Dispatch from Kunming, China

Sun 3/17/02 6:25 AM

Dear Friends,

We’re now in Kunming, capital of the Yunann province of the People’s Republic of China. We’ll be here only long enough to arrange permission and transportation for the Burma road, then we’ll head out. In the meantime, we’re enjoying spending $12 USD per night for a hotel room and $1.25 USD for all-you-can-eat buffets.

Yesterday we were in Macau was a colony of Portugal from some 400 years ago up until 1999 when they basically dumped it into Chinese hands. It’s now a Special Administrative Region of the PRC, as is Hong Kong, only its ties to the mainland government are stronger than those of HK. It’s ties to HK, however, are quite strong and of a more or less carnal variety.

Macau is to Hong Kong something like Atlantic City is to New York City and Philadelphia. Since about 90% of Macau’s deal is hookers and casinos, and seeing as we arrived on the 9am ferry and departed at 3 in the afternoon, Chris and I missed entirely what most visitors come to Macau entirely for. (The one taxi driver we had in Hong Kong who spoke any English explained to us that one can get, so to speak, more bang for his buck in Macau: “Thousand dollars in Hong Kong,” he said, “no happy. Thousand dollars in Macau — happy! happy! happy! Haw haw haw!” [a grand HK is about $150 USD]).

To the casual tourist’s eye, Macau consists of a lot of overcrowded, substandard high rises and a lot of overcrowded diesel buses filled with Chinese tourists (who are every bit as avid with their picture taking as the stereotypical Japanese tourists, let me tell you). Meanwhile, I had come to Macau expecting some kind of Sino-Latin feel. But other than bilingual signage in Portuguese and a number of mediocre “Spanish colonial” style edifices, I didn’t find what I was looking for.

There were a few highlights. The view across the harbor to the Chinese mainland from the Sao Paulo ruins was, as they say, breathtaking, even while shrouded in mist (the weather’s not been great so far this trip) which imparted a bit of ominous mystery.

On the advice of a German whom we met on the ferry, we ate lunch at the Clube Militar de Macau (special, higher non-member price: 130 palacas [20 bucks]). To my knowledge, Portugal is justly unknown for its cuisine, though the meal we had at the Club was quite tasty and perhaps the best Portuguese food I’ve chanced to eat. I especially liked the pickled broadbeans, which are like super-sized limas with a prominent black streak down the trailing edge.

The most interesting thing we found in Macau was a performance of a Chinese opera, which we stumbled upon on a market side street. It seemed an unlikely spot for such an event, but we rounded the corner and there it was, on an elevated, permanent stage, with a further elevated orchestra pit and bona fide PA system (because, I guess, the gongs and cymbals need to be louder than they already are). P.J. O’Rourke once described Chinese music as sounding like a truck full of windchimes colliding with a stack of oil drums during a bird call contest. The opera had a tinge of that but was altogether listenable, if inscrutable. There was but one other foreigner in the crowd, and we stood beside a pile of stinking durian fruit and watched the show for about ten minutes, thrilled by our first real Chinese cultural experience.

Now we’re in the PRC, but other than noticing that the newly minted currency features Mao (I mean, would the Germans, if they still had their own notes, put Hitler on them?), I’m reserving even first impressions.

Regards to all,

Jeremy