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It's the journey, not the destination or the distance that matters

Mountains, valleys, mist, mud, trees, cliffs, stones, bamboo, buffalo, clouds, flowers, air, rain, dirt, sunshine, bumps, honks, barking, croaking frogs, green, blue, brown. These are the main things that bombarded my sensory cortices as I traveled the mountain roads of Yunnan. Yet while on the motorbike, these things didn’t really register as nouns, or even concepts, but instead were processed by my brain as a series of emotions. Mountains and mist were processed as awe, wonder, and respect; trees, flowers, bamboo, and sunshine were felt in terms of joy, relaxation and sheer contentment; clouds and valleys were thrill and excitement; dirt, mud, bumps, honks and barking were annoyance, determination, and fortitude; cliffs, rain, darkness were terror, cold, and uncertainty.

Yet the emotions that triumphed were pride, fun, and happiness. I’m proud of myself for riding a motorcycle through bumpy country roads for two and half weeks with no accidents (aside from a burn). There were a few precarious cliffs with downhill, hairpin turns and no guardrail that could easily have sent any of us off a cliff-face, but that fortunately didn’t happen (Not to worry, I was well prepared mentally to handle that situation. I practiced in my head how I would jump off the motorbike and let it and my stuff go off the side of the mountain in the event of a slide out arounda turn. I would have been fine, just down a motorbike, two computers, my passport, and all my stuff. Hypothetically.) I had an amazing time with Andy after 9 months of separation, and went on a magnificent adventure. The scenery also was just breathtaking. I’ll post a few of Andy’s photos here, but you should check out his Flickr site to get the full effect. All in all, it was one of the most exciting vacations I’ve had in a long while. I’m very sad that I had to abandon my beloved motorbike in Yunxian. Hopefully somebody with a good heart will find it and give it a good home.

Gorgeous scenery (Andy's picture)

Exciting certainly doesn’t mean that the experience was a piece of cake, nor that it was all enjoyable. There were plenty of times where the ride was hard, terrifying, wet, and cold. The forty kilometers from Gengma to Mengsha was ridden entirely in a steady rain that left me soaked and chilled to the bone. I also felt a profound sense of unease whenever trying to get past a herd of water buffalo on the road. Although I know that those animals are docile to the core, and rather stupid to boot, they are massive, alien, and with rather unnervingly large horns. Trying to ride through a pack of them is unsettling as you feel that they could either kick you or gore you and that would be that. I feel much better trying to get around a herd of goats or cattle.

More beautiful scenery

Many have said that the journey is more important than the destination. In the case of this trip, it was totally true. The road itself was the adventure, the present was beauty, your fellow travelers your home. It was a good ride.

Sunburn was a constant threat. Here's how I protected my arms! I know I look goofy as all get out, but function is better than beauty!

Muddy roads. I almost got stuck one time when I was following Andy and he suddenly slowed. Note: Do not lose velocity when trying to get through mud. I had to frog push my way out.

Trying to wait out the rain

Now on to my next adventure of the summer: my internship at the Consulate.

Me at the monastery, in my Wa ethnic minority head scarf!

The second biggest religion in China -second to atheism, if that counts- is probably Buddhism. Throughout the small towns of Southwest China, there is usually at least one Buddhist temple in the vicinity, and it is not uncommon to see young men in bright saffron robes riding by on motorcycles, picking up a pack of cigs at the nearest xiaomaibu, or sitting around looking monk-like. As Evan wrote in his post “A Totally Tea Time with Tutu” (http://www.portraitofanlbx.com/2010/05/a-totally-tea-time-with-tutu/), in many areas (such as Bulang) all boys are required to be a monk for at least seven whole days of their lives, a concept similar to the period of mandatory military service for boys in places such as Korea and Israel. Interestingly, it is absolutely illegal for girls to become Buddhist nuns. I guess girls become dangerous to society when they become religious and get a bit more of an education. As we soon learned, “being a monk” is a rather relative concept. Ascetic the life is not, even though it is supposed to be according to Buddhist tradition and doctrine. In fact, much like everything else in China, the Buddhism practiced here is based on a doctrine (law) proclaimed in words but very rarely followed in practice. All the rules of Buddhism can be broken (just like law in China!), and they most certainly are (just like law in China!).

