July 2. I wake up to the sounds of chickens in a village in the Salween river jungle in Northern Thailand. I hike back to town, hop on a bike to the next town, and then onto an overnight bus ride back to Bangkok. I watch the sun rise over the city as I sit atop Wat Arum, rays of light streaming across decks of commuter ferries as they rush young workers up the Chao Phraya River. Ate breakfast with an Icelander having beer and cigarettes for his meal, bought souvenirs and dress clothes for my upcoming adventure, and was definitely ready to leave. I did enjoy eating one last final meal in an alley. Thirty six hours in Bangkok and I arrive in Beijing: seat of empire, fortress of the Khans, capital of capitals.From Beijing central train station I couldn’t get a taxi to the hostel I wanted to go to, and luckily found another one right in front of me (Beijing City Central YH). Met a beautiful Russian girl and a few other people, mostly studying Chinese or getting on and off the Trans-Siberian train.
It’s a few days later and I’ve had several job interviews, I turned down a job at a kindergarten to work at a conversation school, it sounds a lot like Nova. Stepping out of this school’s location in the heart of downtown Beijing, skyscrapers rushing up like erector sets around me, I knew this was how I wanted to experience the new China. Matter of fact, the moment I stepped out of this school accepting a job, I get offered an interview at another school by a guy handing out flyers. I go up to their school and talk to the manager, she hires me but their school doesn’t have any students yet. My Chinese classes are down the street in another ridiculous looking office building.
The hostel I’m staying at now is kind of special, the one and only Feiying Youth Hostel Beijing. I did find some cool Americans to celebrate the 4th of July with, and ran into some Peace Corps folks I had met in Philippines. Crazy coincidence; there are more than a few youth hostels in Beijing. They were finished with their service and traveling on their way back to America. My roommates are three Spanish speaking guys who’ve been in the hostel for months and not going anywhere quickly, a Vietnamese guy who went to college in Hungary, an Australian also looking for work as an English teacher, and a one armed Belgian painter who talks to himself. Late at night in the lobby random Chinese men walk around in their underwear and spit on the floor.
I’m looking for an apartment but thinking about doing a teach English-exchange for home stay. Beijing is rowdy, it’s crowded, loud and rude, but it really feels alive: babies, grandparents, a healthy balance of ages but no doubt people everywhere you turn around. The scale is huge, everywhere; the boulevards are massive and sidewalks broad, and forty story buildings everywhere you look. But the big streets are the western Beijing, the alleys are a step back, people are sitting on the sidewalk eating stall food and selling in dinky shops; the front streets are stuffed with chain restaurants and shopping malls. The malls are exactly the same as Japan, exactly.
July 8. I like it more everyday, especially at night. I drank in the alley behind the hostel with a few friends, we ate grilled animal parts on sticks and a drunk guy tried to finish his baijiu with us. Yesterday I met Lucy, my SAT prep student, a 17 year old who wants to go to college in the US, and her mom (hot!) at a KFC in downtown Beijing. Looking for another tutoring student, I went with a Chinese associate to an extremely distant corner of Beijing, got on a bus to go even further, and found a giant mall surrounded by huge apartments. It just doesn’t stop! The student, in clearly pronounceable English, said she had a bad personality (I think she was right), and spent most of the time arguing about the price of the lessons with the associate. All of this and the associate said I wouldn’t be teaching this woman anyway, just tell her I would and then we would switch teachers later. After this exchange, the woman at the table next to us asked about lessons but was worried about studying English because apparently foreigners have AIDS. We were at McDonalds. I started my Chinese lessons later that day, they were kind of slow paced, but we’re on the 16th floor in the middle of the city and the view is amazing, sometimes in one glimpse you can see seven cranes working on a skyscraper. We went out to dinner at 11:00 that night but the restaurant was out of rice.
July 12. Still in the Feiying hostel, thinking about staying three more weeks so I can get a cheap home stay in August. There are Chinese and foreigners to talk to here, some of them are obnoxious, but that’ll probably happen anywhere. It’s close and cheap here. There are stupid Irish kids always drinking, entertaining, a balding older Dutch guy, and an American on the way home after being in the Philippines with the Peace Corps. I taught Lucy the SAT student for the first time, she’s super smart but at such an English disadvantage. The Chinese class has ups and downs, in the last class there was a Japanese housewife and an Iranian college student (“our countries are enemies,” she said). I went out to dinner with Wendy, the Chinese hand model, much more assertive and talkative than Japanese girls. I’m not spending much time working yet but I’ll do more soon, I’m happy focusing on Chinese, there just so much to learn at the beginning; with Japanese I didn’t really do to much at the beginning.
July 15. I taught my first day at Vivid yesterday, it was not much like Nova. The school doesn’t care whatsoever what the teachers teach, and the materials are few. It creates an interesting atmosphere among the teachers because they also seem to think a little about what they teach. The lessons are three hours long, a really long time. But it’s amazing what difference a dress code makes; teachers’ wearing casual clothes around adults just doesn’t seem right, it makes it feel like they just walked in off the street and started talking. And the students were absurd, they kept talking over each other (and me) and correcting each other; Nova students would have been shitting their pants if they were in this. But they were good, really good. They were putting a lot of effort into learning English and most of them were really getting somewhere. Both classes asked me for my email, one girl wanted to take me out to a restaurant, and when I turned around they were talking in Chinese about dating me. But the girls at my Chinese school are my favorites; I learn more language in 15 minutes with them than in three hours of chanting tones in class. I went out to dinner with the Australian couple fr
om class, they are my age and living in a Central Park West-like mansion in downtown Beijing. When they asked me how much the hostel cost I couldn’t tell them; the difference in prices would have just been too shocking. I’ve had some good beers and snacks in the alleyway with hostel people most are too young but they have good stories to tell, almost all are European. I speak Spanish to the Spanish guy sometimes, he’s from near Basque.
