China Part 6: Comparative Tourism

Like many American tourists in China, Emmy's dad preferred walking and sweating to being shuttled around on a golf cart.

It was easy to travel in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and even Indonesia without knowing the local language, because people who had no other use for their educational system learned English so they could do business with tourists. Everyone is shocked when they come from Southeast Asia to China and suddenly nobody speaks English.  We've found better English speakers at a one-bus-a-day bus stop in rural Laos than at the Kunming train station that sees 10,000 passengers in a single day.  China has a far better educational system than its neighbors to the south, so why does it fail to provide for the needs of its foreign tourists?  The reason is that tourism in China is almost entirely domestic tourism.  There are tons of foreigners roaming around the famous sights, but there are ten times as many nouveau riche yuppies from Beijing and Shanghai, trying in vain to assemble camera lenses the size of automatic rifles from out of their fanny packs. One man had earned true tourist credentials by installing a five-foot, remote-controlled tripod into his backpack. Tourism majors at our university don't really learn any English, because they don't need to—they're communicating with these Chinese tourists ninety percent of the time.  But the difference between us young foreigners and our Chinese counterparts isn't confined to language needs.  Our two-month winter vacation taught us how foreign and Chinese travelers generally enjoy themselves in very different ways. 

Our university treated us to a grand Chinese tour of the tourist-heaven that is Teng Chong.  Teng Chong is only fifty miles from the border with Myanmar/Burma, a country led by a despotic government that has rejected all advances in modern life since the British left in the 1940s, executed thousands of Buddhist monks after they led civil rebellions in 1988 and 2007, and erased many of its citizens' life savings because a fortune-teller declared the $20 bill unlucky.  But Kunming University's itinerary sought luxury, not adventure. We spent the trip eating three enormous banquet meals a day and soaking in coffee- and aloe-flavored hot springs.  When we dared to venture out to the area's famous but diminutive volcanoes, our tour bus was met by a special escort who ferried us around the site in super-stretch golf carts.  We cancelled our visit to the largest volcano, "Big Empty Mountain," because we were late for lunch. 

This was the main attraction at Teng Chong, a hot springs "ocean." It would have been more impressive except it was the size of a kiddie pool and smelled like the peanuts they were roasting in its steam.

We were allowed out of the golf carts long enough to check out Little Empty Mountain

Get your heads back inside the golf cart! It's time for lunch.

At every meal including breakfast, we ate massive feasts of all the same local specialties. The disappointed-looking woman to Amos's right is allergic to MSG ("perfect flavor" in Chinese). She just learned that all of the dishes contain MSG and she'll be fed a bowl of fried rice instead.

Immediately upon returning to Kunming, we hopped on a bus headed up toward the Tibetan Plateau. Desperate for some exercise, we planned a two-day hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge. We stumbled across a Naxi-minority wedding (see China Part 5), a middle-schooler and his grandma selling wild honey and marijuana, and scenery so beautiful we took the same picture over and over, hundreds of times.  The only cloud over our trip was a dust cloud caused by Chinese road crews, thousands of feet below, dynamiting the cliffs to build a two-lane road straight through the gorge.  Despite international pressure to preserve hiking heaven in one of the deepest, most rugged gorges in the world, the Chinese consensus is to make it into a no-walking tour-bus day trip.  If you come to China, be sure to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge.  But if you see golf carts parked at the entrance, turn and run.

Until around 10:30am, the sun is still hidden behind Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, so the mountains are a wall of ambiguous blue and the valley is filled with haze.

We never got tired of taking this same mountain picture. Every hour or so, the mountains would change color. Here's the morning blue.

By 11am, sun was barely above the mountains, so they were bright but hazy. There was also a large amount of dust from the new road being dynamited, deep down in the gorge.

By lunchtime, the sun had finally climbed high enough to give us a bright, clear picture of the mountains.

By around 6pm, as the sun drops below the mountains on one side of the gorge, the mountains on the other side begin to blush.

Look out, dad! Storm's a-comin'!

This concludes our series of identical mountain pictures.

We left Yunnan Province, and our first stop in Sichuan Province was holy mountain Emei Shan.  The bottom of the mountain was flooded with tourists who had arrived to take pictures of monkeys eating peanuts out of their screaming cousin's hair.  We tried to skip the monkeys and hike up the mountain, but the monkeys didn't skip us.  Three fifty-pound males bared their teeth and correctly sniffed out Emmy as the one with the food-bag.  They jumped onto Emmy's back, and she flailed and screamed "THROW THEM THE WATER!!!" as Amos tried in vain to beat them off. Amos couldn't understand why the monkeys would want water, but he threw them a water bottle wrapped in a plastic bag that was peeking out of Emmy's jacket pocket, and the monkeys flung themselves after it.  It turns out the monkeys weren't smelling anything at all, they just saw a plastic bag and assumed it meant food.  For the rest of the trip, we trembled in fear whenever a monkey crossed our path, but an old man with a slingshot miraculously appeared each time and scared them away.  Perhaps this is what makes it a holy mountain.

