China: Christmas in Kunming

Yangjie to Kunming: 202 miles

I’d found my feet in China but it was now 22nd December and I really wanted to be in Kunming for Christmas. I hoped to find some celebrations there, but if not, I knew it would at least be a comfortable place to pass the occasion. I had three days. The race was on!

From my camp in the woods my first target was the historic city of Jianshui, a 100km’s ride.

As with most things in China I had very little info on the route, so it was a nice surprise to crest the hill and see a wide agricultural plain below.

There was another surprise as I descended – mystery cargo!

The blade of a giant windmill it turned out. Far too big to make it round the hairpins, the truck effectively had two drivers: one in charge of the wagon and another pivoting the blade with a joystick. China’s green revolution on the move.

I stopped for breakfast at the base of the hill in a small town, surrounded by poly tunnels.

It was another bowl of noodle soup, but somehow each place was a little different and I loved seeing how it was all done.

This one had a its own tofu grill. A seat around the high table, warming up next to the coals, seemed a particular honour.

As I got going I noticed several mosques – something I’d associated more with central and western China. In fact, Islam has a long history in Yunnan too, going right back to the 13th century.

To be honest, China in general was much more diverse than I’d realised, with 55 ethnic groups and hundreds of different languages.

Party murals (like this one) encouraged ‘ethnic unity’, while others spelled out the CCP’s achievements alongside depictions of grateful minority groups in traditional dress.

I carried on through neat rows of cabbages and onions, accompanied now and then by the occasional call to prayer.

By early evening I’d reached Jianshui where I had a lot of fun leaning my bike against the immense city walls.

I expected to find creaky shopfronts and narrow alleyways. Instead it seemed the historic centre had been given a few face-lifts and was now a well ordered shopping precinct.

I had time before dark at least to visit the Zhu Family Garden – a 24 room mansion built at the turn of the century by a local mining magnate. The 20th C was a bad time to be a mining magnate in China and, according to the display, the family soon saw sense and ‘acceded to the revolutionary ranks’. Black and white photos show the house requisitioned at various points as a barracks in the fight against the Japanese and then as a military school and field hospital for the CCP in the civil war that followed.

Today it’s been restored to its original glory, with the addition of a coffee bar and gift shop. China old and new.

In the morning I was hailed over by a shopkeeper. I thought I was in trouble for bad bike parking but he just wanted to check I had plenty of water. I didn’t – so he put the kettle on and we got chatting with our phones using WeChat.

It turned out he was a bit of a tea expert and he took it upon himself to load me up with a personal supply free of charge (citing the medicinal properties for my ride!).

The road for much of the day was shadowed by an ongoing patchwork of intense market gardens. It was tough going for the labourers with very little of the work mechanised. Even the watering was done by hand in many places, sometimes using old fashioned shoulder poles.

I was working hard too, still aiming for my Christmas deadline. The railways and highways ignored the contours, but I was not so lucky.

It was bad news in particular when you came across one of these guys: a truck filling up with water. The drivers spray it to cool their brakes on long descents – spelling out steep climbs ahead (and gungy spray in your face). Nice.

I couldn’t camp among the neat rows of spring onions so was pushing hard to reach Fuxian Lake, a nature reserve not far from Kunming. This plan was scuppered by terrible roads toward the end of the day.

I battled on but it was totally dark by the time I neared the lake and getting quite cold. My map indicated a hotel in a small town just before the water, a good option if they’d take me. I showed the address to some bemused passers by who, after much discussion, auto-translation and knocking on doors decided it didn’t exist and took me instead down an alley to this red sign. Also a hotel! It was now 8pm so I was pretty happy 🙂

Asking for somewhere to store my bike was always a guaranteed laugh in these small places. “Here is safe!” they’d say quite emphatically (pointing to the street). “This is a very safe neighborhood/city/country – no problem”.

True enough, across five weeks of travel in China, I never once worried about leaving my bike unlocked outside a shop, restaurant or anywhere else, but I still liked to bring it in at night if I could.

After obliging my strange request, the hotel owner walked me to a good place to eat and introduced me to the staff. I was pretty hungry but now much more confident at ordering food.

I’d learned from my language tape that instead of saying “I would like to order”, the Chinese actually say “I would like to point“. The fridge is always front of house, so you just gesture at whatever looks good! It’s a great system.

Contrary to expectations it’s actually an excellent place to be vegetarian too. Here I ordered (or pointed at) some kind of delicious tiny potato things, some greens, tea and rice. In these informal places you could usually see the chef too. The five or six foot flame coming out of his pan fazed nobody.

The next day was Christmas Eve and by early morning I had reached the lake (which would indeed have made a great camp spot).

After a nice stretch along the shoreline it was a straight forward 30km run into Kunming. Happy that I’d now make it for Christmas, I pulled in at a breakfast place for a rest, ordering fried sesame balls, a kind of purple bean porridge and a big handful of sweet bao buns. I decided I would 100% open my own Chinese breakfast place when I got back to the UK and communicated as much to the proprietor with a hearty xiè xiè (thank you!) on the way out.

The cafe was in a strange place – a new town of huge apartment blocks (mostly empty) and wide 6 or 8 lane streets with nobody on them. China is growing so fast. Sometimes places like this didn’t even appear on the map – or did so just as tiny crossroad towns.

None of the apartments below were occupied.

Leaving the ghost town behind, I thought hard about my imaginary bao bun business, reaching the outskirts of Kunming by late afternoon. Here I got stuck in a traffic jam (in the motorbike bike lane) – which I found funny.

Then stopped for a snack at this street stall – which they found funny.

It was my first big Chinese city – so I was quite excited.

I’d been in touch with an amazing WarmShowers host called Vera before arriving. She was really helpful with info on cycling routes. “I won’t be around” she said, “but you can stay in my house if you want”. Incredible! No chimney, but otherwise the perfect Christmas gift.

I’d also been in touch with someone called Cindy from Couch Surfing. “You can’t be alone on Christmas!”, she said, “It’d be like me all alone over New Year! What do you want to do?”

Since Christmas is an average working day in China, I figured a church would be a good place to feel festive. Cindy was excited “Omg – I wanted to go to church too!!”

So we did, me doing my best to follow along with the Mandarin ceremony (the hymns were to the same tune!) and Cindy doing her best to translate now and then.

Though actually there were bits of the service she couldn’t follow either as they were carried out in Tibetan and other local languages. This was a legacy of the European missionaries who operated on the fringes of China in the 19th C. They travelled to remote areas, sometimes in disguise, hiding out in mountain monasteries translating the Bible into Naxi, Miao and Bai languages – all of which have their own Christian communities today.

Cindy took me on a tour and I later met Jan – a young German guy I’d also connected with through Couch Surfing. He’d cycled from Europe through the Mongolian winter (a real mad man). We went to an all you can eat vegan buffet attached to a local monastery. A Christmas dinner of sorts!

I kept in touch with Cindy who ended up locked down in Wuhan where she travelled to for New Year a few weeks later, and with Jan who was cycling south, a little ahead of me.

I spent the rest of my time figuring out where to go next, video-calling family and feeding Vera’s cat.