Having Fun All The Time

We got up early the next day and got on a bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge. We spent three hours on the bus riding through the Yunnan countryside, and along the way got acquainted with the other foreigners who were with us. They turned out to be a great bunch: a young English couple who were in the middle of a six-month trip through Asia, and a couple who had come from Spain to travel—one American guy who had been living in Spain for four years and was fluent in Spanish, and his wife, a very warm Spanish lady whose face lit up with an amazing smile whenever anybody spoke with her.

Along the way I asked the English couple a question that had been nagging on my mind ever since the first time I met someone who was doing a World Tour or equivalent, like they were doing—a trip that lasted months on end with no stops at home to rest and recuperate and let your feet settle back on the ground: How do you keep from getting completely exhausted?

 

This question has particular significance for me because traveling, while one of the most stimulating things I’ve found on this earth to do, completely takes it out of me. It’s not only physically tiring, but deeply emotionally draining. This, for me, is just because of the constant movement and change: picking yourself up every few days, or week, or few weeks, and getting on a bus or train or plane to a new part of the world—I love it, but after a couple of weeks I tend to get weirdly moody and excitable, and to have a tendency to break down. I find that this is usually a delayed reaction: when I have to deal with something stressful while traveling, I usually have little emotional reaction while the thing is going on, but a day or two later when I have a minute to myself, I feel totally adrift. This happens especially when I meet someone and travel with them for a day or two or longer, and then split off and go back on my own. The transition can be abrupt and very unsettling.

And when I asked my question I could tell that I wasn’t alone in this feeling, because the English folks knew exactly what I was talking about and the girlfriend, Anne, answered without blinking: “We take days off,” she said. “Every so often along the way, when we find some particularly nice hotel or beach or something, we’ll just stay in that place for a few days and not do anything, not go anywhere except maybe to eat. We’ll just read our books or write in our journals or whatever….sometimes you feel guilty that you’re not out there seeing stuff, like if you miss some waterfall or something, but then you just tell yourself, ‘Well, I saw 20 waterfalls yesterday, so it’s not a big deal…’”

This idea might have been perfectly obvious to anyone else, but I had never really thought about taking “days off” while actually vacationing around China. But I liked the idea, and after Tiger Leaping Gorge when we got back to Lijiang for the second time, we put it to good use.

But we were still approaching Tiger Leaping Gorge—this would not be a “day off”, although it would be the nicest day of our whole month-long adventure. When we arrived at Jane’s Hostel at the trailhead I realized that I hadn’t actually checked the guidebook at all, so I asked the others where to go from here, because they looked like they knew what they were doing. They explained that we could leave our bags at the hostel, start the trek, and then when we arrived at the other end a bus would bring us back by road to this very hostel to pick up our stuff.

Since Jess and I had left our bags back in Lijiang and were carrying small daypacks, we didn’t have to deal with this, but we grabbed a bite to eat at Jane’s (gross food, lots of flies, also other reviews online say the rooms are nasty) and then started the hike.

We walked for about 45 minutes up a hill that afforded pretty views down into the valley below us, corn and other vegetables planted in various spots along the mountainside, and at the bottom a lazy brown river which we would be following for the next two days.

After an hour we rested at a little store along the trail, and started talking to a Swiss guy who had been traveling solo for six months all over the world. I asked him how long he was going to carry on, and he shrugged.

“I dunno; it depends on when I run out of money,” he said, as if the detail couldn’t matter less to him.

He explained that when his money was gone he was going to go to Australia to work for a while—I learned on this trip that Australia has a program that Americans can also participate in which allows you to work there for a year at any job you can find, kind of a work-travel thing—and then he would head home. After a few minutes, we all got up and started the hike again, and the Swiss guy charged ahead. That was when we saw the mountains along the gorge for the first time.

The straight stone faces of the mountains were dramatic in all this peaceful greenery, and as soon as I set eyes on them I felt all the stress of the last year in China melt away. This was going to be a good hike. After a couple more hours Jess and I set nicely into the rhythm of walking, and eventually we neared the “28 bends”, a steepish switchbacked part of the trail.

It was here that I saw, for the first time, real marijuana in China.

Before the steep 28 bends started there was a little stand on the trailside, with a few young Chinese guys milling about and an old lady standing behind the counter. I was hot and sweaty so didn’t take the time to look around; I homed in on the cooler.

“How much is the water?” I asked.

