Follow-up On Internet Access (the COPE bill)

I posted last summer about the COPE bill (renamed HR 5252):

http://holidaydarin.blogspot.com/2006/06/for-sale-one-not-very-recently-used.html

I'm happy to report that after passing the House of Representatives, the bill died in the Senate when Congress adjourned at the end of 2006. That's great news for now. The telecommunications companies donate big in DC. Don't expect that they'll give up trying to abscond with profits from a system they never even had a hand in creating.

Another Sweet Reunion

And the first member of our "Heros" list to be inducted for the second time . . .

Captain Ken Phelps!

Ken met up with us in Dali a few days ago. He's brought news of home; a full, in-person summary of the Garage Mahal fundraiser party and his own unexcelled and inimitable self.

Stay tuned for more photos and stories.

China Continued

Modern Kunming

I've come to realize that I can't really say "China" when characterizing my experience here. China's just too complex and enormous for that. My myopia started to become apparent when we hit the city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. Yunnan alone which, in three weeks, we've just started to get a feel for, is a bit larger than California and has 45 million people; several million of which are ethnic minorities with cultures much different than the majority Han Chinese. Sometimes Tami and I feel like we are in an Andean village in Peru, sometimes in a farm valley in Burma. If a person had the time and money, a fantastic trip would be to enter China at a distant southern or western border and travel slowly overland to Beijing or Shanghai. As we've moved north from Laos, the changes have revealed what a huge, teeming country this is.

Prosperity and energy were apparent from the moment we crossed over from Laos. I was in no way prepared for Kunming, though. Accurate numbers are hard to come by because China is changing so rapidly. Our guidebook published in 2003 says Kunming had about four million people at that time. We spoke with a local man who worked for China Railways. He was an engineer and seemed to be very well informed. He said the current figure was closer to five million and the government expected (and was building out the infrastructure to accomodate) a doubling of that to ten million by 2020. Sheesh! We have two metro areas of ten million in the US - LA and NYC. People here keep telling us Kunming is a small, big city in China.

Tami with Kunming Behind


Whatever... numbers only tell part of the story. Visiting Kunming felt, for the first time since Bangkok, like visiting a full-fledged, modern metropolis with all the accoutrements: forests of skyscrapers, constant passenger jet traffic, bright lights and so on. It was not unexpected to find that the people of Kunming while nice, were a bit more like city people everywhere - busy with their own lives and fairly indifferent to a couple of foreigners walking their streets. That said, we did have a handful of very nice interactions and conversations with Kunmingers. Virtually very person we asked for help, whether it was a bus driver or a shoe repair person, took care of us with a smile. I'm starting to think they put courtesy dust in the water here.

Kunming's New "Old City"

Kunming is an old city. They even have what they call an "old city". What's left of that is going away very quickly, though. From what we've read and what we're seeing, the Chinese have not been sentimental about old buildings. Many "old cities" - some centuries old - around the country have been razed to make way for modern towers. Kunming stands as a stark example of that. Here and there you see rickety old slices of villages nestled among modern glass, steel and concrete. Even the area city developers are calling "old Kunming" seems destined for a ground-up makeover. Pretty much every city we've visited has buildings or neighborhoods constucted in traditional styles. Apparently they do this, not out of a love for the past but with the understanding that "old" is what Chinese (and foreign but to a lesser extent) tourists want to see. I'll give them this much, they stick to traditional styles and use local craftspeople. I've never seen so much hand carved stone and wood.

When they cast their eyes to the future, the gloves really come off. Kunming's avenues and huge pedestrian areas show an awareness of what design qualities make for a grand urban experience. The Chinese are clearly thinking big and thinking long-term.

Of course, "long-term" begs a bigger question or two. They seem to be building with only slightly more regard for dwinding oil supplies than we do at home. They're building up with towers rather than out "ex-burbs". American style ex-burbs are unlivable without cars. We've seen rail lines being constructed on a massive scale. That's certainly more efficient for moving people and goods than cars and trucks but it won't be enough. They are following a resource gulping, consumerist model that is adding fuel to the already raging fire.

The Cold Shoulder and the Heat & the Haze or . . . No Accounting for Taste 2

4:30 Sun (No Sunglasses Needed!) - Luang Prabang

So...as I said below, in all our time on the road, we hadn't really heard a bad thing about the country of Laos. Even in conversations with travelers over past years, virtually all of them raved that Laos was a special place. Consequently, as a rare exception, I'd allowed myself to fall into a trap with Laos - the trap of having high expectations. This almost always sets me up for a letdown but it was hard to discount all we'd heard. The one negative we'd come across was in our guide book. They wrote that the spring months in the north of the country could be smokey due to slash and burn agriculture practiced by the ethnic hill tribes. Little did I know.

