Yangshou: dead dogs, bicycles and randy water buffaloes

Yangshou, Guangxi. I’d read that, in the past, this was a sleepy little backwater, a haven discovered by those mystical wandering itinerants: ‘early backpackers’ (sounds like some new age of man).

Back then they adopted it as some hippy hangout, a quiet and relaxed place where everything was genuine and they could see some of the ‘real China’.

Today, if you consider yourself a spiritual descendent of these hippies don’t bother to visit: it’s an empty shell of its former shelf. Yangshuo is a town ruined by tourism, a monument to its excesses, where the corporations have taken over, bussing the groups in, buying up the streets and filling them with flimsy, tacky replicas of their former selves.

This is the living nightmare of mass tourism, Chinese-style. Any new hunk of meat cruising into town is sized up, chewed over and squeezed for every yuan they’ve got. Hotels are the worst - cold and damp prisons where staff are rude and obnoxious, pressing you to take tours or visit their friend’s shop.

The streets heave with tourist toot, useless merchandise and hideous variants of local traditions, scrubbed down, dressed up and flogged to death.

In Yangshuo it was one of my pet-hates: stupid reedy flute-type thingies. Usually fashioned out of a gourd or a piece of driftwood or something else suitably rustic their musicians whack out an incessant tuneless warbling, their faces a picture of timeless bliss, as they try to flog you a scratched CD from their shelves.

It turned the whole town into some kind of outdoor beginners recorder class, though I’m sure even my chums and I produced a better noise back when we were seven.

I might sound jaded, perhaps even cynical but I’m sorry there’s nothing authentic about this - they are not bucolic tunesmiths, they are aural menaces.

I must have been in this part of the world too long. Or perhaps it was the sight of great lumps of dead dog hanging up in the market, either way something had gone bang in my mind, causing me to suddenly loathe this country, blind me to natural beauty around us.

After all, this was Yangshuo and the Li River, home of the world-famous and unique landscape of Karst peaks.

I needed something different to put me right, something that would get me away from all the filth and the storm.

I needed a bicycle.

Across Asia, pedal power has been a fine friend of ours. From the suburbs of Kyoto to the Hutongs of Beijing, we have found no finer way to see the life and get up close to daily life. It had never let me down and now I needed it more than ever.

We hired a couple of basic rides, wheeling them out of the shed at the back and through the hairdresser’s salon from whom we’d hired them. Pointing north we took to the road, pedalling furiously to put some distance between us and the flute and dead dogs.

The road was busy and noisy, we were coated with dust thrown up by large trucks. We stayed to the verges which, surprisingly sensibly the Chinese had a habit of incorporating into such roads.

The peaks pushed up all around us, crowded out corn fields, casting large shadows.

We turned off the road and headed for the sticks, choosing a rutted little track leading towards a little group of mud brick houses.

The roar died down behind us, we slackened our pace.

Breathe.

Peace.

It’s beautiful.

The track shadows a small river, weaving in and out of the odd house. In between lie hayricks and harvested paddy fields where water, water buffalo wallowing in muddy holes, and modest little orchards.

The rice may have been gathered but the scene is still fecund, the trees in the orchards groaning with fruit, apples and persimmons, oranges and pomellos.

And all around the Karst peaks dominated, towering over the scene like giant sentinels. Poking up suddenly through flat fields like mushrooms after the rain.

The scene is bewitching, so much so we had to stop every few minutes to take yet another photograph.

Soon we come across a wreck of a building, hard to tell whether it’s going up or coming down. A signs reads “The restaurant at the end of the Universe” - perhaps they need to work on their sales pitch.

Lara’s been excitedly eyeing up the pomellos - huge, light-green fruit, like monstrous pears - ever since we arrived in Guangxi. Now she spies an orchard full of the monsters on the other side of the yard.

A woman shuffles up to us, a baby cocooned up in a bundle on her back. She watches the new Caucasians admiring her trees and picks a couple of oranges, handing them to us. They're green on the outside, delicious on the inside.

