Shangri-La!

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Lost Horizon” (or read the book), you know that in this Himalayan utopia, there is so little stress that no one ever gets sick, and people commonly live well past a hundred.

We arrived in Shangri-la yesterday.  It used to be called Zhongdian until some clever marketing people decided it closely resembled the enchanted valley described in the book.  We arrived in the afternoon after a slow and tedious, albeit scenic , bus ride.  We were a bit the worse for wear; I was recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning that had emptied out my digestive tract from both ends, and Tom and Lillia had been complaining of vague flu-like symptoms for a couple of days.

So there we were at the bus station.  According to my most recent email exchange with Kevin’s Trekker Inn, we could call them and wait 20 minutes for them to come, or get a taxi.  We had no phone, and a Tibetan fellow was very keen to take us, so when I got him down to 15 kuai, I said fine.  He was right here, right now, and seemed to know where to go.

Well, he stops at the end of a very long pedestrian-only street and waves a hand “down thataway”.  Tom wasn’t born yesterday.  He isn’t going to hand over any money until we are at the door of the inn.  So we all start dragging our luggage (WAY too much luggage) down the cobblestone road.  When we’re nearing the end, our taxi driver is looking around left and right, and gets on his cell phone.  Oh my God, I thought, this is a replay of our Taxi Ride From Hell at the Beijing Airport three years ago.  Except that that time we were actually in the taxi the whole time our driver was lost, not dragging our luggage all over the place.  I show him the phone number in the guide book, and after several misdials he gets it right, but the call doesn’t go through.  So I go into a nearby antique shop and ask the proprietor, showing him the Chinese characters for Kevin’s Trekker Inn (Long Men Ke Zhan).  Ah! Yes!  He knows it!  Up the road this way about 30 meters, on the left.  He points back the way we came.  So we turn around and drag our stuff back to…Dragon Cloud Guest House (begins with the same character, long, meaning dragon).  I know this is the wrong place, but I stick my head in the office and ask in English, ”I’m looking for Kevin’s Trekker Inn?”  The guy answers in perfect English,  “This isn’t it.  It’s down the road that way, about 20 meters”, and points back the way we have just come.

When I come out and tell Tom, he says, “how could we have missed it?”  By now a little knot of locals have gathered around us and are having an animated discussion about our situation, most of which I’m not catching.  Another guy tries the phone number, but doesn’t get through.  He holds the phone up to my ear so I can hear the beeping sound.  By now I’m close to that tipping point between hysterical laughter and abject weeping.  Tom goes back into the Dragon Cloud and asks English Speaker, “Duibuqi, but could you show us where it is?  Because we don’t see it.”  So, he leads us back down the street once more, and then says, “Oh, I made a mistake.  This is N’s Kitchen, not Kevin’s Trekker Inn.  Kevin’s is over on that street,  to the left, around 400 meters.”  I confirm that “that street” is Dawa Lu, the address given in the guidebook.  Finally, we’re on the right track.

So we haul our luggage (did I mention, WAY too much luggage?) back up to the taxi, and a few minutes later we’re there.  We pay our hapless taxi driver the 15 kuai that he worked much harder for than he ever imagined.  We’re shown into a nice clean room, where we all collapse.

So, all’s well that ends well, right?  Not quite.  Almost immediately, Tom starts having shaking chills, and soon has a temperature of 103.  Plus diarrhea.  Lots of it.  I have rarely seen him this sick in the twenty-one years I’ve known him.

That night, Tom continues to run a fever despite alternating doses of Tylenol and ibuprofen ever few hours.  I am battling nausea and intestinal cramps, and my diarrhea returns.  I’ve just nodded off around midnight, when I’m awakened  by Lillia crying.  She doesn’t feel well.  I take her temperature and it’s normal but she has a headache, so I try giving her some Tylenol.  We didn’t bring any children’s, because we thought at eight years old, she would be able to swallow a pill.  A few days ago we discovered our mistake.  So I crush a tablet in a little bit of water, but it doesn’t dissolve.  I advise her to give it a good shake and toss it back in a big gulp.  Instead, she looks at it dubiously and takes a couple of diminutive sips.  I am sick and crazy tired and not in Good Parent mode.  I tell her that if she can’t take the medicine she should just try to go back to sleep.

