Right Location, Right Time

Tanti Amina and her four children live in Keur Massar, a community on the outskirts of Dakar.  To look at it, Keur Massar could be extraordinarily old, a ruin of some forgotten war, with crumbs of concrete being swallowed and regurgitated by slithering mounds of ochre sand.  On the contrary, Tanti Amina's neighborhood is very new, under development for only about three or four years.  In fact, Tanti Amina's house—sparkling-clean, ornamented with various succulents in pots of seashells behind the front gate—is under construction, too, with workmen piling concrete bricks on top of the roof and hammering at all hours.



She tells me one morning that she plans to turn the extension into a location, another apartment for vacationers to rent for a week at a time.  I tell her about AirBnB, and she seems interested.



Inside, meanwhile, it is cozy, tastefully decorated (not that I'd know, of course), with comfortable, new-looking couches—the kind without obvious butt grooves, that tend to have tablets left on them (best to check before you sit down).  As Mohamed, my self-professed guide (he pronounces it "gweed"), shows me in, Tanti Amina and her children greet me warmly, excusing their lack of English.  I thank them profusely, promising to try my best with French for the next week.  Considering the type of houseguest I am, it gets much easier once Tanti Amina reminds me of the phrase n'importe quoi, "it doesn't matter."



After a few fits and starts, mostly due to faux pas or fear of committing one on my part, we sit to eat dinner.  It's late, after 9:30, and I apologize for seemingly having kept the family waiting.  I assume my poor French is what causes their confused looks, though it becomes clear over the next few days that dinner in Senegal rarely happens before nine, nor lunch before two.  We eat our couscous and chicken in a rich red sauce from a common dish while sitting on the floor, and though Tanti Amina's questions lead me to believe this isn't an everyday affair, the family's evident comfort with eating in this style make me marvel at its authentic exoticism or exotic authenticity.

Before going to sleep, I fret for awhile about eating before the young woman who cooked our food ate her own dinner—am I profiting from some misogynistic tradition where the younger daughter eats after the rest of the family?  My mind is put at rest the next day when Mohamed tells me that that girl is the family's hired help (giving rise to anxiety about having committed another faux pas by being unable to tell apart family and employees).




It's a long, dusty walk to anything from Tanti Amina's house.  No taxis come anywhere closer than ten minutes away, to the Shell station near the highway.  As Mohamed walks me that way in the morning, I note several horses and donkeys lashed to strange two-wheeled carts, as well as dozens of big golden eagles wheeling over the unfinished, brightly-colored houses.  Later, in a crowded city bus painted brightly like the Jeepneys of Manila, we ride past bald vultures clashing on what looks like an abandoned playground.  It's relatively quiet between Mohamed and me on the bus, and before that on the walk, as well as on the taxi rides downtown, across town, and back home.

Mohamed and I hadn't gotten off on a very good foot, unfortunately.  But that's a story for another day.

Casablanca

It hasn’t been all that long since I’ve traveled somewhere new, but it’s been long enough that I’d forgotten just what it feels like.  Specifically, I seem to have blocked out just what a fantastic mix of lows and highs the whole affair is.  The lows started coming on sometime while I was writing the previous blog post, and got much lower after I boarded the plane to Casablanca.

After carefully stashing my small backpack and my precious ukulele in an overhead compartment and getting settled in the middle seat right by the wing of the plane (of course), between two middle-aged Arabic-speaking men, I was alarmed to see another passenger take my bags out of the compartment, insert his own hefty rolly-bag, and roughly begin to cram my uke and backpack back in.  “Hey, hey, careful!” I snapped, half-standing.  Every passenger in the back of the plane turned to look at me…except, of course, the guy who was manhandling my gear, who continued to stuff them in between other, much heavier suitcases before finally sitting down.

For the next half hour I sat there fuming, hating every minute of the travel experience.  I hated how long we sat on the runway.  I hated the cramped space.  I hated the fact that the video screens hadn’t been turned on yet.  I hated the smell of the other passengers.  Most of all I hated the notion that some rando had busted my gear, the valuables that had been so carefully packed, that had survived thousands of miles of travel by train, ferry, plane, and bicycle.  I eventually convinced myself that the only thing that was likely damaged in the repacking was the half-finished bag of Cheez-Its in the side pocket, and those were mostly busted already.  This conclusion ended up being entirely correct.

Something else I’d forgotten is what it feels like to travel alone.  The last time I traveled anywhere without Jenn was ten years ago now, and I mostly remember spending my time moping around London and Oslo, shunning human contact and feeling sorry for myself for not having any money.  That may have been a function of youth, or perhaps listening to too much mopey music (which itself is often a function of youth); whatever the reason, wandering around Casablanca for three hours felt like an almost comically long amount of time.  And while I still shunned most human contact during my day on the town, spending a few hours walking and taking pictures definitely felt like a high point.  (It helped that the $20 I withdrew from the ATM turned out to be way, way more money than I needed for buying a coffee and lunch, enough that I also splashed out on a couple of pastries in the marketplace and a bottle of water in the airport.)

I didn’t forget how much easier traveling by yourself can be than traveling with another person…in fact, I had never known this.  It’s lonely, sure, but not having to justify poorly-informed or impulsive decisions cuts back on stress in a big way.  For example: after a nap in the airport-provided hotel, I rather unwisely decided to just walk towards where Google Maps claims the Old Medina is.  It should come as no surprise that there was very little where the pin was placed by Google, but the fact that I was only wasting my own time made the experience much less of a thing.  Likewise, choosing a restaurant is often a fraught experience with travel partners: when one person doesn’t like the feel of a place the other person suggests, that creates some natural conflict.  (Also, had there been anyone else around, I probably would have been embarrassed that after two and a half hours of wandering around the city I ended up eating at the awesome French restaurant right by my hotel.)

