The Zoo Debate

DAY 312: Zoos are controversial things. One on hand, they aim to bring wild animals from faraway lands to urban areas, so that city folk who don't have the time, money or courage to see them in the wild can simply stroll around and see them all in a day before "Must See TV" starts. On the other hand, innocent animals are held in captivity for the convenience of Man -- their treatment depending on the level of professionalism of the zoo. Lonely Planet China's biased paragraph of the Beijing Zoo states that "All zoos are animal prisons, but Beijing Zoo seems like death row." As readers of The Blog may know, you can't believe everything you read in a guidebook -- particularly a Lonely Planet one -- so I decided to see the zoo for myself. Besides, I wanted to see the pandas.

The Beijing Subway took me to the Beijing Zoo in the northwest corner of the city center. With Lonely Planet's description and Ed's negative comments of the zoo in mind (he had been there before trekking The Great Wall with me), I expected it to be a depressing place where animals lived in tiny cages with no where to roam around at all. Ed said the exception to this was the Panda House, the Beijing Zoo's main attraction, but inside, pandas were trapped behind glass: one sloped over a tree branch like he was dead, another feeding on bamboo. It was a bit depressing to see them pace in circles around and around, waiting to go outside. On the outside I saw that, when given the opportunity, they had a big lawn to play around in, with a little jungle gym and a slide.

THE BEIJING ZOO WAS A FAIRLY BIG PLACE with impressive landscaping and many animals not in cages, but in paddocks surrounded by ditches to keep them out of harm's way to people. There were many depressing exceptions though, like the yak, the deer, the ground hornbill, the flamingos and the big cats -- although the predator felines took turns to stretch their legs out in a much bigger pavilion that surrounded their cages, which was a comforting though. It still wasn't like releasing them into the wild, but a compromise as far as zoos are concerned. Debate it if you'd like.

Of course there's no real substitution for natural habitats, but I suppose that's the challenge of zoo management -- finding the cost-effective balance between the allotment of animals' real estate and the paths in between within the total real estate given. While I would agree that a zoo is a sort of animal prison, I don't knock them; I have very fond childhood memories of zoos, ever since I rode an elephant at the Bronx Zoo on a trip with my parents as a kid. I understand the nature of a zoo and endorse any zoo that does its best to care for its residents. It's funny how Lonely Planet's China says Beijing Zoo is like death row; Lonely Planet's South America on a Shoestring describes the Mallasa Zoologico zoo just outside of La Paz, Bolivia as "kickass" -- and it was a much less maintained zoo than the Beijing one. My final analysis on the Beijing Zoo: I thought, as far as zoos were concerned, it was a decent one. I mean, not even in the wild could you feed an elephant.

I sort of zipped around the different animals -- from the indoor, open area tropical rainforest house to the lagoon to the African mammal paddocks -- all in a haste since I was still a little under the weather. Besides, not to sound like a snob here, but I'd seen most of the animals in their natural habitats already. I went back to the Panda House before I left that afternoon to see if they had been let out to play -- one had. It was sort of ironic; after the panda (picture above) played around on the jungle gym and scratched his ass for a bit, he paced around and around like he did that morning, this time wanting to go inside the cage. I guess it's true what they say: the grass is always greener on the other side.

STILL FEELING A LITTLE SICK, I decided to take it easy again to watch the Olympics in my room -- I swear I never heard the Chinese national anthem so many times in my life. Roommate Sam stayed in too but we briefly went out to get some local
food, which he bargained down using the limited Mandarin he picked up from his daily morning language lessons. We picked on lychees back on our way back to the room and watched a bootleg DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11, presenting Michael Moore's one side in the debate over whether or not George W. Bush should be re-elected president. Toni and Paul came in near the end pretty hammered after a night of boozing and sampling all the unorthodox animals to eat in Beijing: fried scorpions, grilled silkworms and dog. I'll admit I felt a little envious since I hadn't been around to join them -- it would have made for an interesting Blog entry -- but then again perhaps some animals might be better off in zoos than be served on a stick to drunken backpackers.

Workin' For The Blog

DAY 313: Everyday when I'm behind on The Blog I tell myself, This is the day you'll just stay in and catch up, Erik. You become a writer when you write because you have to, not because you want to. Some days I listen to my inner monologue, but other days I go out to do more -- all for the benefit of The Blog and its readers of course. I swear, it's hard work playing the role of producer, keeping each daily entry interesting and different from others so as a whole, The Blog doesn't get stale. Anyway, I decided that this would be the day to catch up, to finish as much I could before my 5:33 p.m. train to my next destination, Xi'an.

I didn't leave the house all day, or rather, I didn't leave the stadium all day. Checkout time was at noon so I packed up and put all my bags in storage -- minus my laptop and my notes to spread out on the dining area table in the kitchen to work while everyone else was having fun. Toni and Paul went off with their bicycles to explore Beijing's hutongs (old small residential streets) while I sat to do work like a kid grounded with extra homework. I didn't even go out for food; I ordered in (Chinese of course). I was on a roll, sorting out photos, writing, editing, and uploading what I had finished on the Ethernet connection in the computer lab in the next room. I was on a roll so much that I almost didn't make my train -- I had forgotten to factor in rush hour weekday city traffic.

My taxi barely made it to Beijing West Railway Station on the opposite end of town in time. I only had about ten minutes until departure when I was still in traffic, just outside the train station. I paid the guy my fare and ran to the entrance -- losing time at the security x-ray check -- not knowing exactly where to go, putting my faith in good signage.

Fuck, where's the Pinyin? The Roman character equivalent to Chinese characters were absent from all the signs. Stress level went to orange, but back to yellow when I realized my ticket used cardinal numbers -- I simply matched my "231" to the big board (picture above) and ran in a frenzy to track "4." I think I was the last one to board the train because I didn't see anyone get on after me; everyone was all set to go already. Before I settled all my things in, the train started its "30"-hour southwesterly route through the Shanxi province to the city of Xi'an the Shaanxi province. (No, that's not a typo. Confusing, isn't it?)

