at the front. A long and mysterious process of "rationalization" begins, so that when the bus eventually leaves town there are only a few standing passengers.
The journey trundles along a narrow road down the side of the deep Ding Chu valley. The countryside is much drier than I expected, mostly with only light scrub, including the locality near Guxue gompa - a place I have imagined quite differently. We pass Benzilan on the opposite side of the river, through farmland and eventually reach Zhongdian (Tibetan Gyeltang) at about 2:30, walking a kilometre or so to the Tibet Hotel and checking in. This establishment is designed to be attractive to the backpacker market; it is set around a courtyard and includes a restaurant with English menu. Suddenly, we are in territory where there is a steady flow of tourists. My bed is one of four in a tiny room, the others all occupied - the most crowded I have encountered outside Hong Kong and English YHA hostels.
Rebecca and I have a snack at the hotel restaurant where we meet David from Scotland and Mark and Sarah, a couple from Melbourne.
I catch a bus to the nearby Gyeltang Sungtseling monastery, a celebrated tourist destination that I espied in the distance from the bus coming down from Derong. A Chinese guidebook to Yunnan says it is a perfect replica of the Potala palace in Lhasa, but any resemblance quite escapes me. The signs are all in Chinese - never mind that this is a Tibetan monastery. I walk up the long central staircase and inspect a huge new temple that is being built with extravagant use of materials, especially timber. It is occupied by a golden statue under construction that rises through its three or four storeys. I have no idea where the huge amount of money must come from, but it is scarcely supportable on the basis of making a tourist attraction. Surely it reflects one fundamental divide between Chinese and Tibetans, that where the main ambition of the Chinese is to get rich the main ambition of the Tibetans is to gain merit (karma) by such things as endowing monasteries: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." The trouble with that is that it results in the Chinese walking all over the Tibetans when it comes to commerce.
I find a building where half-a-dozen artisans are making life-size religious statues from sheet-copper, all with what seems like perfect precision. I wonder how such skills survived the bad years, especially the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.
I wander through some other buildings, meet some Dutch travellers
who give me two copies of a map of Tiger-leaping Gorge and ask me to leave
a copy at the Backpackers' Cafe in Qiaotou, and catch the bus back to Zhongdian
for dinner with the same crowd as I met there before. Mark and Sarah are
planning to go down to Lijiang and walk Tiger-leaping Gorge, and are happy
for me to join them.
Rebecca shows me around the central part of the old Naxi town. Classified by UNESCO, its streets and buildings are being preserved under strict controls, but it is now very much a tourist resort, a far cry from the town depicted in the seven-part TV series "Beyond the Clouds" in the early nineties, and of course a different world from the one observed years ago when Joseph Rock and Peter Goullart lived here. There are many restaurants, and we have lunch at Mama Fu's, one that offers an English menu and a variety of local and English dishes, together with beaming smiles from the prospering Mama Fu. Later I walk up the wooded Lion Hill behind the old town to the fence around the Wan Gou Lou pagoda and views over the town before returning for dinner, again at Mama Fu's.
On Thursday, Mark, Sarah and I buy bus tickets to Qiaotou for tomorrow from one of an uncertain number of bus depots in the new city. Then there is time at last for a rest, some wandering, my first calls home, and postcards. To plan our expedition to Tiger-leaping Gorge, Mark, Sarah and I meet for dinner at CC's restaurant. The restaurant, whose food is prepared elsewhere, is abandoned by the manager to a young waitress; service is atrocious and slow, and when after a long wait I get a dish I have not ordered I pay for it but fume out without eating it. Before bed, I make up a bag to leave with the hotel while I am at the gorge.