We learned this first hand when we decided to visit a temple fair in Gengma. It started at 8 in the morning, but as it was raining, and as we are pretty slow in getting moving in the morning, we didn’t show up until around 11 am. As we pulled up in front of the temple, we see three or four monks sitting outside the temple gate smoking. Thinking it a little odd for monks, we muse that it must not be against the rules.

We walk inside to find that the fair has ended, and all the monks are just sitting down to eat lunch. Our initial disappointment turns to interest when we are promptly invited to sit down and have lunch with the monks. Even though we had just had breakfast, we gratefully sit down at a table with the head honcho, the director of the Buddhist Association that is responsible for the temples and monks of six nearby counties.

We are immediately surprised when we see the food. 5 out of the 8 dishes were meat!!  In other parts of China I have known Buddhist monks to eat fish, but never meat. We ask about this strange phenomenon and are told that Dai Buddhism is different than  Tibetan or Chinese (or Indian) Buddhism. Apparently they follow the Theravada school of Buddhism, and thus can eat meat. That’s fine in itself, but 5 out of 8 dishes are meat? Considering that meat is so much more expensive than vegetables, these monks are actually living quite large. We’ve witnessed and have heard that monk life is actually a fairly easy life when compared to the lives of most villagers. Not only do monks get all their food prepared and given to them for free, they get good, expensive food that the villagers often don’t get on a daily basis.

Additionally, there seem to be very few sacrifices on the part of monks. We talked to the head monk, a bespectacled man named Tikka Dashi, who gave us an entire explanation of the life and death of Buddha, the role that the monks fulfill, and certain doctrinal guidelines. The monks, it seems, are not allowed to smoke, drink, or do anything that defiles their bodies. We immediately bring up the fact that we just saw five monks smoking outside. At this, Tikka Dashi sheepishly explains that even though the monks aren’t supposed to smoke or drink, etc, a lot of them do anyway, blatantly breaking

the rules with impunity. I guess rules are meant to be broken!

All in all, it seems that being a monk is a pretty desirable thing to be. There are only upsides, no down. You get free food, free lodging, you can smoke and drink, and leave and get married when you want. A monk’s main job, according to Tikka Dashi, is to disseminate information on the classics, read the sutras, and conduct certain spiritual rituals. Other monks that we met even engage in commerce, tending to tea trees and the like. In sum, not a bad life.

On an only slightly related religious note, the drunk Wa middle school teachers we met in Xuelin who toasted us all night were Christian. We discussed different religions with them, and they said that while not all Chinese believe in the same God, they all believe in the Party. What a load of communist crap. Kinda made me want to vomit a little in my mouth. Totally something a government worker (i.e teacher) would say.

Yesterday we biked from Danjia to the first bit of real civilization we’ve seen in four days, a county seat called Geng Ma. Geng Ma is populated mostly by the Dai people (derived from the Thai’s), and the name is a Mandarinized version of the local dialect which loosely translated means “a place arrived at by following a horse.” The ride was beautiful again, but there were patches of construction work and torn up road that proved to be arduous. However, the last 25 kilometers were blissfully paved, lined with flowers, trees and bamboo clusters, which made the final push rather pleasant. This is one of the nicest county seats I’ve ever been in. The town itself is relatively clean, the Dai people are colorfully dressed, the food is superb, and we found a very nice hotel that overlooks a pretty neat sugar factory. The boys are hoping to stop by the factory on our way out of town tomorrow, which would be fun. Yesterday we ate at an open air market, and had rice cooked in a clay pot over coals, which was accompanied by many small dishes of pickled vegetables, beans, garlic and pearl onions, and to which we added grill-roasted meat, eggplant, squash and tofu. It was a feast! We will probably go back again tonight, and I am on a mission to have some sticky rice, which I saw when we were eating at the market yesterday but was too full to get. I even purchased mangoes this afternoon in preparation to eat with my sticky rice. I’m looking forward to it!

On a side note, I am really tired today because last night I dreamed all night about running from and killing zombies. In an interesting twist, in my dream I could turn zombies back into regular people by spraying them in the face with this liquid solution, so I was running around with spray bottles in my hand, and at one point I was on top of a hill with a fire hose and making noises so all the zombies would run toward me and then I’d spray them with hose. Then, this morning Bethany tells me of the unfortunate behavior toward my kitty, who gets sprayed when he tries to enter my room by a guest. Was my dream some sort of weird premonition?

