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.

Boredom on the Orient Express

Hour 0: The guidebook tells us that Beijing West Railway Station is the largest train station in Asia, and it certainly seems busy enough to justify so much square footage.  Even at 9:00, when we begin lining up for our train to Kunming, Waiting Room 4 must have five hundred people crammed into it.  Families squat among islands of bags that clog up the aisles, though nobody sits on the floor but us.  When we see people hack up big wads of phlegm and spit them on the floor, we understand why.

Most of the men crouching by the walls are slurping down cups of instant noodles.  We came prepared, having stopped for a plate of the famous Peking Duck before coming to the train station.  Or at least, that was the plan, but somehow we ended up being served an entire roasted pigeon instead.  It was good, but greasy.  And gnawing on the bald head was an experience I’m not eager to repeat; made me feel like I was cannibalizing Patrick Stewart.

o_O

We’re called to line up for boarding at 8:45, and the aisle turns into a scrum.  Old men shoulder past me to squeeze ahead one place in line, young women in high heels elbow past us, dragging their children by the collars.  Gradually the space between passengers is reduced to an inch, then to nothing.  Compared to yesterday’s train to Beijing from the Great Wall, this is completely senseless; everyone in line has an assigned seat on the train, which means that getting to board three seconds sooner brings no reward but an extra three seconds of train time.

We board our train and congratulate ourselves for sending our bikes ahead instead of bringing them on board and hoping for the best: our hard sleeper car is composed of stacks of bunks and little else, with virtually no room for luggage.  We happily take the bottom bunks, which have the added luxuries of a table and storage space under the beds.  We make ourselves as comfortable as possible and settle in for the next 43 hours.

Hour 1: One of our bunkmates is a youngish guy who bellows every time he yawns.  He sticks around the whole trip, serenading us with his sleepiness.

Hours 2-17: Toss, turn, and fret about our bicycles.  The young English-speaking employee at the freight counter in Beijing assured us that everything would be fine, but images of broken spokes and missing cycles haunted my thoughts, keeping me awake even on the surprisingly comfortable bunk.

Hour 18: We’re finally on the ball enough to catch sight of a sign at one of our stops.  We’ve made it to Changsha, yet another Chinese city I’ve never heard of.  Looking at our map, it looks like we’ve been going due south since getting on the train.

Hour 20: Xiangtan.  Our previous bunkmates have all moved on, and we are joined by a couple of middle-aged ladies and a smiley 3-year-old with a long rat tail and a toy musket that he tries to jab in his mom’s eye.  He quickly becomes the star of the whole car: he’s patted and spoken kindly to by every other passenger, and Jenn and I pass an hour entertaining him (and ourselves) with hilariously inept magic tricks.  He laughs every time we speak English; for comparison, I try saying nonsense syllables for awhile, and he finds these less funny.  He then tries to force-feed me an enormous slice of grapefruit, and I completely fail to teach him the word “no.”

Hours 20-41: The boy's mom and her friend eat.  Just, like, eat and eat.  Cakes, fruits, lunch boxes, instant noodles, dumplings, candy, chicken.  In fact, it seems that nobody on this train brought anything to entertain themselves with except for food.  By the end of the trip, we're wading through plastic wrappers and crumbs.  In that time, we finished a book, knit half of a sock, played Settlers of Catan, and drew adorable pictures to help explain ourselves to people who don't speak any of the languages we speak.

Hour 22: I look up from my falling-apart copy of Tom Jones when I hear a plastic hissing noise.  The little boy, under the half-watchful eye of his mom, is peeing into a trashcan.  Jenn and I exchange shocked looks.  The toilet is just down the hall, after all.  And hey, that toilet is scary as heck, and I certainly don’t want to go in there, either, but it must be horribly unsanitary to have a puddle of pee sitting open in the train.  We try not to think about it, and are a little more careful about putting on our shoes.

Hour 25: Improbably, impossibly, the radio starts playing a song from “Pure Moods.”

Hour 28: I wake up, realizing the lights and radio were finally turned off at some point.  Jenn is still awake, tells me that she can’t stop coughing.  “I hope I didn’t catch something from that kid,” she says, and I can’t do anything but agree.

Hour 35: Wake up in a city somewhere in Yunnan province, I think.  Sharp, tooth-like mountains jab up from the earth, breaking up the roads and bridges of an otherwise unremarkable, new-looking city like all the ones we’ve passed so far.  The smog seems to have returned, though that could be...just fog?

Hour 37: The endless fields and rivers have turned to dramatic rocky mountains sprinkled with distant rice paddies.  When the train veers closer, they turn out not to be rice paddies at all, but stairs of narrow paths cut into the red earth.  Too small to be rice paddies, or really anything agricultural.  What are they?

