On top of the world

Plan as much as you like but sometimes holidays just don’t quite meet your expectations. My winter break in Xinjiang was like that. I’d gone at the wrong time of year and the whole holiday was spent desperately chasing entertainment but just missing out on it while getting tired and frustrated in the process.

And sometimes, by accident, everything just works out.

All I wanted from Yunnan last month was some peace and quiet and fresh air. Oh, and maybe a chance to escape the intense humidity that builds up under Chengdu’s hazy grey skies.

The photo says it all really.

It was taken from my room at Tashi’s Lodge near Deqin right on the Yunnan-Tibet border. I’d not planned to go there at all but turned up having missed my bus back to Zhongdian and then stayed for four days either sat on this terrace reading a book in the sun or walking around Meili Snow Mountain.

The mountain is one of Rough Guide’s ‘Must see’ sights while in China – although you have to be extremely lucky to see it at its best during a cloudless sunrise. Still, even through the clouds that hung around it while I was there, you can see why it made the Rough Guide list.

(By the way, it’s also home to the world’s most southerly glacier. I spent three hours climbing up the mountain alongside this rather sad piece of dirty ice which is disappearing fast because of the changing climate. My Tibetan guide wistfully pointed to the spot way down the valley where he remembered the glacier reaching when he was a kid. Ten more years and it’ll be virtually gone.)

Many of the most memorable bits of the holiday were kind of accidental. Just looking out of the window of the bus on the way to a new place often made you gasp. The towering mountains! The plunging valleys! Rocky roads scratched into sheer rock faces at nose-bleeding heights. And blue blue skies that lift your spirit like no drug or booze ever can.

Artificial reality

I've written about places like Huanglongxi and Lijiang before. They're both sites of very old settlements but populated with buildings barely five or ten years old, recreated in an approximation of the original style. The only difference, of course, is that they've been rebuilt to accommodate modern day supermarkets, banks and public conveniences so their authenticity is dubious to say the least. Some students took me to another "ancient village" near Chengdu called Longquan recently and one of them proudly told me that her brother had actually designed the main street.

Chinese people I speak to don't find anything odd in this. They seem to have a different perspective on history. If a building is in Tang Dynasty style then it's a Tang Dynasty building. When I've pressed students on things like this, asking for instance, when exactly the Tang Dynasty was they haven't a clue. And if any building is from more than about thirty years ago then it's "very old". I don't know if it's something to do with the skewing of history during the Cultural Revolution but "the past" just seems to be a single block of time - sometimes known as "culture" - rather than a long timeline of discrete events.

Still, I rather like Lijiang (as long as it's not choked with tourists). You don't so much "suspend your disbelief" as ignore it altogether and just enjoy getting lost in its tangle of narrow, cobbled streets criss-crossing streams of fast flowing mountain water.

Six hours' bus ride north west brings you to another "ancient village": Zhongdian. This one is actually still being built. To add to the surreality of it all, the authorities audaciously renamed the town "Shangri-La" claiming it was the inspiration for James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon. (Most foreigners - and locals - seem to find this an absurdity too far and refer to it as Zhongdian still.) Its friendly jumble of Tibetan style buildings houses hostels, 7-11s and more 'outdoors' shops than you can shake a walking pole at, all stuffed to the rafters with fake North Face branded waterproofs, fleeces and jackets.

But come seven o'clock in the evening Zhongdian comes into its own. I'd seen traditional folk dancing in the town square in Lijiang and in a kind of open air theatre in Luoshui on the banks of Lugu Lake but you couldn't escape from the fact that both of these shows were put on purely for the (mostly Chinese) tourists with the suited and booted dancers going through the motions a bit. In Zhongdian it feels different. The square becomes packed with concentric rings of dancers old and young. One or two are in traditional dress, most come as they are but all know the moves for each tune being played through the loudspeakers. Old ladies lead grandchildren by the hand; middle aged shopkeepers join-in to unwind after a long day of selling all that dodgy gear; and teenage lads seem genuinely proud to be part of the tradition, dancing the intricate (often almost effeminate) steps with a kind of hip hop style and a rapper's glare.

