The Yangtze's Three Gorges are looking quite full these days

March 13, 2009: I'm pretty sure the toothbrush salesman had exhausted his supply by the time we reached Chongqing. I headed straight to the "wharf" to look at Yangtze River travel options.

I wanted to visit Fuling, home of some nice varieties of pickled vegetables and the "River Town" of Peter Hessler's classic book. I wanted to go there via the river, as Hessler had done before, but i was assured that no passenger boats went to Fuling.

"How do peasants from Fuling go home then?" I asked the taxi driver.

"They sit on a bus. It takes 1 hour. Sitting on the boat takes 5 hours. Why would they sit on a boat?"

The superhighway screws the river then, or rather, the (former) river transport operators - actually it's probably good for the river itself if the peasants are kept away from it... However, the truth is the river's already screwed. a situation educated Chinese blame on a lack of awareness of one's place in the world that they often refer to as part of people's "素质“, or "quality". For the "low quality" people who throw their household rubbish into the river, they say, the river takes the rubbish away from their world - their immediate area - and that's it, full stop. Throwing rubbish into the river is thus a reasonable plan. The really fucked-up irony is that as poor people's material position improves, their non-biodegradable rubbish output probably shoots up much faster than their education level. Given "low-quality" people make up a good 800+ million of this country's population, the logical conclusion is that the whole world is fucked. I wonder what percentage of China's population have even been told the idea of biodegradable and non-biodegradable.

Eventually i gave up on Fuling, so all i wanted now was a plain old ticket that entitled me to go by boat through the Three Gorges. But apparently no-one in China wants that - only packages that include marked-up entry to the various tourist attractions along the way. After all, what's travelling in China without temples and trinkets? I was about to find out. After long negotiations the company admitted there was a plain simple ol' 3rd class ticket - and at 435RMB for the 2-night, 2-day cruise it was a bargain.

Chongqing reminded me a lot of Changchun with the addition of a skyline. It's very confusing and chaotic, a bit greasy on the pavement side of things, and undeniably, potentially endearingly, ugly...well, the parts i saw anyway.


It's built on steep slopes (not in the photo above) above the Yangtze, slopes so steep that in the central city area there are many massive retaining walls - up to 20 storeys or maybe more - so you generally can't just walk from A to B, you have to know where the staircases are and they're not advertised; and huge highways dominate the river banks, adding to the messy effect and pedestrian mayhem. The passenger wharf is so far above the river (the river looked relatively low when i was there) that a special kind of toothed railcar is provided (and whose tracks mean you must take a long detour if you want to walk down) just to get up and down from the boat.


It appears to be a converted city bus, but i've no idea how or why they'd go to the effort of bending a whole bus into the required shape, rather than just making a platform with walls. Maybe it was a face project in the 80s - "Come to Chongqing - where you can sit on a bus right down to the water's edge!". Speaking of water's edge, the rubbish layer is visible even from afar:


Chongqing is also famous for awesome greasy, spicy snacks including chilli potato pieces.

The tourist boat turned out to less shit than i was expecting, given the discount price: a three-storey floating hotel, basically, like this one.


When i first boarded, the staff simply couldn't understand what i was doing coming aboard with a boat-only ticket. Did i understand i wouldn't be able to get into the "attractions" we would be stopping at? They immediately commenced upselling me the tourism products and services i'd just spent more than half an hour eliminating.

Fellow passengers, too, didn't understand why one would go travelling down the Yangtze but not participate in tourism activities. But of course, the next day when they would return to the boat from this or that temple or fun park, i would ask them how it was and the reply would be that it was just like all the others.

A suitably motley crew of characters had emerged by the second morning on that boat: The Shanxi Coal King who was desperate to "treat" me to a Chinese prostitute at the next port;


...the paranoid Taiwan Cryogenics Mogul who, after giving it to me, wouldn't let me look at his business card in public lest the details on it be seen by the Mainland riff-raff;


...the Shaanxi county-level government goons, who oversee welfare in their county (although they had strangely little to say on the subject, about as uncontroversial as subjects get, when asked);




...and the Ningxia book editor with a daughter too fond of Chairman Mao for her liking.

So i kicked back, drank beer, smoked pipes and waited alone on the boat at various Yangtze ports, until we reached the entrance to the Gorges.






Unfortunately the most immediate way they looked to me was "flooded". Although the mountains all around are probably still at least 1,000 metres high, and the portion underwater is only a bit over 150m, they really looked like the peaks of mountains sticking up out of the water. I'm sure a huge part of the Gorges' former glory and impact on travellers was due to their narrowness, which effect is obviously completely gone now. Still insane to think there used to be massive, raging rapids 150+ metres straight down below though.

