Mekong Diaries: Day 25

Day 25

When we eventually get out of the beds made for us in the centre of the living room, the rest of the family has been gone for hours to work in the fields.

After breakfast we walked slowly back to the town, taking a long way through rubber trees to photograph people collecting sap. Met a woman who warned us against going to the dam reservoir as because of the monsters lurking in the river. She was quite serious. As with everyone we spoke to in the Dai communities, she was unequivocal in saying that rubber was a boon. Her only stated wish was to be able to plant more trees, earn more money. Another man, with fewer trees invited us to return to do business together, and make lots of money.

Caught a bus to Jinghong where we hired push bikes with the intention of riding cross country to try and find the dam. Every road we took up the river was blocked until we came upon the offices of the regional national parks bureau. We blithely walked in and tried to get permission to visit the little pristine forest left. Leaving without the permission but thankful to have our cover story of being tourists intact we continued to try and find a way to see the dam. Our venture took us onto increasingly thin paths through, you guessed it, rubber plantations cut into steep hills, and concealing completely the river below. Eventually the paths disappeared completely and we found ourselves carrying our bikes on our backs as we scrambled up and down slippery ridges given completely to growing rubber, trying to find our way back to the roads.

Later eating pizza at one of the few tourist haunts in Jinghong not designed to serve Han visitors we wondered at the success of China’s vision for this region. In place of poor villagers and abundant forests, we had found rich well developed village communities, plantations, monocrops and ethnic tourism that bears no relationship to reality. Jinghong itself, clean and full of well lit clothes and gift stores, with scarcely a beggar to be found, bears no resemblance what so ever to the sprawling cities of the rest of South East Asia, although the local people, their clothes and customs are definitely closely related to Thailand, Burma and Laos.

RFA News Summary

This a summary of stories being carried on Radio Free Asia today December 01, 2009. Please use the links to go directly to the relevant RFA language website to listen to the stories or read original language transcripts. Some items are translated into English and are available on RFA’s English language page.

If there are stories that you want to hear more about or you would like to see covered we would love to hear from you. If you have a story to tell we will listen.RFAs main page has contact details for all the language services.

UN: HIV/AIDs Scourge In East Asia And Getting Worse

Sex workers and gay men in East Asia are becoming increasingly vulnerable to HIV infection at time when much of the world is seeing a slowing of the number of cases.

RFA reports that the United Nations latest global AIDS update says that Six million households will be forced into poverty by HIV/AIDS in the next five years due to fast-growing infection rates among female sex workers and men who have sex with men.

Meanwhile authorities in the Chinese capital Beijing  have detained an AIDS activist from the southern province of Henan after he tried to use World AIDS Day, December 1, to highlight the plight of people living with HIV in poverty-stricken rural China.

Tian Xi, 22, who lives with HIV, said in an interview from his home in Henan’s Xincai county that local officials were currently guarding the door of his home.

Lawyer Detained In China For Teaching Twitter

A civil rights lawyer speaking at a college class in China on internet censorship fell victim to a low tech firewall when police arrived and marched him off.

RFA reports Tang Jingling, a lawyer based in Guangdong’s provincial capital Guangzhou, said he was invited the Guangzhou College of Vocational Technology on Nov. 27 to lecture students there on the Internet and its applications.

Instead, he said, he was interrupted by a member of the campus security force who was auditing the class, and was told to show his identification before being led away by police.

November 30 RFA News Summary

This a summary of stories being carried on Radio Free Asia today November 30, 2009. Please use the links to go directly to the relevant RFA language website to listen to the stories or read original language transcripts. Some items are translated into English and are available on RFA’s English language page.

If there are stories that you want to hear more about or you would like to see covered we would love to hear from you. If you have a story to tell we will listen.RFAs main page has contact details for all the language services.

Mekong Diaries: Day 24

Day 24

Today we are on motorbike. We leave early and head towards the Jinghong dam’s reservoir. Not long on the road we pull in at another community rubber factory. We spent some time photographing the process of preparing the raw resin for shipment to a larger factory for the final manufacturing of tires, erasers or something else.

The roads soon left the narrow lands of villages and trees and entered into the wide flat plains typified by the courses of a great river. Here farmland spread in every direction, with many clearing fires burning at the end of the harvest. The road surface also soon worsened until we were bumping merrily along on gravel and mud. 25 kms later we reached a village relocated by the damming of the Mekong.

Mekong Diaries: Day 23

Day 23

We catch our boat costing 640RMB for the four of us about 40 mins and 12 kms downstream to be dropped in a car park where we find out we will wait for 10 mins for a local bus to take us to the next town, where the ‘indigenous tour’ will start. On the tiny super expensive boat trip here we again passed the small hill where our tour took place the day before flowing into the Mekong just south of the city of Jinghong.

300 years ago this place was indeed the site of the Dai King’s palace, but 40 years ago when the ruins left from the former glory still remained the Cultural Revolution happened and the ancient ruins were destroyed by the Communist government, as were all the temples in villages.

Mekong Diaries: Day 22

Day 22

Today we cast around for the best way to approach being in a strangely functional tourist town at the edge of China and South East Asia. We have come here to find out about the Jinghong dam, and the fate of the Dai people, but there is no quick or easy way to cut up a subject as immense of China. So we decide to take a tour, something classy called the Mekong Impressions Boat Tour to the ancient Dai Palace.

We discovered the tour yesterday while researching how to catch a boat to Thailand from Jinghong. So as the day starts to heat up we catch a taxi across the Friendship bridge to the River harbour port where a mini bus filled with middle aged Chinese tourists collects us for a short drive to another boat ramp.

Mekong Diaries: Day 21

Day 21

Our first night in Jing Hong which on first impressions seems to be all South East Asia and very little China. The city has a small but very clean and modern centre, complete with malls, fast food restaurants and an abundance of tourist orientated stores, selling tea, jade and elaborate carving apparently so prized by Han tourists. There is a small street with just a couple of restaurants serving western food, and it is apparent that the target market is not European or English speaking.

It is for an authentic indigenous experience that most come to Jinghong. The surrounding hills are home to many hilltribes, the Dai forming the largest group.

Mekong Diaries: Day 20

Day 20

Leaving YunXian the scenery quickly reverts to the farms and industry. Amazingly the town of YunXian is only 2 years old, but it already fills the bowl of its valley with an ocean of low rise buildings including a thousand mobile phone stores.

We follow the tributary called the Lancang towards the Mekong we started to notice sugar cane fields. In the river bed gravel extraction machinery was hard at work on every bend and shallow.