A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
I think I'm allergic to China.

I've been sniffing and sneezing off and on since a few hours after I crossed the border, and it's getting worse the longer I'm here. It's really not so bad, but with this SARS thing freaking everyone out, every time I sneeze I fear that others might think I have it and demand I get off the bus/train/whatever. I don't have it -- not to worry. I checked out the required symptoms on the CDC site, and really don't have any of their itemized list other than being in a high risk area. So yesterday I spent a fair amount of time massaging my nose to avoid sneezing, and today I just sneezed and hoped for the best. Hopefully this antihistamine I took will do the trick -- I took two for good measure.

Anyway, I arrived in Lao Cai, the Vietnamese border town, around 5:30 a.m. yesterday, and sat at a cafe swatting flies for an hour and a half until the border opened. Naturally, since it was Vietnam and these were immigration officials, the process did not go swiftly. They had no clear signs telling us where to go, and once we handed over our passports they took them into the back room and did mysterious things to them for 20 minutes. I swear Vietnamese border officials are the worst around. They've been known to turn people back at the airport if they can't remember the address of where they're staying.

The border station was a fairly entertaining place to hang out, however, as hordes of Vietnamese ladies were pushing and shoving to get to the head of the line so they could wheel their goods over to China. Good to see that they do that to eachother, not just to foreigners. Once we got through the Vietnamese side it was smooth sailing -- the Chinese make a very good first impression.

I had been semi-planning to take another night train to get to Kunming, the capitol of Yunnan province in southwestern China. But as I looked at the guidebook again I realized I had misread the times involved -- the train was six hours longer than the bus, and wasn't supposed to leave until 4 pm, which would mean seven mindnumbing hours in the Chinese border town of Hekou. Not exactly a garden spot, if you get my drift. So at 10:30, I boarded a deluxe bus to Kunming, complete with legroom, reclining seats and complimentary bottles of water. Really the lap of luxury compared to what I've been used to.

Although nine hours is a long time in a bus, I did enjoy the ride very much. For one thing, the roads were way above Asian par. The first road, which would through and over lush mountains and valleys, I would describe as "very good". In the context of Asian roads, "very good" means:

-- Paved. Bumpy, sure, but no potholes to speak of, and no long stretches of backbreaking uneven rocks.

-- Mostly complete. It has been my experience that Asian roads are in a constant state of construction or rebuildin, causing endless delays, detours, and speeds in the neighborhood of 10 miles and hour. This road had some construction areas, but they were short and didn't involve the endless breaking or handplacement of sharp rocks.

-- A visible drainage system. In this case, a huge ditch on the hill side of the road. You wouldn't thing this would be important to me, but believe me, when you're on one of these roads perched precariously on a steep hillside, you're thankful for all efforts to prevent erosion of the road surface.

As delightful as it is, "very good" does not mean:

-- Lines in the road. These are clearly unneccessary and just limit the creativity of the drivers.

-- Shoulders. Also extraneous, though admittedly there have been moments when I have seen "Tragic Bus Accident Kills 26" rolling through the headlines in my mind.

-- Barriers of any kind. You'd think that on these twisty mountain roads in which one side is hill and the other abyss, a guardrail of some sort would be in order. Apparently not.

Halfway through the trip we switched to an Outstanding, Unbelievable, Superlative Asian Road. This thing had lines! It had no-passing zones and truck lanes on steep hills! It had a guard rail!!! Of course, it was still somewhat dangerous due to the flexible attitude that drivers have adopted with respect to the lanes. For example, it is acceptable practice to pass in a no-passing zone if: A. you honk your horn very loud, and/or B. there is sufficient room on the shoulder for the oncoming truck to swerve out of the way.

But enough about driving -- I really should take a paragraph to talk about the scenery. The drive really was beautiful, and as you can imagine when driving 9 hours, the terrain changed quite a bit over the course of the day. The first part was the same sort of gorgeous lush green mountains and death-defying drops that we experienced in northern Vietnam. And while I had thought the Vietnamese adept at terraced agriculture, they've got nothing on the Chinese. Although the area is not particularly suited to large-scale farming (very steep hills, very narrow valleys) the Chinese have managed to plant food on a remarkable percentage of the countryside, including terracing slopes so steep that the terraces themselves look only a few feet wide. Even the crappy soil on the side of the road has banana trees planted in it. I guess when you are trying to feed over a billion people, you learn how to use what you have efficiently.

As we moved north, the countryside began to look more and more like southern California (or Chelan, for those in WA), if the southern Californians were into terraced farming. The hills got rollier and browner, and the rain-fed crops gave way to irrigation. The trouble is, now I'm in a city in the middle of this dry, rolling hills sort of area, and I'm not that fond of that sort of scenery. So tomorrow I head for Dali and some serious mountains.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 5:53 AM