July 19. Teaching Lucy she said, do you have friends here, and I said, yeah, a few; she says, wow, you’re so brave. She thinks its good that she spends all her time studying but wants to go to the US to broaden her horizons. I went out with the Vivid teachers last night. They seemed an all right, normal enough bunch, and going out to a bar the students just tag along after class, its nuts. Most of the teachers are from the US, it’s kind of strange- I haven’t seen all these Americans in a really long time. I got food in the alley the other day and the meat man started talking to me, he got his 12 year old girl to speak English to me, she was correcting everything he said: daughter… d-a-u-g-h-t-e-r, daughter! I finally found a good Chinese teacher at Eloquence, and I also taught their once and they paid straight up cash right after the lesson, it was fantastic. I get good informal Chinese lessons at the hostel too; I learned how to say cockroaches and disgusting (like this place, right? I told them.)
July 29. Time’s flying by in Beijing. I teach more now and I’ve spent a few nights out with the other teachers; know I’m starting to think they’re a little more full on than folks were in Japan. Like not so ordinary, and sometimes it’s good for people to be a little ordinary. I usually go to Chinese class in the mornings, chat with the girls in the lobby for a few minutes, and then work at Vivid until 9. After that maybe a drink with the teachers or maybe back to the hostel. In the afternoons I teach a group of 16, quite mixed in ability; a few people understand nothing, a few people complain that it’s not boring and school-like enough. In the evenings my class is phenomenally better, maybe just because it shorter though. They understand a lot more, laugh at each other, and are just more relaxed. Everyone that I meet in China just has such a more interesting history, they get standing tickets on the train to schlep 24 hours to their hometown for spring festival, they come back to Beijing for the rest of the year because it’s the only way they can make a living. A lot of my students are graduated from university but with no job, learning English to get ahead. They’re not shy but still seem a little reluctant to talk about themselves.
Nevertheless my afternoon class wanted to hang out together, so we did today; we walked around Chaoyang Park and I took them on the bumper cars. Only in China would the city parks be fenced off and charged admission to. Afterwards we went to a buffet hot pot restaurant; talk about part of the problem! The place was overflowing with frogs, turtles, and all kinds of seafood, I could just envision a graph in my mind, a graph of fisheries stocks plummeting dramatically. It was even all you can drink, complete with warm Tiger beer and horrible imitation wine. I went to the Beijing Botanical gardens the other day with Sofie, a Chinese girl that I met, from Inner Mongolia. She says I’m unstable and change my mind all the time, I want to say, no, I’m just indecisive. She’s rally cute and just a little feisty, she has strong opinions but giggles often. I went to a hospital with another friend from the Chinese class, the same one who told me to become a businessman and stay in China for longer. There were lines of people everywhere; it looked not unlike a flea market.
Aug 6. Still in my hostel, all my apartment plans have failed. Two of my good friends from Japan, Mark and Kiki, come today and I’ll stay in their hostel until the end of the week. I’m free in the morning because I’m done with Chinese class for a little while. Yesterday I went to Houhai with Liu Qing, it’s a little lake in the middle of the city surrounded by a walkway and little bits of park, at one end lies a bar area teeming with foreigners. I found myself in the unfamiliar position of convincing her that I didn’t like noisy areas, she didn’t believe me. Saturday night I saw transformers and sat at a street café until 3 in the morning with a couple friends and some dancers from the Cook Islands. The time passed well that night. The movie theater was 100% western, prices inclusive; truly distinctive even among the shopping malls of Beijing. The next afternoon I played mah jong at Chinese class, the game is almost the same as rummy. Friday night I went to Sanlitur with people from Chinese class, the area was kind of horrible, just like a giant frat party, or maybe Goergetown, the last time I felt this feeling was at Koh Phanang. My Chinese teacher who went out with us is very cool, she’s a Beijing native but seems a little dragged down by life, she’s 26 and unmarried. In the hostel now there’s a Japanese guy from Osaka who quit his job and is on the way to France to study Algerian cooking. As a hobby!
August 16. I gave my two weeks notice at Vivid, in the past week four teachers have quit or been fired- the fired one is my new roommate for the next three weeks, Matt. I’m staying at his apartment, a nice room in a big building in a huge apartment block, but it’s just another place to live in this city. Mark and Kiki came last week, we went to the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, both were two of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Mark and I and four students took off on the weekend to Datong to see the Yungang Buddhist caves and a temple on a holy mountain. The caves were completely amazing, it was a whole temple inside a grotto, not just a sculpture in a rock. The temple wasn’t too bad either, located an hour hike up Wutai Shan Mountain, across the highway from the over crowded and over hyped Hanging Monastery. On the way back to the train station, my cell phone was stolen by the fucking mini bus driver, now I can’t call half of the people that I’ve met in Beijing. I was livid. It got better soon though, we took the train overnight coming home. Everything was like an old movie from the 30’s: the platform, the sounds, the speed; the train was packed, there were people in the aisle all night, resting their heads on my knee. We played cards a little while, I took a sleeping pill, and passed out.
