My Crazy Encounters with the Deadly Wild Elephants of Southern China

Before I arrived in Jinghong, the last Chinese city before the Laos border, I had asked a restaurant owner if I could camp in their unused field. They fed me, treated me like a king and I was forced by old granny to stay for lunch the following day. The wee Granddaughter was amazed that my home country has swimming pools and gave me plenty of warning about the ferocious Daxiang (Elephants) that lay in my path ahead. They were a really nice family. The one armed grandfather told me how he had a motorcycle accident and refused to have medical treatment because he believed god would help him.  He has survived to tell the tale; I hope he survives to tell the tale of how his huge stomach abscess miraculously heals. Evangelical Christianity is growing in China at a phenomenal pace. I learned that the Chinese word for hallelujah and amen are the same as in English and that the word for god is Shendi. I had a really good time with this lively family who refused to take any of my money, they treated me so well it was almost embarrassing so leave having given them nothing in return.

I had earlier assumed I would have been entering Jinghong with plenty of cash to burn and was going to go to Karaoke for the first time in China (for the quintessential Chinese night out) and blow the rest of my renminbi on luxuries that I haven’t had in a while. 


I was hoping my bike would get trampled on by Wild elephants in the jungle near Jinghong after being told how dangerous they were. The photos of Elephants jumping on my bike and stealing my tangerines would have been epic. By mid-morning I was just hoping to see one, by midday I was hoping to hear an elephant and by the time I left wild elephant valley I was just content that the socks I’d washed in the stream had dried and my suntan had improved. No matter what I do or where I go, nothing out of the ordinary happens to me. Apologies if you thought the title of this blog entry was going to result in me ferociously fighting off stampeding tusks. I wasn’t being deceitful; this blog is about my encounters with wild elephants, which adds up to a grand total of none. However, I did see footprints on the mud of the riverbank which I washed my clothes in. The photos didn’t come out well but trust me, it was  Elephants that made them. Don’t tell me otherwise.

I arrived in Jinghong with little Chinese money left and after stocking up on camping gas, I spent my last day in a Chinese city trying to find the cheapest noodle stall instead. I was hoping something bad would happen as I left China so that I wouldn’t miss it if Laos turned out to be utter dross.

The last town I passed through before entering Laos was Mengla. I bought a jin (600g) of tangerines from a fruit stand and then was given loads of freebies (2 gorgeous fresh pineapples, 5 tangerines, 2 apples and a type of fruit that I’ve never seen before and was also given the opportunity to chat up the fruit seller’s highly attractive 26 year old daughter who lives in Kunming (I got nowhere). I will definitely remember China for its people doing everything they can to rip you off one minute and being unbelievably generous the next. Since I got my bicycle my Chinese has improved a lot and more often than not towards the end, I was overwhelmed with the friendliness, curiosity and generosity of its citizens. 

I arrived at the border the following day with enough cash to buy rice, a bowl of fried tomatoes and eggs, a small bottle of water and a can of coke. The radio was playing the same pop songs that were being played 5 months ago when I arrived in Beijing. I left China in the early afternoon and cycled the half kilometre or so to the Laos checkpoint. They allow you to pay in US dollars but wouldn’t accept my 100 dollar bill as they had no change. I wasn’t allowed back in China so spent about 3 hours waiting for a taxi driver to exchange money at a good rate. I had a pineapple, a Salman Rushdie book and plenty of cigarettes so it wasn’t too bad. I ended up paying 8% commission for exchanging my US dollars to Laos Kip. I suppose it could have been worse.

 I didn't know it that the time that this would be my last good meal for 300km

The border at Mohan

I reflected on my 5 months in the Middle Kingdom whilst lounging around in No Man’s land. China is too vast and varied to be summarised in a book let alone a short blog entry. I’ve shown a couple of people my route through China and they’ve been amazed at the amount of places I’ve seen whereas I look at my route and it feels as though I’ve whizzed by so many sections and missed so much even in the small percentage of the country that I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel through.

Looking back

When I hear the name China the first thought I think about is its beauty; its old pagodas, willow trees, bamboo swaying in the cool breeze, gravity defying mountains, lush fertile farmland with buffaloes ploughing the fields, round straw hats popping out of the rice fields as its farmers use every daylight hour to feed a billion mouths in techniques of an age old tradition. There is the smell of wood smoke and freshly cooked food in tightly clustered villages with chickens roaming the cobbled alleyways and children smiling and laughing as their grandparents look on from the comfort of their tiny little stools, gambling, smoking and watching the world go by. Inside are spacious houses with no consideration given to decoration but in a strange way, this functional clutter nevertheless has a definite aesthetic appeal. Chinese civilisation is the oldest living civilisation.

