Happy Christmas from Bangkok

Happy Christmas from Bangkok, from Bob and Claire and Lucky. P-bear, Lai Lai and Foster send their best wishes from Tucson.

We’ll celebrate by crossing the International Date Line on Christmas Day. Does that mean we get Christmas twice?

Happy Christmas

Claire and Bob Rogers

PS. See a video of us having a look-back at our Shangri-la journey from Bangkok, Christmas Eve day.

No Cars or Trucks in this part of the Mekong Delta

Mid Afternoon Shade Hammock and Soda Break (check out the 7UP bottle

We are enjoying our first day in the Mekong delta; the ferry crossings, river views, the traditional, and rapidly changing ways of life. We hope to post some videos as we cycle upriver on what we think is a riverside tiny road. We’ll give it a go tomorrow.

Ferry Crossing in the Mekong Delta

Pretty Girls Everywhere!

Man Praying in a Temple

This interesting thing about this is there were twice as many people before I took out the camera to video. Chinese do not like to be photographed as a part of a crowd, and yet they always like to be a part of a crowd. I wonder if it has to do with how much they are under surveillance, or think they are?

We took a detour after the city of Shangri-la, deep back into the mountains where the non-Tibetan peoples live. Many of the villages are prosperous, and the spirit and cooperation of the people is inspiring. We will have many more still pictures soon; this is a very very beautiful, if remote, area.

First Class Care

Bob:
Yesterday we took a little detour on our way into Lijaing – to the hospital. We crashed. A combination of a long day, with 1200 more meters of climbing, a patch of water laid down by the cooling water of a truck’s brakes, a little bit of clay, and down we went at about 30kph.

Claire was not responding at first and I got her out of traffic carefully, in case any bones were broken (none). I can’t explain how I felt seeing her, barely moving, having trouble hearing me, or answering to her name.  She finally came around, and I got her sitting upright and talking coherently. I checked her eyes for dilation or wandering, and she could focus and had no double vision (we’ve been through this before).

A motorcyclist helped direct traffic as I dragged Zippy to the edge. I started to search for the first aid kit, and by then Claire was thinking clearly enough to tell me where to find it. Before I could start cleaning her abrasions, a van full of police arrived. My first thought was that we were in even more trouble than the crash aftermath, but they were great. “We take you to hospital,” said with authority, had an amazingly calming effect. They commandeered a small pickup, and loaded Zippy in. We wondered if we’d ever see him again, until we saw one of the policemen get into the truck.

Claire:
It’s really frustrating having to admit you need help, but when the police came and said “hospital” I knew we probably should go, even though it meant transporting Zippy some other way, struggling to communicate with doctors or nurses, arriving in an unfamiliar town not under your own power, and worst of all, losing your bearings.

Since I’d lost a minute or two, I had a lot of questions for Bob and it took me a while to come out of the fog that makes you think you’re having a bad dream. I remember knowing we were going down, but that’s all.

At the hospital, we had our scrapes swabbed. They thought my nose might be broken, but I think my glasses just gouged it. I took the hit evenly between shoulder and hip. Bob got it pretty bad on the knee, but it hasn’t swollen. Bob noticed the doctor watching me for signs of brain trauma, and from previous experience, he knew to wake me in the middle of the night to make sure I knew who and where I was. We’re both a little stiff and sore today, so we’ll take an extra day in our three star hotel. (Total hospital bill: $6)

We’ll post our days in the back country soon. Beautiful…

Wisn this sign had been before that curve!

You might wonder why we don’t find better accommodations? The next Bingwan was 84 kilometers, and 1500 meters up the road, a hard all day ride. Sometimes the basics seem awfully nice after a long hard day, with another one waiting.

But there is a change. The prayer flags, stupas and monasteries are fewer, the flags more likely to be tattered and faded, and the architecture increasingly Han and not Tibetan. There have been a few instances of architecture new to us, indicating we are entering an area of more diverse ethnicity. Groups of women walk in brightly decorated dresses and several varieties of head dress.

Today was a nearly perfect cycling day: the road was smooth, and mostly downhill, with just enough cooling upstream breeze. We had a few hills, but none were long. There were friendly people, cute donkeys and goats, spectacular gorge scenery, and all our official interactions at check stations were pleasant. I’m beginning to think we just got a couple of bad eggs, on edge because of the 60th anniversary of Communist China’s founding. The army was even guarding a bridge, complete with sand bagged bunkers, though they seemed relaxed, perhaps because the day, October 1, has come and gone without incident, as far as we know. Unescorted foreigners are still blocked from the Tibetan Autonomous Region, though that was supposed to be lifted this week.

