Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, China

Xishuangbanna is the southern-most region of Yunnan province, bordering Myanmar (Burma) and Laos. Only a third of the population here is Han Chinese; the majority are Dai, Hani, Lisu and Yao people with their own cultures and languages. The area is also home to Burmese and Lao people, so the region has a strong multicultural atmosphere. The principal city is Jinghong and we arrived here last Wednesday on a flight from Kunming. Laid-back Jinghong is located on the northern bank of the Mekong River and has a distinctly South-East Asian feel to it – warm with attractive coconut palm lined streets buzzing with motorbikes.

We spent a few pleasant days here before striking out for the more distant villages. In Jinghong we strolled around the manicured Tropical Flowers and Plants Garden and walked across the suspension bridge over the Mekong River just a stone’s throw from our hotel. We also checked out the cafes around Manting Lu, quickly deciding that our favourite was the Mekong that provided both Asian and western food, and free wireless broadband internet at the open-air tables under the street-side coconut palms. On this trip we are carrying a micro laptop that weighs less than a kilogram; a barely noticeable weight in a shoulder bag compared with our previous brick. It’s a lot more convenient and enjoyable to fire up our own laptop at a street side café and connect to the internet wirelessly than to use the usually smoke-ridden internet cafes in most cities. I’ll never forget the internet café in Dunhuang in Gansu province; the air inside was so thick and blue with the cigarette smoke generated by the horde of puffing young men playing internet games that after half an hour I could take no more and was driven out dizzy and nauseous.

From Jinghong we caught a minibus to the village of Menghun about 80 km to the west. This dusty, smoky, rough and ready township has unsealed streets shared by people, trucks, motorbikes, fume-belching tractor carts and cattle. We checked into a spartan hotel on the main corner and found a café that served excellent food. It was Saturday night and our purpose for coming to Menghun was to attend the weekly Sunday market that our guide book raved about. But we were doubly lucky as it turned out that there was to be a special regional dance performance in Menghun that very night, and so at 8pm we joined the throng of what must have been the town’s entire population rushing up a track to a grassed area where a large stage had been erected. The crowd of about 2,000 listened patiently to the succession of long introductory speeches given by local town leaders. Then a line of about 20 people came onto the stage to receive awards of recognition, probably for their roles in organizing the event. Each of them was wearing a red paper flower the size of a cabbage on their chest. Finally the dancing got underway; this comprised performances by different ethnic communities in the region. It was a classy show, featuring dazzlingly colourful costumes that contrasted starkly with the drab and dusty surroundings in which it was presented.

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Next morning we were up early, mingling with the people from the surrounding hill villages bouncing into town on their tractor carts for the market. This was a colourful affair too, with the women dressed in their finest and ready to buy and sell, and to enjoy what was obviously the highlight of the week. We enjoyed it too and pored over the myriad of fresh produce and manufactured goods for sale. Around noon we caught a minibus back to Jinghong, from there catching another to Ganlanba in the south-east. The latter was a hair-raising trip; the road hugged the tight loops of the Mekong River below, the bus driver was a maniac, and the bus itself had shock absorbers that had long since absorbed their last shock. But we made it into Ganlanba unscathed and checked into a hotel recommended by our guide book, but which turned out to be the grottiest hotel we’ve stayed in. Our fault for not checking the room more carefully when we arrived.Ganlanba itself is an attractive town with palm-lined streets, even more laid-back than Jinghong, and its main tourist draw card is its Dai Minority Park that showcases Dai architecture and daily life. But the following morning we decided to avoid this touristy spot and to seek out a more authentic Dai setting well away from tourist buses and trinkets. So we took a motorized trishaw to the Mekong River where we caught a passenger ferry to the other side. From there we walked down a country lane that passed through banana plantations and Dai vegetable farms and after 30 minutes or so we found ourselves in a small village of rustic and pleasing to the eye Dai houses where the only visible concessions to the 21st century were solar hot water units and satellite television dishes. In the yards of several houses we saw large steaming cauldrons. At one house the occupants invited us in, sat us down in front of their cauldron and gave us a cupful of bubbling brown liquid drawn from it. It turned out to be sugar cane juice they were boiling down to make sugar syrup or crystals.

