Clearly I´ve made it far in the professional world of the Ecuadorian Amazon, the other month I was asked to judge an elementary school plant contest. Here I am in Mera with José, our volunteer from the Orchid Garden.

For several months we had also been working with a high school environmental club. As a culmination project, we had some of the kids come to a local elementary school to teach the kids about their projects, show a video, and work with the kids for a short afternoon.

One of the sights in town thats always amazing is packing the crates of naranjilla, a fruit incredibly common to the region (and consumed throughout the country), but thankfully not known well outside of Ecuador. Its an environmental mess to cultivate, and it doesn´t even taste very good.

And an orchid (Brassia) for good measure.

After several months of planning, discussions and phone calls, we finally got the website put together before Christmas. You can read about PC volunteers around the country, and soon we will be out in Spanish. Its kind of a grand culmintation of our two years here, and although there is clearly a slant towards the volunteers we know personally, like the ones in our group, we hope that this website is just the beginning, and that future PC groups will be able to keep it running. Free publicity for volunteer´s and counterpart organization´s work! So link to it on your blog please, so that it will show up in the Google results.

Feb. 2010

Ok, Marcie didn´t help with the website but she´s just so wonderful and I couldn´t be here without her.

Boobies and more boobies, I don’t know what more there is to say, the Galapagos are an incredible place for anyone, especially a pseudo-scientist. It was kind of like being in an open zoo, or wild animal park: the animals are numerous and docile, not being afraid of humans because of their evolution in the absence of predators. I went with a couple of great Peace Corps friends, it was great to have a week in Ecuador but free from normal life. We spent the week staying at a hostal, taking day trips to the volcano, around the island, and out on the water to snorkel. I left them once for a day to go on a dive, but the snorkeling was easily just as good. It was amazing to see the marine life, it was kind of a mix of California and tropical (as I guess it should be); there were wrasses and sheephead from California and surgeonfish, butterfly fish, and angelfish from the tropics. I didn’t get to see hammerhead sharks, but there were tons of turtles, rays, and sea lions; we also saw dozens of white tipped reef sharks in tide pools. The islands struck me as real meaning of tranquilo; on the mainland I often find that people are fairly easygoing but are still often impatient, whereas here people really walked the walk. We were on Isla Isabella, admittedly one of the less touristed and more local islands, but people drove slowly down the few roads in the town, something I rarely see elsewhere in the country. Most of the commentary I read and hear about the Galapagos surround the environmental impact of tourism, but I found relations between the community and the marine and land reserve to be more relevant (although this is likely due to the fact that I was there in the off season and not on the main island or a tour boat). The land reserve, as in the National Park, was the first National Park in Ecuador, and is of course the source of the Darwin legend. However, being an island ecosystem makes it extremely susceptible to invasive species, and the island is ravaged by goats, cows, and pigs, in addition to several exotic plants, among others guava. I believe that goat control has been conducted on a fairly large scale, but it seems to have caused community problems (they like hunting), and more animals remain of which the park is not removing. The guava, on the other hand, is extremely invasive, and not only does it seem out of the reach of the park’s management, but they don’t seem too involved in education. Every month to the islands arrive dozens of foreign volunteers set on saving the environment by feeding lettuce to captive tortoises; I can think of a few manual labor tasks that would serve them better. The marine reserve is a different kind of story, it is only a recent addition, only 10-15 years. Locals are allowed artisanal catch, and big boats from outside are banned, but this seems to be frequently subverted and / or bribed. Theoretically, a marine reserve should improve the fish stocks, thus benefitting the few fishermen that are permitted. It’s a sad refrain for me that everywhere I go around the world, land or sea, people say that there aren’t big animals like there used to be.

A couple weeks ago I got the books out on the road (and trail) into the jungle. A friend of mine was going out to an indigenous Shuar community so it seemed like a good time to hop along and visit some schools out in the interior communities.

These communities, or ¨al dentro¨ they are sometimes called, are the ones that can´t be reached by road, meaning you have to get there by airplane, motor canoe, or foot. We rode in bus and pickup for a couple hours,

then walked about four hours into two small commnuities of about 100 inhabitants each.

The communities definately look different. Most houses and buildings are made out of the traditional materials, there`s much less trash, and people (especially kids) are dressed much simpler. The school rooms looked about the same as ones along the highways. High school kids go off to town to live with an aunt and uncle and attend high school, although some girls get pregnant at a young age and never make it out. The little kids are precious though! They are fascinated with the hair on my arms and some even called me "colono", the word for a mestizo (non-indigenous) Ecuadorian!

Food was also noticably different, being in much scarcer quantity. Chicha, a fermented yucca drink, makes up most of the diet here. Its really sad to see the malnutrition in the kids resulting from parasites and vitamin deficiency. The land produces fruits and vegetables but the people have lost the custom and impetus to grow them.

The saddest thing of all thought was seeing the road that is being blazed in towards some of these interior communities, a fact that is repeated throught the Ecuadorian Amazon. It is true that roads can bring the promise of economic development to rural communities, but its is a proven fact that road construction is the primary agent of tropical deforestation. Roads open new land to logging and subsequent development, usually cattle grazing but sometimes mineral exploration. Do not be mistaken, indigenous communities take great pride in their rainforest riches, as they have been for the hundreds of years they have been inhabiting them. However, many fail to see the connection between roads and deforestation. One enlightened local leader of an Ecuadorian NGO told me once, you open a road to the communities but what have they got to offer, what do they have to sell? Timber, nothing else.

Two local groups I have met in Ecuador do work that stands above their peers. One is Amazon Partnerships Foundation, a group that works with local communities to implement small scale development projects to improve quality of life and protect their local environment.

www.amazonpartnerships.org

Another is EcoMinga, an organization that manages ecological reserves located in valuable and threatened ecological habitats.

www.ecominga.net

Thanks for all your donations and encouragement! I`ve finally been able to start going out to the schools and working with the environmental ed books that took so long to print. These pictures are from a few days ago when I went to a few communities outside of Puyo. The kids are 7-8 years old, could read and write a little, and were very polite. They were in a small town if a few hundred, and taking into account the surrounding farms, the elementary school held about 75 kids, allowing the classes to be reasonable grouped by age. In the smaller communities, an entire elementary school will be clumped together in a class no larger than 20. Many of these communities are separated by only a 10-20 km, but the remote jungle makes travel difficult. Sometimes the teachers arrive at dawn and leave the same day on the only cars that come to the village, other times they stay for the week and go home on the weekends. All in all, the teachers are often coming from outside of the communities, making community relations occasionally strained. I´m starting to think that more than anything, the books will be most useful as a literacy tool. Of course the schools have a few basic textbooks to read, but I`m hoping that this is going to give them new materials to practice on, and the books for the younger kids are especially designed to be brief on text, while mixing with drawing and fun activities. I can`t say that its not sad to see a nine year old struggling to write the name of their community. The best that this book can do is give them a chance to learn basics of reading and writing, while doing it in a context of the natural world that surrounds them. The last picture here is of the teacher walking across the stream to get from the road to the school. This school was named sacha runa, which in local Kichwa means jungle man or jungle person. The town was named lan yacu, yacu means river, and lan is a tree known as sangre de drago, whose sap is used as medical treatment for healing scars, among other ailments. And if you are looking for a vacation this summer, I can always use help carrying the boxes for the longer jungle hikes that are coming up!

Its election time in Ecuador and if you thought politics in America were too much, just come down here. Since March its been every day in your face, rallies, parades, and talking cars. Out in front we have President Rafeal Correa, big fan of fist pumping, who greeted the crowd in Kichwa the day that he came to Puyo (Correa spent some time volunteering in a Sierran Kichwa town when he was young, and gathers a lot of support from them, by far the most numerous indigenous group in Ecuador). Below is a poster of him that reads, "You decide between the dark past or this marvelous future that is the Democratic Revolution!" On the street post we have Lucio Gutierrez, of Party 3, asking "Vota 3 otra vez", as he was the president before Correa, only to be impeached! Some of his other ads say, we were better off before with Lucio, and things were cheaper with Lucio. I find it interesting that all the parties feature their number much more prominantly than the name. The name is usually some combination of the words independent, alliance, country, socialist, progressive, etc. However, the number is (I`m quite sure) designed for illiterate voters. In fact, in TV ads, they clearly instruct a voter marking a ballot marked with the party number.

¡MOVIE STARS EXPOSED IN PUYO!

I have to say that one of my favorites here is the guy in the middle of this photo, in the black shirt, kind of looking at the camera. His name is German Flores, his slogan is 100% German Flores, leading many foreign visitors to Puyo to ask me, why do I see so many ads for flowers from Germany. The only reason that I really like him is his striking resemblance to Rambo. I was running alongside this parade like a giddy schoolgirl trying to snap a photo of him.

How do you say "thug" in Español?

This candidate for prefecto (governor) makes no attempt to hide that all he wants to do is pave roads. This ad reads, more asphalts for the province. Some of his other ads read "Mas vialidad". Unfortunately, vias means roads, not viability. Once I actually met him in a fancy restaurant in Puyo. It was a rainy afternoon and we were the only two groups eating lunch at 3 pm. An Ecuadorian friend I was with wanted to tell him about our orchid garden, to which he responded, yeah, its raining alot these months so Pastaza is no good for tourists, but we`re busying paving roads to improve the access. A couple weeks later the bridge near my house collapsed.

Or maybe "goon" would be a better word for this guy?

These guys just don`t know how to look good for the camera, or anything else for that matter. Maybe they`re trying to portray the image of security.

No, its not the gay pride parade of Puyo, the rainbow flag is the symbol of the nationwide indigenous party, Pachatutik. This party is acutally supporting the guy in the drawing above.

In Ecuador anyone can be a candidate, and when you don`t know anything about the candidate, you can look at their title to get a little idea about them. A few are Dr. (usually a lawyer), most are Ing. or Lc. (college degree), but a few are more interesting. The young girl in the photo here is an Od, which means Odontologist, or Dentist.

Next we have the Pastor, (on the left)

and finally, my favorite, the cute girl in the poster on the bottom is the waitress at the restuarant where I usually eat lunch! She`s running for the National Assembly, the equivalent of Congress! I hope she loses because she`s the only person who remembers to bring me the hot sauce.

New project: I`m working on printing some school materials for rural elementary schools in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Its actually a continuation of some environmental education materials that were written by the previous volunteer here. Walk into some of the rural schools here and you will find a dearth of materials, books; even the essentials like paper and pencils that we take for granted are missing from these classrooms. We´ve come up with a 25 page textbook about the plants, animals, ethnic groups, and conservation issues in the region. I`ll be distributing a paper version (as well as digital CD) during the next semester of the school year, from March until June, I just need a few thousand dollars to be able to print these materials. You can see a few sample pages I`ve attached. Its in Spanish (obviously!) but you should be able to figure it out. To donate go to the link below, at peacecorps.gov in the donors section.

Please feel free to share this with any one you know, teachers- biology, Spanish, etc, grandparents without email.

See the book!

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=518-328

This is a new website that I made for an ethnobotanical garden in Puyo.

The Presidents come to Puyo!

Our president Economista Rafeal Correa came to visit our humble abode of Puyo last week, along with his "compañero" Hugo Chavez.

Peace Corps prides itself on remaining apolitical, as much as could be possilbe for an arm of the US government. So, for the sake of international diplomacy, I will refrain from all comments about our socialist friends in the south and simply say this: Hugo Chavez is fat. Really fat.

They came to speak at a big coliseum, there were perhaps 3,000 people, and almost every one of them tried to rush up to the front to shake hands when Correa and Chavez walked in. Correa was wearing his typical indigenous, semi-casual white floral pullover, while Chavez was decked out in his favorite colors of olive green and more olive green. The crowd loved them both, but loved Correa more. It had the energy of a campaign rally, which is to say, a lot of energy, considering that this was a fairly normal state visit in a medium sized city. They just get really excited here. The sound quality was poor, but I definately heard Correa shout "la patria ya es de todos" a few times, and several times I heard Chavez thrash out the word "imperialistas."

¡WILD ANIMALS!

Why do I love Ecuador today? Because I went jogging outside of the town where I live, through the sugar cane fields at the foot of the mountains, and I got chased by a goat!

Disclaimer: Not the actual goat. Any resemblance to aforementioned goat is purely coincidental.

I've been working at this orchid garden outside of my town. Its a fascinating place, I wanted some excuse to be able to hang out there and learn about plants, and when I started talking to the owner, he told me that he wanted a website. I had been wanting to learn for a little while, so I gave this a try (I had some help from friends)

www.jardinbotanicolasorquideas.com

New Photos on Picasa!

dams and apartments

It was about time for a haircut- with the dudes in Quito in late September for a reconnect meeting. Everyone had stories to tell and local counterparts to show off. PC sent us staight home from school on Friday so that we wouldn't get caught up in the chaos of election weekend. So far I've hardly heard a car honk their horn.

Welcome to Puyo, Ecuador, the second rainiest city in the world. Its beautiful when it stops raining. I'm settling my way into life here, sampling strange drinks and exploring my new home for the next two years. When I go to a new office people here often great a newcomer by saying, "we're here with open doors, open arms, etc.," and if you look at these photos you'll see that my apartment really does have open doors. So much that in fact one day the mother next door returned my camera with several new photos that the kids had taken of themselves when they walked off with it for a day without me noticing.

June 2008

Ecuador: Cayambe and quito

Training for Peace Corps Ecuador

Working hard in the at

the beach in Canoa Ecuador.

It was hot at night

Waterfalls in the Sierra

Nov. 25. So many airports! From Melbourne, a flight to Sydney, 36 hours, two runs around the botanical gardens, two self cooked dinners of pesto spaghetti, and one awesome McD’s apple turnover later, it’s onto Japan. Halfway there, in Cairns, the footprint of Japan begins; an entire airport of well dressed tourists incapable of speaking any language but Japanese; the only people speaking English are the helpless store clerks. My flight was to Nagoya, on account of the price, but it was delayed, so I rush through Nagoya station onto the shinkansen, then onto food old Kintetsu, asking strangers along the way to borrow their cell so I can call Masayo to pick me up at Saidaiji at midnight. All I had to do was step foot into the ocean of Japanese and the language came pouring back out of my mouth, faulty at best but nevertheless flowing with Osaka ben in full effect. We go to Tomo’s apartment, she gets excited, we drink some wine, I’m happy. After a quick stop at 100 yen for supplies and Nara Fam for breakfast, it’s off to another airport, KIX, for Korea. I sit next to a nervous Korean woman, she seconds my order of aka wain (red-o win-u? she says) and tells me about her job as a stem cell researcher in Kobe, her brother goes to / works at Penn. Talk about brain drain. I’m overwhelmed with a feeling of effortlessness as I arrive in Seoul, hop on an airport bus, wander through some streets and alleys in the dark to a hostel to meet my friend Rieko.