On Friday I meet Mark and Sarah at 6:45 and walk to the small bus depot in a hotel yard near the Mao statue in the new city, meeting a number of travellers and catching the bus to Qiaotou we booked yesterday. At Qiaotou we have breakfast at the Backpackers' Cafe, where I leave the map of Tiger-leaping Gorge acquired at Zhongdian. The waitress "organizes" us a taxi into the gorge at Y40, but we negotiate with the driver of a small van at Y30, to take us to "the" carpark. After paying Y30 each for admission to the gorge at a check-gate, we drive into the gorge to a carpark just before the road passes into a short tunnel. The driver expects to drop us here, and only reluctantly takes us through the tunnel, but then refuses to go further. This road runs through the length of the gorge, but we will discover it is blocked by several landslides, some before but most after the settlement of Walnut Grove.
We walk four or five kilometres along the road, to a small and friendly road-side guesthouse where we get refreshments and directions. We continue, looking for a small quarry on the left-hand side of the road, with steps from the road leading to a path which will take us to the upper path, a walking path which parallels the road but at a higher level. We find the steps without difficulty, and steam up the side of the gorge, eventually passing through cropland and past several farmhouses. Soon after that, we reach the upper path at the Half-way Guesthouse, an attractive farmhouse where we relax over lunch and cool drinks. The gorge wall opposite the guesthouse is the higher of the two sides, and the view is spectacular.
From here, the path follows an irrigation channel for several kilometres, and so is nearly level. There are continuous views of down into the gorge and across to the other side, and walking this path almost gives the feeling of gliding above the gorge. Soon after the path leaves the channel it begins a long descent to the road, which we then follow for several kilometres. At one stage we must cross a rapid-flowing ford, which we manage with some difficulty.
At Walnut Grove we reach the first of the two guesthouses, Sean's Guesthouse, where the Tibetan Sean's Australian wife, Margot, invites us to come in off the road and buy some cool drinks. We relax with her, Sean and their young daughters, who are pressed into helping with running the place. For dinner we move under the verandah, looking down into the gorge. Later, we watch the (Australian) ABC TV news by satellite from Sydney, which the guesthouse is permitted to receive because it takes foreign guests. Our rooms have beds with clean sheets, complete with teddy bears.
Margot has told us that the landslides beyond Walnut Grove are stable and not dangerous, and so we have decided to go ahead rather than the alternative of returning to Qiaotou. We shall be very glad that we did. On Saturday (25th September) we have breakfast and are on the road by 7. The gorge is still huge. In places the road is good, but several of the landslides over the road are very large; they appear to be stable, although we hurry across one or two of them. Then we climb a path that leaves the left-hand side of the road at a hut, up past several water-mills and farmhouses. We come to a made road, but follow the trail which continues on the other side, a long path across flat elevated farmland. We cannot see the river or ferry, but at times we see a white pagoda on the other bank which is a little to the left of the ferry. Eventually the path zig-zags steeply downward to a ferry which is under repair. We are directed downstream, and scramble along the bank to a rough stone wharf, which is being approached by another ferry, from the other side. It leaves as soon as we board. It is now just under three hours since we left Walnut Grove, and we have been walking at a leisurely pace.
The crossing takes only a few minutes despite the strong current. We have a long climb up the bank to the flat farmland that runs towards Daju. Following the path, we first reach an outlying village, where there is an inn and a painted sign saying that the bus to Lijiang leaves at 1:30. The bus arrives, and the driver assures us it will leave at 1:30, but in fact it leaves an hour earlier. Stopping after a kilometre or two at a restaurant in Daju itself, the bus waits there until it leaves - at 1:30.
There is a long, sustained climb, effectively of the mountains forming this side of the gorge, and the trip to Lijiang takes some 3 1/2 hours.
I am very happy that we chose to walk the gorge west-to-east (i.e., downstream), to have lunch at Half-way Guesthouse, on top of what must be one of the greatest views in the world, and to stay at Sean's. Continuing on from Sean's was certainly worthwhile. My only regret was that we did not try to get to the upper path earlier than we did. Some guidebooks speak of dynamiting for continuing construction of the road: in fact, the road was completed years ago, and dynamiting for repairs or other purposes is rare. Some guidebooks speak of substantial dangers in walking the gorge: there could well be danger in crossing recent or active landslides, but we found the whole walk safe and not at all frightening.
