Q&A: Yunnan Without Tour Guides
By David G. Allan
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The city of Lijiang.
Q.
What’s the best way to arrange off-the-beaten path travel in a country where you don’t speak the language? I’m hoping to travel to Yunnan Province in China next spring but don’t want to go with a tour and don’t want to completely wing it either.
Karla Robertson,
San Francisco
A.
That’s a tall order, but I may have a nice middle way that will give you a tour-less adventure without the worry over how you’ll eat or where you’ll sleep.
There is something of a tourist triangle that I have taken to the Yunnan cities of Kunming, Dali and Lijiang, above, with reliable public transportation links and numerous lodging and dining options where English is understood.
Kunming, the provincial capital, has excellent hotels, restaurants and night life plus lovely Cuihu Park, great for soaking up local atmosphere. On the Kunming guide you’ll find a great overview of the city from T: Travel magazine, “China Lite” by Sean Rocha (Sept. 23, 2007) with recommendations like the Green Lake Hotel (South Cuihu Road; 86-871-515-8888; www.greenlakehotel.com.cn) and the regional cuisine at Gingko Elite (16 East Cuihu Road).
Dali is a compact town with hostels and outdoor cafes that cater to backpacker aesthetics; a major draw of the town is the looming Cangshan Mountain, which you can get to via a converted ski lift and hike along for hours, and nearby Erhai Lake, which you reach by rental bike. Lijiang is a sprawling maze of a city and a Unesco World Heritage Site where cobblestone streets and small canals are fun to explore.
If you’re feeling confident after those towns, you could venture farther into Yunnan to sites like the Tiger Leaping Gorge, the more remote city of Zhongdian (also known as Shangri-La after the fictional James Hilton site) and the preserved village of Wenhai near Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the destination of Craig Simons in “A Village Preserves a Shangri-La” (Nov. 21, 2004). Even more adventurous is following Edward Wong along the hiking trails near the Yunnan-Tibetan border reported in his “On Foot in the Mountains of Mystical Yunnan” (April 5, 2009).
China can put up a language barrier to visitors. You can’t count on locals, even in the service industry, to speak English. Two easy suggestions are to memorize a couple phrases for common dishes you like (like jiaozi for dumpling) and to pick up business cards at hotels where you stay (they often have maps on them) so that they can be handed to taxi drivers when you need to return to your hotel.
The Surf’s Always Up in the Chinese Hawaii
Christie Johnston for The New York Times
Tianya Haijiao, a beach depicted on the Chinese two-yuan note, is a popular attraction on Hainan Island
Published: March 15, 2009
THE sun is out, the sand gleaming white, the waves rolling toward shore in clean, regular sets. At the edge of this palm-fringed paradise, the sea is a pale, minty hue and empty of people. Launching my surfboard from the beach on Hainan Island, I paddle out to catch a wave.
Hainan Island has often been called the Chinese Hawaii, and indeed, it is the only tropical beach destination in China. With coasts on the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin, about a 90-minute flight southwest of Hong Kong, this island, slightly bigger than Maryland, is attracting hordes of Chinese in the market for a little sun and fun.
The warm, sandy south coast around the port city of Sanya is experiencing a luxury hotel boom: Ritz-Carlton, Banyan Tree, Le Méridien and Mandarin Oriental have all opened resorts there in the last year, with Fairmont and Raffles properties also in the pipeline. Look around, and you’ll encounter weekend warriors from Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, all seeking to escape the crush of big-city life for a quiet stretch of beach and a frozen cocktail.
In the past, Hainan had a romantic, Wild West frontier air about it; as the southernmost point in China, it served for centuries as a place of banishment for criminals, exiled poets and political undesirables. Thirty minutes from Sanya is the famously scenic Tianya Haijiao, a k a the Edge of the Sky and the Rim of the Sea, a boulder-strewn beach depicted on the Chinese two-yuan note. Today, it is an immensely popular tourist attraction.
