Odyssey

[Written on October 5]

Arrived on the afternoon of the third, and have felt overwhelmed to some extent since my plane rolled up to the gate, The journey was about as comfortable as a 13-hour flight in coach can be; I think I'm a fan of Air Canada. The difficult part was getting up at 3:30 am to catch a plane to Toronto, only to wait in the airport for five hours.

I left the Beijing airport on an impressive high-speed train and transferred to the subway with no problems. I have only myself to blame for the series of unfortunate events that commenced once I got off the subway, since I had forgotten to print the confirmation email I received when I made my hostel reservation, or even to read it closely enough to realize that the hostel I thought I was reserving at no longer existed. Apparently the Beijing Gongti hostel had been kicked out of the Worker's Stadium and reincarnated as the Golden Pineapple Hostel somewhere nearby.

But I was not to learn this until I checked my email the next evening. At the time, I tried relying on Lonely Planet, signs near the Worker's Stadium (on these the hostel still existed), and asking people who worked around the stadium, not one of whom had ever heard of the place. Most of them were determined to help me, though, which led to much wasted time. one exceptionally kind woman, who spoke not a word of English, led me at my request to a shop to use the telephone. the phone was in use, so she took me to a second shop, where I tried calling the hostel--no answer. Then she discussed my predicament at length with other shop patrons. Then we went back to the stadium park, and I pointed out to her on the map at the gate where the hostel was supposed to be. I'm pretty sure she didn't understand this, just as I understood next to nothing she said, except when she commented that finding this hostel was really not easy. I agreed wholeheartedly.

Then she explained her plan, which I understood not at all, but it seemed easier to follow her than to try harder to extricate myself from her leadership. I'd tried to extricate myself already, thanking her when we arrived at the shop with the phone, and trying to explain afterward that I was just going to go back to the park and look some more, but to no avail.

The new plan took us out of the park, past restaurants that included an Outback Steakhouse, and far away. I felt increasingly desperate as we grew further from the stadium, with its signs that assured me the hostel was right there, but I was strangely resigned to my fate. The intense physical discomfort that came with wandering Beijing with a pack hardly had meaning anymore.

After 10 minutes or so we came to a sort of shopping center, where my guide looked at the list of businesses. Of course, the hostel wasn't on it. I'd been holding out hope that she was leading me to an alternative hostel, but this was clearly not the case. She asked an older couple walking by about the hostel, and everyone looked at the map in my Lonely Planet book for the umpteenth time that night. The old couple pointed out the obvious, which was that this hostel was by the stadium.

We started back. In an effort to avoid walking and regain some measure of control over my own destiny, I hailed a cab. I tried to offer my guide a lift, since presumably she was returning to the stadium grounds as well, but she probably didn't understand where I was going, and didn't get in. The driver didn't understand either, and dropped me off a few blocks later. But at least I'd saved a few blocks of walking.

I went back to the park and looked some more, until it truly seemed impossible that this hostel existed. Then I went to a hotel I'd seen while we were on our way to the shop with the phone. It cost more than twice what I'd have paid at the illusory hostel, but that was still only about $50. To say it was worth it would be an understatement.

My first Chinese lesson: Be careful whom you ask for help.

About the photograph: No, I did not open the 25 yuan package on my hotel nightstand to see how the vibrating condom worked. Anyone who knows is encouraged to comment (anonymously, if necessary).

Beijing: Day one

I woke up early--I'd slept in short spurts all night long--and set off in search of another Lonely Planet-recommended hostel in the neighborhood. This one seemed to have ceased to exist as well, but I'd seen signs for another hostel the night before, and this one I eventually found. I moved, then set out for the Forbidden City and Tiannanmen Square.

The square was still decorated for the Olympics--I enjoyed seeing the Olympic mascots miming various sports. Lines of soldiers marched purposefully here and there, and Mao's portrait beamed down benevolently on us all.

I worked my way into the Forbidden City eventually and was suitably impressed. Apart from the main courtyards, my favorite parts were the exhibits of various treasures, like the empress's hair pins.

My tired feet and the subway bore me back to a street near the hostel, where I had my first real meal in China, a tofu-vegetable dish from which I carefully removed the pork.

My hunger sated, I felt overwhelmingly sleepy and had to force myself to check email and read for a few hours before passing out at around 8:00.

Beijing: Day two

Went to the Lama Temple, where there were many people praying among clouds of incense. Was strangely underwhelmed until I wandered into an exhibit of sculptures of strange, Indian-looking gods.

It was raining a little. I walked around nearby hutongs for a bit, then down an important street past a Ming-era center of Confucian learning. I feasted at a somewhat pricey vegetarian buffet on the same street; though it was obviously geared toward tourists, I took comfort from the fact that most of the tourists were Chinese.