Back in Lijiang, I plan to go to the Naxi concert which is held at 8 every night. I have been told that the ticket office opens at 7:30, but while I am having dinner at Mama Fu's, opposite the concert hall, I notice that in fact it opens at about 7. Seats cost 35 yuan and are not numbered, but all the seats in the front half of the hall have been allocated to Chinese tourist groups. Each piece of music is given a long introduction in both Chinese and good English by Xuan Ke, the seventy-year old Naxi man who revived traditional Naxi music after the Cultural Revolution. The music is performed by the orchestra he founded, many of whose members are in their eighties. For me, the music is interesting rather than moving, strong on percussion and light on melody.
Afterwards I have supper at Mama Fu's with Eva, whom I have met at the concert. We are both planning to go to Dali on Monday morning, and agree to go together to the Black Dragon Pool tomorrow.
On Sunday I buy a bus ticket for Dali the next morning at the main bus station in Minzhu Lu, and then walk with Eva to the Black Dragon Pool, a large lake surrounded by a pleasant park with various buildings displaying Naxi art works. I walk up the many stone steps to the pavilion on the top of Elephant Hill, from where there is a marvellous view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in one direction and over Lijiang in another.
On Monday I am at the bus station by 7 for the bus to Dali. To the bus operator, the destination we want is "Old Dali" and the "Dali" which is the bus's destination is what we call Xiaguan, about half-an-hour further south. So the bus drops us at a junction some distance from (Old) Dali. With a Chinese girl we share a passenger cart drawn by a badly overloaded small horse, which takes us to No.5 Guesthouse, a pleasant place set around a leafy courtyard. We book in and go off to explore the town. We take the view from above the South Gate, walking along a long section of newly constructed town wall, and then to Yita Si nearby, an imposing but entirely neglected, tall pagoda. There are sizeable bushes growing at several levels of the tower. The ground floor is open, but has a timber ceiling without any opening, and there is no means, locked or otherwise, to climb the tower. In the overgrown grounds a pair of young Chinese lovers have taken rare refuge. A pair of old Dai women are performing a religious ritual involving the burning of paper flags and the offering of food; they wave and smile to us.
Back in town, Rebecca spots us from a restaurant, and we all have a meal together, Rebecca and I catching up on "old times" and on what has happened since we were both in Lijiang at the same time, all of four days ago.
Time is very tight, because I want to visit Ruili and Jinghong in the southern extremities of Yunnan. We would like to take a ferry trip on the lake, but the only worthwhile ones seem to depend on tourist numbers that have not eventuated, or to be in conjunction with the four-daily Wase market on the other side, the next one still two days away. Later I will regret not having enough time to go up the Cangshang mountain range behind Dali.
The next morning, Tuesday, we buy bus tickets to Ruili from one of the several tour shops in Huguo Lu. The price includes an escort to accompany us on a commuter bus to Xiaguan and guide us to our sleeper-bus for Ruili; not doubt this is an extravagance, but we want the certainty and convenience.
We shop around for some "ethnic" clothing, and I buy for Y35 a beautiful traditional jacket with knot-buttons. This is admired by He Liyi when we have lunch at his backpackers' cafe in Boai Lu a short distance north of the guesthouse. He is a Bai who speaks excellent English and whose autobiography, in English, is "Mr China's Son", a book widely available and read in the west. I will later wish that I had read the book before meeting the man: I would have had many more questions for him. It would also have been interesting to know if he knew anything of C.P. FitzGerald's years studying Bai culture in Dali in the mid-1930's.
At Xiaguan the bus conductress tries to get us to pay fares to
Ruili, but after some argument accepts that we have already paid, and issues
us tickets before the bus leaves at dusk.
After a stick-potato and beancurd lunch with beer at the marketplace, we hire bicycles from the courtyard of the Limin hotel, a short distance west of ours, for Y10 each; they are standard Chinese bicycles without gears, but adequate for a ride which will be along roads that are almost flat. We ride to the Burma border at the Jiegao checkpoint on the road to Mandalay, marked by a large and imposing building. Absurdly, no foreigners can cross to Burma by land, and they may only enter Burma by air.
