In Kathmandu a Yankee rover/Did a stately pleasure dome discover
I am in Kathmandu, the blog is blocked no longer, and after five days' driving between Lhasa and Kathmandu, over roads that were not, in fact, roads at all, but merely the future promise of roads, if not their wholesale improvisation, in a Toyota Land Cruiser rattling through bog through brick through brake through briar, to say nothing of dust-choked mountain passes and rocky riverbeds, sleeping in beds infested with vermin, in monasteries infested with rapacious monks and nuns, listening to the Michael Jackson tape five times a day because the only alternative was carcinogenic, “splitmecrackle, crashmecriggle” Chinese Canto-pop, walking eight kilometers at over 16,000 feet, sucking oxygen from the bottle, gnawing dry, sinewy Yak meat bungled up with slattery noodles and foul fried rice, trying not to breathe in the nauseous odor of molten yak butter, squatting over the "ni hao toilets" from hell that were less toilets than unutterably filthy craters giving on colossal piles of excrement (the Chinese call defecation “da bien,” or “big comfort;” I call it shitting on a throne of lies), Everest Base Camp featuring literally the worst facilities in the world, after a week in Lhasa, my body infuriated with the lack of oxygen, feeling weak, gasping, my heart throbbing after so much as climbing two flights of stairs, gasping also in shock at the prices, which are as inflated as the sealed plastic packets that make their way up to the rooftop of the world (all packets, because of the exterior oxygen levels, puff up dramatically, like a bag of chips on an airplane, when they hit that altitude), tuning out the "hello hello looky looky!" of the Barkhor market, and prying loose the fingers of the old women that grab your wrist and press bangles and baubles into your palm, feeling the heat o' the sun, and the furious winter's rages depending on whether you’re standing in the sun or shade, breaking out in prickle-sweat constantly, lips cracked, nose flowing fluidly, kvetching, kvetching, kvetching, sleeping in a bed harder than the hard sleeper class on the train, after five days' mucking around lonely in hot, sticky Chengdu, running out of underwear for the umpteenth time, having to go commando, and feeling the gentle breeze nosing around my vitals, trying to figure out how exactly one is supposed to eat chicken feet, and resolving, after many efforts, that this is simply not something man or beast was ever meant to do, because there is simply nothing on them to eat, feeling helpless and alone without the language, after the thirteen-hour train ride and seven-hour bus ride, which consisted of endless winding, at horrifying speeds, around unceasingly twisting mountain roads, the Canto-pop music videos blasting, and the driver blaring the pugnacious horn, which lost its alerting timbre to abuse years ago, and now just sounds shrill and hysterical, at everything and nothing, and dreaming, in the fitful and restless snatches of sleep I was able to catch, of wrapping garrote wire around the driver's throat and daring him, just daring him, to honk that horn one more fucking time, and all en route to a wretched and insignificant town of a million called Panzhihua, where one must go to catch the train to Chengdu, and where I had to spend a night, from Lijiang, where we were assaulted on the sheer face of Tiger Leaping Gorge by young stupid would-be bandits who thought to set up a "toll" on a short bridge over a waterfall, and demand Y10 from each traveler, our answer to which was to dismantle the blockade and walk purposefully past them, their answer to which was, run up the mountain and start hurling stones down at us, our answer to which was, keep walking, just don't get hit, and this was, bear in mind, after about seven hours of continuous trekking up the gorge, and I was already hobbling from a four-hour, one-on-one kung fu lesson in Dali, which came on the heels of a glute-destroying horse ride up a mountain and a misguided, pointless, thigh-and-soul-destroying attempt at a bike ride up the same mountain, which followed the shave and haircut from the bowels of hell, performed in an outdoor market in Shaping village by a cheerful barber who clearly doubled as the village butcher, which I know because I have never, never in my life felt more pain than I did when, after the haircut, which was gruesome in its own right, and surrounded by twenty very amused local onlookers, he laid into my poorly-lathered face with the utterly unsharpened edge of his razor, and commenced to flaying me alive, a process which lasted over ten minutes, and which left me unable to touch my face for days, though at least it was an exciting change from the fifty-hour train ride from Shanghai, which featured my friend Mike and I as the lone laowai, foreigners, on the train, and naturally the foci of unrelenting staring and shouted helloes, our every action, from eating to carrying the Charmin to the toilet, a de facto public spectacle, all of them just waiting for us to do something Caucasian, and I, of course, possessing no Chinese at that point, nodding and smiling idiotically in response to what I soon understood to be the same inane conversation over and over, and watching one of my beers, my beloved beers (the amazing thing about Chinese beer, given the immensity of the country and the variety within its population, being the degree to which the 300+ local brews do not vary in the least), plummet from the ceiling rack and explode on the floor, and trying to ignore the whiny Cantopop (it's everywhere, inescapable, on