Out-of-Continuity Update

In case you're wondering...

At the moment Jenn and I are hanging out at a beautiful little guesthouse in the north of Thailand, right by the border with Laos.  Close enough, in fact, that we've been spending the last two weeks staring at it from across the Mekong.  As is our way, we showed up here by accident, planning to stay for a night or two, and two weeks later, we're still here.  We've been extremely busy writing, meditating, doing yoga, making music, and just generally being as creative as all get-out (also, "Settlers of Catan" is involved).  In a few days we take the train down to the far, far south of Thailand for a ten-day meditation retreat.  No, I don't know anything about meditation, but when have I ever let that stop me?

And oh yeah, we bought our plane tickets back to America.  It's a Christmas miracle!  See you in February, American friends!

Oh, and merry Christmas.

Home Sweet Homestay

“Is this the town?”

“I...guess so?”

In the dark of the woods, we had slowed to a crawl.  Our headlamps, their batteries run nearly dry, barely illuminated three feet in front of us, and the muddy craters that dotted the road made riding impossible.  We had gotten past what the Internet told us was the “hard part” of the day, and now had made it to the gently rolling hills and enormous potholes and mile-long stretches of unpaved road.  Sixty-something kilometers from where we had started, we reached the closest thing to a “town” we’d seen all day: on either side of the road, haloes of insects flocked around streetlights that illuminated indistinct shapes in the trees.  We saw the green reflections of our headlamps in the curious eyes of villagers, we saw thatch-roof huts and sheds and a dozen sparse buildings that could have been anything but were unlikely to be guesthouses.  It was pitch-black, and though it was probably only about 6:30, I wasn't sure if this all wasn't just a dream.

This, we hoped, was Muang Beng, a village that our hilariously out-of-date guide informed us boasted "a basic guesthouse and restaurant."  The rolling hills since Oudomxay had yielded gorgeous views of impossibly green rice terraces, bamboo forests teeming with snakes, thatch-roofed villages populated by adorable children and incredibly lazy dogs, and exactly zero guesthouses and restaurants.  We were even too tired to wish that we hadn't sent our camping gear back home (though the black, impenetrable jungle probably wouldn't have been an ideal campsite anyway).  Once again, we were exhausted, we hadn't eaten a proper meal in ten hours, and as far as we knew, the village we had arrived in was of the sort we'd been passing all day:

Oh, sure, beautiful, now show me something with an ensuite bathroom.

An island of light materialized by the roadside ahead, right next to the mile marker that said we still had five kilometers to go.  A squat middle-aged woman was sitting on a stool behind a counter that held a row of jars containing brightly-colored fluids with ladles.  Her eyes widened, unblinking, as I approached her, hands outstretched to show my peaceful intentions.

"Sabaidee," I greeted her, to no response.  "Hotel?"  I mimed resting my head on a pillow and sleeping blissfully.

She straightened and began to smile.  "Homestay?" she asked.  I looked back to Jenn, who was holding our bikes somewhere in the shadows, then nodded enthusiastically.  The woman put her hand to her mouth and called something into the darkness.  Before long, a slight Laotian man in a dress shirt came out and greeted me.

"Homestay?" I confirmed, and he nodded with a smile.  "Thao dai?" I asked, making good use of the other Laotian phrase I had mastered.  He held up four fingers.  "Forty thousand kip?"  He nodded again and began speaking to me in rapid-fire Laotian.  I did some quick math to make sure I wasn't forgetting something obvious in my exhaustion, and reconfirmed that the price came to about $5, well below anything we'd paid in Laos so far.

Before I knew what I was doing, Jenn and I were carrying our bags and instruments past a tiny but ferocious dog and up a creaky flight of stairs.  When I started to chain our bikes to a column, our host  (who surely introduced himself though we were unable to catch his name) laughingly motioned that it wouldn't be necessary.  I smiled back at him and nodded my agreement, but locked them securely all the same.  He then invited us to sit in a place of honor next to him, right beside the ancient TV that was blaring some ridiculous Thai sci-fi show.  We obliged, and he told us about himself in Laotian and some excellent pantomime: as best as we could tell, he lives in that house with three of his children and two of his grandchildren.  He has two more who are married and live elsewhere, and one of his children, the parent of the adorable little moppets who watched us warily from the corner, is divorced and moved back in with him.  Also, sometimes other cyclists stay with him in his home -- either one cyclist stayed with him twelve days ago, or twelve cyclists stayed for one day.  Bursting with pride, he showed us the souvenir that one of his guests had sent him in thanks, a license plate stamped with "J'♥PARIS."

In return, we attempted to share something of ourselves with our new friends, a feat made significantly easier by the cute little self-introduction I'd drawn to pass the time on the train from Beijing:

Goddamn am I adorable.

