camp memories

I went to many summer camps in my youth. The last one I went to before I stopped going entirely was a camp called Bucks Rock, which was described by many as being an artsy-fartsy place. I spent the majority of my time avoiding the numerous activities available to us, though I did manage to make something horrendous and long-forgotten in the "metals" shop and otherwise pass time in the "leather" shop where a number of others also not interested in doing much sat around in a trailer with a very overweight woman whose name I have also long forgotten talking about who knows what. I stayed in a wooden building in a cabin with three other guys, sharing two bunk beds. There were several counselors overseeing our activities or lack thereof. It was generally a very relaxed place and I'd probably enjoy it more now than I ever did then. The most productive thing I did there was spend many hours in what was literally a shed with a piano in it, probably developing my ability to a level at which I could reasonably consider going to music college though at the time that was hardly the goal. Congratulations to myself for using the time semi-effectively. Anyway, one of the counselors was a large black man named Lee who looked like Hootie if he were in the NFL. He was a nice guy and I remember one time when me and my bunkmates were up quite late playing cards far beyond our curfew, he burst into the room angrily and we expected him to scold us and tell us to get into our beds. He said, "Guys, I have only one thing to say to you." Wait for it. "Deal." We applauded I think and ended up playing cards well into the night, a game for which I wish I could remember the rules. The reason I mention the story is one of my most vivid visual recollections of the camp (although I do have quite a few apparently) is of Lee, standing on the second floor of our two-story cabin/house living accomodation and blowing out of his nose the most impressive snot rocket I had and still have ever seen. Perhaps I am romanticizing it, if it is possible to do that to a snot rocket story, but he was 6 feet tall or so and I'm pretty sure it touched the ground before it finished leaving his nose. Is that even possible? The reason I mention this is not specifically to gross everyone reading this out, but up until that time and I think until now, that was the only time I'd ever actually seen anyone do that. Not that magnitude, but just in general. Believe it or not it is something I have never attempted. I can barely blow my nose without getting grossed out. So, the full circle is that this sort of thing I saw on the street in China with an incredible regularity, and of course plenty of times in Yunnan which is why I thought of the whole thing to begin with. This is not stepping off onto the side of the road or into an alley to discretely empty one's nostrils, this is in the middle of a crowded market where are people are eating and shopping for things they do not need. For the sensitive Chinese readers of my blog, I am not telling this story to condemn or criticize everyone in China. I know this is not acceptable behavior necessarily as most of the rude behaviors I described are also not, but it is just a bit more frequent and I have to call attention to it because it is interesting and at least to me, kind of amusing. I admit though, watching so many people do that openly and spit as well does definitely make one wonder if it is part of the reason for the prevalance of all these respiratory ailments. I did hear that for a while the practice of spitting in public was being cracked down on around the time of the avian flu epidemic. Anyway, you can take my anecdote for what it is or is not worth. What can I say, I like to paint pictures.

On a sidenote, I am back in a hostel and it makes me appreciate just how incredible the Sheraton hotel in Kowloon is. I stayed there for two nights at a cost of about $200USD per night and it was far nicer than that money would ever get in New York I think, though I admit I haven't stayed in that many hotels in New York. Also, perhaps the fact that I have stayed in all these budget places for the last two months has increased my appreciation of a giant and soft bed with a thermostat in the room after spending many nights with not much in the way of temperature control while sleeping on large planks of wood with what is basically a towel on it.

My cold is continuing to improve though my stomach is a tad on the fritz, this time because I had a few beers last night. Probably excessively optimistic but I was feeling better and ended up in Lan Kwai Fong again, one of the nightlife areas around here, hanging out with a friend from the hostel so I figured what the hell. Probably overdid it on the falafel too. In any case, tonight things are fine and I just had a chana masala which can't possibly be as good as I think it was. This placed Branto just makes some really impressive Indian food. I wonder if I'd be so enamored had I not just spent 2 months deprived of what is apparently my favorite cuisine. I've said my esteem for Chinese food has been raised considerably on this trip which is true, but Indian remains in a class of its own. The guy I was hanging out with is from Bristol in England and spent 6 months living in India, so he was telling me a bit about the different street foods they have over there. Apparently a samosa can be had for only 2 rupees, at an exchange of rate of apparently 80 rupees to 1 US dollar. That's a whole lot of samosas man.

I bought a ticket to go to Taiwan today, that will be my next stop. If I do not alter the return date at a later time, I will be on the island of Taiwan in various cities from 12/5 until 1/3, through New Years. I return to HK after that and where I'll go after I'm not sure. That's the question isn't it?

