Tuk Tuks

Tuk Tuks are the only way to get around Siam Reap.

For the uninitiated, "Tuk Tuk" is the colloquial term for a small fiberglass carriage attached to a motorbike, and they basically dominate the cities of Southeast Asia. Tuk Tuk drivers are some of the most fast talking, aggressive, charming, and utterly amoral people you'll ever meet, and unless you possess truly Bodhisattva levels of calm, they are likely to drive you insane. They're also some of the best drivers I've ever seen, and if I ever have the need to rob a bank, I'm importing Hos as the getaway driver.

"Hos" (pronounced huh-oh-ssss) is our personal Tuk Tuk driver. We met him after climbing off the bus in Siam Reap, realizing we were lost, and deciding that, hell with it, we might as well catch a ride to our hostel instead of walking like we do every time.

Hos and his army of other Tuk Tuk drivers swarm the bus stops, looking for people exactly like us. But unlike his buddies, Hos walked up to us, asked, in pretty good English, if we were all right and then waited patiently while we worked out what we wanted to do. More than anything else, his courtesy and respect of our space won us over. So, take note, any blog-reading, English-speaking, Cambodian Tuk Tuk drivers that read travel blogs.

I also have no idea why I've been capitalizing Tuk Tuk this entire time. Huh.

- Doug

New Humans

Exhausted, filthy, and completely and utterly hiked out, Amanda, Machete and I make our way down the only street in Chi Phat. It is the hottest day we've had, and I am near totally fried. I have had longer hikes, and I've had hotter days, and longer hikes on hotter days, but for whatever reason by the time we get to the CBET visitor center, I am so tired that all I can manage to do is rip off my shoes, drop my pack and sit in the first chair I see.

A few days in the woods will make you appreciate the real luxuries – like chairs. Amanda sinks into the chair across from me, and we lock eyes for a moment. She looks as tired as I feel. Amusement tickles behind our eyes, but we don't laugh. Laughing would take energy.

Perhaps an hour and a half later, we manage to stumble back to our guesthouse, which despite being around half a kilometer up the road, feels like about five miles. Being gentlemanly, I let Amanda shower first.

Shower is a relative term. There is a giant tub of water and a bucket. I debate just climbing into the tub, but don't want to dirty up the water for whoever uses this place after us. Heh. Dirty up the water. I'm nine-tenths of the way sure that the tub is collected rainwater, and there's a layer of dirt at the bottom I'm careful not to disturb as I scoop the water into the bucket and dump it over me.

Its one selling point is that it is ice cold. I've no idea how the Cambodians managed it, but the water is cold enough to make me shiver and swear. But it's a good kind of pain. That, combined with the soap and shampoo, is enough to make me feel almost human again.

Which is part of why we do these things – things like take round-the-world trips, climb mountains, and hike through jungles filled with leeches. They hurt. They're painful. They're exhausting. But they are accomplishments – acknowledgements of your labors. Scrubbing dirt and sweat off your body is more than performing maintenance and making yourself feel good. It's a physical acknowledgement that you have pushed your limits. The ablutions after trial let you know that, yes, you are human, and that you have grown, and that it was a painful process, as growing always is. But it was worth it.

It always is.

I scrub the dirt and stink and sweat away, and reveal the new human underneath.

- Doug 

the Jungle Book

Jumping off a waterfall is perhaps one of my favorite things to do. After hiking through the Cambodian jungle for five hours, the cool water and mild adrenaline rush make you feel less like a wrung our wet rag and more like the human being you're supposed to be.

We started pretty early. In the jungle you wake up whenever the sun comes up, because that's when the animals wake up and start making noise. The night before, our guides had assembled a shelter out of nothing but bamboo and some tarps. It took them about half an hour, and was better than anything I could have put together in that amount of time. We were a little crowded, but the tarp kept the rain out, which is the most important thing.
 

We'd spent most of the day before hiking, with a short detour to a jar burial site that was over three hundred years old. It was mildly interesting, but also anti-climactic after all the grand tombs I'd seen over the last two months. I was secretly hoping for some Indiana Jones style boulder dodging, or at the very least a cliff jump, but what I got was a rickety ladder and some broken jars. After that, it was hiking through bamboo forests and a few open fields.
 

So it was a bit of a surprise today when just after lunch we turned off the main trail and found the biggest camp we'd seen yet. It was exactly like the first camp, but with multiple raised platforms, a no kidding toilet (drop toilet, no water) and a picnic table. It was paradise.

 

After dropping our packs Machete led us of down a short path to a series of waterfalls, and then surprised us by asking if we wanted to jump. It had been forbidden at our pervious ones.

Charlie and Carlos broke out their GoPro and proceeded to do some back flips off the rock. Amanda and I stuck with cannonballs. Not all of us can be skydiving, dive instructing, Buddhist retreat going adrenaline junkies.

A few hours later we rested in the shallows, watching some monkeys play in the trees across the water. They jumped from tree to tree, chasing after each other, visible as they ran along exposed branches and then disappearing, but still easy to track through the moving bush. As we watched, we talked, chatting about anything and everything. In a shockingly short time we had become good friends – a team. We shared equipment, stories, and food.