After Hainan separated from Guangdong to become its own province in 1988, a development boom was quickly followed by a bust that left many building projects on the island half-finished. In the last few years, Hainan has welcomed back investors and become a fashionable draw for Russian tourists looking to escape winter — entire blocks in Sanya have signs lettered in Russian for their benefit.
More recently, Hainan has attracted younger international travelers like Drew Aras and Catherine Forman, both 24 and from Melbourne, Australia. Mr. Aras, a physical therapist, first heard about the island while watching the Beijing Olympics, since it was where organizers obtained the 17,000 tons of sand for the Games’ beach volleyball courts.
“Usually, when we travel together, we negotiate a place that is both interesting to travel to and has the added bonus of offering some surf time for me,” said Mr. Aras, who has been surfing since he was 5. “We thought we’d find a nice place to relax by the beach and maybe catch a few waves between cocktails.”
What they found were uncrowded waves, cheap and delicious seafood and a quirky landscape that skipped from isolated coastline to spots jammed with mainland package tourists outfitted in matching head-to-toe Hawaiian prints.
The couple were introduced to the island by Brendan Sheridan of Surfing Hainan, a small local company that leads surfing expeditions and rents surfboards to visitors. Mr. Sheridan, 29, attended high school in Hong Kong and learned to surf while at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Two years ago, he made it his mission to bring surfing to the Chinese people.
“It’s the right time for the Chinese to get into surfing,” Mr. Sheridan told me as we set out to surf at Riyuewan, a picturesque bay about an hour and a half northeast of Sanya. “There’s an emerging middle class that is finally learning how to spend their money and have some fun in life.”
Most of his customers are foreigners, as many Chinese have an aversion to the sun — having a tan still denotes “farmer” — and don’t have much experience with the ocean. But Mr. Sheridan, who speaks Mandarin, finds that more and more Chinese are interested in the culture of surfing, including his two Chinese staff members, who are both in their 30s and have taken to the sport with a vengeance.
Around Hainan, the surf is up pretty much year round. Between April and September, waves tend to come from the south, while October to March brings a northeastern winter swell.
It can be somewhat expensive to be an independent traveler exploring the island beyond Sanya — public buses are infrequent, and a one-way taxi ride from Riyuewan to Sanya, for example, can run upwards of 300 yuan, about $43 at 7 yuan to the dollar. But Mr. Aras thought it added to the sense of adventure.
“It was refreshing to go somewhere not set up for Western tourists,” he said. “My parents, who live in Hong Kong, already plan to go back to Hainan, and they know of other Aussie and Hong Kong expats who visit frequently. I don’t think it’ll take long for surfers to catch on.”
Development is already fast and furious. The economic downturn may have lessened visitor numbers, but the hotels, with their glass-tiled pools and grand marble staircases, keep coming.
Along Yalong Bay, a lovely four-and-a-half-mile stretch of beach about 15 miles east of Sanya that was developed as a national resort district, the new Ritz-Carlton sits at the end of a long string of resorts that went up before it, including the Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton and Crowne Plaza. Overlooking the water, the Yalong Bay Golf Club, designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., is shaped like a dragon’s claw and has hosted tournaments on the European and Asian Tours. There are now 16 courses on the island, with a couple more in the works.
The sheer numbers of Chinese mean that remote, once-unspoiled locations like Tianya Haijiao (on the two-yuan note), Wuzhi Shan (the “five finger mountain” in the center of Hainan), and Wuzhizhou (a tiny, white-sand island just offshore northeast of Yalong Bay) have been developed with Disney-like fervor to entertain the throngs of flamboyantly dressed tourists who want to view them on a package tour (ferries every 10 minutes, waterfall rides, horse treks). In these places, the Chinese Hawaii more closely resembles a Chinese Miami, full of shiny resorts and artificial attractions.
