Xishuangbanna, which is no longer mysterious, stayed in the old Dehong.

Xishuangbanna, once famous for its mysterious customs, has gradually become a model scenic spot that can provide the most thoughtful and standard services, while Dehong, which is not far from the northwest and also belongs to the border where ethnic minorities gather, seems to stop in the old days. Travel writer Zhang Hailu passed by the capitals of Jinghong and mangshi, and saw beautiful but somewhat false bonsai and comfortable but bumpy life.

Wen hai hai Lu

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Northeast Night Market and Fresh Ethnic Style

Flying to Jinghong (the capital of Xishuangbanna) is the noon of hunger. Fortunately, the airport is not far from the apartment booked in the city. After I checked in, I immediately asked the nearest place to solve the problem of food and clothing. As soon as the store's strong Northeast dialect was exported, I knew I was going to stand on my own feet. Of course, this doesn't mean that people in Northeast China don't understand food, but as outsiders, they are really separated from the Dai area on the other side of the diagonal in China. Stewed vermicelli with sauerkraut and dry rice with hot and sour taste are definitely the two poles of the sour menu. As the daily food of Dai people, dark cuisine comes from the bitter intestines of cattle, which naturally isolates most tourists whose curiosity fails to cross the psychological safety zone.

As expected, the shops in the northeast can't recommend anything, and the Zhuanggao is very lively, but the night market won't be put up until dark.

At dusk, with the bright light and shadow of Shuangjing Shwedagon Pagoda on the east bank of Lancang River, the most industrious vendors have started to set up stalls. I walked down the stairs from the main hall of the Golden Pagoda and ordered a glass of mango juice in front of an unfinished fruit drink stall. Like the owner of B&B apartment, the stall owner also has a northeast accent. In the evening, along the karaoke stage singing Fish Leong's love songs, there are Changsha stinky tofu, Jianshui roasted tofu, Harbin roasted cold noodles and more barbecue stalls. Real local fried cowhide, bamboo tube barbecue, fried moss, glutinous rice Baba called Mi Bang in Dai language, and even high-protein bee pupae and bamboo worms that some people dare not look directly at can be seen in nearby restaurants, but they are isolated from the night market belonging to tourists.

This whole landscape, which means "nine towers and twelve villages" in Chinese, together with the prosperous holiday real estate in this area, can probably be regarded as a brand-new landscape specially built for foreigners to meet the imagination of foreign countries.

The next day, after the local delegation's one-day tour, I went to A Dai Massage Workshop in Gaozhuang. The technician with good strength and acupoints is a sister of Jiamusi in Northeast China. She said that she had adapted to the local taste, and would go to the village with friends of the Dai and Jinuo nationalities during the holidays, but a group of friends came to play and also needed to tell Zhuang about the night market-it was expensive and not delicious, but they just wanted to have fun.

The girl knows very well that this is the taste of tourism.

On the next trip, I flew to mangshi, the capital of Dehong Prefecture, which is also located on the border of Yunnan Province, and my stomach immediately enjoyed a three-dimensional enjoyment beyond my experience. The food here is much richer than Jinghong. Mainly there are my old classmates here. Tourists always know more about scenic spots and accommodation than locals, but the surprises outside the raiders often come from food and the moment when they meet their bosom friends.

After four consecutive dinners, I was taken to restaurants or mountain villages of Achang, Jingpo, Dai and De 'ang by my classmates. The price difference that outsiders can't accept is the standard for eating here. Beef jerky, ghost chicken, leek and rice noodles are decorated with bright peppers and unique green plants, which are delicious and beautiful.

The children whose classmates just went to elementary school rinsed the polished rice noodles in hot and sour sausage water for a long time. Children here can eat spicy food early instead of pestering their parents to eat McDonald's, but the coarse spicy food in the southwest stomach may have laid a stubborn foundation.