That night I broke out the powdered Gatorade I'd been saving for a rainy day, and we shared the sickly sweet drink – the first not water we'd had since starting this adventure. It was magnificent.

In the morning we would part ways; Charlie and Carlos going for the last leg of their trip, while we returned to Chi Phat, and then on to Phnom Penh and then Siam Reap. That night, I reflected on how lucky we were to have met them and had them as hiking partners. We'd made friends, shared a great experience, and learned a lot, couldn't ask for much more. 

 

-Doug

 

Leeches and Waterfalls

I am skeptical of our guide. He is significantly shorter than me, skinnier, appears to be younger in age, and has a wide toothy grin that makes me mildly nervous. He is also wearing flip flops, which has the pretentious gear junkie in me scoffing and the 2nd Lieutenant of Marines in me wanting to buy him a pair of good hiking boots and smartwool® socks like I'm wearing. Everything I've ever learned about hiking tells me that his feet are going to be ripped up at the end of the day, and we're going to be stuck out in the woods with a Cambodian who can't walk and no idea of where we are.

There is a much more quiet voice in the back of my head telling me that this teenager with his wickedly curved scythe-like machete has been born and raised in these woods, and that there is a very good possibility that he knows a lot more about staying alive out in the woods than I do, and can hike for longer, go faster, and carry more than I could in this particular environment.

I listen to the quiet voice and shake his proffered hand, nodding my head respectfully and asking his name. He responds with something that sounds like a cross between a cluck and some consonants, and I mentally resign myself to not being able to say, remember, or understand it. Of all the languages I've encountered so far, Cambodian is my least favorite and least understood. Carlos would later give him the nickname "Machete", which he seemed to like.

Amanda and I are paired up with two other trekkers, Charlie and Carlos, two of perhaps the most interesting people I've had the pleasure of encountering on my trip so far. Along with the four of us there was Machete, another guide who we called Red Socks, for the blood red knee socks that he wore under his flip flops, and two cooks. Charlie and Carlos are on a 5 day trek, but their route is exactly the same as ours until the very last day, so they might as well have been on the same trip.

Machete points down the one road in Chi Phat, and without any fanfare we start walking.

 

 

Hiking is the kind of physical suffering that I love. Pack weight usually doesn't bother me, nor does walking for hours on end, in heat, cold, mountains, whatever nature, and the route thrown at me usually fades away with the satisfaction of crossing distance under your own power. I love to hike to places; I'm a caveman like that. Real, physical progress makes me feel accomplished, and it is an accomplishment. Humans don't walk enough. 

Hours later, as I always do, I am regretting my decision to walk somewhere with a pack on my back. Sweat drips down my face, my muscles burn and my breath is ragged. My fancy hiking boots are soaked through, courtesy of walking through a few streams just wide enough to be unjumpable while not being wide enough to justify taking my shoes and socks off, wading across, and then putting them back on. I am seriously concerned about my feet because of this; wet feet and hiking are no joke, but no one else seems worried enough to put up with me slowing them down. "Its good training, we understand?" I mutter to myself in my best Sergeant Instructor growl.

The jungle we are hiking through has given me a realistic understanding of how badass any Korea or Vietnam Vet really is. The temperature is unreal, and I've only been hotter in Quantico; this is supposed to be winter for Cambodia, too. After walking through some rolling open plains, we enter triple canopy jungle, following a path that is sometimes wide enough for a Ford Explorer, and other times seemingly non-existent. The few times we've deviated, Machete had to hack us a way through, slowing our progress unbelievably. It takes mere hours before I come to the conclusion that we should never ever fight in this kind of terrain again, and pray that we won't have to. Why can't the bad guys ever fight over some place pleasant, like Southern France . . . Wait, sorry Grandpa Wood.
 

 

 

It really is beautiful though. The plains are dominated by waist-high grass and water buffalo, and provide a great view of the Cardamom Mountain range to our North. The jungle is vibrantly alive with everything from monkeys to birds to a centipede that scared the shit out of Machete when he noticed it on the path. Apparently those things are poisonous. I gave it a wide berth while at the same time trying to get a good look at it.

Around noon on the first day I got my first leech. I didn't notice it until I was stripping my shoes and socks off to cross the first major river we'd run across. I was still hoping I'd be able to keep my feet dry while hiking, and was switching over to sandals to cross to the opposite bank, where our guides were setting up lunch. Just down the river was our second waterfall, the first of which we had stopped at briefly around 10 am. Both were amazing, but this was the larger of the two, by an order of magnitude, and I was looking forward to jumping in.

 

 

So it was with some surprise that I hiked up my pants and realized that the left side of one of my socks was soaked in blood - MY BLOOD!

Huh.

Red Socks looked over and nodded sagely, "Lychee."

I felt no pain. Apparently when these guys bite you they hit you with an anesthetic and a pretty impressive anti-coagulant. They take their fill, and drop off when finished – leaving you bleeding and wondering what happened. I am more curious than frightened or irritated. The leech was gone, and I was already bitten; no point in getting angry about something I couldn't control. My leg bled feely for a while, and eventually stopped, leaving a small ugly bruise the size of a sharpie mark where the bite was.

