Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan province, has plenty of virgin, old growth forest, where you can have an unforgettable experience of great natural beauty.
Get off the beaten track and hire a guide to take you through the pristine, old growth rainforest of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, Simon Lewis, says

Darkness was falling, we were alone in the forest and the fallen tree that served as a bridge over the swollen river had been swept away. We couldn’t go back – we’d already walked 20 km through dense jungle – and going forward appeared to be a dubious proposition.

But Mr Rush, my indomitable guide, didn’t give it a second thought.

“Just take off your shoes and jump,” he said and dived in. The water foamed around his thighs as he waded ahead. I followed tentatively with shoes held above my head, shivering at the cold water and feeling the mud squelch between my toes. I tried not to think about the leeches and snakes we’d seen earlier.

“This is nothing,” Rush said. “One time I came with two Dutch girls. The stream was so high we had to wait for some villagers to come along, and they pulled us all across with ropes.”

This, I believed, was a cunning tactic. Whenever it looked like I might complain, he’d bring up some other tourist who had it worse. And I had no right to grumble, I had got what I had asked for – a real warts and all trip into China’s biggest rainforest.

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan province, has plenty of virgin, old growth forest; but you have to get out of the sleepy capital, Jinghong, and away from the touristy “forest parks” before you can really see it. And for that you’ll need a guide.

Mr Rush really loves the forest. In his previous job as a beekeeper he had traveled with his hives to every province in China, and he had finally settled in Xishuangbanna because it had “the most magic”.

Though he said he was given his English name because of his eagerness to learn the language in class, it seemed particularly appropriate as he sped down the narrow, overgrown forest trails, swinging a machete to clear the path.

Being inside the forest was a sublime experience. Every moment I was overwhelmed by a glut of visual detail, millions of leaves and tree trunks, all in the narrowest of palettes, green and brown.

Dazzling touches of color were provided by the iridescent wings of butterflies, which seemed to taunt and flirt, by staying just out of reach. The buzz of insects sounded like incessant ring tones. Exotic birds flashed by as the trees above cast shadows and pressed in from each side, as if to repair the red earth scar of our trail.

For hours, the only other sign of human activity was the occasional hole hacked into the bamboo, made by locals looking for tasty grubs to eat. It was only after fording the stream that we began to see signs of civilization.

We passed through a rubber plantation – narrow trees planted in rows – and there were bowls or broken bottles that collected the white sap.

Farming rubber is hard work – every day the trees have to be cut at 3 am. The locals don’t like to do it and employ Sichuanese laborers. They peered out at us from simple bamboo huts. Here there were no birds, or butterflies and the only animals were long, bright red centipedes. Rubber trees take up so much water that nothing else grows around them.

Here Mr Rush seemed to walk even faster, it was obvious that he didn’t like this monoculture. With the price of rubber rising, in recent years a lot of forest has been cleared for plantations. Fortunately, much of what remains is now protected.

“There is something very precious here and it needs to be protected. But the people also need to make a living. The challenge for China is to develop without destruction,” Mr Rush said.

Finally, we arrived, in darkness, at a village. With no light pollution the stars shone brightly, seemingly close enough to touch. The locals walked around with torches strapped to their heads, resembling giant fireflies. They were chopping vegetables, cooking, putting children to sleep.

I had a cold shower then settled down to a simple meal around a hearth. I was so hungry that even a bowl of the aforementioned grubs was welcome. Actually, they were pretty tasty, a good meat substitute when fried in chili oil.

Lubricated with home-made baijiu, our host opened up. He said that in his younger days he would go hunting for wild pigs in the forest with a home-made gun. He told a story about a villager who, angry with an elephant for eating his rice, shot its calf. The angry elephant, so the story goes, charged the man’s house and killed his wife.

Today there are few wild elephants left in the forest, in a nearby forest park.

My hosts were Jino, one of China’s smallest ethnic groups, with only 20,000 members. You can distinguish them by the white headdresses of the women and the rising sun painted, for protection, on the eaves of their houses. Not far away were the jungle villages of Blang people, famous for their elaborate black headdresses; and Wa, whose women were easy to distinguish by their long hair.

“The cultures here are worth every effort to preserve,” Mr Rush said.

As I lay down to sleep on a mat on the floor I thought about this unique face of China that Mr Rush had shown me. I promised myself I would return, though next time I’d bring some wellies.

