Chinese New Year

It's eerily quiet in Shanghai. I checked out the rail station (pic) and there were no crowds, no mad rush, no snaking lines at ticket windows, kind of weird.

But I'll be spending the week in Siem Reap, Cambodia, to see Angkor Wat. I had thought about staying in Shanghai this Chinese New Year, but in the end, the freezing nasty cold weather made the decision easy -- I just don't do well in cold weather...

Eff'in Farm Fresh

Right now I’m an unshaven, unkempt, unruly looking man, suffering from vertigo, being back in the big city, sitting at the Guyang airport coffee shop while waiting for my flight back to Shanghai. Guyang is not exactly a big city, but any place that has wide paved roads, truck fumes and taxi-clogged traffic counts as City compared to where I’ve been for the past 2 weeks. It’s dizzying to be in a glass and steel encased space with stale air; seeing horn-rimmed glasses under gelled coifs, kids with clean faces and no running noses and not bundled up like a mini Michelin Man under 7 layers of clothing to keep the chill out; and having my toes and fingers thawed out by excessive all pervasive heating.

But before getting here, I couldn’t resist one last hurrah. On the way from Xijiang to Guyang (with a transfer in Kaili), I hopped off the bus after seeing a few dozen cattle under a freeway underpass, their breaths steaming in the morning sun. It turned out to be a cattle swap meet. (I’m not sure if you refer to them as cattle, steer, bull, cow, livestock or general bovine -- I confess to not know the difference, but I know they are destined to be beef.)

The animals ranged from year-old calves (which I’m told will fetch about CNY1,000) to big huge things that the locals use in spring festival bull fights (up to CNY10,000), led around by their owners by the nose, with about a hundred would be buyers circling. The cattle pissed and shat everywhere, and when one starts to moo the others join in a cacophony of moo, and vendors lined the side of the street hawking rice noodles.

After about 30 minutes, the buyers started in on their targets and the bargaining began. I didn’t completely understand the local dialect, but I think the bargaining went something like this: seller gives opening price, and buyer feigns shock and spits; buyer counters, and seller feigns disinterest and ignores buyer; buyer says the said cattle looks small for the price and tells seller to be reasonable, and spits; seller explains he has raised the cow for years and the buyer’s price doesn’t even cover his cost, and spits; meanwhile the cattle is getting scared shitless (well, not exactly, cos it continues to piss and shit) and wants to get away from all the people crowding around, so the owner lets the cattle walk but in a continuous circle; this bargaining and circling cattle dance continues for awhile, with both sides getting animated now, seller angry that buyer low-balls and buyer angry that seller knows the market price but doesn’t budge; the turning point seems to be if/when the two sides are close, then buyer offers a last concession and takes the roped cattle from seller to walk to the shack in the back to settle payment, and if seller lets this happen then the deal is sealed, but if seller takes the cattle back then buyer spits one last time and walks away.

I got jostled a bunch of times by circling and frightened cattle, stepped in lots of piss and shit, took pics while the farmers looked at me as if I were from another planet, and finally hailed another bus to get back on my way.

The people at the airport were looking at me funny when I got here. I suppose you can say that I look and smell farm fresh. The ticket agent looked like he was skeptical about whether I could afford the flight. Here at the coffee shop, the perfumed waitress made a point of first staring down at my mud caked boots and then flipping the menu for me to the low-budget section. Well, fuck Them and Their clean nails, cos I’m one with the cows and farmers!

Ok ok, I say this in my polar fleece top while eating a CNY78 bowl of noodles (which tastes like hell cos it ain’t farm fresh like me), while an iPod feeds Vida La Vida into my ears (…"I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing / Roman cavalry choirs are singing"…) as I type away on my laptop. But humor me. Give me my moment of solidarity with the people before I re-urbanate myself.