THE RAILWAY SYSTEM IN CHINA is a fairly efficient one. The original lines were constructed in the 19th century, and over the decades have been improved and improved -- like in the eyes of the Soviet Union and the U.S.A., railways were a symbol of a nation's greatness and economic growth. Nowadays, the trains are a popular and safe way to travel within the country. For an overnight journey, one can choose from a "hard sleeper," a bed in a non-compartmental railway car of twenty triple bunks, or an upper-class "soft sleeper," a comfortable compartment for four (two double bunks), similar to the 2nd class accommodations on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Of course I didn't know the difference when I booked the tickets with Lily at the hostel in Beijing -- blame The Blog from taking away pre-destination research time away from me -- and ended up in the pricier (but nicer) soft sleeper. It was a slight step above the Russian trains, with plush oriental carpeting, a big shared washroom and really comfortable fluffy comforters to sleep in. Moreover, there was an electric outlet for me to plug in my laptop to continue the chore I had been doing before my little almost-missing-the-train escapade: workin' for The Blog. I came to a stopping point around ten o'clock and just fell asleep, knowing I had the entire next day to work.

THERE WAS A NUDGING AT MY FEET the next morning around seven -- it was the conductor waking me up. That's pretty rude, I thought, but at least I'd get an early start to the full day of Blog writing ahead.

That's funny, why is everyone packing up?

"Excuse me, are you going to Xi'an?" I asked a Western-looking couple I noticed in the hallway.

"Yeah."

"When are we arriving?"

"In about fifteen minutes."

"I thought this was supposed to be a thirty-hour ride."

"Thirteen hours."

"I think I should pack my bags."

Thirteen hours? I thought, shoving my things in a bag. Maybe I misheard Lily's words. But thirteen, not thirty? I thought they told me the train ride was going to be a long one. Then again, to the average person, thirteen is pretty long. I had just become conditioned to thirty-hour journeys through Siberia. I remember at the beginning of The Trip I dreaded a five-hour journey through Ecuador. Geographically and mentally speaking, look how far I've come.

Seventeen hours before I knew it, I arrived in Xi'an, a brand new city to explore that would put The Blog on the backburner for the time being.

He Said, She Said in Xi'an

DAY 314: Xi'an, the former imperial capital for eleven dynasties since China's territories were unified by Emperor Qin Shi Huang of the Qin dynasty, lies about a third of the way westward from the eastern Pacific coast. Here, the Great Silk Road was established linking trade between the Romans and the Far East, making Xi'an one of western China's most prosperous cities not only politically but commercially. Today, Xi'an is the political and commercial capital of the Shaanxi province, a modern city of five million whose center is surrounded by protective city stone walls. For tourists, it is the base for visiting one of China's must-sees: Qin's Terracotta Warriors.

A GUY HOLDING UP THE HOSTELLING INTERNATIONAL LOGO was outside the crowded Xi'an train station, waiting the arrival of the seven people who had made a reservation for their hostel in town. A Dutch couple, four young Germans and I arrived in piecemeal and collectively hopped in a van, which took us across town near the city wall's south gate to the HI Shuyuan Hostel, a big rustic Chinese building with three inner courtyards. The registration process for the seven of us was a somewhat time-consuming one, with all the forms, passports and payments only being handled by two people.

While waiting my turn at the end of the queue, I noticed a girl waiting too, looking a bit impatient, but with the polite poise to keep it in. I couldn't place where she might have come from; I just saw that she had Western-looking features. "I'm just trying to check out," she told me in an American accent, tipping me off. I let her go ahead of me, but she still had to wait, so I started with the usual small talk.

"Have you been in China long?" I asked. She told me that although she was from Houston, she was living in China, studying in Beijing. She had been on a jaunt to Xi'an for a couple of days, but had a flight back that afternoon. I explained to her my disorientation of China, not knowing exactly where I should go -- due to the fact that The Blog had taken up most of my time that I could have used to read up on places of interest -- and she suggested that I might try going to Chengdu and Guilin, places she hadn't been yet, but had heard raves about.

When the young Chinese guy at the desk attended to her, her mouth opened and blew my mind -- she was fluent in Mandarin, with all the rising, falling, high, low and undulating tones that I try to use, but end up making me sound like I'm trying to talk with the inflections of Scooby-Doo. I stood there feeling open-jawed, totally mesmerized, like when Tia Carrere's character was impressed with Rob Lowe's character in the first Wayne's World movie as he ordered Chinese food in her native Chinese language -- all while Wayne (Mike Myers) jokingly ordered the "Cream of Some Young Guy."

The guy at the desk said something in his native tongue, and she totally understood it. She said something back and he understood it too. He said something, then she said something and the two of them were going back and forth in Mandarin, chuckling at times, like a Chinese linguistic Olympic ping-pong match -- until she missed the ball with a reversion to English: "Um, can I put my bags in the storage?" He gave her the key.

"Where are you going after here?" the guy asked me when he was filling in my registration. Hostels always seem to ask you what your next destination city is, even though I really didn't have a clue as to where that might be.

"Um, let's say Chengdu," I said, pointing to the notes I took from the girl's advice. "Since she says it's so good."

The Mandarin-speaking American girl went off to store her bags for the day while I paid for my accommodation. She tapped me on the shoulder before she left to go wander the city. "Nice meeting you," she said in English. She probably could have said it in Mandarin, but I probably wouldn't have understood it.

I DECIDED TO KEEP MY SIGHTSEEING LIGHT for the day so I could spend the afternoon and evening to catch up on The Blog. After discovering a little divey restaurant with the best little freshly steamed dumplings I've had to date (and for just 37 cents [USD] for ten), I went out to see the immediate sights in the downtown area, the first thing being the most noticeable structure in the center of town, the Bell Tower. Once having held the bell that indicated reporting time at dawn in days of the Ming dynasty, this 16th century tower had been most recently restored in the 18th. Nowadays on the second tier of the Bell Tower was a bell (no surprise there), although not the original -- it was merely a replica made in 1996 so that tourists could ring it for prosperity (and for a fee). Inside the tower was a small exhibition of smaller bells, as well as a view of Xi'an's commercial sprawl below.

