and specifically the album for my last trip . Dimaluo-Yubeng (save the pictures for later!)
and a map. (you can look at the map)
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7pm departure from the spring city, $30 and 15 hours later I was in Fugong. The mode of transportation was a sleeper bus. Sleeper buses are a great idea, you get to ride on a bus to all sorts places without train tracks and you get to sleep going there so you save on hotel costs, in theory. Unfortunately, the beds on most sleeper buses are small and short, on this particular bus extra short. 1.5m at most. I am 1.83m. That leaves about a foot of me that doesnt fit not to mention the narrowness of the bed. Before arriving in Fugong, at approximately 6am I was awoken by a soldier roughly tapping on my head with is finger to wake me up. I was not impressed. After waking and mentioning in annoyed english that tapping a persons head is not a good way to wake them up, he began repeating 'passport' in chinese. Now as i came to my senses and looked around, I was the only person being hassled. This check point was only for foreigners and foreigners dont speak chinese. Passport would have been more appropriate. but instead i got head tapping and HUZHAO! HUZHAO! After producing the document for the soldier, he took it and turned and left. I called out immediately and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing running off with my passport without telling me what he was doing. as i said this english, he didnt understand, and just ignored me and continued walking away.. I jumped out of my bed and pursued him to the check point. About 15min later they figured out how to read enough of my passport to register my crossing and my passport was returned to me and i thanked them for the warm welcome.
Arriving in Fugong, a quick lunch of covered rice(盖饭）was in order. Covered rice is the cheapest meal to be had here in china. aside from a bowl of noodles or fried rice that is. About 1USD gets you a big bowl of rice (more in quantity, but not calories, than you are used to eating) and 5ish topping dishes. On this particular day I had pork and pickled vegetables, twice cooked pork, corn and beans, and egg and tomato. Everything gets humped real high on the rice bowl and you dig in with the sticks. 5mins to consume the lot and feel stuffed. 3hours and $4 later we were in gongshan. quick transfer to mini bread loaf van, 1 hour and $2 later we were in the booming frontier town of Bingzhongluo 丙中洛. Actually not on the frontier, but pretty close to t1bet, about 50km. Stepping out of the car we began asking shop keepers if we could leave our bags with them and eventually were directed to a small hotel that allowed us to leave our bags in their bedroom for free.
The plan for the day was to walk 20km to the nearby village of something or another and spend the night. Returning the following day to retrieve our bags meet our parties third and walk to a different village before beginning our hike proper the following morning. we walked about 30min on a twisty road through corn fields and a village or two before being hailed by 6 young chinese guys sitting under a tree. they appeared to be drinking a local corn liquor and upon accepting their hails and sitting down i quickly learned what the local liquor was all about. tasting something like nail polish remover and estimated by our new to be about 40% alcohol. I didnt plan on drinking much, but after refusing the 3rd, 5th, and 6th glass my will waned. I ended up very drunk and eating dinner with our new friends. One was a local gov offical, one a local cop, and the others friends from childhood and hired as contractors for the hydro powerplant the local government was building.
Hydro powerplants were frequent on the Salween River. All following a similar design. They were not dams. They were placed along a tributary to the river. Up stream in the tributary a 2ft pipe was placed to collect part of the tributary's water( much less than half). The pipe then follows a near level path out of the tributary canyon and upon reaching a place almost to the Salween canyon, drops almost vertically for several hundred feet before entering the turbines. The water then exits the turbines and enters directly into river. I dont know to much about their impact, but I cant see the hydro plant have a large negative impact, especially nothing like a dam.
After dinner our new friends gave us a ride for the remain 15km or so. Once we got to the village and our guest house i spotted a ladder than needed climbing. I immediately ascended and found myself on the flat sub-roof of the family's house under the eaves. I felt suddenly tired and decided to lay down on the roof announcing that i planned to sleep there. I was eventually convinced to descend the ladder, not an easy task. After a awkward hug-slide dismount i found my bed and promptly passed out at 7pm. I awoke the next morning at 4am with my travel buddy talking to me. Apparently he thought i was awake and thought he saw my eyes open in the 4am darkness.
I should probably introduce the rest of the group. The guy talking to me at 4am and continuing to talk to me until the end of the trip is named Junyang. He is a chinese PHD marketing student that happens to play frisbee with the kunming team. He is also very chatty and full of questions about everything especially the US and americans. He asks lots of questions. Sort of like an annoying 8 year old. Why is the sky blue? How many girlfriends have you had? how many to most americans have? do you really eat beef everyday? The questions were relentless and I was hungover and trapped in bed.
I eventually made it out of bed and was able to see a bit of the village in the rain. About 11 we started walking back to Bingzhongluo. Supposedly we would get picked up on the road and would only have to walk 30min or so. 3h later we arrived in Bingzhongluo without a single car passing. I was not a happy camper. On the way we passed a cow. It was not a particularly healthy cow as its ribs were clearly visible. Seeing it and its ribs made me think of ribs and BBQ. I tried to explain BBQ and BBQ sauce to Junyang with no success. After trying to explain bbq sauce as tomato based with some spices sugar and vinegar and american style grilling, the best conception we had was Chinese bbq with hot chilies flakes and ketchup. Another hour bus ride to some bridge and we met up with our third tongzhi, eric. Two hours walking on a dirt road and we arrived in DImaluo.
On the way there I began to notice the numerous roads scarring the steep canyon walls. Many of the roads were new or even under construction leaving large swathes of land above and below the road scarred by landslides. The roads reminded me of logging roads in the US national forests. Logging roads contrarily were built only to be used for a few months and in the best case to be returned back to nature after logging is finished. Either way, carving roads out of steep unstable slopes leads to landslides and scarring. Once we hike over to the Mekong river basin, the evidence and impact of road building would become even more apparent and severe.
In Dimaluo we stayed at the only guest house in town. A'luo's Guesthouse and guiding service. The famous A'luo was not present, but his wife, wife's sister (who didnt look related) and two children of ambiguous decent. The guesthouse was actually A'luo's wooden house with a large multipurpose meeting room, several dorm rooms, a kitchen and dining room with a TV. There were also rooms for the family. In the multipurpose room the walls were lined with bilingual posters about hiking, tourism, environmental protection, and people in area. It was all very well written and contained very surprising content. Topics like leave no trace, cultural sensitivity, and an explanation about trash along the trail and in nature from a local perspective was given. Basically, there is no trash service in the area, nothing to do with trash but heap it up and little incentive for the locals it pick up scattered pieces of trash. Basically there is not a high value on trash free environs. Despite the info and the guest house actually being the families house, the place had a distinct rundown look. There were dust and piles of long forgotten things everywhere.
To be continued.....
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