Not A Cloud in Sight in China's Yunnan Province

Greetings from China / Hic Incepit Pestis

That's right, we've both been battling what feels like a plague/SARS hybrid-type bug for the past week, but we're finally feeling up to some blogging - so here's the rundown on our first ten days in the People's Republic.

Since landslides have closed the main rail line linking Hanoi and southwestern China, we took a pass on an 18-hour bus ride and flew straight to southwest China's largest city -- Kunming, pop. 2.5 million. We headed out on the town after our uneventful arrival and were immediately struck by the tranquility of the city center, which, despite its skyscrapers, pulsing neon signs, and traffic-snarled six-lane boulevards, was mercifully short on scooters and the constant blaring of scooter horns that infected the sound scape in Vietnam. It was Sunday, so after checking out the city's main Buddhist temple, we joined the locals strolling through a boutique-lined central promenade, and were soon overcome with a dreadful feeling of schlumpiness that has stuck with us throughout our time in China. We were wearing our usual mono-tone fleeces and travel pants, but everywhere we looked, Chinese were dressed to impress, conspicuously draped in every designer clothing brand you can think of, sporting bouncy foiled hair-do's, and with brightly colored, exotically-skinned handbags of enormous size (B.C.E.S.H.E.S.'s) slung over their shoulders--the display was all-the-more impressive considering Kunming is way closer to Khasakistan than it is to Shanghai or Hong Kong.

In the evening we ate at a great mock-meat restaurant--skipping the the injection molded mock turtle in favor of good-old mock chicken--before continuing our spiral into aesthetic inadequacy while perusing the the bars on the strip outside Kunming University, eventually ending the night with the following disconcerting conversation with a middle-aged Westerner and his six-year-old Asian daughter in the elevator at our hotel:

Man: Where are you two from?

Anna: The U.S.

Man: Oh, so are we. . . . Are you here on business?

Anna: No, we're traveling around China for about a month.

Man: Why!? . . . You mean, you came here voluntarily?

Anna [somewhat taken aback]: Sure . . . You know, we're excited to see the . . .

Little girl: [interrupting]: We're here to get a baby!!!

Man: That's right! We're getting your sister aren't we, and then we're going home.

The next morning, we day-tripped it out to the Stone Forest, a thousand-acre geological spectacle of tree-sized grey and white limestone karsts. After obliging two Chinese families on the way in by posing with them for pictures ("Here's a photo of two Americans we saw! They sure don't know how to dress, but look how tall and pale they were"), we ditched the tour-group gridlock in the central viewing area and spent three hours wandering the site's deserted patchwork of outlying trials, admiring the other-worldly scenery, and trying our hands at identifying some of the ambitiously named individual formations listed on our visitor's map, eventually agreeing that we could just make out the "Eternal Mushroom" and "Elephant Relaxing on a Terrace," but definitely not "A Lady Yearning for her Lost Husband," or the "Rhinoceros Gazing at the Moon."

We then caught a puddle-jumper east to Lijaing, flying on the start-up China Southern Airlines (whose in-flight magazine boasted that it now has "more former Beijing Olympic medal presenters" working as stewardesses than any airline). Lijaing is a small city set in a sprawling mountain valley that's known for its minority Naxi-tribe inhabitants and its winding, cobble-stone old-town alleys. We rolled into town past a snow covered mountain and fields of grazing yaks, but as soon as we arrived, it was clear that reports we'd heard of the entire area being overrun with domestic tourists were spot on. Literally every inch of the once residential old-town now consists of restaurants and shops selling tourist kitsch, and rather than locals, the streets were packed with middle-class Chinese tourists who, like us, had flown in to check things out for a few days.

Despite our initial trepidation, however, the ostentatious flaunting of wealth, combined with the fact that it was genuinely cold in Lijaing, gave the town the feel of a Colorado ski resort in full swing, with a festive atmosphere and fantastic people watching. So we spent our first night drinking beer on benches set along a small stream adjacent to a row of open-air restaurants, taking in: (1) the commitment to form-over-function of the innumerable woman walking in boots with spiked heels on the rough-hewn cobble-stones; (2) super-expensive D300 and above cameras worn like Oscar-night jewelry by dozens of proud owners; (3) full length man-furs; (4) a shifty-looking kid who we watched try and fail to pick someones' pocket; (5) a kid casually setting off M-80 sized firecrackers, which didn't seem to phase anyone but us; (6) a game of street badminton that was as impromptu as it was short-lived, what with the stream and all; and (7) teenagers carrying guitars with battery powered amps who serenaded diners with Chinese pop songs and us with Celine Dion's theme from Titanic.