From Xuelin we rode to another small village called Danjia, for a total of 83 kilometers on more unpaved, under-construction road. The view was again super beautiful, but the roads were really, really awful. We were really high up in the mountains, at around 2000 meters. The cloudy skies finally disappeared, and there was nothing but blue, blue sky, bright white clouds, and verdant green valleys with patches of bamboo forest, terraced rice paddies and tea trees to really remind you that you are in China, not anywhere else. When we initially set out we got on the wrong road, the road heading to Myanmar. We had to turn around, which set us back seven kilometers, but it was nothing too terrible. My stomach decided that day to revolt at the sight and smell of noodles, which is the only thing that is really available for breakfast. So, I did not eat anything in the morning, thinking that I would be fine until lunch. Turns out that I wouldn’t get to eat a meal until 8:00 pm that night, as there was no food to be had for 80 kilometers. At around the 50 km mark we came across a village in which we thought there would be food, but no luck. The boys manged to buy some instant noodles at a small stand, but again, my stomach, no matter how hungry I was, would not let me eat noodles, so I had no lunch. I pulled into our destination for the day, a village called Danjia, around 6 pm in the evening. I was very low on gas, so my first priority was finding a gas station, rather than eating. There was no gas station in the village, but luckily, gas was sold by the coke bottle by the family of the Vice Party Secretary. After some help from yet another random guy on a motorcycle, I found the family’s house, and bought some gas from a woman named Ms. Zhong, who was the VP’s daughter. Inquiring about where I came from and where I was going, I told her that two friends and I were coming from Xuelin, that my two friends were biking and would probably be a while, and that we would be staying in the village tonight. She promptly invited me into her home to rest while I waited for my two friends to arrive. As she had said that she was unsure whether there was a hotel in the village, I thought it would be a good idea to build up a relationship with her just in case there wasn’t a hotel, and we’d have to try to finagle our way into sleeping on their couch. So, I duly sat with her in their living room (which had three couches), and talked with her and watched the news on TV for two hours as I waited for Andy and Evan.

Turns out Ms. Zhong wasn’t that great of a conversationalist. Every time I asked her about anything, including Wa history, her daughter, her life, the area, neighboring Myanmar, she would either say she didn’t know much about it or that there wasn’t much to tell. She couldn’t even tell me about the traditional clothes and jewelry her grandmother was wearing (who came in after a while but couldn’t speak a word of Mandarin), and just told me that her outfit was traditional and that younger people didn’t wear it. She didn’t even know what material the thick, heavy, metal necklace the grandmother was wearing was made out of. However, she was very nice, and after a while the rest of the family came in. They didn’t seem surprised to see me, and didn’t ask me anything about myself other than my nationality. Ms. Zhong’s father, Mr. Xiao, as mentioned earlier, was the Vice Party Secretary, and he duly invited me (and Andy and Even by extension, who still weren’t there yet) to stay for dinner. Still not knowing whether there was a place to stay, I asked him, and all he said was that there was a place we could spend the night, but he did not elaborate whether that place was in his own home, in a hotel, in a random public building or where. I decided to leave it, as these things tend to figure themselves out on their own.

At around 8 pm, the boys finally arrived, sweaty and exhausted, and we immediately went up to the kitchen (a dark, dank place) to eat dinner with the family. The dinner, as usual, was delicious. We had fried eggs, pork and bitter melon, pea flour cubes (with the consistency of a rice noodle), wild lettuce, and a meat and vegetable soup. All were sublimely delicious (even more so given that it was my first meal of the day). Afterward, we went back and talked with the VP for a little while, and eventually he escorted us down to a hotel about 500 meters away, where we crashed for the night.

On May 21, we left Fubang and set off for Xuelin, for a total distance of 47 kilometers. After the experience of the night before, we wanted to make sure we got in to the next village nice and early, while it was still light out, and while we still had a chance of actually eating dinner (which we didn’t get to do the night before). The ride today was sooo much better, and we even got on some paved road, which was miraculous! Although we spent a lot of time going uphill, the view was spectacular. SPECTACULAR! It was so very beautiful, which hopefully you can see for yourself if I can actually gets some VLOGS uploaded (I have a ton, but the internet is too slow to load them and send them, so you may just have to wait until I get to Shanghai before they get posted).