It had occurred to me while I was at the Lama Temple that I wasn't really in the traveling mindset yet. And why not? Maybe because I hadn't seen anything really surprising yet, with the possible exception of Beijing's sparkling subway system. I needed to find something weird. After lunch I set out to buy a ticket for a kung fu show, another wild goose chase I won't go into other than that I finally did find the Chaoyang Culture Center, it apparently no longer hosts kung fu shows. Clearly the Beijing described in my Lonely Planet--published in spring 2007--was not the Beijing of October 2008.

I caught a taxi to the Pearl Market next and tried out my haggling skills on a windbreaker. The experience taught me that my haggling skills needed work. I didn't stay at the Pearl Market for long--not weird enough, and it seemed sensible to leave the shopping to the end of my trip. So I crossed the pedestrian bridge and entered the park surrounding the Temple of Heavenly Peace.

There for the first time, I felt myself really getting in to the traveling groove. People were singing in a huge group; others were playing a game with ping pong paddles but no table; down a little further people were playing instruments; further still, there were women with red spangled scarves around their waists dancing to recorded music. In more secluded spots among the trees people stretched and practiced tai chi. It was lovely and strange.

I wandered the park until dark. A sign claimed that some of the cypresses in the park (the park where the emperors used to come to pray for big harvests) were 800 years old. Here's a country Americans tend to think of as recklessly destroying its environment, yet in the heart of Beijing it's harbored trees through several dynasties and foreign invasions, a civil war, Communism, the Cultural Revolution, capitalism, and the city's famously polluted air.

At dark I headed to the famous snack street, but skipped the fried bugs on sticks--the weirdest thing I ate was fried ice cream on toast. The area the snack market is in seems like Beijing's answer to Times Square. In fact many parts of Beijing--those that I saw, anyway--were bigger, newer, and cleaner than the nicest parts of American cities. After snack street I turned in early once again, but this time with good reason: My bus to the Great Wall was to leave at 6:30 am the next day.

Terra cotta warriors

It was foggy and rainy in Shaanxi province. I'd made a reservation for once, and got a shuttle from the station to the hostel. Feeling like a new woman after a shower and breakfast, I set out to buy my next train ticket and see the terra cotta warriors. I managed to use my Chinese to buy a "hard sleeper" ticket for the next day, and left the train station feeling quite proud of myself, even though I was to leave at 13:20 instead of in the evening, as I would have preferred.

I walked in front of the train station looking for the shuttle bus to the warriors museum. There were huge puddles everywhere and I accidentally stepped in a few, wetting my feet through my sturdy hiking shoes. But I didn't wander long before a bus conductor saw me and pointed out the bus to me. I'd ridden a taxi to the train station and bough a ticket in Chinese, then found the correct bus, all in 20 minutes or so--my confidence in my travel skills was beginning to return.

I'd seen the warriors museum on the Travel Channel just a few months before, so it seemed an unlikely candidate for a site that would surprise me. But I found the warriors' expressive faces and broken, jumbled bodies (in the partly-excavated sections) strangely moving, as if they were real people who'd been interred here alive. In fact they do represent the exquisite life's work of countless nameless artisans, buried pointlessly for milennia thanks to an emperor's delusion of immortality.

After a few hours with the warriors I took the bus back to the city. It was about 6:00 when I arrived, and cold. I was very hungry. I walked down a major street for awhile without seeing anything remotely appealing, then spotted a restaurant on a side street. It didn't look like the kind of place that got many waiguoren, but I went in anyway.

One of the waitresses opened the door for me and asked how many people I was. This seems to be a mandatory question at restaurants in China, even when, as then, there's no one else around. I don't know whether it's an immutable rule that it must be asked, or if people are simply incredulous that anyone would go to a restaurant alone.

My apprehensions were confirmed when I got the menu: It had no English, no pinyin, and no pictures. The waitress patiently awaited my order as I whipped out my tiny dictionary, but clearly nether it nor I were up to the task of decoding that enormous menu. I decided to throw myself on the mercy of the waitress, even though she hadn't understood me the first time I asked for tea.

In Chinese, I explained that I don't eat meat, that I like vegetables and tofu and mushrooms. She aksed whether I liked spicy food, and I said no. There were other questions that I tried to guess at and muddle through. I said yes to rice.

And voila! A dish of tofu, mushrooms, onions, and peppers appeared a few minutes later, sans meat, with rice. I was incredibly awkward in Chinese, but maybe I could get by after all, I thought.

I turned in early again. This time my excuse was that I'd been on a train the night before. Besides, if I was to leave at midday, I wanted to get an early start.

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.

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.