Lara hands over three yuan and gets the pick of the orchard: choose your pomelo. She zones in on a particularly impressive-looking specimen and soon it's filling up the basket on the back of my bag, like a mutant prize from an easter egg hunt.

We cycle on, only stopping soon after for yet another photograph.

A woman trots past, leading a large water buffalo.

The creature becomes excited as it spied a female in the field up ahead. The bull starts communicating with the object of its affection, uttering strange squeeking noises, more bird-like than beast.

The female turns and he charges forward, dragging its helpless owner behind it.

An old man sitting nearby, puffing on his bamboo pipe, watches this and laughs, then comes to the woman’s aid, thwacking the randy old bull with a branch as it gets intimate with its new female friend.

We cycle on, past a woman washing clothes in a pond, and a group of boisterous blokes playing cards, their loud dance music booming out across the still air, incongruous in such a timeless, bucolic setting.

They shout out excitedly to us; we continue, bouncing on the worn stones peeking up through the dirt.

People working in the fields look up as we approach and wave, a stooped old man in a dirty Mao hat grins through a gappy mouth.

Others run up to us and motion taking a photo, gappy smiles, wind-chaffed faces, posing for nice rustic pictures, hands out for yuan.

Two woman loom up ahead, each carrying a young child in a basket slung on shoulder poles. Too good to resist: I take the shot and soon my notes are being rifled through - grubby yuan gone for that perfect framed photo for the lounge.

On again, through more fields and small yards, where chickens scatter in front of us, past another grove of persimmons, more banana plants, more bamboo thickets.

A kingfisher darts across the track in front of us, an electric blue bolt in the dimming light.

Finally a t-junction appears and we tip into the narrow streets of a village. We draw stares, people sizing us up but we’re past before they can catch our attention.

Back onto the tarmac and across a bridge and we’re back on the road to Yangshuo.

Back at one with China once more my mind turns to dinner. Hmmm perhaps I'll have dog tonight, serenaded with a nice reedy flute in the background...

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Laos - Thailand

Crossing from Laos into Thailand, on the ‘friendship bridge’ spanning the Mekong River is a relatively simple affair.

Indeed, if it wasn’t for the painfully slow queue at immigration, standing in line in the baking heat for some dead-eyed, moustachioed chap to staple yet another piece of paper into your passport it’d feel more like a little jolly across the Severn Bridge rather than crossing an international border.

But low-key as it is, the differences between these two countries start to become apparent the moment you reach the other side.

Goodbye sleepy little Laos, hello thrusting ‘tiger economy’ of Thailand.

Within minutes the tiny, winding bumpy roads of Laos became a fading memory, as we sped along a smooth, fast dual carriageway, heading south for the second city of Nakhon Ratchasima. We travel a good inch across my battered map of the world in a few hours - something that would have taken a several days north of the border.

The scenery has changed as well. Gone are the wild mountains of the north, smothered in dense jungle, the jagged limestone peaks peaking through low cloud and teak forests teaming with wildlife.

Instead we speed through the pancake-flat plains of north east Thailand, a land of coconut trees and paddy fields where water buffalo submerge themselves in an effort to escape the searing heat.

And gone are the villages of little rattan, thatched huts, perched precariously on their stilts. Now we pass shopping complexes, car showrooms and steakhouses.

It seems south of the Mekong they have plumped for one form of imperialism for another: forsaking old Europe for the New World; French for American; colonialism for cultural and economic imperialism.

In the land of the Thais Uncle Sam has found himself some followers as the economy as expanded. Thais drive their pick-ups to the parking lot, they shop at the mart, they go downtown at the convenience store.

But the US isn’t the only country to get a piece of the action. Even dozy old Britain is represented, albeit by Tesco superstores (sweetly branded ‘Tesco Lotus’ in order to give it a nice, suitably exotic-sounding appearance) and the overpaid primadonna footballers from the Premier League, gurning across many TV screens and newspaper back pages.

Still the Thais are not ready to disown their own identity just yet. Indeed in this land you need only look at the nearest fencepost to be reminded of where you are, for the national bunting is permanently on display. The Thai flag festoons every frontage, usually accompanied by the yellow Buddhist flag.