We ride back towards Ruili, stopping to inspect the Golden Duck Temple, a languid place beside the road, before heading out again for a couple of hundred metres and turning right at a crossroads towards Nongdao. This is harvest time, and the busy, sealed road carries a ceaseless stream of noisy tractors and trucks. About half an hour from the Golden Duck Temple I leave Eva for an hour, riding further towards Nongdao for fifteen minutes, and then on a lane to the right, into a small farming settlement with large Buddhist temples. At one, there is a lone, friendly old Chinese monk and photographs of him with important-looking people including, I think, the king of Thailand. I continue on lanes and rough tracks, trying to find a way back parallel with the main road. Apart from the ubiquitous tractors, there are few signs of modern life here. I wish I had more time: there is endless scope for just mooching along observing rural life. But at least in half a day I have sampled it - much better than nothing.
As night falls back in Ruili, so does heavy rain. Many food stalls are setting up under umbrellas along Xin'an Lu - some quite late, so that there is more choice after dark. After eating we stroll through the night market along Xinxi Jie, full of clothing and cheap goods, all factory-made and none of them traditional.
On Thursday morning we are at the bus station on the south-west corner of Nanmao Jie and Buihjiang Jie, enquiring about buses to Jinghong. The clerk explains that to reach Jinghong we must travel to Kunming; our guidebooks say there are buses "direct" but that they take between 54 and 72 hours. I do not believe it is necessary to go to Kunming and suspect that if there are no buses to Jinghong from here, there will be from Baoshan. So we jump on a minibus which leaves for Baoshan at about 11 a.m. and arrives late in the afternoon.
Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the People's Republic, and we suspect that bus schedules may be affected. At the bus station where we arrive, we enquire about buses to Jinghong. Yes, there are buses, but the next one is not until Saturday morning, and tickets will not be available until tomorrow morning, Friday. But we know that in Chinese towns there are often more than one bus station offering buses to the same place. We have come into what the Lonely Planet guide calls the "City Bus Station"; what it calls the "Long Distance Bus Station" is immediately opposite, and at that bus station we buy tickets for a sleeper-bus to Jinghong leaving at 6 p.m. tomorrow.
We book into the Hua Cheng hotel, north of the "City Bus Station". There are loud sounds of fire-crackers through the evening, presumably because of tomorrow's jubilee.
Since leaving Ruili, I have been coming down with something like the flu. I get up rather late. A hotel maid comes to the room. At first it seems she is saying that rooms must be vacated by 10, but what she is really on about is that we should be watching the telecast, which begins at 10, of the great anniversary parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I do watch it, for nearly two hours, a fascinating combination of huge military contingents with their hardware, unimaginative floats, and genuine emotion - and how could it fail to be genuine? We shall not see any sign of celebrations in Baoshan, and it will appear to be almost a normal working day, for shops at least.
Eva and I walk through the town. We buy stamps and cards at the post office, open as normal, and head up to the Taibao Park, high above the edge of town, a pleasant forested place of many steps and several pavilions. There is an open park with lawns at the top where many people are enjoying their holiday. Nearby a large temple, Wuhou Si, is surrounded by a beautifully tended garden with many flowers and plants in pots; inside, a statue of Zhuge Liang (Three Kingdoms) is flanked by his ministers Wang Kang and Lu Kai. A pagoda and other buildings are further afield, but we are pressed for time, and must return to get our bags and catch the Jinghong bus leaving at 6.
I am now quite sick, with a fever, and the forced time lying down on the long sleeper-bus trip to Jinghong is timely. We arrive at Jinghong at about 9 p.m., some 27 hours after leaving Baoshan, indicating a total travelling time from Ruili of about 33 hours. In my feverish state I am not even sure which bus station we have come in to. After a few nearby hotels have all refused us, presumably because they are not allowed to take foreigners, I acquiesce in the unthinkable, and join Eva in a taxi ride. It takes us to the Xishuangbanna Hotel, a celebrated establishment that offers accommodation in a range of classes in different buildings in a big garden compound - a pleasant place.
