4th January: Xishuangbanna, China
After almost 12 weeks, today is our final full day in China. Breakfast was chilling on the balcony with jasmine green tea, tiny oranges, and red bananas in beautiful temperatures.
As with yesterday, there was just enough cloud cover to keep it very comfortable until the afternoon. We decided to walk across the Lancang to the main part of Jinghong city. It might be ‘small’ but this is still China and therefore it’s still a city of 650,000 people! There is only one bridge in the town itself, which was busy with cars, scooters, and people walking.
After diving into the tranquillity of a park on the west bank, Kaja got ambushed for a photo with an old woman who insisted they find a nice background before instructing me on how to take their photo. Our first target was the main China Mobile shop in town as way back in Beijing I’d been told to do this in our final place to cancel my SIM. As it happens, this morning I got cut off from the network as there weren’t funds in the pre-paid amount to cover the next bill. After a bit of a walk to the shop and waiting in the queue for 45 minutes, we were told that there’s nothing they can do for SIMs registered outside of this province and not to worry about it! As it happens, our queue number was 88. In China this is often used as shorthand for goodbye or good luck, which seemed appropriate for today.
Our final sit-down meal in China was fittingly homemade tofu and braised aubergine with rice. Although it wasn’t the best, it also had a lot more garlic than we’ve gotten used to in other regions which was a little refreshing. The amount of oil on the other hand was not!
Given that we’ve had a few things to sort in Jinghong, we’ve not had time for trips out of town. There is a supposedly fantastic botanical garden here and a place where you can sometimes see ‘wild’ elephants. There definitely are wild elephants in the region as some famously travelled over 1,000 km in each direction to the provincial capital of Kunming and back again a few years ago, but those you can see are apparently not so wild. Instead, we had a few hours of daylight left, so chose to visit a park in the city. What we didn’t realise was that the ‘cultural’ performance we’d noticed on boards after entering was actually going to be five trained elephants. We quickly left, not wanting to be part of this and regretting paying for an attraction which included such cruelty and wandered to the area with flowers instead.
The rest of the place was a bizarre theme park of people dressed up for photo shoots in faux-traditional clothes clambering all over temples which were supposedly historic but clearly weren’t. Tour groups buzzed in between. Chinese tourism at its worst! I did finally find out that my favourite tree is called a Frangipani, however, so it wasn’t a total write off!
China average spend per person per day: £30.64 without Hong Kong & Macau (£33.08 with)