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.

Forbidden fruit

I woke up late and went down to take a shower in the cobwebbed bathroom that Simmons described as "shared but clean" (it was neither shared nor particularly clean at the moment). There was no hot water, where depressed me. Not because I couldn't shower, which didn't seem too important in a place this remote, but because the water was supposed to be heated by the solar panels. I stood shivering in the concrete bathroom, with its bilingual posters on sustainability, and decided there was no way I could stay there for the three nights I'd reserved.

At breakfast I asked Mr. He for the cell phone, and told the English-speaking woman I'd like to leave the next day. She didn't ask why or seem disappointed, just asked how I'd like to get down the mountain. I said I'd like to walk but have the horse carry my bag. She said sure, and would I like to go the same way or take a different route down the mountain? I chose the latter.

Mr. He and I set off after breakfast (dumplings and shredded potatoes). I'd thought there were no shops at all in Wenhai, but on the way out of the village Mr. He bought something at a window in a cinder block building. Certainly people find a way to buy things there, judging by the snack wrappers and beverage containers that litter the paths. Probably there isn't much of a trash-disposal system there.

We passed through one tiny Yi village where no one was about. Before we even saw the second village I heard gun reports periodically, which echoed from the other side of the valley like soft thunder. Closer in I thought I heard firecrackers, too. But it was the middle of the day.

As we got closer still I saw a large group of people gathered on a path above the village. The shots were being fired into the air from a field next to them. There was cheering and laughter. Further up the hillside a yak was tied to a tree.

I asked Mr. He what was going on, and he said it was a "si le." This wasn't in my dictionary, but I assumed it meant a wedding. He pointed to the yak and drew the blade of his hand across his neck to indicate it would be killed.

In the village proper a trio of children stared at me, and I stared at two old women in bright colors and hats that had a large black-draped flat rectangle. The hats reminded me a little of the Flying Nun, or maybe of large graduation caps. I could see that the women at the wedding were dressed the same way.

Mr. He and I took a break on a pile of timber off the village's main drag, where we watched the festivities from a distance. In addition to the shots and firecrackers and laughter, there was a strange howl-like singing going on. Eventually the wedding party paraded down the main road through the village, some bearing a white sheet on poles that they' also been holding up on the hillside. When I looked up at the yak again, some men were gathered around it; it appeared to be dead already. I realized I knew how to ask Mr. He whether the villagers dressed like that every day. He said they did.

We moved on, and Mr. He asked whether I wanted to go to another village. I said sure--it was only mid-day, and I'd no desire to go back to the weedy ecolodge. We descended steep goat paths to the valley floor, and started up the other side.

When we stopped for a breather I noticed a plant with a fruit hanging down. It was wedge-shaped, almost as big as my hand, covered in pomegranate-like seeds. Mr. He saw me noticing the plant and indicated it was edible. I was there to try new things, right? I stepped off the path, plucked the fruit, and took a bite of the red seeds. They came off like kernels from a corn cob, except more easily. The taste was sweet, but... very tangy...

Suddenly Mr. He was beside me. "Bu chi" he said ("don't eat"). I spit out the seeds. Mr. He made digging motions to indicate it's actually the root that edible, but it was too late. The inside of my mouth felt stung by a thousand sharp pins. I spit and spit, but moving my mouth just made it hurt more. My eyes and nose watered. I didn't know how long this pain would last, or whether it would get worse. What if my throat swelled shut? But I felt strangely calm, and continued following Mr. He uphill. I discovered that keeping my mouth perfectly still made the pain more bearable, so I did.

A short way up Mr. He sat down for a break. He watched me intently but didn't say anything, and I appreciated his wordless concern. I leaned against a rock nearby. Finally he asked whether I was hungry, and I said no. Eating was the very last thing I wanted to do, but I didn't know how to say that. In fact my lips and tongue felt swollen, which did nothing to improve my Chinese-speaking ability. He gave me a piece of candy. I tried to refuse, but he insisted, and I thought maybe the sweetness would help, so I popped it into my mouth. Ow. Eating the candy required moving my mouth, which was nearly unbearable. When we were within sight of the next village he handed me another piece. I refused harder this time, trying with my burning mouth and bad Chinese to explain that eating hurt, but he insisted harder. I slipped the candy into my pocket when he turned his back to make a phone call. Half of the last piece of candy was still stuck to my molars.

