We're not dead

Prelude

It's a cliche that Eastern culture is collectivistic and Western culture is individualistic. We'd seen suggestions of this already: coordinated workouts in the street to promote workplace unity; matching cyclists pedaling in unison; and Thais' uniform and devout love for their king.

But it was on the sleeper bus from Jinghong to Dali that I really recognized America as a place that respects idiosyncracy and fragmentation. We were stacked in beds three wide and two deep. The lights over each bed could only be controlled up front, in unison, so after dark no one could read himself to sleep. Instead, a video played that was supposed to sedate us -- mountains, lakes, an empty canoe phasing in out of nowhere.

It would be one thing if they played it the whole time, but fifteen minutes was supposed to be the exact dose for every rider, one and the same. God forbid anyone might be in his own private prison or funhouse. I thought again about how Shuo San was more western than the average Chinaman. He was divorced, he was Christian, he sang "Love Me Tender," and he had insomnia.

The nighttime ride was eleven hours of white fog and phantom trees. After that, I phased in and out of consciousness. So, for the sake of democracy, diversity, and the nauseous feeling produced by my writing, here are a few words from Mike:

The judaisos and storefronts of old China crumble, disassembled. The hand-carved stones of their foundations are hauled off to the new cities of neon and commerce where they're broken up and poured into empty spaces, supporting office parks, sports complexes, and hydroelectric dams.

I watch through the bus window, camera out of batteries. Switch to memory--unreliable. Pencil and paper. A mountain, stripped for minerals and paved over. The next mountain, still green. An old house on top keeps watch over a pile of ancient tombs and the souls within. Maybe they will let the man in the doorway die before they pave it all over with highway.

The other riders in the double-stuffed bus busy themselves with ringtones, curtains drawn. Dali is their destination. On arrival they will pour into the streets, cameras fully charged, ready to reproduce the pictures they saw in the brochure.

They throw up frequently, wishing the new highway was ready.

Preparations

Eventually, we arrived in Dali and rented a room in "Old City," which has mostly been torn down and re-erected for tourism purposes. Most of the tourists are Han Chinese from other provinces, but there is one street with several bars and cafes for foreigners. It's very easy to picture Dali Old City -- just think of Disney's Epcot Center, if you've ever been there, and imagine the China section of the world tour.

We bought hats, gloves, and long johns, and we rented a motorbike from, real name, Jack Office of Dali. The bike came with one pair each of yak leggings and knock-off North Face gloves. We wore all our clothes and consolidated our things into one bag, which we strapped onto the plastic box at the rear of our bike. Our plan was to go as far north as we could stand and then return to Dali via the Lancang (Mekong) River valley to the west. Elevation rose drastically as you went north, and Lonely Planet describes winter temperatures in that area alternately as "arctic" and "glacial."

DAY 1: MOTORCYCLE DIARRHEA

The land was already mountainous, but it took us a while to get out into the country. As Mike described earlier, the countryside consists of natural wonders, ageless villages, and the third element, the off color, massive "land exploitation projects*."

One of our first side trips was up a rising zigzag road alongside rows of rectangular structures, grey ghouls of tumbledown stone, where workers were taking white stones from a quarry that happened to be lined with ancient tombs. Other workers would smash these into smaller bits and dump them into some sort of sulfuric fire.

After this was a high rock face, pale with those bloody smears of rust, and beyond that were the green hills receding away in great round waves.

We descended into a small town where we rode through a golden corridor of late-autumn leaves with the sun at our backs, catching starbursts from the mirror of the bike ahead of us. Then our road sliced into the side of a mountain and dragged along that way for several kilometers. Crowding us the whole time, close enough to touch, was the lumpy brown face of the opposing mountain.

*The only English sign explaining one of these projects read, "Land exploitation and construction project of blah blah county district etc." The Chinese official who authored it must have been unaware of its subversive connotation.

This section reveals whether or not we crashed the bike

As we began to wind our way up the mountains, the driving first got fun. I was always either turning, recovering from a turn, or preparing for a turn. I hunched over the handlebars, connecting the elbow of one turn to the armpit of another, gliding through the S's, taking the sharp ones at a delicate, high-speed lean. Through a valley as we turned west, I could see the hulking shoulders of four stone mountains, like soldiers standing in diagonal formation.

I cut back south going downward, leaning into the turn, feeling happy amid the rush of cold wind, the ground-ward pull and backward thrust of physics, the high young growl of the motor, and oh yeah the backpack perched way up on the storage box.