This practice in itself would seem odd if it weren’t overshadowed - often literally - by the enormous portraits of the reigning monarch and his family, given pride of (public) place on every road, in every street.

They gaze down serenely upon you from every available space: on roundabouts and above pavements; along central reservations and across bridges, on calendars hanging in shops and outside municipal offices.

I’ve even seen soldiers sporting the kind of plastic wristbands worn in the West to pledge allegiance to a particular cause, yet their ones proclaim ‘Long live the King’.

As the longest reigning Thai monarch ever (60 years and counting), and indeed the longest-reigning current monarch in the world (he even puts our Brenda into the shade) His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX)’s is particularly popular.

Blinging up his his bespeculed, rather straight-laced appearance as elaborately as possible has ascended to almost an art form, albeit one that is perhaps more in keeping with Posh ‘n’ Becks rather than a refined royal.

Entering this country from Laos, where the monarchy was overthrown by the Communists and the Hammer and Sickle still flies from government buildings, it feels rather surreal - like travelling through a Tintin comic set in some obscure East European country where all the names contains lots of z‘s.

Unlike Laos, where tourism has only recently taken off, Thailand is now well-established as a firm favourite for Western tourists. The Thais have got it sussed: they dazzle you with their smile, enchant you with their accessible exoticism and leave you happy to be relieved of your Baht.

They have had time to develop this winning formula, benefiting from their climate, cultural and natural attractions and the kind of fully-developed infrastructure needed to draw overseas visitors.

The Lao have all but the latter: it’ll be interesting to see whether they will be as successful as their southern neighbours.

All this is immaterial however, compared with the surely the most reliable indicator of a nation’s greatness - its food. Thailand is rightly famed the world over for its fantastic fare and, despite all the differences we had noticed since crossing the Mekong, it wasn’t until we had tasted a Thai Green Curry that we could be sure we were in a different country.

Now all they need to do is take a lesson from their northern neighbours on how to brew a good beer to accompany it.

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Kyoto's legacy

In the sweltering late summer heat of Kyoto, I was most grateful I had the company of Captain Stag.

But this was no pith-helmeted adventurer, bristling moustache and pink gin at the ready. Rather my companion was a small, zippy Japanese bicycle, and jolly useful he was in covering the city‘s streets in the soup-like heat.

I wasn’t alone in choosing this eco-friendly form of transport to pootle through the little streets, as elderly housewives and smart young businessman whizzed by on their own little two wheelers.

This got me thinking about this great city, its green credentials and those of Japan.

The former imperial capital of Japan and justly famous for its splendid temples (a mere 2,000 or so), Kyoto has more recently become closely associated with a more contemporary issue, namely the global fight against climate change.

Finally waking up to the warnings of climate scientists, in 1997 the world’s leading polluters gathered here, seeking to secure a binding agreement to reduce their emissions of the greenhouse gases driving climate change.

The resulting agreement, commonly referred to as the Kyoto Protocol has since then been ratified by over 180 countries, including all developed nations (with the very notable exception of the United States) and Kyoto became a byword for progressive action towards a cleaner, greener future.

A decade on from Kyoto and progress towards the targets set is still painfully slow. Once more Japan is in the lime (or green?) light, having just hosted the annual G8 nations summit, placing climate change high on the agenda.

At the Hokkaido summit the Japanese proudly showed off their spectacular volcanic surroundings to their guests, but what impression did their own record in preserving their natural environment and tackling climate change leave?

Is this crowded country of 120 million leading the world towards an environmentally sustainable future?

Their ambitions are impressive, with (now ex-) Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announcing before the summit a new target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% by 2050,
though of course in practice they have a long way to go.

In Kyoto’s famous Ryoan-ji temple I came across a sign which I though rather neatly reflected the Japanese attitude towards the natural world:

“[Ryoan-ji is] renowned throughout the world as the ultimate example of kare sansi, or ‘my landscape’ style rock garden, in which nature is compressed and given abstract expression within the confines of a very narrow space“.

Can extend this to Japan as a whole?

Japan often seems a country at war with, or at least under siege from, the natural world and its more violent manifestations: typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis. And their response, in this mountainous country, appears to build, build, build, on the flat coastal plains they are squeezed into.