Mr. He talked to someone in Naxi. I thought he was probably trying to figure out what to do with me. We continued into the village, where Mr. He talked to a 50-ish man with glasses who was sitting in his yard. I could tell he was explaining what I'd done. The man went into a building I took to be a kind of workshop--no furniture, with a fire pit in the middle--and came out with a plastic container of what looked like sugar. The three of us walked to another house, where Mr. He told my story to another 50-ish man. We all went inside.

There were no windows, and no doors, just an entrance that was the main source of light at the moment. The secondary source was a fire in a pit in the middle of the room. There were two other rooms, one on each side of the main room. One doorway had a bare bulb handing over it, which wasn't on.

The second Yi man's wife motioned for me to sit on the one piece of furniture in the room, a wooden bed with no mattress. Mr. He and I sat there while the other adults sat on sacks around the fire pit. A boy and a girl, each about 6 or 8 years old, played happily inside and outside the house, dancing, giving each other piggy back rides, somersaulting. A black cat and three identical black kittens went about their cat business, and a couple of lean medium-small dogs wandered in and out. At one point a chicken paid a visit.

The woman communicated through wordless yells and hand signals, and her husband mimed things when talking to her, which confused me. It took awhile for me to realize she was deaf. I wondered whether anyone in a village like this could teach a deaf person to read--probably she is completely without language. We had something in common, although I couldn't even understand the sign language much of the time. While the men talked she watched me, a hand over her mouth. I wondered what she saw.

Potatoes were placed around the edges of the pit to bake. Mr. He took three flat rounds of bread out of his backpack and put them by the fire to warm. He used hot water from the kettle over the pit to make sugar water for me and tea for himself. The sugar water was tolerable, even a little soothing. I drank it slowly and tried to make friends with one of the kittens, which was having none of it. Eventually Mr. He peeled a potato and handed it to me. I tried to say no, but that wasn't working out well for me. I nibbled at it.

The woman put a sort of large wok with no handles over the fire pit and poured batter into it to make thick, flat, pancake-like bread. The host pulled pieces of honeycomb out of a plastic container, and when the first piece of bread was done, Mr. He folded half of it around a few pieces of honeycomb and handed it to me. I still had the potato, and warm honey immediately started dripping from the bread. I asked for a plate, and Mr. He brought me a bowl and chopsticks. By now we were sitting around the fire with everyone else. I felt awfully precious eating out of a bowl while everyone else ate with their hands, but what else could I do with all the food that was foisted on me? As I was using chopsticks to pick at the pancake, Mr. He handed me half a round of the bread he'd brought along. I balanced it on the bowl.

Periodically the men interrupted their chatter to try to talk to me in Mandarin. They spoke loudly and slowly, which helped only a little. Was I staying in Wenhai for two days? Yes, but in China for three weeks. The man in glasses observed that three weeks is twenty-one days. He was the easiest for me to understand. The host asked what time it was in America, and we chatted with sign language about how America was on the other side of the world. They asked me a few times how my mouth was, and I said better, but still not good. Glasses-man told me I wouldn't want to eat for three days, that I'd eat anyway, and that I wouldn't die--tremendously useful information.

The Yi men asked me about my family: Did I have brothers and sisters? Were my parents still alive? Did I have a boyfriend?

The next question: Was I 30? I said no, 28. Later I heard this come up again while they were talking with each other--28. Numbers were the only Chinese words I could recognize in their language.

The woman signaled at me at times, but I couldn't understand her much better. I think she told me that I'm very tall.

The men talked and drank clear liquid for hours. I looked around. Flattened cardboard boxes had been nailed to the back wall. Like everything else in the house, they were yellow-black from smoke. There was an old TV in the corner, which surprised me, but the real shock was the DVD player I noticed later.