Lijiang

On my first full day in Lijiang I tried to go have a look at Tiger Leaping Gorge using public buses. This turned out not to be as easy as Lonely Planet made it sound, so instead I went to Black Dragon Pool, between Lijiang's old and new towns. I wandered into some sort of Dongba Culture Center, and some enthusiastic young English-speaking Naxi gave me a little tour of their classroom, where their teacher demonstrated calligraphy. Apparently Naxi is the only system of hieroglyphics still in use, or maybe it's the oldest still in use.

After giving the park a good wander I booked a one-day tour to the gorge for the next day with a "tourist reception center" in the Old Town. The agent plied me with pu'er tea, which apparently is native to northwest Yunnan. He served it lukewarm, and it had a subtle, earthy taste. He asked whether I'd had it before, and I answered truthfully that I didn't know. He said that if I was a first-timer I shouldn't have more than three of the tiny cups-full, as it would give me the runs. I was skeptical, but didn't try proving him wrong.

I booked a ticket to Hangzhou that afternoon, too.

Baisha

I rented a bike for the trip to Baisha, a village known for its frescoes and its Taoist doctor. Before I even found my way out of Lijiang I managed to crash the bike; a car had pulled out in front of me in the bike lane and I thought I could make it up on to the curb, but didn't. I did a decent roll, and came away with a small cut on my elbow, one on my shin, and a few impressive bruises.

I passed through the new town, as well as a few nice Naxi villages, on the way to Baisha. The weather was great for biking, but some of the cobblestone streets rattled my teeth. Between the villages were fields of tall, yellowed corn stalks; some of the villagers were harvesting them. I could see the corn piled in the second stories of some of their homes.

The houses themselves were built of red brick or cinder blocks, topped by grey tile roofs with turned-up eaves. Most were fronted with nice archways leading into courtyards.

I found the tour bus parking lot for Baisha first, and gratefully abandoned the bike in the designated area. I paid the entrance fee and saw the home of a long-gone important person, complete with a small Taoist temple and frescoes that seemed to have been imported from someplace else. I think they were from the Tang dynasty, and they looked their age. As at one other Taoist temple I'd visited, I was mainly struck by the similarities between these and medieval Christian art: the halos, the faded, orangey tinge, and the formal seated poses of the subjects.

Leaving out the back way, I followed the trail of souvenir stalls to the center of the village. There were plenty of framed newspaper clips from all over the world outside the office of the Taoist doctor, but the man himself did not seem to be in. I reflected that tour-group hordes and free-thinking wielders of Lonely Planet like myself didn't seem to have done Baisha much good.

I kept walking. The touristy and non-touristy parts of the village were conveniently separated by an archway. In front of the archway an old, tiny woman approached me and showed me a guestbook with pages filled with testimonials from all over the world, as well as a few pictures of herself with Western women dressed as Naxi. I wasn't sure exactly what she wanted, but from the testimonials it seemed that she intended to have me for tea in her garden and dress me up for photos. Given the fact that we couldn't communicate, this promised to be an awkward experience. Also, I didn't know whether she'd expect money.

Fortunately a young Han couple wearing yellow Northface jackets had stopped to watch the proceedings, and the woman asked in English if she could help. We three tourists ended up following the old woman to her courtyard, where indeed she gave us tea and nuts and dressed the women up like Naxi, after which we took numerous pictures in various parts of the courtyard.

The young woman was from Shanghai and spoke English as well as any Chinese I'd met in the country. her significant other was from Xi'an and didn't talk much, though he seemed to understand English perfectly. The young woman called our hostess nainai--grandmother--and told me that her "local Chinese" was difficult to understand.

After the photo session we signed the guestbook and took down the old woman's address so that we could send her postcards, and left. On the way out the woman from Shanghai asked the old woman about money, and gave her 20 yuan. I started to get out my money, but the young woman shook her head. She had translated for me that the old woman's husband was dead, and that her children lived elsewhere. Perhaps playing host for tourists was for her some combination of a hobby and a way to get by.

At the main road the young couple headed south on their bikes, and I went back into the touristy part of the village to explore a little more and get lunch. I bought a large batik rectangle of cloth, a wedding gift for some friends, and a couple of tiny oval boxes that the saleswoman said were made of yak bone. Then it was back to the bike.

I'd picked up a better map in the cafe where I'd lunched, and decided to head south to Shuhe village. The woman from Shanghai had told me that she was staying there, and that in her opinion it was better than Lijiang. It was, as I suspected, the same village that Mr. He had delivered me to, but this time I had time to explore. The tourist takeover of the village seemed even more complete than in Lijiang, and I didn't stay long. I bought another batik cloth, this one for my own futon, and paid less than half what the first one had cost, even without haggling. Ah well.

