Art and exercise in Mi'le
Red Wine Castle, a pedal car around the lake and a $4 vegan buffet. Mi'le made me smile.
Kia ora, team! Our Yunnan travels continue, with a quick look at Mi’le 弥勒. A city of a little over half a million people, where ethnic minorities make up 44% of the population. This is a small place by China’s standards. It’s located in the Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, about 100km southeast of the province capital Kunming. Its name means Maitreya, which originates from the Sanskrit for ‘loving kindness’ and is used to refer to the ‘coming Buddha’ in Buddhism.
The very first thing that struck me about Mi’le was its absolute lack of people. As we walked out of the grand railway station building and onto the grand concrete-slabbed square out front, the dearth of humans was ear-piercing. Like the use of silence in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, the audible contrast with our 247km/h train ride and the previous stop in Dàlǐ was a giant and abrupt leap. This was China on mute. The quietness matched the headcount in the square, with just a handful of humans, each gathered there to offer us a ride to our hotel, presumably out of the kindness of their hearts.
Our Didi driver ploughed down the very, very empty roads. At one point, he squeezed between a pair of slow three-wheeler utes, each stacked with crops and taking up both lanes. Next to the city sits the large Echo Lake - Shēngtài hú 生态湖 - and our hotel was beside that. Small clusters of chill-looking people slowly meandered along the lakeside path. Occasionally one of those 4- or 6-seater tourist pedal cars would intervene in our journey. By intervene, I mean it would be in our way and the driver would be forced to make some manoeuvre in order to maintain our speed, since heaven forbids having to use the brakes. It didn’t put me off, we were going to hire one of those!
We checked into our hotel, which had a large, open garage doorway as the entrance. It was like the Ghostbusters’ firehouse, sanitised in white tiles. Above the bed in our room was a huge printed mural: four metres of some imagined tropical island, palm trees and turquoise water. In the corner, perhaps 50cm from the bed, sat a tall bathtub, which the hotel said was filled with natural hot spring water. Bags dumped, we quickly popped up to the roof garden, where we crashed the owner shooting a vlog. Perched high up beside the balcony, selfie stick in hand, she changed her spiel when she saw me. She pointed the camera my way and - I am told - said something like “see? even foreigners want to come stay here!”.
Heading out for dinner, we used the lakeside path to get into town. Several tons of yellow sand had been dumped on one side of the lake, forming a pleasure beach. Just off the shore, a man chugged by on a motorised wakeboard. It all looked so idyllic and peaceful. The vegan buffet we visited for dinner came to a fraction over NZ $4 each. Unlimited plates of crackers, noodles and tofu for under five bucks? We liked!
After one sleep beneath the make-believe Pacific paradise, we jumped on the local town bus and rode it up to DongFengYun Scenic Area, a sort of make-believe art town. Part-art theme park and part-hotel, this place features an array of fascinating buildings and structures to marvel at. Trying to find out more about this place, I found this apt description: “ample opportunities for girls and friends to capture beautiful photos together”. It’s not wrong. I was there with my girlfriend and we didn’t get a single beautiful photo together.
The area’s centrepiece and brochure headline is the striking ‘Red Wine Castle’. A cluster of red brick towers huddle together, their necks pointing at the sky, while their bases fuse to form a church-like interior. Built by artist Luo Xu, the bricks were set from local clay and soil, the material choice minimising its artificial demeanor. To my eye, it resembles the Kent oast houses used for hop drying, with elements on loan from Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The interior takes a haunting angle, with its hundreds of clay heads, each with neck and vase base spun on a wheel and painted in copper or gold. It’s a fun, visual cacophony by day, but you’d struggle to sleep in there at night.
And that concludes my attempt at writing about art. We jumped back on the bus, headed straight to the $4 vegan buffet, wolfed down too much spicy noodles and cake, before running full pelt to the pedal car hire place for a full-stomach cardio smash around the lake. Dang, those things are tough to pedal uphill!
A day of high culture, capped off in a Noddy car: Mi’le has got it all.
Oh, I didn’t mention the remarkably cooler climate. There’s that too. Mi’le is cool!
Do you have any questions?