And the disappointment of a spoiled foreign tourist here or there is, of course, very irrelevant. I'm convinced that the dam has brought benefits to the majority of locals. For a start, the new towns - i didn't see the old towns, of course, but by all accounts they were shitholes by comparison. And river freight transport is so much more efficient than road that these massive drive-on-drive-off ferries for trucks are almost the most common type of vessel. The multi-storey part at the back is presumably a floating inn for the truckies.



The cruise ended at Yichang, or rather, the river port before the dam that they choose to refer to as "Yichang" but is actually an hour's bus ride from that city. Luckily, by blending in with the package tourists (ie. everyone else), i was able to sneak aboard their bus and save myself the cost of a ticket.


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Photos

The Great Toothbrush Salesman of Sichuan

March 10, 2009: Rattling along through the famed Sichuan "Land of Abundance" to Chongqing...


on this train...



and i was almost falling asleep listening to some stooge try to sell Chairman Mao collectible cards when...........this guy, this golden toothbrush salesman arrives on the scene.



He had a hard sale to make here, believe me - toothbrushes are not exactly in short supply in China. I bought 6 toothbrushes from him. Or was it 10? The Chinese Dream, or rather, the China Dream in action, people.

Definitely one of the funnier episodes of the trip. And if anyone by chance sees this who understands the parts i don't - please let me know what the hell he says.

The badlands of Panzhihua

March 9, 2009: Being a tourist city, people don't really stare at the foreigners in Lijiang. But the moment i set foot on the bus from Lijiang to Panzhihua, i was out of the tourist zone and back in "real China" (i.e. the sort of China that 90% of China is). [Update: see comment 2 at the bottom for notable Panzhihua history i neglected to mention]

Every head turned, every eye on the bus burned into me, and in an attempt to express my exasperation good-naturedly i decided to say "Ni hao" loudly to each and every starer. Most turned out to be peasant kids from Sichuan who work in Lijiang.

The road across northern Yunnan Province to Panzhihua on the Sichuan border is not particularly long, but it's a steep and winding 7-hour journey. Probably 2-3 hours max if they built a superhighway. In my second pleasant China roads surprise in 24 hours, the bus driver was an absolute legend: not too fast, not too slow, drove carefully around donkey carts and peasants on foot, used the horn reasonably, and made no outrageous overtaking maneuvers. He even drove slow enough to take photos out the window, and witness the process of urbanisation:


20 years, my guess, and the towns and villages will have joined up.

Quite abruptly the country turned scrubby, reminiscent of Shanxi, as the brown haze that seems to blanket most of the Chinese countryside returned, meaning we were now in Panzhihua's atmosphere of influence. It's an iron ore city, a young one by Chinese standards, only founded in the 1960s. A far-flung outpost among wild mountains on what was traditionally the edge of Chinese civilisation, i must admit Panzhihua's noise, grime, crammed buses and predominance of massive dump trucks was a rude shock after a few days in the tourist wilderness. The signs of what i would term backwardness were pretty abundant in Panzhihua: compulsive staring, "hel-lauwww?", quite a few unfriendly gawks and glances - and, of course, the obligatory touching warmth and hospitality to a total stranger. The ticket sales lady at the Panzhihua train station, for example. She helped me work out what random station i needed to get off at to hike through and see some of the Sichuan countryside and when there would be a train, and whether there were any seats, all the while simultaneously selling tickets to other people. She finally came up with a train leaving at midnight that would allow me to avoid spending the night in the city, going instead straight through to Emei, named for the famous Emei Mountain.

I had 6 hours to kill, to which end i went for a walk into the back alleys, and the further i strayed from the train station, the stranger the stares became. I chatted to a family in their drugstore for a couple of hours, the highpoint being a strikingly Japanese-looking hot-blooded youth who ranted and ranted against (who else but) Japan, completely in Chinese of course but with the occasional, "Nnnnnnaw! Fucka!" thrown in, accompanied by much manic finger-pointing. People told me there were foreigners in Panzhihua, although the amount of staring really kinda suggested otherwise.

The Chinese today are keen to label most places in China, and indeed China itself, as "backward" (the essence of the usual shutdown of China democracy). Presumably this is a post-Mao phenomenon because as far as i'm aware Mao-era propaganda portrayed China as the luckiest country on earth. (Meanwhile Australia was proclaiming itself the, uh, "lucky country".)

A lady waiting for a train even asked me, "Is Australia or Panzhihua richer?" At last! Someone in China who, as Donald Rumsfeld might put it, knows their unknowns: I'd never heard this as a question before, only blanket statements along the lines of, "Australia is a rich country, China is very poor."

