Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Poor S. He’s just googled the name of his bar, the BAD MONKEY, and found a blog entry all about him by some western traveller which calls him ‘an Essex boy with waist length dreads’ (true) and ‘a poster boy for the wasted’ (a bit unfair). The bar itself is excitably described as a ‘modern day opium den’.

S used to test games for Sega in the day and in the evening worked for Howard Marks (the, er, author). I tell him that I’d normally expect to see his type in India, and he gives me a succinct summing up for why not to bother with the place: ‘I like eating meat and being able to fool around with the native girls and anyway the smell of shit makes me puke’. (Not that all of India smells of shit, but I know what he means).

His present headache is trying to get rid of his sort of Mexican girlfriend before his sort of Japanese girlfriend gets back – that’s the problem with running a bar, all your girlfriends can come and hang out where you work.

Then it’s co-owner C’s turn to get annoyed, as he finds an internet review of the bar which claims he and S are on the run from the Thai authorities and relates an incident where a girl pissed through the wooden floor upstairs onto the customers below. I tell C I’m writing a book, and he says, ‘we should do that, it’d be huge, with your stories and my spelling’. He so closely resembles and sounds like the Camberwell carrot guy off ‘Withnail and I’ that he gets exasperated with people noticing it. They’re very entertaining, like a stoner Derek and Clive.

I’m impressed that two English hippies started a bar here on their own – conventional wisdom holds that it can only be done with a Chinese business partner. They sleep above the place, like the Chinese do. They’re proud of being the first bar in Dali with an inside toilet and the first to import beer from Laos, far superior to the local brew. Half the clientele is the foreign counter cultural element and the rest is locals picking up bad habits.

I usually go there with C. He wrote a guidebook to Tibet, and now is here to write a novel about a guidebook writer who has a breakdown while writing a guidebook to, er, Tibet.

I don’t tell him I had the same idea when I was in Tibet – because if a guidebook writer was going to have a breakdown, then that would be the place it would happen. It’s the harsh grandeur of the landscape and the bewildering paganism of the culture. You meet some guy who’s just, say, hopped 108 times round a chorten, or walked a thousand kilometres to pay homage at some shrine, and reviewing hotels and restaurants starts to look pointless and prosaic. I bet anyone who’s spent any time in Tibet has at some point wished to ride off on a horse and go and live in a tent. Especially when the alternative is trying to think of more adjectives to describe monasteries.

He’s very kind and clued up. He took me to this tiny bar where the urban literati hang out when they come here. There was a Beijing rock band skulking in the corner and a Shanghai novelist at the bar. I wish I could say that I spent the evening hob nobbing with the Chinese literati, but what actually happened was a man who I was introduced to as an ‘underground poet’ took it upon himself to play harmonica like a dog gnawing on a bone and – entirely unasked – declaim his underground poetry at the top of his voice. And instead of telling him to shut up or hitting him on the head the other bohemians gave him face by clapping politely when he finished bellowing one ditty so he would immediately start another. It was purely a bullying demonstration of the esteem with which he was held.

So we went down the road to the LAZY LIZARD, run by CK. He has a real lizard, I think it’s a kind of gecko, in a tank. It’s got a spiked collar and he takes it out for walks. And he has a tattoo of a lizard on the back of his neck.

To drum up custom he has a laser pointed up the street, not far above head height, like a taut green rope. Great marketing ploy, I first found the place by following, out of curiosity, the line of the laser, from several hundred metres away.

R was there. He’s an ex cabbie who speaks Chinese with such a San Francisco drawl that no Chinese can actually understand him. He’s sixty two and teaches yoga. When I see him at night I think, brilliant, I hope I’m hanging about being droll around cute chicks at four am when I’m sixty two – but when I see him in the daytime…

Dali is a quaint town between a lake and a mountain. Bits of it are quite touristy, like I’m writing this in a café and a tour group of Australians have sat loudly down. I find it telling that the only Chinese they seem to have picked up is ‘bing’, cold, as in ‘put it back in the fridge, it’s not bing enough, I’m not drinking warm beer, bing it, bing it.’

This is on what the locals call ‘barbarian street’ to each other and ‘foreigner street’ when they realise you can understand them. It’s all boutiques and cafes and Chinese tour groups. It annoys me that the tour guides are all dressed in Bai traditional dress but they’re Han Chinese. About the only real Bai people you see on barbarian street are the middle aged women who walk up and down whispering ‘smoke ganja, smoke ganja?’ at the barbarians.

I’m staying out by the lake at a new place. The rooms are really nice, if eccentric. The shower is a cubicle like an orgone accumulator right by my bed with a radio and a back massager inside and everyone on the road outside can see into it. Yesterday you couldn’t go in the hotel DVD room cause the staff were drying the ganja harvest on the floor.

So yeah it’s great here but I have to get this novel finished. I do wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t have stayed up the mountain. Mind, I have averaged more than a thousand words of clean copy a day which I think is pretty good considering I have yet to get up before midday. Tomorrow a rather more harsh regime begins.

Yunnan has a set of micro climates. Kunming, at the heart of the province, is relatively mild all year round, though rainy. Far southern and south western parts of the province have tropical rainforest climates and a monsoon from May to October, so they’re best visited in winter.

The area north of Kunming is vulnerable to freezing from November to February and places north of Lijiang such as Lugu Lake and Deqin get very cold indeed, and snow is frequent, so this area is best visited between May and August.

Times of year definitely to avoid are Chinese national holidays the first weeks of May and October – prices rocket and every tourist destination is uncomfortably busy. Also, try to avoid travelling just before Chinese New Year, which falls in January or February, as transport networks are over stretched.