However, China isn’t always pretty, far from it. Many of its historical old walled towns that survived the wars in the first half of the 20^th century were destroyed in the second half as Chinas communist government sought to modernise the nation with little or no consideration for its history or the livelihood of its people. As China has abandoned communism in favour of a market economy its wealth has boomed in the last 20 years Chinas and an emerging middle class has grown with an appetite to explore its nation’s roots. Much of the remaining old towns with their historic architecture still intact have become overly crowded holiday resorts that are more like theme parks than living cities; generic shop fronts sell items that nobody needs, every 2^nd building is a guest house and the sound of crickets and the sight of the milky way at night has been replaced with the sound of countless bars pumping bad techno or very bad karaoke to the sight of neon lights and vomiting drunken youths. The local population is almost invisible and rarely treated with respect by its wealthy, city sleeking visitors who have found quick wealth and think overly highly of themselves as a consequence.

Most of Chinas big animals are either locally extinct or highly endangered as there habitat shrinks and they are killed for superstitious traditional ‘medicine’. This appetite for exotic ‘medicines’ is decimating the population of wild animals on a global scale and unless there are huge cultural changes within China, I can’t imagine this situation will get any better as the disposable income of Chinas growing middle class increases. Much of Chinas most beautiful terrain is getting ripped apart for mining, all but two of its hundreds if not thousands of rivers have been dammed (the Li and the Nujiang) and an astronomical amount of sand is being dredged from its rivers for construction materials. Lorry after Lorry belt out black fumes as they carry their cargo through beautiful but rapidly shrinking, picturesque landscapes to one of Chinas numerous indistinguishable, hazy, polluted cities.

The average Chinese city is by no means beautiful but they are full of life. The streets and lanes are a web of activity; you’re never far from the smell of food or the sound of car horns. In the evenings people don’t just lock their doors at night and shut themselves off from the world, they play cards, go dancing in the park or more often than not, just hang around and chat or watch the city as it moves. Neither the young nor the old, nor women feel threatened to go out at night, no matter how poor the street lighting is in the dark dingy lanes. Not once in 5 months did I see violence. When I lived above the town centre in Peterhead I didn’t even bother looking out my window if drunken people were fighting, it was commonplace. I once whacked my knee in someone’s ribs pretty hard when clambering up to my bunk on a sleeper train from Guiyang to Chongqing. I said ‘duibuqi’ and the middle aged man laughed even though he looked to be in pain. Showing anger in China just isn’t cool, they don’t glorify being tough and aggressive in Chinese society and I’m sure that the man wanted to punch me in the face but he just wouldn’t, it’s not the thing to do, I said sorry and he laughed, that’s how they roll.

You have to go a Chinese city to get an idea of the amount of construction that is taking place and even then, it’s impossible to fathom the scale of this growth on a national level. People have asked me why I wanted to spend so long in China of all places (when I could sit around beaches in Thailand instead)…. China is such a dynamic country, it’s energetic, and the changes that are occurring now will have reverberations around the globe for years to come. The greatest migration in human history is taking place in China. The Government project that 300 million people will be migrating from rural life to urban life within the next twenty years. I have a friend living in Shanghai who compares living in Shanghai now to living in New York at the turn of the last century. In my blog I earlier compared Chongqing to New York 100 years ago and you could justifiably compare Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Tianjin in that category too. Shanghai was just a village 100 years ago and is now a high tech, modern cosmopolitan city with a population of 24 million. Shenzhen was a mere village just 30 years ago and is now a city of 12 million and source of just about every product you see that has ‘made in china’ written on it.

These cities of new, towering, gleaming office blocks are a world away from so much of China. All of the wealthiest nations have a high rate of urbanism and I believe China faces two major hurdles in its quest to becoming a truly modern, high tech, post-industrial nation. The biggest hurdle to the government plans for mass urban migration is Chinas geography. Only 10% of the land is arable and that figure would be significantly lower if they didn’t farm steep mountain sides. The staple crop of rice requires a field to be totally flat so that it can be flooded at a controlled level. This means that so much of China is impossible to farm on an industrial scale. Unless there are huge leaps in technology in the coming years China will continue to be dependent on the work of peasants to feed the country and the average age of peasant farmers must be well into the 50’s. In Guizhou I saw countless people in their eighties who are half the height of what they used to be. These hunchbacks still work, providing essential farm labour carrying heavy loads. Almost all the young people migrate to the city as soon as they can. Whereas the youth create the vitality of its ever growing cities, it’s the pensioners that feed the cities and keep them running. The face of 21^st century China is one of growth and upward mobility but the backbone of Chinas economy is old and frail. I had this discussion with a Swiss woman and she asked me if I was worried by this. I told her yes, but eventually the lack of farm labour would increase the cost of food which would provide economic incentives for younger people to farm. The man sitting next to me from Hong Kong was quick to agree. “China is the oldest continual civilisation and things will sort themselves out, like they always have done in the past”. Whereas I agree with him to an extent, Chinas long history hasn’t been without its fair share of disastrous episodes. The average working life left in these farmers who know the land intimately can’t be more than 30 years and you only need to look at Zimbabwe to see the consequences of large numbers of people with no background in agriculture being put in farms. I’m not saying things can’t be done swiftly and effectively and if any country can replace a workforce of 300million in the space of one generation then it’s China. They have lots to think about.