“Eight for a big one, five for a small one,” the old lady answered in Chinese.

“Are you gonna have water?” I asked Jess, and she replied in the affirmative.

“I’ll have a big one,” I told the old lady in Chinese. “Are they cold?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, they’re cold,” she said, and reached down into the cooler.

She pulled up the water and handed it to me.

“Eight yuan, right?”

“Yes, eight yuan,” she said.

Then, as I was pulling a five and three ones from my wallet, the old lady said a word that I had never heard before.

There was a silence after she said it. It had sounded a little like meiyou ah na. My brain, which had become accustomed to working extra hard to decipher meaning from southwestern Chinese peoples’ strange tones and accents, began scanning it for some meaning in Chinese. The first part definitely seemed like the word méiyǒu, which meant “don’t have” or “no”; but the second half made no sense. A na? It could be a word. Those two syllables appear in Chinese, but they didn’t make sense together.

I decided to ignore it, since whatever she said couldn’t have been that important (I had already got the water, which was what I wanted), when my cousin, standing just behind me, said this:

“Ganja, something for you to smoke to get relaxed in the hills.”

“What?” I asked, and turned.

“They’re selling marijuana here,” she said. “Look at this little sign.”

“It’s fake,” I said. This was my knee-jerk reaction to this news: I had encountered “pot” in China before, but it was all just dried herbs. I never expected to see real marijuana in China.

Then another voice piped up.

“No, it’s not fake,” a man’s voice, German accented, said. “It’s total shit, but it’s real.”

I looked around and saw the Swiss guy who we’d been sharing the trail with all day.

“How do you know?” I asked

“Because I smoke it,” he said.

“You mean you’ve smoked this weed or you smoke back in your home?”

“Back in my home, but I know.”

This seemed impossible to me: here of all places, why would they have pot? It made sense in the huge cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen, but up in these mountains?

But it was real. I picked up a bag and sniffed it, and it was definitely pot. It was extremely heavy with seeds and dried and shredded poorly, and there was little visible evidence of the putrid and sticky crystals that represent heavy THC content in pot in the U.S. But it was pot. I was awestruck, knowing that China has very strict penalties for dealing drugs, to find it so obviously for sale even in the mountains. Only two years ago an Englishman was put to death in China for carrying 4 kilograms of heroin into an airport in northwest China. Chinese people are executed with fair regularity for drug dealing. But here it was, in Yunnan, out in the open.

The Swiss guy said that in some of the small towns around Lijiang—Dali and Shaxi—it was everywhere, usually offered by little old ladies like this one, who had been taught two English words: “ganja” and “marijuana”. This seemed to lead him to believe that pot is common in China, but that’s a false notion.

Virtually every Chinese I had ever met had only a very vague notion of what pot was, and had certainly never seen it except in Western movies.

Based on the fact that these ladies knew English slang terms for pot, it was clear that they were part of an operation that produced and sold weed throughout this area, and they were just at the retail end of things. Somebody higher up had clearly studied English, maybe been abroad. And the fact that they had a market made sense: I couldn’t imagine Chinese tourists buying this stuff, but there were a lot of foreigners touring through this area, and foreigners are easy to spot anywhere in China.

Leaving the weed behind but taking the water, Jess and I continued up the trail and a few hours later, after a relatively tough hike through the “28 bends”, we arrived at the Tea Horse Hostel, a courtyard-style building set just off the trail perched at the top of the gorge, a thin dirt road leading up to it from the river far below us, which was presumably how they got food and other goods up to the hostel.

The Tea Horse was very simple—you could even say rustic—but that was fine for us after spending five or six hours on the trail. Behind the hostel was a cement patio with an uninhibited view of the mountains, and there we found our American-Spanish friends enjoying beers in the late-afternoon sunshine. There was another hostel an hour or so down the trail, but the sight of cold beer incapacitated me. It was decided. We would stay here for the night.

The beds were cheap—25 yuan, just north of three dollars for a night—and the food was decent. The company was better. The group we had shared the van with coming out here, the English folks, the Spanish-American folks, and us, shared a table and started telling stories and drinking beers. Jess seemed to be having a good time and seemed to take to the wonderful Spanish woman and the American guy who had mastered the language she had struggled with in high school. A couple of guys joined us—a Briton who had been living in Paris for several years, and his darkly handsome Moldovan boyfriend, who was also in Paris. Between us we had more than half a dozen languages: The American guy spoke English and Spanish; his wife of course spoke both as well; the English guy spoke French, his boyfriend spoke English, French, Russian and Moldovan; and I spoke Chinese; and with the Swiss guy, who joined us briefly, we had at least German and maybe another language or two as well.

