Yes, gentle readers, it’s been a long, long time since we’ve updated the blog. We’re sorry, but we’ve been very busy ever since we returned to North America on April 17.

Immediately following this post, you’ll find four new postings devoted to weekend excursions we took during our five months in Kunming – three with our tour guide friends Dai Hui and Zhang Xuelin to other parts of Yunnan province and one by ourselves to Laos.  You may need to click “Older Posts” at the bottom to see all four.

The rest of our time in Kunming was almost entirely devoted to studying Chinese. We spent four hours per day (in some cases six) in one-on-one lessons with our very kind and dedicated teachers. Marcia and I have tremendous respect for these young women who stayed positive and effective despite the very difficult task of teaching a language to people of our advancing age.

Learning any language is humbling, and Chinese even more than others. I thought I was doing well until about the third month when my teacher broke down and told me my tone pronunciation was so bad that none of the other teachers could understand me. Thanks to her intervention, we went back to square one and did speech therapy for more than a month until I started to speak properly. I’m not perfect, but I can now hold my own in everyday conversation.

So what’s next? Marcia and I have been traveling around the US and Europe meeting many of my old colleagues and customers to validate the concept of starting a consulting business based in Shanghai. My idea is to serve Western and Chinese pharma companies and vendors who need an experienced manager to help them manage relationships and deliver projects in China. We have now confirmed enough interest that we have committed to moving to Shanghai in late October.

It will be another adventure, and I’m sure we’ll have many stories and pictures to fill a new phase of Rough and Ready Tours. Stay tuned!

Marcia and I met Xuelin at a bus station in India in the spring of 2010. Learning that she and her friend Dai Hui ran a tourism business in Kunming, we agreed to get together to play majiang and have some adventures in places ordinary tourists don’t go.

In December, they invited us to go with them on a trip to check out an unusual area called Yunlong County. They had never been there before, so it was an adventure for them as well.

Yunlong (“Cloud Dragon”) county is 150 kilometers to the west of Dali, the furthest most travelers get in Yunnan. It is out of the way, requiring almost ten hours of driving from Kunming, with the last four hours on a terrible one-lane road. When we arrived, we had to call our host to guide us into the village of Nuodeng where we would be staying in a traditional courtyard farmhouse.

Nuodeng is a well-preserved hillside village built around a salt well. It is mentioned in documents as old as the Tang Dynasty (7th century AD) and it has buildings dating back almost 1000 years. Salt was a valuable commodity, so it was clearly a wealthy and influential village.

We stayed in a farmhouse owned by the village headman. The house was over a hundred years old and a fine example of a traditional four-sided courtyard house (siheyuan).

Other houses in the village followed the same layout, although often modified to accommodate the steep slope on which the village was built.

Most had family shrines on the upper floor.

A sign of the salt village’s wealth was the Confucian temple built at the top of the hill. These were usually found only in larger provincial towns where high-ranking students were studying for government exams. But so many influential students had come from this village that it merited its own now-quiet temple.

The area is known for its ancient covered bridges, which were part of the “Tea Horse Trail.” As important as the Silk Road at some times, this road connected the fertile regions of Burma to the cities of Yunnan and ultimately the heart of China. Salt was a valuable currency produced and sold along the way.

The bridges are all still in use for foot traffic, including this vine bridge that even the goats refused to cross.

It was market day, so many people were out in traditional costumes.

Marcia got a chance to make friends with a goat.

Some cemeteries in the area have unusual Buddhist gravestones with Chinese writing on one side and Sanskrit on the other. People speculate that Indian culture may have filtered this far up the Tea Horse Trail and some people wanted to have both languages on their graves.

On the way back we spent a night in Dali, a famous tourist destination that we had somehow never visited. It’s easy to get to and quite the backpacker hangout, but charming nonetheless. Its 16-story pagoda is famous throughout China.

One interesting anomaly that most travelers miss is this religious building in the old town. Only the cross on the roof and the icons of Santa Claus show that it is a Catholic church.

It was market day, so many people had come into town to shop.

Our multiple-entry Chinese visas required us to leave the country every 90 days. Because we were staying in Kunming for over five months, we had to make a short trip outside the country in the middle of our stay. Cheapest would have been Hong Kong, which is considered separate for visa reasons, but we decided instead to go to Laos, where we had never been.

From Kunming, Laos is a short 90-minute plane flight or a grueling 24-hour bus ordeal over terrible roads. We took the plane.

We spent most of our time in the old capital Luang Prabang, now a charming provincial town with excellent French restaurants.  Luang Prabang has a large number of Buddhist temples and monasteries, with active communities of young monks with cell phones. Most are built in a style close to temples in Thailand, but there is considerable diversity.

One had a painting that had survived without being “restored.”

The old royal palace still stands as a museum in a lovely park in the center of town.

Bridges connect the town to houses across the river.

Luang Prabang has a beautiful custom that is sadly being destroyed by tourism. Every morning at dawn, the monks of all the monasteries walk through the center of town and accept sticky rice and other alms from townspeople. Monks give excess rice back to poor children along the route. Local people still participate as they have done for centuries, but unfortunately they are now outnumbered by tourists trying to have an “authentic” experience. I took these pictures from a respectful distance.

We took an excursion to a cave a few hours up the Mekong River.

The cave and scenery were nice, but the real adventure was the transportation in small gasoline-powered long boats.

Our first boat pulled off 20 minutes into the trip and transferred us to a friend’s craft, which the driver billed as a “luxury boat”. The luxury boat, however, seemed to make worse time upstream than any other. Then, on the way back, the engine died shortly above some rapids. The visibly rattled driver did what he could but finally ended up on some rocks. Unfazed, he did some engine work and then lifted us off the rocks once he was confident he had repaired the engine. He left his navigation pole on the rock as a memorial.

We spent our final night in the new capital, Vientiane, which has more great French restaurants but very few historical buildings.

The most interesting site is 6 kilometers outside of town and visited by few foreigners. When the CIA pulled out of Laos in 1975, the new president Kaysone Phomvihane set up his residence in the old compound. Unlike the leaders of some of his crazed neighbors, Kaysone ran Laos with a modesty and pragmatism that left it well place to rejoin the international community ten years later when he convinced his colleagues to follow the quasi-capitalistic reform policies of Deng Xiaoping. When Kaysone died in 1992, the government preserved his house just as he left it, right down to the standard US Army furniture. We could have been in Kansas except for the steady stream of Laotian schoolchildren coming to pay homage to the father of their country.