We dipped in the waterfall, swimming right up next to it and sometimes through it. After hiking for four hours through the sun and jungle it was exactly what we needed.

 

After was lunch. I learned more about setting up a cook fire in those 4 days than I had in all my years of Scouts. One of the deep reservations I have about the scouting community is that, while it puts an emphasis on a lot of very good things, like community service, leadership and appreciating the outdoors, practical outdoor survival skills are not actually practiced by most troops. I never learned how to make a cook fire in Scouts. I learned how to make a fire, but not once did I cook over one. This is true of many "outdoor skills" like water purification, improvised shelters, and about a dozen other things. They may or may not have been covered in classroom form, but rarely did we ever get a practical application lesson. (Mr. Meyer, if you're reading this, I don't want to offend, and would love to lead a camp out sometime that focuses on these things next time I'm back in NM).

Lunch (and dinner and breakfast) for the entire time out the woods was rice, with cabbage, pork, carrots, and some unidentifiable local vegetables. With breakfast we got an omelet which was essentially just scrambled eggs that hadn't been cut up. Sounds pretty boring, but was actually delicious. Cambodian hot sauce (a more badass version of Siracha) is a good way to mix things up, but I didn't want to all that often.

It was after lunch that the leeches came in force. Our guides had cut some sticks for us to flick them off our shoes and socks, and sometimes pants, but they are determined little bastards. By 4 p.m. we were nearly running through the jungle despite our packs, our exhaustion, and the danger of running through such terrain, simply because it made it harder for the leeches to latch on. Despite this, I would estimate that I had upwards of thirty on my body by the time we pushed our way through a stretch of tall grass and made it to that night's camp.

Camp was a raised platform of bamboo that the leeches were too stupid to climb up for some reason. It had a thatch roof and open sides. The jungle pressed in, obscuring the view of a river that you could hear burbling just out of sight.

It was heaven.

We stripped down to our skivvies, desire to get rid of the leeches overwhelming any sense of modesty around our guides or our new friends Charlie and Carlos, who did the same. The little bastards had gotten everywhere, but my worst fears were assuaged when I stripped my trousers off and discovered that the compression shorts below had kept them all away from my crotch. I had several bite marks along my waistline, but nothing had gotten through the spandex.

The guides, making the rest of us look lazy, set up camp, retrieved water, and started a cook fire all in the space of time it took us to get changed into camp clothes. I almost objected when they started setting up my hammock for me, but it had only taken a day of hiking with these guys to figure out that they were significantly better at everything in these woods, and that everything would go a lot more smoothly if I just shut up and went with it.

Night falls quickly in the jungle. During dinner it felt as though we were suddenly thrust into darkness, with the only illumination coming from two candles our guides had set up just before dinner. These flickered and sputtered, yet somehow glowed brightly, illuminating a sphere of faces.

Food is perhaps one of the greatest morale improvers out there, and where we had been really too exhausted to converse much before, after dinner Charlie, Carlos, Amanda and I stayed up in the light of the candles and got to know each other. Charlie was a concert promoter in the States up until four years ago, until he got tired of the lifestyle and decided to do something else. Something else amounted to getting his dive instructor qualification and traveling from job to job teaching scuba diving. This had the side benefit of allowing him to travel from paradise to paradise, and get paid to do it. He met Carlos in Puerto Rico, and the two became fast friends. Carlos is a fast talking and fun loving Puerto Rican native, and perhaps one of the funniest people I've met. His self-effacing humor is both endearing and utterly hilarious, and he would fill our quiet moments with little gems like, "I dated this girl who had this fetish: she would dress up like herself and act like a total bitch."

Carlos and Charlie are both incredibly thoughtful and intelligent people as well. Before they came out to Chi Phat for this trip, they spent ten days in total silence at a Buddhist retreat in Thailand – total silence for ten days, two meals a day, and sleeping on hard stone beds just like the Buddha. Both of them described it as one of the most profound experiences of their lives. Ten days is a long time to be alone inside your head, and I found myself wondering how I would do if all I could hear was me.

Scary thought.

The candle burned low as we talked, and it was with the sudden realization that we would have to walk just as far or farther the next day that we decided to sleep.

-Doug  

Blank Sheet

I have not blogged for over two weeks. It started with Amanda’s and my trek through the woods of Cambodia, and has continued on through Thailand, and now through India. I think the reasons for this are many. One of them was that I was tired. Another is because I was afraid. Afraid of this story, and how big it was. It seemed like an insurmountable task at first, and I hesitated to start. Then, when I did start, some other things got in the way. But I was recently enlightened to the difference between excuses and reasons by a very good friend of mine, and it is clear to me now that I used these things as excuses not to write. Writing is tiring, and sometimes hard, and very, very scary. The blank page is in my top 5 scariest things ever list – dead serious. But I am driven to write, not like I am driven to do other things. Writing has for as long as I can remember been my release, my therapy, my skill, my love, and an intrinsic part of me. It is who I am; it is what my soul is. I grow nervous unless I have something to write with and on close at hand in case I need to get something out. To be a channel for the things inside me, I both fear and love writing, because when you write something really good, it is like breathing air for the first time. Even that is a poor simile, I cannot describe the feeling, though I once read a book where a character was in the presence of a God, he felt like he and everything else was just a shadow, as his mind worked its way around the edges that he might be in the presence of the only thing that is truly real.