To the visitor it can seem like the entire country is made of concrete, passing through gigantic urban centres, like the south of Honshu, where one city seems to merge into another. Here, in the land of ‘salary man’, business is the new emperor and profit is the new creed. Heavy industry scars the coastline and naked development runs riot.

But outside of here, up in the ‘Japanese Alps’ or in the wilds of Hokkaido, it is still possible to lose yourself in the wild. Many Japanese revere these places and great efforts are made to protect them. Here the Shinto emphasis on working harmoniously with nature remains.

When it comes to their relationship with the natural world, perhaps for many Japanese the religious, or spiritual, influences still run deep.

In the zen gardens of Kyoto, the urban dwellers are given an idealised impression, an artificial world where nature is scrubbed-up nature and every blade of grass, every piece of gravel is placed according to how it should be.

Maybe this explains the extraordinary number of zoos and aquariums. Every town, every city we’ve visited seems to proudly boast at least one caged animal-related theme park.

Animals and birds are seen as cute and cuddly, but to be kept at a safe distance, preferably behind bars.

The Japanese are meticulously clean; in the hot summer heat everyone seems to have their own little towels to mop their brows and regularly wipe their hands, and throughout the year people often venture outside wearing surgical masks to prevent infection.

Where foreigners are sometimes feared for their supposedly lax approach towards hygiene, goodness knows what they think of animals.

Their love of nature, their shy curiosity, their tendency towards the artificial, the cellophane-wrapped, the air-conditioned - this all helps to explain the phenomenon of the Japanese tourist.

Left unbounded mass tourism is strangling the very places they love - visitors often complain about the tendency here to build ugly hotels and shops next to beauty spots.

We witnessed this in Toya Ko, with hideous hotels despoiling the natural beauty of Lake Toya and, more recently, at the famous Miyajima, where the Itsukashima temple's famous O-Tori gate, ‘one of the three best views of Japan’ ™, seemingly rises out of the sea - an extraordinary sight.

Were it not for the monumentally ugly line of hotels scarring the hillside directly behind it.

But perhaps the most apparent manifestation of excessive consumption, and the damage this causes, is the incredible amount of waste this country appears to generate.

After a day strolling through a Japanese city, I find myself weighed down with a huge mountain of packaging, simply from visiting a few food outlets.

Everything is sealed in packaging. Often you find yourself struggling with an item of food, from sushi to bananas which, to the Western mind at least seems over-elaborately and excessively wrapped.

It becomes fiendishly difficult to penetrate some wrappers; for example I defy anyone to successively unwrap a triangular rice ball in the manner in which it was designed.

For the budget-restricted traveller you can’t escape the world of 7/11s; individual grocers or other small food shops are scare, and hence you become part of the problem, adding yet more to the 25 billion disposable chopsticks the Japanese throw away every year.

So a lot of work to do then.

But it’s not all green gloom. I’d rather be optimistic about this astonishing nation. The Japanese may do many things to excess but this can bring advantages as well. Take their fantastic public transport system, fully integrated and boasting superfast Shinkansen trains that negate the need to fly.

And consider their incredible postwar economic recovery, which has allowed them to sit firmly amongst the leading industrial nations in the world. Time and again Japan has been looked to be its peers for technological innovations and solutions to the problems posed by a burgeoning world population.

Witness their many inventive answers to the considerable problems posed by dense urban living. Thanks to these their cities, with their huge populations, are civilised, clean and ordered. They work; something we can all learn from.

Japan has woken up to climate change. Like a salaryman after too much Suntory Whisky and Okonomi-Yaki pizza this country is already witnessing the terrible effects of their over-consumption, be it more and devastating extreme weather, the effects of over-fishing or rising oil prices.

They are beginning to realise they have to live within their means. And if any country can do this, Japan can

Rightly or not, our great leaders are pinning their hopes on technology as a way out of climate catastrophe, and we they are going down this route we need Japan, with its wonderful capacity for innovation and resourcefulness at the forefront.

So here’s to future Captain Stags…

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