The second factor I believe may be a hindrance in Chinas aims to be a world economic leader is it’s education system or to get straight to the root of the problem – the government. Tianjin alone has a construction site with office space the size of lower Manhattan being built under the assumption that Chinese companies will be leading the global economy. How can a country lead the world economy when its people can’t be trusted to have information about how the world works? In order to lead one requires creative thinking to find solutions to problems. People in China are bred from birth to think with subservience and not think out the box. This hasn’t had much effect on Chinas economy while its growth is still primarily based on manufacturing but I believe China needs to allow more personal freedom if it is to move to the next level.

A lot of people fear China as it emerges into a global superpower, I can see why. It’s a dictatorship that’s becoming more powerful and polluting more and more as it gets wealthier and wealthier. It has made no secrets about its desire to make Taiwan part of China by force if necessary. The Chinese people generally regard all Chinese speaking places as being China as well as Tibet and Xinjiang even though the local populace may feel very differently. There continues to be simmering tension regarding the border disputes with its neighbouring nuclear powers India and Pakistan over the territorial boundaries of Kashmir and I even heard one Chinese person vehemently correcting me that Vietnam is a part of China that got stolen from them. The lack of education in how the world both in and outside of the middle kingdom works and the inaccessibility of objective information is worrying. Although many of the greatest atrocities of the modern age have been committed by democratic nations with a free press, the Chinese people, having lived in a one party state all of their lives are much more inclined to believe what they are told and act accordingly.

Having heard the scare stories about China taking over the world and now having spent a considerable length of time in China, I view the emergence of China from a sleeping giant to a major political player with less apprehension than much of my fellow westerners.  I’ve found the people to be kind and hospitable despite their cultural superiority complex (if you lived in the centre of the universe you’d feel the same)! They appear rude at times with their pushing in queues, spitting and very direct way of speaking. “Waiter, bring me water” is how they’d say “excuse me, can you please bring me some water”, but no harm is intended.

They are tough in business and will lie out their teeth to get a good deal and never give you a straight answer if you ask them a difficult question but that’s fair play as far as they are concerned, they are not dirty people . A taxi driver once tried to charge me 10 times the going rate, I corrected him, paid the correct fare then he chased me down the street to give me my bag I’d left in his car. A street vendor tried to overcharge me for rice when my bank card was locked and ended up giving me loads of free meat and veg when she realised I was genuinely skint. I was more often than not overwhelmed by the kindness of its people.

China is almost a whole nation comprising of only Children; I’ve talked in the past about the negative aspects of the one child policy but what would have happened if it hadn’t been put in place. The population is well over a billion and Chinese peasant wives were sprouting out six or seven, China would have had to either plunder other nations or starve. The pressure heaped on parents for their only child to be successful is huge. The education system is highly competitive as is the competition for jobs. Social status and the ability to find a partner is determined by wealth as it is in any other society but the pressure to succeed in China feels greater than what I’m used to.

Many of these from the one child generation are very well pampered by their parents and seemed to mature later than westerners as they don’t live very independent lives even after leaving school. Amongst many of the young people, I felt an overwhelming sense of pressure to succeed to the expectations of family, a sense of vulnerability and lack of confidence and more than anything a craving for a sense of belonging. I felt sorry for a lot of the lonely young men who couldn’t get a woman without a good job, one of the 25 million ‘spare males’ that’s occurred as a result of the one child policy. I didn’t see a generation of people to be feared in the future. The Chinese are like the French; their number one concern in life is food. They don’t want to take over the world, for the majority of them, all they seem to be really interested in is a plate of good ‘chifan’ and the latest mobile phone. 

I like Chinese culture and its people and as the nation moves forward at an astronomical pace, I fear the consequences of this explosion of activity as much for how it might affect its own citizens as for the consequences that this new world superpower might have for the citizens of the rest of the world, the environment and the welfare of the 200 or so wild elephants that leave footprints on riverbanks. I don’t care that I didn’t see them, I’m just happy to know that they are still there. I don’t know if I will always look at China with such fondness but I know I will always look at my own time in China as being one of the most educational and enjoyable times of my life. I have forgotten the names of every Chinese person I’ve met (apart from ones that give themselves English names) other than two. Jeng Peng in Beijing and this man here, Heng Hua Xin. As people get older their faces tell the story of their lives. I don't fear dying young or growing old. I fear living as long as Heng Hua Xing and having a face that tells the wrong story because unlike him, I failed to find a reason to smile at any given opportunity. Wo zoule, Zaijian.