I didn't spend long at Lugu Hu, but it was one of the most confusing and beguiling places I've ever been to. Among other things, I got fed dinner by Buddhists, sang terrible kareoke, kissed a girl and got punched by an angry boy.

The bus journey to Lugu Hu, where the small minority culture of the Mosu live, was one of the most incredible I have ever done. In several places I my jaw was slackly open in amazement, in others it was locked tight in vertigo. Mountains of many colours, canyons, remotest farming villages perched on the steep sides opposite our wobbling road. I was looking forward to the return journey even before the first one was finished.

We had been told about the Mosuo way back in Yangshao by our Chinese friend Kathy. She had smirked that they were famous across China because their matricarchial society had no problem with women sleeping with men out of marriage - even if a child resulted, the women of the household raised it. As a result, horny men from around China visited looking for some Mosuo action. Unfortunately, interjects the Lonely Planet, the Communist government had long since put a stop to this, and Han Chinese prostitutes had moved in to take care of male visitors' frustration.

I don't think either of us were expecting any Mosuo matriarchial loving, but the area sounded intriguing, the lake sounded beautiful and we were both a little sick of feeling on a backpacker trail. We had also developed a hearty disrespect for anything the LP said, so were curious what the community would really be like. It really feels like this area of China is changing too fast for a guidebook to keep up; the feel of places often seems utterly different to what is recommended by Tim's scarlet tome.

Not a real man

We had shared a van taxi for the last two hours of the trip with two Chinese girls, Anni and her sister who never spoke. Anni was friendly and fired vines of communication through her limited English. It turned out they were Manchurians living in Beijing - we persuaded her that saying, "I am Manchu girl" might be better than her original, "I am Man girl".
In the night darkness they had brought us to a hotel some way out of the small town. By now I was feeling awful, twelve hours over several stuffy, bumpy buses had made my head bitter with pain, but we needed to eat and Tim and I found ourselves sitting with them plus a local guy, who I think was Anni's Mosuo boyfriend, in a simple restaurant. We sat around a table with a fiery grill inlaid in its middle and the food was cooked in front of us. Delicious soy sauce aubergine, soft but not especially flavoursome sliced pig's heart and a more mundane chopped cow leg. Tim and I declined a cigarette, a first mark against us. Then our new Chinese friends started drinking competitions, throwing beer down their gullets and we were obliged to join in. I felt awful, and drank very slowly, to mockery. The immaculately dressed young woman who ran the place by herself was drinking with us, huge burps occasionally coming out of her pretty mouth. She started making wry comments about how slow I was drinking, as did Anni. This aspect of Chinese drinking really annoys me, it just seems like the kind of thing only school children would take seriously, but, aware I'm unlikely to convince anyone here of that opinion. I made the worst possible compromise, drinking enough to make myself iller but not enough to satisfy anyone. As the meal came to an end, Tim and I said we were going home; the others wanted to dance in a disco but I felt quite sick. As we demurred, the restaurantess started making a quip that was translated as "it's their wedding night, they want to go back together". Tired of all this, I looked her in the eye and, giving her a dirty smile, said, "If you'd like a wedding night with me, I'd be happy to oblige". As this was translated she got very embarrassed and starting saying she wasn't a Musuo girl (she was Han). I just grinned further and said I didn't mind, I was English, so Chinese or Musuo was fine. She stopped making jokes and later we all left - but no one seemed offended. Perhaps this was a bit coarse on my behalf, but it felt a justified course of action at the time. We saw and chatted to her several times in later days, and she perhaps took revenge by overcharging Tim and I shamelessly one evening.

"Musuo people dancing!"

What fascinated and confused Tim and I was how all the Musuo culture that we could see at Lugu Hu was completely and obviously an act, and none of the many Chinese tourists seemed to mind. At the lakeside, there was a series of traditional outfits hanging, and locals casually put on the dresses, hats and wigs with the air of a fancy dress party. As we hired a boat to row us across the lake, locals simply dressed up to take us over and removed their costumes once the ride was done. Some drama: three Mosuo rowed us to the central island of the lake in a long shallow boat. On the way back, waves and ice wind started whipping my face and the Mosuo began to look concernedly at the water. Suddenly, they spun the boat around and without telling us anything, took us back to the island. We met a Shanghai group of business men and their tour guide - one of them told us in perfect English, "They were trying to tell you it was too rough and dangerous to take a boat out today, but you didn't understand them". I was puzzled, "Then why did you guys also take a boat out?" - "We said to the locals, you let the foreigners go out, so take us too!". For a time, it looked like we might all be trapped on the island until nightfall, but the wind marginally subsided and the two boats returned. I asked the businessman what he thought of this place - he loved it. "I never believed there were places like this in China"!