This was met with wild approval from our hosts.  I think it was, anyway, because the next thing I knew, our host asked us with a twinkle in his eye and a drinking motion, "Lao lao?"  We agreed with many thanks and brave faces: lao lao is the name for the local rice whiskey, moonshine really.  He chuckled and poured three thimble-sized shots of something clear from a large jar that once held gasoline.  "Did you make this?" I asked, and he beamed in response.  Down the hatch it went with a hearty "Santé!"  We politely matched our host's screwed-up whiskey face and gasp, though in truth it takes stronger stuff to shock dedicated lushes like us.

As dinner still wasn't ready, our host made it known that he'd like us to play on our instruments for his family.  Before we could start to tune up, he pulled out his own instrument from a hook on the wall.  It was a skinny wooden instrument with a bow threaded between two steel strings (I would later learn that it's called a saw duang and it's from Thailand, though I wonder if our host would agree with that assessment).  As we admired it, he began to play us a lilting, scratchy tune.

Then it was our turn.  As we were unsure if Jenn could safely sing anything without blowing the roof off that little house, we played a couple of instrumentals that were met with polite applause from the family and enthusiastic cheers from our host.  He told us something else that we were fairly sure we were misunderstanding, something about his daughter being a dancer and that we must play for her dancing, but as soon as we smiled and nodded, the matter was dropped and the party continued.

One of our host's daughters hauled a short, round metal table into the room and the other carried in big, steaming bowls of stewed mushrooms and potato soup.  It was dinner time!  I was eager to learn how to eat in the Laotian style (something that had been oddly hard to find in the touristy guesthouses in Luang Namtha), but I tried to conceal my disappointment when the family's basket of sticky rice was substituted in our case with plates of regular old steamed rice.  We politely hoovered down the seven or eight servings that our hosts heaped on our plates while we watched the family grab handfuls of sticky rice, roll it into a ball, and use the rice to pinch a mouthful of mushrooms or egg from the communal plates.  Conversation was limited, mostly consisting of encouraging us to eat more; some things reach across cultures, like apparently good-natured nagging.

When dinner was finished, our host rose to his feet, grabbed his instrument, and asked us to do the same.  Wait, first there was another shot of lao lao.  Then, before we knew it, we were bustled out the door and back out into the night.

The Muang Beng nightlife had come alive in the previous hour: clusters of teenaged boys squatted in the dirt roadside under the handful of streetlights, their faces painted in pale aqua by the screens of their cell phones.  We walked down the center of the road, not wasting a thought on the non-existent traffic, and our host explained to us what was happening over the din of the jungle crickets: "Dancing gesture, my daughter, laughter, playing violin gesture, thumbs up, more laughter!"  Over our heads, more stars than I had seen in my life winked down at us, as ignorant of what we were doing as we ourselves.

After unknown minutes of walking through the blackness, we arrived at a large white tin-roofed building.  Inside were rows of narrow, uncomfortable benches and desks and years worth of cloth banners draped on the walls.  It was only when I noticed a huge, beat-up blackboard leaning against the back wall that I was sure that we were in a schoolroom.  A dozen or so teenagers loafed in the back corner, and a half-dozen adult men sat on benches throughout the room.  Our host greeted them, and all eyes looked to us expectantly.  We met their gazes with confident smiles (well, okay, manic smiles).  "Ha ha!" we told them with our eyes, "I don't know either, guys!"  The teens talked to each other expectantly.  Were they bored?  Or nervous?

Our host urged us to sit beside him, then explained through elaborate pantomime that he wanted the three of us to play something together while the other folks in the room danced (either that, or he had a sudden-onset case of ergotism).  He readied his axe and we tried to think of what we could possibly play under these circumstances, discussing the matter through teeth frozen in smiles.  Eventually we decided to play our fastest number, "Digga Digga Doo," and we acquitted ourselves reasonably well.  Our host attempted to play along for the first three measures, then gave up his instrument for clapping along to the beat instead.  He rose and danced as well as I've ever seen a grown man dance along to a long-haired hippie whanging away the chords to a song from the 1930s on a ukulele -- that is, he danced far better than I ever will.  When we finished, there was polite if confused applause, then a return to pregnant silence.  Hoping to restore the mojo of the jam sesh (or "session") that we'd seemingly spoiled with our heavily-rehearsed Western music, we pulled a few more instruments from our bag of tricks and distributed them to our new friends: finger cymbals, an egg-shaped rattle, and a kazoo, which no one present was familiar with.

Then, with a signal that escaped our notice, the teenagers began to line up out the back door of the classroom.  Our host sat beside a drummer and another saw duang player and together they launched into a folk song that started the teens dancing.  It seems, as far as I can tell, that we were invited to a rehearsal for the local school's folk dance performance.  Most of the kids seemed to sleep through the moves, clearly having practiced before, but still, they all approached their art with far more earnestness than I've ever seen in teenagers.



One number turned into another, then another.  The students practiced some songs three or four times, sometimes to the live band, sometimes to a recording that blasted out of fuzzy speakers by the teacher's desk.  They did all the great dance moves: waving, stepping, shaking their arms around, grinding imaginary pepper mills.  A fiddler asked to borrow Jenn's viola and played along with the band with great skill.  Eventually we tried to join in the fun as well, Jenn doubling the melody on kazoo and me playing our egg shaker in a rhythm so simple it was almost racist.