Just to the west of the Bell Tower -- beyond some promotional statues made out of Heineken bottles and a park where people flew multi-piece kites -- was the Drum Tower which, you guessed it, used to hold a drum. Similar to the situation with the Bell Tower, the original drum that was banged everyday at dusk was no longer there -- the only drumbeat heard was from people ignoring the "No Banging" sign near replica drums. There were many other drums, big ones, small ones, drums all in a row -- which was sort of fitting for a place called the "Drum Tower." Inside the tower was a stage for the seven-piece demonstration of traditional Xi'an drum music, usually played in ceremonies during the sixth moon of the Chinese calendar, around July. Looking at the performance schedule I saw that I had just missed the latest show, but asked for permission to come back in the afternoon to see it at three.

THE THIRD MAIN SITE of my light sightseeing day was The Great Mosque, China's largest, serving the fairly large Chinese Muslim population, evolved from the Muslim influence during the days of the Great Silk Road. Also known as The Great Eastern Mosque, its architecture took the ideas from the Arabs and put a Chinese twist on them. For example, the minaret structure wasn't a square tower as seen in Arabia, but an octagonal pagoda known as The Introspection Tower.

The mosque grounds were divided into four courtyards, each one with gates and pillars representing an aspect of the Muslim faith. At the western end of the fourth and final courtyard was the Main Worship Hall, where Chinese Muslims came to pray to Allah. I left the faithful to pray and quietly slipped away.

"OH HEY," I SAID to a familiar face when I went back to the hostel to finally get to my Blog writing. It was the Mandarin-speaking American girl I met that morning, eating a pomegranate to kill time before her flight. Her name was Elisa, and she was a philosophy student at RenMin(?) University on full scholarship -- although she came to realization not to mention that to locals after receiving snide comments about the fact that the Chinese government could afford to pay her to study and not to feed all its people. I sat down with her to chat -- The Blog could wait -- still amazed that she was fluent in Mandarin. She schooled me on the sites to see in and around Xi'an, as well as three very useful phrases that she wrote down for me in Pinyin: Duo shao qian? (How much?); Ji kuai? (How many?); and Keyi pianyi ma? (Can you make it cheaper?)

"Feel like going for a walk?" I asked.

"Yeah, it beats just sitting around here waiting."

The two of us went out on a leisurely stroll to the nearby Muslim Quarter; she had frequented it during her five days in Xi'an and posed as my Western-looking (her parents were from Spain), Eastern-speaking tour guide. She pointed out the fact that there were Chinese Muslim women around with green eyes and introduced me to ba bau jim gao, a local sweet treat made of rice flour, sesame seeds and different colored sugars that she was totally hooked on. I'll admit they were quite tasty. We continued down the street, me holding my empty wooden skewer that the sweet snack was placed on -- me and my "Don't Litter" American mindset.

"Just throw it in the street," Elisa said as an old ex-pat pro.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, it's weird at first, but don't worry, someone will clean it up." I threw the stick to the curb and followed behind my "guide."

Elisa and I hit it off really easily -- more so that I have with other travelers I've met -- and we had a sort of instant connection as we walked down the main road of the Muslim Quarter, a street of bicycles whizzing by and exotic spicy smells filling the air. We tried to get some halal meat on a stick to walk around with, but were led to a table by a persuasive restaurant staff. Before we knew it, we were sitting at a table sharing a platter of lamb shish kebabs with glasses of Chinese plum juice -- which I used to wash down the spices in the meat.

"What's the matter, you can't handle it?" Elisa teased me.

"No, I can handle it," I said with a smirk, still eating the meat slowly so as to not overload my palate en masse.

Being persuaded to sit at the eatery, even though we didn't mind, was just one of the many times someone tried to bait-and-switch something on Elisa. She warned me of how people might do it, like switching the stated price for a smaller quantity or something like that. She told me the phrases in Mandarin, but it was totally over my head. Maybe I could just order the Cream of Some Young Guy and have the last laugh.

"Be careful at that restaurant," she warned me. "Little kids unzip your bag and take your money."

"Don't worry, they think I'm Chinese."

Just like my experience traveling with Western-looking Tatiana in Mongolia, people approached me and my East Asian-looking face first with the local language -- only for me to respond with a clueless face and have Elisa speak up for me.

"Give me your hand," she said. Not only did she know the language of Mandarin, but she knew the language of palms, and read mine to learn more about the guy she met just that morning. She told me that I was quite a determined individual that didn't seem too religious.

"Actually I think this trip has made me more religious," I told her and explained my philosophy on Fatism. "I've found that nothing is coincidental. Everything happens for a reason."

The philosophy student continued on with the palm reading. "These four lines are for the four women you are going to meet in Life that will teach you how to love," she told me.

"What about yours?"

"I have three, but I think I've met those three guys already."

THE TWO OF US FINISHED OUR MEAL and moved onto dessert when a walking street vendor came to us with candied crabapples (picture above). We started eating them at the table but then got up and walked with them to make up time. Vendors and beggars approached us in all directions -- mostly to hound Elisa and not me.

"I told you they think I'm Chinese," I told her. "See, that? They totally ignore me." It was like I had beggar/tout repellant on and she was amazed.

"You could probably blend in India too," she told me. Only when I got to India myself would I find out.

THE AFTERNOON WAS GOING BY FAST -- I had skipped out on the three o'clock drum show to hang out; there'd be another at four -- and the clock was soon approaching Elisa's desired departure time to the airport. We walked around the block onto the main road, back towards the direction of the hostel and the Drum Tower, talking about the hard work involved in writing and maintaining Blogs -- she had one as well. "I'm pretty much my Blog's bitch," I admitted to her. It was true.

"Have you found it easy to get along with other travelers?" she asked me as I took another bite into candied apple goodness. Perhaps she was wondering if I had clicked as well with others as I did with her.

"Actually, I don't know if it's because I've been traveling for so long, but I've noticed that I only really get along with other Americans," I told her. "I mean, anyone can learn to speak English, but I don't know what it is, there's just something that we share."