On The Prowl

Magic happens when the night lights come on in Xijiang. I spent the night prowling for the last pics of the trip, since this is probably my last night of the trip. I ended my New Years Day (and my trip?) with a greasy dinner at a local restaurant, where everyone except me and an old man ate hot pot with their friends -- is this old man eating by himself, a sign of things to come for me? Well, I'm having the time of my life, so if that's my path then so be it!

New Years Day 2009

New Years Day in Xijiang. The Miao girls prettied themselves up; squeal of pigs in the final throes, slaughtered for the day's feasts, could be heard throughout the valley; families sat around the fire getting happy off home brewed rice liquor.

It was cold and cloudy during the day, as it has been on this entire trip. I wandered around the town market and up and down the village on both sides of the valley, waiting for dusk and the town lights to come on, to make everything beautiful.

New Years Eve ... Yawn

Today was another transit day. I spent about 6.5 hours on the bus from Conjiang to Xijiang, a large Miao village. The only eventful thing that happened was that a rock slide blocked the road for about 30 minutes, until a bulldozer cleared the way.

I spent New Years Eve eating hot pot with a guy from Beijing and a student from Taiwan (we met on the bus), while watching variety shows on TV. Yawn... Oh, and happy new year...

Weary...

I left Zhaoxing in the morning and eventually arrived in Basha. Basha is a small Miao (minority tribe) village, and one of the hillside enclaves in Basha called Wanjiazai is one of the most traditional Miao areas left in the region -- they got running water and electricity only within the last year. There are nice rice terraces here; I got lost on one of the trails and ended up in Wanjiazai, and a Miao family invited me to sit with them to warm up in front of their fire.

On the way back to the village center, I ran into some kids that just got out of class, and took some pics. (They asked me to print and send them to their school -- I have a long list from this trip of families that I need to send pics to!) The Miao boys in this village still will grow their hair in a top knot until they turn 15, and then they can decide whether to keep the top knot or to cut it off.

By that time, I was losing steam and, for the first time on this trip, getting tired; tired of taking pics (some of my equipment fell into the muddy rice fields), tired of taking the same pics of the seemingly same poor people, tired of walking uphill, tired of being cold, tired of bad weather, and decided to go back down to Conjiang for the night instead of staying in the village (where no-one has heating).

But it was dark by the time I wanted to get back to town; the taxis stopped running and the guys with motorbikes didn’t want to take me because it was too cold. So I was waiting by the side of the road, hoping to catch a ride down to town, feeling pretty miserable, when a guy from the village store tapped me on the shoulder and invited me in his house to warm up in front of the fire (pic above).

I chatted with him, his family and his neighbors for awhile. They fed me oranges, offered me smokes, and when they found out that I’m still not married, they offered to find me a Miao wife. Actually, one of the gals sitting with us was really pretty -- she’s 20 and single, and is considered an old maid, because Miao girls get married as early as 14 or 15 -- but I think one of the other guys there has his eyes on her, so I was careful not to unleash my massive charm. (But I think Miao women can take on multiple husbands, so maybe I can be Number 2.)

I was about to have dinner with them when the older brother of one of the guys came by to give me a ride into town. As I was leaving, they insisted that I come back and spend Chinese New Year with them, because I had told them that I’d probably not see my parents this Chinese New Year. They said it was unnatural that I spend Chinese New Year alone, and insisted that I come back to join them. In fact, they said I should stay with them in Basha until Chinese New Year, which is about 3 weeks away. (That's pretty cool, to be on the farming clock vs. the daily billing clock.)

There were times on this trip when my big city guarded nature told me that people are not being nice for the sake of being nice, but because they are after something, be it to sell me trinkets or whatever. Time and time again, like today, I've been proven wrong on this trip. Just as I was slipping down hill toward my usual cynical and faux world weary self, the warm charcoal glow of genuine friendship saved the day.