Mission accomplished, we retraced our steps back across the Mekong to Ganlanba and then back to Jinghong on a slightly better bus driven by a slightly better driver. We were ready to move on from Xishuangbanna and this afternoon we laid out our map of China to consider where we would head tomorrow. We narrowed the possibilities to two options, but Lee Tuan then vetoed the 26-hour bus trip along the Myanmar border to Ruili, leaving the 50 minute flight on Lucky Airlines to Dali our way forward. That decided, we ended our time in Jinghong with dinner at the Thai restaurant on Manting Lu before adjourning one last time to the relaxing Mekong Café for coffee and a slice of brownie and to check our emails.

Yuxi, Yunnan province, China

From Nanjing we flew to Kunming in the south of China where a driver was waiting at the airport to take us further south to the rural city of Yuxi. It was a pleasant drive through intensively cultivated rolling hills and in places with plastic horticultural igloos stretching to the horizon. They made an impressive sight and must have covered an area of thousands of hectares and contained an enormous volume of growing vegetables and flowers.

The Yuxi municipality has a population of nearly three million people and is one of China’s most prosperous rural areas. It has a lot going for it; the weather is pleasant all year round, the local economy is strong, and the city is clean and green with tree-lined streets and manicured gardens and parks. And its lit-up town square is very impressive, occupying the equivalent of many city blocks and featuring a lake, bridges, an artificial beach with volley-ball courts, an enormous walking area used by the locals for evening strolls and mass ball-room dancing, a performing arts centre and concert pavilion, and a large statue to Ni Eer, a music-loving doctor born in Yuxi who composed the music that became China’s national anthem.

And the hot and spicy food here is great too. A variety of cooking styles is employed but the Hotpot seems to be the preferred method. We ate out at a different place every night and found ourselves seated around a large charcoal or gas-fired hotpot on several occasions. One night we had Chicken and the Foot of the Pig Hotpot, another night Beef and the Foot of the Cow Hotpot and on the final day of the class we were driven to a farm in the hillside surrounding Yuxi where we had Ostrich Hotpot. In each case, as well as the featured ingredient, the hotpot was loaded with fresh vegetables, mushrooms, chilies and spices, and sometimes noodles. The common factor was that the end product was always filling, satisfying and excellent. As each day of class also entailed a lunch at a different city restaurant, breakfast provided the only possible daily respite and we assiduously avoided that. But resistance otherwise was useless and our tummies were bulging by week’s end. On Saturday night when we waddled back into the Zhong Yu Hotel we saw that a “Body Contouring” service was being promoted in the hotel and we wryly noted that we had been body contouring all week but unfortunately of the convex, not concave, kind. It would be impossible to meet more friendly or hospitable people than those we spent the week with in Yuxi.

Yuxi’s affluence is underpinned by its agricultural production with a myriad of vegetable and grain crops produced in the vicinity. But the main crop in these parts is certainly tobacco, for Yuxi is the heart and lungs of China’s huge tobacco industry. According to an article I read in the China Daily, 1 trillion cigarettes are produced in China each year (a significant percentage of these in Yuxi), and the government collects a staggering US$1,000,000,000 per day in taxes from China’s several hundred million smokers. According to the same article, the World Health Organization estimates that there are 1.2 million smoking-related deaths each year in China. That’s about the total population of Adelaide, dead each year from fags!

The China Daily is the only English language newspaper widely available in the larger cities and it is an interesting read with serious articles on the developments taking place around the country as well as the more quirky happenings in the suburbs across the nation. An article in the Health Section that caught my eye last week reported on the work of a gerontologist who was studying ageing processes and behaviours in male rats with a view to advancing knowledge of ageing in the human male. When his findings were greeted with skepticism, the professor, obviously not one to eschew mere anecdotal evidence if it helped his case, questioned why there should be such doubt when many women easily saw the parallels between ageing rats and their husbands.