The next day the brushes with Chinese mass philosophy continued. When i arrived at Emei town it was raining and foggy and i very decisively abandoned the hiking idea in favour of a day on the internet. My next train, this time to Chengdu, was at 3am. Being just a 4-hour ride i was happy to go on a hard seat (25RMB, the equivalent of $5), and somehow i unwittingly set off a hardcore anti-Cultural Revolution, anti-Mao struggle session. These guys, two middle-aged and one quite old, were all of the opinion that Mao's only good point was that he united the country.




Actually I've always felt it much easier to talk politics and history with older Chinese people than young. I seem to remember that night in Tiger Leaping Gorge the Granite Studio blogger made a point to the effect that he is disappointed to see so many Chinese students overseas seeing complex issues like Tibet or the Western media in black-and-white, with no interest in mutual understanding or consideration of opposing viewpoints. The Grace Wang case being a prime example, in which a girl was mercilessly vilified on the internet, and subsequently "Human Flesh Searched", for trying to get Tibetan independence and Chinese government supporters to talk to each other. I would almost extend his point to cover young educated Chinese in general. From my perspective there seems to be total unawareness of the possibility that things might not be as they seem. A recently-graduated student saw me reading an article about Tibet and asked me what i thought. The article claimed the Tibetan independence movement had the "full support" of "the West" and i told him that as a "Westerner", it certainly wasn't consistent with my own experience of "the West". Credit to him for caring to ask, but he appeared to have been only fishing for agreement in the first place because he immediately replied, "No, the whole article is true."

It reminded me of the mindless absolutism of the girl in Songyuan whom i asked about the Communist Party's 70/30 judgement on Mao, to which she replied, "Nnnnaw. He was 99.9999999999 per cent right."

Older people, on the other hand, in my experience at least, tend to be much more cynical about the Chinese media and what the government says - they've witnessed the Cultural Revolution (or at least heard people talk about it), seen the 180-degree backflips of the Deng reforms. As these older people are less educated, it would seem that education may be closing, rather than opening minds - which stands to reason really, given what we know about the Chinese education system when it comes to history and politics. The irony is the kids' ignorance isn't just due to schools' political correctness, it's the old people's fault for not TALKING about this stuff with their kids. A few days later a lady told me of how her daughter complained to her that life was better in the Chairman Mao times, and how she had snapped back, "I'm going to cook you cabbage and nothing else every day for a week, then you'll know what life was like back then." But how did she let her daughter come to such a misguided conclusion in the first place, when she herself had first-hand knowledge she could have imparted? This might simply be an intrinsic part of being Chinese - you generally just don't talk about the bad shit. If something's dark and terrible, why would you talk about it when you can talk about something positive? That said, Chinese people generally respond well it when i bring up the idea of learning from the past by studying its mistakes (particularly when i talk about Australia's historical darkni). It's a part of western philosophy that they can understand and, it seems, even respect. Whether China will at some stage face the past head-on is less about the Communist Party than we assume, and more about the people themselves.

We pulled into Chengdu just after 6am - plenty of time to connect with the 8.11am express train to Chongqing. But the train stopped just outside the station and waited. Why, no-one knew. And then it continued to wait until someone decided the time was right and we finally entered the station in...at 8.10, just in time for me to see my Chongqing express roll gracefully out in the other direction.

With another 3 hours to kill, i sat down front of the rather impressive new Chengdu Railway Station, ate some dumplings and watched as a team of security guards issued fines to peasants en masse for spitting or littering.


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Sichuan photos
Yunnan photos

The magnificent Tiger Leaping Gorge

March 7, 2009: I'm not generally that much into laudatory posts, but there is no room for cynicism in talking about Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Some people were cynical that it would soon be filled up like the Three Gorges, but as far as i can tell that's a non-story. That dam project was shelved in 2007 after successful environmentalist lobbying - now that's a story, successful non-governmental lobbying in China - but there's (breathtaking, towering, spectacular, magnificent, incredible) mountain scenery to describe. And so, with those used and abused adjectives out of the way (can they be kept at bay for the whole post?)....I rocked up very early to the bus station.

"No bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge today."

"What do you mean no bus?"

"There's no Tiger Leaping Gorge bus, ok?"

"Is there a bus that goes to Tiger Leaping Gorge?"

"Yes."

"Quick, what bus?!"

"You can take the Shangri-la bus and get off at Qiaotou and then take a taxi."

This didn't sound promising. "I thought Shangri-la was a fictitious place...."

"It's not fictitious. The bus leaves in 4 minutes. Do you want the ticket or not?"