We got into Xuelin around 4 pm, which gave us plenty of time to bargain for a hotel and explore the area. Adjacent to Xuelin was a small village populated by the Wa minority. We decided to walk around and take pictures, and came across a wedding under way. While we didn’t get invited, we did run into a number of inebriated wedding guests, all old men, stumbling around drunkenly through the village. The wedding didn’t look like much, there was no music, nor food, nor much of anything that resembled celebrating. Who knows if that is just the Wa way, or whether the family was too poor to have any accouterments. It may have been the latter, but I guess we won’t know.

We decided to have dinner at the nicest place in Xuelin, a small restaurant just next to our hotel. 10 seconds after we sat down, a group of people who had been dining in the next “room” comes over to us and immediately starts speaking to us in really bad (but good for being in a small village in Southwest China) English. A woman begins introductions with a “Hello! I am the Middle School English teacher.” And then reverts to Chinese to apologize for her bad English saying she has already had a lot to drink. The group were all teachers at the local school, and they were all drunk. They immediately asked us if we would “give them the opportunity to go to the school with them to ‘play.’”

Who knows what that meant. We explained that we had come for dinner, and we needed to eat. They immediately said they could wait for “half an hour” for us to eat. We told them that was not nearly enough time, and we would like to eat at our own pace. They then left us, and we had a nice dinner in peace. But, like clockwork, as soon as we had finished eating they came back over, this time without the woman teacher. There were three men, Mr. Aiga, Mr. Chen and Mr. He, all members of the Wa minority. They immediately ordered beers, and thus began a night of shenanigans.

After initially trying to persuade us to go sing karaoke with them at the neighborhood KTV, to which we firmly resisted, the men finally gave in and let us stay where we were to have a few beers. Toasting when drinking is a typical Chinese thing to do, but in traditional Wa culture, toasts aren’t merely offered with words, but with song. Also, you don’t have your own glass to toast and drink as a group, but a single cup is used to toast people individually, and that one cup is passed around among the group and we each drink one by one from the same cup. Following tradition, as we understood it, the host, our Mr. Aiga, started by toasting the oldest of his guests (us), which happened to be Andy. Facing Andy, Mr. Aiga broke into song, with Mr. Chen and Mr. He clapping and dancing along to the beat. The one being toasted (Andy) is supposed to face the singer with his right palm facing up with his thumb and forefinger pointed out, as if pretending to hold a gun. The left hand is placed palm face up under the right wrist. This is supposed to signal respect for the person giving the toast. After Mr. Aiga finished his song, he gan bei’ed (chugged) the glass of beer, and then refilled the cup and handed it off to Andy. Now, it was Andy’s turn to pick a person to toast, sing a song himself, chug the beer, refill it, and hand it off to the person he toasted. The drinking, toasting, and singing is continued like this indefinitely. The only downside to this type of social drinking means that you have to be a good singer, and have a song to sing. Andy, Evan and I quickly had to think of songs to sing, which is really rather difficult when you’re suddenly put on the spot. Evan was the first to get musical inspiration and prevented the USA from losing face with his rendition of “16 tons,” a coal mining song. Andy followed up with some Proclaimers, “I would walk 500 miles,” and I followed with “You are my sunshine.” Loosening up after this first round of songs, we all got a little more creative, and delved into some songs in French, some Aretha Franklin, and Shaboom. We have this all on video, and it will certainly be put up as a VLOG. Hopefully the one of me singing Aretha Franklin’s “I will survive” will be accidentally deleted, or else I will have no dignity for the rest of my life.

