Migrant Worker

A few days back, I noticed that a couple of Kunming blogs covered the 18 Oddities of Yunnan aka Yunnan shiba guai or 云南十八怪. I’ve been collecting real-life photos of these “guai” occurances for a while, but for some reason it never occurred to me to post them up here.

So here goes nothing!

Eggs are sold in grass-chains 鸡蛋用草串着买

This was taken in Xinjie village market, Yuanyang township. Our bus got in at the crack of dawn, and as we climbed uphill through town (it’s built on a mountain), we saw dozens of grandmothers with heavy bags of produce heading in a certain direction. After following them to the market, we got to watch them set up. The area is fairly isolated and very little Mandarin is spoken, especially among the women. Yi and Hani people make up the bulk of the population, and it was clear that many were bargaining with sign language.

Find an official list of the oddities here in Chinese and here in English

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Environmental Education
Originally uploaded by PEAC.

Pesticide Eco-Alternatives Center (PEAC), where I have been working for the last year, is an organization on the move. Since I started, we have gained 5 staff members, published a number of journal articles, won grant support from a few new donors, and entered what feels like a new phase in the organization’s development. There are two professors and a number of PhD and Masters candidates on staff, strong sense of quality and ethics during research, lots of experience in the field and running trainings, and a very transparent and well managed office. In fact, in my opinion from the last year here, PEAC’s biggest challenge has been its ability to sell itself to the public.

Successful American NGOs are defined by their ability to work the press. In China, keeping your head down is sometimes a more effective strategy. But on the whole, positive international attention is very beneficial to any organization, because it translates into research partners, donors, awards, and the like. This is why I am proud to announce that PEAC recently hired someone to develop a new website (coming soon… very soon… any day now).

In the process of writing the quarterly newsletter, I stumbled upon the photo archives and am working on uploading them to flickr for the newly minted Pesticide Eco-Alternatives Center Photo Archive. Keep watching this space for updates — I’ll fill it in for the next month, and then turn it over to PEAC to maintain. With only a few exceptions, these are NOT MY PHOTOS. In fact, it is an extensive collection of pictures from multiple staff members on a number of cameras spanning more than four years. There are some amazing shots of rural China up and coming soon — the kind of pictures that you can’t take unless you are involved in communities that rarely see anyone from the outside.

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Getting there: There are no railroads (and certainly no airports) heading to Yuanyang so your options basically consist of a bus or renting a little van and driver (honestly, it’s hard to think up an appropriate way to express 面包车). The bus departs from the bus station near the train station on Beijing rd, and as of this writing, there is a 7:30 PM and 8 PM as well as a few morning options.

Logistical note — I tend to get my tickets from the Camellia hotel travel office. They sell bus and train tickets, and the booking fee is super low (5 RMB). They speak standard Mandarin (can be a challenge in Kunming) and they do have a few staff that can speak at least basic English. I can’t call up the bus station and ask about schedule and ticket availability, but I can do that with Camellia. Obviously, you could buy your tickets at Kunming’s bus stations, but there are three, so if you’re not sure which one your bus of choice leaves from, it can be a pain. I have no reason to plug this place other than my satisfaction with their service. Give them a call, 0871-3166600.

On the Road: As of this writing, the bus first reaches the administrative seat of Yuanyang County which is in a township called Nansha 南沙. You can find nicer hotels here, and it may be simpler to arrange for guided tours of the terraces. If this is your final destination, however, I recommend taking the daytime busses. The night busses get here at about 4 AM.

I chose to stay on the bus until the bitter end, arriving at the old administrative seat of Yuanyang County, a village now known as Xinjie 新街. It takes about 9 hours to reach Yuanyang Xinjie, and they let you sleep in on the overnight bus once you arrive, since it’s the last stop on the Kunming-Yuanyang bus. While a bit more rustic than Nansha, it is also a lot more atmospheric. If you’re on the night bus and you want to go on to Xinjie, be cautious not to get off too early in Nansha. Yuanyang Xinjie is the last stop, and is VERY mountainous, when you perceive that you’re on a big mountain, you’ve arrived.