On Sunday morning (3rd October), we go to the office of CITS opposite the hotel. Misguided by guidebooks, Eva has the idea that it will offer guided tours that will be useful on our tight time-budget. There is indeed a list of tours on the wall, but we conclude on this and a later visit that tours are only operated for Chinese tourists, and are not available for foreigners. We wonder whether CITS is actually an organization that has anyone at its head.
We head off to look for what Eva's Dutch guidebook, which has otherwise proved most useful, shows as the Minibus Station, but eventually conclude it does not exist. We shall get all the buses we need at what the Lonely Planet guidebook calls "No. 2 Bus Station".
We walk west along Jinghong Xilu and turn right to the Jinghong Tropical Gardens, called in the Lonely Planet guidebook "Tropical Plant Research Institute"; admission is 20 yuan - four times the five yuan quoted by the Lonely Planet book. This pleasant place is being developed, with extensive sections already established around a lake and open, but other sections, also extensive, not yet open. The plants are, of course, tropical, many of them short of maturity so that in years to come the gardens will undoubtedly become more luxuriant. The boundless talent of modern Chinese people for creating (or expressing?) ugliness is again demonstrated here, where some exquisite garden vistas are destroyed by hideously-designed concrete buildings.
We walk to, and across, the old bridge over the Lancang (Mekong) River. It is a very ordinary-looking bridge, curious only for the fact that until recently photographing it was prohibited. As the main bridge it has been replaced recently by a huge and magnificent suspension bridge, floodlit at night, taking Jinghong Xilu over the river. On the way back we walk along the river.
The next morning, Monday, we catch a mini-van from the No.2 Bus Station to MengHan (Ganlanba), a Dai town on the Lancang 45 kilometres south of Jinghong. We hire geared "mountain" bikes, but soon discover that they are constructed to a crazy geometry that makes riding difficult and painful. We try, but fail, to follow the directions in the Lonely Planet guidebook to Wat Ban Suan Men. We ask a boy in a monk's habit for directions, but he does not understand or seem interested in understanding. This is not untypical of Buddhist monks in this part of China, and markedly different from the almost invariably friendly behaviour of monks in the Tibetan traditions.
I head off on the main road east through fertile farmland to a Dai village about six kilometres from MengHan populated by quiet and shy Dai people and with a large temple where there is a group of surly child-monks. On the way back, there is a rough road to the left which a woman tells me goes to Manting. I follow it through farming settlements to Manting Fo Si (temple) and Da Duta (pagoda) and another temple, and after buying some stick food, soon find myself on the outskirts of MangHan again. We catch a minibus back to Jinghong.
Early on Tuesday we buy sleeper-bus tickets at No.2 Bus Station for the 12.30 departure to Kunming, and in the meantime meet some of the local citizens beside the pleasant Peacock Pool Park in the centre of town. The ride to Kunming is just under 24 hours, and we arrive at a bus station off the ring-road, very close to the main railway station. The bus station is not marked on the maps in either the Lonely Planet guidebook or the Rough Guide to China, but is shown on a sheet-map of Kunming that I am lucky to have with me. After walking to the railway station, it is easy to get a bus up Beijing Lu to Dongfeng Lu, where we walk east to the Camellia Hotel and get accommodation. I go for a walk through the city streets for a couple of hours.
On Thursday I catch a bus north on Beijing Lu to the great horticultural Expo north-west of the city, which is running for six months to the end of October, and where I spend the day - as well as the one-hundred yuan admission charge. Every province of China and each of several dozen countries has contributed a small garden. Many of them are impressive for the structures and landscaping, but there is little to learn by way of horticultural information: this is a big show, but hardly directed to gardeners. Although it is a weekday the place is crowded; the overwhelming majority of visitors are Chinese.
