I'm having a great time in southern China in the province of Yunnan, a place I've visited many times but this is my first trip down to the part on the Myanmar and Laos borders. The area is known as Xishuangbanna, a Chinese approximation for the Thai name for the area. It is comprised of about 800,000 people, a third of which belong to the Dai minority, whose language and culture are very similar to the Thai and Lao people. It's fabulous here, and full of minorities that have closer ties to South-East Asia than China. I took a most incredible 2 1/2 day hike right after I got here, which was preceded by half a day at a small town Sunday market where all the minorities come out of the hills in their traditional dress to hock their goods. I took about 600 pictures in the course of a few hours, which means I was averaging over a couple pictures a minute. And most of them are darn good pictures. It was a photographers heaven.

Even more incredible than the market though was the hike I left for later that day. It starts in a village about 20 miles or so from the border with Myanmar and follows a dusty trail cutting through the jungle and littered with small minority villages. The coolest part was that I met some Chinese people at a local cafe here in the main city of this area before I left, and one of the guys was planning to do the same hike. He and his girlfriend were going to first visit her family in the small mountain village where she grew up, which is only about 15 miles from the town where the trailhead is. I was invited to stay with her family, and only as we were hiking up the mountain to the remote village did I find out that I was to be the first foreigner to ever set foot in her remote village of less than 100 people. However, I wasn't alone, as I met a very cool Californian at the Sunday market earlier that day (we tend to stick out like VERY sore thumbs in small minority town markets where most people are wearing their traditional garb and only come up to our elbows in height). He was planning to do the same hike, and not speaking any Chinese he was definitely interested in having someone else to hike with.

So we caught the one daily bus that passed through the market town on the way to the trailhead town down by the border. The Chinese couple were already on the bus, and I introduced them to my new American friend. I knew the Chinese guy would be happy to have him along, since he was keen on practicing his English. At this point they hadn't even told me that the girlfriend lived in a mountain village, only telling me that she lived near the trailhead. After several hours on a packed and insanely bumpy bus, they suddenly told us we were getting off. I looked outside the bus and saw only a few little huts, and noticed that nobody else was getting off. I was a little confused, but they pointed up the slope next to the road and explained that her village was about an hour that way. 'Oh, I see. Brilliant. Carry on then,' I said with not the least bit of surprise. This should be interesting, I assured myself. So we walked for a little over an hour uphill through a forest, and it was absolutely gorgeous when we reached the 'outskirts' of her village. These outskirts comprised terraced rice paddies and fields sprouting vegetables out of the slope of the mountain. There were a dozen women in traditional dress and a few bare-chested men working the fields, and they all greeted us with broad smiles as we walked by. I figured we were almost to the village at this point, but it was another 15 minutes or so uphill before we reached her house.

Like most of the minority houses in Xishuangbanna, the houses in her village are all made of wood and on stilts, with the animals they raise kept below the house. The houses are extemely simple, with just one layer of wooden boards making up the floor and walls, and sheet metal roofing keeping the place dry. The girl's older brother was the village "cheif" as our Chinese friend called him in English, and her younger brother lived next door in a similar house but equipped with a bigger TV and VCD player. This meant that at night other random villagers would pop in and out of the place to watch VCDs (in case you don't know what these are since they never really took off in the US, they are the predecessors to DVDs but lower quality because they are on regular CDs). We watched a really cheesy Hong Kong comedy as the brother and his incredibly gorgeous wife (one of the first people we saw working in the fields that afternoon... had she not been married already, I might just have permanently relocated to this little village) prepared dinner for us. We ate with the men of the family (the parents are already passed on, so it was just her brothers and a cousin... or maybe he was just a random hungry villager), who insisted we drink 'baijiu' with them, the Chinese word for the most horrible tasting rice wine known to man... and they were drinking the cheap variety. Definitely not your average cup of sake.

There were several different plates of vegetables on the table, but only one meat dish. It looked like beef with green vegetables, so I immediately dug in and gulped it down with a pinch of rice. It was nice and spicy, and had a good meaty consistancy. My American companion was a little more suspicious than me about the country food he was about to ingest, and asked our Chinese friend what I had just eaten. He asked the family in the local dialect, and with a straight face turned to me and said plainly 'wild dog.' Oh, I thought, how lovely. Can we have a little wild cat for dessert, and maybe some wild squirrel would be in order for breakfast.

The next day we got up early and set out for the trailhead. The girlfriend did not come with, having explained the day before that she was now a fully-converted city girl and would not be able to keep up with us. She was indeed a fully-converted city girl, and having talked to her in the cafe that first night never would have guessed she grew up in a mountain village with a population of less than 100 people who sweat and toil in the fields all day so they can come home and enjoy their wild dog dinners. At any rate, the boyfriend of the converted city girl, who I will call Chao from here on out (as that is his name), the Californian, who I will call Matt from here on out (using similar lines of reasoning), and I started walking. The brothers told us it was less than 10 miles to the trailhead, but when we reached the town at 1:30 in the afternoon after five hours of DOWNHILL walking, we realized their calculations were a bit off.

After a leisurely lunch of greasy Chinese dishes, all of which I checked VERY carefully for traces of dog, we headed off for the trail. At this point we realize we were behind schedule, as the Lonely Planet recommends taking 3 days for the trail and we were planning to finish the next afternoon. We were already tired and sore just getting to the trailhead, and it was raining off and on, so we were a little hesitant to set out but weren't about to get on a bus and head back to the city either. So we started walking. Along the way we did more walking. Just for kicks we did a bit more walking. All in all, it was a great day of walking.