Point being that it was an interesting group and we had a lot of stories. So we drank and talked until 1 a.m. Somewhere around that time I got a laugh with my best China drinking story: the one about getting so drunk that my decision-making skills were sufficiently impaired that I actually stepped into the doorway of a “red-light parlor” with a Chinese friend of mine, but then got a hold of myself and then put the kibosh on that idea, went back to my friend’s house with him (the buses had stopped running so I couldn’t get back home) and proceeded to throw up on everything. This was shortly after I arrived in China, before I learned how to keep control in the new drinking culture. Always good for a laugh.

At some point I got up to grab another beer and walked by a table of people conversing with one of the hostel girls, and this is what I overheard:

One of the foreigners said: “Are you sure it’s legal in China?”

And the hostel girl said: “Yes.”

“I mean, legal, you know what legal means?”

“I think so…” she said.

And, knowing what they were talking about, and since I had had two beers and was now willing to interrupt anyone’s conversation, I interjected as I walked past: “No, it’s definitely not legal,” and then, for good measure, I added: “Kěndìng shì bùhéfǎ de.”

“That’s what I thought,” the foreigner said. “How do you say marijuana in Chinese?”

“Dàmá,” I said.

And from the hostel girl: “Ohhh…” A sound of sudden recognition.

I went and got my beer.

Back at the patio, the English and Moldovan guy told a story from that day: Somewhere along the trail at Tiger Leaping Gorge they had come across a “sightseeing” spot, a little spur trail, with a sign in front saying you had to pay something like 8 yuan to go down it, and an old Chinese lady collecting money. Since we were in the middle of the woods and it seemed like you shouldn’t have to pay some random old lady to go down a public trail, and on top of that since we had paid about 50 yuan to get into this scenic area in the first place, the English and Moldovan guy had ignored her and just walked on past. So she had done the following: hissed, spit in their faces, threw rocks in their direction (without hitting them) and brandished a knife at them (without stabbing). They were clearly traumatized by the encounter, and I was mystified. Apparently anything is possible in Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Some time, late at night, we all went to bed. And we all seemed to sleep well. And early in the morning Jess and I got up and started our walk. The sky was clearer than it almost ever is in China and the air was cool, perfect for a walk. We spent the day on the trail and hardly saw anyone. The English couple were a half hour ahead of us but we only saw them occasionally in the distance. It was the rarest thing in China: peace, serenity, silence. And for that reason it was perfect. Jess seemed to love it too, but perhaps it was especially wonderful for me, having such little chance in China to experience such blissful quiet and emptiness. China is large, and living and working in the east, you rarely find yourself so literally alone (although it’s not hard to feel alone). I loved it.

Around mid-afternoon we arrived at the “end” of the hike (although we could and should have continued on to Walnut Grove on a cliff-trail by the riverside, had we only known…) at a place called Tina’s Guesthouse. There we bought our bus tickets back to Lijiang and rested, pretty exhausted after the day’s hike. It had begun to rain near the end of our hike and on the road back to Lijiang Jess and I sat mostly in silence, listening to part of an episode of This American Life on my iPod. After arriving back in Lijiang, we were both tired from the hike.

So we took a day off. That evening we just lounged around, and the next day we just lounged around, too. Our trains were leaving at 9:30 that night, and we spent the whole day inside the hostel. Jess spent her time on the computer and I spent mine reading and chatting with other people in the hostel. And it was nice. And we were leaving at 9:30 p.m.. And we ate a wonderful family-style dinner that evening at the hostel with the employees. And we had a nice chat with them. And they explained that Dali and Shaxi are better than Lijiang; even one of the girls from Lijiang said so. And then I hung out some underwear to dry in the laundry room. And I chatted with a French girl named Emilie for a while in the hostel; she had been studying medicine in Yunnan. And she was nice. And she was very smart and interesting. And she seemed really nice. And she was quite good looking. And I asked if she wanted to watch a movie and she said yes. And she picked a movie and I turned on the TV and she started curling up on a blanket in front of the TV that could not possibly be big enough for us to sit on together without being very close. And it was obvious that she was expecting me to sit on the blanket. And it was 6:45, and we had almost three hours until our train would leave, and it was so nice, until I checked our tickets again and realized that I had read our tickets wrong that morning and that we were leaving at 7:30, not 9:30.

