Crossroads

After our very positive experience with Mama Naxi in Lijiang, we decided to stay in one of her franchises, Mama Naxi #2 while we were in Dali. Mama Naxi #2 has a totally different feel from #1, because, let’s face it, there can only be one Mama Naxi.

#2 was franchised by Mama Naxi’s “disciple”, Joker (seriously!) and is located in a very small alley off Renmin Lu in Dali Old Town. We walked through most of Dali Old Town looking for the hostel and was only able to find it when a raving mad Golden Retriever barrelled into us on Renmin Lu (more on this later).

Like the Mama Naxi we stayed in while we were in Lijiang, Mama Naxi #2 is probably not the most amenities-filled hostel you’d expect to find in Dali. Furthermore, Joker was outta town for most of the time we were there.

But this is where the magic happens.

In Joker’s absence, the hostel was run by his cousin Ah Ze and (I shit you not) some of the long term guests staying at the hostel.

We’ve noticed that just like a lot of other parts of Yunnan (Lijiang and Shuang Lang), Dali attracts a lot of tourists who like the place so much that they set up their homes and businesses there and just never left. In addition to that, another demographic of travellers seemed drawn to Dali (and specifically Mama Naxi #2) –  those that are at a crossroad in their life.

I can totally see why that is so.

With majestic Cang Shan looming over the town on one side and sitting at the edge of the beautiful Er Hai on the other, you’ll never be short of a place to sit and clear your mind and think in Dali. Dali Old Town is also “compact”. It’s composed of two main streets running North-South and East West. It’s not as “touristy” as Lijiang but developed enough that it is not as boring as Shuang Lang (notice the lack of inverted commas).

There’s just enough room to breathe and think the next step through… and be comfortably un-bored at the same time.

Amongst others in Mama Naxi #2, we met:

1) Lao Lu (老吕), a businessman whose business suffered a big setback. He spent the last three months in Dali debating whether he should just call it quits and embark on another venture (often with the very mind-clearing help of a couple (dozen) bottles of beer).

2) LuLu (陆陆), a girl who was enroute from Sze Chuan to England via Dali for further studies. The plan was for her to stopover in Dali while waiting for her connecting flight to Beijing then London. She never got on that flight and had already been soul-searching in Mama Naxi #2 for seven months when we visited.

3) Ella, the mad Golden Retriever that attacks and slobbers on anything with wild abandonment and crazy joy. Ella was left at Mama Naxi after her French owner decided not to bring her along after he left the country. Ella is now under the care of 17 (十七), another one of the helpers at Mama Naxi #2.

Lao Lu and LuLu are paying customers at Mama Naxi #2, but they take it upon themselves to make sure that all new guests are entertained and feel as welcomed as they must’ve felt when they first stepped into the hostel.

Before I met them, I would’ve thought that these people are, for lack of a better word, cowards. They are afraid to take the next step forward and commit to a course of action that would demand all their time and attention for the next few years or so, and hence take the easy way out by escaping it altogether.

Jo, on the other hand, thinks that it takes tremendous courage to say “No” to a set course of action. Especially a course of action that they and/or the people closest to them had already invested considerable amounts of time, money and effort into.

I’m not sure which one of us is closer to the truth, but it definitely got me thinking. I guess (Yoda speech coming through….) sometimes, not making a decision for a while is making a decision.

Or maybe the dog has it right all along.

Who cares what happened before or what’s going to happen next. I’ll be happy for now, thank you very much, as long as there’s a meatbag for me to love and leave my slobber on.

An Ideal Life

If you were walking through the street of Shuang Lang (notice the singularity for “street”) (note: this will not be the last reference in this post about how boring Shuang Lang is), you’d definitely notice a small cafe with signs that loudly proclaim the “authentic French cuisine” it serves.

Even after being burnt numerous times by false Chinese advertising, we were still intrigued. And since there wasn’t much of anything else to do in Shuang Lang, we went in.

The first thing we noticed as we entered the cafe was a Caucasian hunched over his big ass computer playing Skyrim. Ok, it was the first thing I noticed, the first thing Jo noticed was that they served “European Coffee” and the cream puffs they have on display.