I’m here without a guidebook or even a map, and can’t speak a word. I’ve got nothing more than a set of directions and one phone number, and it doesn’t bother me an inch. Halfway between Japan and China, geographically and culturally; clean but not anal, friendly but not loud, Korea seems perfect after three days. Food is flavorful and plentiful, the wine is strong, the trains are fast and no one spits. Onsens, mountains, temples, even a little Great Wall of Korea! I’ve yet to see Seoul in the light of day, but Pusan is a striking city on the south coast, skyscrapers packed in the narrow valleys of modest mountains, think and green although the views are clouded by the thin veil of pollution, most likely blown across the sea from China. The fish market smalls of fresh catch, fried in vats of oil at countless restaurants; ancient women push carts of produce and herbs through crowded alleys. I hop on a posh bus that sends smartly dressed passengers to Seoul every 20 minutes. The ride passes cities of apartment blocks, neat shipping yeards, and trim wheat fields, all shimmering in the early evening dusk unique to winter. I return to a booming Seoul; sparkling lights illuminate designer shops and luxury Dunkin Donuts. Throngs of fashionable Seoulites browse the bright lights after work, while even more trendy Japanese women on three day vacation packages spree through the city’s famous shopping districts. Most prices are labeled, a change in the last few years, my friend says, and bargaining, in any language, is usually met with stern refusal. I find that Japanese, not English, is the language of commerce here. Hashing out in Japanese with the Korean vendor, we both complement each other’s language skills, and occasionally I whisper, you don’t have to rip me off, I’m not Japanese. In the morning I explore one of Seoul’s famous palaces, a miniature Forbidden City that happens to be newly refurbished and squeaky clean. Its beautiful, just a little too shiny to conjure images of stubborn despots fighting off invasions of Japanese samurai. At the medicine market, the air reeks of Ginseng, and wrinkled faces shuffle slowly yet aggressively through stalls and barrels of wood chips, used for tea. I remember that my tropical summer journey has turned into winter in the northern reaches of Asia, and Seoul is several degrees colder than Pusan or Osaka, and its time to find something indoors. The search for the perfectly ridiculous tourist experience is this time found at the Kimchee museum. We spend an hour gazing at plastic models of dozens of different pickled cabbages, and I learn all about the wonders of anti-bacterial fermentation. I take a night river cruise, its not a bad view, but Seoul’s heart is not bisected by a river, its skyscrapers and neon lights are scattered in the distance, and the river side is a lonely park, populated only by, what else, ten vendors selling exactly the same product. Have we seen this before in Asia? This time is snacks, Korean sodas, and of course, the inevitable instant noodles. We spend the final morning at the National Museum, a fantastic collection of a culture absorbed and modified from Chinese, only these people were brash enough 50o years ago to abolish Chinese characters completely. We get our last fill of Korean food at lunch, who would have thought that putting white rice in a small metal bowl would make it taste so good? And of course there is lean tasty steak, sizzling tofu soup, and our favorite spicy pickled vegetables.

June 14. I rode a bus from Siam Reap to Bangkok, coming the other direction into Cambodia its known as the “scam bus”, but here it was no problem. I took an uncomfortable mini bus from Siam Reap to the border, walked through customs (they did not ask for ticket proof of departure from Thailand, theoretically a requirement), and all I had to do was show a ticket stub and I was let on the luxury bus going the remainder of the way to Bangkok. Crossing the border was a shockingly disparate view of the two countries, from a dusty wasteland in Cambodia to a paved four lane highway lined with trim timber plantations in Thailand. Bangkok was amusing, it seems everyone who has ever been on an airplane has gone or will go to Bangkok sometime in their life and return with strong feelings, so here are mine. Its an amusing city, the food is superb and the temples are wondrous, all gauchely draped in gold and decoration at every possible turn. Anybody driving a wheeled vehicle will try to scam you, and they can lie like its their job. Distances multiply, temples close, and buses vanish in the tales of these gypsies. June 19. I’m on the way from the beach back to Bangkok, it wasn’t easy but I managed to find the bus station in Surat Thani after someone tried to take me to a private bus, and then they city bus passed by the long distance bus station while I wasn’t paying attention. Taking buses in countries where I couldn’t speak the language, I almost always got by with stating the name of my destination only once when I got on the bus; it didn’t work this time. In Thailand there are foreigner tourist buses and then there are local buses; its nice to travel with locals, but the foreigner buses are more comfortable and infinitely easier for about the same price. It’s a no brainer. I arrived in a dark neighborhood of Bangkok around midnight in a grumpy mood, too proud to pay overpriced taxi fares, and ended up walking a few blocks through blackened streets until I finally got a ride. Probably not the safest thing, in retrospect. For our last night in Ko Samui we found a local restaurant (amazingly) for dinner; it was stupendous. Ko Samui is decidedly upmarket and geared for older tourists who don’t want to see much of real Thailand. The other day we took a tour to Ang something marine park, the tour was brief and dumbed down, full of soft drinks and corny jokes. You’re better off just finding a boat that can drop you off at the park headquarters, where you can rent a tent, borrow kayaks, and explore to your hearts content. On a twenty minute hike from the HQ I saw a troupe of langurs. Wow. I dove at Sail Rock, one of the most famous spots around Ko Tao, it was murky and the coral was sparse, there were tons of pelagic fish though. We rode elephants on Koh Phanang, they were slow and sad beasts, reluctant to move. On Phanang we stayed at the Full Moon Party beach when it was not full moon, thinking this might make it relaxing. There were few people, but the bars seemed to ignore this fact, pumping out dance music across the beach to scores of empty tables. Our best times were spent drinking at our cliff top sunset view bungalow and playing euchre. June 22: Ayuthaya, ancient capital of Thailand, a park of brick ruins scattered across a flat river island. I rode a bicycle around the park for the day, the ruins are frequent but scattered, there are more than anyone would ever need to visit. The temples must have been impressive in their day, filled with shiny Buddhist images, but in the 21st century, mere brick ruins in a park of mowed grass and evenly spaced trees just makes me feel like I’m walking around an abandoned school yard. I was amazed how few tourist there were; most were Japanese. A woman walked up to me offereing a copper medallion engraved with the Buddha, it looked like it came from the machine where you insert a penny and a dollar and your penny comes out elongated and engraved in the coat of arms of some fishing club. She was the only person who really tried to sell me anything in this town, and her persistence made her seem like some kind of a messenger. I saw a giant snake swimming through a pond of lotus at the park; maybe it was a salamander. June 25, near Chiang Mai. I tried going to Doi Inthanon National Park, but I arrived in the border town Chomthong too late. While I was realizing this, a kid offered to take me into the park on his moto. I had been unhappy with the lack of hospitality and forwardness in the random strangers of Thailand, and when this guy came up to me, spitting out fragments of poor English and offering help, I grinned and thought, yes, that’s what I’m talking about! After waiting around for little while, we decided it was too late to try to go into the park, and then searched to no avail for hotels in the town. He offered to take me to his house, and I said sure, thinking it was just some little flat down the road, as he said he was a college student. I hop on the back of his moto and he proceeds to drive into the jungle, through two other National Parks, for about an hour, to his tribal village deep in the mountains. His family and village are Karin people, an extremely large ethnic group that lives in the rural areas of Northern Thailand and Burma. The village holds maybe 200 people, many have pickup tricks and solar panels, but there were few lights on when we arrived not long after dusk. All the women wear exactly the same dress, and the babies have clothes and usually even shoes. It would be a good stop on a trek. The kid brought me to Doi Inthanon NP the next day and seemed to want to take me on to Chiang Mai with him, but I let him leave me at the park headquarters. Before I began my travels, I remember reading in several guidebooks and websites that when you are traveling, especially alone, basically every local person who is nice to you is trying to rip you off. Well, after traveling for several months in Asia, often alone, I can confidently say this is profoundly wrong. Sure, if they are a tuk tuk driver and live in Bangkok, Saigon, etc, this is true, but there were countless occasions where my faith in the fellow man was met with help and friendliness. Doi Inthanon sucked. I finally found the park headquarters, I assumed that I would be able to find everything I needed there: lodges, restaurants, and trails; parks like this are often developed around the HQ. The highway runs northwest into the park and towards the summit, the HQ is located at km 30 from Chumthon, immediately after the turnoff for Siriphum waterfall. But there is nothing at the headquarters. They have food, but camping or luxury guesthouses are a kilometer away. I ask for a ride to the campsite, they say no, I have to carry it. It is summer; all of the trails are closed except for a 300 meter nature loop at the summit, 17 km away. What the hell, I stay, and let my hill tribe friend continue on while secretly paying for his lunch while he was away making a phone call (I was unable to pay for any other food or gas). I lug the tent and the Walmart sized sleeping pad down the highway to the campsite, and I spend the rest of the afternoon looking for the closed trails, assuming there should at least be a sign in Thai leading to a closed trailhead. I found nothing. I would ask farmers and point to the trail on the map and they would just shake their head no. Even in the winter a guide would be crucial in order to find the trails. I did manage to find some greenhouses full of ornamental mums. Now I’m drinking in coffee in the restaurant, a true National Park cafeteria begging for tour buses and windshield tourists. My waiter (there are currently no fewer than nine staff serving zero customers) squelches in Thai at the women in the kitchen and walks with the feminine hip shuffle found in countless Thai men. There are forested mountains all around me that must be dripping with monkeys, I just can’t reach them. Instead there’s a big highway through the park scattering farms and villages almost all the way to the summit of the mountain. I’m starting to feel like the demanding tourist who has an agenda and wants it met; earlier I was happy with just seeing what appeared around me. The other night at the river lodge was quality, I passed the hours eating snake soup and getting drunk on something awful with the Thai – Karin raft guides. They could speak some English, but the night ended with me listening to them sing old folk songs. I can be happy with that anywhere: guitar at night in the countryside. I’ve learned that doing tourist things is tons easier and often even a little cheaper; doing something off the beaten path means less English, more money, and more difficulty, probably requiring guides and greater distances. I had made it this far into the park, and didn’t want it all to go to naught, so the next day I hitchhiked up the mountain. The first ride I got was with construction workers chewing something that looked like glue. They were building a Buddhist temple in the mist near the top of the mountain. I get the rest of the way to the top, cruise the 300 meter nature trail through the cloud forest, and hitch hike my way back out.June 25: trekking, Salawin River, Burma border. At the border town of Mae Sam Lop I met some Babtist missionaries going to Karin villages. They were from Virginia, and seemed really excited to meet another foreigner. My guide’s name is Cha. The river is enormous; the boat dropped us at a tiny beach and we hiked up through the jungle, passing a few huts lying on tiny rice fields. We find our village to spend the night, and it rains on and off most of the afternoon and night. The village is full of chickens and pigs running around under the houses. All cooking is done on woodfire, and everyone sleeps on thin reed mats. I dreamt about Nova and some word starting with the sound nia…; it means lazy. All of the old folks chew betel nut and smoke pipes; their mouths are hideous. Betel nut is mildly narcotic, flaming red seed that makes your teeth fall out. Imagine a wrinkled face that has seen several years, smiling a toothless grin with bright fat red gums. The rainy season is beginning and we see them transplanting the seedlings into the fields. We walk around the terraces and up through the cracks, passing giant teak trees and jungle covered in vine. The jungle is remarkably thick, and the dwellings are few. Its raining hard now, we are about to have breakfast. I imagined “hill tribes” being only one small tribe living by themseslves, but in Northern Thailand they all seem to be Karin, a large ethnic group numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The other day in Burma some Karin rebels blew up a bus. Maybe not a place to go on vacation (in September 2007 the world was shocked by an uprising of monks against the Myanmar government). In this village, all the women wear beautiful red quilted drapes for all kinds of clothing, hats, shawls, and dresses, sometimes concealing babies underneath, often while the women are working in the fields. I keep seeing amazing snails, butterflies, and dragonflies. June 27. We walked most of the day through the jungle and along ridge tops. Along the ridge line the jungle was not thick, but there were very few rice patties along the entire route. On the valley bottoms it was thick, the trees were massive, and birds sounded the air all day long. It didn’t even rain during the afternoon. We stay in a village along the creek; modest homes line the stepp hillsides, all with straw roofs and a few with solar panels. I’m sure that the solar panels are provided by the government or an NGO, and I’ve read that in rural areas far from power lines, solar panels can be cheaper than the cost of building power lines. The babies here seem to have slightly bloated bellies, but food seems adequate. While smoking pipes, the family we are staying with ask me how much was my plane ticket to come from America to Thailand. I try to evade the question by telling them that I didn’t really come directly from America, but they mention how much a waste of money it is compared to what the money could provide in the village. In the morning the mother husks rice. I can’t walk to the toilet without slipping on the muddy slopes: it would be so easy to build a few steps, but I guess they don’t need them.

July 2. I wake up to the sounds of chickens in a village in the Salween river jungle in Northern Thailand. I hike back to town, hop on a bike to the next town, and then onto a long bus ride back to Bangkok. I watch the sun rise over the Chao Phraya river as I sit atop an elephant of Wat Arurm. Ate breakfast with a dude from Iceland having beer and cigarettes for his meal, bought souvenirs and dress clothes for my upcoming adventure, and was definitely ready to leave. I did enjoy eating one last final meal in an alley. Thirty six hours in Bangkok and I’m on to Beijing, ready to turn a new chapter.

May 21: Phnom Penh. I’ve been here for three days waiting for my volunteer job to get put together. In the meantime I’m enjoying the good life in P.P., a French colonial leftover brimming with beggars, street children, and motorcycles. Monks clad in saffron orange, squinting, without the aid of hat or hair, ride on the back of motorcycles through intersections where five bikes in each direction cross flawlessly, all without stopping. Middle aged white men inhabit the city’s restaurants by day and bar by night, they might not all be sex tourists, but one bad apple, well. Vendors pushing sunglasses, leftover guidebooks, and cigarettes wander unimpeded into sidewalk cafes. Wat Phnom is surrounded by monkeys and the children poking them, I asked a man at in the temple to write it’s name in Khmer script in my temple journal; he desperately tried to escape but managed just fine in the end. The Royal Palace was brilliant, a colonial relic filled with stupas, temples, and a pagoda; lotus stalks surrounding the smooth and painted structures. It has the potential to be a beautiful tropical city, it just isn’t one now. Lush, drooping trees line broad sidewalks, but as of 2007, the sidewalks are stuffed with trash, parked cars, and abandoned piles of junk. May 24. Pursat, Cambodia, a small provincial city sitting on a perpetually muddy river. I’m staying at a Chinese businessman hotel and volunteering at the local environmental NGO as well as an English school in the evening. I just walked into the school at 5:00 pm one day and ten minutes later was teaching a class of a dozen teenagers. It was a loud and hot building, and I had trouble understanding the other teacher’s English when they spoke to me. I visit the home stay of the other volunteers in the town for dinner. They have a large house full of people coming and going, and a few of the daughters speak some English; the mother speaks a few words of French.

May 26. Yesterday at the English school I had them write down their goals for the next ten years; most were jobs, travel, and family, the same goals any group of kids would have. A few wanted to be billionaires, start hospitals, and help the poor (never got that one in Japan). Some of the students are teenage monks; they mentioned mother god helping them study, visiting Angkor Wat, and guiding tourists. The monks are six or seven, at college age a few years older than most of the other kids and sit together like punks in the back of the classroom. The kids say thank you and the girls giggle after every opportunity they have to talk to me. They ask me where I stay, where I eat, and how is the hygiene. At the restaurant I go to for lunch, the juice guy invited me to eat with him, we chewed on a plate of rice and chicken claws and smiled at each other; my ten words of Khmer all but matched his English. Later on, in the internet café, kids sit next to me finishing homework assignments on Word and Excel. At night I went out with two of the other volunteers and we drank palm wine while the bar girl tried helplessly to talk to us in Khmer.