Pictures

So all the pictures except Kunming are up now and I labeled them so you can read witty little comments with each one.

The starting point is here.

You can also get to that by clicking where it says "pictures" on the right of the page.

Everything is going fine in HK. I feel better than I did by far in Kunming though I'm still coughing and sniffling a bit. I'm switching to somewhere new tonight, not sure where yet. Might go to the first place I stayed when I arrived in HK the first time for a few nights. The second place I stayed I liked better but they are full until Monday. I'll definitely be heading there after the weekend. I've been eating well. There's an all-vegetarian Indian place that I really enjoy and I expect they'll be seeing a lot of me to come in the next few weeks. For those of you who haven't read this for a while, there's a longer post below explaining why I'm in Hong Kong and everything else that has happened lately.

back in HK

I had this great post planned about snot rockets, but that'll have to wait til next time. So I mentioned I believe that I had been coming down with a cold starting around the giant waterfall at Huangguoshu, and that didn't really improve a whole lot and in fact seemed to be getting worse over about a week in Kunming. The first half of the week I'd been going out and doing things, but I'd been getting increasingly tired and not feeling well and the doctor there wasn't really giving me a whole lot of encouraging news, or at least I couldn't understand all that much since she spoke no English and my medical vocabulary in Chinese is kinda limited, so I ended up catching a flight back to Hong Kong to seek out further medical advice. I arrived last night and saw a doctor who told me that I have a bad upper respiratory infection which is viral and was exacerbated by the high altitude and dry climate of Kunming, and now that I'm back at sea level in a warmer more humid climate I should start to feel better in 2-4 days. I had been drinking tons of water in Kunming but always felt dry no matter what. It was great to get off the plane in HK and get hit in the face with some actual humidity. Also, because of the cold and the high altitude together, it had been kind of hard to breath over there which of course had concerned me. It's definitely a whole lot easier here and I already feel better though I still have cold symptoms. I think my deep chesty cough has improved and my nose is running slightly less. This morning I walked out for lunch totally overdressed. It's in the mid-70s here and though the sun isn't out, with the humidity it is very comfortable. Anyway, bottom line is I'm ok and in a few days should be feeling better. The last few days I couldn't really go out and do anything in Kunming without feeling totally exhausted, so I really needed to get better before I do anything else and HK is well known for being the best source of medical help in the region. It's actually interesting being back here now after my 5 weeks or so in the mainland. When I had first arrived in Hong Kong from the US, it seemed so foreign and Chinese to me, but now I see westerners wherever I go and it seems like it could be pretty much another US city compared to all of the places I'd been. When I was on the plane from Kunming to HK (2 hours btw) a Chinese guy struck up a conversation with me. He turned out to be from Toronto and his son works in NYC. He said it looked like I was the only caucasian on the plane. He was right, though I hadn't actually noticed. I told him after 5 or so weeks in China I was used to being the only one.

So I'm staying in a nice hotel in HK for two nights which called a doctor for me, and tomorrow I'll probably switch to the hostel I stayed in when I was here the first time. Although HK was cheap compared to the US, now the prices seem exorbitant after spending all that time in China. I had been increasingly spoiled each place we went. Sofia and I had been spending maybe 10-20RMB on our meals for two people. I just had to spend 20HKD on a bottle of orange juice, though I'm happy I can at least get orange juice again. In the mainland all I could find was Orange Drink. Everything there seemed to be artifically sweetened. I did find a few bottles of real juice in Guangzhou I think, but by and large it was hard to come by real juice. A few of the vegetarian restaurants had stuff that they made out of fresh fruit, but in those middle 3-4 weeks that was hard to come by. I uploaded a lot of pictures finally, though I have to go through and caption them at some point so you know what you're looking at. Feel free to click the pictures link on the right if you can't wait, otherwise hopefully in the next day or so I will get around to labeling them and post a proper link in my next update. I will probably be in HK for a while now and then head to Taiwan soon to meet up with Joy in Taipei. The current goal is to get better. It should be easier to do here, the weather is really nice and I already had Indian food once last night which was absolutely amazing. I'll probably be doing that quite a bit before I leave here for my next destination.

Probably not enough noodles

I have a bit of a cold. I am still on the antibiotics for the stomach problem, so I guess I have it covered in case the cold needs it, but I don't feel that bad really so hopefully it is just passing through. Maybe it's something I picked up from a keyboard in a seedy internet cafe. That's the problem when they let you smoke here. I need to start carrying around those anti-bacterial wetnaps or whatever they are. In any case, I figure each new thing I survive hopefully continues to increase my immune system's capability to super-western-human levels. Right now it's mostly just some sniffles, the occasional cough, and the desire to smoke less.