Where the cliffs are too steep for these paths they are covered in wild grass or impenetrable woods.  We’ve come a long way from the bamboo forests and gray stone of Japan.  The mountains grow higher and higher around us and my heart sinks in proportion.  Did we make a huge mistake in deciding to ride our bikes here?  Sixteen hundred kilometers from Kunming to Laos.  If all of it looks like this...

Jenn points out that it looks like Tuscany, but with more mountains.  And more dengue fever.

Hour 38: An old man in the next berth beckons me over and asks me something in Chinese.  I follow my usual M.O. and smile, shrug, and say, “Sorry.”  He repeats his question, and I go with my buest guess and answer, “Kunming.”  This seems to satisfy him, so I clarify: “Beijing to Kunming.”  Then he asks something else, and I try, “USA?”  He laughs.  Apparently I guessed wrong.  Somehow he’s able to ask me how I’m planning to travel in China without speaking Chinese.  Mister, I couldn’t answer that even if the two of us shared a language.

Hour 39: I finally break down and order a lunch box from one of the vendors that wheel up and down the aisle.  I take a picture, then judge it immediately too gross-looking to share with the world.  Tasted OK, although I question the wisdom of giving cabbage and kidney beans to people who have to share an enclosed space (and a severely nasty toilet) with one another for 43 hours.

Hour 42.5: We pull into Kunming a good 20 minutes early.  We are stunned that, 3000 kilometers later, this is the same country as Beijing: the smog has all but disappeared, replaced by the hawkers, colorful ethnic dress, and zillions of scooters that scream "Southeast Asia."  Our stomachs tighten as we eventually zero in on the freight office, but all the worry turns out to be for naught.  Our bikes and panniers are fine if slightly dirtier than we remember.  We reassemble Sally and Jenn's bike (which remains unnamed, even though I proposed the name "Bike Tyson" that Jenn dismissed with, "Why, because it's black?").  The crowd of movers and customers stop what they're doing to gawk at our routine and say what I hope are encouraging words and not, y'know, bitter curses.

Jenn and I frantically try to remember which side goes down.

Altogether this voyage cost us about 200 bucks and 43 hours of our lives.  Beats flying any day of the week.  Though next time we'll probably pack more food.  Incidentally, Jenn did catch something from that kid and spent the next 24 hours coughing.

You Ate WHAT? Championship Edition

By now, I think it’s safe that we don’t have anything to prove when it comes to being adventurous eaters.  Every time we get the opportunity to put some kind of unfamiliar critter in our belly, we jump at the chance: we chow down on chicken hearts, blood sausage, sheep testicles, live octopus, whale brains, and silkworm larvae.  And (except for the larvae), they’re all pretty damn good.  In our experience, people typically don’t bother eating stuff that doesn’t taste at least pretty okay, and we’ve armed ourselves with that knowledge in our quest to eat our way across the world.

With varying results.

Now, China has a bit of a reputation as far as food goes.  Actually, from what we’ve heard, it has two entirely different reputations: in the popular imagination, China does not consume what we consider “Chinese food” in the West, but rather heaping bowlfuls of sheep eyeballs and cat brains, fried mantises and pickled anus.  And of course, depending on whom you’re talking to and how potentially racist they are, dog.  According to the people we’ve met who have actually been to China, however, Chinese people are bigger fans of less intimidating cuisine like fried noodles and dumplings.  This was a dispute that we had to settle for ourselves.

On the recommendation of Wikitravel, we made our way to Beijing’s Donghuamen Night Market, a site we were told featured traditional Chinese street food, and also snakes and scorpions.  Truly a challenge that we couldn’t pass up.

We took in the sights and the smells, which were spicy enough to cut through the ever-present layer of smog.  There seemed to be a thousand dishes for sale, most of them on sticks, all of them distressingly familiar.  Grilled squid tentacles, meat dumplings, noodles with cabbage, roast chicken.  Vendors shouted in Chinese and in English, and we tuned them out as we had done with touts all day.  One voice, however, cut through:

“Hello!  Hello!  Snake!”

We did a double-take.  The vendor brandished a skewer of diamond-painted skin and smiled.  We ordered two, with chili.

Honestly, snake is the least intimidating weird food we’ve tried.  The taste and shape were so similar to a garden-variety squid tentacle (that’s what we keep in our garden, anyway) that we half-thought we’d been ripped off.  Still, if you can’t trust a complete stranger selling snake on a stick, who can you trust?  Snake is chewy, savory, and all in all more food-like than half the stuff they sell at KFC.  The scariest thing about this experience was the price tag: 60 yuan for two, amounting to about $10, a hefty sum that would buy four much more filling meals elsewhere.