Simon Lewis is the author of Rough Guide to China
China Daily Updated: 2010-01-07 10:22

The mellow little town of Dali is my favourite China oasis, my retreat when the pace of the cities seems too frenetic. It’s the capital of the minority Bai people in the southwestern province of Yunnan. The centre of the walled old town is China-lite, a tourist-friendly strip of hippyish cafés, but outside it’s pretty and relaxed, and the countryside around is breathtaking: in the dramatic Cangshan mountain range to the west I came across esoteric temples, guesthouse retreats, hot springs and even a secret monastery of kung fu monks. At the huge Erhai Lake, just to the east, I sat and watched locals fishing with trained cormorants.

As the closest uptight China gets to bohemia, the town has become the haunt of alternative types from the big cities, which makes the bar life intriguing, and I bumped into a few famous writers and bands, down to renew their creative juices.

Chinese student dropouts turn up, learn to fire-juggle and dream about opening a café. But the place maintains, at least for the moment, its rural charm.

The main street, cobbled Renmin Lu, for instance, looks the way Chinese roads do in the imagination – its terraced houses have decorative shutters and grass growing between the roof tiles; minority women in traditional dress squat beside their produce, while tailors and cobblers work in their little stores – and, towering over it all, are the mist-shrouded mountains.

| The Observer | Sunday 1 February 2009 |

On the fourth day I stopped caring about time. I thought it was the fourth day, but it might have been the third. Beijing was a receding memory, Moscow impossibly distant. I had slipped into the habit of sleeping for four hours and then getting up for four hours, it didn’t matter whether it was light or dark. Life inside the train bore no relation to the outside world -Siberia- which barreled past, cold, unwelcoming and as predictable as wallpaper; birch trees, hills, birch trees, plains, birch trees.

‘I hate those trees,’ said the elderly German in my compartment, ‘I want to cut them all down.’

Occasionally we passed an untidy village of wooden cabins but mostly the only human touch to the epic landscape was the telegraph poles at the side of the track.

My first Russian was a young guy in a shellsuit with a moustache and an anarchy tattoo. ‘The Beatles,’ he said, on hearing I was British.

‘The Rolling Stones,’ I countered.

He nodded. ‘The Doors.’

‘Pearl Jam?’ I inquired.

‘Nirvana,’ he asserted, ‘Napalm Death.’ Which seemed to seal the matter.

Once or twice a day the train stopped and I’d emerge for fresh air, dizzy and blinking, onto a platform swarming with frenzied shoppers. Traders stood in the carriage door and the townsflok, who had waited all week for two minutes of consumerism, rioted to get to them. To save time the traders threw money over their shoulders into the corridor to be collected by colleagues. They sold world cup t-shirts, plastic jewellery and Mickey Mouse umbrellas. Even the man from the dining car had a cupboard of trainers, which was perhaps why he could only offer gherkins and soup in his official capacity.

I played cards then slept, battleships, slept, charades, slept. It was an invalid’s life – a long slow delirium in comfortable confinement. But on the seventh day, or perhaps it was the sixth, when grey housing blocks started appearing and Moscow was imminent, I felt nostalgic for that easy sloth. When I finally got off, something felt terribly wrong; it took me a while to figure it out – oh yes, the ground wasn’t moving.

| ROUGH GUIDES | 25 Ultimate experiences Journeys |

A teacherish voice called from the train loudspeaker, exhorting the passengers to wake up please, we would soon be arriving.

I grew conscious. My eyes felt toasted, my bottom tenderised, and my shoulder, having been rammed against the window bracket for hours, seemed to have relocated to my ribcage. It felt like my left leg was being jabbed with spikes and someone had stolen my feet.

I shared my bench with a pair of cobblers, father and son. Under the seat they had a sack with two chickens inside. The chicken heads protruded from holes and pecked at discarded sunflower seed shells. Now the son, beside me – in fact, much of his body was in contact with mine – yawned and grunted and stamped.

He had a foppish, asymmetrical haircut that would look cool in a London nightclub but was odd in combination with his peasant uniform of ‘Lining’ trainers – white with red flash – and a shapeless brown suit. I felt guilty for the anger thoughts I’d directed at him during the night, when he’d slid into my patch.