Every few miles we'd pass through a small village. Most of the villages were full of kids, but it was funny to see how in some villages the children would come running out to say hi to us (and pose for my camera), and how in others they would take one look at my 2 foot long lens and run for cover. I have to admit that I got some INCREDIBLE pictures, which I will try and send you guys when I get back to Chengdu.

We reached a good stopping point a little before 8PM, a small village on the side of a hill leading down to a small river. We wandered into town and a couple of young teenagers came up to talk to us. They spoke basic but passable Mandarin, and the more business-savvy of the two quickly offered to let us stay in his house. This isn't uncommon, as this trail is listed in the Lonely Planet and I'm sure it sees a good bit of tourists passing through, many of them foreign. Nobody does the trail in a single day (I'm hoping), so lots of people have to stay over in one of the midway villages. The thing is that the guidebook and some locals I talked to here in the city said that it's common practice to pay about 10 RMB (8 RMB = US$1) for person for accomodation and another 10 RMB if you eat with them, so we didn't discuss the money when we first got there. We washed off down in the river and got ready for dinner. Like the house the night before in the mountain village, this house was on stilts and made of wood, with a fire going in the center of the room in a square area of dirt. There were a ton of people in the house, as I'm guessing the whole extended family lived together. Nobody but the enterprising 13-year-old son (who had already 'graduated' from the village school) spoke any Mandarin, so we guessed that was the reason we didn't feel such a warm reception (but they weren't cold either... they just kind of left us to ourselves).

The only reason I was a bit skeptical of the whole setup is that while we were washing down in the river, I thanked the kid for letting us stay with his family but explained that I was aware we should probably leave a bit of money. I asked how much his family expected. He went off about how Americans and Japanese had all stayed in his place before. After asking, in all seriousness, which of those two nationalities me and my white Californian friend belonged to (our Chinese friend was back at the house with our stuff), he explained that Americans usually paid about 100RMB. I didn't know if he meant per person or for the three of us, but either way I could tell he was obviously in this for the money and not because he was interested in a cultural exchange for anything. I explained that I knew the normal rate and told him we would pay 20 RMB per person (which is already a LOT of money in place like this) like everyone else on the trail. He said ok, but asked if we could throw in an extra 5 RMB and gave me a long shpeil about how poor they were. I know they were dirt poor, but that's the problem. You can't come into these villages throwing money around and messing with the local economy. And when one person does that (and somebody must have, most likely an American, because this kid thought we'd pay the same amount he did), they start expecting more money from other people. But when the average yearly income of a village household is most likely less than 1000 RMB a year (around US$100 a year), if you start giving 100 RMB for a night's stay to the same family, suddenly they have all the wealth in the village. Other villagers decide they want a piece of the pie, and next thing you know nobody's interested in farming and carrying on their traditional way of life because they are all competing to put up the occasional tourist who passes through. At any rate, I was a bit put off that this kid was asking for more money than expected, although when he realized I knew the going price and made it clear that's what we would be paying, he quickly changed the subject to his next favorite thing after money... beer.

They made us a lovely meal of 'wild animal'(this time it wasn't specified what kind of wild animal it was... they were only able to get across that it was a wild animal that lived in the forest... oh yummy, yummy) and hard rice, which went very well with the warm local beer. They laid out the meal on large banana leaves though and put some candles on the makeshift table, and all in all it was a pretty cozy little meal. At this point we were so tired and hungry anyway that we would have eaten just about anything, no matter how 'wild' it was. After downing our share of grub, we all hit the sack. I barely remember my head hitting the pillow.

The next morning we didn't even wake up to the cuckooing of the roosters and other animals below the floor. I went down to the river and bathed in the cold water, which actually felt extremely good in crisp morning air. Maybe it's just the fact that my body was so incredibly dirty. We took off sometime before 9 AM, and on the way out I handed the 13-year-old kid the 60 RMB for our stay since his father wasn't there. He and his young friend, along with the other family members just sitting around on the porch, just stared at us as we smiled and said goodbye. It was a very chilly goodbye, and that was one of the only disappointed points of the hike. I don't think we had done anything to offend them, but I'm guessing they were just in it for the money. Who knows. At any rate, if I ever do the hike again I'll probably opt to stay in a different village.

Since we had walked well over a marathon the day before, the second day was a much shorter walk, although a much hotter one as the sun came out in full force. We were all pretty tired from the day before, so when we finally made it to the main road about 6 miles or so from our final destination, we caught a minibus the rest of the way. In the town we arrived at, we sat down for a nice leisurely lunch, stripping our shirts off like the farmers next to us who were consuming copious amounts of the local beer we'd washed down the wild animal with the night before. While my two companions went over to order the food, I struck up a conversation with the shirtless beermongers, who were extremely friendly and extremely happy to have their first conversation with an American. When my friends came back, they invited the three of us to sit and drink with them while we ate. It was a great ending to a long hike.

We took a three hour ride back to the main city and the past three days it has been raining almost non-stop, so I've just been using the time to be lazy and recover from the hike. Actually, the past three days I've met a ton of locals, and last night I went out to a bustling Chinese disco with some new friends, as well as Matt, Chao, and his countrygirl-cum-citygirl girlfriend. There we found more wild animals than you could eat in a year of hiking through the Chinese jungle.

Lovely time I've been having here, but unfortunately after the weekend I have to get back to Chengdu for two weeks of English teaching to save a little money for a month of traveling in August. I'll write more when I get back to Chengdu, and hopefully include some pictures.

Written 7/9/04