TRAVEL

Subject: Travel along Mekong River Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000
From: [email protected] Newsgroups: rec.travel.asia

DALI, YUNNAN PROVINCE, CHINA--The former Coca Cola Cafe here in Dali would have seemed a highly unlikely place to arouse the ire of one of the world's most powerful multinational corporations, headqartered eight thousand miles away in Atlanta.
First of all, the cafe was a hole in the wall--or more precisely, a narrow space between two walls that were covered with graffiti left by several years of backpacking tourists. Secondly, Dali is not exactly an easy place to get to. It requires a torturous ten-hour drive down the famous Burma Road, starting at Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. Yunnan, located just above Laos and Burma, is a gloriously scenic land of rivers and lakes and snow-capped mountains, populated by 26 different ethnic minorities.

But two years ago Xiang Xia, a 25-year-old woman who speaks perfect, unaccented American English even though she's never set foot in the United States, received an official-looking letter from Beijing. Cease and desist, the Chinese lawyer representing Coca Cola warned her, you're violating our trademark. Xiang wrote back, pointing out that in Chinese, "coca" means delicious and "cola" means fun, a perfectly appropriate description of her cafe. Besides, she noted, the cafe started up years before the first can of Coke ever showed its red-and-white face in Dali. But lawyers are not easily deterred, and today Xiang's "Yunnan Cafe" sits in spiffy new quarters a few doors up from the source of all the controversy.
Now, the rest of the world is about to join the Coca Cola Company in discovering Dali. By the end of this year, Dali will have an airport. Instead of arriving bone-weary, covered with dust, hearts pounding because of the kamikaze Chinese truck drivers who attempted to run them off the road, tourists will be able to step out of the 737s of Yunnan Airlines after a mere 35-minute flight from Kunming. Merchants and hotel keepers might be cheering the coming of the planes, but not the rest of Dail, because Dali Airport could spell the end of one of the last true paradises left on earth.

Dali is the last unspoiled vestige of what I call the international hippie circuit," a series of stopovers dating back to the 1960s, all including cafes like Xiang's with menus that feature brown-bread toast, yogurt shakes, and banana pancakes. Today, Bali, Jojakarta, Phuket, Kathmandu and the others are mobbed with tourists and bedeviled with pollution. But Dali remains what it always was--an ancient town of tile roofs and stone buildings sitting at 6200 feet in a spectacular setting. Behind Dali are the Cangshan Mountains, whose 19 peaks averaging 13,000 feet serve as a dramatic backdrop. At Dali's feet is Erhai Lake, with its medieval fishing villages and yet another mountain range on the opposite side.
Erhai Lake is hardly the source of the Mekong River; the Mekong starts hundreds of miles to the north as a stream on the Tibetan plateau. But the lake does feed the Mekong through a tributary called the Xier River. And unhappily, the crystal-clear waters of Erhai Lake pick up along the way to the Mekong the effluent of a paper mill, which, like all industries in China, tend to disregard any environmental considerations. In the roaring gorge where the Xier meets the Mekong, the Mekong gets its first substantial pollutants, to be added to an uncountable number of times in its 2000-mile journey along the borders of Burma and Thailand, and through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to the South China Sea.

In planning my trip, I got drugs to prevent and treat malaria, researched the dangers of dengue fever, wrote friends in Cambodia for advice about avoiding Khmer Rouge bullets, and anxiously read articles about this year's massive monsoon flooding in Indochina, which could lead to an outbreak of dangerous diseases. But determined to begin in a relaxing place, I nominated Dali to be the Mekong's spiritual source, if not its physical one. Not that Dali's three pitiful hotels aid the process of relaxation.
The original two hotels recently received real names, but locals still call them Number One and Number Two Guesthouse, their former designations in the best tradition of socialist nomenclature. Number Two, now the Red Camelia, features 40-watt naked light bulbs, towels reduced to rags from years of use, filthy worn carpeting, and wafting over everything the distinct odor of communal toilets from the dormitory-style accommodations in a second building. A Dali resident told me there's an old Chinese saying that can be applied to these dormitories, as well as to many walks through Chinese cities: "You don't need to use your eyes to find a bathroom, you can use your nose." He quickly added, "And foreigners have big noses." Number One, Dali Hotel, proved to be somewhat better when I stayed there two years ago, but the hot water--which came out of the taps marked "cold"--appeared literally half an hour after I turned on the faucets full force.
Now I'm at the Golden Flower, opened just two months ago and already well on its way to becoming a hulk. The carpeting, already filthy, is starting to pull up from the floors, and the moldy-smelling bathroom fixtures are cracked and stained with rust. The ambiance isn't helped by those wretched Chinese trucks, which barrel through the narrow street outside my window just as they do along the Burma Road, their ear-piercing air horns blasting pedestrians and assorted livestock out of the way. (Every few miles along the Burma road, the remains of a truck can be seen wrapped a tree or overturned at the bottom of a ravine. That doesn't seem to deter the survivors.)

