Chengdu by bike

The train pulled into Chengdu at 5:30 am. At the taxi stand I was besieged with offers of a ride, but didn't realize the touts weren't official taxi drivers, but freelancers. One told me he'd take me to the Wenshu Temple (which was supposed to be near my hostel) for Y40, which I knew was ridiculous. I settled on Y15 with another, only to discover that his "taxi" was a motorcycle. No way was I getting on a motorbike at 5:30 am in a strange city, particularly not with my pack. I got to the temple in a real taxi for Y10.

I found the hostel with no problem, but there found my punishment for changing my lodging plans while on the train (choking on fumes, I'd decided it was critical to find a nonsmoker-friendly establishment). A sign informed me that the hostel had relocated, but notes were thoughtfully provided to direct taxi drivers to the new place. Sticking to the path of least resistance, I took a taxi to the new place. This turned out to be a good choice: Sim's Cozy Guesthouse is an oasis, cheap but comfortable and clean, with all the services a weary budget traveller could ask for.

I showered, breakfasted, and bought a plane ticket to Lijiang to leave Sunday evening. I bought a map and rented a bike and went back to the Wenshu Temple, which I explored thoroughly before feasting in its vegetarian restaurant. Then I walked along the streets in front of the temple, which are picturesque and touristy.

An old man with a smooth, friendly face and a cowboy hat stopped me on the sidewalk and asked where I was from. He told me he would give me an American history lesson. His strong accent and many missing teeth made it a hard lesson to understand, but the gist was that in 1943 Roosevelt sent airmen to Chengdu to fight the Japanese. People walking by turned to look at us curiously. The old man asked me where I was going in China, and made a comment about Xi'an that I didn't understand. Then he said goodbye.

I pedaled south to the giant Mao statue and admired the new subway station in the square in front of him. The next stop was the thatched cottage of Du Fu, a Tang dynasty poet. His actual cottage is long gone, but hundreds of years ago an admirer built a new cottage in the same area, and subsequent dynasties have maintained and added to the cottage. Not a bad way to venerate someone, I suppose.

This was clearly a major tourist attraction, and I was impressed that the Chinese had so much love for their poets. The only equivalent I could think of in the Anglophone world is Stratford-on-Avon. I resolved to read some of Du Fu's work back in the States.

I stopped in at the site's tea garden and was reading when a man came by my table and asked whether I was English. American was good enough--"you speak English, anyway." He was an overweight man in his 50s with a Chinese woman. She was well-dressed with fashionable glasses, perhaps 20 years younger than him. He asked me whether this was my first time in China and what I thought of it, and I said it was great but overwhelming, which was the prelude he needed to launch into a near-monologue about how China is better than England because it's cheaper and the people are friendlier and the women are "superior" to English women, because they won't argue with you. Also Chinese is the hardest language for English speakers to learn, but when he gets back to England he's going to put "her" into an English class, because it's much easier for a Chinese woman to speak English. "They're quite clever, you know. They're not as stupid as we think." I wondered whether my nodding could be taken as agreement that I thought the Chinese were stupid, or that they actually were clever. When he talked about liking women who won't argue I did say something like, "If that's what you're into," but I'm not one to pick fights with strangers in tea houses.

I watched him waddle off with his mail-order bride, or whatever she was, after they'd showed me their electronic translators (his black, hers pink and white), and marveled that anyone could be so obliviously offensive. But his colonial outlook seemed so anachronistic in the China I saw that I couldn't get worked up about it, but somewhat grossed out.

I headed back toward the hostel post-tea, but managed to get a little lost. I think it took about an hour and a half to get there. Given my now-vast experience with bicycling in China, I will here record some principles:

1. Adopt an unshakable Zen mindset. Take nothing personally, and let nothing startle you.
2. American ideas about right-of-way mean nothing. Pay attention to red and green lights, but treat them as suggestions.
3. If you see an opening, take it.
4. If you and another person go for the same opening, the one in the smaller vehicle yields. Bikes yield to everything but pedestrians.
5. Keep in mind that there's safety in numbers. Do as the other bikes do.

Another early night. China overstimulated me with sensory information and with the depth of my own non-understanding. It also overwhelmed me with people, which might be why I became so introverted there. That day I was also having doubts about what I was accomplishing by traveling, doubts I'd had before. Since I can only hope to gain the most superficial understanding of a culture by wandering through a country for a bit, unable to speak the language, what's the point? I might as well be going around on a tour bus collecting pictures of myself with the Great Wall and the Tower of Pisa, or better yet, home watching the Travel Channel.

Yet the world still beckons. A superficial first-hand understanding seems superior to mere research.

Sanxingdui

From Chengdu I took a day trip to Sanxingdui, a site perhaps an hour away via two fuses. It's two museum buildings on the site of a 20-year-old archaeological dig. There's a very impressing collection of pottery, jade, and bronze artifacts that are like nothing that's been unearthed anywhere else, as far as I could glean from the exhibits. I spent a few hours there, fascinated.

Back at the Chengdu bus station I headed for a nearby monastery to try to get a late lunch at its vegetarian restaurant, which Lonely Planet claimed was open until 3:30. I arrived at 3:15 to find it shuttered. I was famished but took a walk around the monastery anyway (it's called Zhaojue). Nice place, but all the monasteries were beginning to look much alike by now. This one was distinguished by an ugly concrete pond full of small turtles. I'd never seen a higher concentration of turtles outside of a Dr. Seuss book.

Two giggling girls, perhaps 13 years old, ran to to me and asked a question, holding up a camera. I nodded, assuming they wanted me to take their picture, but of course they wouldn't have chased down the one foreigner in the place for that. The excitedly took turns taking one another's picture with me. Then they were off, with a chorus, of "xiexie, sank you!"

I wasn't sure what to make of this, but the girls were too cute and enthusiastic for me to regret having said yes. I said yes to all future picture requests, so I'm probably immortalized on Chinese Facebook pages as the giant, freckled foreigner with the crooked smile.

Famished, I walked back to the bus station, determined to catch a city bus back to the hostel. But after going to the trouble oflocating the buses, and then the right bus, I discovered that the smallest bill I had was Y50, which I was sure wouldn't fly for a Y1 fare. So I went to the taxi stand. The first taxi I got in rear-ended another car on the way out of the lot. I got out which the driver was talking to the inhabitants of the other car and got into a different taxi. I'm pretty sure that's where I lost my fleece, in the back seat of the unfortunate cab. I liked that fleece. All because I didn't have Y1.

I ate an enormous amount of ostensibly Sichuanese food in the restaurant of Sim's hostel, laid down for a bit, and then went to see a Sichuan opera. It was touristy by excellent, with music and puppeteering and flamboyant costumes and face-changing and fire-spitting. I'd been particularly interested in seeing the acrobatics, which were not what I expected: A pretty young woman laid on her back with her feet in the air and deftly turned and tossed first a pot, then a table, with her feet.

Back at the hostel I turned on CCTV International, China's state-run English station, as I got ready for bed. I'd become somewhat addicted to CCTV, partly for comforting background noise but mostly for its window into the government's perspectives and preoccupations. The brief roundup of the day's new reported that Obama was ahead of McCain by 11 points, which made my jaw drop. It wasthe first election news I'd heard since arriving.