Big Buddha

I took the bus two hours from Chengdu to Leshan to see the giant Buddha. It's supposed to be the biggest Buddha in the world, or even, according to something I saw, the biggest stone carving.

The place was swarming with tourists, mostly Chinese tour groups who mobbed the area to the side of Buddha's face to take pictures. There were other things to see on the top of the mountain, like a tall pagoda and yet another temple. I was hungry and bought a little 5 yuan bowl of noodles. It was hot enough that my eyes watered profusely and the noodle-stand women laughed gently at me. Several people asked to take pictures with me while I was there; there were only a handful of other Westerners.

The Buddha was big. No surprises there, but I'm glad I saw it.

As I left the site a man asked whether I was going to Chengdu and hustled me onto a minibus that would meet the big bus along the road. I was happy to be saved the effort of getting to the bus station. While we waited for the big bus the middle-aged Chinese couple who were the only other minibus passengers tried to talk to me. The woman spoke a little English. They said America was a nice country, and I said China was very interesting. Later, after the bus made a stop at a gas station with a fruit stand, the woman gave me an orange.

The bus left us at a station on the far outskirts of town, not the same one I'd left from. I couldn't figure out where I was or even how to take a taxi--none of the drivers were in their cars, although one woman told me she'd take me where I wanted to go (I'd written down the address of a restaurant) for 30 yuan, which sounded like far too much. Finally I got a cab driver who would turn on his meter; it cost 20 yuan, but the restaurant Lonely Planet had recommended so highly seemed no longer to exist. The person who invents a combination pocket translator and deliverer of travel information that's actually up-to-date will deserve to be very rich.

I saw a few Western restaurants and even an Indian place, but was determined to get some good Chinese food. I stopped into a place that looked fairly upscale, but I'd miscalculated: The menu wasn't in English, and there weren't really any vegetarian dishes. The first woman who tried to wait on me gave up in frustration. Then a young guy tried, and I randomly pointed to one of the dishes he said was a vegetable dish. It turned out to be a plate of broccoli--excellent broccoli, and served with rice, but not nearly enough for my empty stomach. Defeated, and feeling like one of the characters in Lost in Translation, I crossed the street and entered the Shamrock Pub.

At least half of the patrons were foreigners, and normally when traveling I become more gregarious. But even there I didn't talk to anyone except the waiter, just ordered an excellent "mocktail" and a flavorless vegetarian pizza, read, scribbled in my journal, and left before the live music started. If I kept up my antisocial ways, I thought, the nonstop schmoozing of the conference I'd soon attend in California would be quite a shock to my system.

A day at the park

On Sunday I resolved to do nothing in particular. I had a leisurely breakfast of fruit in my room and packed to the sound of CCTV. I called my great-aunt Lily, a task I'd neglected to take care of before coming to China. Lilly lives in San Jose, and I was planning to stay with her in a couple of weeks. I thought I should give her a heads-up. Hers was the first familiar voice I'd heard since leaving the States.

Next I called the cell phone for the Wenhai Ecolodge, a place I'd found a few months before when I Googled "Yunnan ecotourism." Going to an ecolodge in the jungle had been the highlight of my time in Peru, and I hoped there were similar opportunities in China. I'd made an email reservation with someone who seemed to speak English quite well, and now needed to work out how to get to the lodge. My options were hiking, horseback, or Jeep; I chose horseback. My pack was nice enough for jaunts around towns in search of hostels, but I'd never hiked with it, nor did I want to try. And having someone drive me up a mountain in a Jeep didn't seem very eco-friendly.

After taking care of a few other things I rented a bike and rode to what seemed to be Chengdu's main tourist shopping drag, a place with nice dark wood buildings. It adjoined a park where I went wandering, and confirmed my impression that going to the park is one of the best things to do in China. I saw an old man painting calligraphy on the paving stones with water and a giant brush. This in addition to the usual newspaper-reading, tea-drinking, and music-making.

I did have a destination in mind in the park, namely the Green Ram Taoist temple and its vegetarian restaurant. It's interesting how similar the Buddhist and Taoist temples look to my untrained eye. The main differences I picked out are the ubiquity of the yin/yang symbol (only Taoist), and the way the monks dress.

At the temples, I've seen monks chanting and people reverently lighting incense. I've also seen monks chatting on cell phones and hawking loogies, and woman kneeling to pray in a pink velour tracksuit with "Juicy" printed across her ass. It would be nice to get a tour of a temple sometime from someone knowledgeable, but until that happens, I'm not keen on going to more temples anytime soon.

At the restaurant, the waitress put a menu in front of me that looked like it might have been a relic of the Tang dynasty, if they'd had typewriters in the Tang dynasty. The edges of the pages were ragged. But I noticed later that the other patrons had nice menus with hard covers and laminated pages, and figured the waitress had given me the antique version because it was bilingual.

I was grateful for this, but it didn't completely solve my communication difficulties. When I pointed to a dish described as "pumpkin," the waitress tried to explain why I might not in fact want it, but I didn't understand. So she helpfully went and got the vegetable in question and showed it to me. I looked like an extremely warty cucumber. I nodded--I was in China to try new things, right?--but it turned out to be the most bitter vegetable I'd ever tasted. Fortunately I'd also ordered a tofu dish. I was beginning to catch on that even if you're a lone diner, and you know that Chinese portions are huge, you don't order just one thing at a Chinese restaurant.

