Jinghong, China
May 2018
We crossed into Jinghong, China from Laos on Nico’s bithday. It was an extraordinarily complex journey, involving many bus rides and lots of waiting and not a few moments of confusion. By luck there was an American man who spoke Mandarin on our bus as we crossed the border, and he was heading the same direction as us, and helped us out with exchanging money, buying tickets and ordering lunch. It wasn’t until we said goodbye to him in Jinghong that we really began to realise how different it was going to be travelling in China, compared to the Southeast Asian countries we had come from. No more Google maps (or Google anything), no more Latin alphabet, no English words written or spoken anywhere, no common language. With more luck and the kindness of strangers, we found our booked accommodation, checked in and went out looking for food and a place to have a drink to mark Nico’s birthday. We learned that even ordering food will become quite an adventure. Again, when we looked lost, kind strangers were happy to help us find our way and make telephone calls for us. All this with pointing, gesturing and laughing. How wonderful it is to be able to be lost like that.
The next day in our hotel room, we started trying to devise ways to recognise the Chinese characters, for example, this one looks like an alien with many legs, that one looks like a person kicking a leg out to the side. We used translation apps to find the characters for certain phrases for food and types of meat and drew them in notebooks so we could try to read menus. We learned how to say some simple phrases about ourselves, the usual greetings and how to count to ten.