Meanwhile, our host's grandchildren went absolutely nuts on the finger cymbals, the younger boy holding them with two hands like miniature full-sized cymbals (if that isn't too odious a phrase).  For hours, as the rehearsal went on and songs repeated, they kept their eyes on the dancers and began to play more and more complex rhythms, always on the beat.  As the rehearsal went on, I was more and more impressed by their enthusiasm and their rapid improvement (also, after four years of teaching little kids, I was awestruck at these kids' attention span).

By 9:30, the rehearsal was still in full swing, but our host informed us that we should probably head back to his home before we fell asleep on our faces or accidentally jabbed someone in the eye with a careless swing of a viola bow.  Or something like that.  We apologized to the kids for taking back our cymbals.  They thanked us and bowed their heads at the urging of their grandmother, seemingly dazed after breaking their long concentration.  With the kids and our hostess we walked back through the warm night, leaving the revelers behind.

Our accommodation was standard for this part of the world: a futon the floor and a mosquito net over our heads. After the day we’d had, we could have slept on a bed of snakes.  While we laid in bed, Jenn and I discussed the events of the night.  In two hours we'd gone from being desperate for a place to pass the night safely to witnessing an entirely unique, wholly authentic cultural experience, something that no amount of money could buy us in any tourist trap.  And all for so little money, we were practically stealing from our host.  We'd have to think of some way to thank him, we agreed, maybe by matching his beloved Paris keepsake with something comparable from Kansas.  So...something with a sunflower on it, then.  After another three seconds of reflection, we were out cold, and just like that it was morning.

We were awakened by the festive call of a Thanksgiving turkey (it happened to be Thanksgiving).  "Happy Thanksgiving!" we didn't say, as we covered our ears and tried vainly to get back to sleep.

Over a hearty breakfast of dill-onion omelets over rice, we could barely contain our thanks for our host.  I tried around mouthfuls of egg to explain just how much we appreciated what he had done for us, and I guaranteed that we were going to send him a gift as soon as we returned to our country.  He accepted our thanks with grace, then just before we left to strap our bags back onto our bikes, he showed us our bill: 200,000 kip.  I must have been lacking my characteristic unflappable charm, because when he saw my face he began to break down the charges (meals, 40,000 per bed, tour of the town) and show us past guests’ comparatively larger tabs.  Somewhat chastened, we paid the man and made our exit.

Before we left on a sour note, I tried to recall the advice I keep giving myself about haggling.  I know that haggling is de rigeur in much of Asia, but somehow I can never quite bring myself to do it with merchants (it helps that I'm terrible at it).  Something seems so rude to me about devaluing the merchandise that locals sell for their livelihood, especially when the best possible result I can usually get is saving 16 cents on a bunch of bananas.  "It's the principle," say lame backpacker types, and "It's unfair to charge a higher price of tourists than locals."  Some make it into that same kind of pissing contest that backpackers are so susceptible to, being able to boast that you survived for twelve years in Thailand spending just 35 cents and a pocketful of lint.

To people with these protests, I always say (y'know, in imaginary conversations with them) that 16 cents is a completely different thing for people who live on a dollar a day, and no, Mr. Tourist Bargain-Pants, that does not include you.  I certainly understand the feeling; I rankle at the idea that I'm being charged more by virtue of my perceived wealth based on my assumed country of origin, and nobody likes to feel judged or ripped off.  But hell, dude, if you're traveling internationally, you are wealthier than the person you're haggling with, and you probably can afford the extra two bits even if you don't particularly want to.  200,000 kip was more than we paid before or since for any lodging in Laos, but considering that it was necessary for experiencing something precious and unforgettable, it was probably worth the $25.

We promised the family that if we returned to this part of Laos, we would stay there again.  And we absolutely will, no matter the cost.  Next time I'll bring my accordion.

In Which Our Heroes Ride A Bus, Cross A Border, Ruminate On The Nature of Travel, and Escape a Potentially (But Probably Not) Dangerous Situation

Once again, we were staring down an infinite chain of mountains.  The days were ticking down on our visas.  Rain hammered down on the road, turning it to an impenetrable quagmire, and when it wasn't raining the wind was howling in our faces at 30 kmph.  We would need to make good -- nay, miraculous -- time in order to make it to the border and avoid dying cold and alone in a Chinese prison.

So what else is new?

This situation, like most we find ourselves in, was not...not un-entirely our own doing.  I mean, sure, we had taken longer getting out of Beijing than we had meant to, but, well, it wasn't our fault that the train we planned to take was sold out.  And, yeah, we had taken longer getting out of Kunming, but I mean, we had to bike all over creation to find a map (which, in the end, we didn't use).  But surely, 900 kilometers from the border with two weeks left on our visas, we couldn't be blamed for saying, "Eh, hell with it, let's give it our best."