That night, Anni took us to a Musuo dance. In the courtyard of one of the rapidly built near-identical hotels on LuGu lake's shore, Musuo boys and girls danced - Musuo girls looking rather fetching in a long white skirt, red blouse and a wig that wove around their head and allowed a solitary lock to fall to their waist - the Musuo boys looked like they'd dressed in whatever was lying around in the fancy dress cupboard. Then the Musuo girls started an improv singing duet with the visiting businessmen - a girl sang a verse, a tourist stepped forward and sang to her, applauded by colleagues. The Musuo girls, these deletable sirens, were making little effort to conceal their collossal boredom: one girl started braiding another's hair while yawning continuously. Tim and I were perplexed as to how this could be taken seriously, especially confusing was Anni's asking me, "Are you looking for a Musuo girl, Daniel"? I replied the same way whenever she asked me that: I was, in a general looking-for-a-girl sense. As the crowd dispersed, Anni and sister enthusiastically brought us to the town karoake disco. On the way we discovered that although Anni liked the town, she had broken up with the Musuo boy she had come to visit, he it seemed was only interested in one night stands - but the language barrier prevented any more details. Musuo young things started kareoke and Tim and I opened the song book to discover it had a near enclyclopedic selection of English language hits. We violated Bohemian Rhapsody, failed at Zombie and Perfect Day and, as for our two Bob Marley numbers, it was nightmarish... Then, even worse, all the Chinese at the table started shouting wildly, "Yesterday once more! Yesterday once more!" - I would love to pretend otherwise, but the six of us got up and sang that old Carpenters favourite. Tim takes his music seriously and was horrified the next morning to realise what terrible acts he had committed the night before: "This is the worst thing I have ever done"!

Musuo boys and girls got dancing and in interesting formations bopped to eighties style techno music (lyrics such as "You are a woman, I am a man, be my lady!"). Anni was excited, "Musuo people dancing!" This confused me further. Had the staged costumed dances earlier been Musuo people dancing, or was this Musuo people dancing, where there weren't many tourists watching but the songs and rythmns were obviously twentieth century? For the Chinese visitors to LuGu lake, it seemed as soon as Musuo people did any kind of movement to a repetitive beat, then by definition that was minority culture alive and well, but Tim and I found the whole mix of reality and fiction impenetrable. Things took a turn for the surrealler when Anni asked me, for seemingly the fifieth time, "You like Musuo girls?" - I responded, as I had previously, "Yes, but I like lots of girls". Focusing on the "yes" part of that answer, Anni mused for a minute, then, "If you like Musuo girl, I think maybe 100 yuan, 200 yuan". "Ah", I stammered, as my glimpses of understanding of what was going on in this disco spun wildly.
The two sisters, Tim and I and two hotel managing halfwits that Anni knew sat around a table and downed increasing amounts of 38% bijou. Myself and Anni sat side by side, and at some point in the evening, after some confused conversations, close dancing and feeding each other sunflower seeds, we started kissing. With the disco long since deserted, our group eventually finished our kareoke numbers and we all headed back to the hotel some time after 3. Anni and I walked arm in arm - but, everyone headed back to their original room once we arrived at our hotel. As Tim and I collapsed into our beds, he muttered, "Dan, you man-slut".

The next day, as we groggily tried to regain consciousness, a few things became clearer to me. Firstly, Anni's English was really not that good, especially now as we were trying to have complex discussions such as "Do you like Lugu lake?", or "What do you do back in Beijing"? Secondly, I realised that, I think due to the above language issue, I had totally misunderstood why Anni was visiting the area. We had thought this was a short holiday, but in fact she had left her job and was thinking of opening a bar here. Thirdly, she wanted to pursue something with me relatively seriously. I wasn't sure what I thought about this at first, but when it became clear we would need an interpreter to communicate even basic concepts between us, I think my doubts grew. That afternoon, Anni had a business meeting with someone important about her planned bar. The three of us went to a backpackery tea house and Tim and I watched as Anni talked with a tall power-exuding man in a dark suit. I suspected we were seeing something of who the driving force was behind the explosion of hotels and bars along the lakeside, something of the driving force that was taking whatever Musuo life had been like and transforming it into something we would not be here long enough to witness. At first the conversation was heartrending to watch, as Anni was squirming with nervousness, and Dr Suit was impassive. I wondered if I might be going through something similar to her ordeal in a couple of years - on these travels I have met many people who decided to relocate and start a new business/profession, and it seems an inevitable first phase is one of incredible uncertainty and powerlessness. But as the hours rolled on, the two of them were smiling and I hoped the meeting had worked well for Anni. Certainly, the master plan for Lugu lake must involve more cafe/bar managers.

She and the business people disappeared eventually and we didn't see her until the next day. When we were by ourselves, I told her that I wasn't going to be a very good boyfriend for her - citing the language difficulties and my plans to travel onwards sooner or later. These didn't persuade her: she told me we could study each other's language, I could come to Beijing and earn money as a teacher. I said she would easily find someone else, she say "no, Chinese boys are bad". I said I couldn't believe they were all bad, she said they were, they all wanted a very young woman with lots of money. We left to have lunch with Tim and her sister with nothing resolved. At the door of the restaurant, she said to me, "You are my superstar". I thought this was heartbreakingly romantic, even after Tim explained that this was the chorus line of a pop song currently being hummed by everyone in Beijing. Seeing as I had been the person that had initiated the whole kissing thing the previous night, I was feeling like a bit of a shit and regretted being not much better than the Mosuo boys Anni was already sick of. During lunch, things did, however, clear up and cheer up. Part of this may have been Anni realising I wasn't as old as she must have thought, which perhaps made my protestations that I wasn't ready to settle down and be her lakeside bar's bouncer more credible. Later that night she told everyone, "you have the eyes of a Chinese baby! Ha! ha!" - her sister, who never spoke, nodded agreement with this.