every train, bus and taxi), which is difficult considering they're bleeding blasting it, and watching the windows blear up with the smoke billowing from the “smoking area” between the cars, though there’s irony in that, as China is not familiar the concept of “non-smoking area” in the first place, and all this is after four perspiration-soaked days in Shanghai (Mike summed it up to Isaac all too well: "Yitzhak! Your dirty city makes me schvitz!"), which swallowed up my camera when Mike, Nick and I tried to take a perfectly innocent snap of the three of us on a rooftop, and I placed the thing on a book I had balanced on a promontory, ran to get in position, and all of a sudden the wind picked up and knocked the camera off the book and onto the acutely slanted roof, where it rolled...and rolled...and continued to roll until it rolled under a barrier and it was lost from sight, and during this we are all three standing there gobsmacked, so by the time we think to chase after it, is has clearly gone sailing over the edge of the roof, diving earthward, only it never does hit the ground, which we know because we hunted for splatter damage in the street nine floors below, and found no shards of plastic, glass or metal outside of those that already litter the Whore of the Orient's filthy streets, and so this is the great mystery of the trip so far, what became of my camera, and I am entirely convinced that, just beyond our field of vision, calculation and comprehension, my camera became unstuck in time, or the space-time continuum opened itself a sliver and revealed a worm hole, and smooth, ethereally white alien fingers reached out and snared my camera, stealing it for another dimensions' purposes of research or worship, hopefully the latter, but in any case this is a real bummer because I lost all the pictures of Tokyo and Beijing, especially the picture of the punk rocker in Dashanze with the huge mohawk, aviators and the leather vest that commanded, "KILL THE CHAIRMAN," which dropped Liz's jaw to the floor, though that guy was certainly the highlight of Beijing, which featured my formal introduction to Chinese toilets, and their frequent decoration with what is ordinarily meant to go INTO the toilets, and there flushed from memory, instead of on and around the toilet and the walls, as well as my formal introduction to what emissions standards are all about, because my first day in Beijing, as anyone who was there can attest, was the most polluted day anyone, including the cabbie, had ever seen, a day so polluted you were not only unable to see the huge portrait of Mao from the other end of Tiananmen Square, but you were, conversely, fully able to stare directly at the sun for as long as you wanted, because through the impenetrable, gritty smog, it appeared as more of a small yellow disc, cheap and inoffensive, than as a blinding source of all life etc, although despite the sun's obscuring, it remained ungodly hot and humid, walking felt like wading, so thick was the air, and sightseeing consisted mostly of transport from one air-conditioned building to another, and this is to say nothing of traffic, which is inhuman when gridlocked, and terrifying when moving freely, because in this authoritarian state, the only place apparently free from laws is the road, and the drivers are more than happy to take advantage, driving like maniacs, and the speed limit, point blank, does not exist, the number of lanes on the road is entirely a matter of opinion, and the lines on the road, when they're there at all, have clearly been assigned some kind of point value, and whoever can cross the most wins, with the median strip being the three-pointer, because it's like being in a game of Space Invaders out there, and then there's the constant, constant, CONSTANT honking, but I think I understand that now, because thing is that China imports 60% of their oil from the Sudan, and maybe, just maybe, they recognized the colossal moral error of their ways and decided to seek out an alternative energy source, whereupon they discovered, to their great surprise, a little-known fact, that honking your horn actually causes the objects before you, whether they be cars, tractors, small children, goats or the mere metaphysical possibility of an obstacle, to accelerate, to move at a speed beyond their actual physical capacities, because the klaxon turns out to be an instrument of remote propulsion, nothing less than sonic fuel, and employed with enough skill, insistence, frequency and faith, the simple Chinese horn can provoke even the ricketiest, most tumbledown Dong Feng truck to feats of such daring, speed and complete insanity that even the most decorated Hollywood stunt driver is moved to tip his cap, because there is nothing, nothing like being on a Chinese road, and after all this, after a month on the move, after a month of squat toilets and broken Chinese, after a month of challenge, dislocation and struggle with the culture...I am taking a break.