But I digress - back to Yuxi. It is tobacco that keeps Yuxi’s economy smoldering, and 6,000 people work at the local Hongta Tobacco Corporation's cigarette factory (the largest in Asia) that churns out fags 24 hours a day. One evening during our previous visit to Yuxi two years ago, our hosts took us there for a visit. We didn’t have to travel far, for the factory is located near the city centre. The factory throbbed away and the delicious aroma of tobacco wafted in the surrounding air. It is certainly the best-smelling factory I’ve ever visited. Near the entrance there is a large monument featuring 8 towering cigarettes that celebrate Yuxi’s premier industry, and a small park with bronze statues of men Yuxi admires. Men with enlightened attitudes towards tobacco. Like the famous Chinese poet (whose name I can’t recall now) who put his literary genius down to tobacco and who claimed that without a fag between his lips he could barely think straight let alone produce the dazzling works for which he is renowned. He keeps good company in the park. Busts of Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde and Rousseau are there too, along with their alleged favourable comments on the fine qualities of tobacco. Even in the local Buddhist temple complex there is a large plaque next to the Golden Buddha in honour of a former CEO of the tobacco factory, acknowledging the bounteous gifts he bestowed on the city in the form of freeways, bridges etc. It wouldn’t be smart to denigrate fags in these parts.

I did just that the following day. One topic I cover in my subject is a method for choosing between alternative investment options, and my example that I had prepared months before was a choice between opening additional beds in a respiratory ward, or conducting a Quit smoking support program in the local community to help avoid future hospital admissions. It was too late to change it, and as fate would have it, it was time to cover this topic the morning after the visit to the tobacco factory. I soldiered on, but for a few minutes I felt as uneasy as a margarine salesman at a dairy farmers’ conference. But any upset I may have caused was obviously soon forgotten and following lectures that day, two class representatives took us for a drive about an hour away to see another of Yuxi’s treasures, Fuxian Lake. With a circumference of about 200 km and a depth in places of 1,000 metres, the lake holds an enormous volume of crystal clear water, and the government has imposed strict controls to maintain its pristine condition. We had dinner at an open air café at the lake’s edge, following negotiations between our hosts and the café manager as to what fish would be prepared, and the price. The fish was boiled in a large solid copper pot with assorted fresh vegetables, and the pot was placed on our table when it was ready, along with bowls of local spices and wild herbs. It was a great meal and a serene hour with fishers setting their nets just off the shore as the sun set over the watery horizon.

Nanjing (Nanking), Jiangsu province, China

About 200 km north-west of Shanghai, Nanjing is the capital city of fertile Jiangsu province and one of the most attractive big cities in China with wide tree-lined streets running between soaring office towers and apartment blocks. Few remnants of old Nanjing remain, although long sections of the 33 km wall that once surrounded and protected the city are well-preserved.

Nanjing is also a University town with many universities of assorted types dotting the inner city and suburbs. We came to Nanjing last Monday on a 90 minute flight from Tianjin with China Southern Airlines, and checked into the Jingli Hotel just north of the city centre and overlooking the grounds of Nanjing University where my second class was held. The modern subway has a stop close to the lobby of the Jingli, so we made good use of that to glide into and out of the city centre just two stops down the line.

The Nanjing class organizer took us a on a drive to the north of the city to see the first bridge built over the lake-like Yangtze River that flows through here on the final leg of its journey to the East China Sea. Apparently the Chinese engineers built the bridge by themselves after their Russian allies left in a huff in the early 1960s, taking the designs with them. The bridge opened in December 1968 and was an engineering marvel for its time. One of the longest bridges in China, it has a 4,500 metre long vehicle roadway above a railway line that provided the first direct railway link between Shanghai and Beijing. The approaches to the bridge are highlighted by large, impressive socialist sculptures that tower over the heavy road traffic below.

Nanjing has twice been the capital city of China; first for about 300 years from the mid 1300s and second for a brief period in the early 1900s. Most westerners know Nanjing by its former name Nanking, and know of it for the hideous events that occurred here in late 1937 – the “Rape of Nanking” by the Japanese army. The Japanese invaded China earlier that year and in August launched an air attack on Nanjing from air bases in Nagasaki. They apparently reported the event under the headline “The First Magnificent Trans-oceanic Bombardment”, a rather ironic headline given the tragic fate that was to befall Nagasaki itself from the air eight years later. Karma Putrid.