We finally came to the crossroads by the Bell Tower where one path led back towards her baggage in storage at the hostel, and one led towards the four o'clock Xi'an drum music demonstration. It was the time to part ways. "You're the coolest guy I've met in China," she told me. Our encounter was brief -- only about two hours -- but, as I told her, it might not have been coincidental. I extended my hand for the usual goodbye formalities one does to a fellow traveler on the road -- but she reached around and gave me a hug.

"Keep in touch."

And then we parted ways. I went off to the drum show at the Drum Tower, while Elisa went back to the hostel and then back to the airport to go back to Beijing to talk to her boyfriend back in Texas. I spent the rest of my afternoon and evening in Xi'an finally attending to my overdue Blog duties. Like I said, I'm pretty much my Blog's bitch.

TO READ WHAT SHE SAID about the day, check out Elisa's Blog at http://elisa.onegoodcookie.com. The entry about our encounter is under her "Characters" category, dated August 28, 2004. She's got some great photos too; check them out.

The Farmer That Found A Warrior Within

DAY 315: In 1974, a group of peasant farmers in a remote countryside of the Shaanxi province were digging up a well. Instead of water, they stumbled upon something else: without aiming to do so, they had found one of the greatest archaeological sites of the 20th century, Emperor Qin Shi Huang's army of The Terracotta Warriors.

The Terracotta Warriors, an army of an estimated 8,000 life-sized statue warriors made of terracotta clay, were created under order of the eccentric Emperor Qin Shi Huang of the ancient Qin dynasty (who has also been credited with creating the first sections of The Great Wall). The purpose of this clay army was simply to guard his tomb after death from invaders, so that perhaps he might have a good night's sleep -- permanently. The Terracotta Warriors, and the tomb they "swore" to protect, went hidden underground for millennia until that one day in '74 when the farmers found it by accident. Little did they know at the time that their discovery would spawn an army of kitschy souvenir vendors thirty years later selling replicas of the Terracotta Warriors in different sizes.

VISITING THE ARMY OF TERRACOTTA WARRIORS, 28 km. east of Xi'an's city center in the suburbs, is arguably the reason for a tourist to visit Xi'an. I had signed up to see them, as well as some little added extras, on a tour set up by the travel agency in the hostel. With me were a Swiss couple, the Dutch couple that I had met the day before at the train station, an Australian college student named Mike and three guys traveling China after an international relations conference in Shanghai: Stewart from Scotland, Ben from Australia and Santiago from Ecuador. We were led by our lovely librarian and part-time tour guide Zhou, who spoke into the microphone using broken but decent English to tell us historical information en route to the dig site.

Our first "bonus" site was a terracotta factory, where artisans hand-crafted different functional and non-functional items, the most non-functional being the kitschy replicas of the terracotta statues for vendors to sell on the street -- although the factory also sold them in their showroom. The terracotta statue showroom was just one of many other showrooms selling many different goods to tourists under the guise as a "factory."

"Hmmm, this factory looks a lot like a souvenir gift shop," I said.

"Hmmm, I wonder why they brought us here," Stewart said.

The only redeeming value of this "factory" (for me at least) was the ultra-kitschy Terracotta Warrior costume for an ultra-kitschy photo of myself.

WE SPENT THE NEXT HOUR at another site on the way to the site of The Terracotta Warriors, the small, but decent collection of the Lintong Museum, housed in a building with a guardian lion statue who probably didn't guard much since he was permanently scratching himself. Inside the museum was not only a display of some Buddhist relics, but a comprehensive exhibition of artifacts from the Qin dynasty to the Ming dynasty, covering centuries of history in the Xi'an region. Zhou walked us around the displays and explained some history to us -- something she thought I was most interested in -- including the gruesome corporal punishment of the short-lived Qin dynasty. The violent punishments of the penal laws ultimately led to the end of the dynasty when farmers in the Farmer Revolution took over the land and overthrew the government with more peaceful laws.

After a delicious lunch of Shaanxi Chinese cuisine at a restaurant on the way, we finally arrived at the site of The Terracotta Warriors, a very developed tourist complex that was something out of Disneyland or something, just without the dress up characters -- it was hard to believe that the excavation was still in progress. Zhou led us into the "park" and pointed out the different hangars and buildings where the three main excavation pits were, before walking us to the theater with the introductory historical re-enactment film.

"If you're lucky, the farmer will be there," she said. She was referring to Yang Yen Pei, the last remaining farmer in the group that discovered The Terracotta Warriors in 1974 who was strong enough not to be bedridden. (Only one other remained in the entire group of farmers.)

Yang's reason to be at the "Terracotta Park" was for one reason: to pose as a celebrity and sign autographs in coffee table books about the archaeological find he discovered by accident. The old man in his seventies was indeed there, at a table near a stack of books, looking quite tired of sitting at the same damn desk everyday to deal with dumb tourists. He didn't do it for the fame though; he did it for money. A book cost 120 yuan and an autograph another 50.

We walked over as a group to the desk to see him up close. I was somewhat excited to meet the man himself and was about to extend my hand for a handshake -- but he started picking his nose before I did and I retracted before I even extended. I wondered if he was picking his nose that day in 1974.

Ben was feeling the celebrity vibe in him and didn't want to let the opportunity pass him by, fee or no fee. He bought a book and an autograph, and posed for a photo with his friend Stewart, who didn't mind shaking the old man's nose-picking hand. Stewart and Ben posed with Yang for Santiago to take the photo; I seized the opportunity to take a photo of them too with my little spy camera. When Santiago was focusing, I whipped out my little spy camera out of my pocket pretty obviously and snapped a photo for myself. Yang saw what I was doing and immediately got angry at me for "stealing" a photo without paying.

"You have to pay ten yuan," a woman told me.

"But I'm with them."

"Ten yuan."

Zhou interjected and then reiterated the rule to me. "If you want to take a picture with him, you have to pay ten yuan. Do you want to take a picture with him?"

"Uh, I just took one."

"They said it's ten yuan to take a picture with him."

