Tiger Leaping Gorge

All of the other people in my minibus to the gorge were Chinese. A middle-aged couple from Hong Kong translated a few things for me and we chatted. They introduced themselves as Eric and Pansy. Three other lone travelers invited me to join them on the lunch break, which saved me from having to order in Chinese, and from sitting alone at one of the 8-person tables. The "menu" at the restaurant was a cluster of plastic bins laid out on the floor in front of the kitchen containing various vegetables, meats, and other ingredients. One had live grasshoppers, which made the other two women cringe and brush at their arms. In another swam small, snake-like fish. When the food came I tried to imitate the Chinese way of eating: rice bowl in left hand, chopsticks in right, pulling morsels one at a time from the communal dishes and coating them with rice before popping them into my mouth.

The drive through the gorge was unbelievably bumpy, with no guard rails. The views were beautiful if you happened to be on the right side of the minibus, which I was. At the middle rapids site we gathered around our guide with groups from numerous other minibuses. The guide was a Naxi with a mullet that was bleached from the neck down. He wore a sleeveless Nike shirt and had an even row of round scars down his arm that looked like cigarette burns.

I was the only foreigner in this group, too, and a guy about my age asked whether I was alone, and whether I'd like some company. His English name was Andy, and he'd gone to university in Dublin before returning to China in 2004. He said this was probably the first English conversation he'd had since then. He ran a sort of environmental consulting company in Shaanxi province, and he and his wife were on their honeymoon. As our group walked down the gorge we chatted a little about the US election. My impression from watching CCTV International was that the Chinese didn't much care who won, and Andy said that was probably the case. No one in China ever asked me which candidate I favored. They asked, instead, who I would win, which might have been a polite version way of asking my preference. With just weeks before the election, Obama had a double-digit lead, and it didn't seem like special American insight was needed to predict the race's outcome. But it's also possible that people simply weren't paying much attention to election news.

At the bottom of the steep path the group took pictures of the gorge and the rapids, and of each other with the gorge and the rapids, and took a break in the tiny hut that sold drinks and snacks such as cucumbers. Then it was time to go back up.

I think the most impressive wildlife I saw in Yunnan were large, green, striped spiders that build massive webs. They seem to live in colonies of parallel webs. I stopped to admire a few on the way up.

Andy asked whether I liked movies. His English had an occasional Irish inflection. He said he liked Braveheart and Mel Gibson. I had nothing good to say about Braveheart or Mel Gibson, so I said nothing at all, except "freedom!" Andy had been an extra in a film called America, in a New York scene that was filmed in Dublin.

At the top we rested and exchanged email addresses. Andy and his wife were on a Shangri-la-bound tour, while I was headed back to Lijiang.

That evening I wandered around the town some more. It's hard to avoid wandering around in the Old Town, since even with a map it's a confusing maze. On the main streets things look familiar even when they're not: a clothes shop, a cheap trinkets shop, a shoe shop, a clothes shop, a tourist reception center. Away from the main streets it's hotel, Naxi guesthouse, hotel.

But I found Lijiang fascinating, in part because of its tourist mobs. The clothes shops mostly had a hippie aesthetic that I hadn't seen in either the local culture or in other Chinese cities. Many of the shops sold cowboy hats, and I saw some of the Han tourists wearing them. I even saw a few turquoise-and-silver earrings.

And yet... old Naxi women still walk around in their traditional blue clothes with T-shaped capes, and young Naxi women do laundry at the edges of the canals. One evening I walked to the edge of the Old Town to find a field where a woman was irrigating with a long-handled ladle. It's a strange place.