In December 1937, after a brief stand-off, the Japanese army broke through the city walls of Nanjing and set about systematically killing and raping the population. Within four weeks, many thousands of Nanjing residents had been murdered (the chinese claim 300,000), often after rape and torture. The terrible events are chronicled without hyperbole in the excellent Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre, located just to the west of the city centre on one of the actual massacre burial grounds. Although the subject matter is grim, it is presented in a sensitive and professional manner, and this modern museum/memorial is a must-see if you come to Nanjing. We joined the long, silent, sober rows of normally animated and boisterous Chinese people who filed through the huge building. In one place a wall several stories high supports a stunning stack of thousands of indexed folders containing the evidence that was used in trials after the war to convict the worst of the war criminals involved in the planning and conduct of the massacre.

At the time of the Japanese attack there was a sizeable community of foreigners living in Nanking, and the Japanese, to a limited extent, respected the neutrality of these communities. This provided an opportunity for some of the foreigners to hide and shelter fleeing Chinese residents, and the efforts and personal risks taken by the former are detailed with gratitude in various displays in the museum. One in particular caught my eye because of its supreme irony. One of the most active and fearless foreigners to help the locals was a German citizen, and his efforts that saved many Chinese lives were recognized a year or two later in an ornate Certificate of Appreciation presented to him by the German Red Cross, and personally signed by no less than the leader of the German nation. Mr Adolf Hitler to be precise, who was himself soon to re-define evil. What would Oskar Schindler have made of this? It’s a strange world.

Nanjing has many large parks and gardens and today we caught the subway to the historically-significant Yuhuatai Park in the southern suburbs. This large park covers an area of nearly 400 acres and amongst all the attractive greenery and interesting pathways there are numerous monuments to various historic, revolutionary and heroic figures. Official sights in the park include The Tablet Pavilion With Emperor Qianlong’s Inscriptions, A Group Statue of Revolutionary Martyrs, The Tomb of the Troops Lost in the Revolution of 1911, the Eastern and Western Execution Grounds of Revolutionary Martyrs, The Tablet Inscribing Eunuchs’ Official Discussion, and The Spot Where Yang Bangyi Had His Chest Cut Open. We had better fortune than many who trod the grass here in decades past, thankfully emerging from the South Gate a pleasant hour or so later unscathed and intact. From there we strolled through a side-street lined with shops stocked with the freshest of produce before descending back into the subway to whiz under the full length of the city centre, popping up again just down the road from the Jingli where our bags were waiting to be packed for tomorrow’s departure from happy Nanjing.

Tianjin, China

After another stay of nearly three months in Mt Gambier we flew to Beijing via Sydney on 24 November after a quick 2-day trip to Brisbane to attend to some business. We have returned to China for my next teaching engagement and then to continue our wanderings through this vast country with so many fascinating sights and sounds. We were picked up at the spectacular new Beijing Capital International Airport and driven to Tianjin about 100 km to the south-east. Our Qantas plane out of Sydney took off 8 hours late with the result that we arrived in Beijing at around 4am and then in Tianjin around 5.30am.

Tianjin is a huge, rapidly modernizing city of about 15 million people. All over town whole blocks of formerly decrepit buildings have been bulldozed and in their place have arisen forests of cranes and completed, or the concrete shells of what soon will be, gleaming 30-storey apartment blocks. This is our 4th visit to Tianjin and the rapid changes to the cityscape are always noticeable as we drive in off the expressway from Beijing. Many more traffic lights are also appearing and unlike the recent past, the cars now heed them. Tianjin is largely a grey concrete metropolis with very little grass or other greenery, but it has an air of excitement about it and very friendly locals. Tianjin is home to Nankai University, one of China’s largest, and whose most famous graduate was Chou En-lai who went on to become Premier of China in the 1950s. There is a large statue of Chou overlooking the main entrance to the Uni.

