In the last couple of weeks, my semester in Kunming ended, I spent a week traveling in China, and then made my way to Thailand. It has been quite a whirlwind, but I’m finally settled down on a farm in the mountains of northern Thailand for the next two weeks.
My semester ended with a week of finals and a paper presentation. During the last few weeks of the semester, each student wrote a final research paper in Chinese, on topics ranging from tattoo culture among Chinese youth to vowels in Chinese linguistics. My paper was on violence against women in China, focusing on the social and gender norms that cause it and the legal measures in place to deal with it.
After that, it was graduation, a night of karaoke, and goodbyes (including goodbye to everyone’s favorite street vendor — see picture below), then a friend and I left Kunming for a week of traveling in northwestern Yunnan province.
We headed first to Shaxi, which was a full-day affair. After a couple buses and some lost wandering, we found a guesthouse and settled in. The next day, we decided to rent an electric moped and ride it through the mountains (sorry mom). We cruised through the mountains on our cow-print moped for 2 hours or so, until we ran out of battery and found ourselves stranded near a small village. After some finagling, we were able to charge the moped outside a government building for 3 hours, and then we set off again. Only to run out of battery 15 minutes later. This time, after some frantic phone calls and discovering a switch that should have been turned on while charging, we found a house on the side of the road to properly charge the battery. A very nice couple fed us dinner and urged us to stay the night, but we were eager to get on the road before dark. We set out for the second time…and 15 minutes later, we were stranded again. This time, in the dark. We made our way to a village where we luckily ran across a man with a van, and we were able to negotiate a price for him to take us and the moped (which meant taking apart his van) back to Shaxi. The whole ordeal left us incredibly thankful for the generosity of all the strangers that helped us that day.
After that adventure, we played it safe and trekked to Shibaoshan mountain on foot the next day. Shibaoshan is a Buddhist temple complex from the 9th century Nanzhao empire, with caves and grottoes and statues all carved into the mountainside. It was a long, hot day of hiking, but definitely worth it.
The next day, we headed to Dali, where we spent two (rainy) days in the old city and a nearby city called Xizhou, famous for its delicious Xizhou baba bread. After 5 days of traveling, we took a night train back to Kunming and said our final goodbyes.
That afternoon, I got on a plane to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I spent the next day exploring Chiang Mai, soaking up the tropical weather, and admiring the architecture — not far, distance-wise, from Southwestern China, but quite different.
After a day in Chiang Mai, I headed out to a farm called Mae Mut Garden for a 16-day WWOOFing adventure!