Before I get to the trip recap I wanted to let folks know that Alex and I have signed a two-year contract extension with UWC Changshu (!) with the option to “opt out” after one year if needed. In addition to liking it here and believing strongly in the values and mission of our school…right now just seemed like a terrible time to look for jobs in education (or any industry), go back to working online and have to relocate to any other country in the world. Alex was promoted to the role of Deputy Director of our university counseling office and I have been given the additional responsibility of supporting the ~60 international students who are scattered around the world in their home countries. Now all you blog readers have more time to come visit us in China if the world ever returns to normal!
Nearly seven years since Ari and I hiked Tiger Leaping Gorge, Alex and I traveled to the same region, Yunnan province in the southwest, for our school’s winter holiday. It’s a unique time to travel within China because the close borders mean any foreigners you meet are people who live here. We met fascinating people and were able to bond quickly over the mutual experiences of going through this pandemic in China. At one guesthouse we met Canadian diplomats who oversaw evacuations for their citizens when COVID-19 broke out. A few days later we befriended journalists representing famous news outlets in the US, Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands and got to be flies on the wall when they got alerted to the efficacy rate of the Chinese vaccine.
It is not lost on me how lucky we are to be able to have a vacation during this pandemic when so many people are isolating, social distancing, and suffering. Everyone we met, including ourselves, felt privileged about this, but our relative freedom may be going away soon as well. Since we got back from our trip there has been an increase in cases in China and a few cities in the north have been put into lockdown. The government is strongly encouraging people not to travel for the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday, and our school wants us to stay within Jiangsu province. We are bracing for more restrictions if the situation worsens.
One of the ways China tracks travelers’ whereabouts is through a green health code on your smart phone which is checked when you enter or leave airports, train stations, and subways. The green code might turn red if you travel somewhere with a high number of COVID cases or are exposed to someone who was sick. This contact tracing on a massive scale simultaneously reassures us that we can travel safely and terrifies us that we won’t be allowed to return to our school if our code changes color. Many Chinese people that I talk to view giving up the personal freedoms of location privacy and mandatory testing/mask-wearing as obvious choices if it means they can feel safe going about their lives in a mostly normal manner. So, since we had the green light to travel, here is a photo-filled update of our trip to Yunnan:
Yunnan is one of my favorite places in China because of its natural beauty and diverse ethnic groups. Nearly half of China’s ethnic minority groups — those who are not Han Chinese — are found in Yunnan. Our first stop after flying into Kunming was to take a 6.5 hour bus down south to the Yuanyang region bordering Vietnam. The area is famous for its incredible rice terraces that have been carved into the mountains over centuries by the local people. We stayed at Jacky’s Guesthouse and Jacky himself picked us up from the bus stop. Jacky explained that the local population is only 12% “Chinese” and that there are six ethnic groups in the area, each with their own dialect. The six groups have a dialect in common that they use to communicate or they will speak in Mandarin. Jacky is a member of the Hani group that lives at the highest altitude and can be identified by their black and blue clothing. Tourism must be slower than a typical year because Jacky upgraded us for free to a room with this epic view over the terraces and sea of clouds:
Jacky’s village felt like a place frozen in time as life still very much revolves around the agricultural cycle of harvesting rice. As we ate our daily breakfast of noodle soup a yak stopped outside our window to say good morning. The Hani people use yaks to plow the terraces since they are too delicate for other machinery. Every now and then a local villager would pull out a cell phone and we would be reminded this was 2020.
The buildings in the area (pictured below) are called “mushroom houses” (read about their history here if interested)
We spent two full days doing day hikes around the villages and rice terraces. Often we had to balance along “water channels” (stone barriers about a foot wide) to walk between the terraces and thankfully we never fell in! December is a time of year when the terraces are flooded. The water reflects beautiful colors from the sky and contains a natural red algae that changes the color of the terrace and produces red rice (which didn’t taste any different to me than other rice).
A quirky aspect of many of the restaurants was that they didn’t have menus. Rather, they had a shelf with vegetables and meat and you went over and pointed at what you wanted. The first night we went out to eat the server asked us what we wanted her to make with the raw ingredients and it was very strange to say, “this is your restaurant, you tell us what you know how to make.” We had pointed to a variety of things we liked, not realizing that she was going to make a dish out of all of them. In the end it was quite the feast and a funny moment of miscommunication and misunderstanding as she kept bringing out dishes.
One of the mornings we went to one of the most incredible local markets I’ve ever seen. Locals, mostly women, would come with baskets on their backs carrying items to buy and sell. We could spot Hani women in their distinctive blue and black gear as well as many others from tribes we didn’t know about buying clothes, farming implements, livestock and produce. Throughout our trip we noticed that most of laborers we saw were women — doing construction, carrying huge loads on their back. My best guess is that the men leave for large cities to make money to send back home, leaving the women, children, and elderly behind. The three pictures below show 1) one of the Hani women at the market 2) Alex bent over with the ladies for some clementines and 3) when we bought bananas the vendor used a neat handheld scale/weight to tell us the price.
Stone Forrest
The most famous site near the capital of Yunnan is the Stone Forrest. About two hours from Kunming there are miles of tall and oddly shaped stones that you can wander through. We got there early enough to beat the crowds of tourists and explore the area.
Chinese Cheese in Dali
One of the foods we miss the most in China is cheese. Most Chinese people are lactose intolerant and dairy products rarely show up in local cuisine. However in Yunnan the Dai ethnic minority makes a fried goat’s cheese called rubing and we were on a mission to eat it. On our trip we had it fried three ways throughout our trip: first with a salty/spicy dip, then barbecued with a sweet plum sauce, and finally rolled up to look like bubble wrap.
In addition to eating cheese, we spent most of our time in the Dali area staying at the Linden Centre which is a well-known hotel and center of cultural exchange. The Lindens are an American couple who restored a Bai style courtyard building complex which is now protected by the government. They have won a ton of awards for their cultural, educational, and hospitality programs. For New Years Eve they arranged a traditional music and dancing concert with the local people, and of course it ended with all us guests getting up and dancing with them. Try to spot me and Alex in the video below doing what I would describe as a cross between the Hora, Cha Cha and Chicken Dance:
We brought 2020 to a close doing a bunch of Linden activities including a cooking class where we made “twice-cooked pork,” “Grandma’s potatoes,” and “fried rice cake,” a Mahjong class to prepare us to be the Jewish grandparents we kind of already are, and a hike to a mountain valley filled with yaks, horses, goats and wild chickens.
Thanks for reading! My new year’s resolution is to keep in touch more often with family and friends. Help me out by sending me an update or scheduling a time to catch up. Ramiejacobson@gmail.com
The Wild Wild East 