Noodles and Selfies

你们好 !

I have been in China for 10 days now, it’s time for an update !

Hong Kong felt unreal after India. I arrived there exhausted, a bit lost between the skyscrapers, luxury shops and… sidewalks ! Like real sidewalks for people to walk on without getting scared of being ran over by a crazy honking truck every minute. And traffic lights. And garbage bins.

When I was there my Peruvian friend Andres, who now lives in Macau, came for a day. It made me feel even weirder. I was in Hong Kong, with a friend from Peru, speaking Spanish and looking out for trucks and rickshaws that didn’t exist. I still really liked wandering around the city, between the buildings and markets. I could not stay for long though, because it is crazy expensive. So I quickly moved on to Guilin, in China.

The culture shock was real.

I started by noticing that something was wrong with my phone, and I soon remembered that it is the censorship. No google and no facebook in China, which means no Gmail, messenger, instagram, whatsapp, maps, play store for apps, Google Translate or something as simple as doing a search on Google. Many other websites are blocked such as couchsurfing, WordPress blogs and so on. I’m not on social media anymore but with no whatsapp and no gmail I had basically no way to tell my family that I had arrived in China. I realized how dependent we’ve become on technology and it kind of put me in a weird mood. I ended up meeting another French girl who helped me download a vpn, which is an app that gives a fake localisation for your device so that the “great firewall of China” (yep, that’s how it’s called) cannot know you are actually in China and block your phone. It is of course illegal.

Apart from that I’ve been struggling to put words on how I feel about China. The first place I visited, Guilin, is a small city crossed by the river Li, along which old men fish all day. There’s great tea and the food is awesome. It felt really peaceful. But.

Guilin and everywhere I’ve been in China for 10 days now seem very fake. Everything is like Disneyland. You have to pay to go to parks, climb hills, see lakes, enter temples… There are incentives to BUY things and CONSUME everywhere. And it is filled with Chinese tourists pushing everyone around with their selfie sticks. I quickly moved to Yunnan, a region at the very west of China, at the border with Tibet and Myanmar, that is the home of almost half of the minorities of China.

There I did a quick stop in Kunming, where I saw many old men and women playing games and dancing in the park (and tourists paying to take pictures with the seagulls and then paying to take pictures dressed up in traditional outfits) and then I went up to the Lugu Lake, that is supposed to be a still preserved area, home of the Mosuo people, one of the oldest and last matriarchal society on earth.

I was very surprised to have to pay an expensive fee to access the lake on a big parking lot where people were disguised as indigenous people to have tourists pay for pictures, and even more surprised when I saw entire buses of Chinese tourists coming down to the lake and having photoshoots on the local people’s boats, changing clothes and all!

I almost wanted to apologize to the local community and leave right away, but I was kind of stuck in that village until the next day anyway. I decided to make the most of it and woke up to see the sunrise and take a hike by myself before all the buses arrived with their hordes of selfie-takers.

Anyway, it is not what I came to find here and there is definitely no way to have a cultural exchange and to find out more about the Mosuo traditions. It’s a shame, because the lake is indeed a beautiful place, to which one arrives from a splendid road that goes through villages and fields where you can see actual local people in actual traditional outfits. Along the 4 hours trip (that used to be 10 hours until the road was changed last year, which partly explains why there are so many tourists now) the faces slowly change : more tanned, red cheeks, one can really recognize the traits of the mountain/nepali communities.

On another note the Chinese people I’ve met are all really kind and try to be helpful although most of them don’t speak a word of English. It is very frustrating because they also don’t understand a word of Mandarin when I speak it, despite my 3 years of classes in high school. When I manage to buy a train ticket or ask a question the satisfaction is great. Apart from that they burp, fart and spit all the time and don’t give a shit about it, and the public toilets have no doors so we just crouch one behind another and do our thing. It is also a very safe country and no one cares about a woman wandering alone wearing whatever she wants and carrying a big camera. It’s good to be able to let my guard down a bit.

After lake lugu I went to do the tiger leaping gorge trek. It is a 2-days trek in the mountain (highest point is 2360 meters, do the conversion to feet!) and it was truly beautiful. And no annoying tourists there, since they all do the 1-day tour by bus that just goes down the gorge to the selfie-point. It felt great to just walk in nature and enjoy the peacefulness. It snowed at night and I woke up to the most amazing view of the snowy mountain tops. At the halfway guesthouse I also got a call from the women-led organic farm I was trying to reach and got the news that I can go there to volunteer for a week, with the promise to spend at least a day with a woman farmer from the Yi minority. So I decided to skip Shangri-la, which I feared was going to be too Disneyland-like as well and decided to head back to Kunming to reach the farm on Thursday. I can’t wait!

Give me some news about you, your life, your projects and your potential visits to France in the near future when I’m back there.

Love to you all,
Lucile