Green River

I frequently traveled alone while I was in Asia, and I really enjoyed it. At first I was nervous, and I was convinced I would hate spending so much time with myself. But I started to see the appeal of stopping only when I wanted, sleeping on my schedule, and never worrying about whether anyone else was enjoying the activities of the day. I spent a lot of time writing postcards, writing in my (now many) travel journals, and taking photographs.

When I would return to my house in Taigu, I almost equally enjoyed scrap-booking and methodically going through my photographs, editing them, picking my favorites, and eventually posting them to tumblr. I didn’t expect too many people to look at them, but one picture got popular. In fact, it got popular enough that someone reposted it without crediting me, and one of my friends eventually saw it and posted it without knowing it was my picture. I don’t mean to brag here*, but I took a picture worth stealing.

My most popular photo

And though I am pleased with myself that people who have the need to post ~~tropical blog~~ to everything they see thought my picture is good enough to share with the world, that picture is a big fat lie. The idyllic river with its gentle curves, the algae floating along peacefully, all of those brilliantly green trees and shrubs… They didn’t just happen to be there and they aren’t nearly as pleasant as they would have you believe. And the day I took that picture was a miserable disappointment.

I was in Yunnan, a province on the Southern border of China. It was summer, and it rained almost every day I was there. Most of the time it was just a heavy afternoon rain, but this day it was more of a persistent gray mist that made it impossible for me to wear my glasses. I was still recovering from an illness I had picked up before leaving Taigu, and hadn’t eaten very much in the past week. Earlier that day I had tried to go elsewhere and gotten lost, returning to my hostel damp and irritated. When I was in a very bad mood while traveling, I tried to find the one thing I knew would cheer me up—flowers. It never failed while traveling that a nice garden, or street lined with flowering trees, or ancient scenic burial site full of plum blossoms would cheer me up instantly. So I looked up what the city of Kunming had to offer me and decided to head to the World Horticultural Expo Garden. It sounded promising, and boy, did it not deliver.

The entrance was sort of grand in that someone had sculpted a random assortment of objects out of flowers. Unfortunately, the entrance was seemingly the only part of the expo that anyone had cared for since it opened. The place was enormous, and I walked through all of it, determined to get my money’s worth**. There were little plots for each participating country, and in those plots they had built a representative structure and garden, but only the structures remained. Some of them used to have rides or restaurants or shops, but none of those were open. It was just country after country of no gardens.

While meandering in my disappointment, I walked down a very short path into a small forested area. The path was probably 25 meters long in total, and there was a little bridge overlooking a little creek covered in algae. The algae was actually probably a mistake– it happens from over-fertilizing. But if I faced the creek just right, I couldn’t tell I was in a miserable, run down, fake garden, and for a minute felt like I was standing in actual nature. The massive quantities of mosquitoes bearing down on me helped with the illusion. I stayed just long enough to snap a picture, reflecting that Yunnan was one of the few places in China where malaria was a risk, and walked back into the open, barren horticultural expo.

The next day I hopped a bus to Lugu Lake, where I snapped another of my favorite pictures, this time of something absolutely real and completely worth visiting. I think that picture got a total of five notes on it, but I’m okay with that.

Lugu Lake

 

 

*Oh, I totally mean to brag here.

**Money’s worth of what? Frustration? Lack of flowers? Drizzle? Sometimes my own determination confuses me.

 

Bus Shorts

 

I have previously written about a particularly harrowing train ride here. Today the topic is bus rides, all of which occurred in Yunnan in about two weeks.

Upon entering the bus station in Lijiang, passengers are required to go through a metal detector and put their bags through a security belt. The second time I used this station, neither of these things was actually turned on.  The first time, however, I was busy detaching my bags from my body when I heard a curious noise from the woman next to me.  It sounded like an animal, and I looked at the shape in her arms, trying to visualize a dog out of the black and white form.  It looked at me and panicked, squawking up a storm, at which point I realized her luggage consisted of a chicken in a plastic bag which was trying to escape and murder me. The woman laughed and shoved it deeper into the bag and I rushed on through the “security check.”