So before I say anything about where I am, I would like to point out that since Yangshuo, every single internet cafe I have visited allows me to reach the Flickr.com front page, the website where I store my pictures, but not the sign-in page. I have been able to reach the sign-in page from a few computers in hostels, but never from a public internet cafe. My belief is that this access is being deliberately blocked by the cafes or the great firewall, because what else could it be? Most other websites work, I don't think it is a technical problem. Another interesting quirk is that I can get to the site to update my blog, but I cannot get to my blog itself. I do not know what that is all about, but it does pose the problem of remembering what I wrote, although theoretically I can go back and do that through the editing interface, but I digress.

So remembering inadequately, I believe I last updated the blog from Guilin after having visited the Dragon's Spine Rice Terraces or something to that effect, and staying in a few villages in that neighborhood. That place is called Longji Titian by the way, which I think was what I called it last time. So we stayed in Guilin the one night and relaxed the following day, only heading briefly to a nearby temple and vegetarian restaurant with a Japanese traveler we met at the hostel. He was roaming around Asia much as we are, but had plans to head to eastern Europe at some point. His name was Jun, and he's a cook/chef in Tokyo. Apart from the fact that he likes mushrooms, I didn't have much time to learn anything else. There are many of these encounters, some more longer-lived than others, some involving email exchanges and the possibility of meeting up again somewhere down the line, and others with good wishes for a safe trip and that's about it. One guy in Yangshuo we met only briefly, talked a bit, and he gave me a book that he had just finished and thought I might like since the book-trading store was only prepared to give him a pittance for it and he thought donating it to me would be more worthwhile. I regret not getting his info, he was a good guy named Ren or perhaps Wren from Seattle. We almost decided to go to Longji Titian together but he wanted to linger a bit longer in Yangshuo and we'd already been there for a week or so.

Anyway, after Guilin we caught a plane to Guiyang at which the scenery changes pretty rapidly. Guiyang is the capital of Guizhou province, which according to my book is one of the poorest provinces in China. The city of Guiyang is fairly bustling and in many respects resembled many other provincial capitals and large Chinese cities I've visited. There's tons of traffic, tons of shopping, a whole bunch of pollution, and random temples, museums, and town squares sprinkled throughout. Guiyang does not see a lot of western tourists, especially in this season if at all, so once again I was an oddity and Sofia possibly a bit moreso. We got a whole lot of looks as we walked down the street, though at this point I've definitely become used to it although I still notice. She's better at ignoring it than I am. Sometimes I still want to say 'what the fuck are you looking at' when a little kid is staring at me. No, not really. Maybe a little. Most people are really just curious, though the repeated "hello"s do get a little bit annoying somewhere after the 10,000th or so. We had a few nice encounters with locals in Guiyang. The first was actually on the plane. The lady sitting next to me and I started talking. She turned out to be a Chinese teacher to Chinese high school students, teaching them grammar and so on. Her husband lives in Canada and she was soon going to be moving there, so wanted to practice her English. It wasn't bad, but she was at least slightly self-conscious. We spoke a little bit of English and a bit of Chinese. She ended up offering to help us out and we shared a taxi to our hotel which she then insisted on paying for despite our attempts to contribute. She also gave us her phone number and told us to call if we needed anything but we only had the onen day in Guiyang so we didn't have a chance. Later that night, we ate the most incredible street food for like 2RMB each. It was this heaping pile of fried rice with fried potatoes and vegetables, and then I think some tofu and this weird potato patty. On the greasy side, but really great and our cheapest meal yet. In general we've been eating amazing street snacks the last few weeks. Guizhou is apparently next to Sichuan in their appreciation for spicy food, something I discovered rather quickly. "A little" spicy here does not actually mean "a little." I imagine "a lot" means "I would like to bleed from the ears and nose." I did have this amazing tofu though covered with who knows what, though definitely vegetarian. If there's any area in which I'm truly comfortable speaking Chinese, it's about food. I've got it all covered, lard, pork, chicken, animal oil, pork broth, you name it. In general, most of the street vendors seem to use peanut oil or vegetable oil normally anyway, so that has been pretty helpful.