But I have not gone ten thousand miles to bitch. No, because for every vendor that tried to rip me off, I carved out a great deal, because my bargaining skills have been honed to a razor’s edge, and for every vertiginous cliffside curve we swerved around, there was the exhilaration of speed and the near-death experience, combined with the conviction that the siji knows what he's doing, damn it, for every time they played the songs like "Wo Ai Ni" and "Take Me To Your Heart," we caught Chinese rock and pop versions of "Swan Lake," "Whiskey in the Jar," "God Rest Ye Merrie Gentlemen" and, best of all, "Frosty the Snowman," for every Sichuanese dish that seared your face off and bloated us with la duzi, there was the glorious afterglow you get from true spicy food, when the sweat that's beaded on your neck cools and calms you, and your pores feel cleared, like you’ve been drinking Dr. Bronner’s 18-1 Hemp Pure Castile Peppermint Soap, All-One or None, All-One! All-One! All-One! OK!, and speaking of the doctor, he was there for me with every piddling showerhead, delivering that burns-you-clean sensation to your most sensitive regions, and for every time I felt helpless, castrated in Chinese, there came a time, near the end, when I found myself talking fluently and confidently, and here in Kathmandu, even though I’m relieved that they all speak English, and I mean to a man, I miss Chinese, a language I started out hating, and because I didn’t make it to the Great Wall on my last day in Beijing because I ended up on a date with a local girl, because I didn’t make it the day before because Liz Lambos and I ended up in Dashanze, as I mentioned, which is the meatpacking district of Beijing, and after walking through gallery on gallery of hilariously atrocious (and only very incidentally decent) Chinese contemporary art, we saw not only a guy with the mohawk, the aviators and the Kill the Chairman vest, but an entire Chinese punk rock concert, and the thing is that China needs punk, and the rebellion is genuine, because rebellion in China is not taken lightly, and the repercussions are real, only they make such great punks because they’re so skinny already, and the guy with the mohawk, the aviators and the Kill the Chairman vest got up and sang, of all the goddamn songs in the world, “Danny Boy,” and for me, it was as Beckett says the Happiest moment of the past half million, and it was closure for me, real closure, it’s hard to say why, but it was like an official announcement that Sam has left Ireland, broken up with her, ended the relationship, but now, maybe, we can be friends again, play together again, and though the pictures of the concert may have plunged off that roof in Shanghai, I am not likely to forget any bit of it anytime soon, and because when it wasn’t Liz and I, it was Messrs. Naughton and Frisch and Kramer, and we had us a famous time, from burning up Sanlitun to Uighur food near the Workers’ Stadium, and if it wasn’t eating or sightseeing or bargaining with friends, it was that early morning, 6am, in a courtyard in Beijing Daxue (University, hereinafter BeiDa), after the rain, and I couldn’t tell if it was gentle morning mist or heavy drifts of smog as I did tae kwon do routines alongside old women doing tai qi, and by the end I was slick with sweat, but happy, my body remembering the forms I’d learned before busting my knee, and then there was the soft sleeper to Shanghai, sleeping softly, and waiting for Liz on the platform the next morning and finding our way to the Chuan Gang hotel, a delightfully dingy place five stories up, thoroughly, thoroughly inaccessible to the handicapped, a microcosm of the rest of China, the hotel from whose roof my camera would shortly leap, and thus provide us with a great story to tell (we have pictures of the search, taken with Nick’s camera), because the entire building, and then the entire neighborhood, was alerted to the lost article, and for a few days there we were celebrities, with An Zedong and Bai an Mai meeting Stone Fish out in the boonies, and the wild night that ensued, involving a great meal, a bit of Chinese yellow wine, which is like bad sweet vermouth crossed with dry Fino sherry, running shirtless, as is the fashion in China, it seems, and sandaled through the sheeting rain, hiding our shirts in our pants and ducking into a upscale Jack Jones, on the ludicrous pretense that we had lost our shirts and wanted to buy new ones, and trying on clothes, heads poking out from every door and corner to get a glimpse of the four bright white laowai, bare-chested and dripping wet, keeping our faces as straight as we could as we were obliged to the point of farce by the confused but helpful employees of the store, bargaining absurdly, and finally running back out into the rain, still shirtless, and into a kwik-e-mart where we bought a pot, literally a pot, earthenware, of cheap baijiu, literally “white wine,” but in truth a 110-proof spirit distilled from a sour mash of rotted corpses, and bearing the ineluctable scent of death, but the problem was I couldn’t open this pot for anything, so we ducked into another bodega where, to my shame, a senior citizen popped it right open, and that’s how we found ourselves under a bus shelter, still shirtless, swilling shockingly toxic alcohol from the mouth of the pot, chasing it occasionally with Sprite, in a four-person party which eventually devolved into our essentially spraying the baijiu at each other, which meant that when we arrived in the very classy, vistas-of-glittering-Pudong Bar Rouge later that night, as all that had only been preamble, we all smelled of disgusting white liquor, and the night devolved from there, but then there was the previous night, the polar opposite of Shirtless-in-Shanghai, but no less legendary, which was the grand reunion at Cloud 9 bar, currently the highest bar in the world, on the 86th floor of the Jinmao tower, and then there was Zhou Enlai’s house, pimpest man in the Party, Shanghai Museum, the street food and bright orange gelatinous dim sum, Naughton’s entirely sensible resolution to stay on in Beijing, the crash course in physically restraining people from getting on the subway because by hell that is my seat, the