Spring in SE Asia can be unbearable enough with just the heat.There is no breeze and the humidity gives the air a weight you almost have to push through. Like the Laotians themselves, we had to retreat most days to some internet cafe or under the fan in our room (no air-con) for two or three hours or risk getting decimated by the heat. In the capital, Vientiane, the air had a haze that seemed like smoke or pollution but without any distinguishing smell. As we moved north visibility - and breathing - became more constricted.

Like Walking in a Bowl of Hot Soup - Luang Prabang

Mature trees are rare in Laos so the coutryside has a mostly scrubby appearance. On the bus north out of Vientiane we saw our first blackened hillsides. We had no idea why the hills and valley floors were destroyed they way they were. The land often seemed too steep to farm and everything that was burned seemed to be left fallow. Nonetheless, the local people continued to work up and down the mountainsides with what looks like disdain for anything green. Everything is left white ash, black snags and tan and red earth.

We spent time with one woman from New Zealand who went on a couple day trek near Luang Prabang. She was astonished to walk, at times, along the trail with fire buring on both sides of her. This on days when the temps were just shy of a hundred degrees fahrenheit!

As horrifying as the land is, the air has been transformed into the most irritating and inescapable fallout of the burning. From Vientiane north we were plunged into a haze that burned the eyes and lungs and blotted out the sun. Even at mid-day, on the worst days you can stare directly into its light with naked eyes. One day, at a bus stop in Udomxai, pieces of black and white ash rained down on my lunch - and I was eating under an awning! Every time we'd take a shower, the washcloth turned a turgid gray. Our poor lungs...

What could the people grow that would be worth such destruction? For more than a week, in all the areas that had been burned, we saw nothing planted. Finally, up near the Burmese and Chinese borders, we saw rows of spikey plants along the slopes. A local man who spoke some english told us they were trees. They mature enough for harvest in seven years. As far as we could see, they cut and burn the trees so they can . . . grow trees. Okay...

Springtime In Laos

Whatever, I'm not a farmer and I'm most definitely not in the shoes of a Hmong tribe family man trying to survive. The experience of living in that atmosphere was nothing I'd like to replicate, though. If you're thinking about going to Laos, don't go in spring

Agrarian Apocalypse - Luang Nam Tha

The devastation is grim but it doesn't fully answer the complaint I made about not being able to account for other peoples' taste. The big, suprising negative we encountered had to do with the Laotian people themselves. For a lack of any more charitable way to describe them - they just weren't that nice. I try to live by the credo of not saying anything if you don't have anything nice to say but I've never felt so stumped by such a disconnect between what other people seem to perceive and my own perceptions. Why do other travelers give Laos such an emphatic thumbs-up?

I like to interact with the people in new places - even if they tease or have laughs at my expense or struggle with the language barriers with sign language or whatever. I didn't take off on a travel adventure out of misanthropy. I like to try to connect with people now and then. It's fun to make eye contact and see if you can find any commonality. That that approach didn't work so well for me in Laos. You can walk down the street or trail all day saying "Sabadie" (hello) and get only the most tepid repsonses - very often, none at all. That happened so often that, after a few weeks, I fell into following the Laotian example walking along withdrawn not saying anything to passersby. Even then, they still avert their eyes when they get close and almost never initiate a greeting.

One thing that Laos does offer is a chance to see and experience life at the village level. When you come from the West, you don't get that chance very often; if at all. The odd thing for me is, one of the expectations from village life is friendliness or camaraderie, even if it's only in passing. If you don't have those things, walking through a town of people who don't smile or turn away can make you feel very unwelcome. It's too intimate of a situation to be in without friendliness. At best, it felt like acute disinterest. At worst, it felt like suspicion or even judgement.

OK, fair enough. People are what they are and that's fine by me. My question is why so many other travelers speak so highly about how nice the Laotians are. It's not like I'm traveling alone. Tami came to the same conclusions as I did. One of our German friends who visited in Vientiane said, after only a couple days, that he "missed the smiles" （He's spent quite a bit of time in Thailand right next door to Laos and, I guess, expected the Laotians to be similarly friendly.）I don't know, call me blind for the five weeks we were in the country. All I know is that the people of every country we've visited have their character and that character comes in many shapes and sizes. The Laotians were the first people on this trip to make us feel like they were barely willing to tolerate us visiting their country. Weird.

