If it’s four o’clock it must be the performing elephants, and soon Ms Mi, who is Yi, and me are at the back of a somewhat larger crowd, watching a group of rather dry elephants being led into position in a concreted performance area.
‘Are elephants a minority in China?’ I ask Ms Mi.
She looks at me with vague irritation.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I wondered if elephants were a minority in China.’
She looks deeply concerned, more, I think, for my sanity, than anything else. After appearing to consider the question for a polite amount of time, she frowns and shakes her head.
The attempt to make elephants look cute by pumping disco music from the loudspeakers and then tugging at their legs is a most depressing spectacle and the jokey compere seems thoroughly unpleasant. Maybe I’m just not getting the jokes, so I ask Basil, who confirms that he is indeed thoroughly unpleasant.
The weather’s clouded over and the vast area of the park is almost empty, but the shows must go on and at five o’clock we’re at the Mosuo stand. Their ‘event’ takes place in a smaller version of Namu’s hotel, with log walls and lots of cowboy hats and line dancing. The audience walk in and walk out, talk and photograph each other as if the performers were invisible. There seems not the slightest respect, or, indeed, enthusiasm for the fact these are live performers.
This whole Yunnan Nationalities park has been like a weird, dreamlike playback of many of the places and the people we’ve met these past few weeks, and has the effect of making me feel enormously fortunate to have met our minorities in the wild, as it were.
Day Eighty Eight : Kunming
The first English-language newspapers since we left Kathmandu. It’s not often I read the papers these days and feel cheered up, but The China Daily‘s news of the first full ceasefire in Kashmir for 14 years is heartening. Kashmir was the most traumatized of all the areas we’ve been through on the Himalayan journey and its problems seemed insoluble. Now, President Musharraf has ordered a ceasefire along the Line of Control and there is a suggestion that he will allow talks to go ahead on the future of Kashmir without prior conditions. Previously, the Pakistan government has regarded a plebiscite in Kashmir as a sine qua non of any talks.
The Bank Hotel in Kunming is one of exceptional comfort but in the short time I’ve been here I’ve had to call someone to fix both the heating and the lights. Now I find that my bathroom scales don’t function. This is not, I realize, a big deal, but we’re paying for this little bit of luxury so we might as well get it right. I ring for assistance and have a not altogether satisfactory conversation with someone who seems unfamiliar with the word ‘scales’, but happier with ‘bathroom’.
Within less than a minute the doorbell goes. Standing there is a hefty girl with a plastic cap on, flanked by two men in protective overalls, one holding a red rubber plunger and the other an enormous wrench. They stand there motionless for a moment, like figures on a coat of arms. I have the distinct feeling they would rather not be here.
It’s quite a squeeze with all four of us in the bathroom, and, as we shuffle round, the man with the plunger gestures nervously towards the toilet bowl. When I shake my head and hand them the defective scales, their manner changes completely and, with lavatory-unclogging off the menu, we are one happy family, nodding and smiling and joking.
Taps are turned on and off as if to demonstrate something, but it’s only after they’ve gone that I notice a small sign on the side of the shower apologizing for problems with the water supply.
‘Please bare with us,’ it reads.
Catch up with my notes, then walk into the central square of Kunming. The old city has been razed but the tall, arched West Gate has been rebuilt. This was once the Chinese end of one of the most famous highways in the world. Marco Polo knew it as the Southern Silk Road, an extension of the trade route that connected Asia with Europe, which we’ve touched on in several places on our journey. In the Second World War it was reopened as the Burma Road, a supply line that cost thousands of lives to build and extended through the appallingly difficult country of the eastern Himalaya to come out in Assam in north India.
Little is made now of its wartime connotations, but 100 yards away is the Hump Bar. The Hump in this case refers to the name given to the 500 miles of Himalaya between here and India by the AVG, American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, who flew perilous supply flights across this towering mountain wilderness from 1941 until the end of the war. Six hundred and seven planes were lost crossing the Hump.
The walls of this comfortable, congenial old bar are covered in memorabilia of the period: maps and posters and black and white photos of the Flying Tigers standing beside planes with bared teeth painted on their sides.
The next port of call on our journey will be over the other side of the Himalaya, where the planes landed and the Burma Road broke out of the jungle.
Two last good memories of China, both meals. A lunch of fish in lemon grass, asparagus, chicken and delectable pork cooked beneath a vegetable crust, and a last evening thank you to our long-suffering Chinese fixers, minders and helpers in a chic restaurant, with photos of the old Kunming railway on the walls.
So I’m very happy tonight, and only wish John Pritchard were here to share our enormous sense of relief at having, in not much more than a month, crossed the hardest terrain we’ve ever travelled.
Nagaland and Assam
Day Ninety : Longwa
In the remote hill village of Longwa I can stand with one leg in India and the other in Myanmar, or Burma, as it used to be known. (I like the word Burma and take heart from the fact that Myanmar’s national anthem remains ‘Gba mjay Bma’ - ‘We Shall Love Burma for Ever’.) Longwa, a collection of palm-thatched huts, a tin-roofed church and a huge satellite dish, isn’t marked on any maps I have. It’s at the end of the line, on the very edge of Indian administration.
It’s also the home of the largest building made entirely from vegetation that I think I’ve ever seen. The chief’s hut, or in this case, mega-hut, is some 200 feet long and covered with a striking roof of palm leaves that sweeps down from an apex of 50 feet or more to within 3 feet of the ground.
The hut occupies the highest point of a 4700-foot (1430 m) ridge, on either side of which the land falls away in a series of crinkly valleys. Along the top runs the India-Myanmar border. In fact, it slices right down the middle of the chief’s hut, so he can walk between the two countries without ever leaving home.
Throughout the Himalaya, in Kashmir, on the North-West Frontier, in Tibet and Nepal, we’ve encountered a tension between the hill people, determined to preserve their customs and traditions, and the plains people wanting to build nations and impose control and conformity. It’s no different here. There are a dozen different Naga tribes in these hills, who until very recently fought each other and themselves, took heads as trophies and were generally left alone. From the middle of the 19th century, the British took an interest, but of an avuncular sort, never trying to subdue them but keeping them as a loose but friendly tribal area, which they called Nagaland. They were followed by American missionaries, who tried to persuade them to love God, grow crops and stop fighting.
When India was granted independence, the Nagas were not happy. Assimilation and domination by their Assamese lowland neighbours was seen as infinitely worse than staying with the British, and they made things difficult for India, boycotting general elections and fighting a fierce independence war against central government right up until the 1990s.