The next day I catch a bus to the North Railway Station and another from the main road just north of the station, to the Daoist Golden Temple, Jin Dian. This is a small temple on top of a steep, forested hill, Phoenix Song Mountain. The walk up through the forest is delightful and the temple itself well-presented. Beyond the temple, I continue through gardens on a long, flat ridge. On either side of the path there are wonderful reproductions of bronze sculptures from the Warring States Period. At the far end of the gardens is a tall pagoda giving wonderful views in all directions, and housing a Ming-dynasty bell which tourists can ring for a small fee. To the side of the ridge is a large and well-kept forest-garden of camellias.
A bus south and a short walk west along Yuantong Jie takes me to the Yuan Tong Buddhist temple and monastery. This large complex is well cared-for, the main shrine building towards the rear is undergoing extensive refurbishment, and in another building about a dozen monks are reciting their office. Afterwards I walk to the nearby Kunming zoo. In some ways it is pleasant enough, and no doubt it is a great improvement on Chinese zoos of a generation ago, although some of the cages are extraordinarily small and bare; but then it is no worse than many zoos in the west fifty years ago.
Saturday is the day of my flight to Bangkok, leaving at 4. Somehow I must dispose of my cooking kerosene. I find a market shop that sells kerosene and offer to give it away; the shopkeeper agrees, but is careful to store it separately from his main supply. Reception at my hotel tells me that the only place where I can exchange Chinese currency for U.S. dollars is at the airport, but the main branch of the Bank of China, open on a Saturday, exchanges it without fuss. Bus 52 passes the hotel and goes to the airport, but I am not sure which direction to take. Following advice from the hotel reception, I catch it in the wrong direction, and foolishly fail to enquire on the bus. Fortunately, I have allowed plenty of time, and only lose an hour or two going to the terminus bus station and back again. And so, my business done, it is "Zai Jian" to China.
I have made a personal discovery of some of the most spectacular scenery I have ever seen. Compared with Tibetan lands west of the Yangtzi, in those I visited in western Sichuan and Yunnan I saw far fewer soldiers and police. In many places traditional Tibetan dress and housing were commonplace. Agricultural methods were in most cases primitive, with hardly any machines and much manual labour; but within that traditional context they had for the most part, at least to the eyes of the passing traveller, an appearance of prosperity and contentment. Some of the territory I visited was as far as it is possible to get from the heavy encroachment of Han culture so evident at its edges and in the larger towns such as Kangding, Shiju (Sershul) and Yushu (Jyekundo). It is heartening to know that such a heartland still exists. It is important to recognize how vulnerable it is, not to assume it will be allowed to survive indefinitely, and to understand how even here the heavy hand of Han despotism is often only just below the surface, most notoriously in the "political correctness" gangs of thugs sent by the government to reside in and purge many of the monasteries.
It has been six weeks of hurrying, of driving past things, of
staying a day where I could have stayed a week or more. In particular,
a week or two hiking and mooching in the hinterland between Dege and Baiyu
would have been worthwhile, the same on stops and detours from the main
Kangding-Shiju road, at least another week around each of Lijiang and Dali,
a few days around Ruili and a week around Jinghong. Any number of other
places could have been bases for exploration - Yushu, Kangding, Xiangcheng,
Derong, not to mention Kunming.
At my request, Ben has chosen some places for us to visit over the next two days - two of the most important Kmer temples within a few hours of Bangkok. I have to "reconfirm" my Olympic Airways flight to Melbourne, and as usual the telephone numbers the airline has given me do not work, and I have to ring head office, in Athens. They cannot find their record of the ticket I have in my hand, and the call becomes a long and expensive one before they do find it.
Early on Sunday morning, Ben and I are up early to catch a local bus to the bus station in north Bangkok. Over the next two days we shall have to buy many bus tickets, many at surprisingly large bus stations. It is interesting to hear Ben trying to make enquiries, and to find the difficulty he has. Ben can read the alphabetic script of the Thai language, but it is exceptionally difficult for a foreigner to speak, mainly because of an immensely complicated tone structure, which leaves the simple four-tone structure of Mandarin far behind.
