Travels With Dongbo

Today Beijing is unquestionably part of China. However it was not until the Tang Dynasty 618–907, that it was wrested from the control of nomads to the north, and named Youzhou. And it was lost again later to the Jin, Mongols, Manchu and Japanese. China’s borders have been shifting for centuries. Interesting, in light of the current heated discussion about Tibet and its historical relationship to ‘China’. Was, or is ‘China’ a historical ‘country? Or a civilization in state of perpetual flux?

Our weather website WeatherDock has continually forcast rain for Yunnan, but every day is clear with bight sun! Must find a local weather website that is more useful. With the 蒼山 Cangshan towering in the west and 洱海 streaching to the east, Dali is a great place to welcome in the New Year.

風花雪月 Fēnghuāxuěyuè is how 徐霞客 Xu Xiake described Dali when he visited here in 1638. Dali was the political and cultural center of Yunnan for more than 500 years as the capital of the famous  Nanzhao 738-902  and Dali 937-1253 kingdoms. We find much poetry composed about the mountains, lake and the striking three pagodas. 

This evening on 人民路 Renminlu, a few houses down from our inn, the Tibetan Cafe where we stay, at the Bad Monkey Bar, a group of young hippies were playing guitar, mandolin and standup bass and singing bluegrass, French ditties and country outside in the afternoon sun. This was too much to resist so I fetached my travel guitar and joined them for an out of jamming. It turned out they are French Canadian students from Quebec who have been studying Chinese in Kunming.

Being in Kunming is a great escape from Shanghai! And Wenhua Xiang, the short road near Kunming Daxue, is a fine place to unwind after a day of visiting historical temples and other sites…coffee and WiFi to work on images and text uploading.

Kunming’s history is filled with interesting events and charcters. It was here, just a short distance from the Prague Cafe where this is being written, that the last Ming claimant to the throne, the Southern Ming Emperor Yongli, was killed by the Ming turncoat general 吳三桂 Wu Sangui after being apprehended in Burma where he had fled for refuge. Wu Sangui was ordered to persue Emperor 永曆 and bring him back, which he did. But for some reason not clear when they had treked all the way back to Kunming, Wu slaugtered him here in Kunming. This deed reportedly took place  on nearby 金山 Jinshan, but the Manchus, fearfull of a Ming revival, kept the details secret and no one knows  exactly where and how he was put to death.

At the nearby Yuantongchansi is a cave where the Qing poet 孫髯翁 Sun Ranweng spent his last years living in a cave behind the temple, He is particularly famous for writing at the nearby Daguanlou, on the shore of Dian lake, China’s longest linked couplets.

In Chinese imperial times Yunnan was on the periphery of Chinese culture and for much of the time ruled by the non Chinese Nanzhao and Dali Dynasties, and therefore not very fertile soil for discovering classical poets and poems. But Chinese literature is powerful and spreads whereever there are eduacated Chinese. Perhaps it is no surprise that there is much Chinese poetry here, written by 貶謫 banished officials, failed scholars, the occasional Buddhist and Daoist monk, 隱士 hermits, and Chinese military officers. Two we have tracked down already, after just two days here, are 孫髯翁 Sun Ranweng, a 隱士 hermit, 楊慎Yáng Shèn (升庵 Shēng Ān) an exile in Kunming, the Ming turncoat general 吳三桂 Wu Sangui who murdered the last Sountern Ming emperor, and Wu’s concubine 陳圓圓 Chén Yuányuán

And we have met again our old friend the extraordinary Ming traveler 徐霞客 Xu Xiake. On nearby 西山 we came on a memorial hall to him.

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Built between 1726 and 1736 by the Manchu emperor Yongzheng as a tomb for the great Mongolian Living Buddha Undur Gegeen Zanabazar, sculptor and close friend of the Emperor Kangxi. It was heavily damaged by the communist purges in 1937, although still a great part survived.
The monastery was being restored by Unesco from 1975 until reopening in 1990. There are a number of young monks under 10 years old from orphanages around Mongolia. In October, 2007, the main hall is being repaired. Not a single adult monk to be seen. Suddenly two young acolytes about 8 years old appeared and beckoned us to follow them. They carried a heavy ring of keys and proceeded to open, one by one, the locked halls, finally opening Zanabazar’s temple where his mumified body once sat…perhaps it is still there encased in the statue behind the altar.
Quite amazing that these young kids have the extraordinary responsibility to open for the public some of Mongolia’s most valuable treasures!!

Today we left Karakorum after lunch and headed north on an eight hour drive over mostly rutted and washed out tracks snaking thoough valley after valley. Our driver Jagaa seems to be wound backwards. When the path is relatively smooth he slows down. When is is heavily rutted or rough with razor sharp rocks he speeds up, perhaps in the hope to put it behind him quickly. The result at 5pm is a broken tierod in the middle of an empty valley. only a few eagles swoop overhead as Jagaa sturggles mightly for an hour and finally succeeds to replace it.