Room and Board: There are only a couple of hotels in this town, with the nicest doubles topping out around 200 RMB. (Dorm beds for 20 RMB in the Government Hotel, rooms are fine and clean but the shared bathrooms are stinky and the showers are completely awful). We didn’t see any hostel options although apparently there are some Hong Kong people running one somewhere. There is only one pseudo-coffee shop (think Nescafe) as of this writing. The local snack food/street food is amazing, but if you’re looking for a nice big dinner, you may be disappointed.

Once you’re there, you probably want to go back to bed for a few hours to recover from the bus. Never fear, rice terraces are best at sunset anyway, and given the UV in Yunnan province, you’re not missing out on many good photos at high noon (plus you’re avoiding skin cancer).

Finding the Terraces: This is honestly the most challenging part of a trip to Yuanyang - actually getting out to the terraces themselves.

The first problem is that there don’t seem to be any published maps of the area available in Xinjie in any language. On the web, there are only a few hand drawn ones in Chinese. There was a rough but printed/official map on a sign in our hotel’s main lobby. I took a picture, photo-shopped it into plain black lines, translated, and voila! A bilingual map was born.

Feel free to grab it in full size from Flickr, but please comment or shoot me an email if you do, I’m just curious who is heading down. It’s not authoritative but it’s better than what you will find in Xinjie. (Do any guidebooks have maps of this place?? It’s not in the Lonely Planet.)

Second, you probably want to actually see the freaking fields. There are some right below town, but not much to look at. Our hotel had a big sign describing a tour bus that you can get on at 6:30 AM in Nansha and see a huge number of sites in a day. We didn’t do this for a number of reasons, including unwillingness to spend all day on a bus filled with Chinese tourists on an exacting schedule. On the other hand, if you really want to see ALL of these places and you only have one day, it may be a decent choice.

Alternatively, you can arrange to rent a van and driver or even a motorcycle cart for the day. Based on what I know about other areas of Yunnan, the van shouldn’t run more than 150 RMB/full day of everywhere you want to go in the area. Try to get them down to 100 RMB. The 3 wheeled car/cyclo type options will be cheaper, but also less comfortable and more limited in scope. It is also very easy to hike out and hitch around a bit. 5-10K rides back to town will run you about 10 RMB in the passing tourist vans, or more like 3-4 in passing motorcycle carts. Make friends with the local peasants and you may get a free ride (but it might not end where you expected).

Getting Away: Here is the bus map from Yuanyang Xinjie. (Click through to Flickr to expand it).

You can get very regular busses to Nansha (New Yuanyang - 45 min) and Jianshui (About 4 hrs, very pretty drive). A few busses head to Kunming direct each day. You can also bus on to Hekou (Vietnam Border) or Jinghong (Xishuangbanna) from here.

Further Info: This is as good as it gets in English, from Maciej Tomczak on PhotoTramp. Great info on why to go there (no tourists) and how to take good photos once you are there.

I found this website on Nansha and this one on Xinjie (Chinese) to be pretty helpful, although it doesn’t say much more than I just did. Useful for the few links to other nearby cities as well. If you are into local street food and can handle spicy stuff, or if you like Chinese and South East Asian desserts, GO TO JIANSHUI on your way down or back (4 hr bus from Yuanyang or Kunming). The food was great, and there are cool Confucian museums and traditional courtyard houses and gardens.

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Yunnan province’s prime location (see map) means that we sit right on the intersection of China (world’s fastest growing economy) and Southeast Asia (world’s premier destination for opiates, sex tourism, and, in the case of Myanmar, scary governments). In the last few weeks, this crossroads has been particularly busy, with the following fascinating news items:

Gambling! Asia Times reports on Mong La, an infamous gambling destination that was apparently “shut down” by the Chinese government in 2005 because too many officials were unloading their stolen public money there, is just across our border with Burma. The last time I was down that way (Fall 2004) you could hardly uncurl yourself out of the cramped overnight bus cot before people would swarm you, offering to take you across the border to Mong La (illegally):

According to people familiar with the situation, China briefly sent a small number of troops into the remote region to enforce the travel ban and pressure casino operators to close down their operations. At one point, Chinese officials threatened to cut Mong La’s power supply, which is provided by Yunnan-based electricity generators. That hasn’t deterred Lin Mingxian, more widely known by the alias Sai Leun, the town’s overlord, who currently commands a 2,000-3,000-strong militia known as the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA). Sai Leun is believed to have financed much of the city’s gambling infrastructure in the late 1990s from cash he allegedly earned in the narcotics trade.