May 28. I went to the village of one of my students, they were a farming family; some neighbors were making rice noodles. The father had a tattoo on his chest dating from Pol Pot; it was a traditional Buddhist mark of good fortune. The family of six has one good motorcycle, the son uses it to go to high school twenty km away. The father wanted me to take the son to America to study. When we started walking around the neighborhood a group of no fewer than eight children started following us. I had dinner that night at the house of a friend and three young women living together; they had photo albums consisting entirely of themselves, I had fun looking at each shot and asking, who’s that? Me. Who’s that? Me. Who’s that? Me! They were fascinated that I was traveling alone and wondered why I came to Cambodia; they seemed truly sad that they couldn’t afford to go anywhere. Travel anywhere, or simply talk about traveling, and a light turns on in people, but there was really something longing in their eyes. It is kind of a mellow, sad envy: they see a foreigner traveling through like it’s a vacation but they’re afraid that they will never have the opportunity to see another country. May 31. I visited the village of the ecotourism project that the NGO is working on. Rice fields filled all available land, water buffalo mingled among the ditches, and children were working the livestock. All the houses are on stilts, an adaptation for flooding as well as livestock shelter, and many of the houses were only accessible down a narrow motorcycle path. The full onslaught of monsoon is coming soon; the fields are beginning to fill up with water and the rice is only ankle high. In the morning I went to the monastary where one of the monks who attends my English school lives. We had a little trouble communicating the concept of early morning prayer, so I rode up in the predawn haze at five in the morning, thinking it an appropriate time for some action, only to find that they pray at four am! All the monks are about twenty years old, they study the teachings of Buddhism, then they can become monks and gain a scholarship for general study at a school. I’ve ascertained that it most Buddhist cultures monkship is more of an avenue of youth scholarship than a vehicle of religious devotion. Robes hang outside the dormitories like sheets on a clothesline. June 2. The people I meet keep asking me about how I feel being in such a different place. On June 1 we went to a local festival for international childrens day (something I had not known), and watched traditional dances with peacocks and fisherman, in additional to seeing a traveling science fair put on by a provincial university. I stayed part of the weekend at a friends house that could have doubled as a supermarket. Dozens of various fruit trees bearing round pomes with hard peels and fleshy seeds surrounded the house, while hundreds of football sized catfish wriggled over each other for scraps of food in a pond. But the most fascinating were the crocodiles, no larger than a dogshed enclosure full of satchels of leathery monsters sunning and snatching at rhodents. The father, a fisheries manager, buys them from fishermen who accidentally catch the baby crocs in their nets. Then he raises them and sells them off to food stores, petting zoos, Chinese collectors, you name it. We went out to a floating village on the Tonle Sap lake, there were hundreds of wooden huts and shops floating in shallow water a few hundred meters from shore. Most were fishermen who either found this life easier than land or couldn’t afford a house on land; women and children passed around the “neighborhood” on canoes and rowboats. We stopped on a friend’s porch and ate bucketfuls of pea sized shrimp, freshly dug out of the muck not far away, in addition to a few quarts of clams roasted on the top of a canoe in the sun. June 5. I went to the house of one of the teachers from the English school. We drank beer in the afternoon and went swimming in the river; it was just like any afternoon BBQ in any country in the world. We feebly tossed a net into the river a few times, but they said that there are few fish in the river on account of electric shock fishing. The guys made cheers every time they drink and touched each other frequently. The women cooked and disappeared quickly. I went to the host family’s house for dinner and met the daugther’s arranged fiancée, he worked for a tobacco company and asked questions about democracy in America. The other volunteers were out, so I managed to get the family to eat together with me, something that they hadn’t been doing with us before. They eat a bowl of rice before they begin eating the accompanying dishes, and they forsake a perfectly good table to sit on the floor of the front porch. We ate Thai curry (they said it was “Khmer” curry) and watermelon. I went to my friends house one last time, the three young women, and one of them, a tailor, had sewn me a shirt. I almost cried and went to hug her, but she cringed in terror. I regain my pride and give her a thumbs up, and we spend the rest of the night laughing at Khmer music videos. June 7. Leaving Pursat was sad, all the people I had met wanted to have dinner with me on the last night. Everyone spoke to me with a slight of longing; they thought that I would forget them soon, while they would never have the chance to go to the places that I was going to. Volunteering was a mixed bag, I felt kind of useless at the environmental NGO. I didn’t have any great skills that I can contribute, and as soon as I arrived I realized that a few weeks wouldn’t be enough time. I even have some experience with non profits, which made it even more frustrating that I couldn’t be of assistance. One of the other volunteers said that this kind of volunteering was glorified ecotourism, and although he was an arrogant know it all, he might have a point here. I’m 27 years old and I just feel like I haven’t accomplished anything; I haven’t gotten good at many things. I try something for a short time and gain an understanding but don’t truly learn a skill. Plants, GIS, marine biology, teaching, I’m only a novice at all of them. If I can go to the Peace Corps, what will I be able to do (contribute)? Colorado College said that I was learning how to learn; maybe that’s what I’ll do. I’m imagining myself with some NGO in South America, coordinating an environmental education program. We’ll see what happens. Teaching at the school was a lifesaver here, it was a fantastic experience for me and I’m pretty sure that it was a good experience for the students and other teachers as well. Its something I would recommend to anyone traveling, teacher or not. So many volunteer placements are not something that an individual can be squeezed into easily, but teaching English can be. If you find yourself traveling for an extended period of time, just drop in somewhere and ask if they want help, you probably wouldn’t get turned down too often. And if you have any kind of specialty: a nurse, a carpenter, mechanic, or tradesman, skills with computers, grant writing, accounting, anything like that, just pick out a place you want to go, research some organizations, and contact directly. Don’t bother with any of those volunteer placements that pop up in internet ads and charge thousands of dollars: if you have the time, just go to the source and cut out the middleman. Now I’m in Battangbang, waiting to take a boat across the Tonle Sap to Angkor Wat: the slow route. Battangbang is beautiful, a decent sized city with supple parkland lining the river and wats topping the surrounding hills. I hopped off the bus and a man speaking perfect English caught me and wanted to take me to the Royal hotel. Hey, that’s actually where I was planning on going, so I hopped on. Handing my bag to him as we walked over to his motorcycle, I immediately thought, this is how people get ripped off. But this was Cambodia, a country that treated me perfectly for three weeks, and we zipped off to the hotel. Lets go for a ride, I want to show you some sights, he persuaded me after arriving at the hotel. We cruised around the countryside, he asked me what I was doing here, and we talked about Japan. We had a few laughs about the wonderful women from that great country, and he said he dated a Japanese volunteer for a couple years when she lived there, but then she returned home alone, both of them unable to give up their home. We rode the “bamboo train” back to the city and as I walked off, I thought, he hasn’t asked for any money. How much do you want, I asked. Its up to you, he responded, a phrase I had grown accustomed to hearing in Cambodia. I gave him something, not nearly as much as I should have, and offer this advice to travelers: if you have time to spare in Cambodia, go to Battangbang and look for the guy speaking perfect English who wants to take you on a tour on his moto. The Royal Hotel was nice, complete with a fine rooftop restaurant, and the next morning rode the boat: it was a little long (3-5 hours) and hot, and seating about a dozen on rough wooden boards, its no cruise ship, but it offers a nice view of life along the lake. June 14. I met my friends Randy and Allison in Angkor, as well as Mike, Gill, Mark and Megan, and we had a glorious time together. The temples were amazing, mountains of rock risjing from the jungle. The restored temples, meaning the more popular ones, were less like ruins and more like temples, while I really preferred the others, which were more less like temples and more like ruins. You could touch almost everythjing and walk around anywhere, quite a change from my many years with the National Park Service. Our guide told us how the Hinduism and Buddhism basically coalesced at Angor Wat, as the Buddhist gradually took over the temples in the 12th and 13th centuries and replaced most of the Hindu deities with their own. I was shocked how much was looted in the wars of the 1970’s and 1980’s. As I child I would gaze at my father’s photos of the wats, he stopped on the way home from Vietnam in 1970. Now in 2007, the same statues were there but missing heads. Even now, understaffed, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been hard to walk off with a few backpacks of artifacts. Returning from the wats to Siam Reap on Sunday evening, we passed by what must have been the whole town, out picnicking in the fields outside the main Angkor Wat. All Cambodians are allowed free access to the temples, and at that moment I could comprehend the support that Khmers have for their historic monuments. Deny locals access to parks and reserves and watch them fail; this was not happening here. I bought postcards from a little girl; I used my ten words of Khmer language and asked her what her name was, she gave a brilliant smile and proudly stated an incomprehensible mix of sharp consonants and soft vowels. A few minutes later she found me again, and running up to me, handed me a bracelet and wished me good luck. REFLECTIONS on CAMBODIA Phnom Penh is just a few hours from the coast and the jungle, but ecotourism is still infant and the coast is far from a beach paradise. Angkor Wat, not to mention dozens of fascinating villages, wats, and sights around the Tonle Sap lake are only a few hours north, but a horrible road network makes it difficult for visitors to spend much time on the ground. Seeing Cambodia one must remember that this is a country about ten years old, less than a generation removed from a genocide, civil war, and border war with Vietnam. They have a long way to catch up with their more affluent neighbors, but I truly believe they are on the path. They have a lot of faith in education improving people’s future. Here is an entire generation whose parents knew no school. People would tell me about how there wasn’t enough to eat under Pol Pot, and how he killed all the teachers and educated people. A good friend of mine, a teacher about the same age as me, had five siblings killed by Pol Pot. After Pol Pot, his parents returned to their hometown, and started their life again, having four more children, including my friend. His father died last year of natural causes, and one of his sisters died last year from AIDS. My friend is a lively personality, a fantastic teacher, and an optimistic man. A British aid worker told me that the aid agencies are like a parallel government in Cambodia. In my short experience, I saw this happening; dozens of organizations and agencies from around the world packing into the few cities in the country, trying to help a broken society back on its feet. Cambodia needs help everywhere: schools, infrastructure, finance, government, the list goes on. NGOs also provide some of the best jobs that educated locals can get, and some that I met gave me an interesting perspective on the influence they receive from different countries. The Chinese just want to come to make a buck on short term businesses, but it is something that the country needs to an extent. Japanese help with projects like roads and bridges, and they offer aid because they have a war guilt (maybe this is where the Japanese war guilt is focused, because it surely isn’t focused towards China, or inwards). America is helpful but they are obsessed with democracy; so much of their aid is linked to democracy benchmarks. The World Bank and company are afraid to fund roads and bridges for suspicious governments because they’ve spent decades propping up murderers while destroying tropical ecosystems with misguided projects. So now this is left largely to China, who is perhaps even more immune to brutal regimes and environmentally damaging projects in the developing world. But China is filling a void, a void left by the west. A middle ground must be sought: development needs roads just as much as it needs democracy, and many countries are teaching the US that prosperity is more important than democracy, notably Iraq and almost all the rest of Asia.