Talk about priorities.

There was another couple playing reversi in the cafe when we went in. Boredom is apparently a great unifier because we got to talking. We found out that Peter was from Hong Kong but made his living doing fashion design in Milan and then New York. He and his wife are in the midst of setting up a Bed and Breakfast for their retirement in Shuang Lang because “it’s such a peaceful village” (I had to bite my tongue).

Through Peter, we found out that Max (the gaming caucasian) is a classically trained french chef who retired to Shuang Lang too. The stuff he cooks is apparently “Michelin quality”.

I had a weird moment when it seemed like I’d walked onto the set of Kungfu Hustle where an innocuous neighbourhood is filled with kungfu experts.

After a while, Max actually paused his game to cook Peter his pasta and came over to chat with us for a while (it’s either that, or he might’ve been creeped out by my heavy and excited breathing on his neck as he gamed).

Max had sold off all his possessions in France and moved to Shuang Lang where he was able to buy over a “relatively affordable” shop lot/house. Since making rent is not an issue anymore, he can spend his days gaming and only get out of his gaming chair when there are customers. Then he can indulge in his other love – cooking. It sounded like an ideal life.

It was slightly pricey, but we could not resist the temptation. We bought the most expensive meal we had in a while – crepes with designer coffee (for her) and ice cold beer (for me).

It was good…

Jo with Awesome Crepe. Check out the intricately carved apple at the side of the Crepe

That’s the only picture we have of the food and the place. We were too busy demolishing the food to take photos, or, say… note the name of the restaurant…

Note: Jo is pretty sure the name of the cafe has a very French-sounding name like… “Amigo”.

I think her brains might’ve turned to mush by the boredom.

Scammed…. Again

After my last post about how we were scammed in Xi’an, I received a lot of kind and sympathetic messages from friends, politely (but firmly) questioning my ability to wipe my backside without Jo’s help. So it is with just that little bit of gleeful (and slightly masochistic) pleasure that I am writing this post.

First off, I’d like to say that we really enjoyed Xiao Li’s company during our two days inside the SenLin Gongyuan. However… the series of events leading up to how we met her were not entirely very pleasant, and we probably paid a lot more than we had to for the pleasure of having her with us. (Yes, we have to PAY to get a guide to walk us through a formation of rocks. Yes, I know that sounds stupid. Yes, I know the previous statement sounded a  bit like we hired a hooker. No, she is not a hooker).

To be fair, the times we DID NOT get scammed far outweighed the times that we did (We are in China. There is a chance to scammed around every corner) It’s just that the times when we do fail, we go down spectacularly… like a Singaporean MRT.

Take for example, our train ride to Zhangjiajie. We took an overnight train, and at 6 in the morning, I was approached by a man in a train conductor outfit, asking if I needed a guide at Zhangjiajie. I stood in awe at the brilliance of this grift. An authoritative figure (train conductor outfit) hits you at your most vulnerable (6am in the morning). These people have turned the scam act into an artform.

Knowing this, and yet unable to go against my programming of showing deference to authority, I actually went “oh, ok… that sounds… nice”.

I know… they probably have a poster of me in Scam Central with the tagline “DO NOT LET THIS MAN PASS! HE LISTENS TO ANYTHING IF IT IS SHOUTED TO HIM LOUDLY ENOUGH”

Anyway, the good news was that the travel agency (which the conductor was undoubtedly taking a huge commission from) was not open by the time we pulled into the station. We made the excuse that we really did not want to waste any more time waiting for the agency to open and we scurried off…

…into the open arms of a lady standing alongside a waiting minivan.She told us that she owned an inn just outside the SenLin GongYuan and had just dropped off some of her customers at the train station. They were hoping to recoup some of the fuel cost by picking up customers going back in that direction. All they asked for was a measly 7RMB – the same price we would have paid if we had taken a public bus.