It is now the beginning of winter in Tianjin and the temperatures are dropping quickly although not yet to the level we experienced on a previous visit when a sudden cold snap swept in overnight from the Gobi and blanketed Tianjin in snow and frost. But the hospitality and rooms in Tianjin are always warm and we have enjoyed many memorable banquets and meetings here. Like the time a Tianjin resident we had met a few months before in Adelaide and whom we had taken on several picnics and winery visits wanted to return the favour by showing us the sights of Tianjin. The good doctor and his wife showed us through their modern apartment and took us to lunch at the 99 Serious Dumplings Restaurant. This was true to name; the dumplings were seriously delicious. According to our hosts, Tianjin is actually the birthplace of the dumpling, a fact of which the locals apparently are very proud, and rightly so if our lunch was anything to go by. That evening they took us to the “Kou Bu Li” (“Dog Doesn’t Care”) Restaurant. I wondered why it was called that, but my darker fears were assuaged by the thought that if the dog doesn’t care, that probably means that our best friend doesn’t appear anywhere on the menu. In any case, just to be on the safe side, I steered the conversation, and menu, towards seafood and things that fly (or more to the point, that once did). Another great meal.

Less than an hour to the east of Tianjin is the industrial seaport city of Tanggu, one of China’s principal outlets for the massive amount of manufactured goods it exports every year to the rest of the world. Tanggu is also the departure point for the ocean-going ferries that regularly cross the Yellow Sea from here to Incheon in South Korea and Kobe in Japan. We hope to include such a crossing in our future travels - but not this time as we have air tickets to fly south on Monday.

Mount Gambier, South Australia

From the Whitsundays we worked our way down the Queensland coast, covering several hundred kilometres a day and stopping overnight at Bundaberg, then Beachmere on Moreton Bay just north of Brisbane. The sugar cane harvest in central and north Queensland was in full swing, with cane trains and harvesters crisscrossing vast tracts of ripe, sweet-smelling cane field. Near Beachmere we crossed the short bridge from the mainland to Bribie Island to check out the residential canal estates that have been expanding here over recent years, and on the way back we stopped briefly to admire the sunset over Pumicestone Passage between the island and the mainland. Perched on the horizon were the Glasshouse Mountains - these are not real mountains but remnant volcanic plugs, the last vestiges of ancient volcanic activity in this area. After Beachmere we turned inland and passed through Toowoomba before crossing the border into New South Wales. From there we drove through the scenic countryside of the Warrumbungle Ranges at Coonabarabran, then west across the lonely Hay Plain. We arrived a couple of days later back in Mt Gambier after a journey of four weeks and 10,000 km. We were surprised at how dry some parts of Queensland remain - the drought of the century has certainly hit hard and onerous water use restrictions remain in force. In comparison, Mt Gambier is very fortunate to continue to be watered liberally from its beloved Blue Lake (a turquoise-blue water-filled caldera on the edge of the town containing 36,000 million litres of pure water recharged by inflows from deep aquifers).

We have returned to Mt Gambier to attend to some arrangements for my father who was admitted to "The Oaks" nursing home last month. He wanted to stay and live independently in his own house in the centre of town for the remainder of his life but failing health has now made this impossible. He also had to retire from his part-time job and give up driving his own car a few months ago. Still, he's done well for a 97 year old, and he remains physically mobile and keen to get in the car and go driving (as a passenger) whenever the opportunity arises. Yesterday we took him to Port MacDonnell 25 km to the south for a drive along the coast and fish and chips at a cafe on the foreshore. When we arrived at The Oaks to pick him up he raced me to the front door, and I'm not a slow walker.

His new home at The Oaks is at Yahl just south-east of Mt Gambier. It is located in a beautiful rural setting with a row of tall oaks along one side and a spectacular magnolia tree at the entrance. Yahl is a fertile farming district well known for its cheese production. It is also where my father had his dairy farm for decades and where his mother lived as a girl. She was the daughter of a Swedish couple who had separately come alone to South Australia from Stockholm on sailing ships around 1890, while still teenagers! They married, farmed and raised their family at Yahl. So things seem to be turning full circle - hopefully there's still a few years left in this cycle.

We will stay in Mt Gambier for a few weeks before returning to China for my next teaching engagement, this time in Tianjin, Nanjing (Nanking) and Yuxi. When that's finished we will head north for a bit - we have never visited the far north provinces bordering Russia, Mongolia and North Korea, so that's our objective this time. It will be winter and very cold with outside temperatures around minus 30C, but we expect the discomfort will be more than compensated for by the photogenic ice-white landscapes we hope to see.