That is what good writing is for me – a theological experience.

If you can imagine that there is something divine inside, a story, a beautiful thing that wants to get out and be exposed to the light, please now imagine the utter terror in the knowledge that you are human, and humans tend to screw things up on a regular basis.

My terror seems rightly justified, at least to me.

I have heard the saying that courage isn't the lack of fear, but doing something in spite of that fear. With that in mind, I summon my courage to write, as I seem to have misplaced it two weeks ago. I humbly apologize to you, the reader, because to not write when there is nothing to write is no crime, but to not write because you are afraid to screw it up is, and I have sinned against you greatly.

This all could seem very pretentious; placing great importance on what is, on the grand scheme of things, a very small failure. But as Carl once told me, "Anyone can get the big stuff right. It's the little things that matter."

And they do matter.

Okay. Back to that blank page.

-Doug

Koh Kong

Koh Kong is a sleepy fishing village maybe fifteen minutes by taxi from the border between Cambodia and Thailand. After some convincing, our driver drops us off at the right hotel, hostel, guesthouse . . . whatever. They rent rooms by the hour and still have a big sign in English and Khmer warning that people engaging in sex trafficking will be prosecuted. Whatever. For a whole night it's roughly 16 bucks.

Surprisingly, the room is relatively nice, has air conditioning, and is part of a large courtyard with a pool area. Southern Cambodia is sweltering, and the pool is more than inviting, but we go out for a meal and a short walk about the town, which takes all of thirty minutes, and covers the shoreline, a small market, and a strange memorial with no signs in English.

The big restaurant in town is Bob's Ice Cream, which serves Western food and Cambodian.

And chocolate shakes. At 32 Celsius, a chocolate shake is exactly what you need to take the edge off.

Our next destination was Chi Phat, which is not on any map I've seen, yet is still relatively well known to any Cambodian I talk to. It's also not on any main road, and getting there involves taking a bus to Phnom Penh, getting off halfway through the ride, and taking either a three hour boat ride up the river for thirty bucks or a motorbike ride for six. We opt for the motorbike ride and I spend the next 40 minutes behind a fat Cambodian alternating between exhilaration and utter terror as we burn through the back roads of the Cardamom Mountain Lowlands. There was some truly breathtaking scenery, none of which I have photos of because swift death would have followed if I'd for one second taken my hands off the driver.

If Koh Kong is a sleepy fishing village, Chi Phat is a one horse town, without the horse. The local economy revolves around the eco-tourism business, a cultural shift from twenty years ago when illegal poaching and smuggling was the name of the game. It turns out that that the Cardamom Mountains are one of the most biologically diverse places in Southeast Asia, with millions of different species of every animal from monkeys to elephants to mosquitoes. A few years back some scientists rolled in and offered the locals the alternative of hosting eco-minded westerners and taking them on treks through the jungle. It turns out that rich white people will pay a fair amount of money to be miserable in rural Cambodia, and it's no great trouble for local guides to show them around the waterfalls and back trails they grew up in.

Which is how Amanda and I found ourselves signed up for a five day four night jungle trek through the Cardamom Mountains.

Our heavily pregnant tour organizer looks at us skeptically over her ledger book while giving us the low down on what we'll need to bring and what to expect on the trail. "You know the leechi?"

Amanda has told me to expect leaches. I am morbidly curious and apprehensive. We laugh a little, trying to make light of it. "Yes, we know the leechi."

Her expression doesn't change. "Two backpack, three liters water, hammocks, and blanket. You bring rain jacket, clothes, and hiking boots. Breakfast at 7, you leave at 730. Don't be late."

- Doug

Border Crossing

Getting into Thailand is free for Americans. As long as you have a passport, the border guards greet you with a grin and a quick stamp. Getting into Cambodia requires a little more effort.

If you're smart, like Amanda, you buy your visa online beforehand. You can print it off and it only costs around $20. If you're dumb like me, you can buy it at the border for around $35, and you have to deal with enthusiastic entrepreneurs who offer to fill out your paperwork for you, as well as offering your rides into the nearest big town, Koh Kong. These guys are distinctly not your friends, and having to deal with both them and the corrupt border guards leaves you with a great initial impression of Cambodia. But there are really only two options, smile, suck it up and pay a little more, or get angry, realize you have to suck it up anyway, and pay a little more.

Oh well, at least here they smile at you when they screw you.

- Doug

Bangkok Buddha

Bangkok is everything Beijing is, but not freezing, less developed, and the people smile more. The alleyways are just as crowded, but the city doesn't stink as much, and the feel of the country is more vibrant, more alive. Without having any real basis for the opinion other than feel and a short 36 hours there, I find myself liking Thailand.

The morning after I arrive, Amanda and I wake up early with the objective of seeing as many temples and religious sites as possible while it's still daylight. This is due in large part to our fear that when we return to Bangkok, we will be "Shrined Out" and exhausted after spending a week and a half in Cambodia doing everything from an ecology trek to seeing Angor Wat.

