Rough Day...

I jinxed myself, spoke too soon about clean buses and seated toilets and easy bus rides. I just finished the roughest 24 hours of my trip so far, and would sell my first born for a hot bath.

It started with almost freezing to death last night: the family I stayed with does not believe in heat. And they live in a wooden house with zero insulation, so the temperature of my room was the temperature outside, which was about 5 degrees Celsius. I slept in socks and 3 layers of clothes, with my hands literally in my pants to keep them warm, and I still froze my ass off.

Oh, and then there was the squat toilet, the only one available where I stayed. Yes, I squatted. What choice did I have? I even squatted twice. My thighs got kind of sore after the first squat; the second time around, I learned to lean back a bit, to shift the weight off my thighs and, as scary as is sounds (and feels), shift my weight backwards, as if to roll back into the pit, but it felt much better. Anyway, the cold weather and the fitful sleep and the squatting made for a cranky morning.

And then I missed the bus. I first headed back to Sanjiang, but missed the one daily bus from Sanjiang to Zhaoxing, a Dong village in Guizhou that I heard about. I could have stayed overnight in Sanjiang to catch the next day's bus, but Sanjiang is a dump (see pic above) (besides, the choice of meats at Sanjiang restaurants is not to my liking: rat and dog), so I rattled off the names of a few other villages I heard about to the station attendant and they pointed me to a bus to Congjiang.

This bus was stuffed to the gill, with a dog and a duck and 3 birds in the aisle. And it smelled bad (I probably added to the bad smell, after a second day of not bathing). And people smoked non-stop -- they weren't smoking no weak Marlboro lights or menthols, they were smoking the full on local smokes. And bus fumes leaked into the cabin the whole time. And the first 3 hours out of the 4.5 hour trip was over dirt roads -- these weren't just unpaved roads, they were muddy and full of craters, in fact we stopped twice for mudslides to be cleared, and I literally was bounced from my seat, ass completely in the air without contact with ripped blue vinyl seat, more than a few times. (I was glad I made the decision to squat earlier in the morning, otherwise things could have gotten ugly, and more smelly.) (One last thing about squatting: when I lived in Japan, a friend of mine tried to convince me that squatting was actually a more healthy way to toilet than sitting, something to do with the body being placed in a more natural position where the small intestines are aligned with the colon, making for a smoother exit. My friend said that this was proven by scientific research -- I don't doubt that, because the Japanese are probably the most scatalogically oriented people in the world, so they would do studies about squatting vs. sitting, not that there is anything wrong with that, I love my Japanese heated toilet seat with multiple spray and massage options.)

So I finally get to Congjiang, sore ass and all, and the bus driver remembered that I wanted to go to Zhanoxing, so he pointed me to another bus that went to Luoxiang, where I could hire a taxi to take me to Zhaoxiang. So off I went to Luoxiang, another 2 hour mini bus ride, this time over paved roads, only by the time I get there it's already dark and there are no taxi's in sight. One of the other passengers heard me asking about Zhaoxing, so he said that I could hitch a ride with him if I help him load his truck. I said ok. It turns out that we had to load and unload a pretty big haul of aluminum siding. Damn, so I had to do manual labor to get a ride, why des that not surprise me, on this day, the mother of all bad travel days. So I helped out with the aluminum siding and hopped on the back of the truck for the final open air ride up the mountain to Zhaoxing. Oy vey, what a day.

By all indication, Zhaoxing is a beautiful place. I'll be spending the next two days here, exploring the town and surrounding villages. Now I got to find me a hot bath…