(Before the snarky comments start, I would just like to say for the record that my involvement in the day’s shenanigans ended with the “train conductor”)

ONE of us decided that it was a good deal and we hopped onto the minivan. Fully alerted to the scammy index in the air, we keenly observed where the minivan was going, to make sure we really were headed to the SenLin Gongyuan. When we saw signs pointing us in the direction of SenLin Gongyuan, we relaxed… I think we even secretly congratulated ourselves for scoring a good deal.

And then the minivan dropped us in front of another travel agency.

We were promptly given an intense sales pitch on how it was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to hire a guide to go into the SenLin GongYuan because it was entirely possible to get lost and abducted by (I shit you not) Aboriginals living within the jungle who had never interacted with another other human in their lives.

Furthermore, the BOSS of the travel agency came out to personally serve us. He was willing to give us a very special price if we took on the tour with them. Even though the boss had known us at this point for less than three minutes, he had taken a powerful liking to us, so much so that he was willing to give us a price so crazily low that he would probably lose money on the deal and be forced to sell his company to become a homeless person who can only survive by selling his bodily organs. THAT is how much he liked us.

We were in the travel agency for more than half an hour, so I’m sure there was a lot more to the sales pitch, but I did not get to hear the rest of it… I had a nature emergency I needed to attend to.

What I know was that once I got out from the toilet, Jo was convinced that we NEEDED to go on the tour.

I suspect voodoo.

She was giving me one of those “I will gorge out your eyes if you do not listen to me” looks.

So was the tour worth it?

Well… for one thing, the SenLin GongYuan is a NATIONAL PARK, so the paths were pretty well marked out. And if you do wander down a stray trail, you can always get back onto a main road by using the ancient tracking method of following the sounds from the megaphones of the tour guides for the 10000001 tour groups that visit the park every day.

The price included all admission tickets and unlimited rides on the “environmentally friendly” buses, within the park, but none of the tickets for the cable cars or monorails.

Admission Tickets we needed: 1 (248 RMB)
Monorail/cable cars we needed: 6 (at 100RMB a pop)
Normal cost of a ride on an “environmentally friendly” buses within the park: 0 RMB

Yes... we succumbed and took some cable cars... between a 10 minute cable car ride and a 1.5 hours track through the "jungles", you can be sure most of the time, my first choice would be cable car

Accommodations was included in the fee, but not the food.

We did get a night’s accommodation with a farmer inside the SenLin Gongyuan. Before we checked in for the night, Xiao Li warned us that this particular farmer was known to chase out guests who didn’t eat dinner with him and his family. And yet we skipped dinner because we were stingy little bastards the “farmer” wanted to drive home the point of how much we were scammed. (88RMB EACH for one meat, one vege and one soup) (if you need a point of reference, we could normally get a HUGE ASS bowl of noodles filled to the brim with meat and vege for 8RMB)

We spent the night living in fear of being thrown out to the wilds.

And the worst part?

We did not even get to see any Aboriginals…

On the plus side, we spent two days in the charming company of Xiao Li, one of the feistiest girls we've ever met... She bounces ahead of us on the uphill trails, TRYING to make us sing Miao folk songs with her and she would very LOUDLY scold other passengers who try to take our seats in the buses

Xiao Li also doubled as our photographer during our time in the park. Only problem is... she delights in taking shots of us when we are at our most idiotic...

Life’s Unexpected Turns

So we were supposed to go to Mount Four Girls (四姑娘山) with the nurses (this sentence always sounds so wrong) because one of the girls heard there was salmon there. Salmon…. In China… Of course we had to check it out.

We booked a bus from Zoige (诺尔盖) for the township of Ying Xiu (迎秀). According to the map, Ying Xiu was the closest point we could get to Mount Four Girls on the High Way back from Zoige to Chengdu.

Like many of our other adventures with the girls, things started with an unexpected turn of events. We were dropped at the side of a (literally) dusty highway. Turns out this was the current stop for Ying Xiu since the original township had been destroyed in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. We trekked for half an hour (with our backpacks) to the rebuilt town of  Ying Xiu where we were told that the bridge towards Mount Four Girls had been damaged in the earthquake. The only road there now is a slippery and dangerous four hour drive through a narrow mountain pass on a bumpy dirt road. We decided this might not be the best course of action (It seemed there ARE limits to our taste for adventure) and decided to change course for Qingcheng Shan instead.