The wheels' forward roll suddenly went sideways and then I was watching the bike skid on its side down the hill and skidding down after it. I rolled to a stop, stood up, and inspected myself, expecting to find some jutting bone or bloody swath that I was too shocked to feel. But I had nothing more than a scrape on my wrist. Mike was fine, too. I told him to double-check, and yeah, he was fine. Then we checked out the bike. The turn-light behind a side mirror was smashed out, the left front fender was cracked, and a piece of chrome piping was scraped up, but drivability was unaffected. Did I mention that we were turning, as always, on a cliffside?

At that point in our Asia trip, I had this image of an aging wizardess who had been charged with protecting us but was increasingly disgusted with the absurdity of her rescues. She was sure to give up on us soon enough.

Dismal picnic

Do I have problems in my life? Maybe, sure, but not really, I thought to myself as I watched two yaks at this agro-industrial complex where we had stopped for lunch.

They wore canvas blindfolds over their faces and were being made to sludge around in a small circle of their own shit. If one got tired, or just paused to mourn for his own life, a man beat his legs with a long bamboo pole. The yak would jerk his neck up and trudge on through the thick muck.

Desperate times

We were low on gas as we approached the nearest town, and luckily there was a gas station up ahead. We weren't sure why there were dump trucks parked on the side of the road for several kilometers leading up to the gas station.

We headed toward one of several vacant pumps, but a policeman stopped us. He pointed to the back of the line -- oh, the line -- which stretched even farther in the northward direction. The pumps were vacant because they were empty, and only one of them was operational. In Jinghong, I'd heard about gas stations closing down in China because they could not meet the demand.

We squeezed our way up the road, between the double-row of trucks, until after about twenty minutes we were free. Mike made a dark suggestion about the two strongest, most economically aggressive world powers and their growing desperation for oil.

Luxury

We checked into a hotel in Jianshuang, only ninety kilometers north of Dali, at about 5 p.m. It was a nice room with a television and hot showers right down the hall. From there we went looking for a good place to eat. We filled ourselves up with well-seasoned dishes from every food group, then returned to the room.

"I have to admit," I said to Mike, "this isn't exactly what I had in mind."

"How so?"

"Restaurant hopping, hot showers -- this is the same stuff we've been doing everywhere."

Mike shrugged.

"This isn't very rugged," I said. "Rugged should be the word on this journey."

"I think spontaneity should be the word," Mike said.

"What about suffering?" I said. "And hardship, and struggle."

"I'm not especially into suffering," Mike said.

Not into suffering? I worried -- unnecessarily, it would turn out -- for the severity of our journey.

DAY 2: Big country

On leaving town, we pulled over near a towering silver factory -- complex of tubes and tanks and coils -- because we saw a shop with steaming pots. Workers were outside warming their hands over some coals. Inisde, they were serving a sort of gruel, noodles and potatoes and such. It was hearty if not delicious.

From here on, northward motion was also upward motion. It got colder, and trees thinned on the brown hillsides. Again we left the city for the country.* We saw figures in the mist hacking at the frozen ground with bent shovels and breaking piles of rocks with sledgehammers.

Here we noticed a certain optical effect that happens when you've been watching the rushing road for a few hours. When you look up at the massive brown haunches of some distant mountain, it appears to be zooming away, shrinking from pitiful you and your noisy advance. Mike recognized this effect from playing too much guitar hero.

We stopped for fish and rice cakes beside a brook that ran through the red clay. The western view across the road was of a vast slope of green-gold pines, down which farmers had paved a strip of variously brown patchwork that spilled out into the valley and then rose up again in the south, mingling with occasional trees and those black-roofed, two-horned homes. Above all this, a ghastly band of clouds split the mountains heighthwise.

We rode on, a dark-bodied, white-winged Chinese bird bouncing in flight alongside the bike, until we came to the Yangtze River crossing. At the river's edge, wrappers of every color were piled up by the bridge supports and then strewn like confetti down the brown bank, which rose up to the street in fine striations of mud.

Indeed, the Chinese are unoffended by garbage. In most towns we visited on this journey, garbage was piled in the streets and matted under our feet. People were always amused by my efforts to throw something away in a basket.