But stretches of green, mist-covered mountain slopes do remain. The warm, humid climate makes Hainan a bounty of tropical crops — the island is an important producer of pineapples, coconuts, mangoes, sugar cane, coffee and rubber trees. On a drive I took north out of Sanya last November, the countryside quickly retreated from apartment and hotel blocks to hillsides heavy with mango trees and rice paddies worked by teams of farmers and water buffalo.
Of all the new high-end resorts I visited, Le Méridien Shimei Bay, about an hour and a half northeast of Sanya’s airport, had the most authentic sense of place, with lush forests, a pristine, white sand beach and no other development around as yet, though an adjacent series of hotels is planned by Starwood Hotels and Resorts.
Changes are happening all over China, and Hainan Island exemplifies this moment. The boom in tourism there is exposing mainland travelers to a foreign beach culture in new and interesting ways.
One afternoon, when Mr. Sheridan took two young Chinese couples out for a surf lesson in Sanya, he got an unusual request from one of the women. “Can I take this umbrella with me onto the surfboard?” she asked. Mr. Sheridan fought off laughter and soberly told her that he didn’t think it was a good idea.
But he did admire her effort. He said, “Why not have it both ways?”
LUXURY HOTELS AND LONGBOARDS
Hainan is an easy flight from any major Chinese city; Sanya is about 90 minutes from Hong Kong and Guangzhou and about three hours from Shanghai. China Southern (www.cs-air.com/en), Dragon Air (www.dragonair.com) and Air China (www.airchina.com.cn/en/index.jsp) offer frequent flights. You can fly to Haikou in the north of the island, but it is several hours from the southern beaches.
Of the many new hotels on Hainan, the most secluded is Le Méridien Shimei Bay (Shimei Bay, Wanning; 86-898-6252-8888; www.starwoodhotels.com/lemeridien; doubles from 1,040 yuan, about $149 at 7 yuan to the dollar). The infinity pool and open atrium are stunning, and the 275 rooms, including 25 villas, feature polished wood and indigenous motifs. There is excellent hiking nearby and exclusive access to an offshore island.
In Luhuitou Bay, the Banyan Tree Sanya (6 Luling Road, Sanya; 800-591-0439 in America; www.banyantree.com/en/sanya/index.html; from 3,100 yuan) is closer to the action, but the 61 pool villas make privacy and spa indulgence the priority.
Between Luhuitou and Yalong Bay is the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Sanya (12 Yuhai Road, Sanya; 86-898-8820-9999; www.mandarinoriental.com/sanya; from 1,600 yuan), where all 297 rooms have views of the sea.
To surf several breaks, rent a board or take a lesson with Surfing Hainan (8 Huayun Road, Sanya; 86-135-1980-0103; www.surfinghainan.com; from 350 yuan a person, with transportation and equipment).
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/travel/15next.html
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/travel/05explorer.html?scp=1&sq=Yunnan&st=cse
I HAD high expectations for the holy lake. The locals called it Mystic Lake. Who could not be inspired by a place with a name like that, in the Tibetan hinterlands of southwest China? A sip of the water, and I would either attain enlightenment or get giardiasis.
Then there was the fact that I and several companions had just spent five hours that morning striding and sweating and clambering up the sheer side of a mountain. We had a guide with us, a construction worker named Tsering. We had also been joined by Ngawang, a young monk in red robes from a nearby monastery who was making his first pilgrimage to the lake.
The path had been hard to follow, weaving back and forth beneath a canopy of pine trees. The view opened up only after we emerged from the rhododendron groves covering the steepest part of the trail. We were greeted by a sweeping panorama of the snow peaks, including the 22,117-foot summit of Kawa Karpo, one of the holiest mountains among Tibetans.
After lunch in a high pasture, we forced our aching legs over a ridge and to the lake.