April 25. Hong Kong is beautiful from far away; highrises straddle the line between shore front and mountain. The city burns with people, noise, lights, and movement. So far I’ve seen pushers with their guesthouses, massage shops, and watches, I’ve seen crystal clean shopping malls, and I’ve seen blocks of restaurants with chickens hanging in the window. April 26. I spent the day walking, passing by the markets, the vistas, and the city itself. There were monkeys in the middle of a city park, there was a street lined with goldfish and baby turtles, another with ginseng roots and medicinal bird’s nests, another with dried marine products. The food was great in the cheap restaurants, the service quick and gruff. There were businessmen of all countries, but just a few blocks from the banking district you could see men in dirty clothes handling boxes and spitting frequently. In the apartment building of the hostel there was a woman in a bathrobe, she was on the balcony talking on a cell phone. She must have been there more than two hours. Looking back now, this was one of my clearest memories of the beginning of my travel; there was something memorable about seeing people living their lives, similar to a life that I knew but different in a way. After six months of this, I have come to think that this is just exactly how the world is: everything is different, but only in little ways; there are only slight differences that set our cultures apart. Compared to Japan, Hong Kong is more diverse, has of course more skyscrapers, wider streets and sidewalks, and is much louder. Kissing in public, wrinkled veterans dancing taichi in the dawn light of the parks, and Indians and Chinese struggling to comprehend each other in accented English are but a few lucid memories of this city. I met two Koreans who were traveling through here, one had just finished his military service, and the other was just entering. April 27. I’m in Cebu, in the Philippines: after many years, back in the tropics. Its warm even at night time, people move slowly, the beer is a little warm, and geckos saunter up the restaurant walls. I’m overcome with a feeling of warmth and ease. I’m sating at perhaps the 7th hotel that I have stopped at this night; after continuous rejection from full hotels, I’m still only paying $9 for a decent room, and I don’t even have to share it with anyone. So far I’ve seen motor tricycles, jeepneys, and all other kinds of internal combustion engines packing the streets; in Manila I had to take a bus from the international airport ot the domestic one, somehow I feel that that is about all I need to see of the capital. It looked like, well, Manila. How else can you describe something that completely fills up to your expectations? Back here in Cebu, just about the whole citizenry seems to be loitering on the sidewalk, waiting for something to happen, and both of the taxi drivers asked me if I wanted to meet a girl that “they knew.” April 27. I found my friend Ethan at Moalboal, diving with his monitoring team, and I joined them in the afternoon. It was the first time in two years, and a long time since I had seen a coral reed with brightly colored fish. They monitor the protected areas; he says that mot of the fish are bought for a luxury item. We looked at the beach and had a beer, his group of six are all young Philippinos, in addition to one Australian girl. Then we went to a dinner feast of a local dive shop owner who’s running for Congress; they brought out a roasted pig on an oar. When they drink, they drink a small glass of beer, in turn, out of a big bottle. April 28. We rode eight people on a motor trike to breakfast, which we ate on someone’s patio. We dove in the morning and I saw a sea turtle in the wild for the first time. (After this I was to see one on just about every dive in southeast Asia). We ate lunch at someone’s house again, it was fiesta weekend of the town’s patron saint Vincente, as well as being the local election. People were waiting in shifts to get seats in the kitchen and eat lunch, continuously being schlepped out be a large woman standing next to the stove. We took a minibus back to Cebu, it was swerving around jeepneys, buses, motor trikes, bicycles, and pedestrians the whole way. We ate dinner at a pizza restauraunt in a shopping mall, it was about ten times the price of anywhere else I had eaten in the country. From the sidewalk tables all you could see was a parking lot full of clean cars; no people waiting around, no trikes. May 1. I’ve stayed at Ethan’s place in Cebu for a couple days now, we went snorkeling and diving nearby, we also spent a day in the city with his friends getting tattoos and drinking beer in the afternoon; I got a haircut in a little hut on the side of the road; there were several people watching and the man said that he was shocked that he was getting business. We went to a dinner for Philippine Peace Corps volunteers, they had some interesting and varied experiences doing community work and teaching, some of them were jaded from difficulties with local customs, others with lack of direction from the Peace Corps office. One woman reminded me that its always better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. After diving in Cebu today, we went to the town market and saw a lot of the same fish, this time lying on a table for sale. They were all extremely small. Today I ate green fringed mussels and snails so tiny you had to pick out the meat with a toothpick. Ethan said they were called poor man’s fish; we had seen people collecting them at low tide earlier in the day. We had walked down to the beach at sunset and were followed by some kids who sprinted out in front of me every time I took my camera out; it became a challenge to take a photo of anything but their faces, close up. We were also given a few drinks of coconut moonshine from a group of mostly women. Expecting the worst, I was not let down. May 2. It took a very long time to arrive at Apo Island, and I will dive tomorrow. I started on an aircon bus that was cool and quiet but still crowded, next to me were a mother and two girls, all in one seat. The bus dropped me off at a dive resort of mostly Japanese tourists, after this I took a boat across to another island, and took another bus, this one the most crowded I have even been on in my life. One last boat across the choppy water and I’ve finally arrived at the dive island, it is known throughout the world as one of the best examples of a community run marine sanctuary. After seeing it for just a few days, I would guess to agree: the reef is in good shape, there are large fish, it seems to get support from the community, and the community seems to be prospering. There’s even a guard on duty against illegal fishing 24 hours a day. I walked down the beach at sunset and saw two men skinning a chicken on the shore, I am now quite sure that I have seen everything. This is one of the most beautiful island I have ever seen. The sun sets and gives way to a warm, starry night; videoke music drifts quietly in the background. May 6. Diving at Apo Island was amazing, coral and fish were everywhere, I saw turtles on every dive, even on a night dive I saw a turtle sleeping; it was so peaceful and beautiful it made me think about how nature really exists. On Friday I watched the sun rise from an old lighthouse on top of the island, I watched the sun set from the ferry returning to Cebu. Both times the sun came or went over a tiny island in the vast distance of the ocean. Riding the ferry is quite nice, there’s a little more space than a bus and it doesn’t stop every five minutes and honk at something. Yesterday Ethan and I went to the site of Magellan’s death and did a minor re-enactment. May 8. I went diving in Bohol at Panglao, now I’m staying in the jungle at Nuts Huts on the Loboc River. The divers and dive staff were mostly German, and their safety standards were extremely lax. They didn’t seem to interested in the fish either. Why do they come (and stay) there? The rest of the beach was populated by numerous leathery elder Europeans. But the beach was redeemed by a great selection of books in the hostel and a few superb beers on the beach. I ran into some of the Peace Corps volunteers that I had met with Ethan. Taking a jeepney to get to the jungle river, we roll out of town cruising 10 mph down a straight, broad road nearly devoid of traffic, while the radio is blaring out only the worst sets of pop music. And there is nothing I can do about it. On the next bus, a very friendly man helped me find the jungle lodge, walking down the bumpy road to the entrance, everyone waved and said hello to me. Nuts Huts is full of backpackers fascinatingly traveled yet tortuously pretentious. They speak in vocabulary quite extensive and none are from North America. I fall asleep to the sounds of insects and frogs this time, rather than waves. May 9: spent the day riding around the hills on a motorbike with a German guy named Neils. We stopped at a man’s house to duck out of a downpour, gazed into a 300 year old Catholic Church, walked straight up to handfuls of Tarsiers (a rare primate found only in the Philippines), and cruised through the Chocolate Hills. May 10: hiked through jungle villages and huts up to an enormous cave, swam across the Loboc River coming while floating karaoke restaurant boats passed by. Heading out, I rode in the front seat of the jeepney back through Taglibaran out towards Cabilao, where I met Ethan and friends once more. His directions were to take a boat out to an island and ask for Peetey’s house. I wasn’t worried, and rightly so; getting there was a breeze. We spent the night at his friends house singing old folk songs to the sound of a old guitar and slept on mats in the living room. May 11. Woke up at sunrise and dove at Cabilao, there were millions of fish and a few pygmy seahorses. Took a slow boat that smelled like a farm back to Cebu. Cabilao was truly amazing, just as nice as Apo and much better than Panglao, although you have to work a little harder to get there. A lot of the dive sites in the Philippines depend more on what they got on land than what’s in the water: you’re going to find pretty amazing stuff wherever you look, your experience as a whole will depend more on the lodge and the atmosphere surrounding it. Panglao and Moalboal are much more developed and you get what comes along with that: restaurants, bars, and souvenirs. Apo and Cabilao are isolated islands, diving is about all that’s going on and you will find much quieter if any nightlife and a welcome respite from commercialism and things touristy. May 13. Batad, Philippines, the last village on Earth. OK, of course this superlative gets thrown around, but this place deserves it. From the tourist rice terrace village of Banaue, a jeep runs infrequently the 10 km route to the end of the dirt highway on the top of a mountain; from here it’s a 2 kmk hike down a proper trail into the village of Batad. I ran into some local kids who are college students on vacation, returning from voting in the town; they shared their lunch with me and we hiked together into the valley while each of them took turns holding the chicken that was to be their dinner. Talk about an amazing life; they lived weekdays in Banaue for high school, returning home only on weekends, now they attend university in the next town further. We stopped at their house on the way into the village, a an aluminum roofed structure of decent size; they pointed to the thatched hut where they all lived as children and called it “the native hut.” It was about four square meters raised on stilts, and now was a mere grain storage. Sitting on the porch of one of the lodges, sipping coffee and peering across the endless expanse of damp green terraces, its hard to get more perfect. In the background a girl named Maya strums beautifully on the guitar. The lodge serves a suprising variety of Israeli dishes, thanks to a wave of their tourists from the 80’s. Locals ask me if I am Isreali (almost as funny as all the times in China when locals ask me if I am French). Folks here talk on cell phones but also skin chickens and live in huts without electricity or running water. Pick and choose technologies. May 15. I walked around Batad and the rice terraces today; I saw a man sitting in a hut wearing complete traditional garb and obviously not posing for any photo; he looked as if he hadn’t moved all day. At a waterfall a woman asked me to sing a song, then she proceeded to sing “Country Road” and told me that it was a song by Elvis. So many Filipinos that I’ve met have amazing language skills, they often speak one or two local dialects, the national language, and often English as well, even in the rural areas. I hear conversations where one person speaks a local dialect to another person who responds in English. I met some French folks on vacation from their grad school in Singapore; we played boggle and talked about travel and the new French president Sarkozy. I hired a guide to walk around the rice terraces in Banaue, he showed me how they plant the rice in seedlots and then transport it to the main field, in order to keep them from washing away; he also showed me how the irrigation drips down from one terrace to another. They only plant once a year and its basically organic so the yield is very low, the rice that they produce can’t even sustain the small town. The villages were only really entered from the outside about a hundred years ago; the Spanish had effectively left the interior mountain areas alone. May 18: Singapore. A city apart from the rest- fast, clean, high tech; international- Chinese, whites, Indian sailors, Muslims, Vietnamese hookers, Singaporean kids in military service. British influence is easily noticeable with whitewashed hotels, Indian bellhops, Anglican steeples, grassy lawns, and afternoon tea. A street corner food court will hold between five and ten counters dishing cheap Chinese food; people are eating all day. Markets sell coconuts, pineapples, and any kind of juice imaginable. Indian restaurants pack in middle aged women in saris, while young Muslim women in head scarves return from work on the city buses. The Arab neighborhood sports entire blocks full of silk shops, I meet a friendly man trying to sell me a carpet. But I don’t have a house, what can I do with a carpet, counter, sure that this salesman has nowhere to go with me. You gotta start somewhere, he responds, and realizing hopelessness, starts asking me where I from. You can’t be American, all the Americans have big muscles, he laughs, grabbing my biceps. Meanwhile, the Indian neighborhood sports entire blocks full of jewelry shops, and I fill the rest of the afternoon passing Hindu temples, mosques, and a Chinese Buddhist temple where patrons are packed together raising incense above their heads and depositing stalks of lotus by the hundreds. At the hostel, the enjoyable Betel Box, a met a guy from San Francisco who travels around the world as a freelance nano-technologist, a Canadian living in Bali who came to Singapore for his birthday (37), and two Danish girls on the way home from New Zealand as WWOOF volunteers.

Riding the Rails in the Land of Mao

Every time I take a train or bus in China it’s as if it’s the first time the travel has ever been conducted in the country. Every soul, passengers, drivers, and attendants, are so utterly confused about the logistics of this particular modus of transportation. Entering a train station, you encounter the usual security line with metal detectors you might find in any large station, building, or airport. Only these metal detectors push people through at such a rapid pace one scarcely imagines the two guards manage to ensure much safety. All of the bags, in addition to the shelves of food that every passenger religiously brings on their 20 hour voyage, is thrown on a conveyor belt through the metal detector that is so short you have to rush through the security check at full speed in order to prevent the contents of the food from being crushed by a giant suitcase, or, worse yet, dropped off the belt onto the floor which has probably not seen a mop since the days of Mao. At the gate, lines a hundred deep wait for the doors to open, at which time you have but a fleeting window to lug a suitcase down two flights of stairs and run to the platform in the few minutes before the train departs. See, the passengers are not allowed onto the platform until the train has arrives, providing frightening little time to find your carriage. Just pray your not in car 22, way in the back. One time I even got to wait in one more line on the way to the train, huddled around a table waiting to get my ticket stamped, stamped, who needs a stamp?, while suitcases rolled over my feet and tiny old ladies elbowed me aside to cut in front.

Once on the train, you’ll have the luxury of knowing that your assigned seat or bed belongs to you and only you, although many train passengers are apparently still learning how to read numbers, and remember, we’re talking about simple integers here. There are three stories of bunks, the bottom being the nicest, but likely to be shared by all of your neighbors; the top bunks require a significant 5.3 climb, and grant just enough headroom to gather up enough velocity when you move so that when you hit your head on the roof, it actually hurts. For every six bunks there are two narrow seats in the hallway, usually they are reserved for the use of drinking baijiu or eating Ramen, the only food acceptable to eat on a train (throw in some Sunflower seeds spat all over the floor). Buses fare little better in organization. Tickets are sometimes sold, sometimes not. Fancy coaches have a small toilet (supposedly reserved for #1), but most do not. One time I had the pleasure of sitting behind the toilet (it was located in the middle of the bus) (the seat came with supreme leg room). Occasionally the toilet entrance was used as a stealth smoking spot (obviously banned on the bus). Later the toilet door became locked from the outside with no one inside. I had the joy of watching just about every passenger on the bus, one by one, first knock on the door, then wait five minutes, the attempt frantically, with no success, to pry open the door. Head phones are also crucial for any bus journey; the honking of the air horn at every animate object in the road can be deafening, as can the gunshots and wailing maidens from the Hong Kong cinema played on the bus DVD system. And if the bus isn’t too shiny, you’ll also get the fan favorite sound of China, the sound of me hawking and spitting. Of course, sitting in the aisle seats you’ll have to keep watch of the runway of carts selling snakes, warm beer, packaged cucumbers, ore made tepid meals, and of course, my personal favorite, the souvenirs. Once I saw a man selling what looked to be a box of dried hardened portabella mushrooms. Some kind of herbal medicine I gathered, meanwhile pondering how they might taste grilled with parsley and goat cheese. The man, an avaricious salesman, was detailing the merits of his product in rapid fire Chinese. “Are you, like, a doctor?” I ask, the best my Chinese can muster. “More or less,” he answers. Then there are the Chinese Zodiac cards with poses of Chairman Mao. One of my favorite Chinese pastimes is asking people who Mao is. A pop singer? A basketball player? Oh yeah, I know, he plays for the Houston Rockets, right!? After the koke is over I want to reassure them that everyone, everyone knows who Mao is, but then I remember those Canadiens that I met that one time… But the one souvenir they always have is the set of paper currency from around the world, featuring Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia (pointed out to me as a “sister country”), and my favorite, the Japanese rupee with the picture of a Thai wat. “This is not Japanese money!” I lecture them. “But it’s from the past.” “But the rupee is India, and this picture is from Thailand!” I don’t understand what they say to me after that. The souvenir salespeople are always, not surprisingly, the most friendly and talkative. What else would you do if you were stuck on a train for 20 hours with nothing to do but sell meaningless drivel? The bathrooms on the train cars are plentiful, but timing is essential; the toilets are locked as the train approaches a station (take a minute to do the math of where the toilet dumps its waste.) I learned this is an exchange with the attendant over my admittance to one of said toilets. “No you can’t use it,” she says. “Why?” “blah blah blah blah train blah blah blah short time blah blah,” I make out, and as she relents and lets me in, I’m thinking, what does time have to do with this?, and then it dawns on me as the train begins to slow down. There’s even a sink to wash your hands after the bathroom, and only rarely does it not have water. There are soap dispensers but, alas, no soap. The soap dispenser, this is what China is all about. Anywhere in the world, riding a dirty train for rock bottom prices, passing a countryside of peasant farmers, no one expects soap dispensers. But somewhere along the way someone decided that the trains in China should have soap, but they forgot something, they forgot about the soap.

Four months in the Middle Kingdom

July 2. I wake up to the sounds of chickens in a village in the Salween river jungle in Northern Thailand. I hike back to town, hop on a bike to the next town, and then onto an overnight bus ride back to Bangkok. I watch the sun rise over the city as I sit atop Wat Arum, rays of light streaming across decks of commuter ferries as they rush young workers up the Chao Phraya River. Ate breakfast with an Icelander having beer and cigarettes for his meal, bought souvenirs and dress clothes for my upcoming adventure, and was definitely ready to leave. I did enjoy eating one last final meal in an alley. Thirty six hours in Bangkok and I arrive in Beijing: seat of empire, fortress of the Khans, capital of capitals.

