Photography

I didn't make an easy link to my pictures before, so here's one now! http://flickr.com/photos/27352360@N04/

The most recent pictures on there are of things I've been up to in California since my return, but there's a ton of Asia photos on there and they're awesome.

I still have hundreds more to put on.

Riding through the Night in the Jungles of Laos

Before getting on an 18 hour hard seater night train between Guilin and Kunming:
"It'll be an experience."
"Yeah, a BAD experience."

We went on from Shangri-La/Zhongdian to Kunming, and then to Pu'er, home-base of the famed Pu'er tea. See Joe's blog (hangjoe.blogspot.com) for an account of our odd time in that city. We continued towards Laos, stopping for a night in seedy Mengla before crossing the border at Boten. And on to Luang Namtha. The much-vaunted return. Not much has changed except that there's more trekking agencies, a new night market, and even a couple four-storey buildings under construction.

We did a three day trek with a guide I remember from 2001, Mr. Bou-get. He has learned English and started his own trekking company, "The Jungle Eco-guides". He was an awesome, fun guide. In a matter of minutes he made a bamboo aqueduct to get cooking water from a small stream. He used the same skills later to make a bamboo water pipe to smoke tobacco. The trek was basically a slog through rain and mud in the amazing forests of the Nam Ha NPA. I'll tell you more about that later.

Yesterday we rented motorcycles for a trip to Muang Sing, north of Nam Tha. We'd contacted a couchsurfer up there who works for an aid project. It'd stopped raining by the time we left and the first hour or so was a beautiful trip on a curvy mountain road, through villages, hill farms, and jungle. Then...I got a flat tire. I only vaguely considered this possibility, but had no idea what I'd do. Luckily we were within a minute of a roadside house with a couple people hanging around outside. I pointed to my flat and they quickly looked around for tools and patches. A man walked up, some children gathered as we started working on it. They gave us an extremely sour fruit they'd harvested from the forest. The man patched the tube, put the tire back on, pumped it up. I gave him some money and got on...but it was still flat. So he stopped me and did it again. Put the tire back on and pumped it up and it was STILL flat. There were three holes in the tube and it took the better part of two hours before I was on the road again. Rain clouds were gathering. It was getting late. A guy holding an AK-47 over his shoulder hitched a ride with me for a time. It was soothing to know that I had a local with a gun with me. Then he got off and it really started pouring down. We put on our rain pants and set in for the next hour and a half of intense, dark, wet riding. The sun went down and so did visibility. I just had to keep breathing and telling myself this is awesome. At times the rain actually hurt -- I think it was hail! My bike stalled, in the real middle of nowhere, pure jungle, and I freaked. But it started up again, and we went on. I hit a pothole and again was scared shitless as I thought my bike was falling apart. I saw an unoccupied bamboo hut and thought, if we need to, we can shelter there for the night. The road straightened out before night completely fell, which was a boon. Our meager headlights were enough to make our way at reduced speed. We made it to Muong Sing, nerve-wracked and hungry and profoundly wet.

It was an experience.

(ps -- Don't worry, mom, we wore helmets!)

Down and out in Shangri-la and Xishuangbanna

I have been taking many, many pictures but haven't been able to upload them to my Flickr account. I didn't realize how hard this would be while traveling. I'll upload a select few the next time we find a place with wireless.

We went to Lijiang, which, although over-touristified, even more than Dali, and we arrived at the beginning of the Chinese tourist season so crowds were stifling, is still quite striking. It is a labyrinthine town full of courtyards, gardens, staircases, flowing water, a handfull of towers, bridges -- in other words, most of the elements of the Utopian city.

We hiked the Tiger Leaping Gorge with a group of young travellers we met on the minibus there. So I got to touch the mighty Yangze river near its headwaters. It was really quite an awesome place, with mountains rising vertically into the clouds thousands of feet above the coffee-brown river.

We continued on to Baishui Tai, a very strange place where 'Over thousands of years, the high carbonic acid content in the water sculpted steps, reminiscent of rice terraces, out of the limestone rocks.'

And then to Zhondian, or Shangri-La at is has recently been re-named by authorities anxious to build the tourist economy there. Nintey percent of the people here are Tibeten, but they speak a dialect of the Cham dialect, so it's probably not close to Lhasa Tibeten at all. Not that definitely heard anyone speak it -- I heard people speaking something that didn't sound like Chinese, but it could just as well have been a weird dialect of Chinese. It was neat, but weird, in Shangri-La -- in a way that is hard to explain. We saw a few fights. We went to a monestary and a handicrafts center where they showed us how to make tsampa, tibeten butter tea. Fucking delicious stuff!

So far, we've passed through the lands of several of China's 56 recognized minority ethnic groups:

The Yao (who are called Mien in Laos?) and the Zhuang (related to other 'Tai' peoples) in Guangxi.

The Bai in Dali.

The Naxi in Lijiang, who traditionally are followers of the Dongba relgion, related to the Bon religion of Tibet.

We will leave China soon and enter Laos. I should record a few notable things I've observed about China:

Chinese people love to play cards. Everywhere you go you see people, young and old, playing card games.

Girls wear dresses that Joe describes as "dress-up clothes," because they are reminiscent of the frilly, thin, ridiculous dresses we used to have in the "dress up basket" and Lily used to make us wear when we were too young to resist. No girl in America could get away with what Chinese girls wear.

Old people have street-based social lives in a way you never see in the US. They exercise in public places in droves. They sit around in groups and play cards or other games or smoke or just hang out. When I'm old, I want to be Chinese.