The sun sets ans we struggle on munching on a few cookies. Intermittently we spy a few isolated lights and soon leave them behind. It looks like we may spend the night in our Mitsubishi Delica van. Jagaa drives on. We begin to doubt even he knows where we are headed. At 8:30pm a few lights glow in the distance and at 9 we enter a small mostly dark scraggly village. Jagaa asks directions and we pull up to a small one story shack. The word ‘hotel’ appears in our headlights.

With foreboding we enter and to our complete surprise find it warm and comfortable. It is a family hotel and well managed. In a few moments we are enjoying a good meal and then to sleep in comfortable beds.

A pleasant three hour flight from Olgii to Ulaanbataar, and after one day rest we board our Mitsubishi Delica van for the jolting 9 hour drive to Karakorum, the ancient capital of Genghis Khan. The first four hours were particularly uninteresting because the scenery was dull and the trails, not roads, rutted and rocky. This is well traveled country and at times there were up to a dozen competing trails snaking over the rolling steppe.

Traveling by jeep and other 4-wheel drive vehicles in Mongolia is a unique experience! Outside the few major cities there are no formal roads, just multiple rutted tracks snaking across the steppes. If Jagaa, our driver, driver didn’t like the track he was following, he just drove over the steppes making a new track. It is a bone shaking ride as you lurch wildly from side to side and up and down, grabbing whatever is near for support. I commented that this is ‘Mongolian Massage’ and our driver Jagaa laughed loudly. The land is alternately sandy and covered with sharp jagged rocks. During our travels we had several flat tires and one broken tie rod, which Jagaa replaced by himself in the middle of nowhere.

The tourist traffic to Karakorum, or rather Kharkhorin as it is called in Mongolian, is pretty much shut down for the winter. Only one ger camp is still functioning, the Riverside, so we had little choice. It looked dead but in the dining room we found one retired Englishman and his Asian wife, the only other occupants for the night.

Olgii is one of the saddest town I have ever visited. There is only one hotel that has hot water showers, the Duman Hotel, and there is no place to get breakfast! At 9am the dusty streets are still mostly empty. There is a market of sorts which is an ugly assortment of metal boxes, old shipping containers and a few old railroad cars which serve as stores. The only things on sale are clothes, tools and dusty produce…mostly potatoes and cabbage.

There is one good Turkish restaurant in town, open for luch and dinner, but two nights in a row is too much!

This is the fourth year for the Eagle Festival in the town of Sagsai, a 30km, half hour’s drive from Olgii. It is a two day event, the first day concentrating on various events which test the hunters and their eagles. In one event the hunter leaves his eagle on a nearby hill and rides his horse down to the flat and then calls his eagle. When properly executed the eagle swoops down and lands on the hunters forearm. another event has the eagles catching a fox skin dragged behing the hunter’s horse.

“Eagle hunting is a Kazak tradition dating back 2,000 years. Marc Polo mentioned it in this travels. Female eagles are almost always used as they are one third heavier than the males and far more aggressive. Young birds around two years old are caught in nearby valleys, fattened up and then broken by being tied to a wooden block so that thye fall when they try to fly away.
After two days they are exhausted and ready for training, which involves being kept on a pole called a tugir, and catching small animal skins or lures called shinga. The eagles are trained to hunt marmots, small foxes and wolves (eagles have vision eight times more acute than humans), and release them to the hunter, who clubs the prey to death. Part of the meat is given to the eagles as a reward.

Tools of the trade include tomaga (hood), bialai (gloves) and khundag (blanket) to keep the bird warm. If well trained, a bird can live and hunt for about thirty years. Most hunters train several birds during their lifetimes and release their birds into the wild after eight years.” From Lonely Planet, Mongolia.

On a pristine clear day we jeep down from the mountains and follow rivers from one valley to the next. At luchtime we stop at Singly (White Village), a small oasis village surrounded with green grass meadows and lovely green trees, the first trees we have seen on this trip. Mongolia’s mountains were stripped clean of trees centuries ago. Looks very much like a ‘wild west’ town out of a 1930’s Holywood movie. Bachichan’s sister lives here and we have lunch at her place…two kind of cheeze, two kinds of butter, bread, chai, yogurt and instant noodles. Delicious!

At 3 we arrive at Blue Wolf’s ger (yurt) camp in Sagsai and check into a shabby two bed ger for the Eagle Festival that starts tomorrow. We were told by Blue Wolf in Olgii that he ger were $30 per person per night. Expensive for these accomdations, particularly since the public shower has no hot water as promised. By 7 the ger camp is full and we are asked to vacate our ger because we did not have reservations! Naturally we refuse, because the staff checked us in three hours ago.