From Beijing central train station I couldn’t get a taxi to the hostel I wanted to go to, and luckily found another one right in front of me (Beijing City Central YH). Met a beautiful Russian girl and a few other people, mostly studying Chinese or getting on and off the Trans-Siberian train. It’s a few days later and I’ve had several job interviews, I turned down a job at a kindergarten to work at a conversation school, it sounds a lot like Nova. Stepping out of this school’s location in the heart of downtown Beijing, skyscrapers rushing up like erector sets around me, I knew this was how I wanted to experience the new China. Matter of fact, the moment I stepped out of this school accepting a job, I get offered an interview at another school by a guy handing out flyers. I go up to their school and talk to the manager, she hires me but their school doesn’t have any students yet. My Chinese classes are down the street in another ridiculous looking office building. The hostel I’m staying at now is kind of special, the one and only Feiying Youth Hostel Beijing. I did find some cool Americans to celebrate the 4th of July with, and ran into some Peace Corps folks I had met in Philippines. Crazy coincidence; there are more than a few youth hostels in Beijing. They were finished with their service and traveling on their way back to America. My roommates are three Spanish speaking guys who’ve been in the hostel for months and not going anywhere quickly, a Vietnamese guy who went to college in Hungary, an Australian also looking for work as an English teacher, and a one armed Belgian painter who talks to himself. Late at night in the lobby random Chinese men walk around in their underwear and spit on the floor. I’m looking for an apartment but thinking about doing a teach English-exchange for home stay. Beijing is rowdy, it’s crowded, loud and rude, but it really feels alive: babies, grandparents, a healthy balance of ages but no doubt people everywhere you turn around. The scale is huge, everywhere; the boulevards are massive and sidewalks broad, and forty story buildings everywhere you look. But the big streets are the western Beijing, the alleys are a step back, people are sitting on the sidewalk eating stall food and selling in dinky shops; the front streets are stuffed with chain restaurants and shopping malls. The malls are exactly the same as Japan, exactly. July 8. I like it more everyday, especially at night. I drank in the alley behind the hostel with a few friends, we ate grilled animal parts on sticks and a drunk guy tried to finish his baijiu with us. Yesterday I met Lucy, my SAT prep student, a 17 year old who wants to go to college in the US, and her mom (hot!) at a KFC in downtown Beijing. Looking for another tutoring student, I went with a Chinese associate to an extremely distant corner of Beijing, got on a bus to go even further, and found a giant mall surrounded by huge apartments. It just doesn’t stop! The student, in clearly pronounceable English, said she had a bad personality (I think she was right), and spent most of the time arguing about the price of the lessons with the associate. All of this and the associate said I wouldn’t be teaching this woman anyway, just tell her I would and then we would switch teachers later. After this exchange, the woman at the table next to us asked about lessons but was worried about studying English because apparently foreigners have AIDS. We were at McDonalds. I started my Chinese lessons later that day, they were kind of slow paced, but we’re on the 16th floor in the middle of the city and the view is amazing, sometimes in one glimpse you can see seven cranes working on a skyscraper. We went out to dinner at 11:00 that night but the restaurant was out of rice. July 12. Still in the Feiying hostel, thinking about staying three more weeks so I can get a cheap home stay in August. There are Chinese and foreigners to talk to here, some of them are obnoxious, but that’ll probably happen anywhere. It’s close and cheap here. There are stupid Irish kids always drinking, entertaining, a balding older Dutch guy, and an American on the way home after being in the Philippines with the Peace Corps. I taught Lucy the SAT student for the first time, she’s super smart but at such an English disadvantage. The Chinese class has ups and downs, in the last class there was a Japanese housewife and an Iranian college student (“our countries are enemies,” she said). I went out to dinner with Wendy, the Chinese hand model, much more assertive and talkative than Japanese girls. I’m not spending much time working yet but I’ll do more soon, I’m happy focusing on Chinese, there just so much to learn at the beginning; with Japanese I didn’t really do to much at the beginning. July 15. I taught my first day at Vivid yesterday, it was not much like Nova. The school doesn’t care whatsoever what the teachers teach, and the materials are few. It creates an interesting atmosphere among the teachers because they also seem to think a little about what they teach. The lessons are three hours long, a really long time. But it’s amazing what difference a dress code makes; teachers’ wearing casual clothes around adults just doesn’t seem right, it makes it feel like they just walked in off the street and started talking. And the students were absurd, they kept talking over each other (and me) and correcting each other; Nova students would have been shitting their pants if they were in this. But they were good, really good. They were putting a lot of effort into learning English and most of them were really getting somewhere. Both classes asked me for my email, one girl wanted to take me out to a restaurant, and when I turned around they were talking in Chinese about dating me. But the girls at my Chinese school are my favorites; I learn more language in 15 minutes with them than in three hours of chanting tones in class. I went out to dinner with the Australian couple from class, they are my age and living in a Central Park West-like mansion in downtown Beijing. When they asked me how much the hostel cost I couldn’t tell them; the difference in prices would have just been too shocking. I’ve had some good beers and snacks in the alleyway with hostel people most are too young but they have good stories to tell, almost all are European. I speak Spanish to the Spanish guy sometimes, he’s from near Basque. July 19. Teaching Lucy she said, do you have friends here, and I said, yeah, a few; she says, wow, you’re so brave. She thinks its good that she spends all her time studying but wants to go to the US to broaden her horizons. I went out with the Vivid teachers last night. They seemed an all right, normal enough bunch, and going out to a bar the students just tag along after class, its nuts. Most of the teachers are from the US, it’s kind of strange- I haven’t seen all these Americans in a really long time. I got food in the alley the other day and the meat man started talking to me, he got his 12 year old girl to speak English to me, she was correcting everything he said: daughter… d-a-u-g-h-t-e-r, daughter! I finally found a good Chinese teacher at Eloquence, and I also taught their once and they paid straight up cash right after the lesson, it was fantastic. I get good informal Chinese lessons at the hostel too; I learned how to say cockroaches and disgusting (like this place, right? I told them.) July 29. Time’s flying by in Beijing. I teach more now and I’ve spent a few nights out with the other teachers; know I’m starting to think they’re a little more full on than folks were in Japan. Like not so ordinary, and sometimes it’s good for people to be a little ordinary. I usually go to Chinese class in the mornings, chat with the girls in the lobby for a few minutes, and then work at Vivid until 9. After that maybe a drink with the teachers or maybe back to the hostel. In the afternoons I teach a group of 16, quite mixed in ability; a few people understand nothing, a few people complain that it’s not boring and school-like enough. In the evenings my class is phenomenally better, maybe just because it shorter though. They understand a lot more, laugh at each other, and are just more relaxed. Everyone that I meet in China just has such a more interesting history, they get standing tickets on the train to schlep 24 hours to their hometown for spring festival, they come back to Beijing for the rest of the year because it’s the only way they can make a living. A lot of my students are graduated from university but with no job, learning English to get ahead. They’re not shy but still seem a little reluctant to talk about themselves. Nevertheless my afternoon class wanted to hang out together, so we did today; we walked around Chaoyang Park and I took them on the bumper cars. Only in China would the city parks be fenced off and charged admission to. Afterwards we went to a buffet hot pot restaurant; talk about part of the problem! The place was overflowing with frogs, turtles, and all kinds of seafood, I could just envision a graph in my mind, a graph of fisheries stocks plummeting dramatically. It was even all you can drink, complete with warm Tiger beer and horrible imitation wine. I went to the Beijing Botanical gardens the other day with Sofie, a Chinese girl that I met, from Inner Mongolia. She says I’m unstable and change my mind all the time, I want to say, no, I’m just indecisive. She’s rally cute and just a little feisty, she has strong opinions but giggles often. I went to a hospital with another friend from the Chinese class, the same one who told me to become a businessman and stay in China for longer. There were lines of people everywhere; it looked not unlike a flea market. Aug 6. Still in my hostel, all my apartment plans have failed. Two of my good friends from Japan, Mark and Kiki, come today and I’ll stay in their hostel until the end of the week. I’m free in the morning because I’m done with Chinese class for a little while. Yesterday I went to Houhai with Liu Qing, it’s a little lake in the middle of the city surrounded by a walkway and little bits of park, at one end lies a bar area teeming with foreigners. I found myself in the unfamiliar position of convincing her that I didn’t like noisy areas, she didn’t believe me. Saturday night I saw transformers and sat at a street café until 3 in the morning with a couple friends and some dancers from the Cook Islands. The time passed well that night. The movie theater was 100% western, prices inclusive; truly distinctive even among the shopping malls of Beijing. The next afternoon I played mah jong at Chinese class, the game is almost the same as rummy. Friday night I went to Sanlitur with people from Chinese class, the area was kind of horrible, just like a giant frat party, or maybe Goergetown, the last time I felt this feeling was at Koh Phanang. My Chinese teacher who went out with us is very cool, she’s a Beijing native but seems a little dragged down by life, she’s 26 and unmarried. In the hostel now there’s a Japanese guy from Osaka who quit his job and is on the way to France to study Algerian cooking. As a hobby! August 16. I gave my two weeks notice at Vivid, in the past week four teachers have quit or been fired- the fired one is my new roommate for the next three weeks, Matt. I’m staying at his apartment, a nice room in a big building in a huge apartment block, but it’s just another place to live in this city. Mark and Kiki came last week, we went to the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, both were two of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Mark and I and four students took off on the weekend to Datong to see the Yungang Buddhist caves and a temple on a holy mountain. The caves were completely amazing, it was a whole temple inside a grotto, not just a sculpture in a rock. The temple wasn’t too bad either, located an hour hike up Wutai Shan Mountain, across the highway from the over crowded and over hyped Hanging Monastery. On the way back to the train station, my cell phone was stolen by the fucking mini bus driver, now I can’t call half of the people that I’ve met in Beijing. I was livid. It got better soon though, we took the train overnight coming home. Everything was like an old movie from the 30’s: the platform, the sounds, the speed; the train was packed, there were people in the aisle all night, resting their heads on my knee. We played cards a little while, I took a sleeping pill, and passed out. Last night my class spent twenty minutes trying to ask me how to say “I like you”’ to someone, and I kept saying, no you don’t really say that, and then after the class was over, a couple of the girls say, I like you, Matt. Today they said, can you treat us to dinner, and I said no, you should treat me to dinner, I’m the teacher, but then I actually invited them to come out to dinner with Mark and I, and one of them hugged me.

Aug 25. Vivid fired me Friday. I gave them two weeks notice and they waited one week and told me they were finished. I was told right before I was going to teach the party on Friday evening, so I walked out in anger and proceeded to quickly become inebriated and lose 50 yuan in poker (not too much money in the grand scheme of things). I am really unhappy about it though, I liked being there and wanted to spend one more week with the students and the teachers, I feel like I’ve abandoned the students now. I had kept telling them I was staying for months and months, and then I was going to tell them a few days before the fact, but too late. Two were waiting for me at the party and sounded angry on the phone. I’m mostly just angry with one guy right now, but I honestly feel like all Chinese business is completely fucked up, full of crooks and liars where everything is illegal and quality is a peripheral concern. In just two months, I’ve been asked to lie on my resume and lie to students, I’ve learned that basically all Visas are illegal, and taxes are never paid. Saturday I went to a park with Liu Qing, we found an accordion player sitting on a bench. There was a tree where an emperor hanged himself when the city was being sacked by rebels. We could see the moat of the Forbidden City, it’s a massive river circling a 20 meter stone wall. Everything in this city is huge. The Chinese have a story of the boy who cried wolf, but the boy dies in the end. A little different. On Sunday my student Lucy’s family took me out to dinner and recounted, with laughs, stories of cars crashing outside their apartment on a major throughway and boys getting in knife fights at high school. They just don’t have the same value of human (or animal) life in China. On Saturday, my friend Fernando and I found a helpless looking French couple to play mah jong with, we wandered dark alleys until we found a house where some woman were playing. An old man gave us watermelon and cleaned the house around us; there were two tables all together.

Sept 2. Leaving Beijing, ready to start on a journey. Earlier in the week I went out to a club with some of my students; we played some remarkably simple drinking games, went dancing, and then a few of them came back to crash at my apartment. These young people are adventurous, many of them seem to have divorced parents and they are in Beijing on their own, searching for a future in a deep ocean. I went to a traditional medicine shop and got “hot cups” treatment to increase circulation and aid digestion; it was weird, the last thing I see are glass suction cups and fire, and when they are on your back you look kind of like a cyborg, but it really works! I finished my Chinese class on Friday and we played a little mah jong. The other students are a Brazilian guy who sighs a lot and is looking for work as a computer technician, a Canadian hockey player, and an American girl who wants to work in the Foreign Service. One morning I went to the Pan Jia Yuan market, perhaps the biggest market in the city, so much junk there it was amazing. Tourists were buying jewelry, my Chinese friend bought “rare” magazines, I bought go and chess sets. There were some really poor looking vendors, many looked Arab. Later that day I went to a temple with Dennis, he tried to take me to his house but it was on a military base, so I wasn’t allowed- he wouldn’t even let me take a stealth photo. Better not get deported, I figure. He talked about how bad he thought Mao was because he abolished education, but old people like him because he gave them food when they were hungry. On my last day I went out with some of the older students and ate some horrible tofu products, I think this was composed of the fabric they throw away to make normal tofu. We cruised a paddle boat around Hohai under wish balloons of paper lanterns while I tried to navigate with my newly purchased Feng Shui compass. There were some little girls selling roses, I had seen them a week ago at the same spot. They were the sweetest children ever, perhaps ten and twelve years, slithering around crowds on summer midnights. I’m packing to leave and I get an email from a Chinese friend, she writes, “don’t forgot to call me with a trouble.” Sept. 4. I stayed in Beijing for about two months, and I left the city on a Monday night train bound for the hazy interior of China. The trains of this country are a time travel as well as an uncomfortably long distance, uniform clad porters station carriage doors as coal engines belch smoke and shout whistles down seemingly endless platforms. A student sees me off and the train slides away into the night. My bunkmate tells me that her son is going to America to study a few years from now. He will be 15 at that time. Next to her is a man and a woman, I asked the man if the girl was his daughter. It was his wife. They were in Beijing on vacation and returning to their home. The train station in Beijing was the most amazing station I’ve ever seen. There’s a traditional Chinese gate on the top and thousands of people rushing through under a billboard sized info screen above the entrance. I could have stared at it for hours. I come to Pingyao, a touristy yet quaint medieval town still enclosed by the original city walls. I stay at the TianYuanKui hotel and it’s beautiful and romantic. I drink expensive tea and ride my bicycle around the town, stopping at noodle shops, bell towers, merchant houses, and many cobblestones, and late in the afternoon I come to a Taoist temple. The monks start talking to me in Chinese. Where are you from? America. I don’t like America. Why? Bush. Well, I don’t like him either pal. But I like chuan chuan ge. Huh? Chuan chuan ge! Is this a person, a city, a color, what are you talking about? Nothing. A person, ok, where does he live? The monks are getting livid, and start flexing their muscles. Arnold Schwarzenegger! Got it! I take a bus to Xian, leaving Pingyao we were driven in a cart to the highway on the outside of town, only to wait for an hour before the real bus actually came. Riding the six hours to Xian passed through miles of cornfields, neat guardrails, and few cars. In Xian I climb up the city walls, which are enormous by the way, only on the north side of the city, the distance you could walk on the top of the walls was quite limited as of 2006 (the South side is better). I saw the famous warriors, stayed in the Ludao Binguan hostel right close to the train station; it had great staff and the sketches on the walls that come mandatory in Chinese hostels. I meet some guys from Colorado that are driving across Asia (and around the world), and hitch a ride with them to Hua Shan, a holy Taoist mountain located an hour outside of Xian. The mountain is covered in clouds and smog; the guys move on and I climb it alone, starting in late afternoon and arriving around the lodges located near the top a little after dark. The trail evolved from a broad, clean, slab of pavement into narrow gulleys climbing crevices in the cliffs, it was mostly safe, even in the wet and the dark, but I wouldn’t want to take my mother there. I was holding an umbrella almost the whole way; it was pouring. A peaceful rainy night passed on to a peaceful rainy morning without a sunrise, which gave way to masses of tourists, once the cable car started running. There are frequent food stalls and more than a few lodges, chain links to help you up the steep climbs, and the views would be amazing if it was clear. Dozens of porters pass by hauling out the bottles and the trash, but it was nothing like what I saw later at Emei Shan. In the rainy dawn we ran into a woman, not too old, in old wet clothes and a very small bag walking around the mountain, she spoke a little English to me but the others said that she hadn’t eaten for three days and that she was strange; a “policeman” followed us around to “protect us.” There seemed to be a strong fear of the individual, of the unordinary. But it would really have been a great mountain, even in the rain, if not for the loud tourists and commercialism – lines, pushing, yelling, cell phones, vendors, everything from the city except for the trash. Mountains in China and Japan seem to have a different appeal, something I’ve learned after two years, they’re more like strolling gardens. At the hotel on the mountain there was the meanest looking yet at the same time beautiful Chinese girl, she must have been some kind of staff at the lodge. They were playing cards and she was slapping them down in spite that the crustiest old man would be hard pressed to match. I met a Chinese tourist at the lodge who was a university student studying Japanese, she spoke it pretty well for someone that had never been there. She is from Inner Mongolia, the guidebook describes her town as a dump but when I ask her she quickly says it’s a wonderful place. She says the first emperor of China, who built the famous warriors near Xian 2,000 years ago, was a great man because he unified the country, even though she acknowledged that he killed tens of thousands to build his graves. Sept. 11, on the train to Xinjiang, first we passed through a few hundred miles of mammoth stalks of corn, slowly giving way to the nothingness of the desert. The mountains begin to rise out of the dust; it looks like Nevada. Sept. 13, Xinjiang. I arrive at the train station early in the morning sun, which happens to be around 9 am in the twisted time zones of western China. Once again, the front of the train station is packed with thousands of people, no taxis, and no buses, so ignoring the pushers and hawkers trying to rip me off, I make my way out to the highway to find a taxi tricycle contributing significantly to China’s air pollution problems. The driver was so lost he couldn’t find a church on Sunday, but divinely I manage to find the cornfield hostel, not a bad choice in a strange city. The next day I hike up to a mountain lake, the scenery is alpine with sagebrush in the lowland and spruce in the mountains. From Urumuqi, first take a city bus through the Muslim neighborhoods to the long distance bus station, take the hour and a half bus to the town below Tian Chi, hop on another bus up to the base of the chairlift at the mountain, and from there it’s a steep mile or two to the lake (or a charlift for wimps). At the top of the lake we are approached by a Kazhak man with sharp blue eyes, and he shepards us to his yurts on the other side of the lake (Rashit’s yurts). There’s a little bit of a road, hotel, and chairlift on the mountain, but beyond that it’s quiet. I see the stars and breathe fresh air for the first time in months. I’m with my roommate from Beijing Matt and a Japanese guy who lives in Beijing that I met at the hostel. He’s lived in China for 12 years, but he still uses handi wipes and doesn’t litter his cigarette butts. The bus up to here is full of locals, women with head scarves and men with facial hair, an appearance absent in most parts of China. At the hostel there were other Japanese people, one from Saidaiji; they were heading to Kazhakstan. Back at the lake, we spend a night in a yurt, eat a few hearty meals of grain, and hire the same blue eyed man to lead us up into the mountains beyond the lake for a night. Wearing the same cap one might picture on a Basque shepard, he tells us that his family have been ranchers here for generations, longer than he knows. He says they are building a dam above the lake, others say it’s not a dam but a road into the mountains. Above treeline at camp, we hold down the horse while he changes its shoe. Sept. 17, Turpan. Riding a bicycle around this ancient Silk Road town, I glide through narrow streets of mud and brick houses; old men with white skullcaps and fraying beards pass the time squatting on curbs while drying grapes hang from the ceiling of courtyards. I approach a man in a courtyard, he is reciting the Koran, perhaps? He motions for me to come over, makes a prayer motion and points to the sky, asking me to join him. He is alone. Kids run up to me looking for my camera to play with. I go to a mosque at sunset; I’m the only one there.