Last night my class spent twenty minutes trying to ask me how to say “I like you”’ to someone, and I kept saying, no you don’t really say that, and then after the class was over, a couple of the girls say, I like you, Matt. Today they said, can you treat us to dinner, and I said no, you should treat me to dinner, I’m the teacher, but then I actually invited them to come out to dinner with Mark and I, and one of them hugged me.
Aug 25. Vivid fired me Friday. I gave them two weeks notice and they waited one week and told me they were finished. I was told right before I was going to teach the party on Friday evening, so I walked out in anger and proceeded to quickly become inebriated and lose 50 yuan in poker (not too much money in the grand scheme of things). I am really unhappy about it though, I liked being there and wanted to spend one more week with the students and the teachers, I feel like I’ve abandoned the students now. I had kept telling them I was staying for months and months, and then I was going to tell them a few days before the fact, but too late. Two were waiting for me at the party and sounded angry on the phone. I’m mostly just angry with one guy right now, but I honestly feel like all Chinese business is completely fucked up, full of crooks and liars where everything is illegal and quality is a peripheral concern. In just two months, I’ve been asked to lie on my resume and lie to students, I’ve learned that basically all Visas are illegal, and taxes are never paid. Saturday I went to a park with Liu Qing, we found an accordion player sitting on a bench. There was a tree where an emperor hanged himself when the city was being sacked by rebels. We could see the moat of the Forbidden City, it’s a massive river circling a 20 meter stone wall. Everything in this city is huge. The Chinese have a story of the boy who cried wolf, but the boy dies in the end. A little different. On Sunday my student Lucy’s family took me out to dinner and recounted, with laughs, stories of cars crashing outside their apartment on a major throughway and boys getting in knife fights at high school. They just don’t have the same value of human (or animal) life in China. On 
Saturday, my friend Fernando and I found a helpless looking French couple to play mah jong with, we wandered dark alleys until we found a house where some woman were playing. An old man gave us watermelon and cleaned the house around us; there were two tables all together.
Sept 2. Leaving Beijing, ready to start on a journey. Earlier in the week I went out to a club with some of my students; we played some remarkably simple drinking games, went dancing, and then a few of them came back to crash at my apartment. These young people are adventurous, many of them seem to have divorced parents and they are in Beijing on their own, searching for a future in a deep ocean. I went to a traditional medicine shop and got “hot cups” treatment to increase circulation and aid digestion; it was weird, the last thing I see are glass suction cups and fire, and when they are on your back you look kind of like a cyborg, but it really works! I finished my Chinese class on Friday and we played a little mah jong. The other students are a Brazilian guy who sighs a lot and is looking for work as a computer technician, a Canadian hockey player, and an American girl who wants to work in the Foreign Service. One morning I went to the Pan Jia Yuan market, perhaps the biggest market in the city, so much junk there it was amazing. Tourists were buying jewelry, my Chinese friend bought “rare” magazines, I bought go and chess sets. There were some really poor looking vendors, many looked Arab. Later that day I went to a temple with Dennis, he tried to take me to his house but it was on a military base, so I wasn’t allowed- he wouldn’t even let me take a stealth photo. Better not get deported, I figure. He talked about how bad he thought Mao was because he abolished education, but old people like him because he gave them food when they were hungry. On my last day I went out with some of the older students and ate some horrible tofu products, I think this was composed of the fabric they throw away to make normal tofu. We cruised a paddle boat around Hohai under wish balloons of paper lanterns while I tried to navigate with my newly purchased Feng Shui compass. There were some little girls selling roses, I had seen them a week ago at the same spot. They were the sweetest children ever, perhaps ten and twelve years, slithering around crowds on summer midnights. I’m packing to leave and I get an email from a Chinese friend, she writes, “don’t forgot to call me with a trouble.”
Sept. 4. I stayed in Beijing for about two months, and I left the city on a Monday night train bound for the hazy interior of China. The trains of this country are a time travel as well as an uncomfortably long distance, uniform clad porters station carriage doors as coal engines belch smoke and shout whistles down seemingly endless platforms. A student sees me off and the train slides away into the night. My bunkmate tells me that her son is going to America to study a few years from now. He will be 15 at that time. Next to her is a man and a woman, I asked the man if the girl was his daughter. It was his wife. They were in Beijing on vacation and returning to their home. The train station in Beijing was the most amazing station I’ve ever seen. There’s a traditional Chinese gate on the top and thousands of people rushing through under a billboard sized info screen above the entrance. I could have stared at it for hours.
I come to Pingyao, a touristy yet quaint medieval town still enclosed by the original city walls. I stay at the TianYuanKui hotel and it’s beautiful and romantic. I drink expensive tea and ride my bicycle around the town, stopping at noodle shops, bell towers, merchant houses, and many cobblestones, and late in the afternoon I come to a Taoist temple. The monks start talking to me in Chinese. Where are you from? America. I don’t like America. Why? Bush. Well, I don’t like him either pal. But I like chuan chuan ge. Huh? Chuan chuan ge! Is this a person, a city, a color, what are you talking about? Nothing. A person, ok, where does he live? The monks are getting livid, and start flexing their muscles. Arnold Schwarzenegger! Got it!
I take a bus to Xian, leaving Pingyao we were driven in a cart to the highway on the outside of town, only to wait for an hour before the real bus actually came. Riding the six hours to Xian passed through miles of cornfields, neat guardrails, and few cars.