Worried that we wouldn’t be able to fill our bellies for less than a hundred bucks, we wolfed down some safer offerings, which tended to be much cheaper than the exotic stuff: grilled corn, fried dumplings, and a big bowl of stewed tripe.  Our hunger thus sated, it was time to get serious.

The friendly-looking young vendor called to us as we walked past.  He gestured to his many-legged wares.  “Hello!” he said.  “Hello!”

“How much?” I asked, suspicious.  He told me that each stick of fried locusts was 30 yuan, and I waved him off, assuming we could get a better deal at a different stall.  “But!” he yelled, then abandoned his English, made antennae with his fingers, and began making cricket noises.  We thanked him and moved on.

Sadly, there seemed to be some kind of agreement or syndicate at work at Donghuamen Night Market, as all the prices were the same down the line of food stalls.  We returned to Bug Man, deciding that if 10 bucks was too much to eat bugs, then dammit, we were just going to have to spend too much.  We gave the man a fistful of cash and ordered one stick of crickets and one of miniature scorpions.

This is when it first hit me that we were doing something crazy.  Somehow it had never entered into my head that there’s a reason most people don’t eat scorpions on a daily basis.  They're pretty poisonous, right?  Or venomous?  Is there a difference?  The Fear started to kick in.  Were we about to spend the next week laid up with food poisoning?

Well, if we were, we resolved with a sigh, then at least we’d be the coolest kids in Intensive Care.  We took the plunge.

Cricket is, I’m sorry to say, not a taste sensation.  My worries disappeared with the first bite, which reminded me more than anything of the tiny shrimp that are such a popular snack in Japanese izakayas.  The main taste was of frying medium, unfortunately.  Though the feeling of having legs stick out your mouth as you chew is delightfully bizarre.

Round two: Jenn and Harry vs. scorpions!

Note: we made a delightfully witty video of Jenn eating scorpions and declaring them delicious.  Unfortunately, we can't post it due to technical something-something.  Anyway, little bitty fried scorpions became our new favorite food.

Scorpions were clearly where it was at.  Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to explore this new world of deliciousness, we headed back to Bug Man to try a more intimidating specimen.  This one was a whopping 60 yuan for a single nighmare-creature-on-a-stick, but we were in too deep to back out now.  Also it's possible that the venom was affecting our brains.  We scoffed at the startled-looking foreigners who were tentatively nibbling on chicken wings; we were obviously so, so much cooler than punks like them.  Who would bother to travel thousands of miles just to eat something they could get at home?  We chuckled, then dug into our bug.

And the reviews are in!

Yeah, we clearly flew too close to the sun on this one.  There was some sort of meat inside them claws, but they were protected by a thick layer of inedible chitin.  It tasted like a mouthful of fingernails, something I've finally learned not to eat.  It...wasn't food, really.  Gnawing on a mouthful of shards of black armor did nothing but cut up the insides of our mouths.  Discreetly, we tossed the thorax and tail in the trash, flushed with anger over wasting $10 on something that wasn't even food.  The little scorpions on sticks were a harmless delicacy, something that anyone could giggle over and praise themselves for being adventurous.  This big one?  This was sold only for ego purposes.

As we conducted our walk of shame back to the subway, our reputation had apparently already made it down the line of vendors.  "Hey," one vendor whispered to the next, probably, "here come a couple of foreigners who think they have something to prove.  Bring out the weird stuff!"  "Let's see if they'll eat raw starfish or something!"  "I bet I can get them to eat a hammer!"

"Hello!  Spiders!" called one man, holding up enormous tarantulas on sticks.  "Dog!  Dog!" shouted another, brandishing some unidentifiable cut of meat.  We had been branded as rubes.

"What did we do wrong?" we asked ourselves on the subway ride back to the hotel.  We had wanted nothing more than to eat what few dared to put in their mouths...and therein is the lesson.  There's two kinds of weird food in the world: stuff that people in other cultures really do eat, and that's scary purely for cultural reasons (balut, beonddegi, most state fair offerings); and then there's stuff that was never meant to be eaten, but enterprising cooks know that they can pass off as delicacies to gullible tourists or anyone who wants to show off their fearlessness.  The big scorpion belongs in the latter category along with those hot sauces that make you cry and throw up.  We had proven ourselves adventurous, even fearless.  What comes next for us is to pursue the wisdom that most people learn at a much younger age: don't put stuff in your mouth that isn't food.