The walls are a meter thick of scratchable mud. A short turn of the corner from the hotel brings me to these neighborhoods, a few more blocks leads to vineyards. At night I find some guys that I met on the street in Xian, they have been riding on motorbikes almost all the way from Xian, perhaps a thousand miles away. We ride around town drinking a few beers; there’s good lamb in this town. At 3 am I find the only remaining group of people in the hotel restaurant, we find ourselves speaking in Japanese, and the drunkest guy at the table asks me about Taiwan, the next thing I know, he tries to tackle me at a slow motion pace that only a drunken Chinese guy could muster. His friends profusely apologize, and the night is over. I’m staying in the Turpan Binguan, it pretty much sucks, although there are few other choices in town. I wake up in the morning, and from the hostel section of the hotel, walk outside and down the block to the showers. They’re closed. Until 3pm. I go to the front desk, they tell me there are no other showers. I say, this is an enormous hotel, find me a shower. They give me a key to a room, tell me it’s dirty but unused, go ahead and use the shower. Entering said room I find a completely living person occupying it, but I am soon relieved to notice that it’s the young Israeli girl I met in the lobby last night. I apologize, shower quickly, and when I return the key to the desk, I say, you know, there’s someone in there. Oh, I know. And you didn’t think that would bother her? Right. The Muslims in this town are always smiling and friendly, every time it surprises me. Being in the US in the era of George Bush, it’s easy to think that all of the Muslim world hates westerners and especially Americans, but in this corner of China its just not true. They have another group of people to worry about- the Han Chinese who are flocking to the region and overwhelming their cities. Sept 19, train to Lanzhou. Barren stretches of desert, bumps of terrain in the distance, spotted by power plants or huge tracts of vineyards. Many Uighur people in Xinjiang spoke English, a man on the bus had studies in the Middle East, a traveler on my trip to Turpan was Turkish-German, studying the Altai people of the Asian steppe. Ugher and Han really seem to live in a different world in Xinjiang. There was a tourist village near Turpan, the people lived ordinary lives; a Chinese tourist was washing his bright sneakers in the same well where a local woman was washing her hair. There were Buddhist frescoes painted in caves dating 1700 years, the faces had been chipped out by the mullahs in the last couple centuries. 1700 years and look at how the world around this little cave has changed. For many people in that area, many things could still be the same, though; houses of mud brick, water from wells, stone cooked flatbread, raisins dried in the sun. Back in the big city Urumuqi, at the corn field hostel, my money was stolen – credit cards, ATM cards, most of the cash I had. What can I do, it was bound to happen sometime. I’m lucky it wasn’t my passport; I borrow money from my friend Matt and manage to get by. The next few days when I bargain for prices I tell them that my money was stolen and they give me a good price. There were lots of Chinese tour buses in Xinjiang, lots of Japanese as well. Although I did see Chinese backpackers up here, it was hard to avoid the masses and overly restrictive site regulations (don’t deviate off the path), not to mention exorbitant entrance fees. Chinese folks may be great for dinner and drinks, but they are not for traveling with; all they want to do is ride buses and take pictures. Xinjiang was great though, sort of break from Han China in many different ways. “There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes.” Tolstoy Sept 22, train. The landscape blends from desert range to cornfields to rice patties; it is fall and peasants are harvesting rice cut upon the hillsides. The Yellow river in Langzhou, even in its upper reaches, was massive, thousands of years of history running through central China. I’ve been on the train for three days, about 60 hours total, and I’ve descended the equivalent of Maine to Florida. Sleeping in the hard bunks is not unpleasant, the chugging of tons of coal being emitted into the atmosphere is quiet lulling. Some people on the train are on vacation, I meet a group of ladies who are on a choir tour. Others are businessmen, they ask me to exchange ticket stubs so they can get a greater reimbursement from their company. Moving south, the train rolls into Sichuan and Yunan, the southwest corner of China. Every dwelling is a simple structure made of mud and brick, factories line the riverbanks like I am rural Pennsylvania, and Eucalyptus trees begin to shoot up in the gaps around the farms. Sept. 25, Dali. I met the Geckos tour group in Kunming and we’ve moved onto Dali. Somewhat disappointing, the adventure ability of the group falls short of my expectations which had been built upon the other Gecko group that I met in Pingyao. Nevertheless I manage to leave them with their horses in Dali and take an amazing hike up to Zhonghe temple on Congshan Mountain, outside of the town. It’s just a mile or two in a mini bus or taxi to the base of yet another chairlift and significant entrance fee. After a steep climb I’m at the top, cliffs soaring around me on the edge of a 4,000 meter mountain, green life massing even in September. Along the trail I see a beautiful lodge on the mountain top, meet a flower woman, a drunk, lazy eyed man with a monkey, and walk a really long way. At the top of the trail lays Zhonghe Taoist temple, monks invite me inside and quickly ask for 200 yuan, about $25; this blatant manipulation of visitors in the name of religion is insulting. This amount of money is 10 times the normal amount one might donate in a Chinese temple; it’s even more than most would donate to a church in America. I give them a few dollars and tell them to quit being ridiculous. Above this temple is a beautiful quiet lodge, the Higherland Inn, it would be a beautiful place to stay, and all of this area can be mostly reached by a chairlift from outside of Dali. The girls at the lodge are smiling and friendly and point me in the right direction to hike on down the trail. I see few hikers or construction workers, a rarity on hiking trails in China. I do find one woman who is fascinated by me taking pictures of flowers, she manages to follow me for several miles, but there is something about her though, and she manages to frighten every soul that we pass along the trail. I tell her that I am in a hurry and move on. I reach the end of the mountain trail, near Gantong temple, and begin to descend. I pass a giant construction of a chess set commemorating a monk that lived there and played go (I was confused too), and come across a group of people picnicking and drinking in a gazebo holding a monkey on a leash. I rapidly fumble for my camera, but before I can shoot they snatch up the monkey, ask me for money, and shove its asshole in my face. I say no thanks, and ask for directions back to town. The drunkest of them all stumbles down the hill for a minute to take a piss, points to the right, and says something which I translate to mean “bad walking.” As I reassure myself that I can’t go wrong going downhill, I wonder what it took for me to be taking directions from a drunk with a lazy eye and a monkey on his shoulder. I didn’t die that evening. Reaching the bottom, a road is being built, there is a man breaking rocks barefoot and women carrying pinecones for fuelwood. This is the China that I have heard stories of, the China that is not found in the shopping malls of Beijing. A country straddling the 21st and the 19th centuries, booming wealth and crushing poverty, Han businessmen and local indigenous groups that live side by side but don’t speak the same language. My mind comes to images such as these when I read opinions that China is not a country but rather an empire; so many peoples and so many languages lumped together under one flag. It makes you appreciate the richness of the world, just how much there is out there that we don’t know of, that we can’t even begin to imagine. The next day we rode bicycles through tiny fishing villages scattering the east side of Erhai lake, tents and shacks pieced from scraps creep out of ledges on the roadside fishermen pull out nets of cheap baitfish. This is miserable food, and whether it’s eaten or sold in the market, leaves one to assume that these people don’t have many options in life. One trip across the lake from resort hotels of Dali and I feel like I’m in the Philippines again. Oct. 2. Tiger Leaping Gorge. The gorge is amazing, mist covered gorges dropping precipitous height to a massive river. We had an extra guide with us for the hike, all he carried with him for two days was a pack of cigarettes. The Halfway lodge along the trail is spectacular, peacefully nestled miles from the road among a few farmhouses. Tiny cornfields spotted the hillsides. We passed a few men mining by washing rocks in stream water, its sad to see practices such as these, so much damage to the environment so that a family with no alternatives can put food on the table. At the end of the trail back down on the road at Tina’s guesthouse, tour buses come in the afternoon, but evening and morning are gorgeous, the early morning mist is stunning, and the lodge serves 2 yuan glasses of plum wine as we drank the night away playing mah jong. Lijiang was a beautiful old city in the mountains, although the numbers of tourists were astounding. Cobblestone streets, canals, and hundreds of craft shops; kind of a Chinese Aspen. It might be a nice place to go with a dozen friends and party every night. There were a few dance shows of minority peoples in extravagant costumes, much of a charade for Chinese city folk, just as I saw in Urumuqi with the local Uigher people dressed up in musical performances for the Han businessmen on travel. I know we’ve treated American Indians horribly in our country, but I wonder, is it anything like this? Here we are in the 21st century and these people are taken out of their ordinary lives as farmers and traders, ponied up in costumes and put to dance. The Chinese just want to see this postcard image of minority peoples, not believe anything bad ever happens, and go on with their lives. There’s just something more that’s happening here that I wish I could understand. Back in the tourist world, the Aussie gals’ footy team just won the championship, and I bought us all a bottle of one dollar baijiu (the one that comes already packaged in a brown bag) to celebrate, quite sure that this group of 10 girls and one guy will not be huge fans. Shockingly, two Kiwi girls who never drank in their lives fell in love with it and spent the rest of the night practicing martial arts on trees. It was a great night, and I’m sad to leave the group. On our last night, our guide tells his that he lied and this was actually the first time he ever led one of these tours. Having been a little disappointed with him, I figure now that he did pretty well for the first time. We finally get some drinks into him, and after most of the group has retired, he whispers to me and another that he used to be a teacher until he beat up a student who was acting up. End of that chapter. The tour is over, and I’m on the way to Zhengzhou to see a girl that I met in Beijing. Kunming was a beautiful city, if I was going back to China again to teach English I think I would try to live there. We stayed at the Camelia hotel, expensive but with a hostel and a great café next door. The train ride back north is amazing as always. Porters yell, I mean, yell at people to close the windows, strangers amiably molest the four year old boy in the carriage, and passengers do nothing on the 20 hour journey but stare out the window. Oct. 6, Luoyang. It’s the first week in October, national holiday week in China, a time when you do not want to be traveling, and I’m wisely ensconced in Luoyang, one of the ancient capitals, in the central plains of China. We go to the amazing Longmen grottoes, ancient Buddhist caves dating from the 7th century. Looking out on a branch of the Yellow River into a sea of smog, one wonders how it must have looked 1500 years ago when that city was the capital of China. We also stopped in at Baimasi temple, supposedly the first Buddhist temple established in China, from around the 2nd century, although the present structures are not originals. I find a monk to mark my temple log book, dozens stare at this rarity. Remember that China is a country that has all but abolished Buddhism in modern times. The few days that I spent with this friend and her family were wonderful, nothing but friendliness and hospitality from her friends towards me, the visitor. Absurd amounts of food and unhealthy amounts of liquor were consumed; it was also nice to get off the beaten tracks for a little while. I take an overnight seat (not bed) in a train for the short five hour ride to Xian; its good to celebrate youth while you still have it. I plan to meet the Japanese speaking friend for my short layover until I go on to Sichuan. I pass time in sidewalks and ramen shops from the predawn hours until the bus station opens, and then have breakfast at my old faithful Ludao Binguan hostel, quickly ascending the list of my favorite hotels ever. Meeting my friend on a filthy rainy day, we check out the Forest of Steles museum of Xian, holding enormous stone tablets inscribed with various teachings and historical recordings. Amazing. On par with the Shaanxi history museum, much better than the Banpo Neolithic village (should have known better). I roll into Chengdu in the middle of the night, and start making plans for Emei shan, the holiest Buddhist mountain of China. Oct. 9, Chengdu. Three days of hiking in the rain and Emei Shan is conquered. Seeing the temples rising out of the mist on the forest slopes was a beautiful experience, as was hiking the trails in the early morning and late evening hours, I could feel alone with the nature, and maybe the spirits. One person asked me if I was Buddhist. A soft rain garners a certain tranquility of the forest, even though views are limited. It was very nice being completely alone for three days and moving at my own pace. I would show up alone at the temple lodges, lodges almost completely devoid of visitors, ask for a meal, and wait while they cooked it for me. I would startle at 4 am to the sound of monks chanting in the predawn darkness. The temple lodges were easy to find, and there were more available than what was listed in the guidebook. Descending I stay at the amazing Magic Peak Monastery, a short walk outside is a faint path leading to an enormous cave, I plunge dozens of flight of stairs into the dark to find a tiny Buddhist offering and a twinkling light. Bring your flashlight and try not to panic. I think climbing Emei shan has made me more aggravated by the Chinese masses; at this point I feel kind of finished with China. Listening to my iPod while hiking was the most wonderful thing I did in days, it is a little sad how great it was to be able to block out all the sounds of China. But being alone just makes the bothersome things worse, I think. Back in a tea house in Chengdu, it’s still raining, and I want to see the sun and some people that aren’t tourists. Oct. 11 Songpan, Sichuan. Found the sun, high in the mountains of Sichuan, but I will only later discover that it is short lived in October. Met some people who I will be doing a horse trek with and ate yak steak. Last night in Chengdu I found a nice teahouse, some quiet back streets around Dragontown hostel, and bought a winter jacket (I realized that I wasn’t in the tropics anymore and it wasn’t summer). Next, while eating dinner alone got approached by a drunken young Chinese guy, telling me about the coffee shop of which he is the manager. He pointed to his girlfriend, noted that they were engaged, I asked when, he replies hen yuan (very long time!). He demands to pay for my dinner and inevitable the night ends up back at his extremely high class coffee shop, something that could easily be found on 5th Ave in Manhattan, but here we are in the interior if China. He orders me an iced Hawaiian coffee with pineapple syrup. The horse trek consisted of three days of muddy snow, obnoxious guides, and freezing weather, but the mountains were beautiful, especially when dusted in snow. We passed some villages, Tibetans living in enormous houses built up for the tourists to see. They raised yaks, sheep, goats, grew potatoes, and seemed to wait around waiting for tourists to come. There really seems to be a sort of facade put on with the minorities, every Chinese person I talk to seems to think they live idyllic lives. We sit in a house drinking yak butter tea, watching Tibetan MTV while the Chinese tourists among us pushed the Tibetan women around for photos. Its beautiful country but its pine covered mountains, and I find the highland panoramas of the Tibetan plateau much more suited to horse trekking. On the trek there were four guys from Manchester, totally amusing and with outrageous accents, as well as four Israelis guys and girls right just finished with their military service. We stride back into Songpan town like cowboys returning from an epic cattle drive. I stayed at the hostel above the horse trek outfitter, it’s cold, but you get what you pay for with $3. Next door, Emma, of Emma’s kitchen is wonderful and informative. Across the street I bought some yak jerky that turned out to be water buffalo. It was rank. Oct. 15. Today I woke obscenely early (again) to come to Langmusi, it was a surprisingly short ride from Songpan to Langmusi, you can’t help but be happy when people tell you eight hours and it only takes four. In Langmusi I walk around the town’s Lamasery, a temple complex of Tibetan Buddhism which is more of a village or a monastery than a temple. Temple buildings are surrounded by hundreds of prayer wheels, old men pass the time smoking pipes on benches, wrapped upon mountains of robe, garb, and coat. I find a trekking outfitter on the corner in the middle of town (it’s a small one), and a pleasant hotel just a few meters to the right of it. Between the two, up a dirty staircase, is an internet café. The next morning my friend and I, a Chinese American woman from San Francisco, set out on an overnight stay in a nomad tent. Out Tibetan guide takes us over the hills into a grassland expanse rivaling any in the American west, with only a few tents and a yak herding moped in residence. Miles in all directions are scattered with yaks, sheep, and the occasional horse. Huge Tibetan mastiffs scare off wolves, not to mention me. A damp, October cold freezes through the grassland, but the herders are out until dusk rounding up the last of the great hairy beasts and tying them up behind the tents for the night; no fences mar this range. The tent we sleep in belongs to a stunning black haired Tibetan woman with brilliant jewelry of stone hung around her neck. She cooks us a dinner of potatoes over a stove fueled by yak dung; there is no timber at 4,000 meters. They ask my friend and I about America, its life, its people, and money. They can’t comprehend my friend being a single female and forty-ish. The next day is even colder, we set off to return and stop with a woman and child packing up their camp for winter, stuffing (perhaps) everything they own into a wooden chest the size of a kitchen oven. The mother was using a twig to eat, she kept it in the corner of the tent, not far from the dung pile. I tried to accidentally leave behind my chopsticks. These nomads and their neighboring town are the poorest people I have yet seen in China, equal to any I saw in the Philippines and Cambodia. People had food and a warm coat, but little else. Back in Langmusi, eating at a Tibetan restaurant, we learn that the Dalai Lama is accepting an award in Washington DC and giving a speech that same day. The restaurant family asks me to look on the internet for the speech, and I point them to the world of YouTube. There is a genuine passion in their eyes about this exiled leader; these people live ordinary day to day lives, yet still search for a missing element that the Chinese and we Americans lack. Other times this passion is hard to find. The town has internet cafes, and the great firewall doesn’t block as much as people think. BBC and parts of Wikipedia were the only things in English I could not find, some people had problems accessing their own blog, and I’m sure more Chinese language sites are blocked, but myriad other devious sources remain. But what do I find at the net bar? Some men are watching an Eagles music video and some teenage monks are playing Grand Theft Auto. Go to the super net cafes in the big cities and you will see dozens of men at any hour of the day doing online gaming. So much for the internet breaking down the barriers of information. Back in Langmusi, at the restaurant, one of the men calls a friend in the nearby, larger Tibetan town of Xiahe and we listen to fireworks in the street, later we learn that tourist’s cameras being confiscated by the police. On the highway the next day, the sun comes out on the drive through yet more alpine grasslands; the bus picks up Tibetan herdsmen, they crash into a seat and slumber heavily for 45 minutes until they hop off down the road, no doubt awake since well before dawn. I think about wincing from washing my hands in cold tap water, and promptly decide these are the toughest human beings I have ever seen. We turn and drive up a valley to Xiahe, an even more Tibetan dominated town with a huge lamasery, known as the biggest outside of Tibet. The sun is blinding walking down the sidewalk, passing huddles masses of age worn faces clutching prayer beads smoking curved pipes. We make our way to Tara guesthouse, a decent, albeit cold guesthouse. Monks, Tibetan ranching families, and occasional tourists populate this town, shops pedaling endless rows of trinkets line the streets; stuffed between the souvenir shops sit tiny