Outside, the low sun tinted the mist pink. Hills had been chopped into bite size fields, a cubist landscape. The fields were divided by mud ridges just wide enough to step along. A woman ladled urine from a bucket onto rows of veg and a man sprayed pesticide from a backpack. A white egret, skinny and with bent back, like a fashion model, posed by an irrigation stream. The mud walls of houses were the colour of the red soil, as if they had grown from it. Their tiled roofs curled at the ends. That seemed a characteristic Chinese flourish, you saw the same upward gesture at the end of a calligraphy stroke, in the flick of an opera singer’s wrist. A man was leading a water buffalo. What a head a water buffalo has, sports car sleek with go-faster horns.

On the facing bench, the seamstresses were waking. In daylight they’d played cards joylessly, taking it in turns to present their laps as a table. Beside them sat one of those mysterious Chinese businessmen, well dressed but carrying nothing but a mobile phone and a jam jar of tea. In between us on the floor the cabbie snored away. Last night he’d drunk a bottle of whisky then wrapped himself up in a plastic sheet and lain down. In the moonlight I’d fancied he resembled a mummy, and the fruit peel and wrappers around him were his grave goods. He didn’t look like that now, he looked like a bum, perhaps as much as I did.

Everyone seemed to have had a lovely sleep. I marvelled, as I had during the night, at that peasant ability to hunker down and switch off. They’d slept in positions I would not endure for more than a few minutes.

A guard wheeled a trolley up the aisle, selling breakfast and socks. I bought a couple of eggs boiled in tea and pointedly dropped the packaging on the floor rather than out of the window. A girl swept rubbish into a pan, barking at passengers to raise their feet. One of her epaulettes was loose and flapped like a broken wing. Now a patriotic song was playing. How I loathed that loudspeaker. In the more expensive classes you could turn it off.

Yesterday evening, when the journey had begun, I’d had a fine time. Cigarettes, fruit and beer had been pressed upon me, and I’d fielded questions concerning my origin, occupation and salary. I’d handed round my lucky five pound note and the queen had been much admired. Having scandalised my audience by revealing how much cigarettes cost in my country, I’d had to admit I had no idea of the price of a cow.

Then the lights had gone out and they’d all gone to sleep. I’d grown obsessed with finding the one position that would be comfortable and remain so. I would think I had it then ten minutes later have to shift again. Round about four a.m. I’d forgotten my pains in a delirious flush of ideas. I’d decided that someone ought to genetically engineer a goat that could eat plastic, to clean up all the rubbish along all the railway lines of Asia. Many brilliant observations had followed, none of which I could recall now.

Following that, I’d replayed Monty Python sketches in my head, until I’d realised I was giggling aloud. I think it was shortly after that that I’d passed out.

The cabbie unfurled himself and a chicken pecked at his foot. The seamstresses got their cards out and the cobblers brushed their teeth. The cleaning girl recovered my book, now covered in banana, from under the seat, and emptied her pan out of the window.

| Bradt Travel Guides/Independent on Sunday travel writing competition winner

The preparations for a traditional sardinian festival.

Few musicians, surely, make their instrument before the performance. But that’s what Franco Tolu is doing, fitting together and holing slender lengths of reed. ‘When you’ve been making launeddas pipes for thirty years,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t take thirty minutes.’

Now he is shaping the trickiest bit, the mouthpieces, or canellino. With a pocketknife he chips two tongues into stubby reeds. He weighs them down with beeswax that was kept warm and pliant under his arm. The finished article is three pipes; two short, five-holed chanters and one long drone.

He tests it, puffing out his cheeks and blowing through all three at once. I never heard so much noise from so slight an instrument, it’s like having an elephant trumpet in your ear. The chanters make a melody, the drone a doleful wail. The pipes use the same principle as bagpipes but instead of a separate bladder, the musician fills his cheeks with air. Meanwhile, he breathes through his nose. If that sounds tricky, it is; Franco says that ‘if you don’t learn the launeddas as a child, you never will’. But he isn’t satisfied with the tone, and adds more beeswax.

I’m in the small town of Maracalagonis on the outskirts of Cagliari in southern Sardinia. While the celebrities head north to the glamorous Costa Smeralda the real heart of the island beats in little towns like this one, where an extraordinary cultural continuity is practised. Yesterday, in Cagliari’s archaeological museum, I saw a bronze figurine of a man playing a three piped instrument exactly like the one I’ve just seen made. It’s from the Nuraghic Culture, and it’s over two thousand years old.