*On these country roads, we first noticed the brutal warning signs that appeared periodically throughout our journey. One was of a huntsman aiming at a bird with a rifle. A Chinese guard was approaching from behind him to blow his head off with a handgun. The other depicted a peasant, caught in the act of cutting a power line with a pair of hedge clippers, doubled over the swift knee of a uniformed official, who also had his club raised over the peasant's back. All of these signs were riddled with bullet holes.

May some god have mercy and release him

We stayed that night in Tiger Leaping Gorge Town. We arrived with light to spare, so we went climbing on some stepped farm terraces. We had seen a narrow waterfall, which seemed from a distance to move in slow motion, streaming high above the farmland. To get to it, we crossed the terraces and then bushwhacked our way up the steep bank of the river that the waterfall fed. There was some sharp, sickening smell that thickened the further we ascended.

When the going became impossible, we emerged from the brush and back up to the flatland to find the site of some ill-fated character's grim livelihood. The source of the smell, a garbage incinerator, rose phallically from a bare lot of ground. One man was filling it with a shovel. The pile he drew from was high and wide, and the line of garbage leading up to it was endless. He apparently lived in a brick hovel a few meters away.

Below him was the rushing river and its cool breath; high above was the thin, downward-hopping stream of a mighty waterfall. But he was bound to the garbage, and always would be, for it would never stop coming. We were reminded of Sisyphus and his relentless boulder, and of the buzzards who endlessly ate at Prometheus's guts. So now was this man to live in garbage vapor, endlessly shoveling, while he couldn't help but gaze at the clean clear water that glinted sometimes even through his haze.

DAY 3: Now is not the time for fleeting thoughts of suicide

Everything but the narrow, rocky and sometimes muddy road beneath our wheels, was terrifyingly remote. Tiger Leaping Gorge, believed to be the deepest gorge in the world, is a long canyon that plunges from the tops of two crowding cliffsides to the Jingsha River below. In the middle of this height, a road is granted a thin strip of space, although the emptiness to the east and the rock face to the west don't hestitate to make incursions into this parcel.

The only English road sign we came upon was posted early on our drive through the gorge. It read, with a casualness that both amused and frightened us: "Be careful! Here's the section of falling stones."

I leaned back and shouted to Mike, "What could possibly they mean by 'be careful'?"

Soon we came to a great dip in the road, which was especially rocky and narrow at this point. Some sort of dump truck was barreling toward us. I pulled over to the gorge side and prayed that the truck would clear our bike. I guess we had abandoned the leeward side of the mountain because a great gale of dust was blowing down into the canyon. We leaned into it with the bike and closed our eyes to the dust as well as the denser cloud that the truck made as it roared by.

It was at this point, about nineteen kilometers from the beginning, that we remembered the words of the guard at the beginning of Tiger Leaping Gorge road. He had told us that one could not take a motorbike any farther than nine kilometers into the gorge.

Next was a waterfall that splashed down onto the road, where it had eroded the concrete and now streamed over jagged rock. I bored through it on the bike, and as I did so we heard a loud, bad noise, so we got out to check. The rear basket had cracked in several places as the backpack bounced on top of it. It was useless now, so we left it by the roadside and strapped the pack to the metal piping. This would have certainly happened eventually, and anyway the pack's new location lowered our center of gravity. We prepared to move on.

"Whoa, that shit's crazy," said Mike, pointing to some whisps of cloud by the highest peak. Due to some sort of weird high-altitude currents, the clouds were swirling cylindrically and quickly, like some deep-space nebula.

We continued until we came to a small bridge, and Mike walked around taking pictures. I took rest in a cave formed by an outcropping, under huge hanging droplets of stone. A green squirrel scampered behind the black rock. It was the first really Chinese animal I'd seen, for those blue birds with the long, magnificent, white-tipped tails had not yet flown across our bike's path.

I went to have a look over the mountain side of the bridge. I watched a stream that, with a bravery I could not imagine, cascaded hundreds of meters down the black rock, roaring and frothing all the way. I walked to the other side of the bridge to see it slowing below the towering crags and waving cliff-grass. Some of the water rested in a blue-green pool, tiny below me, where it rippled concentrically and dreamily. After its respite, the stream went on to meet the Jingsha River. The river looked from my height like shale except for its morphing, surging motion.

We got back on and rode through what I guessed was the last and deepest section of the gorge. Though it was late in the morning, the way was still darkened by ours and the opposing cliffside, which was utterly monstrous. Deep furrows, shadowy and white with the bone-dust of ancient rivers, ran the entire impossible height,

A more perceptive person would have trembled at this or any of the other sights on this journey. For me, such things just made my self feel kind of lost, unhomed from its dwelling place. It wasn't a bad feeling, it was like a sigh that never found its way to a finish.

