a little coffee

We travelled west.  First, a two-night stopover in Baoshan and than on to Ruili even further west, snuggled up close to Burma.  So close, we could see the Burmese mountains in the distance (once again, stodgy Chris said no to my plan of tiptoeing across the border!). This was as off-the-beaten-track as Chris and I got.  And, in retrospect, these few days were a welcomed break from the heavy tourist cities of Kunming, Dali and Lijiang.  We, not used to seeing other white people, saw so many other foreigners that we were actually confused for a while.  How should we treat these people who, to some degree, could speak our language?  Should we wave and acknowledge and chat with them?  After one random dude did this to us we decided no, absolutely not.  Your nationality is but a false karass (a granfaloon) and requires no special treatment.  

But in Baoshan and Ruili, there were down sides to being a foreigner.  Mostly the same sort of thing we get in Anyang: blatant stares and pointing and lots and lots of “HELLO!” yelled at us from our backside.  And no English-language menus.  Chris and I devised this neat scheme. When in a restaurant, we told the waiter we don’t eat meet and what do you recommend?  Perfect.

So anyway.  Baoshan.  This was intended as a stop-over en route to Ruili.  We spent a day out in the sunshine climbing the stairs to the top of a mountain, taking lots of photographs of the city below and walking around the small park they made on top.  We “communed with nature” as Chris said.  On the way down, we spied through the shrubbery a 13-story, newly-painted white pagoda (that would prove to be locked once we got there) and a nice little lake a bit below that.  

After meandering around, we headed off in search of food, which would prove difficult to get as it was after 2PM and Nap Time according to much of the country so open restaurants were hard to come by.  We did come across a market, though, stretching more than the length of a city block selling everything from fruits to spices to sunflower seeds and nuts to chicken and various other animal carcasses dangling in bright sunshine.  Here we bought the happiest food discovery in our travels: potatoes with peanuts and salt.  So simple yet so delicious!  (We’ve since had moderate success recreating the dish in our apartment).

Our last Baoshan adventure was that night, at dinner, the impetus for our “what do you recommend strategy.”  We walked into a small, clean restaurant near our hotel expecting to get noodles as that’s what they had displayed just outside.  I’ve become a sucker for this dish called Over-the-Bridge-Noodles.  It’s simple- some kind of noodle cooked in a delicious soup of fresh greens, spices, egg and meat (which we don’t eat). Being in the region where this dish comes from, we both assumed we were picking out fresh ingredients for the soup when the proprietor led us over to a wall of baskets containing a variety of fresh greens, mushrooms, meat and tofu.  I, hungrily and enthusiastically pointed to two different kinds of greens, a mushroom, tofu, scallions and Chris told the man noodles, thinking to confirm yes, we’re getting noodles. 

Then, one of the proprietor’s daughters brought a plate of tofu to our table.  It’s delicious, smothered in some kind of sauce I can only dreaming of making and that’s when we realize, shit.  We’re getting 5 different dishes plus noodles!  Oh crap… there was enough food on our table to happily feed six people.  But our empty stomachs did good; we ate most everything except the noodles and one of the greens, which we gave to a homeless man we happened upon while wandering around that night.

So adios to Baoshan and hello to Ruili!  The main reason for going to this small city, so close to Burma, and so far from everything else, was to rent a bicycle and explore the trails and little attractions spread throughout the villages outside the city. But our out-dated copy of Lonely Planet would once again prove to be a failure.  Nowhere could we rent bikes.  We asked three hotels and went to the (unoccupied) tourist agency and nothing!  Finally, one polite English-speaking man from what we assumed must be the ritziest hotel in town from the sheer size of the hotel’s lobby, that no one rents bikes in the city, we could only buy them.  

Drat.  So, we resigned ourselves to exploring the town on foot.  It was a nice, moderate sized city.  Clean and neat.  But uninteresting.  They had the same sort of shops we get in Anyang and even their architecture was new enough to be completely without character.  Even wandering to the Jade Market, where a lot of the city’s Burmese population (men in sarongs!) did their business was just one shop after another selling exactly the same goods.  Just before leaving the market to find a park outside the city, we stopped in one of the covered kiosks for a strawberry smoothy.  (I was attracted by the plump, fresh fruit and blender. Surely this means smoothy!) Chris was feeling hungry so we also got a bowl of noodles, which the lady dumped in this thick, gooey yellowish sauce (we had no idea what it possibly could have been) and then sprinkled a variety of spices on it.  I was hesitant.  It looked absolutely disgusting, like I’d be eating paste with worms!  The smoothy was light and refreshing, perfect in the sudden, bright 60-degree weather and after a careful bite, I decided the paste was delicious too!  

We set out for the park, a dry, dusty piece of land which, aside from the view of the Burmese mountains, proved to be not at all worth the very, very long walk.  Except maybe the monk on the motorcycle.  Chris got very excited about the monk on the motorcycle and even now talks about how completely awesome that was.    

A break for fresh-squeeze lime juice and a gander around a large pond in the city and we were done with Ruili.  Except for the tasty Over-the-Bridge-Noodles for dinner and we were headed east for the city of Dali.