First Morning in China
Train Ride from Kunming to Jianshui
Our first morning in China, we take an early train. I watch out the window, alert as we move. I’ve never been to this country; I’m not sure what to look for. I’m staring at everything.
China is discussed in such superlatives in the United States: economically erupting, chokingly smoggy, totally surveilled behind the Great Firewall, phenomenally productive, excessive in class divide. The reputation– China as a modern legend– occludes the everyday. Setting aside government, business, and population, what’s here?
This story is the continuation of a series that begins here.
The terrain varies rapidly from the train window: dense fir forest, a cluster of soft-looking pines, a shrubby valley with ferns and leafy bushes. The train ignores the accordion-fold shape of the land, shooting through short tunnels where the hills rise, skimming on bridges over crop-dense valleys which drop precipitously below.
There is no wasted space in this landscape. Everything looks like someone’s harvest. At the edge of a city, varied crops grow lush in plots like oversized vegetable gardens.
We’re in Yunnan province, the far southwest of China. We’re taking the train from Yunnan’s main city, Kunming. Ert tells us that people from Beijing think that in Kunming, people still ride elephants– that’s how rural this part of China is considered.
By riding this train, we are headed out from Kunming to what people from there consider the boonies.
It’s an unusual first trip to China– completely skipping Beijing, Shanghai, or anywhere else I’ve heard of. Ert (my friend from college) invited me over dinner some months ago. He wanted to do some hiking out here, and speaks Mandarin, and was willing to plan the whole thing. So I jumped on board, and brought my parents and Jon, too.
The train itself has more amenities than I expect. The toilet is a glorified hole onto the tracks, but there are sinks where you can wash your hands. There is a spigot in each train car which dispenses boiling water, so people make tea and instant noodles. A trolley comes through selling food. Another takes away trash. We sit at a four-up with a table and look out the window.
The Lonely Planet chunk that covers Yunnan hasn’t been updated since 2009. But we check it anyway: we’re in one of the most racially diverse parts of China, it tells us. We will spend our next two weeks crossing through the towns that keep their distinct cultures.
Jon and I have been learning Mandarin from an app. Our grasp of the language is surprisingly functional after about 10 days of learning. We started practicing while riding trains in Japan, then spent the last week street-testing food words in Taiwan.
I think I have just enough language to talk about food and understand prices, if I need to. But I’ll let Ert handle negotiations and directions; I don’t think I can parse in real time. And I’m not sure how well even his facility will serve us; I read online that the area we’re heading into uses primarily local dialects anyway.
Farmers are in the field as we pass through Yuxi. A woman stands knee deep and bent from the waist digging in a flooded field of lotus. Fruit trees stand rigid, roots in chunky brown clay. Then, without transition, Yuxi is concrete and skyscraper buildings, one design copied over and over. The train pauses a few minutes and then moves on.