Before I forget, we were on this train from Guiyang to Anshun, about an hour away or so from where we were going to head to this giant waterfall called Huangguoshu and we sat in the "hard seat" class. So there are 4 classes on Chinese trains. Two are for sitting and two are for sleeping. Sleeping is easiest, you have "hard sleeper" which is the cheaper of the two, rows of beds, 3 stacked together, 6 in a compartment with no doors. So basically dorms on a train car. "Soft sleeper" is the most expensive, which is a private room with a door that closes and 4 beds. Bathrooms are at the end of the cars and so far aren't as horrendous as I'd been led to believe, though let's hope I didn't just jinx it. So "Soft seat" is next which I haven't ridden but I believe the seats recline and it is comparable to a nice train seat on Amtrak. Finally there is "hard seat" where you can reserve seats, but don't really have to I guess and a lot of people end up riding on the floor, smoking in the space between cars for the entire ride, or sitting on other passengers in some cases. My book describes this class as "a chance to become acquainted with the local barnyard" but really it wasn't that bad at all. Perhaps in more rural areas. So far I have seen no livestock on public transportation, though I have seen livestock AS public transportation in some of the villages. Anyway, so we rode hard seats for the short trip to Anshun and there were several funny things. One is the mad dash for the 'upgrade counter' which is an area in the front of the car where people can try to upgrade their seats after having boarded the train. I guess depending on how that goes, you can unwittingly end up riding a hard seat for a long time, although it is the cheapest way so some people do it just for that. I met a Taiwanese guy in the dorm today who rode a hard seat from Guangzhou to Nanning (at least 12 hours) and then another from Nanning to Kunming (gotta be 14 or something like that). I guess I'm a giant wuss. The whole point of the story really was they rolled through the hard seat cabins with these carts of food and I don't know what everything was but I saw at least a HEAPING portion of chicken feet available, though I did not inquire how much it was. I'm guessing a bargain.

So let's see, we also met this really nice English student in Guiyang who gave us his number and stressed the importance that all peoples of the world should help each other and we should all be friends. He gave us a lengthy list of tips of things we could squeeze into our day in Guiyang and was generally extremely friendly. We ended up calling him later for guidance. Later in Anshun, Sofia was met by a high school student on the street who invited her to his home for lunch. We then later met them for dinner at their request and we had called the first guy from Guiyang to ask if it was appropriate to bring a gift or anything, but apparently it's not necessary except under certain formal circumstances. That kid and his mom in Anshun were really friendly and took us out for this hotpot. I felt a little bad because they were really, really nice to us but didn't immediately understand the vegetarian thing so we had to get a second pot of broth since the first had meat in it. They had figured we could just not eat the meat. Again we offered to pay and they adamantly refused. Oh yeah, in Anshun we had another free meal. In Anshun we were even stranger sites as we walked down the sidewalk. I mean *everyone* there stared. People were doing doubletakes and turning their heads and stopping walking and all of that. So we went to this one restaurant and got a glorious vegetarian meal with minimal effort, after which the owners sat down with us and chatted a bit. I did my best to keep up, but as it turns out all of these places, basically everyone I've visited, has what is effectively their own language. So in Guiyang they speak Guiyang-Hua (Hua means speech in Mandarin), in Anshun they speak Anshun-Hua, in Yangshuo they speak Yangshuo-Hua. I'm still fuzzy on exactly how different these languages are, but they seem pretty distinct. Now having said that, everyone seems to speak Mandarin with varying degrees of modified accents based on where they live. The result is that most people understand me when I speak, but some people are harder for me to understand than others. I mean, my listening really needs work anyway, but at least several Chinese native-speakers I've met have told me similar things. They even have trouble understanding each other times. So that couple sits down, we chat, they are asking us where we're from, talking about China, Guiyang, places to study Chinese, vegetarian food. I totally bailed out of the chance to explain why I'm vegetarian in Chinese. I really need to memorize a few more words to be able to do that adequately. Instead I just told them it was kind of like a Buddhist thing but not really. Total copout. Anyway, we're leaving that place eventually, it's 30rmb, we only have a 50rmb, they can't find change because it is late at night, so they just say forget it and have a great night. We were in disbelief. Under many circumstances, Guizhou people really impressed us with that kind of hospitality.

