In the morning we visited a garden which has buildings and flowers of all the different minority groups in Yunnan Province. The symbol of the local people (can’t remember their name, the Dai or Hua perhaps) is the gourd and there were stone, wooden, metal or plastic gourds wherever you look.
A day of driving through the stunning sub-tropical countryside of western Yunnan Province, close to the border with Burma, took us along country roads lined with trees with the most gorgeous blossom – bright purple bourgainvillea, purple and orange hibiscus (I think) and a tree with bright red flowers as well as trees with a smaller bright yellow blossom. We stopped for dinner at an excellent roadside cafe where we had a delicious rice with pork and vegetables. Restaurants in Yunnan seem to have a unique style of serving food. Unlike the rest of China, where they display rather ambitious pictures of the meals they can produce, and you simply point to the one you want, Yunnan restaurants have a cabinet full of different types of vegetable, meat and fish and you point out what you want and they cook it before mixing it with a generous portion of rice. They eat rice rather than noodles here. Across the road from the cafe there was a large rice paddy field protected from the road by a strip of strange looking plants with fruit which looked like gooseberries with grooved sides. The cafe owner said that they were used for making medicine.
We spent the night in the car park of a fish farm which also has hot thermal springs bubbling away at boiling point. The farm produces a type of black fish which is local to Yunnan and Burma and for which there is huge local demand. They also provide hot thermal water showers. The owner invited us into his huge mansion and treated us to green tea, nuts and moon cakes. He had worked for the local Government until he retired when he and his family built up the fish farm from scratch. He had been the Mayor of the nearby town on Xiangfu (“Happiness City”) at the age of 25 and was a member of the Hua minority group. He was preparing for a visit from his huge extended family (minority groups aren’t subject to the one-child policy) the next day to celebrate the public holiday for the birth of the Peoples Republic of China. He also told us why there were so many police and army checkposts because huge numbers of Hua people are trying to flee from the civil war in Burma to Yunnan where there is already intense population pressure on limited amounts of useable land. We had noted how terraces had been created on 60-degree slopes all the way up mountain sides. We drove straight past one check point while the soldiers were asleep and stopped after hearing some loud shouting. I reversed just as a soldier who looked about 5 years old was taking his gun from his shoulder and pointing it our way. They were all very friendly but found it hard to believe that we had driven all the way from Britain to Yunnan. Can’t think why anyone would think I was a Burmese Hua.