Qiaotou, it turned out, is a town at the very entrance to Tiger Leaping Gorge. The reason i had to find this out for myself was the bus station ticket saleswoman, as Lijiang locals are apt to, had never been there and probably wasn't the slightest bit interested in ever going. So unless you're taking the special tourist bus (i.e. the one called "Tiger Leaping Gorge Bus") they don't know anything about it. Qiaotou was perfect. No taxi needed, just a 1km walk and i was on the trail - the Old Tea Horse Road to Tibet.

The only disadvantage of going through Qiaotou is the troll-under-a-bridge-like presence of an evil old Australian witch. I was in the ticket office (it's a national park) and just about to set off when this hideous creature approached me with a look of utmost alarm and broadsided me: "Are you alone? Oh no, you'd better come with me, it's very dangerous..." and then after a pause, "I live here." As she said this, her wild-eyed expression suggested a psychopathic state one might expect from someone who tries to scare people for a living. I replied that i'd be right thanks, and she walked off, turning back a few times to indicate that she expected me to be following her. I glanced over and saw a giant beanpole of a German, very blond and looking about 18 years and 2 weeks old, waiting with his backpack next to her shop with a look of extreme unease on his face. He stared right at me with a look that seemed to be begging for advice but for some reason i just laughed. He'd obviously been terrorised into signing up for a couple of days by this hag's side and it wasn't my place to go save him.

Then, as i set off, she heckled me from across the street! "You'll get lost!" and then, "Don't be so arrogant!" I don't know why i didn't lacerate her in reply, i think i was just too stunned or maybe i was considering the poor German child, who would doubtless become yet more confused if his expensive "guide" were publicly labelled a witch. But fuck you old hag, i thought, this is one of the last great scenic areas left for people to enjoy exploring for themselves, and with common sense it's perfectly safe - you only need to look up the abundant maps, photos and travel stories to know that.

One kilometre down the road, an arrow marked the beginning of the trail, and up it went. After about 45 minutes of steady climbing, the trail rounded a sharp corner...


I had been looking forward to exploring it on my own but i was wary of my weak body having got out of hospital less than 24 hours earlier, so when a car drove up and a fat Israeli and her Chinese guide jumped out, i agreed to walk with them. This worked for me because by going at a fat girl's pace i would make sure i didn't over-exert myself, and it certainly worked for them because both of their English was shoddy and they were struggling to communicate. As it happened, the guide, from Lijiang, had never been to Tiger Leaping Gorge before, and he didn't admit this until after he had taken us up the wrong path. We were set straight a few hundred metres up the road when we came upon a large gathering of local families building a house, and our stupid tourist waves were met with frantic pointing back down where we'd come from. At that point i decided to follow instead the large red arrows painted on rocks at every possible wrong turn.

In between gasps of air, and when not laughing at the cows or making observations such "whoa, a satellite dish," this Israeli girl decided the time was right to impress on me just how great Israel was. Israel even has Australians who have chosen to move there, she said, including her boyfriend. He dumped her but he chose to stay in Israel, she said, seemingly with patriotic pride.

I assured her that when i eventually hit the Middle East, Israel would certainly be on the list.

"No!" she said. "The other countries - it's very dangerous. There is nothing there."

"Which ones do you mean?"

"All of them. There is nothing there."

"Which ones have you been to?"

"None of them. Trust me, there is nothing there. You should only go to Israel."

I'm guessing she might have been some kind of hardcore illegal-settler type of Israeli. The kind that supports the idea that Palestine should be wiped off the map. Oh wait, it already has been. Anyway, indisputably the kind that guys like this...


...who live in a village cut into the mountainside that would look, from the opposite side, a lot like this...


...make their living off....But no siree, there was no 100RMB for the pair today, just true grit from the sweaty Israeli. What's more, as we pushed on, the trail got even steeper and i found out she was trying to walk the entire trail in one day (i had two days), and thus couldn't stop, even for the scenery.


When we reached a "add oil station" - a small house selling surgically-chosen backpacker products like Snickers bars and marijuana. I purchased a bag of the latter, just in case it worked, and sat down for a rest and they went on. They wouldn't have made it by nightfall.

The owner of the "add oil station" was heavily promoting their honey tea, which was not exactly in keeping with the backpacker-product menu, the honey coming straight from the beehive with chunks of wax and bee legs and shit covering the surface like the Yellow River in darkest Shanxi/Shaanxi. It looked so terrible i even saw fit to check if there was yak butter in it. This was, after all, the arse end of the Himalayas on a road to Tibet.