One other thing about Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou. If we stopped somewhere for a few moments to do something, a crowd could develop to look. I stopped to buy a drink at this drink vendor, spoke Chinese to him, he was complimenting my Chinese and meanwhile Sofia was buying some Yogurt drink at the stand next to it, and all of a sudden there were like 15 people standing around us all talking to us. The main guy was this maybe 60 year old Guiyang resident who was a former teacher and even spoke a few words of English, but not conversationally really. They all pretty much relied on my Chinese which was desperately holding on for comprehension as I tried to wade through the thick Guiyang accents and a sea of vocabulary I don't understand. We did OK ultimately and had to excuse ourselves because more and more people keep coming up to participate. That happens a lot in China in general and definitely we saw it a lot in Guiyang. If something is going on, a crowd gathers to watch, and eventually to participate. So I sat down on a stool in a small park outside of a store waiting for Sofia to go use the bathroom in a restaurant. I'm smoking and a guy comes up and starts talking to me asking me about my travels, my Chinese, and things like that. A few more passerbys start to stop. Within a few minutes I'm surrounded by ten people all amazed at the foreigner first, and then that the foreigner can actually speak Chinese. This is all generally really good natured and friendly. They offer cigarettes and invited me to drink tea, though it is a little daunting linguistically. I'm improving but some of these older guys have these ultra-thick accents of which I can barely make heads or tails.

So we primarily went through Guizhou for a bit of local scenery outside of the tourist scene on our way to Kunming in Yunnan province. This was easy and successfully accomplished. But one reason we chose these places was because of their close proximity to this giant waterfall called Huangguoshu, about an hour or so by bus from Anshun, which was itself and hour or so west of Guiyang. Many people told us now was not really a great season to go see the waterfall, but those fears proved to be unfounded, it was pretty great and really beautiful. Probably actually better lacking the crowds that I imagine flock to see it during the high season, whenever that is. It hasn't been freezing or anything, but the last few days in Guizhou have been some of the coldest of my trip. I've been wearing my windbreaker which I had really not used since Denver. I imagine these next few weeks in Yunnan will be colder as the altitude increases, but I think for the moment my clothes are doing the trick. Yes, I know, I have a cold, but that's from keyboard gunk, not from the weather. So Huangguoshu was crazy and I'll let the pictures speak for themselves once I finally figure out how to upload them given these insane restrictions I continue to encounter. The hostel's internet is out today but maybe tomorrow or later tonight it will work and I will have better luck from there.

So we took the night-train last night, soft sleeper, from Anshun to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. Mostly been relaxing today, the trip was easy enough and I slept pretty well but Sofia had some trouble sleeping. The train left at 9pm last night and arrived at 7am this morning, so it's early to be up with or without sleep. We took a walk for food this morning where I had a false alarm on a Hummus sighting and I was sad. I need to do a search for that again before I leave the cafe. I totally miss indian food and hummus. So we're at a youth hostel in Kunming near a really pretty park. The sun has been out today and though it was cold in the morning, it's actually pretty nice now and the air seems fresher than some of the other capitals I've been. This place is reputed to be a very laid-back and foreigner friendly city, the most relaxed of the provincial capitals according to some. So far that shoe seems to fit. There is a university with many foreign and english students and apparently a large ex-pat community of those who find this place and decide not to leave, or at least perhaps to extend their trip. The next plan is to rest, relax, and generally get better before I head anywhere new. I really hope this is the last of these little bouts with illness. I expected it a little bit coming to a distant country with all sorts of new germs flying around, but enough is enough. I'm still working on my plan for what happens next. There's two cities in Yunnan I'd like to see, Dali and Lijiang, and at Lijiang a famous hike called Tiger Leaping Gorge. After that, I think it might be time to seek out warmer weather for the winter. As much as I'd like to see the North of China, I miss the early days of my trip when I was going outside at night with a t-shirt. I'm sure everyone back in New York is very sympathetic about that.

Anyhow, I'll work on the pictures. In general I'm having fun and seeing pretty amazing things. Now that I've caught everyone up on the details, I'll try to make my next blog entry more philosophical since now I may actually have internet access for two days in a row. Hope you are all well, stay in touch.

I am alive

I can't believe how much time has gone by since I last updated. A number of factors have made this so. One is that I got sick for a bit in Yangshuo. This was the kind of sick that puts you in the bathroom for four days or so, and didn't seem to want to go away regardless of how many bananas and noodles I ate, ultimately making me elect to visit a doctor in Yangshuo which was an experience unto itself. I was walking through the hallways with a Chinese friend who was helping me and a doctor crossed the hall with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Despite my condition I had to laugh. Anyway, several days of antibiotics later and I'm feeling much improved. So that was a main reason. Another is that internet access when it is available has been somewhat unreliable due to what I believe are the machinations of the Chinese government. I cannot login to Flickr to upload my pictures though I can reach the site to view them. This is consistent from internet cafes, though some hostels vary. It is clearly something deliberate and not accidental and it is driving me nuts. My pictures are piling up and these are the best of the trip. Hopefully by the time I do the next update I will have sorted it all out. It's really a bit ridiculous. Finally, the last few nights have had no internet at all, but I will explain that below in a bit.