Dali

I realize I haven't written in here for two and a half weeks. It's hard to blog and travel, what with spotty internet access and always something to do. But I promised you better, so I'll fill it all in, soon enough. But right now I'm in Dali, an ubertouristy town of steep staircases to second storeys and old Bai women who mercilessly try to sell you weed. (We met one of them -- not telling how -- whose weed-seed-eating mother is a partner in her drug dealing operation.). Dali's in a valley between a lake full of odd delicacies and the Cang Shan mountains. It's raining hard now and we're getting on a bus to Lijiang. My scrambled eggs and ginger tea have been served, so I gotta go.

Free and Easy Wandering

Free and Easy Wandering, Chuang Tzu

The weather has been either extremely hot and humid, or raining, so it has been difficult to do anything, but I've been wandering around a bit on foot, by bike, and by bus -- West Lake, Longjing (Dragon Well) tea village, Lingyin temple, and the Botanical Gardens.



Last Saturday night we went to "Dream Party," a Chinese art-hipster shindig with live music and an open bar. They had canvases and paints so you could make paintings. Then we went to Coco club where we've been going a lot. It's an international fiesta led by a absurd Nigerian who's always trying to heat up the party by, for example, getting people to take each other's shirts off on stage. Outside, a massive Ecuadorian, passing out, smashed his head on a taxi, making a large dent. A hilarious fracas ensued, which we watched while drinking cheap beers from the convenience store right outside the club.



On Monday I chatted with a Chinese guy named Steven Yu who I met on the internet. It was cool. He's from a peasant family and a lot of his relatives are migrant laborers. He was very smart. We talked about sustainability, peasant short-sightedness with regard to ecology, holistic medicine, agricultural policy, migrant labor, The Art of the War, the I Ching, taoism and Chuang Tzu. He practically filled a notebook writing each word he spoke down, drawing diagrams, making lists, doing math. We drank 2% snow beer and flower tea and I ate something Taro-like but he said it wasn't, in a restaurant that was under construction.

Lishui

So I made my first solo foray into "real" China by going by bus to Lishui, a little village of two million people about four hours from Hangzhou. Of course, at the bus station I got on the wrong bus and got totally confused as workers looked at my ticket and yelled at me in Chinese. My bus had already left so they put me on the next one.

I sat next to a Chinese guy and he said "Hi," but actually spoke zero English. He yelled on his cell phone every five minutes. The extent of our conversation was thus:

He said something I didn't understand in Chinese.
I said, I don't speak Chinese. Then I said I was American.
He said America and gave a thumbs up.
He looked out the window at China, said Zhongguo and gave a thumbs down.
I said No, Zhongguo thumbs up. We were passing some beautiful mountains and little farms and ponds and it was a really a beautiful landscape.
He made signals with his hands as if to say "Compared with America, China sucks, and is way behind."
Then he got back on his cell phone.

Apparently a lot of Chinese say this. Some kind of inferiority complex. Or talking about countries as if they were soccer teams.

I got to Lishui and Brandon, who I was visiting, picked me up on his motorcycle. He'd once had his motorcycle confiscated by the police, and it was banged up from the time he hid a pedicab. He drove like a local and spit like one (namely, on walls.)

From his apartment (really a dorm room at the university where he teaches) you could see green mountains and farmers working their plots with hoes. From the back balcony you could look right into the Chinese dorms where eight boys are packed into one dorm room. They walk around in speedos or boxers and smoke.

It was like a non-stop sauna in Lishui. We didn't get up in time to escape the heat of the day when he went on a hike through the mountains the next day. I felt like my skin was burning the second the sun touched it -- but I was fine. The hike went up some steep rock faces, through an orange and plum orchard, up to pine trees and ferns, and tombs. Brandon once got drunk up there from an offering of Baijiu someone had left on their ancestor's tomb.

He showed me a cave where a hermit (or hermits?) from the Temple below lives. There was a recording of chanting playing but nobody home.



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The hermit had a grand view of Lishui. There was actually a National Geographic article written about Lishui by Peter Hessler.
The hermit in her rocky redoubt has no doubt seen a lot of changes in the past ten years.



I felt like I was in a sweat lodge in that cave, and was looking forward to going to a lake that Brandon had sold me on. Unfortunately it started dumping rain as we were walking to the lake later that day and we decided to ditch the idea. We just drank a few beers under a mushroom shaped shelter on his campus.



One of Brandon's students, Rain (they often have hippy English names -- Rain, Fire, Sunshine. Brandon named one of his students Gecko), took me to the bus station and sent me off. She told me the Chinese ideal of beauty is not a tall woman, but one who is "small and exquisite." This made us both laugh.

Other news:
I went to a Thai restaurant with Joe and his friend Judy or Sara (she can't decide on an English name) and they just played "Hotel California" on repeat. There was a face-shaped fortune-telling machine that said "Plough a one-yuan coin through the nose-hole."

I got a massage from a blind man. "Blind massage" is actually a thing here. It was good though Chinese massage is rough.

I went to a doctor at the hospital here for my thumb which I hit probably two months ago and it still hasn't healed completely. I wanted to get acupuncture which they do in the hospitals here (along with massage and herbs). Instead he prescribed Imada Red Flower Oil which burns like hell but smells good.

Naaature

"Hutongs" of Hangzhou -- (hutong = old neighborhood)


Random deer in random garden in the hutong

Solar hot water is everywhere in China. View from our building.

Joe and I walked up to the mountains behind his campus...and then down the back way (the free way) into the Hangzhou Botanical Gardens, after an inconvenient downpour sent us dashing for cover and ruined our original plan of walking to the Lingyin Temple.


There was the Systematic garden, in which the plants are grouped by family. I was nerding out in the Legominoseae section, checking out all those strange NFTs! With their cute pinnate leaves!





Nelumbo nucifera