Mangshi: Burmese Ruili Part I

I spent the morning in Ruili, then came to Mangshi this afternoon. I'll be here tonight, then back to Kunming tomorrow on a plane.

 

Here are some pictures I took of the restaurant where I had tea leaf salad. Later, at the night market, I saw that other Burmese places also had these same packets of tea leaves and crispy garlic, so it's a food available in many places in Ruili.

 

 

Ruili: Tea Leaf Salad on the Burmese Border

This morning I left He Shun and went to the bus station in Tengchong to catch a bus to Ruili. It was 9:45, and then 10 AM bus to Ruili was full already, so instead of waiting till 11:00, I hopped on the 10:30 bus to Mangshi. I got a good seat with legroom and a window - it was a minibus, and at times we had so many passengers that people had to stand.

 

The road we took toward Mangshi started out paved, then turned to a cobblestone-like consistency as we went up a huge ridge, with great views on both sides. After that the road was little more than a dirt track at times, as we past lots of tea plantations before heading down again (paved again) toward the Shweli River. The bridge across the river was a single track suspension bridge - along with half of my bus, I chose to walk across ahead of the bus, then got back on the bus on the other side. After the bridge, it was only about 12 km to Longling, a town on the main road between Kunming and Ruili....all of a sudden, the road had smooth pavement with street lights every 50 meters with pictures of nearby sites. This lasted for all 12 km - these street lights seemed a bit over the top and pointless, especially given the condition of the road itself only a few miles back. But whatever...

 

In Longling, our minibus stopped for a while, so I decided to switch buses there. I caught another minibus that was leaving for Ruili immediately, so I made a quick connection but didn't get to have any lunch. The drive to Ruili took about 2.5 hours, which made my entire trip today about 6 hours long. After Linglong, we made a big descent into Mangshi, where it became more tropical, with sugarcane and coffee growing all over. We passed right by a Burmese border crossing in Wanding, and I could see hills and buildings in Burma. Finally, we arrived in Ruili, a city with wide palm-lined boulevards and very calm traffic - mostly bicycle rickshaws and electric scooters. Here in Ruili, I'm closer to Delhi than I am to Beijing.....not to mention Rangoon, Calcutta, Bangkok, etc....so it's definitely a different scene from the east coast of China.

 

I found a hotel, and needed Leo's help checking in since the receptionist didn't speak English and didn't even attempt to communicate anything to me in sign language....she just sort of sat there until I called Leo, despite the fact that I was trying to hand her money and communicating the best I could. But eventually I got my room, then set out to find food (I hadn't had lunch). Since I was so hungry, I got a small noodle soup at the first place I saw...then I went in search of Burmese food.

 

I found a small street with lots of stalls and restaurants, all with pool tables. Apparently it's a pool-playing street. Halfway down the street, I spotted a restaurant with Burmese writing on the awning. I asked if they had La Pat Dok (Tea Leaf Salad, one of my favorite Burmese dishes that I often ate in San Francisco), and they did! The tea leaves and cripy garlic and lentils came in little plastic packets from Burma, and I ended up buying 3 more of these to bring back to the US (they are packaged, so I think they will be OK). The woman who made my salad chopped tomato, lettuce, onion, garlic and chili and mixed them with peanuts, the fermented tea leaves and the crispy garlic and lentils. It was excellent, and I took several pictures of the salad and the restaurant. The manager also came over to take a picture of me on his cell phone - I'm guessing I am the first American to ever come there and order tea leaf salad. The manager spoke a bit of English, but he wasn't Burmese - the woman who made the salad was though, and they were playing Burmese music videos on the TV in the restaurant. She was singing along.

 

There is a lot of Burmese influence in this city - Burmese writing everywhere, women dressed in colorful sarongs, all sorts of interesting looking curries and vegetable dishes on display at local restaurants. It's probably as close to being in Burma as you can get without actually entering the country.

 

After tea leaf salad, I walked around a bit more and then caught a bicycle rickshaw back to my hotel.......this evening my plan is to relax a bit at my hotel, then head to the night market to find more food. My stomach is feeling a bit iffy today, so I will need to be careful foodwise, but hopefully I'll be okay. There is no card reader here, so I can't load any pictures, but perhaps I'll be able to another day.