While lying awake for the next four hours, I was struck with a feeling I’d never had before:  I WANT TO GO HOME.  Mind you, I’ve been sick as a dog in many exotic locales. But whether shitting my brains out in Bangkok or Calcutta, or coughing up a lung in Lhasa or Cuzco, I’ve always thought that this will pass in a few days and I’m still excited to be where I am.  Not this time.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe it’s because this is my sixth trip to China, so it’s not new and exciting any more.  Maybe it’s because all three of us are sick.  Maybe it’s because everything on this trip has been unreasonably inconvenient and uncomfortable, way out of proportion to its meager rewards.  Or maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age.

In any case, I think this may be my last trip to China.  If we decide to spend a year living in a Chinese-speaking country, I think it will have to be Taiwan, even though the accent there almost makes me break out in hives.  After all, it’s way cleaner, the food is safe, the people have more of a developed-country mindset (e.g., they care about the environment), AND you can buy onigiri at the convenience stores.

The Downfall of Dali

I first went to Dali in March of 1986.  I had spent a lot of time in big Chinese cities with grey skies and grim Stalinist architecture, so I was thrilled to arrive in this sleepy little town.  It was filled with traditional architecture and enclosed within a massive stone wall with impressive gates facing the four cardinal directions.  Surrounding it were fields of rice and other crops, and fruit trees in full bloom.  I remember that when I arrived, I thought, “this is what China should look like!”  The town had only opened to foreigners a few months earlier, and there were just a handful of hotels and restaurants.

Fast forward 27 years.  Word had quickly spread about Dali’s charms, and the tourist throngs descended on it. Millions of Chinese tourists from all over the country now come to Dali by the busload.  Foreigners from all over the world are there also.  The town is now chock-a-block full of guesthouses, restaurants, and trinket stalls—hundreds and hundreds of trinket stalls.  We stayed at a place outside the walls, and Lillia would say, “can we go back to the shopping mall?”  Which is exactly what the Old Town has become.  And all those pretty farms that had surrounded the town?  Now replaced by an ugly new city that has grown up around the walls like barnacles on a boat.  I have always felt a bit leery about going back to a place I loved, decades later.  In Japan, it was OK; Kamakura was as lovely and peaceful as I remembered.  But I’m never going to do this in China again.

The Lost Garden

                                                                       

We arrived in Kunming yesterday an hour and a half late, due to a long wait on the tarmac in Beijing.   We were impressed on our way to the guesthouse with how GREEN this city is.  So many Chinese cities are grey, grey, grey.  The streets here are lined with Southern magnolias, ficus, and huge bougainvilleas trained into trees, plus many other trees I have no clue about.  Some of the smaller streets have trees that arch over and touch, forming cool, shady tunnels.

The Lost Garden Guesthouse, which was billed as a “boutique hotel”, was kind of charmingly funky, but “boutique” was not the first word that came to mind.  It could have been any backpacker hangout in Bangkok or Kathmandu, with lots of white kids sitting around eating pancakes.  We made the mistake of eating at their restaurant, which was overpriced and entirely forgettable.  But the staff was very friendly, so we happily settled in.

We went for a long walk around Green Lake Park, just a couple of blocks from the guesthouse.  It’s a lovely place, with weeping willows, bamboo groves , lotuses and water lilies.  Unfortunately, since it was Sunday, half the population of Kunming seemed to be there, and the revelry was deafening.  There were many groups of people dancing, with dueling amplified music.  We decided we would come back when there were fewer people there.

It was an unusually steamy day in Kunming, and our room was very hot when we went to bed.  We left the window open and trained the little electric fan on us.  I fell quickly into REM sleep, and then began having very noisy dreams.  Then a horrendous clanging, banging, crashing crescendo jolted me awake.  “What the...?”  It was half past midnight.  I lay in bed listening to more crashing and banging, along with the idling of a huge truck.  Tom stirred beside me and said, “we need to find a new place to stay tomorrow”.  I suggested at least closing the window,  but Tom had already tried that, and had found that the window frame was swollen so that it could not be closed.  Since sleep was clearly impossible, I went out to see what was going on.  Below us, a stone’s throw from our room, was a huge dump truck, idling noisily.  A front-end loader was roaring back and forth, scraping up and dumping huge loads of construction debris into it.  I went back to bed, put on my noise-cancelling headphones, and read on my ipod until the noise stopped around 1:30.  I guessed they had filled up the truck and driven it off, and I prayed it would not return that night.

Lillia slept through the whole thing.