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

 
You know, I did have a moment of trepidation during that gondola ride as the wind picked up and started swaying me from side to side in an extremely vertigo-inducing way. I examined the space under the seats to see if it might be safer in the event of a drop, but decided in the end to rely on its German engineering and the fact that it was obviously brand new.

The view was nice, but really brought a smile to my face was the sight of the Chinese tourists coming up the other side. A couple of days ago I took a day trip to the Stone Forest, a weird area of huge karst formations a couple hours outside of Kunming. By the afternoon it was absolutely swarming with rich Chinese tourists, many of whom were curiously wearing these matching crappy straw cowboy hats with "Marlboro" printed on that ribbon that goes around it. So you could be walking through these huge bizarre rock formations, turn a corner and see five swaggering Chinese men in matching dorky hats taking photos of eachother. It turned out these hats were available at the tourist shops on the way in -- it was a very hot day, so there were many Chinese cowboys.

So to get back to my original point, as I headed down in the gondola, I could see several cars full of Marlboro-hatted Chinese men heading up opposite me. I'm obviously following a popular Chinese, as well as Western, tourist route here in Yunnan province. Cowboys everywhere.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 2:50 AM