Thursday, December 3, 2009

To the Holy Mountain - Heaven and Hell











I have visited my friend Dewen in Hainan, China - the island near Vietnam - a few years ago. Now he is involved with two partners in building a 25 room hotel in Deqin, Yunnan which is right at the northern-most tip of Yunnan, on the border with Tibet. This land was Tibet not long ago until the Chinese forcibly took it back. Naturally, there is nothing voluntarily said about this. But I noticed on a Google map I looked at before I left home, that there was a large cemetery in Zhongdian (now called Shangri-la) for the heros and martyrs. I asked about this and my friends admitted that China lost a lot of soldiers fighting Tibet for this territory 50 years ago. I saw the front of the cemetery when I was in Zhongdian, but my feet were rebelling against walking another mile over to the entrance up a steep hill and nicely out of sight for most Chinese.
I was to meet Dewen in Lijiang as he expected to be there on his monumental task of buying everything needed to build a hotel from pipe and plumbing, to linens, kitchen equipment, all furniture, electronics - a nearly limitless list of items and limitless because when items were broken on the long truck haul up to Deqin, he had to re-buy and re-ship piece by piece. So I went to Lijiang which I had loved when I first went there 11 years ago. It was a small town then, with few shops, no advertising and no hustle for anything at all, and I think I was the tourist for the month then. Now it has become the second most popular tourist spot in China after Beijing. The crowds are massive and the old town has quintupled in size. Curiously, the admin of the City, has required all new buildings in the old town to be built in the old style - and they are. I saw one going up and it shocked me. No nails, all mortice & tendon, old sawing methods, old stone cutting methods, etc. It must cost a fortune in labour and time to complete these places, but they do look nice. But the Chinese-ness of the place is gone. There are a lot of great restaurants and things to look at, but it is kind of a Disney town now.
I walked out of town about a mile along a path right out of a perfect calendar scene in 72 f. weather under a Yuunan perfectly clear sky to a park which is on the cover of every travel book about China. There is a 1,000 moutain out there with steps carved all the way up, and a tiny buddhist temple at the top. I climbed it slowly. Wy do I climb these things? I never am sure, but this one was truly a wonderful break from daily reality and reminded me that I was somewhere special. At about half way, one enters spruce forests, among which there are quite a lot of gravesites just helter-skelter. The sound of the wind in the trees is so comforting, so embracing that one wants to walk slowly or sit for a while and just listen to the wind and the birds. Eventually I arrived at the top and walked to the monument only to be met with lound hip-hop music and screaming teens who were having a good time. The view was wonderful and I thought if I never get to heaven, at least I have been close.
After a couple of days, Dewen announced that he could not get out of Dali yet, and would I go there instead. I took a bus trip of five hours West, almost at the Burma border. It was great to see him again. He spends so much time in Dali that he lives in a hostel there which to all appearances is little different from a small hotel. He has a large room with double beds and as always, he looks out into a pretty courtyard and there is free high speed internet in the common area as well as tea, coffee and books. The owners have a beautiful young collie. It is mostly black/white with some yellow added. Like most collies, it is all personality and fun. It has the habit of visiting rooms. It is fun to watch the collie decide to go up the stairs, then walk the aisles to see who has their room door open and in it goes to visit. I was sitting on the deck of a sunny roof garden when I heard the claws coming up the steel ladder, and sure enough, there was the collie come to visit. I didn't pay attention to how it got down that ladder, and now I wonder how that was done. Some days later, I stayed at a barn-like hostel in Shangri-la. The parents of the collie lived there and were also characters very popular with all guests.
I had also been in Dali 11 years ago and found it noisy and not interesting. Oddly, the city has spent a lot of money there making the city more attractive to tourists, and this time I did rather like it, and there are a lot more tourists - but it is still more of a real Chinese city now that Lijiang is.
