China's Naxi party

With all four wheels firmly on the tourist trial our next stop was the ancient city of Lijiang, about three and a half hours North West from Dali - an old town of cobbled streets, rickety old wooden buildings and flowing canals. Situated at an altitude of almost 3000 meters the air was much cooler than previous places have been recently, and with a ban of all motor vehicles in the old town the air was… dare we say it.. almost clean! The town is split into two very different parts, the old and the new town, the old being the interesting part and the new being the same as almost every other town in China.
Lijiang is the main town of the large minority group based in this part of the world, the Naxi, who apart from wearing funny clothes have some quite interesting traits. First off is they are the last people in the world to still write using a form of Heiroglyphics which date back over 1000 years, and second is the fact that in their towns the women wear the trousers ( A matriarchal society says Sarah).
The town has a few old men left known as Dongba who are Shamens and the caretakers of the written language, they also act as the mediators between the Naxi and the spirit world and are probably the last few people who know how to write the unique text. We are not sure how much shamanistic acts they carry out now as they are usually hanging round shops writing books and adding text for Chinese tourists souveniers, but seeing someone write using pictograms was so impressive and really gave the feeling of seeing a living dinosaur. We bought a Naxi dictionary just to see the really old man write in the front of it for us.
The Naxi women apparently maintain their hold over men by having a flexible arrangement for love affairs… Their system allows people to get together without setting up a joint residence so the guy and the girl live in their respective homes, at night the guy spends the night at the girls house and during the day he goes back home to work at his mums house which is also where he lives. Any children are looked after the woman who brings them up, the man provides the support until the relationship is over when he would stop with no special effort for paternity. Women also inherit all property and village disputes are settled by what is essentially a big mothers meeting! That’s a meeting made up of lots of mothers not big mummas. This domination by the women also influences their language, we were told that the word female added to a noun would enlarge the meaning and if the word for male is added it decreases it, for example stone + female would mean a boulder and stone + male would mean pebble!
Visiting the old town was very much like being in York or Bath in the middle of the peak tourist season, because of the very narrow streets and its extreme popularity with Chinese tour groups it was packed. Past 9am we were shoulder to shoulder with the red cap megaphone wielding tour goups which very much distracted us from the beauty of the old buildings and waterways. The constant rain added to the danger, not from the threat of being washed away but from all the short ass Chinese people poking our eyes out with their umbrellas. It was like something from an Indiana Jones film, ducking and diving to avoid flying spikes coming towards our eyes!
One of the highlights of the town was the Naxi’s great food, these guys love goats cheese and ham which makes us love the Naxis. Our breakfasts consisted of fired goats cheese, amazing salted ham and huge potato pancake type things, this was a welcome change from the normal Chinese type food. They also cook a huge variety of vegetables and with its tourist site status we were able to find many English menus, which was nice as for once we could pick what we wanted to eat!
Whilst in the town we visited the Mu Mansion, the old residence of the leader of the Naxi. It was destroyed in an earthquake in 1996 so the Chinese have rebuilt the site in a Chinese style… this made it a little boring as it can be added to list of temples and palaces which have all been renovated and repainted in exactly the same style and colours. What separated it from other sites were the waterways running through the site and the fact it was built on a hill so we could walk up and take in the view. The view unfortunately was disappointing as during our time in the temple it rained non stop!
After our time in Lijiang we caught a bus to southern Sichuan to avoid back tracking via Kunming. The journey took us over some high passes via a very windy road. One problem with catching a bus in China on windy roads is the Chinese people’s subseptability to travel sickness… whether its due to their constant eating or because they are not used to traveling almost half the bus starts being sick into bags at some point along the journey, whenever we stop for a break the road is lines with people from the bus throwing up. This combined with some of their other filthy habits can make the journey slightly uncomfortable for us sometimes. The problem is as soon as they stop being sick they sit down and eat a pack of chickens feet or noodles only to throw them up again 30 minutes later???? Why lord why?
Our destination was a city we had never heard of and cannot remember the name of, a large industrial city that spralled along a large river valley for tens of miles but had no mention in our guidebook. The valley was easily one of the most industrialized places we have seen so far on our travels, for over a hour we past many coal and ore mines, and endless other heavy smoky industry. Some plants were pumping out smoke which was bright yellow in colour and the river in the valley was a feable sludgy trickle. We had passed many dams on the journey. After arriving at the bus station we had to get a cab 48km to the train station where we were lucky enough to get a sleeper train the same night onto Chengdu the capital of Sichuan province.
Taking the bus so far in China has had its good and bad points. As an organized system its great, every town and village had a bus station, larger towns and cities have many stations (which can be confusing when you don’t know which one you need) and each station has many buses a day, often as frequently as 20 minuets apart even if the journey is 7 hours or more. The ticket counters are generally easy to use, we show the woman the Chinese characters for the destination and we are given a ticket for the next bus, sometimes it’s a mad dash after she has booked us onto a bus leaving in as little as 3 minutes! The only problems are if it’s a busy station (which is all but the smallest towns) then despite the authorities best effort to impliment a queing system it’s a bit of a scrum to get to the front. Well a scrum is a bit of an exaggeration as about 20% of the people know how to que now but as soon as you let your guard down three or four people would have passed you. Some of the stations we have visited have tried installing some kind of metal gate cattle sorting type contraption, the sort that lines cows up before the slaughterhouse but they still manage to climb over each other and push in. Buying a bus ticket in China requires patience, vigilance and an ability to cast aside any notion of Englishness within your body so you can kick the bastards out the way before they do the same to you!
China is a country constantly on the move, despite buses to most towns every 20 minutes they are almost always full. Every train we have taken has been filled, often booked days in advance in every class. It claims in our guide book that at any moment in time it is estimated there are over 10 million people on Chinese trains… quite a few people! Being crammed so close to people with such horrible habits makes for some really annoying journeys!