Afterward I found my bike--this took a little time--and went to the People's Park in the heart of the city. This one has kiddie rides, full bands giving free concerts, and a garden of Bonsai trees. It also has a famous teahouse that I wanted to try. The teahouse is huge and sprawling, set on a small lake where families rent paddle boats. Men walk around tinging their ear-cleaning instruments (a sound much like a triangle) to advertise their services. I finally agreed to a 20-minute massage from one.

He focussed mostly on my arms, gripping them so tightly at times that I thought I might bruise (I didn't). He also massaged my shoulders and back, my scalp, and even my forehead. I felt ridiculous getting my forehead massaged in the middle of a crowded teahouse, but the liberating thing about being a stranger in a strange land is that just about everything I do will seem odd, so why not?

On the way out of the park I admired a topiary structure of what appeared to be a dragon and a rooster going after a ball at the same time. A trio of pandas seemed to be in the works, but at the time they were just skeletons.

I biked back to the hostel without getting lost, and had about 20 minutes to spend online before taking the airport shuttle. While in China I mainly went online to triage my email and update my Facebook status lines.

An American named Josh was the only other person taking the shuttle from the hostel (we picked up one other person, a Chinese guy, on the way). It turned out we were on the same flight. We had other things in common too, like having been in China for about the same amount of time and having gone many of the same places there, being vegetarian, and having lived in DC, New York state, California, and the Southwest. But it was a long ride to the airport, and by the time we reached the departure lounge the conversation was flagging. Despite his very American friendliness there was something about Josh that annoyed me, perhaps a subtle sense of his own superiority, and I was ready to be alone again.

At baggage claim in Lijiang, Wangning and Henry asked if we'd like to share a taxi in from the airport, which we did, piling our backpacks in the middle seat of a van and exiling Josh to the front seat while the other three shared the back. Wangning is Chinese and Henry German; they met at college in Berlin. Wangning had been back for a year and was showing Henry around the country. I liked them.

The driver was unwilling to take Josh and I to our hotels in the Old Town, and so dropped us off at a taxi stand somewhere in Lijiang. Getting to the room I'd reserved at Mama's Naxi Guesthouse turned out to be no small feat. I'd been feeling very comfortable in China after my half-day of parks, tea, and massage, but was thoroughly tired, hungry, and grouchy by the time I found my lodgings. Even so I couldn't help but find the Old Town charming, with its narrow, carless cobbled streets, graceful buildings, and canals.

Wenhai

I woke up early to the sounds of a cat crying insistently and of a German tourist telling the hostel worker her plans. Leaving my window open had been a mistake.

I gave up sleeping eventually, and showered and packed. The woman who worked there was no longer in the courtyard when I came out. No one had asked me for money the night before or even my passport, but no matter--Mama's Naxi Guesthouse was actually three guesthouses, and breakfast was served at a different one. I had a banana pancake there, actually a large piece of flat fried bread covered in sliced bananas, and paid for both the pancake and the room.

I was supposed to meet Cun Xuerong, the ecolodge manager, at 10:00 at a water wheel on the other side of the Old Town. My experience the night before had taught me that the Old Town is very difficult to navigate for the uninitiated, but miraculously, I arrived at 10:00 exactly. Mr. Cun, a handsome 30-something man with an urban air, found me quickly. He doesn't speak English, it turned out. I expressed surprise, since the emails from Wenhai had been signed with his name, but he said someone else had written them. The woman I'd talked to on the phone, surely.

We managed to communicate surprisingly well in Chinese, though. Perhaps Mr. Cun is used to talking to foreigners with a weak grasp of the language. Was I American? Yes. Was I working in China? I'd learned the word for "work" but forgotten it. I looked it up, then told him I didn't have a job in China, but was a tourist. Where had I studied Chinese, then? In college. Mr. Cun seemed pleasantly surprised to hear that colleges in America offer Chinese. He asked whether the instructors were Chinese or American. I said they were Chinese. It was by far the most successful conversation I'd had in Mandarin since arriving in the country.

Mr. Cun drove me in his Jeep to the foot of a mountain, where we waited for the guide and horse(s) to arrive. When I'd asked for the horse option I'd optimistically expected a guide on a horse, a horse for me, and perhaps a third animal for luggage, but now I worriedly watched a middle-aged man lead one small, dark, slightly mud-speckled horse out of the woods. Mr. Cun introduced me to Mr. He and told me to put my backpack on and mount the horse, which I did with some difficulty. The saddle was what I assumed to be the Naxi traditional style, unpadded with a hard loop of a handle in front.

I didn't particularly like being the tourist led along on a horse, but on our way up the mountain we saw Han tourists doing it too, and one middle-aged waiguoren couple. The path was steep, and the horse had to stop periodically to catch its breath. It wasn't long before my knees were stiff, my backside was sore, and I wished I were walking.

