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.

The Muslim Quarter

Xi'an is widely considered to be the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. This makes it interesting for multiple reasons, but the primary one in my mind is its expansive Muslim Quarter. Islam came to China in the mid 700s by way of spice traders that traveled thousands of miles over Asia, the Middle East, and even into Europe. Since then, Islam in China has developed into two ethnic forms, Hui Chinese, who are found virtually throughout China usually fulfilling the social roles of merchants and traders, and Uyghurs, who are found at the very Western edge of China, and are more Kazakh and Turk than Chinese. Asking a Uyghur if they're Chinese usually ends with you having fewer teeth than you started the conversation with. Still, they are considered by the PRC to be a Chinese ethnic group.

Xi'an's Muslims are Hui. Their section of the city is loud, dirty, and utterly fascinating. It's easy to get lost, as every street looks the same, with fruit vendors, shops selling dried nuts, butcher shops and food stalls all squeezed right next to each other, making traffic, both foot and wheel, an inescapable nightmare. I was once trapped in a single 100 meter section of street for nearly ten minutes because the taxis, pedicabs and pedestrian traffic were so thick that you literally could not move. Eventually I just stepped behind one of the stalls and watched the problem sort itself out. The owner looked at me sideways until I bought a few baoza – dumplings filled with whatever the vendor has handy at the time. They're almost universally delicious.

These are really what has brought me here. My first question once I was settled into the hostel was, "Where's the best food in the city?" I had been trapped on a train for roughly thirteen hours and was starving. I was immediately handed a map with directions to the Muslim quarter. Skeptical, but starving, I started my hike across the city.

No one does food like the Hui. Baoza is the tamest thing they offer, and not even technically their style of food. There were thousands of food shacks, all offering something different, from candied fruit to nuts to chicken to beef to things I could not identify.

 

My first encounter with a butcher's shop stopped me in my tracks. A group of about seven people were working in a shop the size of a small storage shed. They had more than a dozen animals that looked like pigs, but probably weren't, skinned, gutted and hung up by their hamstrings.

And they were, slowly, methodically, taking them apart.

I've never butchered an animal. I've always wanted to, but the opportunity has never arisen, and I haven't desired it enough to seek it out. Now, I watch utterly fascinated. You look at a butcher's knife, and you know what's it's for, intellectually, but until you see it shearing through bone and smell the blood and smell the meat, you don't really understand. My hindbrain, the lizard part that makes you fear and fight and desire, keeps me rooted to the spot. I fight the urge to ask if I can step in and try my hand. I don't speak enough Chinese to even articulate the request.

A glance at my watch shows it's a half an hour later. I could watch all day. A man with leathery skin hacks a ribcage in half and throws the larger part on a scale. The ground is greasy with old fat and blood. The animals are too newly dead to really smell, but I get the feeling no one washes the sidewalk all that often. I watch for another ten minutes before the street starts to get more crowded and I decide it's time to leave.

When I finally find my meal, it's a form of barbecued chicken that is possibly the best chicken I've ever had. Slow roasted over charcoal with sesame seeds, cumin, some kind of pepper and a spice I couldn't identify. It had been split down the sternum and spread eagled on a metal bar that constantly rotated.

The rumors are true. The Muslim Quarter is the place to eat.

- Doug    

Night Train to Xi'an

I'm not going to bother describing Beijing Xi (Beijing West Railway Station). I'd rather you look at the picture and come to your own conclusions about whether or not the Chinese are compensating for anything.

It's 2030, and by my own estimate, I'm being closely watched by around three hundred Chinese people. That's not hyperbole in the slightest. A small patch of ground has been cleared, the middle of which is occupied by myself and one other. We are surrounded by the otherwise packed Platform 5 waiting room. It's like a scene out of a movie, except I'd rather be anywhere than where I am right now, surrounded by people who are alternatively irritated, curious, laughing or neutral.

The only other person in the circle is a pudgy Chinese woman who is currently screaming in rage, desperation, frustration, and just outright insanity. Her face and eyes are streaked with tears, and she occasionally falls to her knees, only to eventually rise to her feet and stumble around before falling back down again. Every once in a while she bumps into the crowd, who recoil as though they might catch her madness.

Believe it or not (and I can tell that some of the Chinese in the crowd don't), I've done nothing to this woman. In fact, when she came up to me some twenty minutes ago, sobbing, I offered her my water. This was probably the mistake that got me in this mess, because now she won't leave me alone.