In Xian I climb up the city walls, which are enormous by the way, only on the north side of the city, the distance you could walk on the top of the walls was quite limited as of 2006 (the South side is better). I saw the famous warriors, stayed in the Ludao Binguan hostel right close to the train station; it had great staff and the sketches on the walls that come mandatory in Chinese hostels. I meet some guys from Colorado that are driving across Asia (and around the world),
and hitch a ride with them to Hua Shan, a holy Taoist mountain located an hour outside of Xian. The mountain is covered in clouds and smog; the guys move on and I climb it alone, starting in late afternoon and arriving around the lodges located near the top a little after dark. The trail evolved from a broad, clean, slab of pavement into narrow gulleys climbing crevices in the cliffs, it was mostly safe, even in the wet and the dark, but I wouldn’t want to take my mother there. I was holding an umbrella almost the whole way; it was pouring. A peaceful rainy night passed on to a peaceful rainy morning without a sunrise, which gave way to masses of tourists, once the cable car started running. There are frequent food stalls and more than a few lodges, chain links to help you up the steep climbs, and the views would be amazing if it was clear. Dozens of porters pass by hauling out the bottles and the trash, but it was nothing like what I saw later at Emei Shan. In the rainy dawn we ran into a woman, not too old, in old wet clothes and a very small bag walking around the mountain, she spoke a little English to me but the others said that she hadn’t eaten for three days and that she was strange; a “policeman” followed us around to “protect us.” There seemed to be a strong fear of the individual, of the unordinary. But it would really have been a great mountain, even in the rain, if not for the loud tourists and commercialism – lines, pushing, yelling, cell phones, vendors, everything from the city except for the trash. Mountains in China and Japan seem to have a different appeal, something I’ve learned after two years, they’re more like strolling gardens. At the hotel on the mountain there was the meanest looking yet at the same time beautiful Chinese girl, she must have been some kind of staff at the lodge. They were playing cards and she was slapping them down in spite that the crustiest old man would be hard pressed to match. I met a Chinese tourist at the lodge who was a university student studying Japanese, she spoke it pretty well for someone that had never been there. She is from Inner Mongolia, the guidebook describes her town as a dump but when I ask her she quickly says it’s a wonderful place. She says the first emperor of China, who built the famous warriors near Xian 2,000 years ago, was a great man because he unified the country, even though she acknowledged that he killed tens of thousands to build his graves.
Sept. 11, on the train to Xinjiang, first we passed through a few hundred miles of mammoth stalks of corn, slowly giving way to the nothingness of the desert. The mountains begin to rise out of the dust; it looks like Nevada.
Sept. 13, Xinjiang. I arrive at the train station early in the morning sun, which happens to be around 9 am in the twisted time zones of western China. Once again, the front of the train station is packed with thousands of people, no taxis, and no buses, so ignoring the pushers and hawkers trying to rip me off, I make my way out to the highway to find a taxi tricycle contributing significantly to China’s air pollution problems. The driver was so lost he couldn’t find a church on Sunday, but divinely I manage to find the cornfield hostel, not a bad choice in a strange city. The next day I hike up to a mountain lake, the scenery is alpine with sagebrush in the lowland and spruce in the mountains. From Urumuqi, first take a city bus through the
Muslim neighborhoods to the long distance bus station, take the hour and a half bus to the town below Tian Chi, hop on another bus up to the base of the chairlift at the mountain, and from there it’s a steep mile or two to the lake (or a charlift for wimps). At the top of the lake we are approached by a Kazhak man with sharp blue eyes, and he shepards us to his yurts on the other side of the lake (Rashit’s yurts). There’s a little bit of a road, hotel, and chairlift on the mountain, but beyond that it’s quiet. I see the stars and breathe fresh air for the first time in months. I’m with my roommate from Beijing Matt and a Japanese guy who lives in Beijing that I met at the hostel. He’s lived in China for 12 years, but he still uses handi wipes and doesn’t litter his cigarette butts. The bus up to here is full of locals, women with head scarves and men with facial hair, an appearance absent in most parts of China. At the hostel there were other Japanese people, one from Saidaiji; they were heading to Kazhakstan. Back at the lake, we spend a night in a yurt, eat a few hearty meals of grain, and hire the same blue eyed man to lead us up into the mountains beyond the lake for a night. Wearing the same cap one might picture on a Basque shepard, he tells us that his family have been ranchers here for generations, longer than he knows. He says they are building a dam above the lake, others say it’s not a dam but a road into the mountains. Above treeline at camp, we hold down the horse while he changes its shoe.
Sept. 17, Turpan. Riding a bicycle around this ancient Silk Road town, I glide through narrow streets of mud and brick houses; old men with white skullcaps and fraying beards pass the time squatting on curbs while drying grapes hang from the ceiling of courtyards. I approach a man in a courtyard, he is reciting the Koran, perhaps? He motions for me to come over, makes a prayer motion and points to the sky, asking me to join him. He is alone. Kids run up to me looking for my camera to play with. I go to a mosque at sunset; I’m the only one there. 
The walls are a meter thick of scratchable mud. A short turn of the corner from the hotel brings me to these neighborhoods, a few more blocks leads to vineyards. At night I find some guys that I met on the street in Xian, they have been riding on motorbikes almost all the way from Xian, perhaps a thousand miles away. We ride around town drinking a few beers; there’s good lamb in this town. At 3 am I find the only remaining group of people in the hotel restaurant, we find ourselves speaking in Japanese, and the drunkest guy at the table asks me about Taiwan, the next thing I know, he tries to tackle me at a slow motion pace that only a drunken Chinese guy could muster. His friends profusely apologize, and the night is over. I’m staying in the Turpan Binguan, it pretty much sucks, although there are few other choices in town. I wake up in the morning, and from the hostel section of the hotel, walk outside and down the block to the showers. They’re closed. Until 3pm. I go to the front desk, they tell me there are no other showers. I say, this is an enormous hotel, find me a shower. They give me a key to a room, tell me it’s dirty but unused, go ahead and use the shower. Entering said room I find a completely living person occupying it, but I am soon relieved to notice that it’s the young Israeli girl I met in the lobby last night. I apologize, shower quickly, and when I return the key to the desk, I say, you know, there’s someone in there. Oh, I know. And you didn’t think that would bother her? Right.
