The Elegant Sufficiency

Yunnan Province 3: A Connection to Home

Text messages from Yunnan Province to home:

Just touched down … picked up by my guide … not much English but very sweet … Beautiful flight over mountains …! Wow…! And so green …. Fresh air… Just passed a buffalo…! On way to hotel… Guide taking me to dinner

Now driving into mountains to start walk… Five hours walk to village ecolodge where we stay tonight… Snow capped mountains ahead…

18km hike today… Almost entirely up a mountain… Thought I was going to die… No one warned me about the mountain … And at altitude… Several thousand feet i think … 20km tomorrow but flat i think..  am at ecolodge on a lake now and may sleep now until tomorrow’s mountain … No soap or loo paper but an electric blanket thank heavens…

Am dead …. Dead I tell you. Just finished day two walk… Ache all over and need soap and coffee… Least no hills today… But 20km of rock paths… many with paschendale like mud… Bring on the five star hotel day after tomorrow.. Rest of today will be spent in village homestay.

Beautiful scenery of course but hard to enjoy when in such pain. Tomorrow just driving thank god… Naxi have discovered mobile phones but no soap… Dying for proper shower and a coffee…

Didn’t get chance at hk airport to buy gin for us… if you can be bothered getting a bottle …

All well and clean now… five-star suits me.

Ow! Expensive afternoon at antique shop!

Now in ugly city and average hotel and we’re a bit bad tempered…

Yeah … Six hours touring hk airport? Going crazy on duty free! Want anything? Perfume?

Yunnan Province 2: Kunming Airport

Kunming airport, September 20: Seats are in short supply. Only one I can find while I wait to check in is in an odd teashop, orange palm-tree cocktail swizzle stick in a tall glass with green tea. (The swizzle stick initially spears a solid ball of tea that later softens and drifts away, leaf by leaf.) What’s the etiquette when the tea leaves won’t settle and you end up with a mouthful? Later discover you’re to spit them out. Shouldn’t surprise me, given the amount of spitting and hawking that goes on here generally.
The airport is a bit of a treasure. The seventh largest in China, our guide later tells us. I don’t much like the toilets here — the first “squatters” without loo paper of my trip — but love the food stalls, like none I’ve seen in an airport before: Yunnan everything. Air-dried yak meat (like biltong: don’t ever feel the need to eat it again), almonds, candies, dried mushrooms, peanuts, sauces and condiments, honey, chocolate-covered lychees (tearing the plastic off the packet tonight, finally, decide they have very little to do with lychees), mooncakes, and fresh produce — custard apples, walnuts, finger limes, persimmons, mangoes, pomegranate, bananas, sweet potatoes, quince-like thingeys. Yunnan, apparently, contributes massively to China’s food supply. Have so much more to show and tell …

Yunnan Province 1: Yunnan Babies

Beautiful trip.
Beautiful babies. Have come back with an idea: a photographic book, "Beautiful Chinese Babies". Well? It would certainly be prettier than the hilarious photographic coffee-table book in the hotel lobby of our Kunming hotel — Chinese Pigs. Seriously.