I sit on my pack, afraid to move because I don't want anything stolen while I’m distracted, studiously staring at my notebook and trying to avoid eye contact with Crazy. And, she is most definitely crazy.

I have no idea what to do. Adrenaline has kicked in, and I'm sweating underneath my shirt. I speak absolutely no Chinese, and it's pretty clear to me that some of the people in the crowd think I've done something I haven’t. There are no other westerners, and I can't get up to get the cops, who probably won't listen to a foreigner in the first place. (I've heard some interesting descriptions of Chinese police, but none of them ever included the word "helpful").  I've tried moving, but she followed me.

My one asset is two old Chinese men who have been watching the entire time and are getting sick of the interruption to their card game. Neither of them speaks any English, but we communicated in sign language and smiles before Crazy showed up, with me having initiated the exchange by trying to find out if I was in the right spot. One of them snaps something at a younger woman, who rushes off into the crowd. He meets my eyes with an encouraging nod, and I shoot him a shaky smile. Crazy lets out a soul-shattering moan and falls to the floor again.

I know that if I give ground everyone in the crowd will think I've done something wrong. It's kind of like running from a crime scene, if you run, you're a suspect. If you stay, you're a witness. On top of all that, I'm the only person in the waiting area that's not Chinese, and that's not really a point in my favor on this.

Finally, a female police officer elbows her way through the crowd, the young woman and the old man are sent off at her shoulder. The young woman is, thank all the gods, pointing at crazy and not me. The cop gives me one look, and I give her my "I don't know what's going on; I don't speak the lingo and am completely innocent" smile. I've had a lot of practice on the crowd.

She looks me up and down, and I can actually see her come to the decision that it's just better to deal with the local and avoid the effort that comes with dealing with foreign nationals.  She turns to Crazy and starts snapping questions in rapid fire Chinese.

With some effort, the police officer manages to drag Crazy away. In the States this might have resulted in clapping; here the crowd mutters like they've missed out on a show and slowly disperses. The old men give me thumbs up. I nod at them and let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

It is literally the most stressful thing that has happened to me in China, and climbing aboard the train for my first overnight train ride seemed anticlimactic afterward.

A "Hard Sleeper" bound for Xi'an province is exactly what it sounds like. Train cars are filled with bunks, six to a "cabin" with maybe twenty or thirty per car. Racks are stacked, and I'm on the topmost of three. In my mind’s eye, I picture WW2 era troop transports and modern day naval bunks. It is exactly how I imagine people travel in developing nations.

And I love it. It's truly the people's mode of transportation – an utter equalizer. I've seen dirt poor farmers with giant sacks of whatever bunking next to guys in business suits. At 250 Yuan, it's the cheapest way to get around, and probably by far the most economical. The only luxury is hot water, provided complimentary in plug in kettles. That’s for heating up ramen, or perhaps green tea.

The train lurches into motion, and I stay up and watch people prepare for bed. Soon enough, the swaying of the train begins to lull me to sleep as well, and when I wake, we are pulling into Xi'an.   

- Doug

The Wall

The Great Wall is a monumental edifice to folly and government expense. With that said, it is also monumentally awesome.

The Wall is not really one wall, but really a series of fortifications that stretch nearly the entire length of northern China. The largest stretch was built by the Ming in the 14th-16th centuries, and stretches more than 3,000 kilometers. Wikipedia informs me that the Chinese have been building walls for nearly 3000 years, and that all the combined walls that are grouped under the "Great Wall" category amount to more than 50,000 kilometers, and include everything from a dirt fortification to advanced military structures as strong, or stronger than, modern base fortifications.

Unfortunately for the Ming Dynasty, who spent what would today be valued in billions of dollars of government spending on the Wall, it was ultimately useless in repelling the barbarian hordes to the north. Ming's fortunes fell, and with them so did the Wall's maintenance.

Looking at the newly repaired section of wall at Mutan-Yu from the parking lot about three hundred meters below, I am initially distinctly underwhelmed. I hesitate to mention this to my new friends, Mike, Anne, and a couple from Quebec whose names escape me. I don't want to lose any traveling cred in front of Mike and Anne, who have spent the last year or so on more or less permanent honeymoon, and have spent the last month getting around China via busses and other forms of overland travel. Before China, they'd spent time in Africa and South America, getting around the same way. They are Jedi Masters of travel, and I make it a point to ask as many questions as I can think of. We'd met at the bus stop, gotten to know each other on the ride to the Wall, and by the time we'd gotten there, were well on our way to becoming fast friends.