The soldiers gave us the news that we were entering Yunnan at their checkpoint. Sichuan is one big, mountainous province; now we will see what Yunnan has to offer.

Headwaters of the Yangtze River

Headwaters of the Yangtze

We saw the Yangtze overwhelm our (unknown name) aquamarine river, with a hard line of flood brown. With the load of sediment being carried by the Yangtze, here in the mountains with little agricultural land to contribute to the load, I wonder how long the impoundments behind the Three Gorges Dam, will last before filling up the impoundment? About a week ago we were within 100 kilometers of the true headwaters, much higher in the Himalayas.

We were in a spectacular gorge all day. This is a land of precipitous mountains, still thousands of meters high, and rushing rivers cutting deeply, quickly. We expect to see the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge in a few days, but I can’t imagine it being more spectacular than the ones we have already seen.

We are in a basic dorm guest house tonight, with cold water washing up done at the roadside tap. Oh well, we had a hot water shower the last two nights, and privacy; what do we want anyway?! There is a fandian here; we will test the food, and our dishes will be washed at the same tap. The video explained the other toilet facilities.

Claire:
Shortly after we turned out the lights the proprietor of the place knocked on our door. That’s usually not a good thing. He repeatedly traced Chinese characters on our door jamb, hoping that one more time would get through to us. I finally figured out that there was something about 8:45 (yes, we were in bed well before 8:45). I went downstairs to see that in the fandian (restaurant), they had laid a table full of festive foods. Evidently, there was to be a party at 8:45 and we were invited. We contributed what was left of some cookies and joined the fun. People dropped by and we snacked on mandarins, tangelos, apples, walnuts, sunflower seeds, boiled peanuts, moon cakes, candy and some type of gingerbread.

Bob had to turn down several offers of cigarettes during the night. We later learned this was for the mid-autumn full moon celebration.

Claire and Lucky examine the 100 ft drop we rode beside much of the day

Off to market on a rainy day

Las Vegas to Shanghai, luxury hotels, and the no-tell motel in the seedy underbelly of thousands of towns, have expropriated his fiction. Shangri-la is the idea of a magical place where people live long happy lives in perfect bliss. All of these places, even the most plush, fall short of the dream.

Whole countries have laid claim to the title, and all but one are fabrications. James Hilton’s Shangri-La is not in Bhutan, Nepal, or Myanmar, but in China; in Yunnan province of the Tibetan cultural region of the eastern most ranges of the Himalayas. Here the great rivers of Southeast Asia begin with trickles, explode into violent torrent, gather into the mighty forces of nature to embrace one of the most dense populations on Earth, and to eventually braid out across huge fertile deltas from Shanghai to Myanmar.

Misty Morning in Shangri-la (Claire)

Amazingly, Hilton was not a traveler. He got his inspiration from the National Geographic which published the explorations of the botanist, philologist, Joseph F. Rock, who spent years in northern Yunnan. The collection of plants was Rock’s primary mission, but he also documented the local Tibetan cultures. Rock’s plant collections are said to have sparked the, now ubiquitous, exotic garden craze in the United Kingdom and beyond. Hilton grazed from this material the fictional beautiful and perfect place.

Shangri-la, and surrounding mountains, hold most of the minorities of China, and are one of the last holdouts from complete domination by the Han majority.

The unique southerly curve of the Himalayan range at the east end, allows the valleys to funnel warm wet monsoon clouds to extremely high elevations. This makes for a fecundity of plant and animal life found nowhere else in the great stretch of the Himalayan range all the way to Central Asia.

Claire and I crossed the Tien Shan mountains of far western China on our Silk Road Crossing. They are the western ending of the Himalayan range in Central Asia. This trip we hope to cross the far eastern part of the Himalayan range, in our search for the real Shagri-la.

What will we find? Well, as with the Silk Road, fantasy and reality are not the same, but in Asia, reality is always fascinating and alive, always challenging and rewarding.

From Yunnan we plan to ride into Laos, then Vietnam, where Claire was born, Cambodia and end our journey in Thailand, after about four months.

We hope you will come along with us, here on our New Bohemians site as we begin in Chengdu, Sichuan, where the great earthquake devastated the region and killed thousands. From what we know of will and energy of the Chinese, the people are recovering. We hope so. We’ll visit some pandas of course, along with our Lucky, and then attempt the mountains, monsoon snows, and vagaries of Chinese Communist bureaucracy allowing us to make the trip. Wish us well and then bookmark and follow us on our unusual, and no doubt enlightening, quest documented on this site.