The Muslims in this town are always smiling and friendly, every time it surprises me. Being in the US in the era of George Bush, it’s easy to think that all of the Muslim world hates westerners and especially Americans, but in this corner of China its just not true. They have another group of people to worry about- the Han Chinese who are flocking to the region and overwhelming their cities.
Sept 19, train to Lanzhou. Barren stretches of desert, bumps of terrain in the distance, spotted by power plants or huge tracts of vineyards. Many Uighur people in Xinjiang spoke English, a man on the bus had studies in the Middle East, a traveler on my trip to Turpan was Turkish-German, studying the Altai people of the Asian steppe. Ugher and Han really seem to live in a different world in Xinjiang. There was a tourist village near Turpan, the people lived ordinary lives; a Chinese tourist was washing his bright sneakers in the same well where a local woman was washing her hair. There were Buddhist frescoes painted in caves dating 1700 years, the faces had been chipped out by the mullahs in the last couple centuries. 1700 years and look at how the world around this little cave has changed. For many people in that area, many things could still be the same, though; houses of mud brick, water from wells, stone cooked flatbread, raisins dried in the sun.
Back in the big city Urumuqi, at the corn field hostel, my money was stolen – credit cards, ATM cards, most of the cash I had. What can I do, it was bound to happen sometime. I’m lucky it wasn’t my passport; I borrow money from my friend Matt and manage to get by. The next few days when I bargain for prices I tell them that my money was stolen and they give me a good price.
There were lots of Chinese tour buses in Xinjiang, lots of Japanese as well. Although I did see Chinese backpackers up here, it was hard to avoid the masses and overly restrictive site regulations (don’t deviate off the path), not to mention exorbitant entrance fees. Chinese folks may be great for dinner and drinks, but they are not for traveling with; all they want to do is ride buses and take pictures. Xinjiang was great though, sort of break from Han China in many different ways.
“There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes.” Tolstoy
Sept 22, train. The landscape blends from desert range to cornfields to rice patties; it is fall and peasants are harvesting rice cut upon the hillsides. The Yellow river in Langzhou, even in its upper reaches, was massive, thousands of years of history running through central China. I’ve been on the train for three days, about 60 hours total, and I’ve descended the equivalent of Maine to Florida. Sleeping in the hard bunks is not unpleasant, the chugging of tons of coal being emitted into the atmosphere is quiet lulling. Some people on the train are on vacation, I meet a group of ladies who are on a choir tour. Others are businessmen, they ask me to exchange ticket stubs so they can get a greater reimbursement from their company. Moving south, the train rolls into Sichuan and Yunan, the southwest corner of China. Every dwelling is a simple structure made of mud and brick, factories line the riverbanks like I am rural Pennsylvania, and Eucalyptus trees begin to shoot up in the gaps around the farms.
Sept. 25, Dali. I met the Geckos tour group in Kunming and we’ve moved onto Dali. Somewhat disappointing, the adventure ability of the group falls short of my expectations which had been built upon the other Gecko group that I met in Pingyao. Nevertheless I manage to leave them with their horses in Dali and take an amazing hike up to Zhonghe temple on Congshan Mountain, outside of the town. It’s just a mile or two in a mini bus or taxi to the base of yet another chairlift and significant entrance fee. After a steep climb I’m at the top, cliffs soaring around me on the edge of a 4,000 meter mountain, green life massing even in September. Along the trail I see a beautiful lodge on the mountain top, meet a flower woman, a drunk, lazy eyed man with a monkey, and walk a really long way. At the top of the trail lays Zhonghe Taoist temple, monks invite me inside and quickly ask for 200 yuan, about $25; this blatant manipulation of visitors in the name of religion is insulting. This amount of money is 10 times the normal amount one might donate in a Chinese temple; it’s even more than most would donate to a church in America. I give them a few dollars and tell them to quit being ridiculous. Above this temple is a beautiful quiet lodge, the Higherland Inn, it would be a beautiful place to stay, and all of this area can be mostly reached by a chairlift from outside of Dali. The girls at the lodge are smiling and friendly and point me in the right direction to hike on down the trail. I see few hikers or construction workers, a rarity on hiking trails in China. I do find one woman who is fascinated by me taking pictures of flowers, she manages to follow me for several miles, but there is something about her though, and she manages to frighten every soul that we pass along the trail. I tell her that I am in a hurry and move on. I reach the end of the mountain trail, near Gantong temple, and begin to descend. I pass a giant construction of a chess set commemorating a monk that lived there and played go (I was confused too), and come across a group of people picnicking and drinking in a gazebo holding a monkey on a leash. I rapidly fumble for my camera, but before I can shoot they snatch up the monkey, ask me for money, and shove its asshole in my face. I say no thanks, and ask for directions back to town. The drunkest of them all stumbles down the hill for a minute to take a piss, points to the right, and says something which I translate to mean “bad walking.” As I reassure myself that I can’t go wrong going downhill, I wonder what it took for me to be taking directions from a drunk with a lazy eye and a monkey on his shoulder. I didn’t die that evening.