Traumatized by our near-death experience, we distracted ourselves by discussing the trail, which was actually a giant flight of stairs that stretched all the way up the mountain.  We had initially thought that mountain-stairs must be another Chinese luxury-tour trick.  But after climbing 10,000 vertical feet of stairs from a lush rainforest into an icy blizzard shrouding two feet of snow, our legs were threatening to fall off and our brains were wondering how the golf cart-tourists would ever get up here. We spent two nights staying in and near monasteries, and our spirits were beginning to melt into the serenity of our surroundings. Finally, we had escaped the high-heeled women and snazzy camera-wielding men!  Our crampon-clad feet negotiated yet another ice-sheet covering the stairs, and suddenly we were in the middle of a two-lane road.  A tour bus screeched to a halt and twenty women in high heels stepped gingerly onto the pavement while their husbands snapped pictures like rounds of ammo.  As we came into view, they turned the cameras on us sweaty, snow-covered backpackers.  We hurried up the last half-mile to the summit, chased by harsh Beijing accents and the scratch-squeak of high heels strapped into crampons. Along the way, these clueless tour groups were robbed of their food bags, scarves, and souvenir cowboy hats by a gang of extremely fat monkeys, which earned those hairy little devils a soft spot in our hearts.  We reached Emei Shan's summit, famed for stunning sunrises above the clouds, but heavy mist cloaked everything except the steps in front of us, so we hurried back down to watch the monkeys steal more souvenirs.

We woke up at 6:30am to hike to Emei Shan's summit and see this sunrise. Well, actually we had lost our camera, but this is what the view looked like anyways.

We challenged tourist decorum at Lugu Lake, hiking straight up Goddess Gemu Mountain instead of taking the chairlift. Emmy resumed appropriate tourist behavior at the top by renting a Mosu ethnic minority costume and striking xiaojie poses.

Every stop on our winter itinerary was spaced out by over eight-hour bus rides.  We peered smugly over our fascinating books to smirk at the Chinese tourists and locals, staring blankly at the seatback in front of them for eight hours straight.  Oh boy, look how jealous they are of our books!  Their lack of reading material taught us two new lessons in comparative tourism.  Number one, most Chinese people don't share our need to be endlessly entertained.  They show zero interest in buying a ten-cent newspaper, talking to their neighbor, or even peeking out the window at sheer cliffs and endless rice terraces.  On a sleeping-berth train ride, one bunkmate even slept for 22 hours straight.  The second lesson is that many Chinese stomachs do not like bus rides.  You'd think after spending their days lurching to and fro on crammed public buses, any bus ride with seats would be a luxury.  But before taking off, the driver passes out plastic bags to all the locals.  Ten minutes into the ride, we are staring queasily at the local specialty foods as our fellow passengers hurl them into their barfbags, casually toss the bags out the window, and open new ones. 

Amos, why study Chinese for 8 hours when you could be staring straight ahead of you?

Even high up in Tiger Leaping Gorge, Amos finds himself unable to relax and enjoy the view. Here he is, caught red-handed studying Chinese!

Don't think this means that Westerners are tougher travelers than Chinese people.  We scheduled a seven-hour train ride on the day before Chinese New Year, when all the sleeping-car berths and even the soft seats were sold out.  We bought "hard seat" tickets, and didn't notice until we boarded the train that in place of our seat row and seat number, our tickets simply read "No Seat."  No Seat travel is the default method for the vast majority of Chinese people, but we found it unbearable.  We entered car number 24, and were immediately hit by a tornado of cigarette smoke produced by 100 people smoking all night in a 60-person car because they couldn't sleep.  We forced our way down the aisle until we couldn't move and squatted on our backpacks, getting up every thirty seconds to let someone move by us.  It was impossible to sleep because our neighbors on every side were blowing smoke straight into our mouths. Nobody was sleeping except a 50-year-old man who had wriggled his way under the seats to find a moment's peace and quiet.  We couldn't go to the bathroom because it was full of No Seat passengers desperate to find a place to sit.  So we tried to occupy our time the way everyone else did— do nothing, and stare straight ahead.  Our brains rebelled.  We realized that the dining car was one car over, if we could make it there we could keep buying food until we arrived at our destination.  We agonized our way down the aisle, which took twenty minutes to go twenty feet, and then we gave up.  After a mind-numbing, torturous seven hours, we vowed never to travel by Hard Seat again.

This vacation, we also visited Yuanyang, a vast expanse of hillsides of which every inch has been carved into rice terraces.

The Chinese crowds all flocked to one spot to take the famed rice terrace sunrise picture, seen previously. While waiting for the sunrise, they took pictures of local, traditionally-dressed girls selling hard-boiled eggs.

We confused our hired driver by wanting to go on a hiking trip through the rice terraces. He expected us to get shuttled all day between the designated scenic spots, just like everyone else.

The picturesque rice terraces weren't created for tourists. On our hike, we saw that the local rice farmers certainly have their work cut out for them-- each one of the over 10,000 mini-terraces has to be painstakingly plowed by hand and hoof.