On May 20th we rode 64 kilometers from Lancang to a tiny tiny town called Fubang. 64 kilometers may not sound like a lot, but we were riding on what Andy and Evan describe as one of the most difficult roads they have ever taken. We were expecting trouble because we had been told repeatedly by different people that the road out of Lancang was under construction, but we didn’t fully grasp the muddy, rocky, hilly, slippery nature of the road that lay ahead (it was raining off an on all day, which made the roads more treacherous). However, despite this fact, the 64 kilometers wouldn’t have been so bad had we not encountered an even bigger snag. Forty kilometers into our ride we arrived at a sudden and unexpected roadblock. I was about 45 minutes ahead of the boys, and thought the road was just closed off on our side to let traffic on the other side come through, and that it would only be a few minutes wait. I was dead wrong. Apparently the road was closed to all traffic until 7 pm that night. It had been closed since 2 pm. We had arrived around four, so it meant we had a three hour wait. Yes, they closed the ONLY road in and out for five hours in the MIDDLE of the day. Of course our American sense of logic and reasonableness was thoroughly offended at this. Evan asked why they had closed the road during the day, to which the reply was that they were dynamiting and it was going to rain that night, so they had to work during the day. Nothing could be done but to wait by the side of the dirt road for three hours. We weren’t the only ones that had to do so, there was a long line of trucks and passenger buses that were stuck as well, but oddly not as many as you would think. There were even some local entrepreneurs who came and set up drink and instant noodle stands. Although there were no signs to announce the road closing on this side of the road, the locals knew about it and came to take advantage of the business opportunity of stranded travelers. Thus, with nothing to be done but wait, Andy, Evan and I pulled out rain coats and plastic bags and made ourselves comfortable on the ground with Kindles, iPhones and iPods to occupy our time. Stay tuned for a VLOG view shortly.

The road fortunately opened promptly at 7 pm. We were still thirty kilometers from our destination, and nightfall was fast approaching, which was worrisome. We came across a hostel 15 kilometers in, and would have stayed the night there had there been any open rooms. Unfortunately it was full, so we had to press on. Interestingly, at this junction we did come across a sign facing the other away that described the road work ahead. Instead of announcing the times the road would be closed, it instead announced, at the very bottom in tiny lettering, when the road would be open, which was a grand total of six hours a day. The only times one could cross the ONLY road in the area was between 7-9 am, 12-2 pm and 7-9 pm. Gotta love China.

The rest of ride was rough. Really rough. At this point we had 15 km to our destination, and it was already dark. The road was still the bumpy, slippery cobblestone, and it was entirely uphill for the rest of the way. I went ahead to try to get a hotel before everything closed, and found myself driving alone, in the dark, up twisty, dangerous, dark roads. I was completely terrified actually. It was one of those moments where you build character and fortitude, and just have to keep pressing on because you simply have no other alternative. It was lucky that I even found the road to the village we were looking for, as it was off to the right up an unmarked concrete road. I only found it because two guys on motorcycles were stopped there, and they directed me up the road. I found a place to stay, and was quite proud of myself when Evan and Andy, who showed up nearly two hours later, decreed it the shoddiest place they had ever stayed throughout their 8 months of biking. Indeed, the place was little more than a shack, built with plywood, tin plating and disjointed walls. There were barely walls between rooms, and there were gaps between ceiling and wall. However, after the mental and physical exhaustion of the day, I had one of the best nights of sleep of my whole life in that shoddy, dirty place. The boys also professed to have slept incredibly well. I think we were just so supremely happy to be off the dark, uphill road that the place could have been ten times worse and we still would have slept like kings.

These past two days have been days of many firsts: I’ve had my first experience trying to outrun a monsoon (on a nearly empty gas tank!); I’ve eaten squirrel and bee pupae for the first time; I’ve worn the fur of an endangered animal for the first time (not in a way you might expect); and I’ve stayed the night in the home of a rural peasant family just a stone’s throw from the very porous Myanmar border. It’s all part of the adventure of being on tour with the Portrait of an LBX gang.

After two days of traveling from DC, I rendezvoused with Evan and Andy in Xishuangbanna (or Sipsongbanna as it is called by the locals), where the boys filled up on western breakfasts and gave their butts a much needed five day break. While in Banna, Andy and I went motor scooter hunting, and we managed to find a second hand 2005 Yamaha (Chinese-made) that will enable me to tag along with the boys for two weeks without any physical exertion involved. The price was pretty much what I budgeted for, costing a grand total of $350 bucks. Hopefully I can recoup at least half of that when I resell the bike at the end of my time with the boys. The bike is a semi-manual, so I learned how to ride it pretty quickly. Aside from a couple minor injuries from accidental stupidness (I burned myself on the exhaust pipe pretty badly, which is hilariously caught on tape, which you will see in a VLOG shortly), the bike has been working like a charm, and is amazingly fun to ride.