Ater a few days in Dali, it was apaprent that Dewen could not leave anytime soon. He suggested that I go on alone to Shangri-la and then Deqin and he would catch up to me. I took a minibus for the 6 hour ride which follows the Meekong river much of the way. Even at that point, so close to its source, the river is 100' - 150' wind, and trapped in between rock cliffs much of the way. It struck me as odd that I never saw one boat, one fishermen (Chinese are obsessive fishers), not one activity on the huge - fast moving - river other than a lot of hydro-electric plants.
Much of the reason I was in China in October and early November was that it usually is the clearest month of the year for viewing the mountains and avoiding rain. It was a pretty time of year. Not as colourful as Ontario, but pretty and a pleasure to be there. There were long vistas of evergreen laden mountains with spots of yellow and orange leafy trees mixed in. The Chinese get very excited about the beauty of this area, but they have never been able to travel to Europe, or Western USA and Canada, so they do not realize how mostely beautiful it is there - but it is still a pleasure to be there.
I arrived in Zhongdian (I prefer the old name to the current Shangri-la) with three hostel recommendations in hand. I didn't like any of them, but I was tired and the sun was about to go down and I stayed in the one like barn. I have never seen a place where the temp drops so remarkably when the sun goes to sleep. It was probably 65 f. during the blinding sunny daytime. Minutes after sunset, it is more like 28 f. A lot of places in China have no heat at all, but if they do have any, it goes on December 15th and not sooner. The Tibetans are human yaks - they always have their windows and doors open and cannot understand the need for heat at all. In the hostel they say 'But we have electric blankets and good comforters, so you will not need heat. But the barn did have nice space heaters available for $3 a night, so I took one and was glad I did. The open air spaces between the ill-fitted windows and doors was easily one-quarter inch and the wind blew in freely. This was one time, I wish I had stayed in a conventional hotel. The only reason I didn't was that the internet was out of date and did not show that there were a couple of four stars hotels in that town.
The old town of Zhongdian was of little interest other than finding something to eat. I went to the large monastery in town, which was interesting. Then I went to the giant one out of town which was worth the trip, but I find it hard to believe that there are many monks in that giant place. It has many temples in the one large complex. I walked up more and more stairs to visit each one. I don't think there were 10 visitors in the whole place and I never saw more than 10 monks in a place made for many hundreds. In one temple, there was a giant seated Buddha about 35' tall, and the usual overwhelm of fabrics, pictures, incense etc. Off to the left was a young woman in her 20's kneeling in front of a seated lama. He was mumbling his prayers and gave her some blessing. She then pointed to a kind of paddle near him as he continued to mumble on. He took the paddle to bless her with that as well. He raised it, she bowed forward, he brought the wooden paddle down to her pate and just exactly as he touched it to her, her cell phone went off. I swear her ring tune was Material girl with Madonna singing something about What a slut I am...etc. The girl did not shut it off, did not answer it until she bowed again, then got up as in a daze, walked over right in front of Buddha himself in all his gold-plated glory, and finally answered her phone. No wonder Buddha is shown smiling so much.
I soon had enough of Zhongdian and decided to catch a frigid early morning 7:15 bus on to Deqin. This was a minibus made for 20 passengers on which they packed 27 people. On Chinese busses, your ticket shows your seat number and Og help you if you fail to sit in the same seat. My seat was in the back row in the middle, so at least my knees were not up against a seat in front of me. I had a stinky fat guy who spat on the floor to my left, and two tiny Tibetan women to my right. I was almost the only non-Tibetan on board (the population of this area that used to formally be Tibet is still 85% Tibetan) except for a couple of Chinese tourists.
We rose slowly off the plateau, among wide pastures of thousands of yaks, up and up into the moutain range. As the sun rose, it was lovely to see the landscape. But then, the Tibetan women began to become motion sick and started vomiting all over the place. As the two to my right were next to a sealed window, they had to jump over me to get to the window on the left in front of me so they could join those two women who were also puking out the window. Sometimes they missed and hit my luggage and the floor and other passengers. Soon more and more people were puking and this continued on for more than five hours. I looked outside and saw heaven while I sat in Hell for all that time. It was the hardest day of the entire trip.

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