tearful goodbyes when Nick and Liz shoved off, and my chronology is all off here, but no matter, because the next stage was the Road to Dali, which might well have made a good Hope and Crosby movie, fifty hours on that train, and for every pair of eyes that stare, there’s a curiosity behind them, not a malice, and walking through the train dawdling in the heat-choked hard seat section, the train being the last bastion of the classist society in China, the passengers packed like sardines in a crushed tin box, yet we laowai seem to give off this uncanny light, this suffusing glow, as though we inspire to delirum the surrounding photons by virtue and majesty of our whiteness alone, and feeling the heat of every eye and consciousness trained on you, and even though I, then a mute as far as Chinese goes, could not be as brazen as I was blazoned-bright, there was still a feeling that life itself was crackling all around me, for fifty hours, and we acquired a gremlin, whom I will call Gizmo, and who is an entire story in her own right, as are most of these experiences, but the doubtless the true brilliance in those fifty hours was that it was then that I learned how to fully take advantage of the fact that they can’t speak English, and began to swear with an abandon, vehemence and sheer delight that never abated my entire time in China, simply because, if you keep the cursing esoteric enough, you can say anything, and no one will understand, and this, for me, is fantastic, liberating beyond description, because I am never having as much fun as when I can run my mouth without fear of reprisal, reply or even recognition, and so joyously to Dali then we came, and despite the fact that its only real industry is tourism, and Chinese tourism at that (which is a sight in and of itself, as Dali is the home of the Bai minority, one of China’s “55 officially recognized minorities” of which they are terribly proud, and whom they are happy to essentially herd onto reservations and then visit in their “natural habitat,” because I think tourism, for the Chinese, is their own kind of improvised pornography, since they can’t get the real kind), the place is gorgeous, and Mike and I set right out doing things, climbing the mountain on horseback, which is always a joy, these little horses, closer to ponies, clambering impossibly fastup the mountain, mine was a terror, as ponies go, insisting on racing to the front and shoving the leader out of the way on the rare occasions he slipped behind, and I loved every minute of it, can’t wait to do it again, despite the sore butt, and then even though Mike left me, took off for Guangzhou the day before my birthday, I called up this little gong fu teacher whose ad I’d seen and made an appointment for a one-on-one four-hour lesson later that day, and that, that was phenomenal, because in the first part alone, he not only taught me a full gong fu form (like learning a dance), but he managed to restore to me all the flexibility I’d lost since I’d stopped dancing so long ago, and in the space of two hours had me so bendy that not only could I touch my forehead to my knees again, but I could also drop to a full split, and then, after a break, proceeded to teach me some deadly moves, in the course of which, incidentally, my wounded knee, which I was trying to treat gingerly, snapped again, and I had to take five, but when this monk who had been watching us all the while saw me pouring water, the only balm I had, on the knee, he shook his head violently and pulled out a small plastic bottle of homemade baijiu, very good baijiu, in fact, which I know because we drank it, and proceeded to pour that on my knee, to remarkable restorative effect, and though the endorphin rush afterwards was titanic, four hours (this was after I tried to bike to another gong fu monastery up the mountain) was a bit much, and the next day I could barely walk (and the two weeks after that, really), but suck it up, because I had to get on the bus for Lijiang with Zach and “Smile,” two people Mike and I’d picked up on the train from Kunming to Dali, and it was there we checked into the Xiangge Yun guesthouse, where anyone going to Lijiang is under proscription from the cadre to stay, because it is run by a woman called “Mama,” who more than fulfills the function for lonely travelers, bustling all around, giving you hugs, making sure everything is fine, whipping up overwhelming meals for the entire hostel every night, Y8 ($1)flat rate, and serving up breakfast for Y2, she’s so wonderful you don’t want to leave, but you have to, because Hu Tiao Xia awaits, Tiger Leaping Gorge, and you get there, you hike it, 20-some-odd kilometers a day, and you wish someone had hamstrung that tiger so he hadn’t jumped so damn far, because I am not a hiker, and at what, 3500m, the altitude gets to you, but it was stunning, the brigands were scary but had fairly rubbish aim, and being with a five-year vet of the Israeli Defense Forces, and a Krav Maga instructor to boot, well, it emboldens one somewhat, and the Halfway guesthouse featured some excellent company, the best I would see until a few days into Lhasa, because between Lijiang and Lhasa, there wasn’t much, from that horrendous bus ride, about which I have nothing good to say, except that I got on well with the other laowai on the bus, an affable Dutch guy named Arnoud who had been zigzagging around Asia, from Iran and Pakistan to Xinjiang, Beijing, Shanghai, up, around, everywhere, and he had done it all with a very serious stutter, tongue-biting such as has not been seen since Seneca was all the rage, and so we