"But I don't want a picture with him, I just took it because we're all in the same group." It was my alibi and I was sticking to it -- I didn't know at the time that Ben had paid the extra 10 yuan in addition to the 170 he spent already.

"Did you take the photo already?" Zhou asked me.

"Yeah."

"Let's go then!" We snuck away before Yang and his underlings chased me down.

THE INTRODUCTORY MOVIE WAS REALLY DATED; it seemed like it had been made in the 1970s, with what sounded like a mono soundtrack and a film reel in desperate need of a restoration. The good thing was that it was presented in a 360° surrounding screen format -- just like they do at Disneyland. The re-enactment was somewhat cheesy, but at least the Yang the old man had a cameo in the background when a guy playing him dug up the warriors.

We all split up and wandered the "park" at our leisure in the manner Zhou suggested: Pit 1, the biggest, most impressive pit of the Terracotta Warriors (picture above), then Pit 3, with broken bits of warriors, then Pit 2, a site of the excavation in progress, and finally the museum of the Bronze Chariots, found in Qin Shi Huang's tomb.

Pit 1 was the definitive site you might have seen in a history book. Protected by what looked like the roof of an airplane hangar, over a thousand Terracotta Warriors and their Terracotta Horses stood frozen in rows ready to attack -- although most of them looked like they wanted to do the dance "The Robot" instead. Each one was sculpted as a real warrior, complete with the uniform denoting its rank in the army. Even the faces were individually crafted, modeled after the actual soldier it was trying to depict.

Pit 3 was just like it had been described to us; a smaller pit with incomplete warriors and broken pieces of the clay army, and Pit 2 was a huge area of clay where more warriors were supposedly hidden underneath. The excavation was on-going -- although we wondered just when archaeologists got to work on it with all the tourists around taking photos at the indoor exhibition of the different types of warriors found in the army: the Kneeling Archer, the Standing Archer, the Mid-Ranking Officer and the High-Ranking Officer.

"JUST LOOK AT THE ANGER IN HIS FACE!" Ben pointed out, looking at their digital photo of Yang the old nose-picking farmer. Santiago too captured the moment digitally of the little incident I caused earlier that afternoon.

"Now that's worth ten yuan right there," Stewart said.

I took out my camera and we compared. They were both similar, truly capturing the emotion in Yang's face. "I think I felt him clench his fist tighter when you took the picture," Stewart told me.

"I think I almost killed him," I joked. We had all left the premises before Yang had time to track us down -- although I'm sure if he had a really good American lawyer, he might be able to get back at me through legal channels.

SPEAKING OF LAWYERS, I met two that night. Over early evening drinks I met Todd, a Canadian from Nova Scotia working in Hong Kong who believed that there were only two true world cities, New York and London. (Paris is on a tier below New York and London, because, as international as it is, it's still pretty French-centric.) Later on that night in the rock bar in the basement of the hostel -- where Santiago and Ben jammed with the local Chinese rock band with vocals and drums -- I met Michael, a retired lawyer of the United Nations in the world city New York. In between lawyers I met a teacher and a student in the hostel restaurant in the back, open to locals as well. It was there I stumbled upon 39-year-old magazine entrepreneur David and his 27-year-old English tutor Hana, who was so excited that I turned up out of nowhere because now her pupil could practice English with a true English-speaker. In the end, it was beer that eased the practice conversations, which eased my wallet that night because David paid for my dinner and my drinks in return the favor of my "tutoring."

Perhaps I should have just offered Yang a beer when he got pissed off at me earlier that day and shook his hand in apology, although I'd probably have to look out for which had he was picking his nose with first.

Big Wild Goose Chase

DAY 316: Xi'an's center is surrounded by a moat and a protective wall that was originally built to fortify the city during the era of dynasties, but nowadays it just sort of separates the city from the suburbs in the most straightforward manner possible. Most of it has been restored -- complete with dress up guards at the gates for show -- forming a sort of jogging/biking trail on top perfect for a morning bike ride -- which was how I spent the early morning. It was a relaxing start to another hectic day on the road.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS WITH ATMs and me. I seem to be a living advertisement for Visa bank cards because I always seem to end up in a place where the ATMs only take Visa, while carrying my bankcard that only works on the Cirrus/Maestro/MasterCard network.

Since the evening before I went on a hunt to find an ATM to withdraw cash, only to find out that while Xi'an had many ATMs, most only took cards on the national Chinese network or Visa/Plus. There were two MasterCard machines that I managed to find, but they both told me to fuck off -- in a polite manner of course (probably because it was Sunday evening and ran out of cash at the end of the weekend).

Wouldn't it be great if ATMs communicated to us in a more human-like way?

<-- ENGLISH (standard)
<-- SPANISH
<-- ENGLISH (in a more human like way) *BEEP*

HA HA HA HA HA HA-- FUCK OFF.

Anyway, so that Monday morning I tried again going from ATM to ATM, even to the ones without a MasterCard logo on them just in case, to try and get cash for my onward travel. Time after time, I still came up blank. The Chinese-only machines told me, in what I hoped was merely a bad translation that my "TRANSACTION HAS BEEN CORRECT" when nothing came out. (I figured it was merely a bad translation because pushing the "CORRECT" key on a menu, canceled the number you typed in.) The wild goose chase was over when I finally went to Plan B, the contingency if Plan A had failed: use the emergency Visa credit card I had from my parents.

HERE'S YOUR MONEY, ERIK! DON'T SPEND IT ALL IN ONE PLACE NOW, YA HEAR?

GETTING TO ANOTHER ONE OF XI'AN'S SIGHTS, about a 10-minute ride on the public No. 609 bus from the bus stop south of the city wall's south gate involved another big wild goose chase -- but only by name. I headed out to the Buddhist holy tower Dayan Ta, more commonly known as the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, one of
Xi'an's more notable structures outside the city walls. As much as I tried to find an explanation to its unusual name, I couldn't find one on the temple grounds -- few of the signs had Pinyin or English on them -- and even my Rough Guide book said no one knows for sure of its origin, only that it's speculated that it comes from the Chinese story Xi You Ji, where a goose saves Xuan Zang and Monkey.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda (picture above), not to be confused with the Small Wild Goose Pagoda in another part of town, was a beautiful temple surrounded by nicely landscaped trees, steles and songbirds chirping above in cages. I climbed the seven stories of the pagoda -- the Buddhist structure evolved with Chinese architecture from the stupa in India -- only to see a mediocre view of the city from above.