Our first stop, the Royal Palace, has been home to the current Thai monarchy for more than 300 years, and occupied for even longer. Most of it is off limits, as is usually the case with actively occupied royal households. The current King is more than 80 years old, and has managed to keep nominal leadership of the country through more than 17 constitutional changes, coups, and a few bloodless revolutions. If HBO's Game of Thrones is boring you, I recommend the wikipedia page of Thai political history.

 Inside the palace grounds is the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the surrounding monastery, which in my mind is even more interesting. The now unoccupied monastery serves as the personal chapel of the Thai Royal Family, and since one of the king's titles is "Defender of The Buddhist Faith," it is decorated accordingly. Strange ziggurats and pillars rise out of the ground, every surface covered in painted ceramic tiles or mirrors or gold leaf.

The inner courtyard walls are painted with an incredibly detailed re-telling of the mythic kidnap and war to recover the wife of a mythical Thai King. This Homeric odyssey features demons, armies of monkey men, giant gods and goddesses, and more than a few bloody battles. There's even a steamy scene between the King and Queen just before the kidnapping. More than a third of the frieze was being restored and was off limits, which of course only made me more interested. I resolved to learn more.

The Emerald Buddha is one of the most holy artifacts in all of Thailand, and possibly the Buddhist faith. The story goes that the Buddha (at this point covered in plaster) was discovered by villagers and delivered to a local abbot, who noticed that the plaster was flaking off the nose. Something green and shiny showed through underneath, and after flecking more off, the abbot discovered the core of the statue was exquisitely carved jade. He initially mistook the jade for emerald, and the legend of the Emerald Buddha was born.

It is exactly as spectacular as one would be led to believe, and the throne that the Buddha is enshrined upon is almost as magnificent as the Buddha itself. More magnificent than both of these however, is the floor to ceiling mural that covered all four walls of the temple.

I've been to the Vatican and seen the Sistine Chapel, The Duomo in Florence with its spectacular painted roof dome, and hundreds of painted ceilings in western churches and synagogues. This mural blew them all away. I can't show you any photographs, because they were forbidden, and I actually saw a Japanese tourist get into an altercation with the guards over his illegal filming of the temple. Besides, it's the kind of thing you can't really grasp with a picture.

After the Royal Palace, Amanda and I took a ferry across the river to see Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn. It towers above everything else in the area and has stairs that Mount Huashan would have nodded in approval of.

A ferry back across the river takes us to the Reclining Buddha.

  

The GIANT reclining Buddha is giant, which is really all that can be said for this gold plated monstrosity. In the same structure, there were a few more temples with murals almost as good as the Jade Buddha's, but again, no pictures.

These three temples took us nearly all day. Exhausted, sweaty, and deliciously full from all the street meat we could handle, Amanda and I made our way back to the hostel. 24 hours later we would be in Cambodia.   

- Doug

Amanda

Intelligent, practical, and game for nearly anything, Amanda Hacking is exactly what you want from an international traveling partner. She meets me at Bangkok airport with a hug and a smile and, as with Marty, it's as if we never parted. In the four months since we graduated school, she has moved back to Thailand to help her parents rebuild the family boat, and is taking a well deserved break from that to meet up with me and travel Thailand and Cambodia for two weeks.

Amanda is a unique personage. After her first year of middle school, her parents decided to go sailing, permanantly. They rented out their house in Seattle and sailed off into the sunset. Amanda and her brother spent the last portion of their teenage years on their boat, the Ocelot. Years later, she applied and was accepted to the University of Washington, where we became friends through a few mutual associations.

After traveling most of Japan and all of China alone, I'm more than glad to see a familar face. Traveling alone is fun, rewarding, and above all other things challenging, but traveling with a good friend is even better.         

- Doug

Accommodations

Lodgings in China are hit or miss, and in true statistical fashion, I had one mostly hit and one mostly miss.

My hostel in Beijing, the Ming Courtyard, was located in one of Beijing's many "hutongs" which as far as I can tell is Chinese for alley neighborhood. In the States, alleyways are the shady places where drug deals go down, women get assaulted and Bruce Wayne's parents get murdered. Here in China, the hutong is the cornerstone of the local economy. The theoretically one way streets that lead off the main roads are filled with tiny shops selling water, soda, fruit juice, packaged foods, and freshish fruit. Taxis, pedicabs, and mopeds clog the alley at nearly any time of day or night, making travel difficult, but not impossible for the wary pedestrian. The stink of public toilets and open sewer lines mix with the delicious aroma of cooking meat and vegetables coming out of many tiny restraints and from carts, creating a nauseating, mouth-watering miasma of olfactory sensation. Tiny one-room massage parlors fill what look like single-car garages, some legit and some obviously covers for less legal activity. Construction materials lie scattered on the street; some getting used, some not, and always in the way of the ever-present traffic. American pop music blares out of a single-room barber shop that somehow always has exactly one customer.