Navigating our way through the minefield of souvenir shacks, hawkers, and other tourists, we arrived at the base of the actual wall after a short, but steep hike up a cliffside. To either direction the Wall stretched off ... forever.

It took a second for my brain to fully adjust to what I was seeing. The wall snaked its way through mountains and valleys to the east and west, mostly trying to follow major ridgelines and keeping out of the valleys. The perhaps three kilometer section we occupied was pristine, restored very recently at the behest of the Chinese Tourism Bureau, but it was when you looked past the restored section that the real Wall made itself known.

In the distance, ruined watchtowers stood over a line of deteriorating stone as far as the eye could see. Like excited schoolchildren, Mike and I rushed to the edge of the Wall and squinted our eyes, trying to find the furthest watchtower. We pointed, trying to coordinate and follow the wild portions of the Wall as they became more distant and more weathered by time. To our right, the Wall stretched on for perhaps twenty or thirty miles, matching the curves of the ancient mountain range. To our left, there was a slight dip and then the Wall went nearly straight up a mountain, with a lonely ruined watchtower at the very peak.    

 

I am overwhelmed with history – again.

We make our way up the hill to the right, which seems to peak about where the restoration stops. Keeping pace with our Quebequois friends, who are a little bit older than Mike, Anne and I, we head first down, then up. I am babbling like an idiot about how much effort it would take to staff and supply the entire wall, and how its very design makes it nearly impossible. You'd need hundreds of thousands of me, and you'd have to pay, feed, clothe, arm and train them. The logistics nightmare makes my head hurt just thinking about it. My new civilian friends are both amused and interested, and I enlighten them about the less glamorous realities of military life, which I imagine the soldiers that manned the Great Wall lived every day. I wonder if five hundred years ago instead of getting NJPed, you just had to run to a certain watchtower and back.

The only upside to having a thing like the Great Wall is that you'd have a shockingly fit fighting force, as getting anywhere on the wall in a hurry is a cardio workout that would leave even the best of modern solders sucking wind.

When we reach the end of the restored Wall we are confronted with an open doorway leading to a section of wall that is overgrown and patchy, a half torn down watchtower beckons in the distance, and Mike and I look at each other.

I point at the sign that tells people not to go any further. It's been ripped out of the ground and thrown to the side, and would be easy to miss if you weren't looking. "I don't see that."

"Neither do I."

It turns out we have nothing to worry about. Hidden behind the trees growing on the wall, ten or so other tourists have had the same idea as us, and are occupying the ruined watchtower. This section of the wall is much more interesting, and I can feel myself straining to keep exploring the wild section, just to see how far I can go.

And of course, we do. Mike, Anne and I, bidding our Canuck friends farewell, (they had to leave early, and really couldn't keep up with us anyway), make our way further along the Wall to the next watchtower, which is significantly more ruined and therefore, in my eyes, significantly less interesting. We are alone, and we spend the time telling stories and joking about how the government was going to come after us. If they did, they were in for more walking than I'd want to do as a cop.

At the second watchtower, we broke for lunch. Mike and Anne told me stories of their travels, and very generously shared their food with me. I'd forgotten to pack any, and was rather embarrassed with my lack of preparedness. Some Eagle Scout, I'd brought a trauma kit, flashlight, 550 cord, some chemlights, a foil emergency blanket, beanie and gloves, but no food. At least I brought some water.

After lunch we made our way to the other side of the Wall. It was a long, hard vertical slog that was made that much easier by being with friends. I probably would have done it on my own, but I also probably wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much.

It was late in the afternoon by the time we reached the opposite end of the developed section, and we had spent more than 5 hours exploring the Wall.

Mike is charitably described as an aggressive negotiator, and while on the Wall I'd watched him haggle with every Chinese drink peddler we'd passed, trying to angle the best deal for beer and water. On our way to the opposite end, we'd managed to acquire five beers and two Gatorades at what I considered to be a steal.

The final watchtower in the developed section requires a 300 meter nearly vertical ascent, with a false step resulting in the unwary tumbling back down the stairs for the whole distance you'd climbed. Naturally we decided to celebrate our injury-free ascent by cracking a brew or two. I was introduced to the tradition of Gatorbeer, and will probably pass it on.

As I sat, sipping the watery Chinese beer that somehow tasted exceedingly delicious with the victory of our ascent, I almost couldn't believe that I was in China, drinking beer on the Great Wall with friends I had made only hours before. Life is grand.

- Doug