A TAXI DRIVER COULDN'T FIND what we were looking for -- it was another wild goose chase -- when I was in a cab with Sybille and Meta from Holland en route to the huoche zhan (train station). The two Dutch girls from the hostel and I had tickets for the same train bound for Chengdu, so we had decided to split a cab. I must have pronounced the phrase for train station wrong because the driver took us to a street out of the way east to a street named whatever it was that came out of my mouth. Luckily we had padding in time and made it to the station with a little time to spare.

I had a ticket for a "hard sleeper" this time, the economic way to travel on the Chinese railway. A hard sleeper is a bed in a big open non-sectionalized train car with twenty triple bunks, a not-so-comfortable (nor private for that matter), but bearable option for just a night. Unfortunately for me, it wasn't as bearable as it could have been, having been assigned a top bunk, which was only about two feet from the ceiling. I couldn't sit up and every time I wanted to drink water out of my bottle I had to twist my head to the side.

I suppose it could have been worse; I could have been a target for pickpockets if I had looked more Western, but I blended in fairly well, except for the fact that I might have been the only person on there without a cell phone. My "cover" was only blown once when the old guy in the top bunk across from me tried to start a conversation with me, and I didn't know what was going on. (He just wanted to know what time it was.)

The train rode through the night as I toss and turned in the humidity and heat of the top bunk, but on the bright side, I knew I had enough cash to get me through the next couple of days -- it's a good thing that Visa ATM was in a good mood that morning.

Sichuan Style

DAY 317: Chengdu is the capital of the Sichuan province, the southwestern province before the Chinese occupied territory of Tibet. Chengdu is a modern metropolis as most Chinese capitals are, known for its famous school of traditional medicine, its panda breeding center, and above all, its spicy cuisine.

It was raining when I arrived and regrouped with Dutchies Sybille and Meta who had hard sleepers in another car. A hostel representative got us a taxi and drove us to a hutong (an old, traditional Chinese residential street) near the city center where the Dragon Town Hostel was located. The receptionist put me in a dorm with the two Dutch girls, although the two of them pretty much did their own thing together.

The rains started clearing up so I decided to rent a bicycle to zip around town like the locals, but as soon as I was about to choose a bike, the rains started up again -- and none of the rentals had an upright umbrella holder like the bicycles I had seen the locals have for when it rained. Rather than pedal around myself to see some sights, I did the next best (or better) thing: have someone else pedal me around in a covered bicycle rickshaw.

By pointing to a map that had English and Mandarin printed on it, I told the rickshaw guy to take me to the Wuhou Temple, the site of the tomb of legendary king Liu Bei, who had won the war in Chengdu during the end of the Han dynasty and established the Shu dynasty. Liu Bei's story is immortalized in a famous Chinese novel known as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which tells the story of Liu Bei's plight to power against the odds with the help of his two warrior brothers-in-spirit, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. A statue of Liu Bei was juxtaposed on the left and right with his inseparable warrior friends Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, and the dynamic trio was surrounded by other statues in the saga of The Three Kingdoms.

Like the other "temples," I had seen in China, the Wuhou Temple wasn't a single building but an entire park with many courtyards, buildings, small bamboo forests and gardens -- it had the most scenic of these gardens I had seen to date. At the north end of the grounds was a teahouse -- of course I didn't know I had stumbled upon one at the time, when a Mandarin-speaking waitress urged me to have a seat.

Sure, I'm a big hungry, I thought, thinking it was a restaurant.

I sat down at a table and asked for a menu with the universal hand gesture: making an imaginary rectangle in the air with my index fingers. The young woman, in Chinese, suggested an item for me -- the most expensive item on the menu of course at 30 yuan. Pretending like I knew what she was saying, I perused the menu of Chinese characters as a phony connoisseur, acting like I didn't prefer that item and wanted something more particular to my tastes. I chose an item for 25 yuan by pointing to it and then sat patiently to see just exactly it was I ordered.

It wasn't a dish of food like I had thought, but a specific kind of tea of course. The waitress brought it out in its dry leaf form in a cup without any water and then stood there awaiting my command.

Uh, yeah, so is this like wine? Am I supposed to smell it or feel its texture? Two others gathered around to see if I approved. I picked up one of the small dry leaves in the cup and was about to sniff it, but I was immediately retorted by stares that said, "Just what do you think you are doing?" Uh, maybe it's not like wine at all.

Luckily a guy sitting at another table who knew some English came to our aid. "Twenty five yuan," he told me. The surrounding staff just wanted me to pay for it before pouring in the water.

The tea at the tea house was rather pricey -- twenty-five for a cup as opposed to a normally-priced meal at five -- because you pay for the ambience and the fact that as long as you stay, the tea is perpetual since they just keep on giving you more. Although popular in other provinces in China, teahouses are particular famous in the Sichuan province since, according to Rough Guide, the Sichuanese are particularly chatty and talk over tea. Teahouses are found in locations around the city where the Sichuanese gather to sit for hours over tea to gossip, read or play a game of cards or mahjong. Some people spend all day sitting around and drinking in a teahouse (picture above) -- until they have to stand up and walk over to the bathroom to pee of course.

SICHUAN CUISINE HAS A DISTINCT STYLE that separates it from the other regions of China. The Sichuanese have embraced the use of the regional Sichuan pepper, a red hot chili pepper used in almost all their food. I think even baby food might have Sichuan peppers in it because the Sichuanese don't even flinch when eating it at any age, whereas I needed to douse the fires in my mouth at almost every bite.