"Our best" worked out to be Yangwu, a sleepy little mountain town a scant 200-ish kilometers from where we started in Kunming.  A week of blowing out our knees pushing up mountains, hair-raising pitch-black rides back down them, slogging our bikes through fields of mud to find hotels (that rarely had Western toilets but always had Wi-Fi), hunching by the side of the road eating jerky and crackers when no restaurants could be found...in short, it was fantastic, but we just plum ran out of time.  Disappointed that we would have to cross the titanic mountains ahead of us by bus instead of bike (though maybe not that disappointed), we made our way to what Apple Maps told us was the Yangwu bus terminal.  From there, we hoped to catch a bus to Jinghong, where buses leave daily for the Laotian border and freedom.

We approached a man who was standing by the snack bar and informed him of our plans to take the bus to Jinghong.  We used our best phrasebook Chinese, which mostly consisted of pointing to the phrasebook and repeating key words in English.  He nodded and explained something vaguely helpful-sounding in Mandarin, and we nodded back.  There was a long pause as we basked in our mutual understanding that we would just pretend we knew what the other was saying.  A small crowd began to gather, including a 9-year-old girl who flipped through her colorful English textbook to try and translate.  Eventually, we repeated a few of the things the man told us for confirmation.

"8:00 p.m. tomorrow?"  He nodded.

"For Jinghong?"  Nod again.

"From here?"  Another nod.

Satisfied, we returned to our entirely too comfortable hotel to enjoy the rest of the evening.  It wasn't until two beers and half an episode of "Star Trek" in that Jenn pointed out how exceedingly odd the circumstances that we agreed to were.  For instance, the fact that no buses seemed to be entering or leaving the place we understood to be the bus station.  And the fact that there was nowhere to buy tickets.  Also, he may have just been nodding to be polite.  Or, hell, to say "no."  We agreed that we would try to confirm what he told us the next day, but we would ask for another night at the hotel just in case.  Our enjoyment of the evening was dimmed somewhat by our uncertain future.  Tick-tock.

The next morning, I hustled over to the bus station (?) while Jenn nursed her sore muscles.  The bus station was a hive of activity, though it did have oddly few buses during the daytime.  The old, toothless woman running the snack bar was still there, though the rest of the cast of characters was new to me, and if the old woman recognized me, she gave no sign.  I repeated everything I was told the night before as simply as I could, and the crowd discussed my words carefully.  I must have said something right, because eventually they all started to vigorously deny that any buses ever left from there.  A different little girl with a different English textbook used the index as best she could while the other people looked to her expectantly.  She excitedly pointed back the way I came and shouted, "Way!  Way!"

One middle-aged dude used a familiar tactic: writing down what he was telling me.  I try to take it as a compliment that people assume that if I can't speak Chinese, surely I can read it at the very least.  Eventually I got what I hoped was the correct information: that I would have to take a bus from Yangwu to Yuanjiang (which he pronounced "ING-jang"), then a bus from Yuanjiang to Jinghong, then a bus to Laos.  And no, he had no idea how much the bus cost, when it left, whether we could get our bikes on it, or where exactly it stopped.  I thanked him and the others with great enthusiasm, smiled, turned away, and began tugging on my collar frantically.

After some deliberation, we decided that the best course of action was to try to bike to Yuanjiang and take the bus from there.  According to the Internet (ha ha ha), Yuanjiang did have a proper bus station where one could do things like buy tickets and wait for the bus, and it wouldn't take too long to get there since it was only 100-ish kilometers away (ha ha ha again).  The fewer buses we took, we reasoned, the less money it would cost, and also the less stress; getting our bikes on buses was usually a harrowing ordeal involving shoving our bikes into tiny spaces, and the threat of bent spokes or broken fenders was a real one.  Biking it would be.

The ride into Yuanjiang was mountainous but breathtaking.  For two days we huffed and puffed through bamboo-forested valleys and up muddy slopes that twisted through the rocky cliffs, then careened right back down them, yahooing and blowing past confused-looking farmers who smiled when we shouted "Ni hao!" to them.  It was a rough couple of days, and we nearly expired in the process, but we did make it to Yuanjiang.

Catching the bus from Yuanjiang was a fairly simple affair.  The tickets to Jinghong weren't terribly expensive, maybe 30 bucks apiece.  Unfortunately, in the process of boarding the bus we had to cram our bikes into the luggage compartment underneath, a narrow little space that had room for two bikes so long as they didn't have pedals, handlebars, or wheels.  We nearly perished with worry, especially when every little push into the compartment brought scary creaking or metallic grinding noises, and we almost destroyed our bikes, but we managed to fit them in somehow.  An afternoon of motion sickness later, and we were in Jinghong.

