Better Left Unsaid

I had arrived in Lijiang two days earlier after a long minibus ride with Barney from Dali. We had only met a few days before, but since then we had fought wild dogs together, gotten sunstroke together, and become as lost as we could in this part of China. I had an image of Lijiang as a city that time had forgotten, amidst the mountains, with mist swirling in the ancient streets. The tour books certainly gave me that impression. The Spanish guy we had met days earlier suggested Lijiang was the actual site of Shangri-La.

Like everywhere in China that I had seen, it turned out to be a little bit different; it was definitely up in the mountains—almost in Tibet. We had spent hours that day on the benches at the back of a minibus as it crisscrossed up mountain roads and through villages that left a lot of countryside in between us and the last place we had been. It was amazing to see the hills traveling back in green humps all the way into the misty distance, and then suddenly to come out on the other side of the ridge and see the depth of land below you, with golf-course green farms cut into strips at all angles. It started getting cold, and our sunburn from the day before was healed, in preparation for the total serenity to come.

When we arrived, the drizzle put a dirty shine on all the traffic that cut up the road as we swung past a row of tiny restaurants and into the bus stop. A walk past a few “foreign guests are welcome!” hotels took us to where we had hoped to go. Amongst the puddles and motorbikes with side-cars and minivan-taxis we found ourselves suddenly in Lijiang old town, where, despite the obvious tourist make-up, things seemed to be more like the Shangri-La we had heard of days before. Streets narrowed, cars disappeared, and roofs and walls of ancient houses shrank and warped. Before long we were settled into a dorm with clean beds in our mock-ethnic hotel.

In Lijiang, you could forget about the screaming traffic, the three-star hotels and the mask of authenticity that smiled just above the relic of old China that the town must have been before they made room for travelers and their western style cafés. For us, it was amazing to see so much of antique China, even if it must have seemed horrible in the eyes of villagers who had lived there through all of China’s ordeals, only to see their minority culture end up in the wallets of a bunch of Western 20-somethings. All the same, it was a view into a place and way of life that I will probably never see again. After all, it was the things that happened to us outside of the tourist events that made the experience so potent.

We took a bus out to where the Yangtze River makes a 90-degree turn and flowed into China. There were no white people to be seen, surprisingly, and we took a ride into the Yangtze on a fisherman’s boat that went sideways most of the time because of the current. We sat on the banks and smoked cigarettes at a picnic table just above the thick mud that surrounded us—a reminder that the whole area would be flooded within a month’s time.

After waiting by the dusty roadside open-air pool hall/restaurant in the town, a minibus took us back to Lijiang. On the way back to the dormitory we wandered down a side street that led into a tiny courtyard, hidden by giant rotting doors. An old Chinese woman beckoned us in and started giving us a tour, pointing out the more interesting or antique parts of her home. The fact that she was blind, and was speaking in a language I didn’t understand, made it all the more informative.

That night – my last night – we faced the funny plastic imitation of minority opera blended with karaoke and people’s mobile phones. We headed for an early night as I had to catch that vital morning bus out of town and ever-northwards from then on. As we were leaving we were greeted by the Shangri-La Spanish guy we had met three days earlier in Dali. He took us to sit with him outside of a restaurant to have one drink before going back to pack and sleep. Before long he was smoking joint after joint and laughing, “If they ask, I’ll just tell them cigarettes smell different where I come from, ha ha ha!” as he told us about the myth of Shangri-La in Lijiang.

He said years ago, a plane had crashed and the survivors had found themselves in a place of absolute perfection. They hadn’t given direct directions to the place, but there were reasons to believe that is was in Lijiang that perfection could be found. I looked away from the table towards a stone bridge carved with dragons and temples, under which a kid was washing clothes in the water flowing from a fountain in the shape of a giant goldfish. With the moonlight and glowing lanterns in the houses behind, it wasn’t hard to imagine what our Spanish friend had said. When I turned back to the bar, sunburned Australian backpackers were doing the limbo to the tune of Abba, locals looked on in amazement. Suddenly things didn’t seem quite so ideal.

The night wore on, and beer became rice wine. The conversation drifted into a barely comprehensible mix of Spanish, French, English and sign language as all our linguistic skills began to fail. Polite trips to the toilet ended up with most people in the bar urinating in the canal next to it. To be a little more thoughtful, I wandered up into the cobblestone alleys of the village to find a quiet corner. Eventually, amidst the quiet night tranquility of streets that had been trodden by the same feet for thousands of years, I gave up the search and settled for the wall of an ancient house. While in that alleyway I looked up into the clearest night sky that I had ever seen and smiled with drunken sentimentality at the thought of all the nights to remember passed under the same sky, give or take a little smog, over the past few years. Helplessly lost and hopelessly happy on a trip that was miles away from all the other great times I’ve had, all I could think of was that Scorpions song, We all live under the same Sun, to sum it all up before returning to the friends that I’d be leaving hours later. I just hoped that the wall dried up in time for me not to be noticed in a town that will definitely never be the place that it might have been for those plane crash survivors, all those years before Barney and I arrived.

The next day I woke up late, missed the bus and got on another, without saying goodbye to those I had met, slept, eaten, and been life-long friends with for the past seven days. At the time it seemed sad that most important moments take place at the stupidest times. But it’s a good thing in the end, because otherwise we would all be using the most valuable things around us like toilets, screwing up the way things are forever, and using the cliché lyrics of some German metal band to try to explain it all in the end. I haven’t heard from Barney since, and Lijiang is a long, long way from London. But sometimes there are the same stars, give or take a little smog.