Mr. He is perhaps about 40, and small. He wore a battered sport coat, corduroys, and shoes resembling soccer cleats, plus a backpack with the vegetables Mr. Cun had bought for my meals. He didn't talk much.

We passed a dam, then a small reservoir. We crested the pass and soon afterward Mr. He suggested that I walk for the next stretch, which was particularly steep. I did so gladly, although my knees were so stiff I could barely walk at first. My dismount was no more graceful than my mount--I wasn't feeling like much of a martial artist.

Further down he had me get back on the horse, which moved away as I did. I joked that he didn't like me, but it wasn't really a joke.

As we neared the village we began to pass Naxi who weren't leading tourists on horses. Mr. He talked to all of them in a staccato language. We arrived at around 1:00, and Mrs. He cooked me lunch. It was simple and excellent: one plate of tomatoes and scrambled eggs, another of mushrooms and garlic, plus, of course, rice from a giant cooker.

But it soon began to seem to me that there was something off about the ecolodge. Mr. Cun had told me, when I asked him, that there were no other guests at the moment, and I hadn't expected luxury accommodations. but I had expected some sort of orientation. The Hes spoke no English, and the English-speaking woman I'd spoken to on the phone was nowhere in evidence. I'd have settled for a printout suggesting things to do, or even a patient explanation in Chinese and sign language, but it seemed that once I'd been shown my room and fed, I was on my own. Also, there was a distinct atmosphere of neglect: Huge cobwebs in the bathroom and hallways, plastic bottles piled under the stairs, and a receipt left in my room from the Grand Lijiang Hotel dating from early September.

Yet there was ample evidence that much care had gone into this place at one time. In the common room, where I ate, a sign announces that the lodge had been launched with funds from the Nature Conservancy and the Japanese government. The Nature Conservancy wanted to foster sustainable tourism in China to benefit the environment, and the Japanese wanted to show their friendship and help the people of Wenhai. Big framed posters, now dirty and faded, declaim in Chinese and flawless English on the philosophy of ecotourism, life in Wenhai, and regional flora and fauna. There are clipped articles on the lodge from the travel sections of the Daily Telegraph, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and the New York Times. These last two were both written in 2004 by the same freelancer, Craig Simmons. The articles sunnily describe the beauty of the setting, the difficulty of reaching the lodge, and its ecological amenities, which include solar panels, a biogas system, and a greenhouse. I wondered whether any of these were still working.

It was only 2:00, so I decided to do a little exploring. On my way out Mrs. He asked where I was going, and I answered truthfully that I didn't know. Perhaps I should have tried to provide more information.

I ambled around Wenhai Lake, which I'd learned is a seasonal lake, although I'm not quite clear on when it disappears. The only wildlife I spotted was a toad, but there were more free-roaming domestic animals than I'd ever seen before in one place: pigs, chickens, dogs, horses, cattle. I even saw some yaks, the first I'd ever seen outside of a zoo. The lake, the tiny streams that feed it, and the mountains--especially Jade Dragon Snow Mountain--made for some beautiful views. Time seem to melt away: Every time I looked at my watch, another hour had elapsed.

I got back to the ecolodge as it was growing dark, and Mrs. He served me three dishes this time, plus the ubiquitous tea (with a huge thermos for refills). As I was eating Mrs. He came in and handed me a cell phone. It was the English-speaking woman I'd talked to the day before. I don't know what she sounds like in Chinese or Naxi, but in English she comes across as strident.

"Hello? How are you?" with preliminaries out of the way, she asked me what I planned to do the next day. I said I didn't know. She told me I could walk around the lake and village by myself, but to go further afield I would need a guide. I didn't argue about that. She said that my options for the next day included climbing a mountain or walking to some Yi villages. Weighing this, I asked how far away the villages were. "Two are close, but two are farther away. But if you get tired you can just tell the guide, he'll take you home." I asked how difficult the climb up the mountain was. "If you get tired, I think you can tell Xiao He "hui jia," or you can speak to him in English, because he has guided many foreigners and I think maybe he understand you." This response seemed unecessarily patronizing--of course I could tell Mr. He "hui jia"--but if could communicate so well with the Hes, why was she calling me? I said I'd like to visit the Yi villages, and handed the phone back to Mrs. He.

The temperature dropped quickly after sundown, and the lodge was unheated, so I headed upstairs soon after dinner, taking the massive thermos with me. Next to my room was a door to the roof, and I went out. Here were the famous solar panels, or two of them anyway. One had a towel drying on it. On the wall were what appeared to be the panels' control or monitoring devices, but their digital displays were dark. Just to the side of the roof was a greenhouse I'd read about on an informative poster in the bathroom. In addition to nurturing vegetables, it was supposed to keep the biogas digester warm in winter so that it would keep working. But its clear plastic roof was almost entirely torn away, and the floor had been reclaimed by weeds.

I was sitting in bed reading about the Naxi in Lonely Planet when Mrs. He knocked at the door. I found her very difficult to understand. She asked whether I had a question or problem. I said no. She said something about the phone call. I tried to say yes, the woman on the phone and I talked about my going to the Yi villages tomorrow. She asked me something that I didn't understand. She said never mind, go back to sleep. Confused, I went back to bed.