souks offering monks’ burgundy robes. We join the semi-required tour of the lamasery the next morning; it allows us a brief glimpse inside the main temple buildings at the hundreds of monks who have journeyed across the country to come here. More fascinating are the Tibetan peasants who come offering yak butter for candles, probably the only item they have to offer. I see a few women laying on the ground in prayer, they lie down completely, stretch out their arms, get up and stand where their arms reached, and do it again, perhaps a hundred times on the ground to encircle the temple. Custom dictates that this is sometimes done three times around the temple. It seems that middle class Tibetan families become monks, it offers a chance of education and escape from harsh rural hardships. I find them in my hostel and at a teahouse, they are fascinated to see a foreigner and ask bright eyed questions about America. I ask a couple of boyish monks, no older than 20 and red cheeked from the cold how long will they be monks, they shrug and say we’ll see. A decent level of education seems apparent, they may not speak English but they can speak Mandarin, something many of the poor Tibetans cannot. Like too many religions, the fervent believes are the poorest of the poor. Buddhism, particularly Tibetan, is rife with customs, rituals, and incantations, a valid comparison between Tibetan and mainstream Buddhism can be made with Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism. Seeing all those rituals is amazing, but I can’t help but think, if this was Christianity and we saw people doing things like this, we wouldn’t hesitate to think of it as senseless fanaticism. But when it’s exotic, its cool. Oct. 20, Beijing. I haven’t been warm for about a week now, but all of this hanges as I roll back into Beijing. It has been two months, and I come back to see friends and collect bags. There were a few more sites that I wanted to see, but my money being stolen gives me a new job for the three days I’m in town: retrieving the money out of the Chinese bank account of the card that was stolen. This soon became the most difficult thing that happened in my whole time in China. The bank said I had to wait a week, which I didn’t have, so I went to my English school, which created the bank account for me. This was also the school that fired me for trying to quit. Not surprisingly, they were unwilling to sign off on something that would allow me to get the money immediately. I said, what am I going to do with this few hundred dollars that will get you in trouble- throw it on the horses, take out a subprime mortgage, come on!? Finally we found that we could publicly notarize a Chinese friend of mine to withdraw the money for me in a week and post it to me. A few other financial lessons learned in months of traveling: pay pal is wonderful for transferring money for free. When my money was stolen and I didn’t have an ATM card, I borrowed money from another traveler and immediately paid her back by having her set up a pay pal account (it takes seconds) and then transferring the money from my bank account in America. You can even do this internationally, say from America to England. You can also do this with Western Union but it costs $20 or something. I was so excited that I thought I could do this same thing by getting a Chinese bank account, like the Postal Savings account (biggest bank in the country), and transferring into it from America. But although pay pal is international, as of 2007 it didn’t support China, so this wouldn’t work, and I’m left with a Chinese postal savings account with approximately $1.50. One last financial note: travelers cheques are becoming almost completely useless in the 21st century. You will have much more ease finding an international ATM than a bank that will cash travelers cheques, and you will save a lot of money in the process. If you’re worried about losing an ATM card just get two of them. The only possible advantage is to have the cheques as a backup, supposedly they can be replaced quicker than an ATM card. Oct. 24, departure, Hong Kong. I will miss China, I will miss the friends that I met in Beijing, as I will missing the loud, dirty restaurants while swilling baijiu and stuffing copious amounts of Chinese food into my mouth. I’ll miss the train stations and their huddled masses of peasants and their bulging sacks of luggage. I’ll miss the ancient carvings in the cliffs of torrid, muddy rivers. Nevertheless, the imminence of departure has kept a smile on my face during the last 24 hours of train ride, and passing through customs I looked the woman in the eye and said, I’m leaving China, and I’m never coming back. On the train to Hong Kong I was bunking next to a stunning Cantonese but Polynesian – looking girl with long flowing hair and big, soft lips. She had been in Beijing on vacation, and couldn’t stop showing me pictures that she took of her herself in front of every imaginable famous spot in the city. Her name was Flora. The landscape turns from brown grain into lush rice patties, and I’m ready to hop on a plane to Borneo. Its time for vacation from China.

April, 2006. I had a great life as an English teacher in Japan: a nice apartment across the street from a bakery, a job whose only requirement was to wear a tie and speak English, and a great group of friends who I could go out for sushi and beer with almost any night of the week. It was comfortable, but it was quickly becoming that gluttonous residue that comfort creates: routine. I was to begin service in the Peace Corps in nine months, so I figured what better for this 27 year old in the cushion of good health and financial independence to do than explore Asia. Already on the other side of the world, I wanted to see if I could find somewhere farther from home (I did: the deserts of Silk Road China). I wanted to discover where the culture of Japan originated from. I wanted to dive coral reefs, see jungles and rare primates, and meet people who had worries greater than shopping and dieting. I had a year and a half of Japan behind me; however there were still a few loose ends to tie up. I wanted to spend a little more time closer to Japanese folks, I wanted to see more of the country and I wanted to exhaust the last of my Japanese language ability: I wanted a home stay. After a roaring sayonara party and a few dozen more mild sayonaras, I took the bullet train from my home near Osaka to Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan. I turn a new chapter in my life as I cross the channel separating the islands, pondering how quickly I could be back at my apartment nibbling cookies. The first step is always the hardest. One of the last students that I had while teaching was a middle aged working woman who happened to be from Kyushu, I leaned close and looked her in the eye and said how about Osaka, she leaned closer and whispered, I don’t like it! She’s been there for twenty years, and still thinks the people aren’t as friendly. A cool drizzle fell as the father of the family picked me up at the station. A thin sixtyish year old man with conspicuous glasses and hideous teeth, he wore a smile that put my worries to rest. We pull into his driveway, a real driveway! I come inside and meet their family as we wander around the wide, spacious house, not at all lacking in cheap, wooden interior. The father tells me the work schedule and I ask if someone could wake me up. “Get yourself up!” he laughs. April 7. Today we drove around the town dropping off and picking up various farm objects: fresh milk, compost, straw, crates. At the farm’s market-store I bagged groceries; maybe tomorrow I will be able to do the register. It’s a little intimidating handling money in a foreign language. Then I picked strawberries. The weather was clear, and the father pointed at the mountains in the distance and said that you couldn’t see them thirty years ago, on account of air pollution. The family’s son also lives at the house; he’s my age and works on the farm. Earlier I met their daughter; she had been the one sending me the emails in English. She’s a little catty, but charmingly sweet. They sit around the TV at night, gazing at the screen like it’s a new innovation, mindlessly watching hit music countdown shows. I feel like I’ve traveled back in time to my mother’s childhood in the 1950's. April 8. Japanese sweets are gross. Because of the historical culinary limitations of their traditional agricultural system, the Japanese were forces to make sweets out of two lone ingredients: rice and salt. Imagine the result. They love choco and cake-ie, but in the 21st century, they still clutch onto their tiny dollops individually wrapped in excessive amounts of packaging. They also don’t drink water. I see people on mountain hikes with nothing but a kiddie sized plastic bottle of tea. You won’t find many glasses larger than a whiskey tumbler in this country, and good luck with a drinking fountain.

April 9. I ask the son if the farm will be his in the future, and he says, yup, I won the lottery (he’s the oldest son). He seems resigned and accepting to the fact that not many westerners would be: he might rather be in another place but doesn’t show it. The younger son lives in the

nearby city and the daughter lives at home but works in the city. At the store there was a five year old girl who was fascinated by me, she says hello, her only word of English, and then shrieks to her mother, I saw an English speaking man!

April 10. I took a walk through some hills in the area, and talked to as many strangers as possible. People kept asking me if I was from the Nakamura farm, they all knew! Pear flowered trees and miles of neat little tea bushes clung to neat hillsides, I stopped at a little soba shop and everyone wanted to talk to me. The last person I met that day was a used car dealer. I walked up asking directions and he stopped everything he was doing to interrogate me about American sports. Then he ordered an employee to drive me home. Back at the farmhouse, the daughter made me curry.

April 12. A man came to dinner at the farmhouse, he was a farmer wearing toe socks, and he looked a little like a Japanese Bruce Willis. He spent most of the time watching TV while we ate, then he stopped and asked me what Spam was. Finally he drove home, on a tractor. Earlier that day I mowed the grass below a grape orchard, their farm offers a beautiful view of the town, wrapped in a blanket of tea plantations; mountains rise gently in the distance. Japanese people still respect farmers, the father assures me, people care more about the environment than they did thirty years ago, and farmers are seen by many as stewards.