At noon, the sun finally clambered over the top of the eastern cliff, panting its hot breath down into the canyon. A few hours later, and it filled the canyon with yellowish haze.

As we came to the northern mouth of the gorge, we stopped for a snack in what is likely to be the most amazing place that I'll ever eat fruit. It was as though the earth had two floors. On the first was the milky olive river and its bands of white streamers. As for the second floor, on one side of the gorge was us, sitting on an outcropping and biting into succulent round fruit that we had no name for. Across the canyon, at eye level, were circular brown platforms that looked as though they'd been carved out of the ground and then pushed up from underneath. On these platforms huddled masses of glimmering villages. From the flatlands behind them rose a set of green mountains, thick ropes of land snaking down their sides to the bottom.

We room with some villagers, help boost production, and freak out the children

Before we were ready, we had passed through the gorge, and it was back to regular old mountain splendor. For some time we had been tracking our progress by gauging the size of a black-and-white peak that was visible between and above the other mountains. Now the view had opened up, and between the wider gap between hills we could see several of these snow-veined summits growing up from a bed of thick clouds.

The sky was bruising, and we knew we were nowhere near a major town. As we passed through the next village, occupied by some ancient minority group like any village in Yunan, we nosed around for who might be best equipped to accomodate us for the night, for we didn't want to impose on someone with scarce resources. One set of homes was set off by a wall, so they seemed pretty well-to-do. We pantomimed sleep to them, and they invited us through their gate and into a living room filled with yolky light. Some ratty couches were situated around an iron cooking furnace. We put our things down and tried to pay them. For the time being, they refused any money or food.

There were about eight men, two women, and two little boys. The children's faces were all sooty except for a shine between their nose and upper lip. At one point I tried to give one of the boys a tissue, and he used it to wipe his snot all over his face. Possibly he was imitating the men, wiping the sweat from their faces after a day of work.

We communicated with them a little bit, explained that we were Americans and used our map to show our progress so far. They taught us to count to ten, and they pored over my copy of Dubliners and Mike's copy of Lolita. I explained with a crudely drawn map that Dubliners comes from Ireland.

Then the men went outside to work. They had a field of bean sacks arrayed in the yard. One person would turn his back to the beans, and two others would heave the sack onto his or, in one case, her back. This person would carry the sack up some planks that had been leaned into the back of a truck.

After some pushiness on our part, they allowed us to help. It soon came to me that by lifting more sacks, we weren't just proving ourselves as good laborers, but as good communists. I got the other Chinese guy to lift with me at the end of "One, two, three!" I'm not sure they got the meaning, though, because we heard them yelling it at each other over at the truck, as though "wuh-toon-tree!" was just an impetus to do work. The kids were going wild with it, shouting the phrase and throwing themselves into the sacks.

Mike suggested that decades later linguists might visit this village and note "wuh-toon-tree" as an idiom meaning, "Work diligently and with a strong heart," finding themselves befuddled as to where this phrase might have come from.

We went back inside and had a dinner of eggy soup and dough balls. After having worked together, they accepted our offerings first of cigarettes (no Chinaman is too polite to turn down a smoke), then of beef jerky, tea leaves, canned fish, and candy.

Again and again, I found myself the only one trying to protect the children from imminent harm, until I felt like the resident den mother or something -- "Don't let them play with those red-hot fire tongs!" " Stop trying to eat whatever's in that tube!"

We went outside to check out the night sky, which was all a-glitter. I've never seen so many stars in my life. And it wasn't just their number but their brightness, and their activity. Twinkling is far too feeble a word. I don't know if it was the altitude or what, but the stars were shimmering, flashing almost, like disturbed bits of liquid light. This was especially true of the stars near the horizon, which as it happens I'd never seen stars at the horizon before.

When we came back in, the men were playing mahjong, and we were left with the two kids and a woman in traditional clothing who seemed to be their mother. She was entirely unresponsive to us, and soon we figured that we weren't supposed to speak to her because she was a woman.

Since Mike didn't have any pictures of America on his camera, I showed them the cowboys and landmarks on the visa pages of my passport. When he saw the picture of a locomotive, the older boy started tottering from side to side and singing this one-line song: "A troi ee ga go." The smaller boy picked it up and kept going long after the older one had stopped. I could shout at him or poke his belly, but he wouldn't stop or respond.