The first day we did a fairly easy 62 kilometers (VERY easy for me on the scooter), and spent the night in a really crappy hotel in a small town called Menghai. That night, the boys met a fellow lodger named Tutu, who lived in Bulangshan, an area about 90 kilometers south of where we were (and not on on the original route). He invited us to check out his village, which is famous for its old tea trees, and the boys made an executive decision to reroute south (for more details on the area and what it is famous for, please check out Andy’s blog, the boys are sure to write about it in depth). So, the next day we traveled 83 kilometers over some massive hills and dirt roads to get to Tutu’s house with the purpose of checking out the tea fields, drinking lots of good tea, and maybe even making some tea purchases. It was a pretty intense ride, but the scenery was beautiful. Unbeknown to me, we were actually going to spend the night at Tutu’s house. Now, I’m typically up for anything, I just like being mentally prepared for it. I like knowing what is coming, and getting in the right mindset to tackle difficulties. While Tutu’s home was certainly beautiful in the pastoral idyll -there were mango trees, pomello trees, a garden, chickens, pigs, dogs, a courtyard, three generations of a happy close-knit family living together- it was also very rustic, with few to little amenities.

To my biggest dismay, there was no bathroom, and more disconcerting, no shower. Granted, the boys had it much worse than I as they were hot, stinky, and sweaty from the uphill climb, while I was only slightly sweaty from the heat rather than from physical exertion. Still, they were used to not showering every day, while I had just come from the capital of the western world where showering is pretty much a daily thing. However, I was able to wash myface in the outdoor sink, and wipe down some grit with some wet wipes, which satisfied me. I was also able to successfully cope with the other main irritant of sleeping in a farm house: the mosquitos. The bites itself suck for me, as I typically have a bad reaction to them, but that’s not what worried me. Instead, I had malaria on the mind. However, I set up a triple defense that night. I covered myself in Off, put an incense coil right next to the bed, and slept under mosquito netting. All in all, we survived the night, and it was actually a pretty fantastic experience. Tutu’s family, which consisted of his parents, his wife, his two-year old daughter, and his 10-ish year old niece (his younger brother’s daughter), were all super nice and so endearing. We spent the entire first afternoon and evening tasting Tutu’s tea, and had a wonderful home-grown, home-hunted, and home-cooked meal with Tutu and his wife. Everything we ate that night was either grown or hunted by the family. Our dinner that night consisted of potatoes, tofu, wild lettuce, pork, bee pupae, and squirrel, accompanied by some moonshine baijiu made by Tutu.

The squirrels had been shot that day by Tutu’s father, who was an incredibly fit 60-year old. I mean, he had bulging muscles. It was really quite impressive. Four squirrels went into our dinner. They were first held over the fire to get all the fur off (which granddad did by hand), then washed, and then chopped into little pieces (everything got chopped, bones and all) and then stewed. As squirrels are so tiny, you pretty much are eating chopped up pieces of bone, and I had to floss more than one chunk of squirrel bone from my teeth that night. The other unusual dish was bee pupae. Tutu’s wife, Ge Lu (pronounced like “glue”), described them as “bee babies” although it was unclear whether they were larvae or what stage of f life they were in. It pretty much looked like white mushy paste. I tried a bite, but wasn’t too enthused. Ge Lu said it was very nutritious, and I thought that they might need the nutrition more than I so I only took a little bit.

Another interesting aspect about the dinner was that it was all cooked over an open fire. A wood fire. The family had TWO TVs, but did not have indoor plumbing, a shower, or a gas stove. Not even a coal stove. She cooked over a wood fire. A WOOD FIRE. That is their ONLY cooking method. They have TWO TVs. Sometimes I don’t understand LBX priorities. But the dinner was delicious!

In another demonstration of hospitality, Tutu’s mother noticed the burn wound on my leg. It was looking pretty nasty at that point, and was still quite oozy and pussy. I had been putting some Chinese ointment on it that

I had purchased at a pharmacy, but it smelled too bad so I had stopped using it. Granny pointed to my wound, and I told them what happened. One minute later she comes out with a bag of fibers. Turns out the fibers were the fur of an endangered monkey that lives in the jungle. In Chinese the monkey is called a fenghou, in English it is called a slow loris. We are also not sure how the family attained the fur, but it was clearly quite valuable. Granny pulled out a tuft of fur, and told me to press it into my burn. I did, which made the appearance of my burn go from unsightly to “WTF what the &@#* is wrong with her leg?” in a matter of seconds. However, the monkey fur has since turned out to be an effective bandage, and has kept the skin from breaking and oozing further.

