little trouble in big china

I forgot that I had promised an answer to the bar-club-lounge quiz upon finishing the Yunnan portion of the blog. Are you ready?

There were no acrobats, at least none performing while I was there. The panda was partially explained by the Movie Night theme -- if you came in costume, you got a free trinket -- and the panda was the bar's contribution (Kung Fu Panda is in theatres here). It kept disappearing behind a door, so we think the employees were taking turns inside the big head. Though you can't tell from the photo, this one was dancing suggestively, hence the mildly surprised looks on the faces behind.

As for the other answers: one of the barmen also got up on the club's stage to do some magic tricks, mostly successfully; there were two white guy-Asian woman couples (sitting together); the staggeringly drunk blonde was a bit of a stretch, as she was most definitely drunk and most definitely staggering, but actually only blonde for about 10 minutes while she borrowed a wig from what appeared to be the only customer in attendance to have followed the theme. The dice games were taking place at two of the bottle-service tables, and reminded me of the game that Bootstrap Bill plays in Pirates of the Caribbean.  I asked a woman at one of the tables how to play, but she didn't know and referred me to the bartender standing next to her.

Of course, he seemed to have his hands full administering to something called a Flaming Lamborghini (yep, that blue stream is fire). And once one table had one, all of the other tables had to have them, so he was a little busy. I wasn't familiar with the drink, but it's apparently all the rage on the interwebs. I had thought the bartender told me that it was Kahlua and cognac, but it was loud, and my Chinese liquor vocabulary is mainly limited to the more generic bottles (vodka, whiskey, and the "local"ish maotai jiu), so who knows what they were using here. They like to pile up the pint glasses, though, so it makes for a bigger flame, and there are 4 martini glasses at the bottom so that you can have multiple drinkers leaning in to set their hair on fire, I mean, partake. Frankly, I think it sounds like an awful drink (not being into either coffee or cream, per the online recipes), but it does have quite the visual effect.

I like the maps. I don't know if any of you are clicking on them, but including them makes me feel like I'm providing an educational service, so I'm going to add another one: off you go.  From Kunming I flew into Hanoi, Vietnam's capital (airplane at the top of the map), where I met up with my friend Valerie, who had come over from the US in search of Big Adventure. We were able to stay with some fantastic friends of mine (technically parents of a good friend from middle/high school, but really my second set of parents, considering how much time I logged in their basement), where we were fed incredible amounts of delicious food. Sadly, I was so busy eating that I forgot to take pictures.
 
Anyway, we left our luggage in Hanoi while we took a 2-night trip to Halong Bay (also marked on the map, east of Hanoi on the coast). We returned to do some more city sightseeing, and then hopped a plane down to Hue, along the coast in the center of the country. We hung around Hue, which was Vietnam's imperial capital through the 19th century and up to the war with the French, for a couple of days before taking the train down to Da Nang, which we saw for all of about five minutes from the taxi en route to the small town of Hoi An (the train doesn't go to Hoi An). A few more days in Hoi An, including a cooking class, and then it was back to Da Nang to hop a flight down to Ho Chi Minh City (airplane at bottom of map). And since it's on the map, we took a day tour that included a stop at the Cu Chi Tunnels (red star at which bottom plane is pointing). Then it was back to Shanghai for me, back to the US for Valerie, and end of the geography lesson for you. Tales to start soon.

Or at least I was. Briefly. In Vietnamese dong.

The going rate is approximately 16,000 dong to the dollar, in case you were wondering (fun math problem of the day for some of you).

At least it's not as bad as the Zimbabwe dollar... of course, given the atrocious state of affairs in Zimbabwe, that could be said about pretty much anything.

So that's it, my two-week Yunnan tour in a (very large) nutshell. From Deqin, we turned around and went back to Zhongdian, checking out a couple of large monasteries along the way, and then flew back to Kunming. If you'd like to see more, a random smattering of pictures lacking a strong narrative can be found on the Yunnan page (UPDATED -- link fixed). In the meantime, who wants to see Vietnam?! (I hope the answer is yes, or you'll be quite bored for the next several entries...I will, however, try to pick up the pace somewhat.)