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From the Lijiang train station I was to take a public bus to my hostel. The train arrived an hour late, so around 100 people were waiting to clamber onto the last bus of the day.  All of our pushing and shoving could not have gotten us on this bus, however, because the driver could not get the front door to open. On most Chinese buses, passengers go in through the front door and leave through the back, and thus only the front door is outfitted with a car reader and a place to drop money.  Eventually the bus driver opened the back door, and the first few people to rush in went up to the front and put their money down before scrambling for a precious seat, but soon the front was impassable with people. Passengers continued to pile on, pushing to the back and not paying. The bus driver grumbled about the free rides and threatened not to move the bus, and around 10 people decided to pay for the bus ride and their money was passed forward. This was deemed good enough, and we started our journey.

I was smooshed between people and bags somewhere in the middle of the bus. I held on to one of the bars and tried not to fall over. This was my first time in Lijiang, and after we’d gone a couple blocks from the train station, I was surprised at how dark, empty, and quiet the whole place was. The bus driver seemed to notice this, too, and he pulled a U-turn on an empty road.

Soon we were driving on a bigger road, but something was clearly off. The roads were empty, but the driver had us going slower and slower. Finally he said something, and the repetitions rippled through the bus. The driver was lost. He made another U-turn.  At this point it started to rain.  I was standing underneath the propped-open emergency exit in the top of the bus, and so about five of us had our own micro-climate of rain.

The bus driver found a couple walking together in the rain, and he pulled over. A passenger helpfully opened the window, and the driver said, “请问…”  This is the equivalent of “excuse me” in English, and it is the standard way of starting to ask someone for directions. The entire bus burst out laughing at this. A public bus driver pulling over to the side of the road and yelling at some pedestrians to ask for directions? The passengers in front starting shushing everyone so that we could actually hear the response, but the giggles kept bubbling up.

We got directions, and apparently some of the passengers knew the way because they started yelling directions from the back. I could see the bus driver’s confusion– the roads we needed to take to get to the city had contradictory lines and signage. Or possibly we were really going the wrong way down a one-way road, but this late at night nobody cared. We finally made it to a road that had lights and people and I thought we were in the clear, but the bus stopped again to ask a passerby where we should be going.  This time they tried to get him on the bus so he could direct the bus driver through his entire route, but given that the front door was broken and the bus was packed to bursting, this was complicated. In the end, I think the front door was forced open and he was placed next to the driver.

Our new navigator did the job, and I got off at my stop near the old town of Lijiang.

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On a bus ride from Lugu Lake to Lijiang, our bus was stopped on the road twice for a herd of goats, once for a couple of racing pigs, and once for a herd of cows that looked rather nonplussed at our honking. The last hour or so was just a dirt road.

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I was standing outside in the rain waiting for a bus in Kunming.  My hostel had given me directions about how to get to some fabulous natural scenery, but the directions were either unclear or wrong, and now I was attempting to back track. The rain wasn’t heavy, but just the relentless small droplets that are just as effective at soaking you to the bone. I was standing underneath an overhang hoping to protect my camera even if the rest of me caught pneumonia.

A man came and stood next to me under the overhang. I ignored him. After 15 minutes of standing next to me, he approached, held out a business card with both hands and said, “Nice to meet you!”

I stared at his hands. I wanted to tell him, “Standing next to a foreign girl in the rain for 20 minutes while she waits for a bus that is never, ever coming is not the equivalent of meeting her.”

I took the business card with both hands and said nothing. The man fled the scene, and I looked at the card.  It was for a window-dressing business.

Not long after that a woman offered to share her umbrella with me, which was nice. Of course, when the bus showed up half an hour later, it was every person for his or herself, regardless of business cards and umbrella sharing.