Reaching the bottom, a road is being built, there is a man breaking rocks barefoot and women carrying pinecones for fuelwood. This is the China that I have heard stories of, the China that is not found in the shopping malls of Beijing. A country straddling the 21st and the 19th centuries, booming wealth and crushing poverty, Han businessmen and local indigenous groups that live side by side but don’t speak the same language. My mind comes to images such as these when I read opinions that China is not a country but rather an empire; so many peoples and so many languages lumped together under one flag. It makes you appreciate the richness of the world, just how much there is out there that we don’t know of, that we can’t even begin to imagine.
The next day we rode bicycles through tiny fishing villages scattering the east side of Erhai lake, tents and shacks pieced from scraps creep out of ledges on the roadside fishermen pull out nets of cheap baitfish. This is miserable food, and whether it’s eaten or sold in the market, leaves one to assume that these people don’t have many options in life. One trip across the lake from resort hotels of Dali and I feel like I’m in the Philippines again.
Oct. 2. Tiger Leaping Gorge. The gorge is amazing, mist covered gorges dropping precipitous height to a massive river. We had an extra guide with us for the hike, all he carried with him for two days was a pack of cigarettes. The Halfway lodge along the trail is spectacular, peacefully nestled miles from the road among a few farmhouses. Tiny cornfields spotted the hillsides. We passed a few men mining by washing rocks in stream water, its sad to see practices such as these, so much damage to the environment so that a family with no alternatives can put food on the table. At the end of the trail back down on the road at Tina’s guesthouse, tour buses come in the afternoon, but evening and morning are gorgeous, the early morning mist is stunning, and the lodge serves 2 yuan glasses of plum wine as we drank the night away playing mah jong.
Lijiang was a beautiful old city in the mountains, although the numbers of tourists were astounding. Cobblestone streets, canals, and hundreds of craft shops; kind of a Chinese Aspen. It might be a nice place to go with a dozen friends and party every night.
There were a few dance shows of minority peoples in extravagant costumes, much of a charade for Chinese city folk, just as I saw in Urumuqi with the local Uigher people dressed up in musical performances for the Han businessmen on travel. I know we’ve treated American Indians horribly in our country, but I wonder, is it anything like this? Here we are in the 21st century and these people are taken out of their ordinary lives as farmers and traders, ponied up in costumes and put to dance. The Chinese just want to see this postcard image of minority peoples, not believe anything bad ever happens, and go on with their lives. There’s just something more that’s happening here that I wish I could understand.
Back in the tourist world, the Aussie gals’ footy team just won the championship, and I bought us all a bottle of one dollar baijiu (the one that comes already packaged in a brown bag) to celebrate, quite sure that this group of 10 girls and one guy will not be huge fans. Shockingly, two Kiwi girls who never drank in their lives fell in love with it and spent the rest of the night practicing martial arts on trees. It was a great night, and I’m sad to leave the group. On our last night, our guide tells his that he lied and this was actually the first time he ever led one of these tours. Having been a little disappointed with him, I figure now that he did pretty well for the first time. We finally get some drinks into him, and after most of the group has retired, he whispers to me and another that he used to be a teacher until he beat up a student who was acting up. End of that chapter. The tour is over, and I’m on the way to Zhengzhou to see a girl that I met in Beijing. Kunming was a beautiful city, if I was going back to China again to teach English I think I would try to live there. We stayed at the Camelia hotel, expensive but with a hostel and a great café next door.
The train ride back north is amazing as always. Porters yell, I mean, yell at people to close the windows, strangers amiably molest the four year old boy in the carriage, and passengers do nothing on the 20 hour journey but stare out the window.
Oct. 6, Luoyang. It’s the first week in October, national holiday week in China, a time when you do not want to be traveling, and I’m wisely ensconced in Luoyang, one of the ancient capitals, in the central plains of China. We go to the amazing Longmen grottoes, ancient Buddhist caves dating from the 7th century. Looking out on a branch of the Yellow River into a sea of smog, one wonders how it must have looked 1500 years ago when that city was the capital of China. We also stopped in at Baimasi temple, supposedly the first Buddhist temple established in China, from around the 2nd century, although the present structures are not originals. I find a monk to mark my temple log book, dozens stare at this rarity. Remember that China is a country that has all but abolished Buddhism in modern times. The few days that I spent with this friend and her family were wonderful, nothing but friendliness and hospitality from her friends towards me, the visitor. Absurd amounts of food and unhealthy amounts of liquor were consumed; it was also nice to get off the beaten tracks for a little while.
I take an overnight seat (not bed) in a train for the short five hour ride to Xian; its good to celebrate youth while you still have it. I plan to meet the Japanese speaking friend for my short layover until I go on to Sichuan. I pass time in sidewalks and ramen shops from the predawn hours until the bus station opens, and then have breakfast at my old faithful Ludao Binguan hostel, quickly ascending the list of my favorite hotels ever. Meeting my friend on a filthy rainy day, we check out the Forest of Steles museum of Xian, holding enormous stone tablets inscribed with various teachings and historical recordings. Amazing. On par with the Shaanxi history museum, much better than the Banpo Neolithic village (should have known better). I roll into Chengdu in the middle of the night, and start making plans for Emei shan, the holiest Buddhist mountain of China.