Jinghong is the capital of Xishuangbanna, a tourist destination for Chinese travelers, and it wasn't hard to see why.  Just a few hours south of where we started, we had clearly made it into the tropics: the main drag by the bus station was packed with fruit vendors, knick-knacks carved of bamboo, and countless motorcycles zipping through the crowd.  We crashed in the hotel right above the bus station, happy to be off that bus and glad that our race to the border was nearly at an end.  We chowed down on our last Chinese meal that we thought we'd be having for awhile, enjoying every last bite of spicy tofu.

The next morning, we readied ourselves for another interminable bus ride, this time across the border.  It was a disappointing time, without a doubt; we had been looking forward to crossing a border by bike since we'd dreamt up this trip, seeing the bewildered, impressed faces of the immigration agents and the boring foreign tourists marinating in their buses.  The reality would be different.  But then, it did beat the reality of being thrown into jail, a world made more vivid by the showing of the amazing and ultraviolent "Ricky-Oh: The Story of Ricky" on the previous bus.  Protip: don't try eating anything with red sauce while watching this fine film.  Or anything at all, really.

The good news about the bus from Jinghong to Luang Namtha is that we didn't have to cram our bikes under the bus.  The bad news: we had to hoist them onto the roof of the bus.  The station attendant pulled down the ladder, handed me a rope, and gestured for me to get on with it.  When I demonstrated my charming incompetence with tying knots, she patiently helped secure the bikes enough that I could haul them, hand-over-hand, onto the top of the bus, where I carefully arranged them as best I could on the luggage rack.  I descended the ladder back to terra firma and patted myself on the back while the bus driver rearranged the bikes and everything else I'd touched.  Good enough.

So, my nemesis, gravity.  We meet again.

The only bump in the road was a literal one.  Around hour six of the journey, we rocked out of our seats and heard a "splat" off to the side of the bus.  As we discovered later, we had sacrificed one of our water bottles to the Road Gods.  We also discovered with some alarm that someone had gone through our bags, but had apparently given up in disgust after opening our tools pannier, which contains a collection of wrenches, rags, chain grease, clotheslines, spools of thread, loose batteries, and mysterious pieces of plastic that is so precisely-ordered that it just happens to look like a bunch of trash.

You can see how shaken up we were by this intrusion.

The border crossing, an intense bureaucratic affair that we'd prepared for and envisioned for some weeks, was entirely uneventful.  This was the first land border that either of us had ever crossed, or at least the first one with an actual border crossing and guards and such.  It wasn't quite the glorious, heroic sight that we'd hoped for, but all said, it wasn't too bad: forking over a few bucks, getting a stamp, watching our Swiss busmate slip through the border without having to pay for a visa, and then back on the bus.

And just like that, we were in Laos, and everything was instantly different.  The bus dropped us on the main road of Luang Namtha, a sleepy little street that had a dozen guesthouses and two dozen restaurants on every block.  Foreign tourists with harem pants, dreadlocks, and enormous backpacks outnumbered the locals by a wide margin.  Local tribeswomen in colorful local garb shuffled up and down the street hawking bracelets, belts, and, weirdly, commemorative U.S. silver dollars; when we refused their offerings, they would pantomime smoking something, and we'd wave them away more frantically.  When we'd boarded the bus in China that morning, we were cosmopolitan world travelers, far too cool to say a word to any of our Western busmates.  Now, surrounded by free Wi-Fi and expensive brick-oven pizzas, we were marks like any other, indistinguishable from the drunken European revelers or capri-panted nervous-looking middle-aged tourists.  We had been delivered by the bus from "off the beaten track" to the head of the Banana Pancake Trail and all its questionable comforts.

For the uninitiated, the Banana Pancake Trail is what most people think of when they describe a vacation as "off the beaten track."  By some estimates, it stretches from Vietnam and Laos through to Indonesia in the south and west to parts of India.  It's a series of exotic locales in developing countries that are shockingly different from one another in culture and geography, yet virtually indistinguishable from one another from the perspective of the Western tourist.  Every stop on the Trail affords pristine guesthouses, solicitous shopkeepers, bus rides to the local cave/waterfall/jungle/extremely large ball of twine, and cuisine inoffensive to the Western palate.  $10 banana pancakes in countries where many of the locals subsist on less than a dollar a day, in short.

Over the course of this trip so far, we had had the privilege of being the only foreign travelers in the area most of the time.  In Japan, Korea, and China we were a novelty, we were relatively exotic and interesting from the perspective of the locals (that is, as far as we could tell; they could have thought we were colossal jerkfaces and we would have no way of knowing).  Each of those countries was sufficiently developed that we never had to worry about impassable roads, gangs of highwaymen, or even non-working ATMs, plus we could pat ourselves on the back about being super cool and adventurous because we were the only white people around.

Now in Laos, all of a sudden travel didn't seem like something that only cool, worldly people do.  It seemed like something done by...well, people we didn't really like very much.  The kind of people who drove very nice cars in high school or drunkenly gave us noogies during study abroad.

From Melanie Swanson's charming e-book on bike touring in Southeast Asia.  A great source of
information and chuckles!  Get it here if you're interested.