This is also my experience and lesson. After years of non-stop travel abroad, my taste has become more and more conservative, contradicting all faint western food, completely returning to the spicy southwest stomach, and completely losing the desire to explore local cuisine. Go to restaurants just to eat, often buy enough reserves in Asian supermarkets and stay in the homestay where Laoganma fried spaghetti.

Do you want to visit bonsai or old times?

Jinghong and mangshi are sister towns located in the same border area, full of exotic customs and unique customs of ethnic minorities. Banner's reputation has always been greater than Germany's, but in today's mobile travel mode, it shows a huge gap.

Open any OTA (Online Travel Agency) application platform, compare Jinghong and mangshi, and find a hotel. No matter the type or grade, Jinghong has too many choices, and because of industry competition, the price is more affordable. Find a homestay, open a beautiful group in mangshi, and the apartments that really live at home are concentrated in Ruili, the border town of Dehong Prefecture, which is 100 km away; Mangshi, which Airbnb welcomes, is either a jewelry town whose owners never reply online, or a very small apartment only suitable for a whole family to travel together.

Local one-day tour products, starting from mangshi, have only one route for long distance and short distance. The former takes a bus to the Ruili border to see the scenery of Gao Jie Port and Zhai Yi; The latter is one of the few scenic spots in mangshi, such as the Shwedagon Pagoda, the Rare Garden and the Book Pagoda-you can easily visit it in one day by bike or taxi. There are also Jinghong, dozens or even nearly a hundred kinds of scenic spots, rain forest, botanical garden, flower garden, wild elephant valley, sky tree, Keno villa ... all of which will take a long time. If you are really interested in plants, animals and even ethnology, you can also be accompanied by a professional guide.

Finally, I chose a one-day tour of Wild Elephant Valley and Rainforest Park. Although we didn't see the wild elephants migrating under the 2-kilometer-long high-altitude wooden plank road, the elephants, the white-cheeked gibbons who have been training with tourists for a long time, the exotic flowers and trees everywhere, the singing performances and jumping games of ethnic minorities easily met people's expectations for the tourist wonders. The only local I met these days, the tour guide, was involved in ethnology of animals and plants in an all-round way. His humorous and well-paced explanation made me, a traveler who traveled all over the world, feel that the money was well spent.

On the other hand, in mangshi, the scenic spots are extremely scarce, and the Dehong Museum is still under construction. Dai Museum is located in Dehong Teachers College, and it has not been opened to the public since the outbreak.

On the Zhihu, someone asked, where is the gap between Dehong and Xishuangbanna? A tourist who happened to have been to the two places from beginning to end 20 19 thinks Banna tries her best to provide nanny service for tourists, but apart from drivers and tour guides, it is inevitable to feel alienated from the locals, like visiting in bonsai; Dehong, on the other hand, has few tourists, so he can ride a bike and integrate into the local culture.

When the Yunnan girls in the circle of friends travel in the province, Banna's photos are all beautiful photos of luxury hotels, green grass like flowers and wearing Dai costumes. Dehong's photos are all ethnic food. A friend who came to the local area to do system engineering at the end of last century and now lives in Toronto commented under the stupa tightly wrapped by trees and green leaves in the noisy market in mangshi, which I took by hand: mangshi is great! It hasn't changed at all. But mangshi's classmates envy Banna's development. He said that his hometown, yes, nothing has changed, as poor as it was 20 years ago.

Past, eternity

15 years ago, I went to Banna and Dehong. Once, after completing the first backpacking trip abroad, I entered Mengla County, Banna Prefecture from Mo Ding/Mohan Port, and visited the Tropical Botanical Garden of Chinese Academy of Sciences on the day I checked in. Once, a special drug police officer drove a police car to Zhai Yi, a scenic spot near Myanmar in Ruili City, Dehong Prefecture. I can always be vigilant not to beautify my memory, and I will completely insist that the past is dirty and messy. At least in my memory, I feel that these two places are really ordinary. In addition to satisfying my curiosity about the border and the pleasure of crossing the border, the scenery and humanistic customs here are far less than those in the jungles of Southeast Asia outside the real territory.