At the end of our stay our host pulled a bottle of pink liquid from a corner by the bed and gave it to me. I asked whether it was alcohol; he said yes. I hesitated--I didn't want to use up any more of their best provisions, and I didn't have a glass, unless I emptied out my tea glass. The deaf woman mimed unscrewing the cap. Finally Mr. He took the bottle from me, poured a capful, and handed it to me. That was lucky, since otherwise I would have taken far to much. The taste was tart, raspberry-like, but not unpleasant. Mr. He took a capful after me, but he didn't like it. He handed out a last round a cigarettes, and we were off into the bright sunshine. I took a picture of our hosts in front of their house, and the man asked me to send him a copy. I said I would.

I didn't try to eat anything on the way back to Wenhai. I asked Mr. He whether the Yi language is the same as Naxi, and he said no, he understood only a little bit of Yi. Nevertheless he greeted everyone we met. Women's clothing in our hosts' village was different from what I'd seen at the wedding village; here, women wore long skirts with broad horizontal stripes of color, and pink scarves tied gypsy-style around their heads.

Back in Wenhai, we saw Mrs. He harvesting potatoes. She loaded them up and walked slowly down the road, bent at almost 90 degrees. There was a large bag of potatoes balanced on the basket on her back, which was also full of potatoes. Mr. He carried the hoe. According to Lonely Planet, Naxi culture was considered semi-matriarchal not long ago. I wondered what men did here.

Another meal by myself in the common room. I ate slowly and carefully, but I ate. It got cold quickly, and Mr. He brought in a bowl of smoldering embers to help. I went to bed early, taking a thermos of hot water and drinking glass after glass of increasingly weak tea.

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.

Huangshan, Day 1

On the morning of the 21st I went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Huangshan, which Lonely Planet described as "China's most beautiful mountain." It would be my last stop before Shanghai, and the guidebook made getting there sound somewhat complicated: Change from a bus to another bus to another bus, and find a place to stash luggage in between. I wasn't looking forward to dealing with the logistics, but the mountain sounded worth it.

There were two other foreigners on the bus from Hangzhou. When the bus dropped us off a small, 30-something man introduced himself to the three foreigners as "Mr. Cheng, from Lonely Planet." I remembered a mention of his dispensing travel advice with an "impressive accent," which turned out to be pretty flawlessly British. He asked us what our plans were and whether he could help with booking rooms, etc. The other two foreigners (who turned out to be Dutch) just wanted to play things by ear, going up the mountain that afternoon, then going to Nanjing the next day. Mr. Cheng told them that just going up that afternoon wouldn't be worth it; admission to the mountain was about $30 and they'd need more time to see the place.

A young woman standing nearby chimed in. "You will need more time--it's so beautiful up there. We thought we'd just come down this morning but we ended up spending 8 hours walking around."

I think I must have looked at her as though I'd never seen an Asian American before. I don't think I'd talked to one of my fellow countrymen since Josh, more than a week before. I wanted to be her friend. But a minibus had pulled up to the curb and a man I took to be her father was loading suitcases into it, so instead I asked some innocuous question about Huangshan. She answered it, and then they were gone.

Meantime, Mr. Cheng and one of the Dutch guys were getting into an argument over whether Mr. Cheng was too pushy. I myself was happy to have someone to tell me what to do by this time in my trip, but now I had to wait out the argument first.

Finally Mr. Cheng (a.k.a. Simon) said he could help me realize my ambition to spend the night at the summit that night and go to Shanghai the next day. He had me climb onto the back of his motorbike for the short ride to his cafe. I asked whether he'd lived in the UK. He said no, he'd spent a lot of time with his British friend.

At the restaurant Simon booked me a dorm bed--private rooms on the summit were way out of my price range--and a ticket for the 5:00 pm bus to Shanghai, which was apparently the only one of the day. I also had what he said was a traditional Anhui dish of mushrooms and bamboo shoots. Then I went to the bus station to catch a shuttle to the cable car station. This was turning out to be easier than I'd expected.

In the cable car I listened to my fellow passengers chatting in sing-songy Cantonese and admired the scenery. The woman across from me asked me one question in English: Was I traveling alone? That was the extent of our conversation.

One of my goals in coming to China had been to see the kind of scenery that gets painted on scrolls, and I'd come to the right place. The conical peaks, the elegantly scraggly trees that clung to them, and the muted greyish hue of the landscape made the scenery seem at once familiar and unreal.