An air-conditioned bus ride to Khorat takes the rest of the morning, and from there we travel by a local bus to Phi Mai. The great Phi Mai temple is close to the centre of town, a great rectangular complex of concentric walls enclosing well-kept lawns around the central building. All the construction is in stone, much of it intricately carved with scenes from Hindu mythology. But unlike the Tibetan monasteries I have visited, this is a well-preserved ruin; there are no monks here who have devoted their lives to the enterprise. Our tickets for the temple included the nearby museum, but after a couple of hours at the temple we are too late to see the museum, which closes at 4:30.
In any event, it is clear that we have a lot of travelling to get to the other temple and back to Bangkok by tomorrow night. And so we catch a bus from the centre of town to Burinam, arriving at about 10 o'clock. From the bus station, we go searching for a hotel recommended by a guidebook, using the guidebook map. But all the streets seem inexplicably wrong. Almost all the traffic in this large town consists of ever-present, small-engined motorbikes, like noisome wasps on the otherwise almost deserted streets. After some enquiry by Ben, the mystery is eventually solved: there are several bus stations in different places, each designated by the map as "the" bus station; and of course we have been referring to the wrong one.
We book into a cheap hotel, with missing window-panes, bare mattresses and a shabby en suite bathroom. The next morning we take a pedal rickshaw in order to find the correct bus station, and catch the first of two buses to a village close to our destination, Prassat Pnom Rung. The only public transport from there to the temple is riding pillion on the back of motorbikes. We negotiate a fare of 100 baht each (about $3.80) for the return ride of about twelve kilometres each way, the "drivers" agreeing to wait for two hours while we look at the temple.
The temple is on the top of a high hill, and approached by a long avenue of stone steps between trees. The surroundings are well-tended, and the temple very imposing. The central building is rather similar to the one at Phi Mai. From the steps there is a wide view across rolling farmland and forested hills to the border of Cambodia.
After rides by motorbike and bus back to Khorat and then to Bangkok, we join Ying to a tasty dinner of street food with cold drinks, in the grounds of Srinuan Court. We are joined by a couple of English expats.
The next day, Tuesday, is the day of my flight to Melbourne. Ben has also arranged to fly to Melbourne on the same day, leaving earlier, but because he is flying via Hong Kong and Adelaide, his flight will arrive an hour or so later. I take a photo from Ben's room and of Ben and Ying in the room and in the garden. After Ben leaves, I go off shopping to buy some trousers to match the jacket I bought in Dali. I look at many clothes shops, much of the stock attractive, of good quality and cheap; but I haven't planned or brought enough money to buy much.
After a walk in the well-kept public gardens not far from Srinuan Court, I catch the airport bus, arriving at the airport well before I need to. My plane leaves at 10:15 p.m., 1:15 a.m. Melbourne time. Just after 3:00 a.m. Melbourne time, I am awoken by a shove to the shoulder by a male steward because the "lady" behind wants to eat a meal and I have set my seat back. When I demand to know his name he refuses and swears at me. Later, my letter to the airline's chairman will go unacknowledged. Now I know that the reason why Olympic Airways' fares to Bangkok have to be so much lower than anyone else's is that it is indeed the World's Worst Airline.
Bernice comes to Melbourne airport to meet me. She agrees to wait to give a lift to a friend arriving on another flight, an hour later. So when the friend walks out and turns out to be our son Ben, it is the nicest of nice surprises.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------
Public bathrooms unless otherwise noted.
Chengdu: Jiaotong Hotel - bed in good 3-bed room, Y40.
Kangding: Binguan (turn right from bus station, follow road
to right at nearby Y-junction, hotel very approximately 300m from bus station,
same side) - bed in 3-bed room, others empty, Y15.
Luhuo: hotel near main intersection (on cross-arm of T-junction
whose vertical member goes down across bridge to monastery) - bed in 3-bed
room, new hotel, Y23.
Dege: main Dege hotel: bed in 3-bed room in main building Y42;
in 3-bed room in old wing by river, Y16.
Baiyu: main hotel - bed in 3-bed room, Y20.
Garze: "Post Office Hotel" - bed in 3-bed room, others empty,
Y35.