                              

In the middle of this semi-organized madness is my hostel. The Ming Courtyard is exactly that, a courtyard with the upscale rooms around the edges, and the larger dorm rooms occupying an annex just past the entryway. The lobby doubles as the hangout space for a few American, British and other European expats, most of who have been in China for more than a year teaching some form of English. No one remembers names, and people are referred to by their nationality and state titles. They are an eclectic group – a lanky Texan and a short British girl seem to have been there the longest. Both teach English at international schools, though neither seem to have a passion for it and seem like they're just marking time. The Brit has taken a sharpie and written "Don't Mess With Texas" and "Border Control" above the entryway to Texas' dorm room. She seems to think this is hilarious, and Texas humors her. New Jersey is a skinny guy with glasses that seems to know the most about China. He's traveled a lot of Southeast Asia overland and gives me free advice on how to get to various tourist stops. He even goes so far as to look up bus times, which is how I got to the Great Wall and met Mike and Anne. His name is Ken, and last I heard from him, he was looking for new jobs outside of China.

These and others formed a nightly gathering in the lobby, all seeking to use the internet and inevitably creating issues for everyone else, thanks largely to too many expats all trying to use the same amount of bandwidth. Simple emails often took more than a minute to send, and web page load times were glacial.

Speaking of glacial, it snowed my second day in Beijing, and I was forced to move rooms because the roof leaked in mine. The same day, the water wouldn’t work for most of the day, and after that it was a struggle to find hot water to bathe in. Most of that week the weather stayed lousy, and the temperature rarely got above ten Celsius. So you could take a freezing shower, go hang out in the freezing lobby or go out into the freezing streets of Beijing.

As you can tell, I really loved the Ming Courtyard.

Not all of it was bad though. Being inside of a hutong was both fascinating and enlightening, and was a good introduction to the social niceties of China.

Mostly, there aren't any.

Cars have the right of way, unless you think you can get past them in time. Trash goes wherever you want it to, but it’s bad form to actually toss something out on the street. Kids should be watched out for, but not watched all that closely. Most of all, get your ass in gear or stay out of the way, because people have places to be, and if you ain't movin’, you losin’.

Xi'an was not that much different. There were no hutongs; the streets were, for the most part, large and wide – slightly cleaner and better smelling than Beijing, and most of the real market activity was confined to the Muslim Quarter. The 7 Sages Hostel was much nicer though.

The site 7 Sages sits on has been occupied more or less continuously for around 2,000 years. Most recently it was used by the Red Army as a base of operations during the Communist Revolution in 1949. Unlike the Ming, it is a true courtyard, which is to say that there are large and impressive exterior walls, within which are multiple buildings and courtyards where the guest rooms are. Showers and bathrooms are common, but the rooms are heated, and there is a bar/restaurant with reasonably good internet.

You can tell 7 Sages is good because the Chinese actually use it. Nearly all of the guests were Chinese on weekend or week long excursions to Xi'an, which is apparently a popular domestic tourism location. The old city walls have been around for over 1500 years, and as mentioned previously, Xi'an marks the beginning of the Silk Road across Asia. Add to this the Terra Cotta Warriors and you have a pretty alluring destination.

You can also tell 7 Sages is good because they have kittens – adorable kittens.

Off to Thailand next, then Cambodia. Looking forward to the heat!

-Doug 

Tombs

The soulless grey eyes of row after row of Terra Cotta Warriors would be more intimidating if the viewing portion was at ground level. And if there were fewer tourists. A woman in a leopard print and high heels starts crowding into my space. After snapping a few more photos, I yield, letting her slide into my former position at the north end of Pit 1, the largest of the three excavation pits at the site of Emperor Qin's tomb. More than three kilometers south of the excavation is the mound of earth under which the only Emperor of the Qin dynasty was buried. It is part of a larger complex that is more than fifty square kilometers and at one point contained a small city, the burial mound, and more than ten thousand model soldiers with weapons, armor and horses to guard the emperor in his eternal rest.

No one can ever say that Chinese dictators have ever done anything halfway.

In my mind, I imagine the laborers digging the pits for the fired clay statues, wondering at the madness of their emperor's massive expenditure. The brick foundation is laid, the statues installed with all their accoutrements, and the wooden crossbeams set down above them. It is night, and raining. Lightning strikes off in the distance and thunder rolls ominously as a captain or command officer jumps down into the pit with a torch, making the final inspection before the army is sealed in time, forever. He climbs out of the pit, nods to a sergeant, who nods to a work crew that seals the last stone entrance. Dirt and rocks are piled up and raked down so that the landscape appears undisturbed. The final workmen are slaves that will be murdered to ensure their silence and prevent grave robbers.

And so the warriors slept for centuries, until a dirt poor farmer digging a well discovered them in 1970. Now Emperor Qin's clay army stands exposed for the world – sometimes called the 8th Wonder of the Ancient World.   

Mount Huashan

Speaking honestly, half the reason I went to China was because of a Cracked.com article. The topic was something along the lines of “The Six Most Insane Things You Can Do On ‘Vacation’.” It detailed some high risk places or activities that people do for fun while on vacation. There were a few interesting ones, but the one that really caught my eye was Mount Huashan.

This is why.
 

Mount Huashan is informally considered to be one of the most dangerous day hikes in the world. Nowhere near K2 or Everest or the Eiger in difficulty and actual danger level, but foremost among those hikes that don’t require snow gear or oxygen masks. It is also one of the Five Sacred Mountains in Daoism, and has a history that stretches back actually before recorded history.
 

