Back to earth

In the morning Mr. He had me put some of my things in his backpack. He strapped one backpack to each side of the horse, and we were off. It took half a day to walk to Shuhe village, and I was confused when we arrived because it looked just like Lijiang's Old Town.

We met Mr. Cun at the edge of town, and I said goodbye to Mr. He and the horse. I loved the mountains, even though the ecolodge was downright spooky, and the return to civilization in Mr. Cun's Jeep made me grouchy. I was muddy, my mouth hurt (more of a generalized burn now than a thousand pin-pricks), I was homesick, and deciding what to do suddenly seemed like a burden.

So I didn't do much: I put in a load of laundry at the hostel, checked my email, got a little lunch, and bought a ticket to see the Naxi orchestra that evening. Before the performance, I took a little nap and watched TV.

The performance was terrific, except that the introduction-to-music ratio was, to my mind, much too high. Most of the talking was in Mandarin. The orchestra was quite large and contained several octogenarians. I wondered how the musicians put up with all of this yakking every night.

After the performance I wandered a bit and ended up at Lamu's House of Tibet. Almost all of the customers were Westerners, but the food was fantastic. However, I made the mistake of ordering yak butter-infused green tea (very salty) and mumu dumplings (even saltier). Eating even bland food still made my eyes water. Having literally rubbed salt in my wounds, I ordered some apple fritters and ice cream. I'd been avoiding dairy products since arriving in China because of melamine, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

There was one computer in the place, and I went over to use it once it freed up. A Chinese guy came over and asked whether I'd like to join him and his friends for some beer. I said that I didn't like beer and spoke only a little bit of Chinese, but he said I could drink something else.

There were three of them, 30-something guys from China's southernmost tip. The other two understood some English, but didn't try to speak it; the one who'd asked me over spoke a bit. We talked about where else I was going in China, and they told me I should go to their province, Guangdong. I pulled out my Lonely Planet so we could look at its map, and the one on my right found it very interesting. I'm always interested to find out what travel books say about places I live. Then he noticed that Taiwan is delineated on the map as a separate country. Shock and horror! I tried to joke that leaving Taiwan off enabled the company to sell more books: You have to buy one for China and a separate one for Taiwan.

They were also interested in my Chinese dictionary. I was happy to provide some sort of entertainment to compensate for my nearly non-existent conversational skills.

We were drinking a bottle of Great Wall wine. They only drank when we toasted--very social--and I tried to avoid sipping solo, but it was easy to forget. I asked what they liked to do in Lijiang, hoping for ideas, and they said they drank and played poker. It was their second time there.

Toward the evening I asked what they did for work. They're judges.

Lamu's closed at 12:00, and the judges paid for my dinner tab as well as my drinks. It felt strange to accept such generosity from strangers, but I didn't seem to have much choice in the matter. The one who spoke a little English walked me back to my hostel, even though I wasn't exactly sure where it was. I was chronically disoriented in Lijiang. Fortunately I found it fairly quickly. We parted ways without so much as a handshake or a kiss on the cheek. I hadn't learned the judges' names. It seemed that early introductions weren't a big thing in China.