Tuesday, September 13, 2005
In Kathmandu a Yankee rover/Did a stately pleasure dome discover
I'M BA-ACK!
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 bedbug Valhallas and monasteries crawling with rapacious monks and nuns, listening to the Michael Jackson tape five times because the only alternative was carcinogenic Chinese music, 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 yak butters, squatting over the "ni hao toilets" from hell that were less toilets than unutterably filthy craters above 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, 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, 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 shithole called Panzhihua, which one must go to to catch the train to Chengdu, and which I had to spend a night in, from Lijiang, where we were assaulted in Tiget 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 thigh-and-soul-destroying attempt at a bike ride up the same mountain, and which left me utterly broken, though at least it was a change from the fifty-hour train ride from Shanghai, which featured 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 local brews do not vary at all), plummet from the ceiling rack and explode on the floor, and trying to ignore the whiny Cantopop (it's everywhere, on every train, bus and taxi), which is difficult considering they're fucking pumping it, and this is after four schvitzing days in Shanghai, (Mike summed it up to Isaac all too well: "Yitzhak! Your dirty city makes me schvitz!") which Nick and Liz quit all too prematurely, and 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 hits 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 read, "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, though 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, the speed limit, point blank, does not exist, the number of lanes on the road is entirely a matter of opinion, 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 honking, but I think I understand that now, because China imports 60% of their oil from the Sudan, and maybe, just maybe, they recognized the stunning 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 gotten really good, 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, 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 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 fucking songs, “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 old time, from burning up Sanlitun to Uighur food near the Workers’ Stadium, and Sir Andrew, your Chinese may have been better then, but I owns your ass now, though I will concede your Beijing accent is better, 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 morning mist or heavy smog as I did Tae Kwon Do routines alongside old women doing T’ai Chi, 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 delightful shithole 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), 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 Naughton and Mike meeting Stone Fish out in the boonies, and the wild night that ensued, involving a great meal, a bit of Chinese yellow wine (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 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 (some of you have tried it, those who haven’t, you’re next), which I couldn’t open 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 that had only been preamble, we all smelled of disgusting white liquor, and 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, the highest bar in the world (as of 2001) 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, which, though broken, should yet be fulfilled sometime soon (my boy, if you have not enrolled in a Mandarin class yet, wait, and I will join you in November—right now, women zhongwen shi xiaoxiaode haio shoushoude; come springtime, ta shi yiyang Da Shan’s, and no, I am not clutching a phrasebook right now, Nick, and I know yiyang is misused), and then there was learning to physically restrain people from getting on the subway because God damn it 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, we laowai seem to give off this uncanny light, this suffusing glow, as though we inspire the delirum of 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 something phenomenal going on, and it went on 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 best thing about 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 tremendous, liberating almost 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 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; 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”—I think tourism, for the Chinese, is their own kind of pornography, because 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 up 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, but then Mike left me, p-issed off to Guangzhou the day before my birthday, so 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 incredible, because in the first half 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, and in the space of two hours had me so bendy that I not only could I touch my forehead to my knees again, but also drop to a full split, and then, after a break, proceeded to teach me some deadly fuckin’ 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 baijiu, very good baijiu, in fact, 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), which was tough tittie 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 MUST 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 fucked up that tiger so he couldn’t jump 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.
There is more. Oh, there is so much more. I already wrote more, actually, but the story of the monk at Sera monastery, the five days overland (and every kind of terrain included in the umbrella term) from Lhasa to Nepal, and the absolute glory that is Kathmandu--these will have to wait for another day. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe later today. We'll see: for the first time in a long time, I've got nothing planned.
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 bedbug Valhallas and monasteries crawling with rapacious monks and nuns, listening to the Michael Jackson tape five times because the only alternative was carcinogenic Chinese music, 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 yak butters, squatting over the "ni hao toilets" from hell that were less toilets than unutterably filthy craters above 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, 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, 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 shithole called Panzhihua, which one must go to to catch the train to Chengdu, and which I had to spend a night in, from Lijiang, where we were assaulted in Tiget 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 thigh-and-soul-destroying attempt at a bike ride up the same mountain, and which left me utterly broken, though at least it was a change from the fifty-hour train ride from Shanghai, which featured 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 local brews do not vary at all), plummet from the ceiling rack and explode on the floor, and trying to ignore the whiny Cantopop (it's everywhere, on every train, bus and taxi), which is difficult considering they're fucking pumping it, and this is after four schvitzing days in Shanghai, (Mike summed it up to Isaac all too well: "Yitzhak! Your dirty city makes me schvitz!") which Nick and Liz quit all too prematurely, and 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 hits 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 read, "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, though 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, the speed limit, point blank, does not exist, the number of lanes on the road is entirely a matter of opinion, 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 honking, but I think I understand that now, because China imports 60% of their oil from the Sudan, and maybe, just maybe, they recognized the stunning 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 gotten really good, 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, 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 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 fucking songs, “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 old time, from burning up Sanlitun to Uighur food near the Workers’ Stadium, and Sir Andrew, your Chinese may have been better then, but I owns your ass now, though I will concede your Beijing accent is better, 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 morning mist or heavy smog as I did Tae Kwon Do routines alongside old women doing T’ai Chi, 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 delightful shithole 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), 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 Naughton and Mike meeting Stone Fish out in the boonies, and the wild night that ensued, involving a great meal, a bit of Chinese yellow wine (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 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 (some of you have tried it, those who haven’t, you’re next), which I couldn’t open 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 that had only been preamble, we all smelled of disgusting white liquor, and 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, the highest bar in the world (as of 2001) 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, which, though broken, should yet be fulfilled sometime soon (my boy, if you have not enrolled in a Mandarin class yet, wait, and I will join you in November—right now, women zhongwen shi xiaoxiaode haio shoushoude; come springtime, ta shi yiyang Da Shan’s, and no, I am not clutching a phrasebook right now, Nick, and I know yiyang is misused), and then there was learning to physically restrain people from getting on the subway because God damn it 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, we laowai seem to give off this uncanny light, this suffusing glow, as though we inspire the delirum of 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 something phenomenal going on, and it went on 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 best thing about 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 tremendous, liberating almost 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 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; 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”—I think tourism, for the Chinese, is their own kind of pornography, because 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 up 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, but then Mike left me, p-issed off to Guangzhou the day before my birthday, so 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 incredible, because in the first half 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, and in the space of two hours had me so bendy that I not only could I touch my forehead to my knees again, but also drop to a full split, and then, after a break, proceeded to teach me some deadly fuckin’ 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 baijiu, very good baijiu, in fact, 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), which was tough tittie 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 MUST 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 fucked up that tiger so he couldn’t jump 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.
There is more. Oh, there is so much more. I already wrote more, actually, but the story of the monk at Sera monastery, the five days overland (and every kind of terrain included in the umbrella term) from Lhasa to Nepal, and the absolute glory that is Kathmandu--these will have to wait for another day. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe later today. We'll see: for the first time in a long time, I've got nothing planned.
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