Portrait of an LBX

A snoozy street in the Fengqing old town, by Andy

By Andy

2010/05/29 – 78 km

We start the morning with a search through town for the post office so we can send the tea we bought the previous day to a friend in Shanghai. During our search, we find that Fengqing actually has an old section of town. By old, I mean it looks Communist-era, with most things appearing to be built in the 1950s when the real Communists were around. With the exception of a few white tile buildings (why they built everything to look like a bathroom in the ‘90s is beyond me), everything is built in blocky, imposing, Soviet style).

What’s striking though is how alive the area seems compared to the new section of town where we stayed the night before. The streets are narrow, a single lane in each direction, and everyone is out and about. Street vendors peddle snacks, goldfish, bamboo brooms and anything else someone might be interested in purchasing on the cheap.

There’s even a big mosque, at which we take a quick peak on our way back to the main road. It is one of the unfortunate, white-tile monstrosities of the 90s, complete with cheap, blue, reflective glass windows. Unfortunately, there’s no one around from whom to learn any of the history, so we head back out to the main road and begin climbing.

The road, paved and in good condition once we get out of town, takes us straight up the mountain to the northwest. Below and to our right is the still under-construction highway that will soon make our road obsolete. On it, the occasional car or motorbike climbs over the piles of dirt that have been set up to keep vehicles off, a fairly ubiquitous but ineffective way of closing off roads in this country. Above, our road’s numerous switchbacks snake up the mountain, and the bridges and overpasses for the new highway, held up by tall, concrete columns, cling to the mountain face.

It’s nearly noon by the time we’re crawling up those switchbacks, and just as I’m considering a break to munch on some trail mix, we spot a small tea factory and stop to have a look. (more…)

By Andy

2010/06/01

A few minutes before midnight, as we’re rushing to get the last of our internet work done in Baoshan before heading for Dali, there’s a loud crash and our fifth-floor hotel room rocks with a jolt like it’s been given a quick whack from the side with some heavenly pugil stick. We throw on some room slippers and head down the five flights of stairs to take a walk.

The street outside is full of people, all the faces lit up with the blue glow of cell phones screens held in front of them under the yellow streetlights. Everywhere the word “earthquake” is being whispered.

After about 15 minutes of wandering around, we head back to the hotel.

“Do you get many earthquakes here?” Evan asks the hotel owner.

“No, not often. But don’t worry! This hotel is brand new and it’s built to withstand a magnitude eight earthquake!”

My mental eyes roll far back into my head at the thought of how many cartons of cigarettes the builder of a hotel in western Yunnan province must have to hand out to the local geological bureau to get a building classified as magnitude-eight earthquake resistant.

“That one was about a five,” a random woman ejaculates as she pokes her head in through the lobby door.

We return to our room and wonder in bemusement at the willingness of LBXes to state things they have no idea about in terms of concrete fact. There’s nothing on the interweb yet on the earthquake, so we figure it must have been a small, local one.

An hour later we jump up again at a crash, a jolt and the sound of voices in the street again. Fortunately, that’s the only aftershock we feel.

This morning, Evan checks the Internet again and finds that the small earthquake was magnitude 4.8 and centered about 30 kilometers from us! Thankfully, it was tiny — just enough to freak us out and send us into the streets. The woman in the lobby was just about spot-on though.

Anyway, the last time there was a big earthquake in China — a magnitude 7.9 in Qinghai province when we were just moving into southern Yunnan — my mom scolded me for not informing the world that we were okay. I’m sure no one heard about this earthquake unless they follow our Twitter feed, but we felt it, and we’re okay, Mom!