At this point I had one of those instants where I pulled back and observed this as a self-contained moment. Here I was on a cold mountainside in the middle of the night, a hundred miles from any city and much farther from anyone from my own civilization. A baby from some Chinese minority tribe, his face covered with filth and crust, was swaying back and forth before me in some sort of trance, singing this chant. The lightbulbs strung across the room kept dimming and brightening on their own. I wondered what it would have been like to get a vision of this moment two years ago to the day, when I was in class or at work or on a date or something.

DAY 4: Thrills and chills

We rose and got ready to leave the village as the mountains slowly donned, from head to toe, their casts of amber light. No one else was awake, so we left them a pictographic thank-you note. It looked something like this.

We left the houses behind, and I wound the bike up the mountain for a long time, clenching and unclenching my fingers to keep the blood flowing. The peaks were all snowy now, and the descending streams were frozen and spilled out onto the road. Icicles hung out with waterfalls. The wind on us -- if the air was completely still, which never was -- was always at least 35 kilometers per hour.

After an hour or so, I heard myself thinking the following: Look at those pine trees. They're doing fine, and they don't have any coats on or anything. The cold must not be that bad. After I had this thought, it struck me as a sort of delirium. Pine trees are not animals, nor are they warm-blooded, nor do they need to maintain homeostasis at 98.6 degrees.

I kept the bike in second gear, despite its protests, because no matter how fast I was going when I shifted to third gear, the speed would slowly decline. At this height, the morning sun was blinding. I steered the bike so it was behind the pines, but still it flashed at me relentlessly.

Pines were replaced by firs, and some kind of pale arctic moss hung from their branches like a wraith's garments. We ascended further and came to a plain of sorts, and there there were no more trees, only a silent brown tundra dotted with shrubs and crooked bone-arms. From this plain we could see many peaks below us, and the sky presented to our eyes a strange grade of blues: an arctic glow around the mountaintops, green-tinted, then a bright gemtone, then cloud-fleeced indigo overhead.

We descended from the plain down the winding road until buildings again passed before us. When we saw smoke coming from a small shop, we ditched the bike and went straight to the cooking furnace. We greeted the matron and stuck our hands over the coals. I couldn't feel the heat, but my hands were filled with a pulsing pain that I'd never experienced before. Same with Mike's toes. Frostbite was becoming too real a possibility, and we decided that when we woke up the next day, we would head south.

The inn matron threw some eggs, potatoes, rice, and vegetables into a grease-filled pan. We ate greedily, then went on our way.

We saw one other motorbike rider during the stretch from Tiger Leaping Gorge Town northward, and it was a Haba Snow Mountain park ranger on his motorcycle, with its big coiled shock absorbers, making the short jaunt from his headquarters to the nearby town.

As we neared Shangri-La (former name Xongdjian; it had been renamed, along with the claim that it was the paradise written about in "Lost Horizons," in order to attract tourists), we saw snow on the ground for the first time. I hadn't seen snow in years, so I got out and rubbed some of it against my cheekbone, which was my only exposed skin. Mike (Asheville, N.C.) was unimpressed.

In Shangri-La we withdrew money from an ATM and lunched on some yak-meat stew. An Italian moto-master we met on the sidewalk informed us that motorbikes have trouble with combustion at oxygen-impoverished altitudes, so that explained why we had to make the bike wail up the mountain roads in second gear. He also told us that the yak meat was a-so good because of the succulent grass they ate, which he had a-tasted himself.

The zenith; the lessons of the Tao

We rode on to the apex of our journey, a cluster of buildings at the intersection of our northbound road and the road that would begin our southward stint. It wasn't even really a town, but it wasn't too primitive either, and people wore fashionable clothing. This was sort of a mild introduction to the string of weird towns that we would sleep in.

We rented a room at an inn for 20 yuan (about $2.75). It wasn't so much a room as a bed storage area. There was nothing but five beds, two of them larger and on a raised platform. To stay in the larger beds cost 30 yuan. The door closed and locked, and we were the only ones in there. I took the blankets off of one of the larger beds to stay warm, and it occured to me that they might see that bed disheveled and think I had stayed in a bed I hadn't paid for. We had been in Asia for almost two months now, but this situation still struck us as absurd.

The bathroom was across the street, which didn't strike me as a problem until I woke up to pee in the middle of the night. The way was freezing cold and the bathroom was pitch black, so I just walked behind the building and peed beside a wood pile. It probably froze and would break some poor farmer's neck the next day.