roomed together in Panzhihua, and made our way to Chengdu the next morning, where I checked into the Traffic Hotel and promptly did nothing for four days, which was lovely, gave me the chance to read the copy of trainspotting I’d picked up at the Anchor Bar, where I went every night because they let me behind the bar to make my own drinks and give them Martini-making tutorials, but when I wasn’t laying about reading, I was hanging out with this young Chinese kid I’d been referred to, Ma Xue, who was about to enter Sichuan University to study English, and in exchange for helping me bargain for a new camera, I gave him a frisbee and contracted him to start up an ultimate frisbee club at Sichuan Daxue, which I think he will actually do, so of course I now have to go back to Chengdu to see how it’s coming along, which I would admittedly rather do than go back to Tibet, because not only does one feel laid out by the lack of oxygen, but the truth is, it’s a lonely place, and yet, even the loneliness was assuaged the night I discovered the Pentoc guesthouse, where camaraderie blossomed over Yak burgers, Lhasa beer and ginger tea and told travel stories into the night, with a cabal of English teachers on break from their jobs in rural China, an elderly and indefatigable couple from New Zealand who had been everywhere, a Dutch airplane mechanic who just liked going around the world, a man who turned out to hold the Guinness world record for elevation cycling, and once, while cycling through Tibet, had gone 37 days without seeing another person, and so we met every night there, ensconced in the warmth of this small refuge in a cold and lonely place, which really wasn’t always that cold, only at night or at Everest, and once one mastered the art of layering, taking clothes off and putting them back on, one learned to handle it, and furthermore, after a few days, I got my breath back and with two roommates, Sam from Singapore and Yoshimi from Japan, managed to bike to Sera Monastery to see the monks debating, and this is something that simply must be seen to believed, because you think of monks debating, you get the image of two imperturbably serene men seated on cushions in a temple sanctum, calmly waxing sagacious about the filaments binding together the cosmos while all the other monks look on mesmerized, and of course this could not be farther from the truth, because it turns out that when monks debate, there is absolutely nothing serene or calm about it at all, because what it is is hysterical, with the entire monastery out in the pebbly courtyard, partnered up, with one partner sitting and the other standing, and the latter positively harangues his opponent, shouting at him relentlessly, breathlessly, grabbing him, shaking him, and more than anything else, rearing back on one leg, right hand raised behind in a wind-up position, and then suddenly lunging forward, swinging his right arm down and smacking his hands together right in front of his opponent’s nose, thereby punctuating his, and clearly he has a lot of points worth punctuating because he literally does this every ten seconds, and sometimes his seated opponent gives it right back, sometimes he sits there stolidly, and sometimes he giggles uncontrollably at the absurdity of the other guy’s arguments, and in any case the whole thing serves only to utterly dispel the notion of monks as serene, because once you picture this scene enacted by two hundred monks at once, smacking and shouting and stamping, you get an idea of the unholy din, which, in the end, is understandable, because most of these monks are barely in their twenties, and often barely literate, a fact that was driven home when, after they’d finished debating, a young monk named Tenba Chanze invited us back to his room for some hot water and tsampa, barley flour, which you knead together with yak butter, sugar and water and eat with your fingers, and is quite tasteless, if constipating, but of course it’s a gift, and we expressed our appreciation accordingly, which put him of a mind to ladle out two more pounds of the stuff into a bag, which he presented to me, and which I had to accept, and which, unwilling to part with the gift, I finally mailed home along with a wall hanging, a small buddha and a large gong before I left Lhasa, as this was going to be the last functional post office for a while, since we were about to set off for Kathmandu on a five-day drive across the aptly-named “rooftop of the world,” and for every “road” we jolted over, there was a gleaming, snowcapped peak to distract us, some incomparably beautiful vista, and for every herd of sheep that blocked our way, there was the endlessly entertaining phenomenon of what sheep do when you honk at them, that is, the ones in the middle of the road zigzag this way and that, and then somehow all elect to go right, and the ones to the right of the road take off along with them, whereupon the ones on the left, who are in no danger at all, panic and follow the other sheep across the road, right in front of the oncoming car, and for all those days when we spent fifteen hours at a stretch in the car, there was the feeling of traveling in the “undiscovered country,” and the knowledge that after this, nothing would be the same.