All traffic signs and regulations are merely suggestions at best here. I have had several occasions to be on buses the last few days, and numerous occasions before that, and the drivers are clearly insane. It's best not to look through the front window, though I can't help myself often enough. The driver rides fairly regularly in the oncoming lane of traffic, regardless of whether there is in fact oncoming traffic or not. He will speed up to pass a few cars and the people, motorcycles, other buses, or cows will also speed up and somehow nobody gets killed, so far at least. Also interesting is that none of the Chinese people seem nervous about it in the least. I think today the bus driver passed somebody in the oncoming lane who was also passing somebody in the oncoming lane, while like 5 motorcycles and a bus shot by in the oncoming shoulder. I just cover my eyes now and try to enjoy the scenery out the side window instead of the front.

So we spent a whole bunch of time in Yangshuo. I wrote about it a bit I believe. I spent several days trying to recover and had some great food despite that whole condition, and then we went biking again our last day out into the villages which was great. We rode to an ancient bridge and had lunch at a local's house in a village called Yulong Cun, right near the bridge looking out at the Yulong river as chickens and children ran amuck. Lots of dogs too, apparently the leash laws aren't as stringent in rural Guangxi as they are in Manhattan. That day we took a few courageous turns and ended up in fields of crops walking our bikes on paths too small to ride without falling off the side into hay or mud or corn or whatever else it is they grow out there. The scenery was as usual amazing, I will sort out the pictures soon. By the way, a lot of Chinese toddlers where pants with no butt on them, kind of like Prince did at that one awards show. Was that in college? Man, I feel old sometimes.

So we took a bus after a week in Yangshuo to a place called Dazhai, a village among the Longji rice terraces. Longji is a giant area with steep hills that look like giant stairs covered with rice plants, or at this particular time, recently harvested rice plants. The scenery is amazing and the villages get some tours during the day, but it doesn't take much at all to get away from the tourists because there are a zillion stairs and no other way to get up there and most tourists aren't too interested in that. We stayed the night in Dazhai and then hiked four hours to another village called Pingan. There's so many details of these places, it's hard to remember everything now. The villages are inhabited by ethnic minority groups within China, in the case of Dazhai the Yao minority and in the case of Pingan and a few small surrounding villages, the Zhuang minority. Some of you will be happy to hear that there is also a Dong minority group in the region. They each have their own language which sounds to me to be a dialect of Mandarin, but that's a wild guess based on listening to them speak it for a few days. I'm sure wikipedia would shed more light on this if I could reach it. The women of the Yao minority don't cut their hair from the time they are married, so they all have really, really long hair which they wrap up elaborately into a turban-like shape and then offer to show tourists for a cool 5RMB if you are lucky. They also relentlessly hound the tourists to buy various handicrafts and once again, no is an unacceptable answer. We continue to politely refuse various requests but have slowly built a catalog of the most irritating offers in different places. They mean well generally speaking or are just looking to make a buck, but I am so tired of hearing "LOOKY!" "BAMBOO!?" "MASSAGEY?" and "POST-A-CARD?" I can't even tell you. Bamboo is a ride on a bamboo ride by the way, and people will run at you from the fields to make sure you realize they do indeed also have a bamboo raft they'd be happy to take you on at any time that happens to be convenient. Anyway, the people who live in these places are kind of amazing. There are giant wooden houses on the side of these mountains and they have carried every single piece of building material up here on their backs. It was a common sight to see what was apparently a 150 year old woman with a bamboo stick over one shoulder, and on each end of bamboo a giant bale of wood or some other crazy supply. Other common cargo included giant logs over the shoulder, or a crossbeam with two giant buckets filled with rocks or something else that looked really painful to trudge up, but they do it every single day. Tellingly, they don't seem to smoke in these villages quite as much as they do in the flatter parts of China, at least as far as I could tell.