I didn't have a map, but I managed to find the hotel fairly quickly. It was a 4-star establishment with dorms in the back, near the foot massage parlor. The lobby was crowded with tourists, which detracted a bit from the 4-star vibe. The room wasn't bad--12 beds, clean, with one bathroom. A Chinese couple was eating instant noodles and watching TV. I left my bag and went out to enjoy the last hour or so of daylight.

All of the mountain's paths were paved, with gradients shaped into regular steps. I walked around the paths until dusk, taking copious pictures. Simon had told me that the following day was supposed to be overcast and a little rainy, so I knew this might be my only chance to enjoy the view.

It got dark at around 5:30, leaving me wondering what to do. Hanging out in the dorm room seemed depressing, and the few couches in the hotel lobby were filled with people who also had nowhere else to be. I had an overpriced tea in the empty bar and wrote in my journal for awhile, then went to the hotel next door to compare dinner buffet prices. It turned out my hotel was the better deal at about $14; I read my book and lingered until closing time. Then I wandered upstairs to see the karaoke room. Music blared and colored lights swept the room, but the place was empty. It was time for bed.

Huangshan, Day 2

***Warning: Extreme complaining follows***

I woke up at about 3:00 because people in the room were moving around and having quiet conversations. I went back to sleep, and woke up a little later to similar noises. At around 5:00 my fellow tourists apparently decided it was time to get up. Seemingly the etiquette of shared rooms is different in China, or perhaps only on the top of Huangshan. I couldn't fathom what they were actually going to do at this hour. There were no planes to catch, nothing was open, and the sunrise was more than an hour off. As I'd ascertained the night before, there was absolutely nothing to do on the top of the mountain in the dark. Was a little bit more sleep on my hard, narrow, creaky bunk bed really too much to ask for?

Yes, yes it was. After 20 or 30 minutes of chatting at full volume and packing, most of the inhabitants were gone--leaving the light on behind them, and me in a truly rotten mood. I tried to get back to sleep, failed, and finally put on my shoes and coat and went out.

It was dark when I left the hotel, but trees and rocks soon began to take shape behind the fog. It looked as though Simon had been right that there would be no sunrise, but I staked out an eastward-looking vantage point anyway. It was already host to plenty of overly optimistic early risers. We watched as the blackness turned to grey and then lighter grey, and as ghostly hints of scenery appeared. Around the official sunrise time of 6:13, some people applauded and cheered, and we all laughed. It was a collective disappointment.

While standing and waiting for the sun to rise, I noticed that my right ankle felt swollen. This was strange, since my right leg had been unscathed in the bike accident, and I'd noticed nothing wrong while putting on my shoes. I walked around a bit and took some pictures, then went back to the room to inspect my foot.

The Band-Aid, inadequate and applied too late, hung uselessly from the skinned patch on my heel. I didn't have another one. My ankle was visibly swollen, and tender to the touch. I pondered my situation: There was no obvious place to get medical care on the summit, and even if I descended to Tangkou, I was certain that getting fixed up would not be easy. Probably I was going to lose my foot. Or die. Or lose my foot, and then die anyway. I struggled to break through my pessimism and come up with a plan. What I came up with was: I would buy more Band-Aids, disinfect and bandage my ankle, and then go see a doctor if things hadn't improved by the time I got to Shanghai. I guessed that Shanghai would be a great place for a foreigner in search of a doctor.

American English is, in my opinion, somewhat deficient in that we lack a generic term for "Band-Aid." Sure, there's "bandage," but that connotes the type of serious bandages that involve gauze and tape. Fortunately I was toting a mini Oxford Chinese-English dictionary, so I looked up the British word "plaster," and went to the convenience store to ask for a "gaoyao."

I was pleasantly surprised when the clerk understood me and went to get the gaoyao. He ruffled around in some shoeboxes behind the counter and came out with a flat rectangular box that did not look like it would contain Band-Aids. He asked me whether it was for my knee, and I said no, pointing to my heel. "Can," he said. It's really a boon to beginners that sentences like "can" are perfectly legitimate in Chinese.

The gaoyao were expensive, about $7. I found a relatively private place off the already-crowded paths and took off my shoe and sock, then opened the box. It contained five bandages, each about 4 by 3 inches. These were serious bandages. After I'd rubbed hand sanitizer on my heel and slapped one on, I felt that I might not die or lose my foot after all.