What of the Musuo who weren't dressing up for the tourists? Well, they seemed to live an idyllic life doing very little. Almost the entire town seemed either to be in their twenties or had just been born, they lounged around, waiting for the unlikely event of a customer, playing games, jumping on each other, flirting, chatting with Tim and I even if it was clear we couldn't understand anything. Going into a shop, the manager would jaunt out of the nearby diner he was idlying in take our money; go to the internet cafe and we'd pass a cook from our favourite restaurant - shouldn't any of you be working? Aside from whispers of occasional drunken fighting, it seemed an ever happy locale, easy to make friends, if only I could speak a jot of Chinese. We arrived in LuGu Hu upset that we'd came too late before progress had changed it utterly - we left grateful that we'd been able to see as much as we had.

You may have noticed I have yet to describe my being fed by Buddists or my being punched. These happened on the last afternoon and night of our time with the Musuo.

After lunch, Anni said she would meet up with us shortly, but after an hour of playing cafe boardgames (Tim generally the upper hand at Jenga, but I think I regained my pride with Connect 4) and no Anni visible, Tim and I decided to head for the Buddhist temple on one of the hills above the town. He and I seemed to have developed a rule that we only approach Buddhist temples from the most difficult route possible - stupidly not finding the path, we clambered through fallow fields, hedges and brambles. At the eventual gate of the small temple grounds, we were met by a man and a dog. The man was tall, dark like the earthen fields around us and so old that his body seemed to be moving on memory alone; his dog was tiny, bursting with the energy of frantic youth, splotches of white and light brown. The man led us creakingly up towards the temple, the dog bounded around, yapping at our ankles but fleeing if ever we looked at it. The temple itself was simpler than past Buddhist ones we had seen and the more powerful for it. Although the art was primary colour simple, almost Pop-Art Buddhism, it was the first Tibetan style temple where the art was about Buddha, rather than depicting endless demons and thousand-handed goddesses. No one was being ravished by a raksasha or being trampled by a twelve eyed ugly bloke - it was our favourite temple instantly. A second caretaker had come out to see these visitors, he was slightly less venerable than his fellow. After we had rested, looking out at the unquestionably lovely LuGu lake and surrounding mountains, we popped our heads in their door to say goodbye. The younger of the two bade us join them for their supper, so we sat on little stools and got fed most of their meal, despite endlessly putting our hands over our plates and groaning, "full, full" in Chinese. They served me rice with spinach and pork rinds - it was delicious. We four sat in silence. I thought about bootstrapping some simple Chinese and miming to ask them about who they were etc, but I realised that conversation was superfluous. They had offered us their generosity, we were repaying them by humbly accepting it.

Climbing down the hill, we found ourselves among a collection of simple wooden houses and farm buildings. Old women chased chickens and smiled at us. "Wow, this almost seems like a real village", marvelled Tim - perhaps we had found something geniune of the Musuo? We finally exited onto a main street and I turned back in horror. The way we had just come, a sign hung over the path: "Musuo folk museum" - we had simply walked through this preserved "living museum" part of town the wrong way.

Meeting Anni and the others almost by random, we ended up, once again, in the Musuo disco. We sat among a big group of Musuo males and our new friends started pouring us big cups of strong bijou. We had already drunk a lot, and so cognitive functions were starting to slip. Tim was the drunkest he had ever been, he sat with the karoake songlist helplessly on his lap, "I'm really drunk Dan, I can't read"! I sung a godawful Superstitious, came back to the table and sat next to a Musuo boy in a white t shirt. He said something to me, I told him I didn't understand him, he responded, "fuck you"! I felt this was uncalled for, so replied, in a reasonable tone of voice, "fuck you"! His face contorted and his fist smacked into the side of my head. I wasn't hurt, but one of the things I rather like about myself is that I become completely non-violent when drunk (becoming overly confident, lecherous and occasionally very rude are different matters unfortunately). I stood up and stepped back, and other Musuo boys surrounded me and pulled me away and towards a taxi. "Sorry, sorry, bijou, bijou" they apologised. We took our taxi back and the next morning left, as we had planned, for Li Jiang to start Tim's homeward journey.

Daniel, 26 February, Chengdu

An epilogue of sorts: We had arranged with Anni and sister that they would come to Li Jiang later in the day - they wanted to sleep in, but Tim and I needed to head off quickly to make sure Tim could arrange his flight and bus tickets. I left her details of where we were staying in Li Jiang, but they never showed up - so I never saw her again.