I continued to take it easy as the road continued to climb, and eventually on one of my many scenery/rest stops, a pair of Dutchmen, or rather, a Dutchman and a Belgian, caught me up and they turned out to be great blokes. Great blokes with great names: Dijs ("Dice") and Brik ("Brik"). Classic. Brik couldn't speak English, but he managed to express that he was a manual labourer, and manual labourers in Belgium get 1 year of long-service leave, paid, in Euros, for every two years they work. That's why he was there. Dijs is a mountaineer who climbs the Alps every summer, and i was fascinated to listen to his mountaineering tales as we trekked along about 1000 metres above the Yangtze torrent below.


The Tea Horse Guest House is about halfway along the gorge, and is home to sensational handmade pizzas, dogs that won't shut up, and, on this occasion at least, exalted company: one of the elite of China bloggers just happened to be there with a bunch of his students from Beijing on a uni expedition. What's more, he did me the honour of opening forth the fountain of knowledge for most of the evening, for the low low price of just one cigarette - contraband for him, being on uni camp - which he was promptly caught smoking by another teacher. Click the above link to his blog if ever you care to be educated about China and Chinese history.


The second day in the Gorge was just one of those brilliant days that makes life worth living and death inconsequential. Early start with the sun sending streaks of light over the giant craggy peaks opposite, followed by Yunnan coffee (not as good as Lao but still pretty good), a giant hash brown from the Tea Horse's kitchen, and a joint rolled by Dijs's expert Dutch hand. He even used two big papers to make it one of those awesome cone-shaped joints of Amsterdam. I was expecting the weed to be something similar to our Gansu ditch weed that tauntingly grew everywhere but offered no effect whatsoever. But strangely enough and to my delight, it worked.

Then Dijs pulled out the munchies: weed cookies. Strong ones. So just as the effect of the joint started to wane, the cookies kicked in!

We set off, the trail now almost flat, winding along the side of the mountain, more than a kilometre above the river, and with a 4-kilometre high wall of rock topped with Mordor peaks facing on the other side. In my absolute wonder i could barely keep my eyes on the path and several times i stonedly misstepped. Had i been unlucky and it happened in the wrong place, i would quite assuredly have been smashed to death on the mountain.

Though i somehow hadn't realised at the time, the steep, stony trail we were walking is known as the "Old Tea Horse Road", and is an ancient tea caravan route along which trade still passes on horse/muleback/pack donkeys. We, nay I, as the Dutchmen were smart enough to phase away from the edge to make room, was almost run over the edge by a couple of small caravans of mules loaded with building materials: the path has regular passing places but it's usually much narrower that a loaded pack animal, whose loads often stick out horizontally. At one point we strayed from the path and ended up down in a tiny village where a new wooden house was under construction. Dijs wanted to take photos and the workers, perched on thin beams 2 or 3 storeys up, were a little frosty about this idea until Dijs explained that his father was a carpenter and it made him happy to see people still building by hand. (Chinese people really need to get over this "we are backward" hangup.)

We passed several waterfalls, the last of which required fording over slippery rocks with a vertical drop a few hundred metres straight down around 40cm to the right. This photo didn't capture it, but it did capture the attempt to capture it (Dijs is in the background).


Dijs was on hand to explain the finer details of what we were looking at - "There, between those two sharp peaks, that's a glacier"--"See this? It's a natural bonsai. The rock has stunted its growth. It's probably a few hundred years old."--"Look at those two peaks there, they look like they're next to each other, right? There's a whole valley in between them."

And also, "Look at those dots on the wall of rock there. They're goats."


At various points i found it great fun to imagine caravans of traders and all the hiding places that banditos would've had to ambush them from. (The panorama below, and the other panoramas, are worth clicking on to see big because the file has already loaded).


Alas, no banditos these days, just backpackers, and very few were Chinese. Plenty of Chinese tourists down below on the big road at the bottom near the river. But they just drive in, have a look around from down below, and drive out again. It's crazy that they don't care to see their own country's magnificence (does that count as a repeated adjective?), though it's obviously good for the ecology of the place and for that dumb type of traveller who, like me, is always seeking the 'untouched' destination to go and touch.

When we got to the aforementioned road we wandered down to a guesthouse restaurant in front of the view shown at the top of this post, where weed pancakes were the local specialty.

The drive back from Tiger Leaping Gorge to Lijiang was most notable for the minibus driver getting pulled off the road at a police checkpoint for driving without plates. The cop exuded an Australian-style cop meanness, and what looked to be a surprisingly formal and strict enforcement method. Given the driver wasn't allowed to go on, my feeling is that at least part of the money he will pay will be legitimate fines. He said the general unwritten rule was that when you buy a new car you get 30 days to hoon around recklessly without plates, although officially it is 7 days. If this whole incident is a sign that China, or at least parts of China, are now clamping down on cars without plates then that's a damn good thing. But everyone in the van felt sorry for him; and i was in turn feeling sorry for the pleasant couple sitting next to me from Essex, England, just because of their accents.

