Until a mishap stopped me in my muddy bike tracks yesterday, I hadn't stopped moving since I woke up last Thursday. My student's mom and her sister taught Jason and me how to make dumplings and a couple of other dishes. After lunch, I set to cleaning my apartment slowly and steadily, with Rosie's help/moral support. Including breaks for mixing cocktails, it was an all-day event.
Friday, Mr. Lei took us to Sledge Hammer Hill, a prominent feature of Chengde's surrounding landscape that looks more than a little phallic. Appropriately, touching it is supposed to add years to your life. Army crawling through the cave in nearby Frog Crag, which we did, is supposed to make your immune to disease. So, I will live forever and never get sick.
After a farewell feast with Mr. Lei, I gave my last batch of finals. Highlight: Two girls worked a dialogue about how much they love me and my beautiful smile into their final presentation (suck-ups, I know! But it was sweet.) Low Point: In my final act as a teacher, I had to tell a boy he's lucky I'm not failing him--only because I'm not allowed to--because he slacked off all year and then failed to prepare a final presentation.
I hunted down Chengde's foreign liquor supply, a shop curiously connected to an elementary school on a leafy side street, to buy Cuervo for my farewell fiesta. I went home to email information to the Seattle Red Cross (my future employer!), organized my apartment, packed a bag and headed to la fiesta. I even slept in a hurry, and left Chengde at 5:45 a.m. I spent the afternoon in Beijing with Daisy, and took off on the overnight train to Guilin at 4 p.m., plummeting forward as I read Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which suited my pace, and convinced me that moving is the only thing to do, really. I plowed forward even as I slept.
Within an hour of arriving in Guilin, I hopped a bus to Longsheng, where I missed a connection by five minutes, crashed in an ugly hotel reluctantly recommended by Lonely Planet at a last resort if you end up overnighting in this "decidedly ugly" town. The showerhead was positioned directly over the squat toilet, the whole place precariously perched above a coursing, muddy river. It's always raining down here, strange to see rivers with water after a year in the dust-stormy north.
Up early, I caught a bus away from decidedly ugly into arguably the most fascinating manipulation of landscape humans have ever pulled off, the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces in Longji. There I spent some of the best few hours of hiking, through soggy mountains of muddy, shimmering pools, little waterfalls pouring into the pools below all the way to the bottom, the water and me in constant motion.
Busses. Back to Longsheng, to Guilin, to Yangshuo. I walked 90 minutes in the twilight to my current dwelling at Yangshuo Outside Inn, past several tiny villages, amid perhaps the most interesting landscape on earth. Towering limestone peaks covered with greenery, grown up from shifts in land otherwise as flat as Nebraska. So I walked and walked and walked, slept, and leapt out of bed to rent a bike and traverse the countryside. Thursday to Tuesday, I barely stopped to eat and sleep.
It started sprinking as I left the hostel on my brand new Giant mountain bike, the Crayola color of burnt sienna, accented with deep maroon. A beautiful bike. Soon it was pouring. I hate to turn around, and I hadn't stopped yet, so I plowed on--almost Chinese as I futilely held my umbrella with one hand, navigating puddles and sharp rocks with the other.
I biked all day, stopping only for lunch under a tent restaurant during a hard downpour. The proprietor's child was curious about me. She also had a huge glob of thick green snot under one nostril, and while her mother smacked her hands and arms repeatedly for unseen offenses, she never wiped her nose. The little girl seemed as unphased by the beatings as her mother was by the snot globule. I sat until I could sit no more, and rode to visit a cave.
Foolishly, I assumed two things. 1: Caves are natural wonders. 2: It doesn't rain in caves. China sometimes has a way of taking naturally beautiful places and exploiting them in the tackiest possible way. So this cave's stalag-tites and -mites are lit up like a Saturday night disco, and photography teams take portraits and show them on computer screens--inside the cave--like it's Adventureland or something. Also, I had to pull out my umbrella a few times to dodge the dripping roof.
I tried to loop back to the hostel, but some conman (or maybe he was legit, but it was a scam regardless) wanted to charge me to bike through his "historic village" situated conveniently on the main path. I hated the idea of just going back the way I came (why? why?) so I turned and took a side road from the village, going going going as the path tapered into more of a stream, until I was walking my bike on a narrow stretch that wasn't actually a path at all. I wouldn't turn around, because I was at the river and knew my hostel was just across the water, if only I could find a bridge. And I wasn't about to stop moving now.
But I looked back and realized my umbrella was gone. I'd rigged it over my basket to cover my camera bag. My heart sank--the umbrella was given to me by a sweet couple from California on Easter Sunday at the Vatican in 2008, when they noticed me next to them, umbrella-less and soaked to the bone. Since receiving that umbrella, I've never forgotten it on rainy days. So, finally, I turned around even knowing there was no chance it hadn't been claimed by the next passerby.
Here I am, frantically peddling up muddy, rocky slopes in the most beautiful place in China (did I mention this? It's beautiful. No, really.) going and going because I don't want to stop going. At once, it starts to sprinkle again, and I hear a dooming metal-on-rock sound.
scrape-scrape.
The back tire on my brand new, burnt sienna Giant mountain bike is completely flat. And of course it starts to rain harder. This bike is really heavy, so I can carry it about seven steps before dropping it in a puddle. Going the long way around, the only way I know how to get back to the hostel, I figure it will take me approximately the rest of the week. I wanted to cry. Or maybe I did. In the rain, who can tell?
Two guys passed on their motorcycles before a skinny little man in an army surplus jacket took pity on me. He surveyed the situation, shook his head slowly and chuckled a little, and finally made a phone call to a bike repairman. I tried to communicate that I'd like to call the hostel, but eventually just plopped down on a rock to wait. If there's one thing I have learned this year, it's that things just happen in China, at a pace and through a method that I haven't yet managed to grasp. Usually, the thing to do is be still and wait anywhere from 60 minutes to 60 days longer than I imagine a thing should take. And so I did. Finally stopped after five days of going, I surrendered to the situation.
My rescuer was kind, but couldn't hide his amusement at my situation. I took off my shoes to ring out my muddy socks. He grinned and shook his head some more. Don't you have an umbrella?
Mei you. He shook his head. Slowly, to rub it in. Then he pointed to the bike and shook his head grimly some more. The repairman was an hour arriving.
He found no fewer than five holes in the tube (how?) and I finally did call the hostel manager to negotiate the price of a new tube. (He found the holes or he made them?" she sighed in typical ex-pat fashion.) After a few more calls, the mechanic left, came back with the tire, and had it fixed up in three minutes. He also donated his old poncho to me for the ride back.
My savior squatted under a nearby roof, shaking his head still at the turn his afternoon had taken. And, again, I went.
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