So we grabbed our stuff, and I said goodbye to Emilie (my face probably completely shattered) and we ran out of the hostel and caught the first overpriced cab we could (no time to haggle) and went straight to the train station and got on our train.

It’s a good thing the trains from Lijiang to Kunming are really nice and comfy. I promptly forgot about the nice French girl in the hostel (as my tiny squirrel brain has a tendency to do) and chatted with two middle-aged guys from northeast China for about an hour, until the train people turned out the lights and everybody went to sleep.

Of course, things took a turn for the worse the next day. The magic of Lijiang and the Tiger Leaping Gorge was shattered when they turned on the interior lights on the train at 5 in the morning for no FUCKING reason, even though we were arriving in Kunming three hours later. And started playing really loud music, again for no reason. And then announced that we would “very soon be arriving in Kunming” an hour before we got there. It was a nightmare. Everybody was tired, still trying to sleep, almost everybody on the train, for those three hours, but the train stewards made it impossible to sleep for no reason.

I will say only briefly: this, and a thousand other reasons, is probably why China was rated second-to-worst-place in terms of service by The New York Times Magazine.

And one other reason: Jess forgot her bag on the train, and it was taken, I am nearly certain, by a train steward. Like, not taken and sent to lost and found, but just taken. I say this because after we got back to the hostel and Jess realized that she had lost her bag, I did the following: I went to the train station and begged them to help me; I spoke to about ten different officials of different rank and order until I found the correct place to ask for help getting the bag. Those guys then took a half hour to find out that the train had already been sent to the Cheku—the parking garage—and that I would have to go there myself to look for the bag. So I got a cab and he didn’t know how to get to the cheku. So I switched cabs and a nice middle aged lady drove me there. And I gave my passport to the guys at the gate. And I walked a half mile to the train. And got on board and walked the whole length of the thing to the very car that we had ridden in and checked it myself. And there was no bag. And I asked the cleaning ladies about it and they seemed certain that I would never see that bag again.

And every step along the way, people asked me what was in the bag. As if they knew that the level of importance of what was in the bag would determine whether or not it was “found”. In retrospect I probably should have lied and said that my passport was in the bag, and it might have turned up, but as it was it just contained Jess’s driver’s license, wallet, credit card, and some clothes. And after all that, the bag never surfaced.

I called Jess and broke the news, and then went back to the hostel. I realized around that time that I had also forgotten something over the last day (not just Emilie): the underwear I had hung up in the hostel in Lijiang was still there, waiting for some brave soul other than me to take it down.

Jess called her mom and told her about the bag, and I waited for the tears. Knowing my family as I do, I had a feeling they would come. And come they did. I’m not sure if every family is like this, but nobody in my family has ever liked it when things got lost. The reaction is always bad. It was bad when I was 1 to 18 years of age, and watching Jess’s face as she dealt with battling her own conscience about losing the bag, and then dealt with her family’s frustration that she had lost her license and credit card, was like looking at a mirror that could show me myself 10 or 15 years ago. It was strange and rather freeing, in a way: I realized that whatever horrible things I feel now whenever I screw something up are not just things I feel but things everybody feels. And they come from the hard process of growing up, and dealing with screw ups and lost bags and little failures like that, and learning the hard way how not to do that anymore. Which is the only way to learn it—the hard way. In a way, it sucks to feel awful and cry and get yelled at by your parents, but I guess…if there’s a good thing in it…it’s probably that you learn.

Anyway, we got over the missing bag and didn’t talk about it anymore, and relaxed for a day in Kunming. And soon it was time to go again to get on a plane to Shanghai, which was our final stop on the adventure. And which would be the place I would finally say goodbye to my cuz, and continue the China adventure on my own—this time, with a couple days’ rest in me, slightly better able to get by.

Our next destination was Yúnnán in Southwestern China, bordering Vietnam and Tibet. Far away from anything I had seen in China yet and south of Sìchuān, Yúnnán was hot and beautiful, and from what I saw as we traveled through the province, the women were definitely better looking than in Sìchuān, too.

Our real destination in Yúnnán was Lìjiāng, a small historic town in northern Yúnnán that is listed as a Unesco World Heritage site. We arrived on the comfy double-decker sleeper train early; the sun had recently come up and the air was a little chilly. Traffic was heavy as we left the train station but soon thinned out as we passed through sparse suburbs until we arrived at the Lìjiāng old town.