The following morning, we reflected on the many bathrooms we'd been afforded on this journey. At first we were happy to have a bathroom in our room. Then we were happy if the communal bathroom had hot water. Then we were happy if it had plumbing. Then we were happy if the bathroom was lit or in reasonable walking distance. In bed-storage-room, we were happy that there was a bathroom that we could potentially use.

We think this has something to do with the Tao, but it's been years since I took world religions, and Mike remembers little of the paper he wrote about it.

DAY 5: Thawing slowly; will we sleep in a cave?

That morning, I watched the mother and daughter who ran our inn preparing chickens for breakfast. The daughter walked out to the front of the building carrying a bloody bucket full of breathing white forms. Then the mother took a big cement block and crammed it down into the bucket, prompting spastic kicks from underneath. The daughter poured boiling water, one jugful after another, down over the block. The chickens kicked some more and then slowly stopped. The women dumped the chickens out into a large bowl to strip off their feathers, and I couldn't help but notice that one of them was still heaving.

We had breakfast somewhere else and then began to travel south. As we did so, we passed more and more Tibetan-style farmers and buildings, with their aura of snowiness and white magic. It seeemed that at every turn there was one of those white stone stupas, multicolored prayer flags strung radially in the wind from the central structure to far ledges and trees.

The landscape was still semi-arctic, but with hints of warmer seasons. The opposing cliffside was like a vertical desert, pom-pom shrubs growing on the face and stone pillars rising up from the side like coral. Our hillside was more foliated, though, all red, yellow, and green.

Every face said: 'What the hell are you doing here?'

It was getting dusky, so we looked out for the next town. The symbols on our map matched those on a high blue sign, which pointed us down a rugged dirt road. At every turn, we expected to see the bright lights of a city (the place we sought was a big dot on our map), but we saw only the rough surface of our road stretching on until the next turn. We bumped and jarred and splashed, rocking too hard even at six kilometers per hour. The road's condition rapidly declined.

"This isn't even a road," I noted to Mike. "This is just rocks and water."

"This can't be right," he said.

Eventually, we saw a cluster of village homes up a side road to our left, and we got off the bike. Vicious dogs were snarling at us, so I grabbed a heavy stick, and we approached a woman and her two obviously frightened children. We showed them our map, and she signaled, we figured, that the town was eight more kilometers down the "road." The sky was already dark purple, and we considered begging to stay at this village, but they didn't seem like the sort of people who would have blankets to spare.

Night fell as we rode away from the village, and the temperature sank. My headlamp for some reason dimmed out whenever I eased off the throttle. We wondered, of course, what the hell kind of town this could be. After riding for an hour, we speculated that it may not exist, and so made note of caves that might make suitable shelter.

We did finally arrive at about nine thirty, and we found a town that was strange indeed. Only farm vehicles -- no cars or bikes -- rested on the unlit streets. At the base of our hotel was a convenience store, and cluttering the second and third floors were all sorts of industrial materials -- coils, gasoline drums, broken machinery. At the fourth floor, oddly, were fancy hotel rooms. We found a cheap one, but we could sneak into the room across the hall, which had both a bathtub and a western-style toilet.

After we put our bags down we went into a sort of garage and had a dinner of yak stew. At a later lunch stop, the only English speaker we met on this stretch (he told us he spoke English "half") told us that foreigners come through that valley only once every three years or so. As far as this town, I feel safe assuming, probably never. As we ate, a crowd of men circled us and tried to ask us questions in Chinese. They fed us rice liquor so strong it would probably have killed me if I drank it fast.

DAY 6: Crash course in motocross; fabled white long-face; lost city of disco highlanders

We left town via a different route that was really no better. I made quicker use of it, though, reflexively doing the motocross thing where you stand up on the footrests when things get really rough. We came to a ledge where we could see down into a valley. First a slope of combed-back pines, then the rippled descent of the farm terraces, then the clustered black roofs of village homes. Crisscrossing it all was the jagged topography of our road, continuing as it was for several kilometers.

Here, unlike on the paved roads, our agile motorbike was able to pass the bulky motorcycles. On the whole trip, I was continually impressed with the bike's ability to cut sharply in front of one pit and behind the next, to follow a narrow strip of mud as it wound around huge puddles, and to speed over even the most severe humps without breaking apart.

As we neared the bottom of the valley, Mike exclaimed, "Wow! Look at that."