Stuck in the middle of nowhere, the girls decided to head back to the highway to hail passing buses on their way to Chengdu that would drop us at Qingcheng Shan. (I swear it’s true)

Anyway, as luck would have it, there was a tout at the roadside. After some haggling, we negotiated passage to Qingcheng Shan PLUS detours to see the sites that had been ravaged during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

A quick sidenote: the epicentre of the earthquake that hit Sichuan on May 12, 2008 was along the LongMenShan fault in Wenchuan County. The quake measured 7.9 on the Richter scale and the outcome was catastrophic. 88,000 were killed and 375,000 injured. 33 million people were affected, with 11 million left homeless and 1.5 million people displaced. (source: Lonely Planet China, 2011 ed)

The numbers are mind numbing. But if you are like me, the statistics above are meaningless numbers.They are huge, but I had no idea what they truly mean.

Along the way, the tout introduced himself as Uncle Zhang, and told us that he, like almost everyone who lives in the area, is a survivor of the earthquake. On the way to the Xuankou Middle School Memorial, he told us that most of the casualties of the earthquake were babies and children. He clammed up suddenly after telling us of a primary school where more than 300 of the 400 children studying there were crushed because they didn’t know how to get out of the building. This was especially devastating because of China’s one child policy. The parents who lost their kid would have lost their only child. We suspected he lost his child in the quake too and didn’t dare to press any further.

Xuankou Middle School Memorial

The ruins of Xuankou Middle School were left intentionally in disrepair. It was sobering to hear the guide tell tales of what happened in the school during the quake. To hear about the teacher that held up the door frame to let 41 of his 42 students escape (he was crushed to death along with number 42); about the family that could not bear losing their only child and committed mass suicide by jumping into the Min River.

The cynical side of me wanted to think that the emotional aspects of the quake were played up, but it is not easy to be indifferent standing amidst the ruins of the school and hearing the mournful bugle music played over the loudspeakers.

This was the first of our many encounters with quake survivors. It’s really hard to believe that something that lasted two minutes could have done so much damage. It’s truly terrifying. We saw mountains that had been split in half and rivers that had changed courses because of the quake during our time in Sichuan. We saw the mass grave for 6,000 people that perished during the quake because there was no time or resources available to conduct individual rites in the aftermath of the quake. But all these paled in comparison to the human stories. Stories of people trying to find support from walls only to have the walls collapse on them. Stories of children who were drenched by the torrential rains that followed the quake because they had been locked up in the school fields by well-meaning teachers trying to save them from the aftershocks.

I suppose, more than anything, I was reminded about the uncertainties of life. Sometimes, uncertainties bring unexpected rewards, like our detour to Ying Xiu and its surroundings, but other times it brings about a total change in the way you thought you would/should live. Nobody really knows what tomorrow would bring.  Living in naturally calamity-free Singapore, I suppose I had been lured into a false sense of stability and security.

This made me glad that we had chosen to take this travelling option… Even if it might be for just a little while.

Life is too short.

Serendipidipity

Karma comes in many forms…

For us it comes in the guise of five feisty nurses from Guangzhou whom we’ve been travelling with for most of the pre-Tibet leg of our journey. To all the male readers, I know the previous line sounds like the start of a porno movie, but I swear even I cannot make this shit up.

We met the girls on our first night in Jiuzhaigou. We had just agreed to stay at a local’s house near Jiuzhaigou and were going for dinner. On the way to the eating place, we saw 5 girls being harassed by a tout about their accommodation for the night. The girls were trying to discreetly ask us if we’d found our accommodations and how much it cost. This is harder than it looks because they had lied to the tout that they already had sleeping arrangements so as to not to appear too desperate (which they were….it was late and hotels were scarce at peak seasoned Jiuzhaigou). The tout understood Mandarin (duh) and was hanging around like the proverbial vulture.