The driver wasn't even allowed to drive away - he had to organise alternative transport for all his 8 passengers. We eventually were transferred to another minivan about an hour later, and once back in Lijiang i stayed the night in that ever-present cheap accommodation option, the internet bar. The whirlwind had to go on: early the next morning i was on the road to Sichuan Province.


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Photos, including more megapanoramas.

The city of clean streets and dirty hospitals

March 5, 2009: My time in Lijiang was divided almost equally between the spotless Old City and the dirtiest hospital in China.

Well at least it's the dirtiest i've seen in China, emperor among a number of royally dirty hospitals...

Yunnan Province's name refers to "云之南", or "South of the Clouds", and i found it interesting that this could actually be seen from the plane. For the first 90 minutes, China down below was simply blanketed in thick, low cloud - well below the plane. As soon as we hit Yunnan, the clouds were blocked by high mountains (it happened so suddenly i didn't have time to get a photo; one of the mountain ranges is actually called the "Cut off the Clouds Mountains"), and the weather below became the sunny "Eternal Spring" that Yunnan's capital, Kunming is famous for. From Kunming, where I landed, I took the fast bus to Dali, another historical city, which, if Lijiang is anything to go by, is also now an ancient-China-themed theme park for Chinese tourists. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was willing to pass by Dali in the dark on another bus headed for Lijiang.




Under a massive snow-capped mountain, Lijiang's Old City is pretty well maintained - even by theme park standards. Among its large mass of pretty upturned roofs and cobbled streets it appears there are no residential buildings at all. Every single space ("berth") i saw was either a shop (tea, silver, fabrics or artwork), a guesthouse/ restaurant, or a public toilet (sensationally frequent and sensationally clean for China). The exception was one street, namely "Alcohol Bar Street". Built along both sides of a fast-flowing stream like many of Lijiang's streets, it is a street of hanging lanterns and little stone bridges, lined with ancient trees and insanely loud bars and clubs all blaring a horrible fusion of traditional Tibetan singing backed by aggressive imitation-Casio keyboard beats. "Tibetan with Chinese Characteristics" it might be termed.

Each bar has spruikers making sure you feel welcome; pity i was already feeling lousy by the time i walked down there, and thus didn't stop to let any of them try to sell their bar to me. But the main purpose appears to be generally agreed upon, at least that's the impression i got from the various male tourists who throughout the day who all started the conversation by telling me Lijiang was a "good fling place".

Where Lijiang really is beautiful is along the little rivers that run through the city - all bubbling and full of goldfish and koi. Here, earlier in the day as i lazily, stingily phased from tea-shop to art-shop to tea-shop drinking free quality tea in exchange for conversation, i had met a band from Kunming who were particularly keen to hear some East Timorese folk tunes (it comes up surprisingly often because Chinese people often ask "Which countries have you been to?"). Tragically though, in two years i have completely forgotten almost every song i ever knew on guitar. Except some Metallica so i played that.




I don't know whether it was the delicious "baba" flatbread i nailed for breakfast/lunch, or the delicious well water, which i saw many others drinking, but by 10pm i knew i was in trouble. By 1am i felt like i'd lost most of my body's water and was moving towards losing consciousness so i struggled down the stairs and found the guesthouse's steel roller door down, as formidable a fire-escape barrier as the one in Fugu, Shaanxi. But luck was on my side: roller doors are one instrument by which you can actually wake a Chinese person. I banged and rattled until i got the required attention, and headed straight to hospital.

What a hospital it was, Lijiang Hospital. Dirt caked up in the corners, goobies and cigarette butts on the floor, and sweaty unchanged sheets. To complement this, the nurse was the kindest sort imaginable - especially considering the hospital staff appeared unanimously to believe my problem was drinking-related. At one point i suddenly yakked up a vicious, bright yellow solution of liver bile into a ceramic pot beside the bed. The bottom of the pot was curved, and the yak so violent that a large amount of the said solution just looped the loop and flew right back out again, ending up all over the floor, sheets and nurse. "Don't worry," was the nurse's response. I suppose if this had actually meant she would have to mop up, change the sheets and even change her own clothes then she might have been less amicable about it. But my making a mess didn't mean she had to do a thing.

Then there was the toilet: there were 5 cubicles, 4 of which were literally piled full of plastic medicine bottles, tubes and god knows what else. A large plastic bin was in the middle of the floor, half full with used syringes and used syringes only. The place stank worse than a Dongbei shit pit in spring, there was nowhere to wash your hands, and worst of all, absolutely nowhere to hang an IV-drip bottle while you're squatting.