So we spent two nights in these remote villages in rooms that resembled places I lived in summer camp. The food was good and in the last few weeks has evolved to be no problem whatsoever. I'm pretty comfortable ordering in Chinese now without a menu, just explaining what we want and they are only too happy to provide it. We've had great noodles, soups, some unusual and tasty vegetables, and then in one place they had a burrito and we couldn't resist trying it. That was actually in one of the Yao villages and was actually really good. It was also the first time I've used a fork in what seems like ages. Today we're back in Guilin, the trip from PingAn was extremely easy and we're staying in the same hostel we stayed in the first time we came through here. It is a fairly big place and a traveling hub, kind of a shock in a way after spending nights in these villages where everything closes down when it gets dark and you have to walk down a stone staircase for like a mile before you get to the base of a hill which isn't even really the base of a hill and where you can't really get anywhere anyway so you shouldn't have wasted battery time on your flashlight if you're lucky enough to have one in the first place. Tomorrow we'll be heading in the direction of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, the southwesternmost province of China. I won't bore you with the travel details, but we'll be stopping a bit in Guizhou on the way and possibly visiting this giant waterfall which will hopefully have some water since it is now the dry season and apparently the non-optimal time to visit it. It's on the way, so what can it hurt?

Hopefully next time I update I will have sorted out the pictures. Hope all are well!

ridiculous scenery

This is going to be a tough blog update for several reasons. One is that I can't actually get to my own blog and see what I wrote last time, and the other is that I have done so much in the last few days that it is hard to remember it all. I'll try to get the highlights.

So I met up with Sofia in Guilin and I think I wrote about a day there, in the caves with the crazy Chinese tour groups. Actually, maybe I updated the blog from Xingping now that I think about it. Ok, so we woke up in Xingping and it took us 30-40 minutes after breakfast to bargain a fair price to a nearby fishing village called Yu Cun. We were fairly proud to get them down from the original asking price of 100RMB to our final price of 40RMB. This was on a bamboo raft with two reclining chairs on it. There's a motor on the back and we cruised down the river about 30 minutes before debarking on a non-descript and somewhat empty beach-like area where there weren't really any other boats. We were planning to head to Yangshuo by boat later after checking out this village, so we considered a bargain with our boatman but the price seemed too high, and our bargaining failed so he left. We wandered around this tiny village for an hour or two which has a few tables with people trying to sell various trinkets and fruit, but mostly just homes, old buildings, occasional rubble, and a ton of chickens. Also, this giant green fruit whose name I still don't know, but it is kind of citrus-like and tastes pretty good. So the real adventure started when we headed back to the beach to find a boat to Yangshuo and there was nobody there. We befriended a few locals on the beach, and eventually this one guy had two small bamboo rafts which he actually tied together while we waited with bamboo cross-beams and wire. He then attached a motor, put a few boards over the top upon which he placed two chairs, and we had ourselves a ride. It was kind of amazing and while we sat around waiting for him to do this, his family members offered us fruit (for free!) and chatted with us in Chinese as best we could. The ride was beautiful of course, and we made it to Yangshuo in one piece.

Today we rented bikes and rode out of Yangshuo into the nearby villages. Our first stop was actually a giant attraction called Moon Hill which we biked to and then hiked up. The bike rental was 10RMB per day plus a deposit in case the bike explodes or something. The best trails came after Moon Hill when we got onto small roads with no cars, often rocky and full of stones, gravel, sticks, loose dogs, chickens, and more often than not giant cow-like beings. I don't know what they are called. It's not a bull but it isn't a cow either. I have to look into this more. They stare at you in a very disconcerting but calming way. We rode around for hours eventually finding our way back, but not before we had to cross a river by loading our bikes onto a bamboo raft that was only 6 bamboo logs wide and being poled across. The driver uses a giant bamboo pole to push us off the bottom in the direction we want to go. The scenery the entire day was completely surreal and defies description. I took a bunch of pictures which I'll upload eventually, I hope they do it some justice.

We're going to check out the local vegetarian restaurant tonight, I'm kind of excited about that. Last night we tried but they were closed so we did ok at a different place with some spicy tofu and vegetables and whatnot. Yangshuo is touristy as expected, but has a certain charm as well. Many pedestrian streets with no cars, generally narrow, tons of cafes and shops that are all a little bit charming. The place we're staying is a hostel with a bookstore on the first floor where backpackers buy, sell, and trade books so there are sections for just about every language you can think of. Anyway, things are good, hope all are having fun and doing well.