No Accounting for Taste

In a million years I'll never understand how some people can see things one way and someone else will see the same thing a hundred and eighty degrees differently. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was apprehensive about visiting China. For years I'd heard how difficult it is to travel here. ''Virtually no one speaks English. Being a vegetarian is impossible. The people try to trick you on prices.'' These and more are commonly heard travelers' laments. By the same token, for years but especially since Tami and I left on this trip, we've heard not a single disparaging comment about Laos, which we just left.

We've only been in China for about six days but, if our experience thus far is any indication, this place is going to be fascinating and enlightening. As I said below, the people here have been the best. Sure, we've had to haggle on some prices but much less so than Vietnam or India. They have been so nice that, in some sense, we feel, for lack of a better analogy, like old family returning after decades abroad. The smiles and enthusiastic hellos are killing me. I helps that we haven't seen the floods of foreign travelers, backpackers or otherwise, that ply all the routes of SE Asia. For the first time in a long time, we feel like we are in a place very far from home.

It goes w/o saying that China is huge. Area-wise it's about the same as the US and it has more than FOUR TIMES the population. This is a world unto itself and you can feel it. In other countries there are lots of concessions to western sensibilities, spoken English, for example. So far here, we've been approached several times by people who start coversing in Chinese as soon as we say "ni hau" (hello). When we try to explain that we can't understand them, they don't get it. One guy yesterday kept pointing to his ear. He thought my lack of understanding was b/c I was deaf! One young woman, when she and her friends realized we couldn't understand what they were saying, took a full minute to write out a phrase . . . in Chinese. She thought we'd at least be able to read it.

Many people here seem to be so inside the Chinese experience that they think everyone else must be, as well. It makes for very interesting travel b/c you really can feel that they're living their lives with no regard what some tourist might be willing to pay for. You can still find that kind of unselfconsciousness in villages in some countries, but it's a rare thing in cities.

The city where we are currently, Jianshui, is great example of this. It looks what I imagine many of the mid-sized American Rust Belt cities looked like fifty or seventy-five years ago. It's kind of grey with mostly masonry construction. All the streets and lanes are lined with shop fronts owned by local small-business people. People are out and about shopping, drinking tea, eating or just socializing. The general mood is genial. People smile and laugh. Employment seems to be fairly robust. Activity really picks up in the early morning and at the end of the work day. Factories (actual factories with smokestacks!) are scattered off in the distance around the edges of the city. People seem comfortably busy.

China has a lot of coal. The smell of it burning permeates the city but that smell is something best taken in small doses. It is, at one and the same time, comforting like a campfire but, because of the sulfur, irritating. (The sulfur dioxide from Chinese coal burning is dumping tons of acid rain onto Japan and killing many of its lakes.) My eyes and lungs have a slight burn especially in the morning and evening when people cook and heat the most. Most of the coal comes in shallow cylinders like those in the photo to the left. Holes are drilled in the center to make the coal burn faster and hotter. The smell of Jianshui reminds me of the cities of the Midwest back when I was young.

I already mentioned that getting some vegetarian food has been no problem. Actually, we've been finding as much interesting veggie food here as any country we've visited. It's cheap, too. We can both have a decent, full meal for one American dollar.

As for people not speaking English, for the most part, that's a big plus. We're forced to learn some basic Chinese words now. Pantomime and struggling to pronounce words correctly do a lot to bond travelers with locals. So, yes, it's early days for us in China but we both feel like we know a good thing when we see it. I'm looking forward to more.

This, of course, has led us to ask ourselves how we ended up spending so much time in Laos. Check out the next blog to see how that unfolded.

Yunnan Hospitality

Tofu Grill in Jianshui - Yunnan Province, China

Yesterday we stopped at this tofu grill for lunch. These grills are all over Jianshui and this style of dining is far and away the most common in town. All of them have charcoal grills the edges of which are heaped with these little pillows of tofu.



The Grillmaster

As people eat, the grilltender moves more tofus to the center to brown over the coals. In a glass case at the door they have bowls and bottles to concoct various dipping sauces with ingredients like peanut paste, chili paste, fermented soy bean paste or soy sauce. They also have a bunch of bowls of cooked veggies, meats and cold relishes. You get a small plate or two of the veggies, sit down by the grill and pull a tofu pillow off the grill when you want. People sit shoulder to shoulder, low to the ground dipping tofu and driking tea. For the first time in a LONG time, we're in a city that does not see many tourists from outside the country. People often stop and stare at us like we have two heads, especially the older ones. As soon as you say "ni hau" (hello), though, they break into huge smiles.