Tengchong: He Shun Village

He Shun village is really beautiful, surrounded by green hills and rice paddies. I walked around the town and took some pictures, then went up into the hills (fields, tombs, forests) for a view of the sunset. Notice the pagoda on the top of the mountain in the picture with the clouds and pine trees.

 

 

Tengchong: The Road to Burma

Yesterday I said goodbye to Mark, and to Dali, and headed off on my adventure westward toward Burma.

 

I couldn't buy a ticket to Tengchong in Dali Old Town, since the buses left from Xiaguan (Dali New Town, about 15 km away). So I took a public bus most of the way to the bus station in Xiaguan, then walked the rest. I got there at about 9:15 AM, in time to buy my ticket for the 10 AM express bus.

 

I was impressed by the public bus system in Xiaguan and Dali - the buses were big and spacious, and seemed to also be frequent and efficient (and easy to navigate).

 

I was assigned an aisle seat for the busride, which was annoying because I wanted a window. Luckily a man in a window seat in front of me switched to a different seat in the back of the bus, so I took his window seat, next to an older man.

 

Nobody on the bus spoke English. It took a while to actually leave Xiaguan, but once we did, the road was fast. The expressway has been extended west from Xiaguan - I'm not sure how far it goes now, but the aim is to connect it all the way to Ruili and the Burmese border. This new highway means travel times are a lot shorter - we drove on the highway for two hours, through several tunnels and across the extremely brown and fast moving Mekong River, and then stopped for bathrooms and lunch just outside Baoshan.

 

The man who was sitting next to me on the bus paid for my bathroom ticket, which was very nice of him. I think he thought I wouldn't know how to pay on my own. Later I shared my rice crackers with him. After bathroom, it was lunchtime, and everyone from my bus went into a restaurant where most people got a meal on a silver tray - much like a thali meal in India. Everyone got a small serving of several dishes: green beans and potato salad, eggplant with chili, cold salad of ma-la fatty pork, pork with pickled veggies, french fries, peanuts and rice. On the side everyone also got a bowl of vegetable and garlic soup. This cost me 10 RMB, which is about $1.25. While nothing was outstanding, I definitely prefer Chinese rest area lunches to American rest area lunches.

 

After lunch, we continued through the valley surrounding Baoshan, then went up into the hills again before making an impressive descent into the valley of the Salween River. The Salween River, according to Wikipedia, is the longest un-dammed (or however that's spelled) river in Asia...it starts in Tibet, then flows through Yunnan province before going into Burma and Thailand and emptying into the sea near the Burmese/Thai border. Many major Asian rivers go through Yunnan province - north of Dali, near Lijiang, the Yangzi River goes through Tiger Leaping Gorge before flowing north an east through Sichuan and out toward Shanghai....the Mekong flows south from Yunnan to Laos and Vietnam, and the Shweli River (which I would cross later just before arriving in Tengchong) is a tributary of the Irawaddy, which is the principal river of Burma.

 

At the Salween River, we left the highway to head west toward Tengchong on a smaller road. Down by the river, the landscape started to look a lot more tropical. I saw fields of sugarcane and coffee, as well as banana and mango trees. The bus got hot too, since it seemed like the air conditioning only worked when we were going downhill, which was only about 50% of the time.

 

We drove through a lot of forest - the least populated part of China I have seen so far - and then made our way down to the Shweli River valley, then it was about 45 minutes more driving on curvy roads before we arrived in Tengchong. As promised, the busride only took 6 hours (including the lunch stop), so it wasn't too bad at all - I was able to listen to my ipod which helped block out the movies blasting on the TVs in the bus, and the seats had decent leg room so I wasn't as squished as I was on the busride from Kunming to Dali.

 

When I arrived in Tengchong, I took a taxi straight from the bus station to He Shun, a small village about 6 km outside town. That's where I spent last night and I'll be staying there again tonight - it's very pretty and peaceful and there are a ton of nice houses and gardens, since many of the former residents are rich and have sent a lot of money back to the village. Tourists also come to visit the village on day trips, and there is a 30 RMB entrance fee, which I avoided since my taxi went straight through the gate without stopping. I will hopefully return to the village late enough tonight that the ticket collectors won't be working anymore, so I'll avoid the fee again.