And as cool as we felt the week before, all of a sudden we were afraid that we were just like all these other people, the ones we felt so comfortable judging.  I grew more somber and reflective with each glass of beer until I had nearly given up on the concept of travel and my identity as a human being.  Maybe it doesn't take an amazing pioneer spirit to travel the world.  Maybe it just takes money.  Had we invested years of our life and thousands of dollars on a mere commercial transaction?  Sure, travel is broadening, travel exposes you to new places and people and cultures, but it's still something you get by spending money.  If all these people drunkenly singing "Hey Jude" in their Beer Lao T-shirts weren't made cool by traveling the world, then how could we pride ourselves on traveling the world?

Because, make no mistake, we aren't too different from all those other tourists.  For three or four days in Luang Prabang, we downed beers with our friends from the bus, thrilled to have the chance to check Facebook, eat french fries, and talk with some kids from Wisconsin about the midterm elections.  We drank cup after cup of coffee, our first since leaving Korea.  Were we ridiculous to go to such effort and travel thousands of miles from Kansas just to spend all our money on food that reminds us of home?

Eventually Jenn snapped me out of it (literal snaps were involved) and we pledged to spend our last evening in Luang Prabang doing something cultural.  We visited the Night Market for an introduction to Laotian culture and cuisine, and also hopefully get some chicken.  At 6 p.m. the sun was down and the market was as bustling as it was going to get.  A dozen or so tourists were snorking down pork ribs, papaya salad, and grilled bananas sold by bored-looking local teens.  Stray dogs patiently watched the diners, and as soon as the tourists abandoned their empty banana-leaf plates they were on the stone tables licking every last bit of sauce.  Chickens, unlike the rest of the city, did not wander around underfood; they knew the score.  Clouds of mosquitoes flitted through the few haloes of electric light that painted the little market like a gloomy little bar.

While Jenn grabbed us a table, I ordered us a batch of fried noodles from one of the vendors.  By the time I got back, I saw that the huge table Jenn had chosen had attracted another visitor: a Laotian dude sat opposite Jenn, and three beers sat at the corners of the table.  Jenn looked back and gave me a frantic smile, then the new guy looked to me and did a triple-take.  I smiled at both of them.

"What's happening?" I asked quietly through my smile.  Jenn smiled back, and the guy introduced himself.  I utterly failed to pronounce his name, then introduced myself to him while I opened the box of noodles as casually as I could manage.  When we began to eat, the guy pulled out his phone and glued his eyes to it.

"Uh...thanks for the beer!" I said, cracking mine open.  The guy made some indeterminate hand gesture and rose to make a phone call.  "Everything all right?" I asked Jenn.

"I'm so glad you're back," she said.  "He was trying to pick me up."

"Really?  Are you okay?"

"I think he thought you were a lady."  We slurped down our noodles, unsure of how to proceed.

After a minute or so, the guy returned, carrying three big boxes of food.  I started to protest, telling him we'd already eaten, but he seemed to pay me no notice as he tore open the styrofoam containers.  Then, out of the corner of our eyes we saw one of the purple-scarved old ladies who sells bracelets approach our table.  The guy waved her over, then beckoned into the distance.  Within seconds, there were a dozen old ladies, all dressed identically, all bearing cloth shoulder bags or beaded bracelets.  I was dazzled by activity: they all started to grab for the food, or maybe they were laying their goods on the table?  The guy took a handful of bags from one of them and started to flip through them in front of us.  In our time in Luang Namtha, we hadn't seen a single Laotian person pay the tiniest bit of attention to these ladies.  Was he in the market for a fringed purse or souvenir bracelet?

"We should go," Jenn said.

"Yeah."  Our beers still full, our dishes on the table, we stood and walked away briskly.  I saw the guy look up to us before I turned away, and I quickly mumbled a thank-you and apology, and then we were gone, power-walking back to the hotel as politely as we could manage.

We still have no idea what was happening at the Night Market.  It could have been a scam of some kind, some way of distracting us in order to grab our wallets or swindle us into buying unwanted merchandise.  Then again, it could be that we had caused some great offense by ungratefully running away from a friendly local who wanted to share his food and culture with us.  I don't think we'll ever know.  But the next day, we were gone from Luang Namtha, escaping the situation as well as our philosophizing about travel.  It was back to being the only honkies around and being too tired to care.  Almost, anyway.

Listicle Touring: 6 Amazing Things You Don't Know About Life in China That Will Literally Restore Your Faith in Humanity. What Happens Next Will Blow Your Mind. Hashtag.

Over the *mumble* kilometers that we traveled in China, we had the chance to encounter a fair number of crazy, kooky things in China that we hadn't expected.  And now, for your illumination, I present them to you in the traditional manner of my people: a numbered list.

1. Babies wear pants with a big ol' split in the crotch.

Note: this is not an original photo.  All credit to the original photographer, mostly
because I don't want to be known as the dude with all the photos of baby butts.