Caoping, the Li River, and Xingping

This morning Sofia and I caught a bus to the long-distance bus station and with some effort found our bus to Caoping, a small village a bit south of Guilin along the Li River. This experience reminded me of my time in Guangdong before making it to Guangzhou, particularly the bus station and dealing with no English, no English signs, and a chaotic environment filled with all the weird people who usually hang out at bus stations. Apparently that is one thing America and China have in common. So we got on the bus, which was actually more of a minibus or shortbus if you will, and circled Guilin for a while picking up more passengers. At each location, this woman would get out of the bus and walk around shouting to people and telling them where we were going, in case you happened to be a random passerby suddenly interested in a chance of scenery. We finally got out of Guilin and the scenery got really rural and really interesting pretty quickly. The number of jagged limestone hills rising out of nowhere gradually increased, as did the number of farms and people wearing those conical hats you see in the movies. We drove through these rural outskirts of Guilin for a while finally arriving at Guanyan village, near or the same as Caoping, I couldn't figure that out. We were the only white people the whole way, and the bus driver had already told us about his friend who had a boat and would take us down the Li River if we were interested. I told him we'd see what happens when we got there. His friend was waiting for us, a pleasant lady who wasn't too pushy which was appealing since we were simultaneously assailed by about 5 old woman who wanted to sell us fruit. They hang it in a bag in front of your face repeatedly shouting prices at you, and will not go away. Politely declining, less politely declining, it is all futile. Walking away eventually worked. We ended up striking a deal with this woman who helped us get onto the boat and set us on our way. We had our own boat, which was pretty great. The walk to the boat was kind of cool. We walked through these streets of Guanyan and there are chickens, pigs, and other animals just hanging out in no particular designated area. That was the first time I saw that. I guess I am a city slicker. We made it to the boat, and after some negotiating he let us sit on the bow for the trip where we were treated to ridiculous views of these endless limestone peaks and cliffs jutting out in every direction, and passed numerous bamboo rafts as the sun shined down and we sped down the Li River towards Yangshuo. We got off near to Xingping, or at least what was supposedly near to Xingping, and walked down the road to which we were directed, but it took at least a few miles to make it to the town itself. We didn't mind since the scenery was crazy. This was an unpaved, tiny, untrafficked road through farmland and the occasional house. Everyone we saw was friendly enough, a few trying to sell us various things, but generally just saying hello, sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese. Although this is apparently a 'touristy' thing to do, we didn't really see any other tourists, except maybe a few Chinese folks with cameras. Along the river is a different story. Although it was by no means crowded, in the span of our hour or so journey we saw at least 10-15 larger cruiseboats go by though not many of them were filled with people since this isn't the high season. It is possible to take a 6 hour cruise all the way from Guilin to Yangshuo (about 85 km) but apparently that is an extremely touristy experience comparable to the caves I described yesterday, complete with megaphone-augmented descriptions and hundreds of squawking tourists. Riding on the front of the boat we had to ourselves was great and far preferable. I felt a bit like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now without all the napalm.

So we made it to Xingping in one piece after our few mile nice walk and agreed that staying for a night before heading to Yangshuo was very appealing. We found a place that was identified in one of our books as being backpacker friendly, so we checked it out and it was again $5US per person, but this time we have our own room and bathroom and it's very clean, so we went for it and subsequently managed to score a pretty tasty all-vegetarian meal, though we probably ordered more than we should've. We did some damage to our Mapo Dofu, Sweet and Sour vegetables, Fried Noodles, and yes, French Fries, and it was all only about $6US anyway. That includes the giant beer we shared before taking a walk around the quiet town (the one big street) and finding this internet cafe by accident. I haven't been to Yangshuo yet but I imagine it was something like this maybe 10 years ago. This place hasn't really gotten its tourist feet yet, but it looks like it is on the way. It's nice to have found a quiet spot to relax in such a beautiful area and with so few tourists or even people around. Our hotel is right along the river and the view is amazing. Tomorrow we're thinking about taking another boat down the river, maybe a smaller bamboo raft this time or something like it, and enjoying the rest of the trip through this amazing place. Apparently Yangshuo is more of the same, and it is possible to cheaply rent bikes and explore more villages like these during the day. It's pretty amazing and more like I imagined China before I came here. It is certainly a far cry from Guangdong and the other areas I've been so far.

I've had a bunch of really good days since arriving in Guangxi. It's been nice having company to travel with, especially someone who is also vegetarian who appreciates finding the meals we have been. The atmosphere in general here is relaxed and people are friendly. The worst thing I can say about it is constantly having people shouting at you or coming up to you wanting you to buy things, who will not leave or accept "no thank you" as an answer, but that is something to which I am rapidly becoming accustomed. Other than that, this place is wonderful and I'm happy to have made it to such an idyllic destination. And to think this is only the beginning of travelling in this place!