The next day we took an awesome tour of the bulangshan village, but I’m sure Andy/Evan will blog about it, so won’t go into detail here. We departed the area rather late in the day, with 83 kilometers to go to the next town. It was an easier ride back fortunately, but the bad part is that 20 km away from our final destination storm clouds started rolling in. Assessing it to be a big storm, Andy and Evan told me I should book it ahead of them to try to make it to the city and get a hotel before the storm hit. In preparation, I put on a poncho, and gunned it in attempt to beat the rain. I pretty much was racing a monsoon, and on a nearly empty gas tank to boot. Turned out thatwearing a poncho was a pretty bad idea. The wind was already picking up, and with the poncho catching the wind I was just being blown around on the road, at 60 kilometers an hour. I was hoping and praying I could get to the city in time, but the heavens broke when I was a mere two kilometers away. Luckily I was right next to an abandoned gas station right as the rain started coming down, so I just pulled under the overhang to wait it out. I was under there for only about twenty minutes -monsoons are messy but quick- before the rain let up enough for me to idle into the city, fill up on gas, and find a room. The boys had it worse than me, and came back muddy and wet about 45 minutes after me. But, we all made it.

The next day (yesterday) was me and Andy’s four year anniversary. We kinda forgot about it in the morning, as we had a 111 kilometer ride to do that day. But, 111 kilometers later, after settling into another hotel (with Internet finally!), we pulled out the bottle of wine that Andy’s mom had sent as a birthday present for Andy, bought two wine glasses at the supermarket, and set out in search of a restaurant with four walls. We couldn’t find any and had to settle for a restaurant with three walls. But it did have walls, and the food was good, and the wine was amazing. Happy anniversary to us!

I’ve been in eight cities in the past 50 hours (DC, Baltimore, NYC, Newark, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Kunming, Xishuangbanna), lugging about 90 pounds of stuff. Traveling is always arduous, but excitement about seeing my boyfriend after nearly nine months apart provided the adrenaline needed to withstand the journey. It also helped that I was able to punctuate my trip with two nights of decent rest at friends’ apartments along the way, first in Hong Kong and then in Shenzhen. Given the fact that I’ve lived in China for three years, and the Shenzhen/Hong Kong area for an entire year, I thought coming back after ten months in the States would be no big deal. I thought I was already immunized to the chaos, the noise, the lights, the crowds, the constant non-stop pace of life, the sense that money is the primary thing on people’s minds, whether for the purpose of mere survival, for simple economic betterment, or for the ability to buy Prada bags for your mistress. Turns out I felt very lost and almost depressed in the area I spent a year of my life, and the country in which I spent three years. It wasn’t the culture, it wasn’t the food, it wasn’t the language that felt alien, it was the simple fact that I felt I didn’t belong here anymore. It wasn’t my home, it wasn’t my universe. It used to be, but that has changed. Now, I’m just a visitor.

As I was on the train from Kowloon bound for the Shenzhen border,  I had this overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. The train was nearly empty as it was a 11 am on a Saturday morning, but looking out the window there was just an unending stream of high rise apartment buildings, continuing for miles and miles and miles. 1.3 billion is a large number conceptually, but it really hits you when high rise buildings continue out into the boondocks. There are no people on the streets, but still, the skyscrapers are there. I began thinking that the sheer numbers of people is why “guanxi” is such an important cultural concept in China. Without having your network of friends and family, you would feel lost and isolated in a population of millions. When the universe is so big, you need to create a smaller universe just to stay sane. It reminded me a lot of a chapter in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, when Zaphod Beeblebrox enters the Total Perspective Vortex, a machine designed to show a person their actual place in the universe. As the universe is so big, most people are shown their insignificance in the grand scheme of things, which makes them go mad, and they come out of the TPV as a babbling vegetable. Not so Beeblebrox, who was so arrogant and self-centered that he came out of the TVP fully convinced of his own important place at the center of the universe. I think that is what guanxi networks are for, they create a universe around you in which you are the center. If placed in a Total Perspective Vortex, you would be shown how important you are to your friends, family, and business contacts, and thereby stay sane. Although I still have many contacts here in China, I do feel that I stepped out of my universe, left the relationship web that holds me together and of which I am a vital component. This feeling has dissipated a bit now that I’m with Andy, and am once again grounded in a relationship network. But, if put into a TVP here in China I’d probably go insane. My universe, it seems, is now back in the USA.

