There is a whole lot of counter-revolutionary activity going on in Kunming. People here consume passionately. For my part, I’ve been making an unusually strong effort to contribute to the local economy.
First stop was a tea shop. Tea shops are one of the more pleasant ways to waste time in China. I spent the better part of an hour unstoppering massive glass jars and taking in lungfuls of the fruity or vegetal aromas. Tea, like breakfast cereal, comes in a bewildering array of not only flavors, but also physical formats: sprigs, florets, powders, curlicues, flakes, buds, and even densely pressed blocks.
Whenever I found a tea that seemed promising, the attendant came by with a small ladle and transported a sample to the master of ceremonies, keeper of the magic kettle. The master steeped the tea in a manner appropriate to its individual character, poured it into a thimble-sized cup, and watched as I made knowing I-sure-am-appreciating-the-complex-flavor-of-this-tea faces.
I purchased three teas and then hit the drugstore, this time marching past the glass jars with their silly roots and powders and going straight to the gleaming cases of reassuring, blister-packed pills. I’m going off into the wild soon, and it’s important to be prepared for any contingency. Ah yes, here we are. Cipro for bacteria. Tinidazole for giardia. And valium for chicken buses.
I next briefly browsed a bootleg DVD store, out of idle curiosity. This store wasn’t one of those tatty market stalls. It looked rather like a Blockbuster, but one stocked entirely with fake merchandise. I picked up a box labeled “Rocky III.” The front had a picture of Sly in his championship belt. The back employed the standard typography of movie boxes — large pull quotes from critics; breathless description of the movie’s plot; small-caps/big-caps listing of credits at the bottom — except that the content was entirely nonsense:
— they encounter many
A stylish thriller that recalls David Fincher’s SEVEN…
STARRING Mark Wahlberg, Lou Diamond Philips, Christina Applegate, Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Sabato Jr, Elliot Gould PRODUCED BY John Woo, Wesley Snipes DIRECTED BY Che-Kirk Wong
Elliot Gould vs. Rocky Balboa. I like that.
But mostly I shopped for outdoor gear. In China I will occasionally camp while I bike, and I need to be prepared for some potentially very cold nights at altitude. Kunming has a good supply of camping stores. None of them are REI, mind you, but on the other hand, at REI I’m never waited on by 4 attendants at once. Of course, one of the attendants was chain smoking, and the only product information they offered was “Beautiful, beautiful.”
Less than $200 netted me a tent, down sleeping bag, mattress pad, dry bag, fleece pants, and balaclava. I sincerely hope the temperature doesn’t drop so low that I need a balaclava, but whatever else happens, I shouldn’t die of hypothermia.
The presence of so many outdoors stores — carrying so much decent equipment — is an encouraging sign. Appreciation of the wilderness requires a certain amount of leisure time, a certain amount of disposable income, and also certain cultural predispositions. National parks in developing countries are often solely the domain of first-world tourists, with maybe a few subsistence farmers thrown in. Camping is, put bluntly, a fairly whitebread activity. So it warmed my heart to see store walls adorned with snapshots of Chinese in crampons, Chinese wielding ice axes, Chinese swaddled in polypropylene, Chinese peeking out from tents. And the pictured vistas made me very excited for what is to come.
