Xishuangbanna: Southeast Asia in China

Deciding to simultaneously explore the surrounding area in Yunnan while basking in warm weather, Colleen and I decided to explore the most southern part of Yunnan called Xishuangbanna. Xishuangbanna is a sort of province within a province and is home to a very large number of ethnic minorities who currently outnumber the population of Han Chinese. The most prevalent minority in the region are the Dai people (language and culture related to Thai people) and the region is known as the Dai autonomous. The region is also very warm with tropical weather that hovers around 80 degrees in January so naturally is was a good place to escape the fact that I hadn't seen the sun in Japan since November.

Large gate at Jinghong, the language written on it is Dai.

Our first stop in Xishuangbanna was the regional capital of Jinghong. As Colleen and I stepped out of the airport and into the palm tree lined avenue with a large gate with the Dai language written on it, it indeed felt like we were in Thailand or somewhere else in Southeast Asia rather than in China. As we made our way across the street, we came across the main plaza where an ethnic minority group was practicing a dance routine for a performance to be held later that night. We stopped at a nearby restaurant and had some food. Colleen herself was a little unsure as to what kind of dish this was but it was some kind of fried bread topped with sugar.

Ethnic Minority dance

Some sort of fry bread

In the afternoon, Colleen and I traversed to the Mekong River, which was the original lifeline of Jinghong. As the weather was nice and toasty, we saw many children bathing and splashing around in the river. Having heard all the horror stories about the pollution in Chinese rivers, I was pleasantly surprised to see how relatively clean the Mekong was (although this may change in the coming years as tourism and industry increase in the region).

The Mekong River

That night, Colleen and I sat down and watched the performance that the women earlier in the day had been practicing for. Evidently, the performance was was commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the Xishaungbanna prefecture and had invited a congregation of local minority dance groups to participate in a dance contest. According to Colleen and her research, modernization and the growth of tourism in the area has created some drastic changes in the area for minority groups such as these. Apparently the Chinese government pays these groups some decent money to perform these dances but it comes at cost tot their cultural heritage. For example, these groups will be obligated to perform these traditionally sacred dances for tourists even when it is not the correct time of year for that particular dance, or a certain group will even be mandated to dance to another minority groups sacred dance. So I guess it’s been a sort of mixed bag as wealth in the region increases but certain aspects of traditional culture are diluted.

Dance Performance in Jinghong

The winning dance team

Early the next morning, Colleen and I boarded a bus to the city of Menghai, located about an hour to the west and closer to the Burmese border. While the stop in Menghai was mostly so we could transfer buses, we nevertheless got to a bit of exploring around the city. Highlights include strolling through the morning market were we were served a mysterious rice porridge thing by a woman working there and stolling through the city limits which became increasingly rustic. We eventually stumbled across a really cool temple. It was interesting because this temple looked quite new, I’m guessing it was a perk of the community making money so recently.

Eldery doing Tai Chi in the central square

Exploring MEnghai

Temple at Menghai

Around noon, Colleen and I took the bus into the countryside and it was here that I the 21^st century began to fade away and one almost felt like they were stepping back in time (minus riding a bus of course). Our destination was the city of Manmai located even further in the depths of the hills and jungles but as the bus didn’t make trips there directly, we had to find the way ourselves. Thankfully, Colleen found a local boy to point us in the right direction and it turned out the best way to get to Manmai before dark was to get out of the bus about 5 kilometers from the village and hike there by foot. So Colleen and I did as he said and stepped out into one of the most epic hikes of my life. The beauty of the mountains, tea plantations and valleys was made even more spectacular when arrived at Manmai around sunset and stopped at temple overlooking the surrounding area. After taking in the scenery, Colleen stepped down to the village of Manmai in hopes of finding a place to spend the night. Using a combination of body language and broken Mandarin (most of the villagers couldn’t speak it according to Colleen) we found a home run by a middle-aged woman and her family who had hosted foreign travelers before and spent the night there. Before we went to bed, the family cooked us up a meal of fish, veggies, noodles, and a super strong rice-liquor that tasted like what I imagine battery-acid tastes.  Colleen and I then did some exploring outside and gazed upon a crystal-clear night sky teeming with shining stars.

Countryside in rural Xishuangbanna

Village in the countryside

Hiking with Colleen at sunset

Now at this point in the story, dear readers, this story gets a little less dignifying for me…I’m still not sure if it was the meal the family served us, the battery-acid wine, or something else that day, but something I consumed made me terribly terribly sick that night. Waking up at around 3:00 in the morning I felt as if my insides were on fire and proceeded to make a mad dash to their outdoor toilet. My endeavor was for naught however as I proceeded to release that nights dinner all across the outside of our gracious hosts house. After a whole night of puking my guts out, I thought the worst of this stomach bug had passed…how very very mistaken I was…the very next morning stage 2 of the misery began and…lets just say that they rest of the dinner chose to come out of me in another violent and explosive way…I’ll spare you the details of this particular suffering although let me just say being afflicted with it and having to use a squat toilet, which incidentally was right next to their pig pen did not a very merry Christmas make. Suffice to say that day I was utterly incapacitated and could barely even eat. The only food I managed to get down were a couple of oranges, which Colleen awesomely scoured the village for. As we needed to be back in Jinghong the next to return home, Colleen asked our host mom when we could get a bus back to the capital. Apparently, the host mom told Colleen that there were only two options to get back: Option A would be to take a several hour hike to nearby village of Bada to catch a bus (which given my inability to move wasn’t going to happen) Option B was to wake up at 5:30am the next morning and to ride on the back of motorcycles driven by her husband and his friend. Guess which one happened!

So the next morning, feeling completely exhausted from having consumed no food and having only expelled nutrients from the past day, I climbed on the back of the friends motorcycle like a helpless baby sloth and we drove through the mountain road under a starry sky. I probably would have appreciated the moment so much more I didn’t feel like I was going to die and compounding the situation was that much of the mountain road was paved with very bumpy and stomach churning cobblestone. Thankfully I neither passed out nor released my stomach contents on my hapless driver (I guess there was nothing to release at that point). We eventually got to the village, transferred buses and were on our way back to Jinghong. As our flight didn’t take off until 10pm, we still had a day to kill in Jinghong. As I was in no condition to hike around, we settled on seeing a subtitled Jackie Chan movie playing at a local theater. The film was a very bizarre movie about Jackie stealing national treasures for the Chinese government and had very strange nationalistic tones in it about how great the Chinese government is and how terrible Western powers were/are for stealing Chinese art. We then finally caught our plane and I was back in Kunming where I could finally get some rest in peace for a day.

Woemn selling veggies in the morning