The dancing in Luoshui had not been free (although I'd not paid having been invited by a couple who knew the guy on the door). Even here though, where I knew the dancers were getting paid, it was kind of amazing to see the pride of young men and girls in their traditions. And it wasn't all fake by a long chalk. Spending three days walking round the lake, I was surprised to find villagers wearing traditional dress or - among the young ones - combining the old skirts and shiny leather boots with the new jeans and trainers.

The villagers were people from the Mosu and Naxi minorities who are coming to terms with the Twenty First century, combining their old pastoral lives with the new and potentially lucrative opportunities offered by tourism. Each village has a handful of guesthouses all decked out with Tibetan prayer flags, the city slickers' shiny 4x4s parked in the courtyard. And, of course, they have some of the most magnificent scenery in the whole of China.

Straddling the border between Sichuan and Yunnan, Lugu Hu is a vast lake set among the mountains at 2690 metres above sea level and covering an area of around 50 square kilometres. Ten hours from Xichang, about nine from Lijiang, it's not easy to get to but, boy, is it worth the effort (even in a truly ancient minibus along roads and tracks blocked every so often by the most recent landslide having tumbled down a virtually sheer mountainside).

This was everything that Chengdu isn't. There were no car horns blaring mindlessly, no squealing brakes and no smog. There were blue skies, there was fresh air. Huge purple butterflies wobbled through the air as though leading the way along the lake shore. You heard bird song. Hell, you even heard the flutter of birds' wings. Every corner brought a new perspective on the lake, a new way of looking at it: now from high above on the unmetalled road, now within earshot of the water slip-slapping the side of trough-like boats hollowed out from tree trunks. I sat alone on a jetty listening to singing as one of these boats crossed the lake. There were four Mosu women, all blue skirts, white sashes and black bonnets, rowing from the other shore and bringing huge bundles of firewood, singing as they paddled, giggling as they brought it all ashore.

It felt good. It felt real.

P.S. See more photos at

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=138981&l=3572a&id=589175623

Simply The Fourth Best!

I know. I tend to write mostly of disaster and depression. This is basically because it's easier to write interestingly about bad stuff than about happy stuff. But last term ended rather well: all my students passed their exams this time (a remarkable improvement!) and one or two said some very nice things which made me think that maybe I'm not doing such a bad job after all.

Nonetheless, I still got messages from others who told me they were 'depressed' by their exam score. Well, not so much by the score as by the fact that they weren't top of the class. That's the nature of the system here: it's so damn competitive that even when they score around 20% better than last time they're still not happy. I felt like telling them to grow up and get a life.

(Others who had kindly given me end of term gifts like tea or Sichuan spices seemed baffled that they too had not scored top spot in the class.)

Sometimes I think I'll never get the hang of China. Exam fortnight fell on the two weeks immediately after my year's contract officially ended. I'd pointed this out at the beginning of the year and had been told not to worry, it'd sort itself out. But sure enough when I went to pick up the two weeks' wages I was told that I shouldn't have worked those days! Then the college said I should talk to the Foreign Affairs Office; the FAO said it was a college matter. It all got very messy and fractious.

Really, it's another case of Yes. Probably. Maybe. - the state of uncertainty that people like to live in here. It's the same story with my visa for next year. It runs out a month before the end of term. Pointing this out, I was told "It'll sort itself out". Hmmm, we'll see.

Many foreign teachers - especially those in private schools - have had terrible problems renewing their visas and quite a few have had to leave China altogether. The authorities have clamped right down on issuing them in the run-up to the Olympics which has caused a bit of an exodus. It doesn't make you feel very wanted or valued! What's more, there are very few new expats coming into Chengdu because of worries about earthquakes. Those of us left should really be at a premium - but it doesn't feel that way at all.

But that's just the way of things. Apart from the wrangle about payment at the end of term, there was no word from my boss to say thanks for the year's work or any kind of review of how things went. Nothing. Not a word. Another teacher, however, came up to me and, beaming, shook my hands saying he had some good news. It turns out that the students are required to assess their teachers at the end of each year and, in his words, I was "the fourth best teacher out of one hundred".

It's great news of course. But I can't help seeing the negative side too: why on earth did my bosses (in either the college or the Foreign Affairs Office) never even mention it to me?