But I have not gone ten thousand miles to bitch. No, because for every vendor that tried to rip me off, I carved out a great deal, because my bargaining skills have been honed to a razor’s edge, and for every vertiginous cliffside curve we swerved around, there was the exhilaration of speed and the near-death experience, combined with the conviction that the siji knows what he's doing, damn it, for every time they played the songs like "Wo Ai Ni" and "Take Me To Your Heart," we caught Chinese rock and pop versions of "Swan Lake," "Whiskey in the Jar," "God Rest Ye Merrie Gentlemen" and, best of all, "Frosty the Snowman," for every Sichuanese dish that seared your face off and bloated us with la duzi, there was the glorious afterglow you get from true spicy food, when the sweat that's beaded on your neck cools and calms you, and your pores feel cleared, like you’ve been drinking Dr. Bronner’s 18-1 Hemp Pure Castile Peppermint Soap, All-One or None, All-One! All-One! All-One! OK!, and speaking of the doctor, he was there for me with every piddling showerhead, delivering that burns-you-clean sensation to your most sensitive regions, and for every time I felt helpless, castrated in Chinese, there came a time, near the end, when I found myself talking fluently and confidently, and here in Kathmandu, even though I’m relieved that they all speak English, and I mean to a man, I miss Chinese, a language I started out hating, and because I didn’t make it to the Great Wall on my last day in Beijing because I ended up on a date with a local girl, because I didn’t make it the day before because Liz Lambos and I ended up in Dashanze, as I mentioned, which is the meatpacking district of Beijing, and after walking through gallery on gallery of hilariously atrocious (and only very incidentally decent) Chinese contemporary art, we saw not only a guy with the mohawk, the aviators and the Kill the Chairman vest, but an entire Chinese punk rock concert, and the thing is that China needs punk, and the rebellion is genuine, because rebellion in China is not taken lightly, and the repercussions are real, only they make such great punks because they’re so skinny already, and the guy with the mohawk, the aviators and the Kill the Chairman vest got up and sang, of all the goddamn songs in the world, “Danny Boy,” and for me, it was as Beckett says the Happiest moment of the past half million, and it was closure for me, real closure, it’s hard to say why, but it was like an official announcement that Sam has left Ireland, broken up with her, ended the relationship, but now, maybe, we can be friends again, play together again, and though the pictures of the concert may have plunged off that roof in Shanghai, I am not likely to forget any bit of it anytime soon, and because when it wasn’t Liz and I, it was Messrs. Naughton and Frisch and Kramer, and we had us a famous time, from burning up Sanlitun to Uighur food near the Workers’ Stadium, and if it wasn’t eating or sightseeing or bargaining with friends, it was that early morning, 6am, in a courtyard in Beijing Daxue (University, hereinafter BeiDa), after the rain, and I couldn’t tell if it was gentle morning mist or heavy drifts of smog as I did tae kwon do routines alongside old women doing tai qi, and by the end I was slick with sweat, but happy, my body remembering the forms I’d learned before busting my knee, and then there was the soft sleeper to Shanghai, sleeping softly, and waiting for Liz on the platform the next morning and finding our way to the Chuan Gang hotel, a delightfully dingy place five stories up, thoroughly, thoroughly inaccessible to the handicapped, a microcosm of the rest of China, the hotel from whose roof my camera would shortly leap, and thus provide us with a great story to tell (we have pictures of the search, taken with Nick’s camera), because the entire building, and then the entire neighborhood, was alerted to the lost article, and for a few days there we were celebrities, with An Zedong and Bai an Mai meeting Stone Fish out in the boonies, and the wild night that ensued, involving a great meal, a bit of Chinese yellow wine, which is like bad sweet vermouth crossed with dry Fino sherry, running shirtless, as is the fashion in China, it seems, and sandaled through the sheeting rain, hiding our shirts in our pants and ducking into a upscale Jack Jones, on the ludicrous pretense that we had lost our shirts and wanted to buy new ones, and trying on clothes, heads poking out from every door and corner to get a glimpse of the four bright white laowai, bare-chested and dripping wet, keeping our faces as straight as we could as we were obliged to the point of farce by the confused but helpful employees of the store, bargaining absurdly, and finally running back out into the rain, still shirtless, and into a kwik-e-mart where we bought a pot, literally a pot, earthenware, of cheap baijiu, literally “white wine,” but in truth a 110-proof spirit distilled from a sour mash of rotted corpses, and bearing the ineluctable scent of death, but the problem was I couldn’t open this pot for anything, so we ducked into another bodega where, to my shame, a senior citizen popped it right open, and that’s how we found ourselves under a bus shelter, still shirtless, swilling shockingly toxic alcohol from the mouth of the pot, chasing it occasionally with Sprite, in a four-person party which eventually devolved into our essentially spraying the baijiu at each other, which meant that when we arrived in the very classy, vistas-of-glittering-Pudong Bar Rouge later that night, as all that had only been preamble, we all smelled of disgusting white liquor, and the night devolved from there, but then there was the previous night, the polar opposite of Shirtless-in-Shanghai, but no less legendary, which was the grand reunion at Cloud 9 bar, currently the highest bar in the world, on the 86th floor of the Jinmao tower, and then there was Zhou Enlai’s