Hiking on the edge of a cliff that plummets down for literally thousands of feet to get to a temple carved out of a sheer rock face that’s more than a thousand years old – where do I sign up?
 

Despite the history and adrenaline candy that Mt. Huashan represented in my mind, I was pretty leery of going by myself. Hiking by yourself is a shady prospect even in a country where you speak the language, and I don’t here, but on top of all that, my hostel wasn’t exactly what you’d call helpful about getting there. Oh, they’d take you and give you a tour, but it would cost you 500 Yuan, which is around sixty bucks, and you have to take the cable car up instead of actually hiking it. If you didn’t take their tour, they just pointed you toward the bus station and said, “good luck.” Yeah, not going to happen.

And that’s where Joe comes in.
 

Joe is a Chinese national from the north part of China. He was sharing a dorm room with me, and speaks enough English to maintain a conversation. I was heading to bed, and we were talking about our plans the next day, when he dropped the bomb. “I go to Mt. Huashan.”
 

Well, there go my plans for the Terra Cotta Warriors.
 

“Can I come?” I try to keep the begging out of my voice.

“Of course, but we must leave very early.”

“What time?”

“5:30.”

Five thirty is nothing. I’d get up at midnight to climb this mountain. We seal our agreement with a handshake. I have known Joe for a total of 5 minutes.

As it always does, 0530 comes way, way too early. By 0700 we are eating breakfast at the Chinese equivalent of a Mackers, and Joe and I are hesitantly feeling out our new acquaintance. A newspaper hawker comes up and starts harassing us. Joe buys a newspaper to shut him up. Taking one look at the cover, he snorts and throws it on the table next to us. A quick glance shows me a picture of the leaders of the CCP. I try not look curious and fail.

Joe asks me about the United States election. This rapidly leads to a discussion of the recent Chinese election. Joe indicates the newspaper and says. “You found out who your president was yesterday. I’ve known who my new president was going to be for four years. It’s ridiculous!” With little encouraging from me, he continues his commentary, and I wonder if I should be keeping an eye out for English speaking police officers. Fortunately no one seems interested.


Joe is one of the new generation of tech savvy youth who have smartphones, internet access and a healthy frustration with a stagnant and despotic government. His ultimate goal is to emigrate to America and start a family there. He’s also probably one of the nicest Chinese people I’ve met yet. I’ve only known him for a few hours, and I like him. He’s smart, competent, kind, and a little shy in an endearing way. I get the feeling girls make him nervous. When I ask about a girlfriend, he shakes his head, but tells me that there is someone, but their relationship is not “defined.”

We spend the meal talking politics shop. Joe takes the lead in the conversation with me occasionally asking questions. He’s frustrated that he doesn’t have a voice in his government, and that his internet is filtered and that the system is seemingly set up to prevent hardworking people from getting the wealth they deserve (apparently a not particularly good two bedroom apartment can cost as much as $500,000 US. I didn’t ask about buying land and building a house.) His frustration rubbed off on me, and I found myself wishing I could do something, and promising myself that if I ever ended up in a position of governmental power, I’d do my best to put a stop to injustice like this. Knowing I probably would never have that power made me feel more insignificant than I ever had before. Still, I’ve always believed that even the smallest voice matters.

Once on the bus we both passed out, our early morning catching up with us. I woke up when the bus jolted to a stop in front of a supermarket. The bus operator kicked everyone off, and we stood outside in the cold, some people going inside and a few others smoking outside. I followed Joe into the store, took a bathroom break and bought some things. Joe made some noise about the prices, but I just sort of assume that I’m always getting fleeced in this country and took it in stride.
 

While we wait for everyone to finish buying things, Joe explains the scam to me. “The grocery store hikes the prices up to two or even three times what they’re worth. This is the last stop before the mountain, and they know they can do that and get away with it. But the reason we’ve stopped at this one in particular is because the bus driver has an arrangement with the owners of the store. He gets a cut of the profits.” I don’t think I’d actually seen corruption before, like no holds barred in your face we don’t care corruption.
 

And it made me furious.
 

Joe’s response - he just shakes his head.
 

I’m reminded of “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.”
 

I bought some Snickers® anyway. Pound for pound of energy, the only thing better than Snickers for hiking is peanut butter. Mountain Warfare School instructors tell you to wrap duct tape around three or four Snickers and throw them in the bottom of your pack for emergencies. I didn’t have the heart to tell Joe that even at jacked up prices, we still paid a third of what we’d pay in the states for a candy bar.
 

Despite this, I was running low on cash, and the entrance fee to the mountain nearly broke me. It costs 180 Yuan to hike up the mountain, not to mention other fees and the cable car, if you wanted to take that. When we started our hike up I had about thirty Yuan to my name, which is around 4 bucks.
 

Two hours of sweaty hiking later, we’d made roughly six kilometers of horizontal progress, and what I’d guess to be two to three kilometers of vertical, most of it in the last 45 minutes.
 

Joe and I talked about our interests, and I asked him about Chinese religion. He shrugged and said it was one of the things that got stamped out during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. “It was a desperate time. Father and son fight. Husband and wife fight. Chinese culture died. You want real Chinese culture, go to Taiwan, Shanghai, not China.”
 