Times have changed, and now the scenic spots are much cleaner and fresher than in the past. In 2020, when you can only wander around the country because of the epidemic, simply punching in these scenic spots in Jinghong City will feel that you have completely surpassed your Southeast Asian neighbors. Some people may say that such beautiful scenery is a little plastic, but they are not artificial, and at most they are properly processed naturally.

Unfortunately, Dehong failed to keep up with the development of eco-tourism.

Dehong and Banna form an interesting contrast. For a long time, Xishuangbanna was a mysterious foreign land in people's imagination, and it was a beautiful love affair in the TV series karma. Dehong has become one of the five counties (Yingjiang, Longchuan, Ruili, Luxi and Longling, which are close to the border and used to belong to Dehong Prefecture) that Kunming elderly often talk about when they miss the hard times of teenagers. What is often overlooked in the history of contemporary literature is that Wang Xiaobo spent two years in Nongba Farm in Longchuan County, Dehong, but the love between Wang Er and Chen Qingyang did not really exist in the golden age. But what people pay attention to is the influence of Banna on literature, film and television. They are familiar with Acheng and Chen Kaige, and have seen and read king of the children and Chess King more or less. In other words, Banna's educated youth memory has become a cultural work, while Dehong's educated youth memory has become a customized tourism product.

On the last day in mangshi, my classmates took me to take a bath in Shudong Hot Spring in Shefang Town, which is rich in high-quality rice. Finally, villagers who have a sense of scenic spot management set up a duty table under the big banyan tree and charged 3 yuan. The messy scene with plastic bags all over the floor in students' memory becomes refreshing and clean.

Passing through Nongyao Village in Feng Ping Town, I saw Meng Xiangguang Dai Culture Training Center. Some Dai girls study Dai language, Dai songs, Dai dances, cucurbit silk, elephant foot drums, fruit carving and embroidery in such a rural courtyard ... Principal Feng Xiaoping said that the tuition fee is low and many parents will bring their children to read it, but she also felt that the commercial version did a good job in terms of the inheritance of national culture.

The trip to Yunnan is coming to an end, and I am still considering whether to become a tourist bonsai or choose a comfortable but relatively bumpy life. As a short-distance tour, especially in places where online celebrities can't be called scenic spots without mobile phone screens, the bonsai of the destination is naturally beautiful, which can quickly bring tourists into exotic customs different from daily life; If you choose to integrate into local life, you may prefer a rough and comfortable place. But if you look at the information about tourism real estate, you will find that Dehong, which is comfortable and delicious, has never been an attractive place to live. Many times, living in a place is only for the local comfortable climate and slow-paced life, and will not pursue real integration-just like another famous sample in Yunnan: the new Dali people from all corners of the country and the old Dali people from nine to five are two species that rarely come and go.

More often, we live in a fantasy about a place. In the romantic imagination endowed by film and television literature, Dai people should live in the depths of bamboo forests accompanied by songs and cicadas. In fact, with the expansion of the city, bamboo forests on the flat land of bazi are becoming more and more scarce. A few years ago, when my classmate was bored, he scanned the surrounding area of his hometown with Google satellite map, dreaming of building himself a mountain house without poisonous snakes and wild boars. Suddenly, he caught a glimpse of a light green in the dark green not far from the city.

The lush bamboo forest near the waterfall became the last dinner place of my trip. In this hidden bamboo Dai village, I know why there is no ancient town in the southwest border. Villagers who run restaurants say that bamboo blooms every 60 years and then dies. The life span of bamboo buildings is really limited, so how can they survive? Most of the guests were acquaintances, full of food and drink, and gathered in front of a large rear projection TV in Zhulou to sing local pop songs, but a Thai cover version of Cai Qin's golden song appeared by accident. This scene made me suddenly enter the same karaoke scene of bamboo house in the middle of the movie "Tropical Diseases in Abicha", and the natural Thai pronunciation made the bamboo forest more charming at night.