But there's lots to compensate for the hotels. The visitor who climbs a bit into the foothills of the Cangshans gets a five-star view: the tile roofs of Dali, the lush green of the rich farmland surrounding Dali fed by 18 rivers turmbling down from the mountains, and the emerald lake with little villages on its shore. The city is filled with traditional Chinese wooden shophouses, painted red, featuring ornately carved latticework. The family sleeps upstairs and sells its wares downstairs. Almost all the shops are devoted to luring tourists, but the shopkeepers--of the colorfully dressed Bai minority that predominate in Dali--are so refreshingly shy and naive that they have no idea of how to pressure foreigners into making purchases. Their reaction to a fast-talking, hard-bargaining foreigner is to shrug and smile sweetly.
And in this land of breathtaking scenery, there isn't a postcard for sale. What Dali residents, ostensibly isolated from the rest of the world, do for entertainment is a bit bizarre. On the main street, stereo speakers at one of the shops blast out black American rap music, competing with American rock at other shops. During my first visit, the Dali Cultural Center hung a huge banner across the main street showing drawings of two-headed men and other freaks. I bit and paid the admission--only to run out ten seconds later when I discovered the "cultural exhibit" consisted of deformed fetuses in jars. Now the Cultural Center has reverted to an even more ignominious use--a karaoke parlor and beauty parlor, two essentials for the Taiwanese and Hong Kong tourists drawn to Dali in increasing numbers.

I prefer to spend my evenings in the restaurants and cafes. Foreigners Street, bearing a striking resemblance to the Freak Street of Kathmandu 20 years ago, is endlessly entertaining. With names like Red Star Cafe and Mike's Hard Rock Cafe, its restaurants serve as a haven for young European backpackers puffing a joint or two to come down from their harrowing three-day bus rides from Tibet or train rides from Vietnam. When I ate breakfast at the Old Wooden House Cafe, the waitress, finding that I was an American, a rare species in Dali, practically embraced me. She moonlighted as an English teacher, she informed me, and therefore I could put away my phrase book and have a serious discussion. It didn't take long to understand why so many Chinese say they learned English from the Voice of America rather than from school teachers. Despite being both a waitress and an English teacher, this woman didn't understand the worlds "check" or "bill." The accommodating restaurateurs of Dali aren't about to confine themselves to Chinese food. Xiang's Yunnan Cafe offers beef and bean burritos, pepperoni pizza (surprisingly good), Indian curries, and falafel with yogurt sauce. Prices are unreal; two people can pig out for three or four dollars, including lots of beer. The most expensive item on the Yunnan's menu is an eight-slice pizza for $1.50. An elaborate omelette is 60 cents, French onion soup 35 cents, lasagna with meat sauce 95 cents.

Lawrence Ling, the head of a government-owned Dali travel agency, is another illustration that Dali has entered the real world even before the first airplane lands. Ling, who speaks Japanese, Russian and English, was a Shanghai resident sent to Dali during the Cultural Revolution to work in the countryside; he took one look and never left. "I prefer staying here to going anywhere else," he says. "I have a Chinese friend who went to America a year ago. She had been an accountant for an Australian bank in Shanghai. Now she's washing dishes in a restaurant. I sent her a fax, but she couldn't fax back because she doesn't have the money. She wants to return, but is afraid that if she comes back to Shanghai that quickly she'll lose too much face."
Ling has become a computer freak, so much so that he wouldn't agree to an interview unless I included his e-mail address so that he could make reservations or just talk to people ([email protected]). In a country where telephones barely work, and in a city that tourists consider so isolated it's at the other end of the earth, he has tapped into the White House through the Internet.

hotel brokers - heavy discounts on hotel rooms
Travel Channel - general reference
Internet Travel Network - be your own travel agent.

Airlines

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