Oct. 9, Chengdu. Three days of hiking in the rain and Emei Shan is conquered. Seeing the temples rising out of the mist on the forest slopes was a beautiful experience, as was hiking the trails in the early morning and late evening hours, I could feel alone with the nature, and maybe the spirits. One person asked me if I was Buddhist. A soft rain garners a certain tranquility of the forest, even though views are limited. It was very nice being completely alone for three days and moving at my own pace. I would show up alone at the temple lodges, lodges almost completely devoid of visitors, ask for a meal, and wait while they cooked it for me. I would startle at 4 am to the sound of monks chanting in the predawn darkness. The temple lodges were easy to find, and there were more available than what was listed in the guidebook. Descending I stay at the amazing Magic Peak Monastery, a short walk outside is a faint path leading to an enormous cave, I plunge dozens of flight of stairs into the dark to find a tiny Buddhist offering and a twinkling light. Bring your flashlight and try not to panic.
I think climbing Emei shan has made me more aggravated by the Chinese masses; at this point I feel kind of finished with China. Listening to my iPod while hiking was the most wonderful thing I did in days, it is a little sad how great it was to be able to block out all the sounds of China. But being alone just makes the bothersome things worse, I think. Back in a tea house in Chengdu, it’s still raining, and I want to see the sun and some people that aren’t tourists.
Oct. 11 Songpan, Sichuan. Found the sun, high in the mountains of Sichuan, but I will only later discover that it is short lived in October. Met some people who I will be doing a horse trek with and ate yak steak. Last night in Chengdu I found a nice teahouse, some quiet back streets around Dragontown hostel, and bought a winter jacket (I realized that I wasn’t in the tropics anymore and it wasn’t summer). Next, while eating dinner alone got approached by a drunken young Chinese guy, telling me about the coffee shop of which he is the manager. He pointed to his girlfriend, noted that they were engaged, I asked when, he replies hen yuan (very long time!). He demands to pay for my dinner and inevitable the night ends up back at his extremely high class coffee shop, something that could easily be found on 5th Ave in Manhattan, but here we are in the interior if China. He orders me an iced Hawaiian coffee with pineapple syrup.
The horse trek consisted of three days of muddy snow, obnoxious guides, and freezing weather, but the mountains were beautiful, especially when dusted in snow. We passed some villages, Tibetans living in enormous houses built up for the tourists to see. They raised yaks, sheep, goats, grew potatoes, and seemed to wait around waiting for tourists to come. There really seems to be a sort of facade put on with the minorities, every Chinese person I talk to seems to think they live idyllic lives. We sit in a house drinking yak butter tea, watching Tibetan MTV while the Chinese tourists among us pushed the Tibetan women around for photos. Its beautiful country but its pine covered mountains, and I find the highland panoramas of the Tibetan plateau much more suited to horse trekking. On the trek there were four guys from Manchester, totally amusing and with outrageous accents, as well as four Israelis guys and girls right just finished with their military service. We stride back into Songpan town like cowboys returning from an epic cattle drive. I stayed at the hostel above the horse trek outfitter, it’s cold, but you get what you pay for with $3. Next door, Emma, of Emma’s kitchen is wonderful and informative. Across the street I bought some yak jerky that turned out to be water buffalo. It was rank.
Oct. 15. Today I woke obscenely early (again) to come to Langmusi, it was a surprisingly short ride from Songpan to Langmusi, you can’t help but be happy when people tell you eight hours and it only takes four.
In Langmusi I walk around the town’s Lamasery, a temple complex of Tibetan Buddhism which is more of a village or a monastery than a temple. Temple buildings are surrounded by hundreds of prayer wheels, old men pass the time smoking pipes on benches, wrapped upon mountains of robe, garb, and coat. I find a trekking outfitter on the corner in the middle of town (it’s a small one), and a pleasant hotel just a few meters to the right of it. Between the two, up a dirty staircase, is an internet café.
The next morning my friend and I, a Chinese American woman from San Francisco, set out on an overnight stay in a nomad tent. Out Tibetan guide takes us over the hills into a grassland expanse rivaling any in the American west, with only a few tents and a yak herding moped in residence. Miles in all directions are scattered with yaks, sheep, and the occasional horse. Huge Tibetan mastiffs scare off wolves, not to mention me. A damp, October cold freezes through the grassland, but the herders are out until dusk rounding up the last of the great hairy beasts and tying them up behind the tents for the night; no fences mar this range. The tent we sleep in belongs to a stunning black haired Tibetan woman with brilliant jewelry of stone hung around her neck. She cooks us a dinner of potatoes over a stove fueled by yak dung; there is no timber at 4,000 meters. They ask my friend and I about America, its life, its people, and money. They can’t comprehend my friend being a single female and forty-ish.
The next day is even colder, we set off to return and stop with a woman and child packing up their camp for winter, stuffing (perhaps) everything they own into a wooden chest the size of a kitchen oven. The mother was using a twig to eat, she kept it in the corner of the tent, not far from the dung pile. I tried to accidentally leave behind my chopsticks. These nomads and their neighboring town are the poorest people I have yet seen in China, equal to any I saw in the Philippines and Cambodia. People had food and a warm coat, but little else. Back in Langmusi, eating at a Tibetan restaurant, we learn that the Dalai Lama is accepting an award in Washington DC and giving a speech that same day. The restaurant family asks me to look on the internet for the speech, and I point them to the world of YouTube. There is a genuine passion in their eyes about this exiled leader; these people live ordinary day to day lives, yet still search for a missing element that the Chinese and we Americans lack. Other times this passion is hard to find. The town has internet cafes, and the great firewall doesn’t block as much as people think. BBC and parts of Wikipedia were the only things in English I could not find, some people had problems accessing their own blog, and I’m sure more Chinese language sites are blocked, but myriad other devious sources remain. But what do I find at the net bar? Some men are watching an Eagles music video and some teenage monks are playing Grand Theft Auto. Go to the super net cafes in the big cities and you will see dozens of men at any hour of the day doing online gaming. So much for the internet breaking down the barriers of information. Back in Langmusi, at the restaurant, one of the men calls a friend in the nearby, larger Tibetan town of Xiahe and we listen to fireworks in the street, later we learn that tourist’s cameras being confiscated by the police.