The old town is all cobblestone street and old wooden houses, some partially or completely restored, some authentically old but with restored roofs and interiors, but some genuinely crumbling, looking old and dilapidated and lovely.

Lìjiāng is famed for this sort of thing, and was genuinely nice, but we found out very soon that we should have planned to stay in this place only one night and then have moved on, either to the real countryside or to nearby Dàlǐ or Shāxī, which everyone we met said was worlds better than Lìjiāng. Lìjiāng was just another tourist destination, and I learned again, as I had learned at nearly every stop on this trip, what was impossible to decipher in the guidebooks—you’ve got to head away from the tourist spot at all costs in this country, or be damned.

The driver pulled up to a quiet side street and we walked to our hostel, and I tried for a couple of hours to get in touch with my friend Shūlěi, who was also traveling in Lìjiāng at this time, with no luck. Who knows where she was or why she wasn’t contacting us. She had messaged me the night before saying that I should get in touch when we arrived, and we had spoken and agreed that we would meet today.

After a while Jess started talking about wanting to rent a motorcycle. I didn’t know where to get one but the hostel manager, a guy named Jiāng Yángzi (English name River), told me that we might be able to go to a village called Shùhé to rent bikes, so we hopped on the broken down hostel bikes and took off, rode for about an hour, about 7 or 8 miles, me asking directions every ten minutes, until we arrived in the village.

It was overwhelmed with horses and stalls selling souvenirs, a nightmare and worse than Lìjiāng itself, which the foreigners we had met along the way all derided as just another tourist trap.

We crawled through the little town for an hour but found no motorcycles, so I called the hostel and they told us to try another place. So we biked for an hour to find it, only to find that my Google maps was wrong. And in the end we simply returned to the hostel after biking in the hot sun for four hours, basically convinced that there were no motorcycles for rent anywhere in Lìjiāng (this turned out to be true; I confirmed later).

We stayed in the hostel waiting for Shūlěi to call, and I tried to work out the details of what we could do over the next couple of days. I texted Shūlěi and eventually she got back to me, calling, and said that she could see us the next morning and that they were staying outside of town.

So we relaxed. We were both exhausted from the bike ride and badly sunburned, and Jess collapsed into bed and stayed there the whole afternoon. I looked in the guide and went off to try to find a restaurant that claimed to offer calligraphy lessons, and walked for two hours aimlessly, unable to find the place in the winding roads of the old town, asking for directions multiple times and still not getting anywhere.

It got dark and I gave up. The streets were getting thicker with people, the noise growing steadily, until I wanted to escape temporarily. I went back to the hostel and found Jess still in the room, dozing. I asked her if she wanted to eat and she said, as usual, no, so I told her I was going to take a shower and we could go after that.

I went downstairs to relax a bit more after my shower and met an American guy who had been traveling with a woman who looked Chinese. She was tall and beautiful, with shoulder length hair that she repeatedly pushed back with her hand, a nervous tick that conveniently looked good.

The woman had heard me speaking Chinese and complimented me on it through the guy, in a way, and then he asked me my method for studying. I told him about how I’ve used Chinesepod for two years and then asked a few questions, and the girl spoke to me in Chinese. She was wearing leggings, dressed like an American, and as always it took me ten minutes to realize that she spoke perfect American English. By this time there was a weird tension between us, the American Chinese girl who speaks perfect English and perfect Chinese, confronted by the American white male studying Chinese who speaks decent Chinese and English, both vaguely threatened by each other in some inexpressible way, both on not opposite but opposing ends of a cultural spectrum, looking at it from different angles, somehow epistemologically indifferent to each other.

Finally I showered and Jess and I wandered around the town, which in the evening had become furiously choked with Chinese tourists, shouting, loud, pushing, crowding around street attractions, moving slowly and bumping into each other, everybody either trying to pass someone or walking too slowly. We got sidetracked and went over a bridge I didn’t recognize. We saw children placing paper flowers with candles on them in the small river and the candles getting caught in a whirlpool and piling up beside the bridge, only a meter away from the kids, refusing to budge and shattering the magic of what they were doing. We walked past an old well in the town that had once been used for drinking water, now surrounded by a crush of Chinese snapping their cameras and shouting, and we caught a glimpse of a man standing down in the well, holding a bowl of clear looking water over his head, preparing to drink.