April 13. I came across a group of old ladies today that I swear could have been 150 years old. Their faces looked like earth. I climbed a mountain path dotted with shrines, one was built into a cliff and I took a nap there. At the summit of the mountain was another, I ducked inside from the torrid wind, shut the doors, and found myself in pitch blackness. Nothing but thick walls and an unassuming altar. Mist in the mountains of Japan is beautiful. Hiking down, I discovered some nuevou Buddhist temple, and then thought to myself that the only thing missing from my day was an onsen, and what was I to find around the next bend but, yes, an onsen. I love this country. I start talking to some old men at the baths (who else would be at a rural onsen on a weekday afternoon). I wait for it to start raining, and when they ask me how I will get back to the train station, I put on the saddest face I can muster. Riding in their van, the thought occurs to me, Japan can be cold and anti-social, but county folk always come through.

April 14. A girl who used to work at the family’s farmers market came by today with a cake she had made; she apologized profusely. She said it was no good and that she screwed up the crust. Before that she said excuse me no fewer than seven times for the inconvenience of sitting in their house for five minutes. The father took me to a nearby kofun, the ancient burial mounds common in Japan from 300-600 AD. This was before Buddhism came to Japan and before Shinto was developed, but over time objects from these religions have been placed inside. How weird is that, to stick some completely unrelated objects in an ancient tomb, like putting a crucifix in the Parthenon (or maybe someone did that one time). At this site you could go underground and see where the actual tomb for the body was; he told me that the tombs originally held gold and other precious artifacts, but they have all been looted through the years. April 16. It rained most of the day and the neighboring dairy farm was louder and more pungent than normal. On TV during dinner they were watching a show where teams of comedians ride through an amusement park like simulation and monsters would spit out obscure kanji (Chinese characters) and the contestants would have to identify them. Imagine defining words like penurious. Kanji is fascinating though. For example, the character for planet is an amalgamation of the character for star and the character for wandering. Later the daughter, who is about my age, said to me watashi tachi furo o haite mo ii des ka (do you want to take a bath together), to which I said, once more please, and she repeated it more clearly, watashi saki furo o haite mo ii des ka (can I take a bath first). Close calls. The day before I made spaghetti for nine Japanese people and a fewKorean friends. There we were, sitting on the floor, slurping spaghetti with chopsticks like it was ramen, and I tell myself, you can lead a horse to water . . . A couple people said they liked it but then they started talking about eating bamboo shoots.

April 17. I spent the afternoon working in a Bento shop making Japanese box lunches with a handful of old women. Bento, not sushi, nor anything else, is the epitome of Japanese food: very small, very neat, but nothing really tastes very good. It takes hours just arranging all the food in tiny dollops aro und the tray, forget actually making the food. The owner of the shop is a divorced woman whose husband gambled away all their money at the track. Now she works sixty hours a week making food. She said that things were getting better for women in Japan. We talked about food and she said that you canput anything in sushi rolls as long as it’s a pleasing color and not too wet.

April 21. We went to Aso volcano by car in a group of four: the daughter Manami, the cake girl, a Japanese friend of mine that I knew from Nova, and me. The trip was like a Japanese TV show- they were ohhing and ahhing at the scenery

and stopping for snacks every fifteen minutes. The volcano was amazing; a huge crater with a pool and steam rising out. They were selling sulfate or some sort of volcano derived insecticide at the top of the volcano. So often I love this country, but times like this I can’t stop but think, just leave one enough alone for godsake. The day before we went to a cave where there were Buddhist carvings inside; just a little gravel shoulder on the side of a road, one can only imagine the things that have happened their through the years that no one cares about anymore.

April 22. I spent the day with my Nova friend and her mother; we met in Nara but now she lives in this area of Kyushu. We ate lunch then went to a reconstructed prehistoric village from 1500 years ago; there were sunken earthen pit dwellings, wooden towers, and no shortage of traditional shrine looking buildings. It was remarkable how reconstructed it looked, but I guess the ruins weren’t much to look at in the first place, so maybe its justifiable. Afterwards we went to an onsen, its truly amazing how beautiful and natural looking they appear on the inside, truly a private world removed from the rest of Japan. It must be the only place in Japan where people aren’t hurrying, where people don’t bump into you, and where some machine or shop clerk won’t talk to you. My friend’s mom said that Japanese boys are spoiled because the father is the one to discipline the son, but he isn’t around. The mother, on the other hand, is always around to be able to discipline the daughter. My friend is 24, well employed, and even after being independent in Osaka lives under her mom’s thumb. She asked permission to have a sip of sake with dinner.

April 24. On the plane to Hong Kong, I’m finally leaving Japan for good (I discovered later I would make a short stop on the route home). After staying with the Nakamura family for a few weeks, I got to see a lot more of normal Japanese life, as well as farm life. The father of the family is a very happy man who seems to enjoy his life and his family, and his home; almost everyone that I met in this area had been there their whole life; I guess there is reason to move away but no reason to move in. The farmers in this area are not briefcase farmers, but they do talk on cell phones while they attend to a pear orchard or pick strawberries. Only one child inherits the farm while the others hold normal jobs, the father told me there are few or no subsidies, price supports, or tariffs on foreign products (wheat and soybeans only). I still find it difficult to wade through all of this and discover how Japanese farmers manage to subsist; one can’t help but notice the disparity between the tiny farms and the farmer’s large homes and new cars. Studies show that the average Japanese farmer receives $28,000 per year in subsidies. These distortions are finally being noticed as harmful, and in this case the victims are food producers in poor countries who cannot sell their food in western markets like Japan because subsidized local food is cheaper than imports from Africa. Food security is a defense often given for these subsidies, as agricultural self-sufficiency in Japan is among the lowest in the developed world at 40%. Nevertheless, in Japan there are cultural factors that promote local markets that can’t be gleaned from reading the Economist: most Japanese would pay much more for a Japanese product, especially a food, over a foreign one, and food is a product that people are accustomed to forking over money for. Additionally, one ride around any suburban area would show that Japanese live closer to farm life than we do in America- tiny farms are scattered amongst residential communities in ways we just don’t see at home.

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Yoshino trail (10-18km) This is a nice hike around Yoshino, which for two weeks in spring is the most crowded place in Japan, but nearly empty the rest of the year. From Kintetsu Yoshino station, a 300 yen cable car (or short and steep trail) leads to the quaint little town of Yoshino, complete with the impressive Kimpusenji temple, notable with the steeply angled roof showing distinct Chinese influence, in addition to more souvenir shops than you could ever want in a lifetime. But this is Japan so they are all small. This hike will wrap around the hills surrounding Yoshino and connects with numerous other long distance trails in the region. Start at Kintetsu Yoshino station. Outside of the station in the parking lot there are poster maps; look at this for the Kinki long distance trail, it is marked throughout the length of the trail with green dragonflies. Kinki kind of means Kansai. This will be your trail. But before you find the actual trail you must walk up the main road for 200m, turn a soft right at the apartment building (turn is marked). Follow signs. After 4 km, trail splits to Miyataki trail to the left and on up Yoshino Mountain to the right. Climbing up you will pass picturesque farms, later to be replaced higher up by thick cedar forest. Omine trail is at the top of the mountain, this trail goes really far in multiple directions. Go back down through Yoshino village to make a loop and return to the station. As of 2006, a bus ran from Yoshino station towards the top of the mountain, but it might be only during cherry season. This hike is more of an adventure, not many people seem to know about it.

Akame 48 waterfalls (4-8km) From Kintetsu Akameguchi train station (semi-express on the Nabari line), take a bus to Akame (10 minutes), and from the last bus station walk 10 minutes uphill through the village to the salamander museum, which is the beginning of the park. The trail is paved, you will see lots of waterfalls, oden shops, and obachan mouthing “oishii.” This is a popular destination so its pretty easy to get to. Apparently there was an independent Japanese film named after this site. http://www.kansaiscene.com/2007_06/html/getaway.shtml http://www.eco.pref.mie.jp/english/shizen/keshiki/05_e.htm

Around Asuka. (3-12km from Asuka or Yagi) Abe no Monjuin – easy to find on a bicycle around Yagi. On the grounds are a beautiful pond, small cave with Jizo statuettes, a giant flower-decorated figure of the present Zodiac, and a miniature tunnel of Toris. All this for free, pay an extra 700 yen to get in the temple and see the big Buddha lion, and get free matcha! Nearby are some stone tombs dating from a really long time ago: Ishibutai and Takamatsu. And of course any self respecting visitor cannot forget the incomparable Asuka-dera temple, site of the first Buddhist temple ever in Japan. The temple is a reconstruction, but the Buddha inside is original, dating from the 7th century, and if you follow his line of vision he is looking at an angle out of the temple and across the rice fields of Asuka to Tachibanadera temple, the supposed birthplace of Prince Shotoku, the founder of Buddhism in Japan. Asuka is a great place to have a bicycle and cruise around the rice fields and the somewhat scattered historical spots. Asuka is not too far from Yagi or Kashihara Jingu-mae. http://www.pref.nara.jp/nara_e/area04/index.html

Kashihara Jingu-mae (~3km from shrine to top of Unebi-yama) A great place for a jog or half day break from Yagi, this shrine is the mythical birthplace of Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan. Unebi-yama, the hill just to the north of the shrine, has a couple of trails ascending to a nice lookout over the plains of Yamato. The shrine is five minutes west of Kintetsu Kashihara station, or a short bike ride south of Yagi. This shrine is a great place to be at the New Years, weather on New Years Eve or the next day; half of Kansai will be there dressed in their finest kimonos. Tanzen ji.(~10km one way) – mountain top shrine, take a bus (#4) from Kintetsu Sakuri station or go on a ridiculous adventure in the Japanese countryside: from Ishibutai burial mounds in Asuka, walk uphill towards the east, find the giant highway that is incomplete and not being used, at some point at the beginning of this road find a steep narrow path and take this shortcut straight up the mountain, once you are ¾ of the way up you will get back on the highway that will take you the rest of the way to the top. These directions may seem hazy, but if you just go straight up to the top of the mountain you’ll be all right.

Yama no be no Michi 12-15km This is a fantastic hike through farms and countryside just a little south of Nara city. It also happens to be the only trail near Nara city that is detailed in Lonely Planet’s hiking in Japan book. From Kintetsu or JR Tenri station, walk east through the city or the arcade until you get to Tenri-kyo, the New Life Church of Buddhism, where you definitely need to stop. Everyone you ask about this place will give you a different answer, but its some sort of new branch of Buddhism that is headquartered here. Their temple, with free entrance, has the biggest tatami room I have ever seen in my life. From Tenri kyo head south and keep looking for sign markers, the trail does a few turns before leaving Tenri and joining the Yama no-be-no Michi. For the next 10 kilometers, the trail weaves around rice, persimmon, and mikan farms, and you will have to work to stay on it. Just keep looking for signposts, and stay at the foothills of the mountain. Eventually the trail comes to Omiwa jinja, a beautiful shrine set back in the woods. Just down the road from here towards Sakurai is an enormous concrete Torii hanging over city streets, where they have a nice fireworks festival in August. The trail continues to Sakurai along roads, alternatively you can take a bus or hop on the fantastically slow and diminutive JR local to Tenri or Sakurai. http://www.pref.nara.jp/nara/kaido/kokaido/eg/yamanobe.htm

Koya stone markers- (Choishimichi) 22km From Namba, get on the Nankai line towards Koya-san and get off a few stations before Koya-san at Kudoyama station. From here ask for directions to walk through the city to get the one km to Jison-jin, the temple at the base of the trail. From here the trail is well marked, hence the name, and you will see a large stone marker approximately every 109 meters, the measurement of “cho,” the same “cho” that is used for your address if you live in Japan. The beginning of the trail will pass through hot, unshaded persimmon and mikan orchards, but soon the trail will enter the woods, and stay there until it reaches the Daimon (great gate) of Koyasan. If you hate the idea of taking trams to the top of holy mountains, this trail is for you. It makes for a long day. Of course, the tram is already there, so it makes for an easy way to get back to Osaka in the evening. Alternatively, Koya-san has hundreds of charming dwellings to spend the night in. http://www.katuragi.or.jp/tyouisimiti/e-gaidosimasyou.htm http://kanko.wiwi.co.jp/world/english/history/worship.html

Omine: 2-4 days This is an epic adventure, its well detailed in LP’s Hiking in Japan so if you’re thinking about going make sure you got one of those. In October it is freezing cold, but the solitude can't be beat. I left from Nara at dawn, took a two hour bus ride from the Kintetsu station, the north end of the hike, and began hiking mid morning. We reached Omine temple in mid afternoon, continued on to a small hut to spend the night, and came back the next day.

Yagyu road. (17km one way to Hotokuji)This is a nice hike behind Nara park, and ends at the handsome Hotokuji temple in the town of Yagyu. You can also hike part of the way and return from Enjoji. From Kintetsu Nara, take a bus towards Shin Yakushiji and get off before the Nara Woman’s College. Walk east through some neighborhoods until you enter the woods and begin climbing behind Nara park. The route weaves in and out of trails and small roads and passes tea plantations, sake shops, and stone carvings before arriving at the temple. Hop on a bus to return to Kin Nara station. There have been reported sightings of monkeys in these parts, although farmers insist that they only come into civilization when people are not around, in order to steal food. http://www.pref.nara.jp/nara/kaido/kokaido/eg/yagyu.htm

Nara park waterfall (~15km round trip) This hike runs parallel just to the north of Yagyu road. Walk through the main road of Nara park, between Todaiji and Kasuga taisha. Behind the hideously designed Nara Prefectural Public Hall, you will come to an intersection, continue straight (east) past souvenir shops into the woods. If you were to turn left 100 meters up the hill is a nice and extremely expensive French restaurant with a great view. The trail winds up a wide path and comes to a small waterfall after ~7km. Near the waterfall is road access from the north side of Nara Park (near Nigatsu-do), an onsen is also nearby. This trail is beautiful in autumn leaves, and is a great place for jogging when you get bored of Nara park.

Ikoma-san (~8km from Ishikiri to peak) The front of Ikoma mountain is lined with a beautiful staircase climbing through a neighborhood, ending at the magnificent and free Hozanji temple. From Kintetsu Ikoma station walk out the main exit, one block along the main road towards the mountain, and turn left at the Century 21 office (caddy corner to the Kinsho). From here walk straight about five blocks until the staircase begins. Its about 30 minutes from the train station to the temple. There are also cable cars decorated in pet motifs. The backside (facing Osaka) of the mountain is a longer, proper hike in the woods, take the train one stop closer towards Osaka and get off at Ishikiri. From here walk a few blocks east towards the mountain and you will find a trail that leads up the mountain. At the summit you will find, what else, but an amusement park (rarely if ever open). You can take the tram down the opposite side. http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/osaka.htm

A few other random spots: Shigi-san An amazing temple nestled in the mountains near Horyuji, often passed over in the Nara circuit. From Ikoma or Oji, take the Kintetsu train to Shigi san shita station, and take a bus from there. Just a few stops away, at Motosanjogushi station, you can take a bus up to Nodoka-mura, a tourist farm where you can pick fruit (in season) and go for some walks around more farms. http://www.asia-planet.net/japan/nara.htm

Additional Links: A great guide to rural Japan made by some gaijin: http://www.ease.com/~randyj/rjjapani.htm#jtofcx Outdoor Japan: http://www.outdoorjapan.com/oj/contents/home/?language=english The best Japanese language instruction out there: http://learnjapanesepod.com/newsite/

An old hut selling ground up starch, used for making sake.

Who needs China when you can trade all of the tea in Japan?

Maples change colors in December in Japan.