Here, in an attractive shady courtyard, workers are preparing for Sa Festa, a feast and a show put on for local weddings and, increasingly, curious visitors. A couple of capped men roast boar piglets on spits over a crackling open fire. The pig’s skin has been lashed with thyme to strip the hairs off. Long skirted women lay out bowls of olives on crisp white tablecloths. A girl slits and curls dough to make fanciful baroque whirls. When glazed and fired, the surrealist buns will be used as decoration. She makes for me a traditional Sardinian easter egg – a flat figure of a dough woman with a wide skirt, with a boiled egg affixed over the stomach with a strip of dough. It seems bluntly pagan.

There are still a few hours before the feast is set to begin so I go for aperitif with Carlo, the manager’s son. Maracalagonis is languid in the afternoon heat. Old women sit in the shade of palm trees outside the church and young toughs stand outside bars with beers and cigarettes – the men aren’t being ominous, just law abiding, smoking being banned inside.

The bodywork of Carlo’s car is heavily scratched from trying to negotiate the town’s narrow alleyways. Over a mirto, the Sardinian liqueur made from myrtle berries, Carlo explains how the Sa Festa venture snowballed from a venue for local celebrations into a tourist attraction that can host three hundred guests in one night. He feels that this is an exception; generally the Sardinians of the south are not good at making others aware of their rich culture, and blames their insular nature.

Island races usually go out and explore the world, but not the poor Sardinians; for them, the world came and beat them up. So they retreated to the hills and looked in rather than out, over the centuries developing a culture that is rich and, to outsiders, rather strange. I think of the pictures I have seen of village festivals, where men swathed in heavy goat skins stamp and jump to make the bells hanging from their body ring. In seems a long way from the urbane sophistication of the mainland. They must be doing something right, however; these inland Sards are some of the longest living people in the world. Carlo’s convinced that that is the benefit of their diet.

We visit the Coronas, three generations of sweet makers, who are busy making Sa Festa’s exquisite deserts, with sure hands that don’t need measuring tools to get the right quantities.

Laetitia, the youngest at eighteen, is making is making amaretti cakes. She explains that nowadays most people mix the ground almonds with wheat, and decries the practise. The almonds she’s using have been roast in the wood fired oven in the courtyard then ground with a pestle and mortar.

Her mother, Christina, is making a star cake by pouring caramelised sugar, almonds and lemon peel into a wooden mould. As well as the delicious roasting almonds, I can smell oranges – Anna, the eighty four year old matriach, is grating dried peel. She’ll use it in Pardulas, little cakes make with ricotta cheese and saffron. It’s a charming cottage operation, and the ladies won’t let me leave until I’ve sampled everything.

Back at the courtyard, juniper branches have been spread across the entrance way, and their delicious fragrance is released as they are stepped on. The dancers have arrived, and are changing into the Sardinian traditional dress of long black skirts and waistcoats. Carlo tells me that not so long ago it was common to see villagers in traditional dress, but now they only wear it on special occasions.

In a side hall, the pasta operation is in full flow. One cook is whipping up fregola. It’s simply stone ground wheat mixed with water and agitated by hand until it adheres into little pellets. It’s one of the oldest forms of pasta, a staple of the Sardinian kitchen first imported from north Africa. It sounds simple to make, but there’s more to it than it looks, as I discover when I give it a go. The tricky bit is getting the lumps all about the same size. The cook reminds me to always whisk anti-clockwise and pretends I’m doing well.

Malloredus shells are being made by pressing a sheet of pasta against a basket, then rolling up finger sized smidgons. A third cook is making ravioli, moulding a paste of three kinds of cheese and folding it into a pasta package. It all looks absolutely delicious, and Iﾕm impressed with the care and dedication.

I ask Carlo what the Sardinian is for free range and organic and he doesn’t even understand the question; everything is free range and organic, so he don’t even understand the concept. He advises me not to eat too much of the sausages now sizzling in a long spiral over the fire, or the ravioli now being ladled with rich sauce, as I must leave space for the boar; it’s rich and gamey and has little fat. By now, I’m feeling incredibly hungry, and glad that the guests are starting to turn up.

Most are Italian tourists, who have paid only forty Euros for this four course feast. As they arrive they are serenaded by Franco Tulo with his langueaddas. They are given a glass of wine, Moscato (sweet) or Malvasia (dry), made from a grape that the Romans would have used.

An accordionist and a guitarist play folk songs as the chefs, now changed into traditional dress, dish out the antipasti. The spits are hoisted up like pennants, three pigs impaled on each, to great applause. Carlo proposes a toast, Franco plays a jig, the skirts of the dancers rustle as they prepare themselves, and the party starts.

| The Italian magazine | Jan 07 |