Swiss Miss

The day started when electricity for the whole village went down. My room got pretty cold as a result, so I made my way towards the other end of town, had some local noodles for breakfast, went down a few alleys to find the one coffee shop in town and had my first cup of coffee in 3 days.

Zhaoxing is a bigger village than the previous villages I visited -- it's not quite as sleepy as Ping An or Chengyang, but not as nearly as developed as Yangshuo or as bustling as Longsheng or Sanjiang. It seems to be the center of a handful of smaller villages in this area, so it has a life of its own; the people here seem to merely put up with visitors, and not depend on them as much as the other villages I’ve visited. People here are nice enough, but not quite as friendly as the smaller villages.

One of my lasting memories of this village will be of the open market. I saw a few pigs being butchered, which did not bother me as much as I thought it would, but what I did find disturbing was that, after they were slaughtered, the villagers used a torch to scorch the skin, so that they could scrape off singed hair more easily. The scorching process produced this pungent, burnt, sickening sweet and chemically propane smell that lingered in the air most of the morning, and as time went on, the smell bore into my clothes and made me somewhat nauseous. This is one odor that will be staying on my permanent olfactory blacklist.

My other lasting memory of this village will be Swiss Miss Olga. When I got back to the hotel after coffee, I found this tall blond lady struggling to talk to the hotel clerk in English -- she was trying to bargain the price down, with no luck, but she was in my exact same shoes as the previous night: tired, cold and in need of a hot shower. So I took her around to a few hotels, and found her a cheaper room with hot water and heating.

Her name is Olga, a Russian born Swiss working for the U.N. in Geneva. She was friendly, super adventurous, a photographer, and we discovered that we had been traveling on almost the exact same itinerary at almost the exact dates; in fact, I think I saw her in a restaurant in Ping An a few nights back. Weird... So we decided to hike up to a small village of Tong An together.

It was a straight climb up the mountain. Half way up, we ran into a couple of guys fixing 3 trucks broken down on the side of the road. All 3 trucks broke down at the same time, trying to climb up the mountain carrying sand to build roads. They were the sorriest and sootiest bunch of guys I've seen on this trip, a few of them seemed to be covered entirely in motor grease. They had been stuck on the side of the mountain for a few days, and from what I could tell were making zero progress at fixing their trucks.

They were also the nicest guys -- we chatted them up, started to take their pics, they called over a few guys from the third truck down the hill, and we ended up having a small lunch together (well, mostly just fried dough and biscuits), huddled over a can of burning motor oil for warmth, while huge trucks came flying by blasting horns.

It took almost 3 hours of climbing vertically to get to Tong An village. This turned out to be one of my favorite villages on the trip. It's a small Dong village at the top of the mountain; we found most of village men huddled around a fire under the village drum tower, playing cards and carpentering to build a house.

I watched a few girls play a game of something that looked like hopscotch. After awhile, they asked me for candy, I told them that they shouldn't eat candy because they’ll end up having bad teeth like one of the girls in the bunch, and they thought it was the funniest thing, next thing you know a bunch of village kids were chasing me around.

We got back to Zhaoxing pretty late, and Swiss Miss and I had a long dinner, mainly because, damn, she eats a lot. She has traveled all over the place, and when I asked about her favorite destination, she started talking about India. She spent 6 months traveling in India and inspired me to make that one of the next trips I want to take, but she liked to not only eat, but eat and talk and talk. I haven't really had a real conversation with anyone since I started this trip, and it wore me out. She's leaving for Geneva from the same place I’m flying out of (Guyang), on the exact same day, and she has a list of the same villages that I want to see this week, so it makes sense to travel together. But I think I will leave tomorrow while she stays in Zhaoxing. I’m enjoying traveling alone on this trip and wandering around without really thinking about what’s next and when. To start planning on when to meet for breakfast, or worrying about how fast or slow to walk, or getting our lenses crossed chasing the same pic, is not something I want to start doing. I guess I’m a loner at heart… So, it's back on the bus for me tomorrow.