I liked this guy's hat

Anyway, people here can be nice, and I mean catch-you-way-off-guard nice. While we were eating at the above grill an old guy sitting next to me put his hand on my shoulder, pushed a ten yuan note into my hand and motioned at my and Tami's plates. He was buying us lunch. I did my gracious best to decline but there was no way I was going to override his hospitality. This was a totally working class place and he was the image of a working class guy (Jianshui looks to me like a true-blue working class city, something like Saginaw might have looked in 1925.)

Our first night in the country, we were sitting at a little noodle stall on the street. It was hot and had been a LONG day traveling from Laos so we were looking for a beer. Everything on the menu was printed in Chinese script. All we could do was point at a bottle and hold up a finger. The food was a mystery. We left to go down the street and saw a man selling fried potatos and tofu squares (tofu's everywhere it seems). Armed with snacks, we went back for a second beer. The young people working the noodle stand saw that we got food and, after bringing our beer, dropped a plate of noodles on our table (w/o meat!), no charge.

We haven't been here long but China is certainly working hard to make a great impression. We're liking it!

Waxing and Waning?

New Grade for the Freeway - Yunnan

We just crossed over from Laos into Yunnan, a southern province of China. Two words describe my feelings about coming to China: curiosity and apprehension. I'll explain the latter in another post. The curiosity comes, more than anything else, from twenty years of hearing about the stupendous economic growth and development in China. The first stories I'd read described areas like the capital, Beijing, or Guangdong outside of Hong Kong, where new skyscrapers, factories, even whole cities were being built at a speed that hadn't been seen in anywhere in the world since the period after WWII - if ever. I remember talking to a neighbor from my hometown who took a trip to China with his wife around 1992. He was a very successful businessman back in Michigan; by many accounts the richest man in the county. When we visited in California shortly after their return to the States, he said if he were a young man then, he'd take a quarter of a million dollars and head straight to China. I didn't have the quarter mil but, knowing how well he'd done in his career, I got the point. His eyes saw a China on the rise.

Stories of China's emergence as a world economic player played on the front pages more and more frequently and with greater detail. Maybe four years ago my former boss took a trip to Shanghai. He returned with eyes wide in wonder. He said he'd never seen such a concentration of human energy. The famous quote making the rounds at that time was that three-quarters of all the overhead building cranes at use in the world at that point in time were in the city of Shanghai.

All this is old news now. I read the other day that China will pass France this year as the number four economy in the world. (Due to opaque financial reporting and doctored govt. statistics in China, many think it passed France some time ago and is much larger than officially reported.) Way out here in the Chinese hinterlands, I wasn't sure what we'd see. As soon as we crossed the border the difference was tangible. Laos is the scruffiest and poorest country in SE Asia. China's side of the border crossing felt like Thailand, now a wealthy country in its own right. The road north, though, was rough. For several hours we crisscrossed back and forth on an old road running beneath an under-construction super-highway.

The Chinese are punching an expressway, conceived no doubt in Beijing, from the provincial capital of Yunnan, Kunming - five hundred (+) miles north of the border, down through northern Laos into Thailand. You could say this is China's own version of a 'NAFTA' freeway. For the entire ride we saw small mountains carved out, forest cleared and overhead flyways built to smooth the route through areas filled with tribal (not Han Chinese) farmers who still have yet to run plumbing into their houses. Talk about imminent culture shock.

Seeing the juxtaxposition of something so sleek and modern slicing through a farm landscape reminded me of seeing the final stretch of I-69 between Lapeer and Pt. Huron get completed. My dad worked building the highways of Michigan . . . back when Michigan had an economy that the world envied. Four-lane divided ribbons of concrete crossed the state from city to city. I think his last job was helping to complete that stretch of 69 in the late 1980's. His and perhaps industrial Michigan's swan song?

I-69 Just east of Pt. Huron

I remember being a kid in Bad Axe in the '70's and '80's. Every now and then, the rumor would make the rounds that M-53 might get upgraded from a two-lane to a four-lane divided highway. The trip to Detroit and all the glamour of the city would be just an easy cruise away. Life in a small town would be salvaged from total provincialism.