"It's like porcelain," I marvelled.

Up ahead, our dirt road faded into smooth pavement. We bounced one final time and then eased into a swift glide that stilled our shaking bones.

Making funny faces

We stopped for lunch in a town that seemed to center on a busy roundabout. On the streetside, a woman had paid to have a tooth glued into one of her gaps. Mike took some photos, but was shooed away from the crowd that watched the operation. To our dismay, we also saw a pair of pliers on the dentist's table.

As we sat on the sidewalk eating ice cream, we observed the way the head of every passing Chinese person turned to look at us until his neck would not allow it any longer. Children observed us from behind obstacles, and when they were spotted they ran and hugged their mothers' legs. The bolder ones would come right up to me and watch, but when I said hello, or turned my eyelids inside out, they ran away squealing.

What?

We left town, and that evening the road declined beyond its morning condition. It was at its worst yet, in fact. The scenery was reduced to land exploitation sites and massive transport vehicles. This was where the Lancang/Mekong River, brown where it flowed in Thailand and Laos, first appeared brown in China.

Occasionally we came across dead-eyed, slack-faced villagers carrying large scythes or sledgehammers. They showed no response to our calls or beeps.

It grew dark, and again we thought we would never find the town that the map said we were nearing. We started ascending sharply. Last night we had been able to ride in second and third gear exclusively, but this time I had to keep it in first all the way up the rocky hills. Could those farm trucks even make it to this town? Who lives here?

The sky became pitch black, and with my frail headlamp I could see the pits and rocks only a half second before I was over them, so I was constantly yanking the bike back and forth. This went on for an hour before we saw, high ahead of us, a bright star system of many colors. We had expected to find some sort of workers' stronghold like the last town, but this was something else.

As we entered the town, we checked into its first hotel, whose bottom floor was a bike repair shop. This made sense because if you made it into town, odds were you needed to get your bike fixed.

We dropped our bags and went walking. The town was overrun with young people and hair salons. Teenagers wandered the streets like outlaws. Motorcycles and trucks were the only vehicles. People stared at us from within streetside shops where they were huddled around a TV.

We heard from a three-story building the pounding of syncopated techno. No, it couldn't be. We climbed a rickety metal staircase at the base of the building; at the top were dank hotel rooms on either side. Behind a half-hinged door was another staircase. We climbed this to the rooftop, and there, sure enough, was the red-lit doorway of a disco.

The dance floor was shot at with real infra-red laser beams, the kind that burn your eyes, and also attacked all over by frenzied green squiggles. One Chinese guy sat in a chair in the middle of the small room, spinning and waving his arms all around. His two friends danced on either side, grinning down at him.

We got out of there and continued to walk the streets. There were streetlights, but none of them were on. The town was built on a steep slope, and streets ascended and descended in tiers as in a parking garage. At the top of one long, dark ascent was a lone building, green-lit and arch-roofed. When she saw us outside, a girl opened a rusty side door and sat back down by the TV. It was a fancy but empty restaurant, run by a few young girls and one grown woman. After we ordered, a crowd slowly collected in the dining room.

"Where did all these girls come from, might I ask?" inquired Mike.

I stood up to get something, and they surrounded me. The grown woman sighted her forehead to my chest. They brushed the hair on my forearm. Then they approached Mike and felt his rosy, sunburned cheeks.

They asked if I had a girlfriend. I told them that we'd broken up, and they asked her name. They repeated it over and over again, like a charm, not quite in unison: "Kandah, Kandah."

After dinner, our walking took us to a stone wall behind a building. We were at the edge of town, supposedly looking down on a valley, but all we could see past that wall was total blackness. Maybe, Mike said, that was where our minds stopped creating. Our best theory to explain where we were was that we had crashed the bike many hours ago, and this place was Mike's or my comatose dream.

DAY 6: Hard and fast through industrial wasteland

After we descended from biker outlaw town, we were really deep in the valley, nearly to the bottom of the cliff that had menaced us before. (It still did, but now it left open the possibility of paralysis.) Across the valley was a brown wall that stretched high into the stratosphere.

As we traveled down this way, we witnessed the seasons changing in reverse. On the first day down from the apex, the afternoon sun melted the snow on the hillsides, and they looked as though they'd been flung at with a white paintbrush. The road was still lined, though, with the black skeletons of fractallated trees.