According to The Rough Guide to China (I bought it from John and Adam after the acrobat show in Beijing), one of the dishes to sample in Sichuan cuisine in Chengdu is mapo dofu, a spicy tofu dish with Sichuan peppers and ground pork. There is a debate (so the guide says) over who has the best mapo dofu in town, and arguably it is the secret recipe of Grandma Chen of the Chen Mapo Dofu restaurant, a few blocks north of the Mao statue in the city center, which was pretty much a construction zone.

Finding the restaurant, even with a map, was hard because there was no big bright neon arrow pointing down to it with a bright neon sign saying, "EAT AT CHEN'S," and there was no English or Pinyin either. Rough Guide made it easier than Lonely Planet with easy-to-use charts in the pages of each city so that you could match the names of places with its English equivalent. I matched the characters for Chen Mapo Dofu like a kindergartener and found it -- a small restaurant in the middle of what seemed to be the moped dealer district.

An old woman who may or may not have been Grandma Chen had some waitresses bring me out a pair of chopsticks and a small package of tissues. I waited and waited to be waited on, contemplating what kind of crazy sculpture I could make with two wooden sticks and some tissue paper -- a stretcher for a G.I. Joe action figure perhaps? -- until I realized I had to order at the desk.

"Uh, mapo dofu?" I asked the presumed Grandma Chen.

"[Something something]," she said in Chinese.

"Mapo dofu?"

"[Something something]," she said, this time waving her hand across as if to ask, "That's all?" I nodded yes.

In less than a minute I was staring at a big bowl of mapo dofu and a side of rice. Unlike the spicy tofu dishes I'd had back home, this dish had a layer of Grandma Chen's secret herbs and spices. I definitely tasted garlic and ginger, but they were no match for the dominant Sichuan pepper, which was still bearable and let you taste the food -- unlike some Texas chilis. Don't get me wrong, it was spicy and I soon discovered that the package of tissues wasn't just to wipe my mouth of sauce, but to wipe the sweat off my forehead and nose at every bite.

THE REST OF THE DAY I wandered just around the modern city center of Chengdu -- it was pretty much like any other modern Chinese city -- and then went back to the hostel to work on my laptop to work the rest of the night. It was a pretty bland end to a hot and spicy afternoon, but at least I didn't have to keep on wiping the sweat off my face.

Porn For Pandas

DAY 318: When you look at a panda, chances are you don't think of it as a "sexy beast." That sort of description goes to a sleek animal like a panther, not that I've ever had the urge to spoon a panther. Pandas are, from what I gather of mass public opinion, considered to be "cute," which according to Rough Guide, contributes to the fact that they have an unfair advantage over other animals on the endangered species list; it is their cuteness that people respond to that have launched worldwide awareness and conservation programs of the otherwise lazy animal. If the dodo was an attractive animal, it might still be around today -- although I doubt I've have the urge to spoon a dodo either.

Due to heavy deforestation of bamboo forests in the 1970s and 80s -- bamboo is the vegetarian animals' preferred food -- pandas, 80% of which are found in the Sichuan province, almost died out from starvation. Their numbers reduced over the years significantly, causing the remaining population to resort to inbreeding whenever a male got beyond third base on a date -- but those offspring had birth defects and didn't survive. There are only about 1,000 great pandas today, but conservationists around the globe are doing their best to prevent extinction of the cute pandas -- so cute that even the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) uses them for their logo.

One of the premier facilities for panda repopulation lies in Chengdu: the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, which was once featured on an episode of Globe Trekker with Justine Shapiro. I might not have remembered to go there if not for Elisa's (Xi'an) suggestion to go to Chengdu -- if I had been turned onto it earlier I might have skipped out on seeing the pandas in the Beijing Zoo to see them in the more natural environment. Allow me to quote the great Edwin Way Teale: "Those who wish to pet wildlife love them, but those who respect their natures and wish to let them live natural lives, love them more." I'm not exactly sure who that guy is -- I just saw his quote on a sign -- but I'm sure he thought pandas were cute too.

No better place would I be able to see pandas than the Chengdu Panda Breeding Center (other than perhaps the wild Wolong Nature Reserve, farther west of the province), created around pandas' natural environment, as opposed to the other way around. Paddocks were created around the dwellings of pandas and, unlike the zoo, they were so big that unless pandas were eating at the feeding areas near a viewing platform at feeding time, they were often not seen, hiding in bushes somewhere.

With me on this trip to the Breeding Center were my Dutch roommates Sybille and Meta, an older Irish woman named Ann and Dutch couple Alex and Kim, who I had kept bumping into since arriving in Xi'an. Our driver picked us up early in the morning at seven to arrive at the center by the eight o'clock feeding time -- going any later would reduce the chances of seeing a panda. The driver got us there in time and turned to me to translate to the others for the pick-up time, thinking I spoke Chinese -- we managed to get by with body language.

RECOGNIZED BY THE WORLD COMMUNITY, the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Center has successfully bred pandas -- which is not so easy than one might think. New, healthy pandas are born in a lengthy process, as I learned by watching a documentary film in the center's Panda Theater.

Breeders first need to find a suitable male and then find a suitable female to start a successful pregnancy. But finding a panda a date isn't as easy as posting his/her information on Match.com. Scientists have paired a male and a female that they thought were suitable to each other and put them in a room together to get it on. However, in one secretly-recorded segment of the film that looked like porn for pandas, the male first mounted the female from behind (doggie-style, or in this case, panda style). The female refused his manly urges and moved away, probably turned off that he had no job, no money and no life prospects other than to sit around and eat bamboo all day. The male, confused as to which way she might like it, tried to slam her against the wall to do her from behind (picture above). This apparently was a turn off for the female because she shoved the male aside and knocked him over, and then started hitting him and growling, causing the not-so-studly male to run away and hide in the corner like a frightened squirrel.

I think if the scientist breeders were smart, they might have made the ambience a little more romantic for the panda couple, perhaps with a little Luther Ingram (3.34 MB MP3 file) to set a sexy mood for a little panda foreplay. No, instead the square old scientists just resorted to boring old scientific methods: getting the pandas really drunk at a frat party to see if they end up hooking up. No, no, I'm kidding -- the square old scientists "simply" sedated the male and jerked him off to get some panda sperm for artificial insemination in the female. I suppose the male panda might have been able to extract the sperm himself if there was a sufficient porn for him to watch in a little back room, but perhaps "Ling-Ling Does Dallas" was out at the video store.