 

 

Tengchong: All Around Erhai Lake

Here are pictures from various places around Dali and Erhai Lake.

 

A) View of central Dali from the West Gate tower.

 

B) View of Dali from the temple near Higherland Inn.

 

C) View of temple from the chairlift

 

D) Shuanglang Overlook

 

E) Shuanglang at the edge of the lake

Tongcheng: Dali Food Pictures

Here are some food pictures from Dali. Again, not sure what order they will show up in when the blog publishes, so you can play a matching game:

 

A) Cold Rice Noodles with Chicken in Dali.

 

B) Choosing Vegetables for the hot pot-like dish in Dali.

 

C) Individual servings of vegetables cooking in a communal hot pot in Dali.

 

D) Woman making traditional bread in Xizhou.

 

E) David and Mark getting ready to eat bread in the plaza in Xizhou.

Tengchong: Kunming Food Pictures

Just two pictures for this post.

 

Photo A) The big hawker center in Kunming was impressive, and I might have to go back there for lunch next week when I'm there again. Miao Miao told us that the city doesn't allow street food stalls anymore, so they have all moved to this big indoor food court. It was a lot of fun checking out all the local foods.

 

Photo B) Crossing the Bridge Noodles. I described this in the previous post from Kunming, so here is a picture.

Tengchong: Goodbye Yangshuo

During my last few days in Yangshuo, I went out to two big dinners with Leo, Kelly and Kelly's family - by this point, basically my Chinese host family. Here's a picture of one of the big meals, at a new restaurant in the center of town. The highlight was garlic bean thread noodles with cabbage (on the left part of the lazy susan). We also had roast duck, spicy beer frog with pickled vegetables, water spinach with salty tofu, pickled vegetables with chili, basket of fried shrimp, intestines and tea leaves, old duck soup with ginko nuts and longanberry, pork belly with taro served in bamboo, and sizzling squid.

 

I'm also including a picture of Leo and Kelly with Pippy (the dog) and Stella (Kelly's niece)

 

Tengchong: Old Stone Bridge

I'm in Tengchong now, far away from where this picture was taken. But I took this photo last week, very close to the cooking school in Yangshuo. I took a walk around the countryside and found this nice bridge.

DaLi: Erhai Lake

I'm still in DaLi, but leaving tomorrow for Tongcheng, and then on to Mangshi after that....then flying back to Kunming from Mangshi on Tuesday, then to Shanghai on Wednesday.....then there for 3 nights before going back to London, and then New York!

 

So now everyone knows my schedule. Good.

 

Just after my last blog post, Mark and I went to a great noodle place where we had spicy cold noodles with chicken - we both got small bowls for 3 RMB, but I wished I had had a bigger bowl, since they were really delicious. After that I was still a bit hungry, so we went to a place across the street where they cooked vegetables in a sort of hot pot and then the cooked vegetables were served in a soup. It had sichuan peppercorns but wasn't too spicy - but it made the tongue feel tingly with the 'ma la' sensation.

 

After lunch, Mark and I walked with our bags in the blazing sun up to the chairlif - about a 20 minute walk, which was a bit uphill and very hot. We took a chairlift up the mountain, where we were immediately summoned in to the Budhist temple, where we lit incense, said a prayer, wrote a wish in a book and then paid money to help our wish be granted. Mark paid 100 RMB for his wish, which meant he received a little charm on a necklace. I was cheap and only paid 10 RMB for my wish, so I got nothing, and probably my wish won't come true.

 

We stayed at a place called Higherland Inn - the views of the valley and lake down below were really nice, but it was kind of chilly out, especially at night. We took a small hike to a nearby waterfall in the afternoon, then just relaxed in the evening. This morning, after breakfast, we came back down the mountain and checked into the Jade Emu hotel, where the German girls had stayed two nights earlier. It's a really nice place and the staff are friendly, and they helped us organize a taxi to take us up to three different villages along Erhai Lake.

 

We had a good trip, took a bunch of pictures, and tried some good food. The villages had little touristy pockets, but for the most part people were going about their everyday lives and we had a good glimpse into traditional life around here. Hopefully I'll be able to post some pictures at some point.

 

But now it's off to enjoy the last night in DaLi before my potentially endless busride tomorrow.