Then we left the tundra behind, and fall colors once again burned down the hillsides. A few hundred kilometers later, and we pulled over for lunch deep down in the Lancang River canyon. The opposite cliffside was green with a moss-like covering of plants. At the base of the cliff, the quick green river had pulled down its underpants to expose smooth, flesh-colored lumps of stone.

In my country we have problem/And that problem is transport
~ Borat Sagdiev

I've already begun to describe the general condition of the roads that we drove on, but there are more specific hazards that I also want to mention.

Chunks taken out of the road that expand the territory of the ever-present cliff. Falling rocks, ice, rivers to ford, piles and piles of burning trash. Crowds of goats, donkeys, and pigs being herded through the streets. A lone horse galloping toward us at full speed. And Chinese drivers, a special kind of madmen that pass other vehicles around blind cliffside turns, but who, in buses, are unresponsive to your honking and edge you toward the cliff even as you try to pass, so that you must find a hump of road shoulder that they can't cover and speed up to the driver's window shaking a fist, then maybe they'll move over.

A paragraph about Dong Feng dumptrucks. These are massive blue monsters that occupy the whole road and cover the way behind them with a dense black cloud. They fill your mouth with dust and your eyes and lungs with smog, so that at night your eyes burn and you wheeze out gobs of dark mucus. They have no drivers; instead they are all controlled remotely by one heartless industrial master-brain. When you try to pass them, they are ordered to discharge an extra-concentrated burst of filth, and you must winnow your eyes and hold your breath for several minutes if you ever hope to escape them.

Seriously, though

The everpresent trademarks of land exploitation projects -- huge clouds of smog, mud everywhere, cascading rocks from the cliff above, constant roaring noise, vehicles too big for the roads, tunnels in the mountain, industrial waste strewn about -- made for an intense obstacle course for two guys on a motorbike. But there were villagers who had been there before and are there now, and that was the environment they were forced to live in.

I don't think that China shouldn't industrialize, but from what we've seen, and from what we heard from an American photographer in Dali sent here by an NGO, there is little if any regard for the environment and the people being affected by the projects. For example, the need for emissions standards was never so real to me as it was on this leg of the trip.

DAY 7/8: The slow decompression

As we neared the final stretch, the going eased considerably. The road into Dali was essentially a highway, affording us an uninterrupted cruise. I could barely tell I was driving.

I thought back on the last half of our northward leg, Tiger Leaping Gorge and beyond. I remembered looking ahead to the paved notch in the rock that followed the contours of the cliff, seeing it disappear around the bend. Sheer crags shot down from it for a thousand meters. Unbelievably, that was the road we were following on our miniscule bike. That section especially, but certainly our journey as a whole, was the most perfect union I've known between modern technology and the offerings of the Earth.

Fixing the bike

We found a bike repair shop in Dali New City. They installed new side mirrors and a new rear basket. They superglued the fender crack and spraypainted the tarnished piping. I used the glue to fix my broken chinstrap.

Whenever they needed a part they didn't have, they made a phone call and someone rode up on a scooter bearing the part within minutes. None of that "wait a week for the manufacturer to send the part" bullshit. They fed us lunch and tea, and the total came to 140 yuan, less than $20 between the two of us. We washed the thick coating of mud off at a nearby shop for only 5 yuan.

When we brought the bike back to Jack of Jack Office, he was happy with his new basket. As far as I know, he didn't find out about the body damage, nor that the bike stalls whenever you stop it in traffic.

More fun with prostitutes

Before we brought the bike back to Old City, we stayed at a hotel in New City. It was a relatively expensive place. Mike paid the extra cost because he wanted to take a long hot bubble bath.

He was doing this, and I was watching some bizarre television show, when I heard a faint but insistent knocking at the door. I opened it to find a small woman in a yellow jumpsuit standing in the hallway. She wedged her way through the partially opened door and looked up at me with the wide eyes and taut face of a space alien.

"Let's go to the bed," she said.

"Oh my God," I said. I tried to close her out the door but she squirmed in, whereupon she wrapped one of her large hands around my testicles.

I told her that she must go, my friend was here, we wanted to have a quiet evening alone eating ice cream.

"Oh, two," she said, her wide eyes shining like oil. She held two fingers in the air and danced them back and forth.

"Look," I said, "I'm impotent, you beast. Now goodbye."

She searched the room, saw the two disheveled beds, then heard sounds from the bathroom and opened the door. She found Mike wet and naked, and at that point she must have assumed we were gay because she went out into the hallway and was gone.