That’s when we realized some of the girls were communicating in Cantonese and I suggested to Jo to talk to them in (broken) Cantonese too.

To be honest, I was quite reluctant to share the information about our lodging initially because there was only one shared washroom where we were staying. We had wanted to leave for Jiuzhaigou at 7 (don’t snigger… Jo CAN wake up with enough motivation) to beat the tour group crowd into Jiuzhaigou. Using simple arithmetic, I figured that in order for eight persons of the feminine persuasion to finish using one bathroom by 7am, we’ll need to start getting ready at….midnight?

Anyway, I ignored this niggling inconvenience, recommended our hostel to them and I must say… Best.Decision.Ever.

The girls were REALLY delightful company and more importantly, quick as lightning when using the washroom. More impressively (at that time), they seemed to have done extensive research from mandarin websites about the region. While we’d eventually find out that their plans were not as solid as we’d thought they were, it was still quite an adventure travelling with them because they had a tolerance for uncertainty that rivalled exceeded ours.

Having just visited Huanglong, they recommended for us not to go there as it is too similar to Jiuzhaigou and suggested that we join them instead. We suspected that has got something to do with the fact that there were only 7 seater vans going where they wanted to go, but the opportunity to travel with five nurses was too good a story for me to not just go for it.

5 Nurses and Me

Our first stop was supposed to be Hua Hu (花湖)or Flower Lake, north of Jiuzhaigou…

When we found out (after 5 hours of bus journey) that Hua Hu had been closed for MONTHS because it was autumn and the flowers had… ermmm… WITHERED… the girls were unfazed. They decided we should just wander along the open plains and get closer to the herds of yaks and sheep. Because of this, we were approached by one of the tribesmen, Uncle Mai who invited us to his tent for lunch. Of course we had to pay for lunch, but I don’t think it’s an opportunity many others would/could get to share.

I mean, THAT lunch was an adventure all by itself. It started innocently with zangba, (from what I could understand), a staple made from roasted barley flour, milk powder and a little bit of water. It’s kinda like oatmeal. This was followed by home made yak milk yoghurt mixed with sugar…actually pretty tasty…and just when our guards were down… That’s when Uncle Mai brought out the joke item.

Adventurous Lunch

Uncle Mai, ever the showman, started by telling us this is an extremely expensive delicacy that even he and his family hardly get to enjoy, so he could only give each of us a small sliver. He took out a piece of dried meat and cut out tiny pieces. He looked on encouragingly as he handed us our pieces of meat individually. It was preserved RAW sheep meat. It’s very hard to describe the taste… But here’s my take… It tasted like sheep meat that has not been cooked and has the consistency of something that has been left out in the sun for too long. The girls visibly grimaced once the meat touched their lips but we all trooped on so as to not appear rude and wasteful.

To be fair, chewing the meat and swallowing it was bad, but the aftertaste was…how do I put it… Decidedly worse… I could not get rid of the taste for hours!! (I found out later that SOMEBODY spat out her meat when we were not looking) (well played, Jo, well played).

Anyway, this was the first of our many adventures with the girls. Together, we rode horses across the open plains near Zoige, climbed up an infernal hill to watch the sun set across the first bend of the Yellow River, braved sub-zero temperatures to see a Red Army monument, changed our plans to go to Mount Four Girls (that’s what she said) and headed to see quake-ravaged townships. Of course, we hiked up and sprinted down Qingcheng Shan (青城山) together too.

Yup... To get to see the first bend of the Yellow River, you need to HIKE up monstrous stairs again

Totally Worth the hike... I think....

A good view is best enjoyed with FIVE nurses

I mean a good view is best enjoyed with someone you love.... *twiddle thumbs*

But what a view it was.... first bend of the Yellow River

They were wacky and great company while it lasted but eventually we had to part ways because they had to go back to work.  I guess getting to spend quality time with  awesome people like them was a perk of long term travel we had not really anticipated and  we certainly hope to meet more friends like them as our travel goes on.

(Yes… the title was intentionally misspelled… bleah)