house, pimpest man in the Party, Shanghai Museum, the street food and bright orange gelatinous dim sum, Naughton’s entirely sensible resolution to stay on in Beijing, the crash course in physically restraining people from getting on the subway because by hell that is my seat, the tearful goodbyes when Nick and Liz shoved off, and my chronology is all off here, but no matter, because the next stage was the Road to Dali, which might well have made a good Hope and Crosby movie, fifty hours on that train, and for every pair of eyes that stare, there’s a curiosity behind them, not a malice, and walking through the train dawdling in the heat-choked hard seat section, the train being the last bastion of the classist society in China, the passengers packed like sardines in a crushed tin box, yet we laowai seem to give off this uncanny light, this suffusing glow, as though we inspire to delirum the surrounding photons by virtue and majesty of our whiteness alone, and feeling the heat of every eye and consciousness trained on you, and even though I, then a mute as far as Chinese goes, could not be as brazen as I was blazoned-bright, there was still a feeling that life itself was crackling all around me, for fifty hours, and we acquired a gremlin, whom I will call Gizmo, and who is an entire story in her own right, as are most of these experiences, but the doubtless the true brilliance in those fifty hours was that it was then that I learned how to fully take advantage of the fact that they can’t speak English, and began to swear with an abandon, vehemence and sheer delight that never abated my entire time in China, simply because, if you keep the cursing esoteric enough, you can say anything, and no one will understand, and this, for me, is fantastic, liberating beyond description, because I am never having as much fun as when I can run my mouth without fear of reprisal, reply or even recognition, and so joyously to Dali then we came, and despite the fact that its only real industry is tourism, and Chinese tourism at that (which is a sight in and of itself, as Dali is the home of the Bai minority, one of China’s “55 officially recognized minorities” of which they are terribly proud, and whom they are happy to essentially herd onto reservations and then visit in their “natural habitat,” because I think tourism, for the Chinese, is their own kind of improvised pornography, since they can’t get the real kind), the place is gorgeous, and Mike and I set right out doing things, climbing the mountain on horseback, which is always a joy, these little horses, closer to ponies, clambering impossibly fastup the mountain, mine was a terror, as ponies go, insisting on racing to the front and shoving the leader out of the way on the rare occasions he slipped behind, and I loved every minute of it, can’t wait to do it again, despite the sore butt, and then even though Mike left me, took off for Guangzhou the day before my birthday, I called up this little gong fu teacher whose ad I’d seen and made an appointment for a one-on-one four-hour lesson later that day, and that, that was phenomenal, because in the first part alone, he not only taught me a full gong fu form (like learning a dance), but he managed to restore to me all the flexibility I’d lost since I’d stopped dancing so long ago, and in the space of two hours had me so bendy that not only could I touch my forehead to my knees again, but I could also drop to a full split, and then, after a break, proceeded to teach me some deadly moves, in the course of which, incidentally, my wounded knee, which I was trying to treat gingerly, snapped again, and I had to take five, but when this monk who had been watching us all the while saw me pouring water, the only balm I had, on the knee, he shook his head violently and pulled out a small plastic bottle of homemade baijiu, very good baijiu, in fact, which I know because we drank it, and proceeded to pour that on my knee, to remarkable restorative effect, and though the endorphin rush afterwards was titanic, four hours (this was after I tried to bike to another gong fu monastery up the mountain) was a bit much, and the next day I could barely walk (and the two weeks after that, really), but suck it up, because I had to get on the bus for Lijiang with Zach and “Smile,” two people Mike and I’d picked up on the train from Kunming to Dali, and it was there we checked into the Xiangge Yun guesthouse, where anyone going to Lijiang is under proscription from the cadre to stay, because it is run by a woman called “Mama,” who more than fulfills the function for lonely travelers, bustling all around, giving you hugs, making sure everything is fine, whipping up overwhelming meals for the entire hostel every night, Y8 ($1)flat rate, and serving up breakfast for Y2, she’s so wonderful you don’t want to leave, but you have to, because Hu Tiao Xia awaits, Tiger Leaping Gorge, and you get there, you hike it, 20-some-odd kilometers a day, and you wish someone had hamstrung that tiger so he hadn’t jumped so damn far, because I am not a hiker, and at what, 3500m, the altitude gets to you, but it was stunning, the brigands were scary but had fairly rubbish aim, and being with a five-year vet of the Israeli Defense Forces, and a Krav Maga instructor to boot, well, it emboldens one somewhat, and the Halfway guesthouse featured some excellent company, the best I would see until a few days into Lhasa, because between Lijiang and Lhasa, there wasn’t much, from that horrendous bus ride, about which I have nothing good to say, except that I got on well with the other laowai on the bus, an affable