On the highway the next day, the sun comes out on the drive through yet more alpine grasslands; the bus picks up Tibetan herdsmen, they crash into a seat and slumber heavily for 45 minutes until they hop off down the road, no doubt awake since well before dawn. I think about wincing from washing my hands in cold tap water, and promptly decide these are the toughest human beings I have ever seen. We turn and drive up a valley to Xiahe, an even more Tibetan dominated town with a huge lamasery, known as the biggest outside of Tibet. The sun is blinding walking down the sidewalk, passing huddles masses of age worn faces clutching prayer beads smoking curved pipes. We make our way to Tara guesthouse, a decent, albeit cold guesthouse. Monks, Tibetan ranching families, and occasional tourists populate this town, shops pedaling endless rows of trinkets line the streets; stuffed between the souvenir shops sit tiny
souks offering monks’ burgundy robes. We join the semi-required tour of the lamasery the next morning; it allows us a brief glimpse inside the main temple buildings at the hundreds of monks who have journeyed across the country to come here. More fascinating are the Tibetan peasants who come offering yak butter for candles, probably the only item they have to offer. I see a few women laying on the ground in prayer, they lie down completely, stretch out their arms, get up and stand where their arms reached, and do it again, perhaps a hundred times on the ground to encircle the temple. Custom dictates that this is sometimes done three times around the temple. It seems that middle class Tibetan families become monks, it offers a chance of education and escape from harsh rural hardships. I find them in my hostel and at a teahouse, they are fascinated to see a foreigner and ask bright eyed questions about America. I ask a couple of boyish monks, no older than 20 and red cheeked from the cold how long will they be monks, they shrug and say we’ll see. A decent level of education seems apparent, they may not speak English but they can speak Mandarin, something many of the poor Tibetans cannot. Like too many religions, the fervent believes are the poorest of the poor. Buddhism, particularly Tibetan, is rife with customs, rituals, and incantations, a valid comparison between Tibetan and mainstream Buddhism can be made with Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism. Seeing all those rituals is amazing, but I can’t help but think, if this was Christianity and we saw people doing things like this, we wouldn’t hesitate to think of it as senseless fanaticism. But when it’s exotic, its cool.
Oct. 20, Beijing. I haven’t been warm for about a week now, but all of this hanges as I roll back into Beijing. It has been two months, and I come back to see friends and collect bags. There were a few more sites that I wanted to see, but my money being stolen gives me a new job for the three days I’m in town: retrieving the money out of the Chinese bank account of the card that was stolen. This soon became the most difficult thing that happened in my whole time in China. The bank said I had to wait a week, which I didn’t have, so I went to my English school, which created the bank account for me. This was also the school that fired me for trying to quit. Not surprisingly, they were unwilling to sign off on something that would allow me to get the money immediately. I said, what am I going to do with this few hundred dollars that will get you in trouble- throw it on the horses, take out a subprime mortgage, come on!? Finally we found that we could publicly notarize a Chinese friend of mine to withdraw the money for me in a week and post it to me. A few other financial lessons learned in months of traveling: pay pal is wonderful for transferring money for free. When my money was stolen and I didn’t have an ATM card, I borrowed money from another traveler and immediately paid her back by having her set up a pay pal account (it takes seconds) and then transferring the money from my bank account in America. You can even do this internationally, say from America to England. You can also do this with Western Union but it costs $20 or something. I was so excited that I thought I could do this same thing by getting a Chinese bank account, like the Postal Savings account (biggest bank in the country), and transferring into it from America. But although pay pal is international, as of 2007 it didn’t support China, so this wouldn’t work, and I’m left with a Chinese postal savings account with approximately $1.50. One last financial note: travelers cheques are becoming almost completely useless in the 21st century. You will have much more ease finding an international ATM than a bank that will cash travelers cheques, and you will save a lot of money in the process. If you’re worried about losing an ATM card just get two of them. The only possible advantage is to have the cheques as a backup, supposedly they can be replaced quicker than an ATM card.
Oct. 24, departure, Hong Kong. I will miss China, I will miss the friends that I met in Beijing, as I will missing the loud, dirty restaurants while swilling baijiu and stuffing copious amounts of Chinese food into my mouth. I’ll miss the train stations and their huddled masses of peasants and their bulging sacks of luggage. I’ll miss the ancient carvings in the cliffs of torrid, muddy rivers. Nevertheless, the imminence of departure has kept a smile on my face during the last 24 hours of train ride, and passing through customs I looked the woman in the eye and said, I’m leaving China, and I’m never coming back. On the train to Hong Kong I was bunking next to a stunning Cantonese but Polynesian – looking girl with long flowing hair and big, soft lips. She had been in Beijing on vacation, and couldn’t stop showing me pictures that she took of her herself in front of every imaginable famous spot in the city. Her name was Flora. The landscape turns from brown grain into lush rice patties, and I’m ready to hop on a plane to Borneo. Its time for vacation from China.
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