Nothing like the PRC to kill a good party. Anyway, this guy Sai Leun sounds pretty cool. He’s building a new set of casinos specifically designed to allow corrupt officials to continue unloading China’s public money without leaving home:

From the comfort of their homes in Beijing, Kunming or Shanghai, Chinese gamblers watch the tables via a live video feed over the Internet and place their bets through agents on location at the jungle casinos. The arrangement, says the casino operator, allows the players and casino operators to circumvent recent Chinese efforts to prevent the outflow of cash into Myanmar’s black markets.

The whole article is worth a read, because the freelance reporters who wrote it basically schmoozed around with this guy for a while and got to check out his whole operation. I don’t know who to root for here, though, since all the parties (Burmese and Chinese governments, drug-dealing casino-owning warlord) are not exactly morally upstanding.

Drugs! While we’re on the topic of morally questionable, let’s talk about China’s latest effort at international aid:

By this June, southwestern Yunnan Province has helped its bordering Cambodia and Laos to plant over 900,000 mu (60,000 hectares) cash-bearing crops to relieve their dependence on growing opium poppy, said sources with the local government. Sun Dahong, deputy director of the provincial department of public security said on Friday at the mobilization conference on poppy alternative development, that by the end of last year, the Yunnan government has developed 700,000-mu cash-bearing crops in the northern part of Cambodia and Laos, among which nearly 400,000 mu soil had been planted poppy originally.

Sounds like a great idea, and it might help to cut down on that heroin soaked panties issue that has been plagueing us lately. On the other hand, I just have to wonder how effective this program is going to be, since the Chinese are helping impoverished farmers replace opium poppy with “grain, rubber, rice, sugar cane, longan, tea and corn,” and the program detailed doesn’t seem to extend beyond planting new crops. Opium grown in these regions is very valuable and mostly destined for “export” to major cities or richer countries (China), whereas crops like grain and corn aren’t likely to be worth a whole lot. Another critical issue is infrastructure, longan requires efficient transportation to prevent spoilage, rubber and sugar cane aren’t that valuable unless you can do the value-added processing somewhere nearby. I seriously doubt that there are adequate roads, refrigerated trucks, or processing factories in rural mountainous regions of northern Laos.

Thinking about this problem reminded me of a blog entry by Sarah Chayes I’d read in the NY Times last month (I think it may only be available through Times Select) called “Why Farmers Grow Poppies.” Although she was writing about Afghanistan, her arguments ring true here in East too. She adds water scarcity to the list of motivations leading farmers to grow poppy, and then mentions:

Opium eradication campaigns target the lowest rung of the opium economy, the struggling farmers. Yet well-known traffickers strut around town, flaunting their connections with senior officials. They drive late-model S.U.V.’s. They buy up property at fantastic prices and build wedding cake villas — the kind that used to be rented out to al-Qaeda members.

Development! Apparently Kunming will be even more connected, between plans for a superhighway between here and Bangkok, and the proposed railroad line(s) between here and Singapore. So much for our reputation as a dull backwater:

China, which last month launched a rail track from Beijing to Tibet, has also shown renewed interest in ASEAN’s plan for a rail line spanning 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) from Singapore to the Chinese city of Kunming […] A rail line already runs from Singapore to Bangkok. From Bangkok, Ong said there are plans for two separate rail lines to Kunming. One rail track will snake across Cambodia and Vietnam, with a connecting track to Laos, while the other line will cut west through Myanmar.

This is going to make it a lot easier for us to get our opiates here in Kunming, just a comfy overnight train ride away. Not that procuring opiates in Kunming is difficult at the moment. This migrant worker has heard a few stories from her friends in the HIV prevention/needle exchange field.

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