We got back on track and arrived at the restaurant, which was nearly empty, and the waiters curtly directed us to our seats, where we looked at 50 yuan burgers, 30 yuan Tibetan dumplings, 20 yuan sodas, everything overpriced but at least with a relaxing environment. The bathroom was in a store next door and a sign inside instructed customers in English, “only pee, no poo!” and in Chinese, “forbidden to large convenience” (this is the Chinese way of saying “poo”).

We ordered our food and jess found that her burger had egg mixed in the meat, as well as carrots and some other unidentifiable vegetables.

The dumplings were OK but I felt that we had wasted our time and money coming here. And on the way out we wanted to pay money for a book from the book swap, which they initially agreed to but then reneged. By now I felt sick from the extremely spicy and delicious noodles I had had for lunch, and we started to rush back to the hostel, but Jess saw a dress she wanted on the way. She bought it quickly while I writhed in stomach pain standing up in an alley outside, trying to avoid the tourists who crowded and streamed around me.

We went back to the hostel and soon went to sleep, feeling stressed and frustrated, both, I think, slightly disappointed with the day, but expecting, rightly, better things to come.

Monday I got up early, unable to sleep, and Shūlěi called me in the morning and said that we could meet in about an hour. I set out to meet her and her friend Píngpíng and found them eventually near the water wheel in the middle of Lìjiāng old town, and we walked back to the hostel together. Shūlěi’s friend was very friendly and a little shy at first, and it took about 15 minutes for me to realize that she could speak English and that she had lived in England for four years. Shūlěi thought that I had been traveling with three others and was surprised to learn that I was only with my cousin; they met Jess back at the hostel, and we sat around drinking tea for a while until it was time to go get food.

We walked up to the main street above the old town to find a restaurant, where Jess became horrified by the chickens and fish being slaughtered and cleaned in the doorways of the restaurants. “We’re not eating here, are we?” she asked with a raised eyebrow when we stopped in front of one of the places. They were classic Chinese—loud, grimy, doing brisk business with a mix of different style of dishes.

“They feel this kind of thing is pretty disgusting,” Píngpíng said to Shūlěi in Chinese.

“It’s OK,” I said, “she does think it’s kind of gross, but I don’t mind.”

“Well let’s go somewhere else,” Shūlěi said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, my stomach grumbling. “She’s not going to eat anything no matter where we go. She picks bones out of a chicken egg,” I added, using a Chinese idiom to describe someone who’s overly picky.

“How can you treat your cousin like that?” Shūlěi demanded, laughing a little at how uncouth I was, and she and Píngpíng led us on to a place where they weren’t slaughtering chickens but only cleaning fish in front.

We ordered fish flavored fried pork with no spice for jess, and fried Chinese greens, and a boiling vat of spicy fish for the rest of us and ate well, Jess occasionally chatting with Píngpíng and Shūlěi listening intently, trying to parse their English, and interjecting in Chinese when she understood something they said. There were times when Shūlěi couldn’t understand what we were saying, but mostly she could follow along.

I wanted Jess to be able to participate in all our conversations so I tried to translate whenever we spoke Chinese, but also I felt that this was part of the experience of truly experiencing a language — being very aware that you don’t understand, listening to the sounds, occasionally being caught with someone who can’t speak at all. Seeing Jess in that state reminded me of the few times, in the very beginning, when I was left on my own–when I rode in a car with someone who spoke no English and I spoke no Chinese, when a friend who spoke English got up to use the bathroom–those moments when you are left with someone who speaks a different language, who perhaps wants to ask you things, say things to you, but who has no choice but to sit in silence while you sit in silence, neither of you wanting to frighten the other by launching into a speech in an unfamiliar language.

This had been the reason I had studied Chinese to begin with. I had wanted to see what it was like to be the one who was able to pierce that wall of silence, where the combinations of sounds—seemingly arbitrary, endlessly complex, irreproducible without years of effort—became beautiful aural symbols that released us from our cages of silence, sometimes made us aware of how simple and helpless we were without it, how defenseless and isolated a person is without words.

After lunch Shūlěi and Píngpíng left to go meet some people who they might be sharing a van to Tibet with. Their plan was to hire a van and a driver to take them the rest of the way across the west to Tibet in a long drive, four people altogether, crammed into one van, and since two of Shūlěi’s friends were going home they would have to share the van with two strangers.