Speaking of, it’s striking just how much less stressful it is speaking French with people for whom French is likely not their native language.  I’ve griped about this extensively before, but it bears repeating that many French people are kind of…well, to put it as kindly as I can manage, they’re proud of their language, they place a premium on being well-spoken, and they don’t take terribly well to the fumbling efforts of cretins like me getting grubby fingerprints all over their beautiful language.  Speaking a simple sentence in Korean or Japanese in those countries is frequently met with smiles of relief (and sometimes literal applause), no matter how simple the grammar or how awkward the pronunciation.  Not so French people, who tend to correct minor errors and/or appear frustrated when they hear a foreign accent—not that everyone we’ve encountered has been rude, of course, but no matter how kindly it’s done, it’s frustrating to have one’s best efforts with the language met with condescending correction at best and angry criticism at worst.  This is one reason I managed to make it out of seven months of living in Normandy and still speak pretty piss-poor French.  After today, though, I’m hoping that I’ll discover that speaking French to French speakers not from France will be just as easy in Conakry as in Casablanca.

And what of Casablanca itself, then?  In some ways, it was completely different from what I had expected: it was quite green, especially from the air, and it was chilly enough that I ended up needing the hoody I’d packed.  In other ways, though, my expectations were confirmed: the architecture is white and dusty and gorgeous, the coffee is powerful, and the city is crawling with a population of extremely pathetic-looking stray cats.

That may not be a great deal to learn over three sleep-deprived hours getting lost in Casablanca, but it’ll have to do for now.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever stop thinking “I wish Jenn was here to see this,” but it’s good to know that I can have a good time discovering a city even when I’m alone.

Air Male

I know that I’m breaking very little new ground when I say that airports aren’t the most pleasant places; the better airports are generally distinguished not by appealing qualities, but by the relative lack of the indignities that characterize the species.  When graded against pretty much any other human-built structure, even the best airports would fall short—less convenient than train stations, uglier than government buildings, less fun than, say, Dave & Buster’s.

All that said, New York JFK appears to suck even for an airport.  Unlike in O’Hare, outlets are in criminally short supply, so I type this sitting cross-legged on the white tile floor, hoping it’s less dangerously unhygienic than it looks.  There’s also a complete lack of electronic departure boards, so underlying all the boredom is the persistent worry that my gate has been changed or flight cancelled without any way to know.  So I sit here, eagerly awaiting the moment when I can stand in line to sit in a tiny chair and breathe in recycled farts for six hours.  The only way to travel!  (In that there is literally no other way for me to reach Guinea.)

I’ve been traveling for twelve hours now; I have about twenty-four more until I arrive in Conakry, Guinea.  My flight lands at 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, and the first day of school is Monday.  Tick-tock.

I’ve been teaching for roughly eight of the last ten years, which I understand will make me something of a hotshot at the international school where I start work in about sixty hours.  It’s nice to be taken seriously and have my experience respected as a useful resource.  On the other hand, all eight of those years were enabled by my exacting qualifications of being born an English speaker and pretty much nothing else.  It should be no surprise that I’m still stuck in that wonderful tailspin of ego and imposter syndrome that’s characterized my career to date: “How dare they treat me as a clueless newbie just because I’ve been hired without any teaching qualifications?  They’d better respect the expertise I have to contribute to the school community…just as long as they don’t discover that I actually have very little idea what I’m doing!”

Twenty-three hours and fifty minutes.

Of course, they know what they’re getting.  Last year this school actually offered to hire Jenn and me both, sight unseen, certification unnecessary.  The only thing that kept us from accepting on the spot was prior commitments, but the fact that I have another year of graduate classes and teaching experience under my belt should make me overqualified if anything.

This is it, then, my big chance.  After the next six months and a few more grad classes, I’ll have the license and Master’s degree to back up the sense of self-importance.  I’ll be qualified to teach in elementary schools around the world.  Assuming, of course, that I make it out of the next six months alive.

That’s another point of conflict: for as much credit as I get from friends and relatives about my international lifestyle, I’ve spent extremely little time in developing countries (to use a somewhat loaded term), and all of that has been in very tourist-centered countries such as Lao and Indonesia.  Sure, plop me in a foreign city and within a day I’m confident I can manage the subway system and mail a postcard home.  The thing is, in addition to having to worry about tropical diseases, poor infrastructure, and wild dogs, I understand Conakry lacks both public transportation and a postal service, rendering my international skills (such as they are) pretty moot.  Mooter than usual.  The mootest, even.

What little I know of my incipient workplace has been fragmentary and not a little frightening.  I understand the school lacks a lot of resources and until this year was housed in a relatively unsafe environment (the phrase “razor wire” doesn’t crop up in most pedagogical literature), and has been kept open and revitalized by the U.S. government in order to maintain diplomatic relations with the country.  Communications with my new coworkers have done little to allay my worries.  If nothing else, I’m confident I can manage the students; jokes about butts transcend culture and language, I’ve found.

I think it would be relevant to bring up how alarmingly poor is my knowledge of Conakry, Guinea, and Africa in general.  I can finally point the city and country out on a map after a bit of sweating, and I know that the lingua franca is French (appropriately enough) and that the region is famous for drumming and, more recently, Ebola.  I feel a bit sheepish about entering a long sojourn in a country with such pathetic ignorance of my new temporary home (not that that stopped me in Korea), but with twenty-three and a half hours to go, it’s a bit too late for that.

I guess knowing things about Guinea is about to sort itself out, one way or another…

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.