It was not what I had expected. Dull water lapped at the edges of the lake. Small hills, even duller in color, ringed the lake, which did not look much larger than one of the ponds in Central Park. There were no glaciers tumbling down from the mountains, no ice floes in the water. A small set of Tibetan prayer flags fluttered next to a pile of stones.
“So this is it?” said Shu Yang, a backpacker from Henan Province whom I had met at my guesthouse.
Then Ngawang dropped to the ground and prostrated himself before the lake. He pulled a book from a satchel and began reciting mantras. So high up were we, at nearly 15,000 feet, that the soft chanting seemed to float like incense into the clear blue sky.
I sat down and closed my eyes and listened. I began noticing things: The warmth of the afternoon sun on my face. The silence after Ngawang stopped chanting.
The minutes wore on. The silence deepened. Even the cries of birds seemed to be swallowed up by the void.
It was for a moment like this that I had made the long journey last fall to northern Yunnan Province from my home in Beijing — which has the dubious distinction of being both one of the most polluted and one of the most populous cities in the world.
Back home, looking at a map of the rugged Tibetan areas of western China, my eyes had fallen on the deep river valleys of Yunnan, where three of Asia’s great waterways come tumbling down from their glacial sources in the mountains of the high Tibetan plateau.
The Chinese authorities have always made it difficult for foreigners to travel in the Tibetan areas, but restrictions have gotten much worse since the protests and ethnic riots that erupted across the region in March 2008. In the last year, the government has occasionally closed off large swaths of western China to foreigners, including Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and the famous monastery of Labrang, in Gansu Province. Parts of northern and western Sichuan Province, long a favorite of backpackers, have also been shut off for months at a time. Ethnic tensions are still high, and the government has deployed soldiers and paramilitary units throughout the area.
I had heard that northern Yunnan was an exception. There was no unrest there last year. What’s more, the local government has adopted relatively progressive tourism policies, and foreigners have not had their access curbed. Ethnic Han Chinese tourists also seemed less fearful of going there.
Months after my trip, the Chinese government closed most Tibetan areas of China to foreigners as security forces prepared for possible unrest in March, during the 50th anniversary of a Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. But foreigners were still allowed to travel in northern Yunnan, and it remains the most accessible Tibetan region of China.
The centerpiece of the tourism in that corner of Yunnan is the Tibetan town of Gyalthang, called Zhongdian by the Chinese but renamed Shangri-La years ago by the local government to boost tourist numbers. The government had hoped to evoke the mythical lamasery that is the setting for James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon.”
My friend Tini and I made the town our first stop. The large and wealthy monastery on its outskirts, Ganden Sumtseling Gompa, one of the most important in the Tibetan world, was now being carefully renovated decades after the destruction of the Cultural Revolution. Tourists could walk among the buildings, looking into prayer halls as rows of monks sat reading their sutras.
But a sense of loss, so deeply ingrained in Tibetans, could still be felt here. An older monk, when he heard I was from the United States, turned to me and eagerly asked, “Have you seen the Dalai Lama?”
Back in town, Gyalthang seemed a little too manicured, with cafes in the renovated old quarter serving pizza to tour groups and souvenir shops hawking colorful pillow cushions. I wanted a rawer experience, something closer to what I had experienced years ago on the Tibetan plateau and in the mountains of Ladakh and Sikkim, both in India.
For that, I would have to go beyond Shangri-La, to the foot of the Kawa Karpo massif.
Tibetans consider snow mountains to be holy sites, life-giving forces, and Kawa Karpo is one of the most sacred. Tens of thousands of pilgrims come from far and wide each year to trek around the massif, gaining karma by repeated circumambulations. I was told most Tibetans do the circuit in under 10 days; foreigners usually take longer.
We only had a week off, so we decided to hike the “inner circuit,” a shorter walk that goes first from the valley of the Mekong River, called the Lancang here, to the secluded Tibetan village of Lower Yubeng, then to several sacred sites near the village. Among those are Mystic Lake and Mystic Waterfall. With names like that, the area promised no shortage of spiritual encounters.