Despite the initial 2 bottles of saline solution, 4 hours of unremittent usage of this toilet had meant i was still feeling bone dry on the inside, so i requested two more bottles, big ones this time. I demanded the drip be turned up to hit me with full speed (last time they denied me proper speed). By the end of the first one i was feeling fine and so i decided to leave the hospital, but as i was getting up someone in another bed said, "Hey - leaking!" pointing to my drip. I looked down at my arm but there was no sign of leakage so i said, "Yes, right, thanks," or something to that effect, and continued on my way. The patient repeated, "Leaking," pointing at my hand, and only then did i notice it had swelled up fatter than a sumo's, and was squidgy to the touch. It wasn't painful at all, although it was kind-of stuck in a fist shape...what would happen if i'd just kept going for the second bottle...how big could it get? Would make a very appropriate the Fist Challenge, Steve Foxx.


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Lijiang Photos

El Finale begins as expected, but early

March 1, 2009: I left today on my 16-day, 6-province rampage that is supposed to provide enough China to get me through the next 3 years or so.

I haven't left though. I'm sitting in this cavernous airport and will be until tomorrow morning, asking myself what the fuck happened today.

It was always a sure thing that shit would go horribly wrong. It just happened earlier than i expected. I left an envelope containing almost all the money i have in the world, and 3 plane tickets, in the stairwell of a taxi. I was on the subway to the airport when i realised. I got off at the next stop and caught a train going back the other way, repeating to myself under my breath, "I'm not going anywhere." In a state of shock, i very slowly retraced my steps to the place where the taxi dropped me off. And there it wasn't.

Is it possible that there are positive signs to be read in being utterly gobsmacked by one's own stupidity? Well, i guess if i was still this stupid but didn't know it, that might be worse... no, actually that would be better.

No, no positives.

So, almost penniless, i got into another taxi (a strange thing to do for someone just made penniless - i was in shock), and directed the driver to take me home, thinking how pleased boxy would be that i'd come home so soon...absurd, i phoned her a little while later and she wasn't pleased at all.

Very slowly and deliberately, i told the driver my situation. I would like to find one particular Shanghai taxi driver, but i had no receipt, no driver number, no driver name or company name. I had the turquoise colour of the taxi and the fact the driver had a strange croaky voice.

But turquoise turned out to be representative of one company only. I called their complaints line and they took down the pick-up and drop-off points and times, and my phone number. I don't know if they just sent a text message to all drivers or if they analysed the various slivers of information super-quickly, but just as i arrived back at the gates of our apartment complex my phone rang, and a voice croaked on the other end: "Where are you? I'm bringing your thing over. I was worried a passenger was going to take it."

I plyed him with several 100 yuan notes for his trouble, and he raced me out to the maglev station.

The maglev did the 30km to the airport in 7 minutes, but it still wasn't fast enough. I got there 18 minutes before the flight departed and the airline company wouldn't check me in. Now China's overpopulated, mostly state-owned, domestic airline industry is brilliant in the way it allows you to miss a plane and simply transfer to another flight or even another company if necessary. But my 73%-off internet value ticket screwed me - only customers who pay at least 40% of the original price have the transfer thing available. I bought a new ticket for 1000 yuan, twice what i paid for the original ticket that went to waste.

But my luck was about to change. I'd brought one of Ima's joints with me, in anticipation of having a relaxed smoke-up before the flight. As such it was a very good thing i missed the flight because i doubt i would have remembered what was in my pocket and would have been risking arrest. Instead, having just missed the last flight of the day, i went outside and got nicely, unhurriedly toasted. Pudong Airport's massive terminals are very simple: two long parallel rectangles with an undercover drop-off area in the middle. Where i came out i found i was about 9/10 of the way along this drop-off area, so i walked to where the sidewalk ended. Having only one joint and no-one to share with, but carrying a butane lighter, i was in the unusual position of hoping for wind to blow the joint out after i lit it - so that it wouldn't go to waste. Sure enough, as i moved out from the shelter of the drop-off area, a wall of fresh sea-wind blasted me, and the view opened out to planes docking and taking off. With no-one within 200 metres, it made a pretty special place for an mp3-enhanced tokeup and the air guitar was freely abused. The closest vehicle was a cop car with flashing lights. That didn't actually mean anything (cop lights are always flashing in China) but it made me start thinking of the potentially farcical and tragic fate of a stoner who did the same at Pudong airport...


He first comes to the authorities' attention when he walks away from the departures hall entrance pushing a trolley out into the strong, cold wind. Others are smoking outside but they huddle near the door, shielded from the wind by the terminal building.