Jess and I relaxed at noon, still feeling not fully adjusted to the elevation change and the rough couple of train rides that had brought us to Lìjiāng, and then around 4 we went to meet Shūlěi near the water wheel again.

The four of us took a cab ride out to where the girls had been staying, Lāshìhǎi lake, about 20 minutes away from town.

The cab ride took about 25 minutes. First we zipped through the streets of Lìjiāng and quickly escaped onto a narrow country road, and began climbing up a hill. Soon we were at the lake—a long stretch of still water surrounded by motionless fields of grass and gently sloping mountains. Everything was a bit gray and muted, the clouds steely, suggesting rain, the air cool and lightly windy. The place was beautiful and quiet enough to hear the wind blowing in the leaves; there was only one road visible, the one we came in on, and no other cars in sight.

Shūlěi and Píngpíng explained that they had found the place after they had arrived in Lìjiāng. They had been staying in the old town and hadn’t liked it, so they had taken a cab ride to check out the area outside town. They had gone to Lāshìhǎi and walked for a while, and paid an entrance fee. Then they walked ahead further and met some men who asked them for money to go for a boat ride, but they were a little startled by the six men, who were large and somewhat forbidding looking. So they declined the boat ride and walked by themselves a long way, walking around the river until they were hungry and thirsty, until they finally found a house that looked somewhat like a hotel, and they knocked on the door, and someone answered.

It turned out it was an incomplete and run-down hostel on the side of the lake, inhabited by a young Chinese guy from eastern China who had moved to this area to relax and work with the locals. Shūlěi and Píngpíng both explained that he helped the locals, but they didn’t clarify exactly how, except that he helped them buy things that they needed and teach them some things. He had a Harley Davidson motorcycle in the hostel, and lots of western liquor, but the grass in the courtyard was severely overgrown and it appeared that they hadn’t cleaned the place in some time. It looked almost abandoned, but was still running. In the entryway there was a comfortable and relaxing couch with a table in the center, a hanging chair, but it appeared that no one had used any of it in weeks.

Píngpíng stayed behind to prepare to leave for Tibet, and Shūlěi took us for a walk out toward the lake through the soggy grass in the wetland, our flip flops gathering thick, heavy muck. Horses grazed on the side of the road and throughout the wetlands. Apple trees and pears grew in the orchards ringing the lake, the apples individually wrapped in small paper bags, to protect them from bugs or the sun, I couldn’t be sure which.

“Why is it like this?” I asked Shūlěi. “It seems the hostel is set up for foreigners, but there’s no one there.”

“Actually he’s not the owner,” she said. “The owner is cycling to Nepal and he’s been gone for two months, and when he comes back they’re hoping to finish it and start up a hang-gliding operation here, but they still haven’t figured it out. And when he comes back this guy might leave.”

“Wow, he’s got a pretty comfortable life,” I said, but Shūlěi didn’t respond to that at all.

Shūlěi had been a good friend of mine for several months in Sanming. She was very different from all the other Chinese women I had met: she was confident, for one—she moved and spoke in a self-assured way that you rarely saw in young Chinese women; she was very friendly and outgoing, and wasn’t shy about saying what she thought, and often expressed more thoughtful opinions than many of the young women I met; she also never asked me silly questions that directly related to my foreignness, and seemed to sense that I would rather just be treated like an ordinary person. She didn’t try to pamper me or treat me like I was special; if we ate something or had tea together, I could pay or she could pay or we could split the bill; she didn’t worry about it. And perhaps most of all she expressed dissatisfaction with the traditional life she was expected to lead—she had a steady job at the university that her parents wanted her to keep, but sometimes she talked about ditching her “stable” lifestyle for something more adventurous. On top of that, she was an independent traveler. She was the only Chinese friend of mine who had been all the way to Tibet, and she was already planning to go again.

When I knew them both back in Sanming, Ruirui (the friend Jess and I met in Xi’an) called her the only “Chinese foreigner” in Sanming.

But now that I had met Shūlěi here in Lìjiāng, she seemed even more independent. Perhaps traveling does that to all of us, but the difference was striking. She seemed preoccupied with getting to Tibet, and a little bit stressed out by the preparations. She had told me earlier that they were planning on spending more than 3000 yuan each for the trip, which I knew was probably almost two months’ salary for an average employee at the university (somewhere north of $450).

We walked further our into the marsh and eventually I took off my flip flops, because they had become completely laden in mud, and Shūlěi continually urged me to put them back on until she took hers off herself and realized how much easier it was to walk without them, and we walked, our feet covered in thick layers of mud, until we reached the end of the muddy path and the lake began.