AFTER we left Gyalthang, we spent two days getting to the trailhead village of Xidang, stopping first to view the Kawa Karpo massif at sunrise from the lookout point of Feilaisi. The next day, we hiked up to a sprawling glacier above the village of Mingyong. The glacier, the lowest in China, is retreating at an alarming rate because of climate change.
Standing on a platform above its white and blue crevasses, we could hear the crunching from its maw as ice shifted in the nether reaches.
Xidang was just a short drive from Mingyong, along a rutted road that ran along the stunning Mekong Valley. Villages with white Buddhist stupas dotted the valley walls. On the final stretch of road up to Xidang, our driver stopped at a monastery to burn juniper branches, unleashing an intensely fragrant smell that, for me, instantly evoked the Tibetan world.
No corner of the world was immune to change. For one thing, capitalist cooperatives had arrived here. Dozens of Tibetan horse handlers had formed such a cooperative at the trailhead to Yubeng. They charged tourists a fixed rate to carry people or luggage over the Nazongla Pass into Yubeng.
Tini and I wanted to walk, but not with our large backpacks, so we hired Aqinmu, a middle-aged Tibetan woman, to take our packs to Yubeng on her horse.
Most Chinese tourists opted to ride horses over, as did a group of Tibetan city slickers who wore cowboy hats. We saw them along the trail as we hiked up, their horses kicking dust in our faces. But the horses always outdistanced us, so we had the trail mostly to ourselves — just the birds and pine trees and blue sky for company. It was late October, the end of the good weather, but the days were still warm.
Living in Beijing does not do wonders for the lungs, I discovered. I huffed and puffed my way up to the 14,000-foot Nazongla Pass. It was anticlimactic. There were prayer flags and Tibetan horsemen and a soda stand in a small clearing, but no panoramic mountain views.
We didn’t get the views until we arrived at the village of Upper Yubeng. That and its sister village, Lower Yubeng, were nestled in a beautiful valley right at the foot of the Kawa Karpo range. Snow peaks pierced the sky in every direction. The best part was that people had to get here by foot or on horseback: roads had not been built yet, though no doubt many locals would appreciate easier transport options.
In recent years, Chinese backpackers had begun flocking to the valley. Locals were building wooden guesthouses in every corner of the two villages. We walked down to the very end of Lower Yubeng, where we found the Mystic Waterfall Lodge, one of the older and more popular guesthouses. The Tibetan owner, Aqinbu, had been putting up travelers for years in simple wooden rooms.
What the lodge lacked in creature comforts it made up for in the view: a small monastery, home to a lone monk, sat across from the lodge, and behind that rose the snow mountains.
“You won’t find a more beautiful spot in Yunnan,” Aqinbu said.
We happily threw off our boots and plopped down on our balcony. We sipped cups of tea while watching the snow peaks turn pink with the setting sun, then fade to blue as twilight set in.
The next day, Tini and I did a three-hour hike up to the Mystic Waterfall, in a cirque of mountains. The entire way, we met Tibetan pilgrims carrying bundles of food and green bamboo walking sticks. A grandfather in a gray suit walked next to his grandson, and a mother carried a baby in a sling over her back. “Tashi delek,” we said to each other — “Hello” in Tibetan.
Right before we reached the waterfall, we ran into Ngawang, a young monk wearing sunglasses and brandishing a digital camera. He was coming back from the falls. I had seen him at our lodge the night we arrived. He had taken a few days off from his religious studies to travel here with two Chinese friends.
“I’ve been to the waterfall seven times,” he said. “It’s a holy place, like so many other places here. Have you been to Mystic Lake?”
He pointed to somewhere high up the mountains, hidden in the trees. I shook my head.
“Neither have I,” he said. “Not many monks I know have gone. It’s a long walk and very far away.”
So the next day, we went.