Manigango: Manigango Guest House at bus station - bed in 3-bed
room, Y10.
Shiju (Sershul): Guesthouse on left-hand side of main street/road
to Xiewu, near northern edge of town, above row of shops, NO toilets or
bathroom - bed in 4-bed room, Y10.
Sershulgompa village: Guest rooms on swampy courtyard to left
of main street going towards Xiewu, near video theatre, NO toilets or bathroom
- bed in 4-bed room, Y10 (in 1998).
Yushu: Tibetan guesthouse on first floor of building on south-east
corner cross-arm main T-junction, entrance a few metres towards Xining
- bed in 3-bed room, others empty, Y20.
Huashixia: multi-storey hotel (north side of road, just before
checkpoint near Xining end of town) - bed in 8-bed bunk room, others empty,
Y30.
Xining: excellent hotel (when facing station, go to far left
of rear corner of station forecourt along a short lane at right angles
to railway line; turn left down lane for 195m, 95m past tall chimney on
left, to hotel on right) - bed in 2-bed room, Y20. Yunfu hotel, a favourite
with backpackers on the "round corner" on the west side of Jianguo Lu,
just south of the river and diagonally opposite the railway station, which
was closed during 1998, is open again, but renamed the Kunlun hotel).
Lanzhou: Lan Shan Binguan (east side of Tianshui Lu, entrance
a few metres from corner of T-junction opposite the station forecourt)
- bed in 3-bed room, others empty, Y28. (Yingbing Fandian now charges minimum
Y100).
Litang: Bei Ta Binguan (from bus station on left-hand side of
Kangding and Xiangcheng approach to town, turn left on leaving bus station;
hotel on the right, several hundred metres from bus station, just before
first corner to right) - bed in 3-bed room, others empty, clean hotel,
Y20.
Xiangcheng: 3-storey green-tiled hotel almost opposite bus station
near Litang end of town, NO toilets (!) or bathroom - bed in 3-bed room,
others empty, Y25.
Derong: Derong Binguan (from Xiangcheng-Zhongdian road, cross
main bridge to main part of town, turn right at end of bridge into main
street, find hotel on left a couple of hundred metres from bridge) - bed
in 3-bed room, others empty, excellent hotel with 24-hour hotwater, Y16.
Zhongdian: Tibet Hotel (turn right on leaving bus station, walk
several hundred metres before turning left to hotel on right, perhaps 1
km from bus station; there may be direction signs), backpacker-style hotel
with restaurant - bed in cramped 4-bed room, Y20.
Lijiang: Old Town Square Hotel (leaving CC's restaurant in square,
turn left, follow lane a few metres before turning 90 degrees left along
very narrow pedestrian alley to find hotel entrance after a few metres),
beautiful rooms in a beautiful hotel, set around courtyard; clean bathroom
- Y30 for bed in 2-bed room (but hotel may be reluctant to sell on bed
basis unless it is clear that the other bed may be occupied).
Walnut Grove (in Tiger-Leaping Gorge): Sean's Guesthouse - single
room Y15.
Kunming: Camellia Hotel, hotel with several wings offering different
classes of accommodation, but all good, including cheap Building No. 3
- bed in multi-bed room, Y30.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------
The road over Erlang Shan west of Ya'an - narrow, poorly maintained.
A few rough sections of the otherwise good road from Baiyu to Garze.
The atrocious road between Sershul Gonpa and the Sichuan-Qinghai border.
Some rough stretches (on the route I took) between Xiangcheng and Derong,
including some dangerous places affected by landslides.
A number of major and long-standing landslides blocking the road through
Tiger-Leaping Gorge, east of Qiaoutou, mostly east of Walnut Grove.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------
Another journey, through Tibetan areas of northern Sichuan (Aba
County), southern Qinghai (Jiuzhi County) and southern Sichuan (Muli County),
and through Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi Provinces to Macao, Hong Kong and
Singapore, is described at
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~dawa/china00/htm.
Tony Williams,
Bulleen, Australia,
17th December 1999.
Home page
9bgphl0e.html 010619