Dutch guy named Arnoud who had been zigzagging around Asia, from Iran and Pakistan to Xinjiang, Beijing, Shanghai, up, around, everywhere, and he had done it all with a very serious stutter, tongue-biting such as has not been seen since Seneca was all the rage, and so we roomed together in Panzhihua, and made our way to Chengdu the next morning, where I checked into the Traffic Hotel and promptly did nothing for four days, which was lovely, gave me the chance to read the copy of trainspotting I’d picked up at the Anchor Bar, where I went every night because they let me behind the bar to make my own drinks and give them Martini-making tutorials, but when I wasn’t laying about reading, I was hanging out with this young Chinese kid I’d been referred to, Ma Xue, who was about to enter Sichuan University to study English, and in exchange for helping me bargain for a new camera, I gave him a frisbee and contracted him to start up an ultimate frisbee club at Sichuan Daxue, which I think he will actually do, so of course I now have to go back to Chengdu to see how it’s coming along, which I would admittedly rather do than go back to Tibet, because not only does one feel laid out by the lack of oxygen, but the truth is, it’s a lonely place, and yet, even the loneliness was assuaged the night I discovered the Pentoc guesthouse, where camaraderie blossomed over Yak burgers, Lhasa beer and ginger tea and told travel stories into the night, with a cabal of English teachers on break from their jobs in rural China, an elderly and indefatigable couple from New Zealand who had been everywhere, a Dutch airplane mechanic who just liked going around the world, a man who turned out to hold the Guinness world record for elevation cycling, and once, while cycling through Tibet, had gone 37 days without seeing another person, and so we met every night there, ensconced in the warmth of this small refuge in a cold and lonely place, which really wasn’t always that cold, only at night or at Everest, and once one mastered the art of layering, taking clothes off and putting them back on, one learned to handle it, and furthermore, after a few days, I got my breath back and with two roommates, Sam from Singapore and Yoshimi from Japan, managed to bike to Sera Monastery to see the monks debating, and this is something that simply must be seen to believed, because you think of monks debating, you get the image of two imperturbably serene men seated on cushions in a temple sanctum, calmly waxing sagacious about the filaments binding together the cosmos while all the other monks look on mesmerized, and of course this could not be farther from the truth, because it turns out that when monks debate, there is absolutely nothing serene or calm about it at all, because what it is is hysterical, with the entire monastery out in the pebbly courtyard, partnered up, with one partner sitting and the other standing, and the latter positively harangues his opponent, shouting at him relentlessly, breathlessly, grabbing him, shaking him, and more than anything else, rearing back on one leg, right hand raised behind in a wind-up position, and then suddenly lunging forward, swinging his right arm down and smacking his hands together right in front of his opponent’s nose, thereby punctuating his, and clearly he has a lot of points worth punctuating because he literally does this every ten seconds, and sometimes his seated opponent gives it right back, sometimes he sits there stolidly, and sometimes he giggles uncontrollably at the absurdity of the other guy’s arguments, and in any case the whole thing serves only to utterly dispel the notion of monks as serene, because once you picture this scene enacted by two hundred monks at once, smacking and shouting and stamping, you get an idea of the unholy din, which, in the end, is understandable, because most of these monks are barely in their twenties, and often barely literate, a fact that was driven home when, after they’d finished debating, a young monk named Tenba Chanze invited us back to his room for some hot water and tsampa, barley flour, which you knead together with yak butter, sugar and water and eat with your fingers, and is quite tasteless, if constipating, but of course it’s a gift, and we expressed our appreciation accordingly, which put him of a mind to ladle out two more pounds of the stuff into a bag, which he presented to me, and which I had to accept, and which, unwilling to part with the gift, I finally mailed home along with a wall hanging, a small buddha and a large gong before I left Lhasa, as this was going to be the last functional post office for a while, since we were about to set off for Kathmandu on a five-day drive across the aptly-named “rooftop of the world,” and for every “road” we jolted over, there was a gleaming, snowcapped peak to distract us, some incomparably beautiful vista, and for every herd of sheep that blocked our way, there was the endlessly entertaining phenomenon of what sheep do when you honk at them, that is, the ones in the middle of the road zigzag this way and that, and then somehow all elect to go right, and the ones to the right of the road take off along with them, whereupon the ones on the left, who are in no danger at all, panic and follow the other sheep across the road, right in front of the oncoming car, and for all those days when we spent fifteen hours at a stretch in the car, there was the feeling of traveling in the “undiscovered country,” and the knowledge that after this, nothing would be the same.
posted by Sam | 5:55 PM
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