It was hard to stuff everything in my bicycle basket, but I managed it. I turned in the bike in Lijiang, had a snack at a cafe on the grass-selling square, checked email, collected my bag, and got to the airport hours before my 10:45 flight.

The receptionist at the hostel had booked me a complicated arrangement that involved flying to Chengdu, using a voucher for a hotel, and flying to Hangzhou first thing in the morning. This sort of thing seemed to be common, and there are companies that pick you up at the airport and take you to the hotel. In theory, anyway.

In reality, I collected my bag and went over to a man who was holding a sign; people were collecting around him. He was with an airport-hotel company, but not my airport-hotel company. In an amazing stroke of luck, another man reached the sign-man just before me and asked the same question. he turned out to be a fluent English-speaker (originally from Hong Kong), and explained that our company wasn't there, but that we could walk to the hotel in five minutes. Which we did.

We arrived after midnight, but the entrance area was full of people, and all of them seemed to be hoping to check in. Most were clutching vouchers. The man from Hong Kong finally made his way up to the counter. All I could catch was some discussion of whether he was one person or two people (because of me, presumably), and the word "foreigner." An argument broke out between the receptionist and the line of men at the counter, with one of them using that word I'd learned a few days before, "judge." Was he threatening legal action? Finally the man from Hong Kong explained to me, somewhat unnecessarily, that there weren't enough rooms.

Soon afterward, a woman procured a key card and asked me whether I'd like to share. This seemed like my best chance of getting to sleep anytime soon, so I followed her up to the room. She explained that she was studying English and had asked to share a room with me. But we didn't talk much, apart from a brief discussion of how to conjugate "to choose."

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.

Komodo

When Niffer-bur and I got to the Chicago aquarium on Monday we found a line that went out the door, down the front steps, and halfway across the courtyard. A clue to the reason for the madness was the giant blow-up lizard whose mouth the line disappeared into: There was a temporary lizard exhibit going on, including a Komodo Dragon.

While I was impressed with the aquarium, I thought the Komodo was nothing to wait in line for 40 minutes for. It's kind of goofy-looking. Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd seen it flick its tongue or lumber around its enclosure or something.

Tourists III

These are the kinds of food we ate this past weekend:
Afghani
French
sandwich (Potbelly, such a hit we went back the next day)
Ethiopian
Turkish (ok, only so E97 had the Turkish breakfast, but I'm counting it)
sushi

I also introduced Joey to the wonder that is the mojito.

On Sunday afternoon Joey and E97 walked up the Exorcist stairs in Georgetown. Then Joey pretended to fall down them. Then they raced back up them. I had to stay at the bottom because, well, that was just the sacrifice I had to make in order to record the whole ordeal.

Tourists II

I've had out-of-town visitors for the last two weekends, and much fun has been had. In the case of Joey (from Colorado) and his high school friend E97 (who lives in Baltimore now, but whom I had not seen for nine long years), I felt kind of like I was in a Kevin Smith movie. Except that the dialogue was nerdier (in a good way), and, on E97's part, much less crude.

I'm a long way from getting tired of doing touristy things here--there are always new things to discover. Take this comment card at the National Archives, which I found quite entertaining.

A few blocks away, I spotted this work of art in the women's room at Potbelly:

Blooming

I like DC much better now that the trees are in bloom. Here's a picture I took a few days ago on my way to work. Even the pathetic triangle of dirt on 17th and New Hampshire that passes for a dog park was bedecked with beautiful white blossoms.

Yesterday half of our office went down to the Tidal Basin (where the famous Japanese cherry trees are) for a picnic lunch. The famously ephemeral blossoms were near their peak, and breezes sent blizzards of little white petals swirling around their throngs of admirers.

Last night brought an impressive hour-long thunderstorm and hard rain, and on the way in this morning most of the cherry blossoms had been washed from the trees, revealing new green leaves.

Tourists

One nice thing about living in DC is that it's easy to impress out-of-town visitors.

A few weekends ago NSCV came down for a festival involving Flogging Molly, a pseudo-Irish band we both like. M.M. came out with us, and I introduced them both to Turkish food one night and Ethiopian the next, both at restaurants within walking distance of my place.

This past weekend G.R. made his first trip to our nation's capital from his new home base in Delaware. G.R. is naturally enthusiastic, and actually pays attention to things like the Supreme Court, so he was like a kid on a sugar high. If kids on sugar highs kept dropping the F-bomb and talking about evolution.

So what could have been a somewhat brutal post-St.-Patrick's-Day slog around the mall actually turned out to be quite fun, with stops at the Botanic Gardens, the Canadian embassy, and the Museum of Natural History. I may have even learned some things about evolution.