Some Chinese boys rowed close to us on a long blue boat made of blue aluminum, 15 feet long and heavy, with a deep puddle of water in the bottom.

“You guys wanna go for a ride?” Shūlěi asked.

“No, let’s not bother,” I said.

The four boys rowed closer. We could see that they were dressed in colorful athletic shirts, one in a bright yellow Kappa jersey, and wore dirty but not cheap pants and shoes. They were deeply tan and laughing and joking in the boat, apparently out fishing, and as they got closer they began calling “hello” at us. They got closer and Shūlěi called out to them in greeting.

“One person 30 yuan!” was their reply.

It was strange to hear. We were miles away from Lìjiāng, which itself was miles away from anything except mountains. But we hadn’t come far enough to escape the money-making impulse at the sight of visitors.

“You guys really know how to do business!” Shūlěi shouted back, laughing.

They rowed past us.

“Can you get in here?” She called, as the water seemed too shallow to get to solid land.

Yeah, they shouted back, as if it were completely obvious and she must be a little dim for asking.

“How do you get to land?” She asked.

“We just go in here,” they said, giving that peculiar Chinese answer to her question — the one that answers nothing, that gives no information, but simply makes the questioner seem ignorant.

We walked back and then went to the hostel, and washed our feet. We sat around for a while and Shūlěi told me about the animals in the hostel. There was a dog called Bājiè, Pigsy, from Xīyóujì, the classic Chinese tale about a monk who travels to India to retrieve the sacred Buddhist scriptures. The dog was huge and black and did not look like a pig but like a monster to me, after the episode in Sìchuān. Then there was another dog, a chocolate lab named Prince, and then a small tabby orange cat named Iron Bullet, Tiědàn, because she had been the only of her litter to survive

“Pigsy watched prince grow up,” Shūlěi explained, “so when Prince was a puppy Pigsy was really protective, even bite people. Actually he doesn’t bite people unless he’s protecting Prince, but one time he used too much force and hurt someone,” she said.

Suddenly I became very aware of how close Jess was to the big dog. “Maybe we should get going,” I said.

We headed back to town by car, getting a ride from a wealthy couple who had a television in their black four door sedan, installed in the dashboard. They dropped us off on the side of the road and we transferred to the van of Shūlěi and Píngpíng’s friend, Límíng, meaning “dawn”–and then he took us to Shùhé village, where we watched people dancing around a large fire in the small village square. The Chinese people had a conga line going in a huge circle around the 10 meter bonfire, tourists all, except for a group of five very pretty Chinese girls dressed in ethnic attire and looking uncomfortably and unsmilingly at the squirming masses of tourists around them. A few police officers stood inside the ring making sure nobody got too close to the fire.

Jess and I watched for a while as Shūlěi and Píngpíng danced. It seemed fun, but I didn’t trust Chinese tourists around a huge fire, no matter how many policemen were there, and anyway dancing has never been my strong suit.

After the fire, we walked back to the van with Shūlěi and Píngpíng and Límíng, and on the way we bought several of the hand-made tie died tablecloths from a vendor in the town, Shūlěi and Píngpíng bargaining doggedly on our behalf while Límíng waited outside. Then we walked back to the van and Shūlěi realized that Límíng wanted to go back to his place the opposite way from the way we had come in, so taking us back wasn’t convenient.

So we said goodbye in the parking lot, some weird distance in the air between us, maybe because none of us knew if we would see each other again, and because we had only had a chance to meet for this one day, while all of us were planning to go elsewhere.

They would start their journey to Tibet the next day, and I couldn’t go with them. This was because of the ban on foreigners in effect this summer (potential political unrest in Tibet) and because you couldn’t get in anyway even if you were allowed, because foreigners had to go with a tour group.

Jess and I walked back through Shùhé to get a taxi back to our hostel. I was tired again and a bit sorry to say goodbye to Shūlěi and Píngpíng so soon. But the next day we were heading out for Tiger Leaping Gorge, which promised to be one of the best parts of our trip. And turned out to be by far the best place I’ve been in China so far.

And I’ll write about that in the next installation of this travel log. It might take a few days for me to get to it, though, as I’m in the middle of a transition to Xiamen at the moment and time is limited. Saying goodbye to another place even as I write this travel log—and finding that it takes as long to record these adventures as it does to live them.