Getting There

There are no direct flights from the west, but Kunming is only an hour and a half from Bangkok on Thai air.

Getting Around

Southwest Airlines is reliable and comparatively inexpensive; a ticket from Kunming to Lijiang, for example, costs around $45. Roads are generally good, at least between the cities, and most long distance travel is done on cramped but tolerably comfortable sleeper buses. Fast, a/c luxury buses run between popular tourist destinations. For foreigners, hiring a car involves too much paper work to be worth it; it s cheaper and less hassle to hire a car and driver.

Cost of Travel

Generally a bit more expensive than neighbouring south east Asian countries, but still very cheap by western standards. Rock bottom hotel rooms cost around $2-3, a decent mid-range a/c room costs $10 and the very best around $60 (though concessionary advance booking rates are often available). Eating out in China is usually a bargain; a decent meal for two costs around $4.

• Bottle of beer: 20p
• Cup of coffee: 50p
• Two-litre bottle of mineral water: 40p

Health & Safety

There is some risk of malaria in Xishuangbanna.

Food & Drink

Food is immensely important to the Chinese; they talk about it the way the English do about weather, and ‘have you eaten?’ is a standard greeting. Despite the impression you might have from Chinese takeaways at home, Chinese cuisine is regional, and in Yunnan each minority has its own specialities.

Eating is a social occasion and the Chinese like their restaurants to be ‘renao’, hot and noisy. Slurping is considered a sign of appreciation, and isn’t rude, but leaving rice in your bowl is. The ultimate in good table manners is to put a tasty morsel in someone else’s bowl.

• Over the bridge noodles

This tasty local dish was said to have been created by a scholar’s wife. She used to take lunch to her husband when he was out writing poetry in an island pavilion, but by the time she had crossed the bridge to the island the noodles were cold – until she had the idea of keeping them warm by pouring an insulating layer of oil on top of the soup. Order this popular dish today and you’ll be given a hot chicken broth with a layer of oil floating on top, and, on a separate dish, noodles, pork, vegetables and egg to slip into it.

• Naxi bread or ‘baba’

This staple of the Naxi people is a deep fried patty of flour lard and sesame oil with a stuffing of meat or vegetables; it’s common in Lijiang.

• Stinky tofu

Love it or loathe it, you can’t avoid it; that pong isn’t the drains, it’s this regional delicacy ‘rotten’ tofu barbecued then covered with spice. It’s available at every street corner after dark.

• Crisp skinned duck

The whole duck is basted with honey and roasted over a pine needle fire.

• Fake meat

You’ll find vegetarian restaurants outside Buddhist temples; the biggest is opposite the Yuantong Temple in Kunming. Most dishes feature fake meat, often made using cunningly spiced tofu and potato, which can taste eerily like the real thing.

Matriachal Minorities

Anyone spending any time in Lijiang will soon notice the dominant role women play in Naxi culture; they’re running the businesses while the rather underemployed men while away their time with gardening, falconry and the like. Naxi society is, to a large extent, matriarchal, with inheritance passing to the eldest daughter. In more remote communities, children are kept by the mother while the father stays in his own mother’s house and provides financial support. The Naxi language reflects the feminine bias; ‘woman stone’ means boulder, but ‘man stone’ pebble.

Even more girl power is in evidence in the Mosuo people, who live beside Lugu Lake. Their axia system of marriage means, broadly, that any woman ditches her lover when she feels like it, and any children are raised in the mother’s house. Family names pass from mother to daughter. Children might know who their father is, but the bond is not seen as special.

Dr Joseph Rock

Joseph Rock was a larger than life Austrian botanist who lived in Lijiang between 1922 and 1949. As well as sending over eighty thousand plant specimens back and pioneering the use of photography in the field, he was a keen defender of Naxi culture and compiled the first dictionary of their language. His reports for National Geographic made him widely known in the west. His fastidiousness made him notorious, and he travelled with an entourage to rival any western film star, including cooks, hundreds of mercenaries, and servants to carry such dubious necessities as his gramophone, gold dinner service and collapsible bathtub.

Smuggling

Any visitor off the beaten track will find having his passport inspected at roadside checkpoints a common occurrence. This is because Yunnan, at the crossroads of south east Asia and the edge of the golden triangle, is a haven for smugglers.

Around 800 kilograms of heroin a month is estimated to flow across the ill policed border, bringing social dysfunction in its wake; rates of HIV infection in border towns such as Ruili are the highest in China. Another lucrative trade is in the body parts of endangered species such as pangolins and muntjacs, which are trapped in the forests of Burma or in Xishuangbanna. They’re consumed either as delicacies or medicines, usually aphrodisiacs. But surely the most macabre trade is in boy children, kidnapped then sold to families desperate for a male heir. Over two hundred boys have gone missing in Kunming in the last three years.

Tea

As with most Chinese customs, tea cultivation has been going on for a very long time; one of Yunnan’s most popular destinations – admittedly only for Chinese tourists – is the rather unremarkable looking ‘King of Tea Trees,’ in Xishuangbanna, which is nearly two thousand years old.

Broadly, Yunnan teas come in four categories; green, black, flower and pu’er. This last is half fermented and steamed into blocks – originally for ease of transport on the long ride to the main market of Tibet. It has a musty taste that lingers in the mouth. Tea shops stock thousands of varieties, and are more than willing to let you sample their stock; you’re not expected to buy anything until you’ve tasted it, but take note that some teas are extremely expensive.

Tea is drunk for health as well as refreshment; Snow tea is good for sore throats, flower tea is regarded as a sedative, and ‘slimmers tea’ is, it is claimed, an appetite suppressant.

| Wanderlust magazine | October 04 | Issue 66 |