Whitsunday Islands, Queensland, Australia

From Cooktown we travelled south inland through the Atherton Tablelands and then down the coast, passing through Tully and Townsville. We had overnight stops at Flying Fish Point near Innisfail south of Cairns and at Ayr, before arriving at beautiful Airlie Beach overlooking the stunning Whitsunday Islands. We stayed here for two days, taking a boat trip around a few of the 74 islands in the Whitsunday group. We snorkeled over the colourful and varied corals on the fringes of Hook Island and spent a couple of hours on Whitehaven Beach on Whitsunday Island. This beach is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest with tropical blue waters lapping along 7 km of pure white sand.

Airlie Beach was teeming with overseas visitors, particularly young English people, and the hotels were pulsating after dark. We had been carrying a tent in the car as back-up accommodation and we decided to pitch it in a park next to the beach. But we hadn’t counted on the late night revelry of the many backpackers in the park in their tents and campers, or their post-midnight phone calls back home to Mum in England. One young woman in a camper van next to us breathlessly and loudly recounted to her Mum her day’s adventure skydiving, and then repeated the whole detailed story in turn to the five or so other relatives who seemed to be on the other end of the line in England. But her genuine excitement was infectious and it was nice to hear what a great time she was having in Australia, so all was forgiven and I quietly put the tyre lever down. Eventually silence fell across the park, allowing us to get to sleep.

Cooktown, Queensland, Australia

From Cairns we headed to Cooktown on Cape York Peninsula, stopping for awhile just to the north of Cairns at beautiful Palm Cove. This is a great palm-fringed sandy beach lined with modern apartments. This would be a great place for a quiet beach holiday and many people here were having just that. But we carried on to Cooktown about 350 km to the north where we stayed for nearly a week, walking and fishing. This was our first visit to Cooktown and we were pleasantly surprised by the place. It is a more substantial town than we were expecting and it is located at a physically beautiful spot where the wide mangrove-fringed Endeavour River flows into the Coral Sea. In 1770, Lt James Cook on board his ship the HM Bark Endeavour was in desperate need of safe haven and he beached the vessel here, naming the river after his ship. The ship and crew remained here for seven weeks while repairs were carried out. On board was the botanist Joseph Banks and staff who busied themselves collecting Australian flora specimens. Surprisingly for a town of its relatively small size, Cooktown has its own botanical garden with one section containing specimens of all the trees and bushes collected and described by Banks.

Cooktown had its heyday 100 years after Cook was here when alluvial gold was discovered on the Palmer River in the 1870s, sparking a regional gold rush. The town’s population swelled to several thousand to service the approximately 15,000 people on the goldfields. Like most gold rushes, few prospectors struck it rich and the only ones to make a fortune were the hotel keepers and carriers. A legacy of the gold rush days are some very fine colonial buildings particularly the hospital that functioned for a century after opening in the late 1870s and is now a Jehovah’s Witness Church.

We fished at nearby Archer Point, battling strong winds and keeping a close eye on the water’s edge as salt water crocodiles live along the whole coast and river banks here.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/30/2378215.htm

Fortunately we saw no crocs but we did see several sea turtles cruising around the bay. We caught some good fish including a large mangrove jack and silver trevally, and Lee Tuan hauled in what looked a lot like a monster garfish and which we later identified as a Long Tom.

We stayed at a motel/backpackers joint, sharing the kitchen each night with an interesting group of people including young Japanese and German visitors who were working as pickers in a nearby banana plantation to save extra money before moving south to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef and to hike in the Daintree Rainforest. Cooktown has a very pleasant laid-back atmosphere and the air was warm despite it now being mid-winter. No doubt, though, it can get very uncomfortable here in the height of summer. We looked longingly at a detailed map of Cape York Peninsula to the north and the many seemingly interesting places we had never heard of, and the great fishing spots that must exist along the 1,000 km of coastline between here and Cape York, the most northerly point in Australia. The Peninsula is 14 million hectares of savanna country and rainforest, with 21 big wild rivers that feed vast wetlands and mangroves. You could spend months here and barely scratch the surface.