The recent Swine Flu scare has been giving me some flashbacks to my earliest days in China, when I was lucky enough to be stuck here during the great SARS disaster. Some of you who were in China in 2003 might be able to remember what it was like when SARS hit the country, and perhaps will indulge me as I reminisce, for a bit, about the perils of travelling, or even just plain existing as a foreigner in those dark dark days. The Swine Flu, I am happy to report, has nothing on SARS in terms of sheer power to induce fear into the very hearts and souls of China’s Old Hundred Names.

Photo: dmealiffe

In June of 2003, Mike, Amir, Lesley and I boarded an overnight bus bound for Lijiang. In those days everyone took the overnight bus, it was the cool thing to do, and gave you a “real China experience,” spitting, hacking, the chickens and all the rest. As soon as we boarded the bus two health workers boarded as well, dressed in full biohazard gear, and started spraying down the bus with vinegar, which gave the entire scene a very Sci-Fi Channel, post apocalyptic feel. The smell of vinegar permeated the bus and we were off. Everything proceeded smoothly, and we settled into our bunks, reading, listening to music, and chatting, and trying very hard not to cough, (which would arouse suspicion). Several hours into the trip made a stop at a health checkpoint, and we were all herded off the bus like animals, lined up, and had thermometers thrust into our aural cavities. I do not want to imagine what would have happened had someone on the bus actually had a fever, although it probably would have involved being quarantined in a place like Qiaotou, which is, for those who don’t know, the Chinese equivalent of Detroit, only about 10 times smaller, and luckily we were all healthy. However, we weren’t to escape that easily -- the “health officials” doing the checking noticed foreigners on the bus and pulled us aside, asking to see our passports and questioning our whereabouts. I felt a vague sense of indignation rise up inside of me: apparently traveling while foreign was now a crime. It seemed, however, that the “health officials” were not really sure exactly what to do with four healthy foreigners, and certainly did not want to bring the hassle of detaining us in the middle of nowhere Yunnan, nor the near-certain loss of face, and perhaps job, should something happen to one of us, upon themselves so they let us back on the bus after dousing us each with a dose of vinegar for good measure.

Photo: Andy McLeod

Sometime roughly 12 hours later we arrived in Lijiang. Our first task was to find a guesthouse, and we went off in roughly the direction of the place we’d stayed on a previous trip. But all was not well in Lijiang, we could tell right away. The place looked, literally, like a ghost-town. Anyone who has visited Lijiang, a place sometimes referred to by smug backpacker types as a “Naxi Disneyland,” will understand that it is absolutely abnormal to arrive in Lijiang in the middle of the day and see no one, no one at all, on the streets, to see bars and shops and guesthouses boarded up, and to hear no music, nothing except the sound of the canals, rushing through the city quite quickly, as it was rainy season. We eventually found a small guesthouse with a grandma and grandpa very happy, if not a bit surprised, to have visitors, threw down our belongings and went out to explore the ruins of post-SARS Lijiang.

Photo: b0ratD1

If there is one place in Lijiang that can be counted on to be in business come rain, snow, SARS, or nuclear disaster, it is The Sakura. Run by a Korean woman and her Chinese husband, the Sakura is a Lijiang mainstay and has opened branches now in Kunming, Beijing, and even Laos. We decided our first stop would be the Sakura, and we weren’t disappointed. Staffed by a skeleton crew, the Sakura was happy to have our business and the owner slowly began filling us in on the details of Lijiang during SARS. Apparently most businesses had closed completely as the Old Town had been shut off from the outside world for a month. Having lost a month’s worth of profits and still paying expensive rents, many of the smaller businesses had not been able to withstand the impact of SARS and were forced to close. As we were eating outdoors on the patio, a group of official looking Chinese people in suits approached from the other side of the canal. We glanced at each other nervously. Were we about to be arrested for defiling Lijiang with our SARS-ridden foreign-ness? Had someone seen us out on the streets without surgical masks and reported us? Did we not smell sufficiently of vinegar?

Stay tuned for the exciting continuation of this journey into China during the time of SARS.

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