I wandered around the foggy mountain, heading in the general direction of a summit I saw on the map signs that dotted the paths. There seemed to be no escaping the tour groups; they were so thick that traffic jams formed at narrow or steep parts of the paths, while in other places one merely had to walk slowly. The groups paused at overlooks and took turns snapping pictures of each other in front of blankets of fog. My favorite such overlook was ironically named "Cloud-Dispelling Pavillion." There were few other Westerners.

When I got to Bright Summit Peak, I decided to take a different route back to the area my hotel was in. I had an idea that since there was nothing to see, I'd have a coffee in one of the hotels and write in my journal rather than following the tourist herds along the paths all day. I glanced at one of the maps (none of which showed the entire summit, but only what was within a few kilometers' vicinity), and headed off confidently.

I walked and walked. Occaisionally the fog cleared a little and I caught some spectacular views, all the more precious because they were rare. Once I came on what appeared to be a giant soccer ball erected on a summit. But mainly I just walked: uphill, downhill, uphill again. None of the maps I came across now showed the area where my hotel was. Time crawled by. It became harder and harder to convince myself that I was having a good time. I realized that my personal version of hell might be much like this: surrounded at all times by people I didn't know and couldn't talk to, sleep-deprived and tired from walking, my knees aching and my ankle infected, and lost. Why, oh why, hadn't I brought a map? Because I'd had no idea how big and confusing the top of a mountain could be, that's why.

Eventually I started to ask the porters and concession stand workers for directions. The directions sounded somewhat involved, but I could only really understand the pointing part. So I'd ask for directions, walk awhile, ask for directions again. Then the pointers began to contradict each other, and I found myself going in circles. At that point I gave up. It was only about 1:00, and the bus to Shanghai wouldn't leave for another 4 hours, but I went back to a cable car station I'd seen (not the same one I'd come up on) and rode to the bottom of the mountain. I took the bus to Tangkou and went back to Mr. Cheng's Restaurant.

"How did you sleep?" Simon asked. I told him about my roommates from hell. He nodded. "It's normal. They were excited about the sunrise." This didn't really clear things up for me, perhaps because I've never been so excited about a sunrise that I couldn't sleep. And if I did accidentally wake up hours early for a sunrise, my reaction would be not to wake up all my friends and anyone else in the vicinity, but to try to go back to sleep. I guess that's what they call a cultural difference.

At the restaurant I had some tofu and rice and wrote in my journal. I also conscripted Simon to help me make a hostel reservation in Shanghai, and took a trip to the Internet cafe. I tried to get cash, but the ATM claimed it couldn't communicate with my bank. Ugh.

The minibus picked me up at the cafe at 4:45, and I was finally on my way to Shanghai. Simon had explained that the minibus would take me to meet up with a bigger bus. By the time we pulled out of Tangkou there were three other foreigners on the bus, two twenty-something women travelling together and a tall bespectacled guy.

It was quite dark by the time the minibus pulled into a bus station with no signs of life. We sat for a few minutes, and then a man got on and made an announcement that seemed to cause some consternation. All I'd understood was "twenty-five." I was about to ask the other foreigners when they thought was going on when one of the women tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether I spoke Chinese. Fortunately the tall guy volunteered that the big bus wasn't here, but was supposed to maybe arrive in 25 minutes.

For some reason I was having a hard time placing accents. The women turned out to be English teachers living in Shanghai; one was American, the other English. The tall guy was from Saskatchewan or one of those other Midwestern provinces. He was travelling with his Chinese-Canadian wife and his mother-in-law, which was how he knew what was going on.

Eventually a bus appeared, and we got on it. During a rest stop the Canadian helped me figure out that my hostel wasn't terribly far from the bus station we'd be arriving at, which was good news since the subway wouldn't be running in the middle of the night. His wife had been talking to a passenger who lived in Shanghai, a pretty young woman with an extraordinary, Marilyn Monroe-like voice. She came back to relay what she'd learned, the names of the three taxi companies I should use. I could only half-remember one because I knew the first character in its name, "da," or "big."

The swelling had gotten worse; my ankle bones were now mere dimples. I checked my leg periodically for red streaks. There were none. Well, that was something.