Week with the family

On Saturday 8 April my family; consisting of Mom, Dad, Devon, and Aunt Sherri, flew into Hong Kong and I met them at the airport. We stayed the night across the border in Shenzhen and flew to Kunming the next morning. We were met by Dr. Yin and a friend with a big van. Dr. Yin acted as our host and took care of our every need Sunday and Monday. In Kunming, my family was shocked with the chaotic mix of traffic, bicycles, mopeds, and the occasional horse drawn cart.

At dinner the first night, our host and his wife and friends toasted us in every way about 50 times. It is an interesting Chinese custom. Also, groups of waitresses would wander around, place a napkin in front of an unsuspecting diner, hold him back and pour a bowl of various minority rice wines into his mouth. It was an interesting Chinese custom, they said it was showing your respect for that minority. Dad even got a neck  and shoulder massage from some of the waitresses.

The next day my dad gave a presentation at Dr. Yin's hospital, since Dr. Yin runs the same type of department that my dad works in: Physical medicine and rehabilitation. I bought tickets for all of us to fly to Lijiang that night.

We got into Lijiang around midnight and took taxis to a guesthouse. Our guesthouse was in Lijiang's old city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where we walked along cobblestone streets with interesting drainage canals surrounded by walls, and entered the door of a house into an open air courtyard. The courtyard is square with rooms on all sides. The guest house was very simple and nice, with sit down toilets, not the squat loos prevalent throughout China (as an English woman described them). A family of 5 lived there and took good care of us – the grandparents, daughter and son-in-law, and the grandson who was probably just under two years old and quite entertaining. We woke up the next day to an excellent breakfast in the courtyard sitting on small stools at a low table. We washed our clothes and hung them to dry in the courtyard. In the time we were there (3 nights all told), there were a number of other European guests that came and went. Otherwise, we rarely saw anyone but Chinese folks.

Tuesday we walked around the old city, which is all cobblestone streets, no cars, and open air stores everywhere. It basically caters to tourism, because there are tons of Chinese tourists. So we just walked, and I acted as translator and negotiator. Sometimes we ended up paying way too much despite my hard- nosed bargaining skills. When you are white, you just have to pay the "foreigner tax". Dinner at the guesthouse was cheap and very good. It was great for the members of our party who had fickle stomachs to know that we had solid, good tasting, and easy on the digestive system home cooking waiting for us.

The next day we rented bikes and rode out of Lijiang to a small town called Baisha. This was just a small farming town that had a section of its street set up selling tourist stuff. My mom said it felt like we were stepping back in time 100 years or more. We ate lunch there and then perused the tourist goods. I bargained for some stuff that my family wanted, but I had no sense of real value, so my counter offers were too high. I realized this when people would quickly cut their price and agree to what I thought was a really low offer that they wouldn't take. Oh well.

After the tourist stuff we visited "Dr. Ho", an old Chinese medicine doctor that has a room along the street that is covered with foreign business cards, news articles, and letters from businesses or organizations, one I saw was the American Biographical association. One guidebook I read mentioned him. Apparently John Cleese met him once, sparking the quote: "interesting bloke; crap tea."  So my dad talked with him and later he gave Aunt Sherri some powder because Devon mentioned she had an upset stomach. However Aunt Sherri said her stomach was fine and refused to take it later in the day sparking a debate about Chinese medicine and cleanliness. I didn't blame her.

So we were flagged down by an old lady wearing the same traditional looking outfit that all the other old ladies wear, and she invited us to her home to chat in Chinese (very few people we met could speak English) . She showed us a notebook of all the foreigners who she had tea with, and they would all leave real nice entries into the book about how it was a great time. So we went, sat down, drank tea, she forced us to take pictures of Devon dressed in traditional clothes, and chatted. Before leaving, we were debating if we should pay and how much. There was nothing mentioned in her comment book about money. So we offered 10 RMB as we were leaving, that's what I thought was appropriate if we were to pay. I never want to give too much because sometimes I feel like the person might think of it as a slight insult, like "I don't need your charity". But then again everyone is after our money anyway. So it turns out the 10 RMB wasn't enough, she wanted 20, because we took pictures with her. After that we wanted to add to our book entry that we left 20 RMB (she couldn't read the English in the book), but she wouldn't let us, saying that we had written enough. So that's her plan, get them to write in the book before they pay.

The next day we took a bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge, about 3 hours north. The gorge is where the Yangzi river makes its first bend and goes through some serious mountains.

We arrived after 3 hours on the bus, but this was outside the gorge, so we found a guy with a minivan to take us to the middle of the gorge. This ride was a harrowing adventure along the side of a mountain, with maybe a few feet between us and a fun trip way down into the river, on top of what was an unfinished and extremely bumpy road for most of the 45 minutes. It didn't really worry me, I trusted the driver, but what worried me was what was out of our control, like rockslides. And we definitely noticed evidence of them. I'll mention that now that my family is home, I didn't want to mention it while we still had the ride out of the gorge to complete.

So Tiger Leaping Gorge is pretty sweet, on either side of the river you have the steep slopes of mountains going up. On our side, there is terraced farmland working its way up to the road, where our guesthouse was, and it continued further up to the peaks on our side. On the other side it was sheer rock face all the way to the top. Semi distant peaks had snow on them, but the weather was mildly warm. The small village of Walnut Garden consisted of our guesthouse, one a little bit down the road, and a bunch of farm houses going from above us down to the river. So we ate and went to sleep.

The next day my dad, mom, Devon, and myself got a guide to take us on a 3½ hour hike up to a waterfall and down back to the road on the other side of the ridge. It was a fairly intense hike; the beginning was basically vertical past wheat terraces. Then we started traversing and walked along some small irrigation stream that had been made, leading us to the waterfall. From there we basically slid down hill through a bamboo forest and made our way back to the road. I thought all of the views were great. Pictures are already on Flickr.

We went back to the guest house in Lijiang, leaving the gorge in another minivan, on the inside lane this time! The next morning we flew back to Kunming with their flights for Shenzhen scheduled for later that day. My parents were kept at a huge tea market for a long time by Dr. Yin and we ended up being pretty rushed at the airport because my Aunt Sherri, who married last year and now has a new name, but whose passport still has her maiden name, was held up because the ticket I gotten her had her new name on it. So Dr. Yin somehow managed to take care of it while we held our breath. After that my family took off and I wondered if they would make the flight and the ensuing hotel, buses and trains they had to take without me , but I got no phone calls and no emails until they were home in VA. Regarding the ticket issue, over dinner with a bunch of his friends and myself, Dr. Yin told me that if we weren't white foreigners my aunt would still have been in Kunming. So it was a great week.