Yes, we'd heard of this before visiting China, but there was still something of a triple-take every time we saw these garments in action.  The usual emotional journey goes like this: disbelief, shock, disgust, curiosity, looking away because you don't really want to be watching a baby ding-dong.  Historically, these pants were used instead of diapers, which does kind of make some sense if you live in a country with a ton of outdoor space and not an abundance of clean things that can afford to get baby poop all over them.  Now that diapers are more common, you'll often see diapers worn under the split pants, which makes all kinds of sense.

In our experience, parents seem to be pretty on-the-ball about being respectful with baby poop.  This cute lil' guy with the mohawk, for instance?  We looked away to take some photos, and happened to look back just as the mom was holding him gingerly over a plastic bag (sorry, no photos of that).  The boy seemed to be taking it in stride.  I would have opted for the traditional "Dog Doo Technique" and put the bag inside-out over my hand.  Actually, knowing me, I would have probably fled the country instead.

2. People smoke cigarettes out of enormous bongs.

This one was a bit of a shock.  Old men (and only old men) assemble by the side of the road or in little restaurants throughout the day and stuff the filter end of their cigarette in the chamber and pull huge lungfuls of smoke out of the bong.  Sometimes they're made of elaborately carved bamboo or wood, but most of the time they're this sort of repurposed-tin-can material.  I assumed they were just huge pipes, but we saw waitresses pour liters of dirty water out of these things into the street (and onto our shoes).

Our only guess is that these bongs are so popular because, I've been told, Chinese cigarettes are nasty.  Even nasty by the standard of foul-smelling rolls of tar and cyanide.  So maybe they use these to...I don't know, make the smoking experience more pleasant?  I guess it must beat quitting.

3. Condoms are extremely plentiful.

Photo also not taken by me.  I'm not a creeper.

Walk into a pharmacy or supermarket in China and there's usually a giant wall of condoms.  This is notable mostly compared to our experiences in Korea and Japan, where condoms are usually very surreptitiously kept behind the counter or hidden away somewhere, and then usually only one or two boxes of local brands.  I guess Korea and Japan are both struggling with population decline, and...um...

...Is this insensitive?  I feel insensitive for bringing this up.  Let's move on.

4. Everybody wants a photo with us!

Basically everywhere we went, whenever we had even the slightest interaction with someone in Yunnan province, when we finished up they asked if they could take a photo.  Shopkeepers, hotel staff, waitresses, random pedestrians, everybody wanted a piece of us.  Sometimes they wanted to be in the photo with us, sometimes they just wanted us...standing there awkwardly (well, I'm not sure if that's what they wanted, but that's what they generally got).  This guy poured me a beer and tried very, very hard to communicate with me while I was waiting for my dinner.  We're best friends now.

This guy just happened to be around, I think.

We always heard that foreigners traveling in this part of the world got a lot of attention from the locals.  And sure, we occasionally hear people mutter the word laowai as we walk past (the equivalent of gaijin in Chinese, and also one of about four Chinese words we understand).  But the attention all seemed to be pretty positive, as far as we could tell.  People wanted to talk, they wanted to know something about us, but mostly they just wanted a record of us being there.  Can't say I understand what they would do with these pictures -- "Hey, remember that guy I met for thirty seconds, the one I couldn't talk to or understand?" -- but it's nice to be celebrities all the same.  We're trying to enjoy it before going back to looking like everyone else (but far more attractive).

5. They sure eat a lot of bread in China.

Photo also not mine.  No bread has ever lasted long enough around me for anyone to get their camera out.

We assumed that, like Japan and Korea, the diet in China would be generally rice-based.  But while we were in Qingdao and Beijing, everyone sure seemed to be eating and selling a whole lotta bread.  Flatbread, fry bread, onion bread, cheese bread, rice bread, rye bread.  Bread bread bread.  Bread.  Bread is a funny word, isn't it?  I forget where I was going with this.

6. There's three-wheeled cars everywhere!

Yes!  Just like Mister Bean!

Actually, a lot of them seemed to be three-wheeled motorcycles (some kind of...tri-motorcycle) that confusingly had the shell of a car installed over it.  Whee!

Chinese Whispers

I never really cared about going to China.  For the last half-decade or so that we've been planning this trip, my head has always been filled with images of sweltering jungles and banana pancakes.  Lao, Thailand, Cambodia, those are the places that stir the imagination.  China, on the other hand, brings darker things to mind: open sewers, dirty streets, contaminated food, crushing mobs of strangers who spat and smoked and shouted, toxic clouds of pollution, an oppressive government spying on its citizens or disappearing them in unmarked vans.  These ideas come from the American media, from friends who've spent time in China, or from my own frantic imagination, and even though I knew they were probably of limited veracity, they hung over my head as our ferry pulled into Qingdao port.  Years in Japan had intensified my already timid nature; I feel like crying when someone cuts in line in front of me, how the heck was I going to cope in China?