Guyanese food is very difficult to make if you are a newbie. It takes years and years of practice and acquired intuition to get a dish perfect on a consistent basis, and even then, one person’s way of doing things may be completely different than another person’s.  As the recipes on the Guyana cookbook are more guidelines than instructions, I’d like to offer some cooking tips that can help put you on the straight and narrow when it comes to Guyanese food.

Don't let your roti turn out like this!

Top Ten Tips for Making Roti

1. Use WARM to HOT water when making the dough. I don’t understand the physics of it, but it makes the dough turn out better than using cold water.

2. ALWAYS keep dough covered while you are working with individual pieces to keep it from drying out. I like using a damp paper towel. Nothing is worse than working with dried out dough.

3. WOODEN rolling pins are better than marble. Something about the grainy texture provides the right amount of traction but no stick. (Beer bottles can be used in a pinch if you find that someone has stolen your rolling pin for unknown purposes, or if your significant other/children/ayi put it in the wrong cupboard and you just didn’t find it in time)

4. TIE UP YOUR HAIR (if you’re a girl with long hair)- stray hairs in the dough just isn’t appetizing

5. Use ONE hand to mix the dough, that way you’ll have a clean hand to turn on  faucet to refill your water cup without getting flour all over the sink

6. Instead of rolling and oiling and refolding individual rotis, save time by rolling just-made dough into a LARGE RECTANGLE, about twice as long as it is wide. Spread oil and sprinkle flour across the surface like you would in the recipe instructions for individual rotis, and then starting from the long-end, roll the dough up like you would a yoga mat. Then pinch off into balls, twisting the ends closed and pressing them in.

7. Individual roti balls should be about the size of a TANGERINE

8. DON’T roll roti too thin, or else it won’t rise and separate. Optimal thickness is 1/10 of an inch, the thickness of a 5 cent coin.

9. Make sure the Tawa is HOT HOT HOT before you cook. Water should sizzle and evaporate immediately when sprinkled on the surface.

10. Only flip 3 times! Any more and the roti will become tough.

I hope these tips help!

After living in China where you don’t need an ID, wait in a line, pay a cover, nor even really look nice to get into a decent club or swanky bar, the exclusivity and judging atmosphere of some clubs in DC are rather off-putting. I know that the perception of exclusivity is a good business strategy for clubs, as it attracts well-dressed, well-moneyed clientele who will make the club look good and spend lots of money, but to me it just seems oddly counter intuitive to create an unwelcoming atmosphere for customers. I’ve personally never had an issue getting into a club (being young, female and reasonably attractive is certainly an advantage), but it does make me distinctly uncomfortable to enter a place that has dozens of large bouncers standing around doing nothing but hogging floor space.
My biggest problem is with a club called Lima, which has a salsa night on Mondays that I regularly attend. There is always a relatively good showing for it being a Monday (there are plenty of salsa enthusiasts in DC), but nothing extraordinary, it’s certainly not packed, and as most people have to work the next day, no heavy drinking occurs to incite rowdy shenanigans. Yet despite this, there are always four to five big guys in suits standing around the club watching the salsa dancers do their thing. It is really hard to dance well and be carefree about it when there is a guy just a foot away watching you. Of course, I know that he is surveying the whole room, and not just watching me and internally critiquing my dancing skills (although he could be), but it is still an odd feeling. It’s MONDAY, and people are there to salsa dance specifically, not a scenario that would call for 5 bouncers to be in the room. I can’t imagine how many they would have for a typical Friday or Saturday night, but then again, I probably wouldn’t go to Lima if it weren’t for the salsa. I’m not a “there to be seen” type of person, and it is certainly that type of club. Get me back to Beijing where I could go to a club in my PJs and dance without anyone looking twice!