He pushes the trolley as far as he can - to where he can't be seen on the terminal's cameras, and the security monitoring room requests assistance from on-site police in monitoring him while he is off-camera. The first thing they see after they park at the terminal entrance 200 metres away is him rustling around in his bag and pulling out his black stoner beanie - a balaclava from a distance where the lack of eyeholes can't be made out. He puts it on his head, folding back the face-covering part.

He stands with the airport spread out before him, surveying the scene.

He has headphones on. The airport security police have been trained to be especially suspicious of suspicious-looking persons listening to music, as the headphones may in fact be a communications earpiece. Then he pulls from his pocket a small electronic gadget with a wire coming from it.

His mp3 player is not an iPod and it takes him nearly 3 minutes to to scroll through all the albums to choose what he wants to listen to. He finally puts the device back in his pocket, then proceeds to pace back and forth, his lips clearly moving now and again.

"Can't be programming a control device. He would just set it up before he came to avoid taking it out of his pockets," says a young, low-ranking uniformed cop in the car 200 metres away,

In the same car a sergeant whose eyesight is failing him, asks the young officer next to him: "What race is he?"

"Not clear. But he's foreign for sure," replies the officer reassuringly.

"Foreigner!? What do you mean foreigner, you pailful of contaminated river mud! What's that supposed to mean? You little post-80 son-of-a-donkey, do you realise your foreigner-worship could one day cost thousands of lives? We will be MORE vigilant if someone looks foreign, do you hear me? To be suspicious of foreigners is the reason we're here!"

The young officer doesn't argue.

The stoner continues pacing and talking, pacing and talking. The climax of his stoner-rock song arrives, and starts stomping around manically, almost-rhythmically, with one one arm outstretched.

"Uh, looks like a ritual. Maybe..." the young officer trails off.

"You useless turtle, it is that minority's dance, what was it - the Salazu? Yes, the Salazu's dance. Hunting ceremony. Didn't you watch the New Year Gala? Just keep watching. It's definitely the Salazu....... Maybe the Mowuhazu. They have people with hair as yellow as any foreigner's. They've made a fool of you. He's not foreign. He's Mowuhazu. I'm calling this in."

The ritual ends when the mp3 track does, and the now thoroughly-stoned stoner takes off his jacket and moves back towards the terminal, carefully tucking the wires of his headphones inside his shirt.

"404." says the sergeant "I repeat, 404. Enact procedure 36a and train cameras. Resolutely maintain vigilance and do not approach."

Inside the cavernous terminal the CCTV zooms in on the stoner's eyes. They are darting around nervously as he pushes his trolley aimlessly around, scanning for a bank of seats all to himself to sleep the night on. He scans all round the terminal - past the departure gate and security check, all the way to the other end, but there are none.

"What's the status of the 404?"

"Walking chaotically. His intentions are not clear," reports the CCTV monitoring station.

The stoner turns around and walks back the way he came. He nears the security zone for the second time.

"This is Main Departures Gate. We've just had a male walk past looking aimless, and now he's coming past us again. This constitutes a 691, no?"

"Incompetent shit collector, consult reference materials! This male is already being monitored as a 404!"

With nowhere else to go to avoid human contact, especially eye contact, the stoner once again heads outside, to the same spot, the end of the drop-off area. He rummages in his bag for another jacket, this time his windproof one.

"He's rummaging," says the sergeant, squinting. "Closely monitor the rummage."

"It's another jacket. He's walked out in a blue jumper, back in in a yellow shirt, and now he's wearing a gray jacket. He may be trying to affect our monitoring process..." says the young officer.

"Elevate to code orange. Dispatch threat team to vantage."

"Look boss, he's switching to a baseball hat. He is attempting to divert our attentions."

The stoner pulls out the small wired device from his pocket, looks at it, replaces it and moves back towards the terminal. His lips move quickly as he quietly raps along now to his favourite stoner hip-hop music.

"Look, his lips are moving. All units stand by. Target is approaching the building and he is in communication, repeat, he is in communication....dispatching approach. Maintain position, suspected control device is located in his left pocket."

"This is Approach. His eyes are moving rapidly, he looks afraid. Repeat - he looks afraid. He has seen me, and he looks afraid. Hey! - what are you doing here?"

Through his headphones the stoner hears a voice shout something and looks up to see a bulky man with a serious expression heading towards him. The stoner turns, startled, and immediately reaches into his pocket to pause his loud music.

"Vantage Group clear!"

Pop pop pop!

Cue the cartoon super-stoner alternative ending, or else, the stoner slumps.

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"Try paranoia - it's fun"