Over the next four weeks, though, I found myself proven wrong in the best possible way.  The people we met were friendly, welcoming, and chatty (even when we didn't understand a word that was being said).

The food was abundant, easy to order, cheap, safe to eat, and damn delicious.

Except for the scorpions, of course.

The scenery was absolutely breathtaking.  Especially where we did all of our cycling, Yunnan province, which means "South of the clouds."

And the cycling, most importantly, was top-notch.  Mountainous, sure, and therefore exceedingly difficult.  We were unable to keep up our usual molasses-on-a-cold-day pace what with all the 20-kilometer climbs, and so we had to cut our visit short to get out of the country before our visas expired.  But if we had had another 30 days, we would have spent every one happily pushing up those mountains and taking photos of clouds.

The road leaving Kunming is lined with these solar- and wind-powered streetlights.  On a windy day like this, the turbines hum like cicadas. 

Unfortunately, China's nice modern roads are the product of constant construction, which leaves day-long patches of road that are nonstop mud puddles or dusty pothole fields.

 

Of course, not everything about China is perfect.  Beijing was a good city to be a tourist -- easily navigable by bike or foot, plenty of English, lots to see and do -- but the pollution was so unbelievably thick every day we were there.  It was so bad that skyscrapers a block away were all but invisible and the sun looked like it was coming through smoked glass.  In a way, Beijing felt like being in the future.  The dystopian future, y'know, where the earth is too far gone to save and all we can do is cough and squint and hope that it doesn't go completely kaput until we're already dead.  Leaving the city for the countryside was a relief, but we haven't forgotten how awful it felt to be somewhere so polluted, and I hope we never do.

And we did find the pushing, rude, anarchic China that we'd head so many horror stories about.  In fact, we lived it for one brief afternoon.  On our trip to visit the Great Wall, which is only a short train ride away from Beijing, we made it to the train station an hour early for our return to the city to find the station completely mobbed.  We took our place in line and scoffed at the bent-backed grandmothers and young spiky-haired dudes trying to muscle past us.  "Where do they think they're going?" we asked each other quietly, unable to believe that someone would be so rude in order to get on the train 5 seconds faster.

As time ticked closer to departure, though, the station swelled with more and more passengers desperate to get a spot on the next train, which was also the final train of the day.  Miles from the city, none of us could afford to be stranded out here overnight.  Hundreds packed into the hallway, and it grew more doubtful that there would be room on the train for all of us, much less room to sit down.  After an hour of waiting, all thousand of our knees began to ache and we all knew that we needed to get on that train.  Uniformed officials shuffled around uselessly, occasionally making announcements far too quiet to be heeded (also they were in Chinese).

When the gate to the platform opened at last, civilization collapsed.  We all broke into a run.  Elbows out, backpack clutched to my chest, I sprang between mothers and their children, headbutted my way past old men with canes and young women in high heels.  A hand grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back, but I shook it off and sprinted to the end of the platform were there were already a dozen people waiting.  The train pulled up and hundreds of eyes stared at that door hungrily, all breathing that we would kick our own mother in the shin to get a spot on that train (sorry, Mom), so tired were we of waiting and so desperate to get away from this awful place.

In the end, we did make it on the train.  As far as I know, no passenger was left in a bloody heap at the station.  Somehow, Jenn and I even got seats.  We stared out the window into the smog, breathless and dry-mouthed, and we wondered if the price of getting our seats was worth the spiritual toll we paid.  All it took was a little bit of discomfort and a little bit of fear to turn two friendly, sensitive hippies into crazed animals who were perfectly ready to murder the crap out of Piggy if that's what it took.  If this is what train travel in China was like, if this sort of unmediated competition for limited resources was a regular situation to be in, then that must really make it hard for the people who live here to be nice people.

As bad as we felt, we still kept our seats.  I don't know how many orphans or limbless veterans had to stand up for another two hours, and I didn't want to know.

I don't know why China has such a terrible reputation in the West.  I think a fair amount of it stems from good old-fashioned racism; hell, Chinese people have been distrusted or outright reviled in the US for a couple hundred years.  There's also a healthy dose of distrusting the other major world superpower.  I mean, there are more Mandarin speakers than English speakers in the world, and that's scary as hell to a place where few dare utter that USA does not equal #1.  I guess the biggest reason there's such a negative image of China, though, is just basic media scare-mongering: people will watch a news program about a big bad empire of not-white people who oppress their citizens and hate our capitalist freedoms.  Programs about diverse, complicated places don't really make it to air.  And I don't mean to say that China's without problems (because that would be a dumb doo-doo-headed thing to say), just that it's really easy to assume from watching the news that America is nothing but school shootings, state-sponsored executions, and McDonalds, and that's just as ignorant a caricature as thinking that China is nothing but jack-booted authoritarianism and poison toothpaste (and pandas).

So I guess the lesson here is: don't trust the media (sorry again, Mom).

The other, probably more relevant lesson?  China's an awesome place to tour, and we're sure as hell coming back someday.