Thanks to the cable car, the north peak of Huashan is crowded with an army Chinese tourists who have no idea what to do on a mountain. I saw men in business suits and women in high heels running around. Next to most of the people up there that hadn’t made the climb, Joe and I looked positively shabby in our sensible hiking boots and hiking clothes.
 

The cable car is located just underneath the North Peak, which is about an hour away from everything else. Huashan has five peaks, and by the time Joe and I got to the North Peak we had come to the ugly realization that we weren’t going to have time to do all of them. The idea of staying the night on the mountain was floated, but almost immediately shot down. The monastery hotels are dank, smelly, and expensive, and half the reason you’d want to stay the night is so you could see the sunset and sunrise, which, thanks to the weather, wasn’t going to happen. We decided to make for the South Peak, for multiple reasons.
 

Two years ago, Joe weighed in at 200 kilos. That’s a lot for anyone who doesn’t speak metric (440 lbs). He’d started climbing mountains to get fit, and the day we hiked Huashan weighed in at around 130 (286 lbs). Not getting to the top of the mountain wasn’t an option for him, and the South Peak is the tallest. I wanted the South Peak for similar reasons, but also because there’s a little bit of adventure on the South Peak as well, which we’ll get to.
 

The South Peak and all the other peaks are reached by walking over a ridgeline that is barely wider than a car and plunges down thousands of feet on either side. On top of this is a roughly 500-meter vertical ascent of stairs, with your only lifeline a set of rusty chains that look like they were put in before Stalin died.

 

Intermixed with the crowd of tourists are old men that have been hiking this mountain before your parents were born. They carry sacks of concrete powder and bundles of wood for the ongoing construction of the temples on top of the mountain. Joe asks a guy carrying fifty kilos of wood how old he is. The man toothlessly replies, “75!” He is a foot and a half shorter than me and can’t weigh much more than his load. The climb has me panting, sweaty, and at this point, halfway to exhausted. This guy looks like he could do it three more times. I hope I’m half as badass when I’m 75 – but that I have a few more teeth.
 

An hour later we’ve climbed more stairs than I thought existed anywhere, and are finally at the top. The bitter south wind whips through our sweaty bodies chilling us to the bone and making the top of the mountain utterly inhospitable.
 

But, oh Gods, the view!

I’ve been to the top of dozens of mountains. Not one has had a view like this – Ever. The clouds obscure everything from around five miles out, but what you can see is amazing. Sheer rock faces lead down to valleys thousands of feet below, other peaks and ridgelines appear from the clouds and detail the heights that you’ve earned. It is a place not for men, but of Gods and Demons.
 

Throughout the hike, I’ve been pondering the madness that it would take to build a temple on top of this mountain. There are almost no natural ways up, all the stairs have been carved by hand out of the mountain face, and that kind of effort isn’t motivated by half measures.
 

At the top of the south peak, I finally begin to edge my mind around why, and the sheer amount of religious fervor terrifies me both because it is utterly alien to me and also, now that I am standing there, completely understandable. I could be convinced that this mountain is the home of the Gods. I could be motivated to spend my life up here.

I stand at the edge of sky and stone and touch the edges of the divine.

Softly, hesitatingly, fearfully, euphorically, I commune with the Gods. I hear their whispers. I see their works. I know their secret ceremonials.
 

Too soon, I have to leave.

Halfway down from the South Peak to the ridgeline path is a side trail that leads to something called the cliff walk –
 

which is exactly what it sounds like.

Joe takes one look at it and backs away, putting both hands up, “I can’t do that.”

“Come on man, it’s just fear. And if you screw up, you don’t have much time to worry about it. You’re obviously not afraid of heights.”
 

He looks at me, utterly serious. “I’m the only son. I cannot die.” Earlier on Joe had explained that he was the only son in the third generation of his family, and because of that, much was expected of him and put on him.
 

I laughed, “Well I’m just a second son, so no one give a shit about me.” This is utterly untrue, and I’ve never felt unloved or unfairly treated by my family because I’m second born, but it seemed like the appropriate response.
 

Joe frowns but tells me it’s okay to do it, and that he’d wait for me. I consider correcting my statement, but conclude that it would only confuse him – cultural differences.
 

The cliff walk is perhaps the most terrifying thing I have ever done. There are photos, but photos don’t capture the mind numbing fear that fills you when you’re inches from the void. Whenever I had a particularly hairy moment, I closed my eyes, calmed myself, and shed most of my fear –

And promptly regained it at the next section of planking.

Someone once told me that it’s okay to be afraid, as long as it doesn’t stop you.

Nothing stops me.

The cliff walk leads to a cave carved out of the cliff wall that a Daoist God lives in. I accepted his blessings and made my way back across the void.
 

Joe and I made our way down the mountain. We started the morning off as two men who barely knew each other. By the time we finally reached the base, we were close friends with inside jokes and everything. Mount Huashan may be sacred; it may be the home of Gods and Demons; it may be one of the most dangerous hiking trails in the world.

But, it’s also the place where I made a lifelong friend.

- Doug

Note: Joe is not his real name, or even the English name he chooses to call himself by. I changed his name because his opinions are not what I’d call PC, and I don’t want him to get in trouble for having an opinion. It seemed like the least I could do.