On to the last stop: Deqin, up near the border with Tibet (as well as Myanmar and Sichuan) and at waist level to the 6740m Meili Snow Mountain. In Shangri-La we had been staying at about 3000m elevation, cold enough for hotels to provide electric blankets and high enough for even leisurely walking to make some dizzy. We were to get to Deqin, 550m higher and 180km away, via a 5.5-hour bus ride that would ascend to 4300m en route.

The road from Shangri-La to Deqin is not overly treacherous, at least if one is familiar with it and driving under good conditions, in a small, well-tuned car, at reasonable speed.

My tourmates and I were in a 38-passenger bus that travelled in and out of pockets of rain, with a bus driver who was making his first trip north of Shangri-La. On the upside, our journey had previously been delayed about an hour because said driver had found problems with the brakes that he felt needed to be fixed before we headed even further into the mountains and away from civilization. So we figured that at least he was pretty conscientious.

More about the ride, including oodles of pictures, over here, where there's more room.

Movers, shmovers. Dining set for 8?

A taxi in Shangri-La, that's what. These little oddball cars were all over Shangri-La, though I didn't see them anywhere else. It's pretty funny to watch them do a U-turn. Apparently they're not street-legal in Kunming (nor, I would assume, other moderate-to-large cities), but things in Shangri-La are evidently a bit more lax. I was told they're frequently used as taxis up here.

This isn't the only make and model; there are a number of different ones (a little Googling shows that there is a knockoff 3-wheeled Prius, among others). And they do come in other colors, too.

Once we had finished our three-mile trek along the gorge, we piled back onto our bus and headed for Shangri-La, or Zhongdian, to use one of the town/county's Chinese names. The newer Chinese name is Xiang-ge-li-la, which is a phonetic transliteration of Shangri-La.

You're probably familiar with the term "Shangri-La" and what it connotes, if not its actual derivation. For those of you not up on 1930s novels, James Hilton gets the credit. Whether Hilton actually had a specific place in mind, or whether it's completely fictitious, is up for deabte. A number of places in the Himalayan region (India and Nepal as well as other parts of China) claim to be the setting for his novel, but as far as I'm aware, this one in Yunnan was the only one to take the step of changing its name, presumably to boost tourism.

It seems to have worked. For a small town in the middle of nowhere, there are an impressive number of tour buses, conventioneers, and Western-oriented hiking-gear stores. Part of this is probably due to its location on the Lhasa-Kunming road and the proximity of excellent extreme-sports activity locales, but I doubt that most of the other similarly-sized towns have five-star hotels in addition to the budget hostels.

In retrospect, I wonder how much of the tourist traffic I witnessed was due to the current ban on tourist travel to Tibet. Zhongdian is part of Yunnan province, not Tibet, but is ethnically majority-Tibetan, so groups denied entry to that province but still jonesing for a glimpse of Tibetan culture may have decamped here.

Tiger Leaping Gorge gets its name from the legend of a tiger that, being pursued by hunters, leapt from one side of the gorge to the other by bounding off this rock in the middle of the Yangtze river. The boulder is known at least in tour books as Tiger Leaping Stone, and there's even a large tiger statue on the southern bank.

The river, which sits at approximately 1600m altitude, drops 200m over 15 kilometers, and the Tiger Leaping Stone is found at its narrowest point (30m wide -- quite the athletic tiger), so the force of the funnelled water here is pretty darn strong. While some parts of the gorge can be rafted, this ain't one of them, even for experts. It's also noisy, aided by a couple of small nearby falls whose output swirls into the main flow around the same point.  Jade Dragon Snow Mountain to the south and Haba Snow Mountain to the north, both of which top 5300m (17,000 ft), form the heights of the gorge, making it arguably the world's deepest (and people do argue about it).

Our tour guides (who were excellent, incidentally) were forced to make a quick change of plan just before we left Lijiang. Said plan meant that we got to spend a little more time in the old (and less touristy) residential part of Lijiang, and included a ride on horsecarts (4 legs, 2 wheels).

I got to sit in the front row. Since my cart was in the lead, this meant I actually got a view (ahem). The other carts followed so closely together that I think the woman who sat middle-back in my cart probably had horse breath on her neck.

The horses took us to a secondary portion of town that apart from being a bit less colorful, shared a lot of the characteristics of the main tourist-centric old city, such as cobblestones and streams.

We were admiring one of the larger, less-funnelled waterways when the call came that our bus was ready to take us to Tiger Leaping Gorge and Shangri-La. Bring on the tigers!