Because by nature the female panda bear is round and cuddly like a, well, bear, it's often hard to tell if she actually gets pregnant. Breeders again resort the miracles of science -- and wait the two minutes to see if the strip turns blue. The female sometimes doesn't know she's pregnant -- she just knows she had strange cravings for odd combinations of food in the middle of the night. The breeders, in every attempt ensure a successful pregnancy, fulfill her demands so well that, according to the film, females that aren't pregnant actually fake pregnancy to get more food.

New soon-to-be mother pandas don't exactly know what to expect of giving birth; they aren't exactly exposed to humans' home videos of women in labor, clawing at their husbands at the hospital and yelling "PUT DOWN THAT VIDEO CAMERA DOWN YOU PRICK AND BREATHE WITH ME YOU ASSHOLE! AAAAAAAAGGHHH!!!!!" In the home video segment of a female panda giving birth in the documentary, it just sort of happened really fast with no pain at all. A little baby panda shot out of the mother's vagina like a cannon, as fast as a spurt of diarrhea. The newborn didn't look anything like a panda at all -- more like a tiny rodent the size of an apple, all covered in slime -- and in a way the whole birth looked like a scene from one of the Alien movies. The infant panda, which was born not completely developed, was so foreign-looking to the new mother that she didn't know what it was and just swatted it around the floor like a hockey puck, as it screamed and screeched in pain. At this point the scientists ran in and grabbed the newborn before it was stepped on.

Survival of the baby is probably the hardest part of panda breeding; many don't survive at all. Babies are taken away from their mothers and put into an incubator, to be cared for by a human nurse that feeds it regularly and keeps it warm. It is in the nursery that the baby is cared for until it starts to grow the black fur around the eyes, so that the mother may recognized it as one of her kin and cuddle it the way mothers do.

OUR VISIT TO THE CHENGDU GIANT PANDA BREEDING CENTER couldn't have been timed out any more perfect, just six days after a baby panda had been born. We headed immediately to the nursery to see the newborn, behind a glass in a sterile environment that put public Chinese hospitals to shame. Inside an incubator carefully attended to by rotating nurses, the infant slept completely wrapped in a blanket until I asked the nurse if I could see more. She opened one end of the blanket to show the panda's tail -- a tail that would shrink with body growth.

"Oh, it looks like a mouse," Ann said in her Irish accent. That's not to say she wasn't impressed like the rest of us, in awe of the little infant like the way most people react to newborns of any species. We had our cameras pointed to the panda's tail, hoping it'd come out, but it just sort of shook around without revealing itself.

The nurse unwrapped the blanket, showing us the whole body. "Oh, it still looks like a mouse," Ann reiterated. The little panda's back was turned to us, so we really couldn't see the baby's face. We all had our cameras pointed for when it happened, but after ten minutes of inertia, everyone just gave up -- except for me. Five minutes later, with all the strength in its little mouse-like body, it leaned up and looked around for a brief couple of seconds and then went back to sleep.

The rest of the paddocks of the Breeding Center held the different groups of pandas by age, some on the ground, some in trees: cubs, who sat around and ate bamboo; teens, who sat around and ate bamboo, and adults, who sat around and ate bamboo, sometimes in a manner similar to when Bugs Bunny eats a carrot. The pandas never fought over food and often shared it, happy to be fed from the breeders in different poses and facial expressions: snickering, laughing and hiding behind bamboo leaves. The great pandas weren't the only ones to be fed during feeding time; the Breeding Center also kept the giant panda's little cousins, the raccoon-like red (or lesser) panda, equally cute as their big cousins.

BACK IN CHENGDU, I went out to get more Sichuan food, this time trying the smoked duck (a mild dish in Sichuan cuisine), and Gongbao Chicken, a really spicy dish with pieces of chicken, peanuts, ginger and many red hot Sichuan peppers cut into halves to be eaten. The food inflamed my mouth and made my lips feel like they were burning and a couple of hours later I ran to one of the squat toilets at the hostel to expel it from my abdomen. Much like giving birth like a new panda mother, my bowels shot out my excrement like a cannon -- unlike a new panda mother, I didn't exactly play with it on the floor like a hockey puck, not that the thought ever crossed my mind. You couldn't make me do it if you tried, not even if you played a little Luther Ingram.

Chicken Styrofoam

DAY 319: I was awake at 6 a.m. before most people in the Dragon Town Hostel were awake. I was down at breakfast by 6:30, when I met the only other guy up and ready to go: Wayne, an Australian technician for Telstra on holiday in China for three weeks. We had both waken up for the same reason: to get the 6:40 minivan transport to a bigger bus that would take us to Chongqing, the starting point of a three-day Yangzi River cruise we had booked.

In the bus already were German-speaking Swiss Nicole and Sabine and en route to the bus we picked up two other Australian backpackers, Natasha and Kelly, two make-up artists from Adelaide and Cairns. We were driven to the bigger bus, which picked up two more Aussies, Mandy and Sean, plus a whole bunch of Chinese tourists -- all guys -- from another hotel. Natasha and Kelly were almost immediately turned off at some of the Chinese guys, not for their presence or appearance, but for their regular, widespread habit of hocking up wads of phlegm and spitting constantly, even inside the bus. One guy spit out the window, only it wasn't open, and let it slide down the side.

It was about a five-hour ride to Chongqing, which wasn't so bad since I had a book to read, plus the monitor in front showed a Chinese-dubbed version of Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery in The Rock, followed by some Chinese-dubbed classic Tom & Jerry cartoons. (Yes, they dubbed voices in what originally had no dialogue, and rather poorly too.)

The driver stopped twice on the way for legs stretches and toilet breaks. "I'm amazed how my bladder always has some sort of reserve every time we stop, even though I didn't drink anything [since the last break]," I told Wayne as we walked to the facilities. It was true; I always seem to have a little pee to release should the occasion arise -- unless of course I've been drinking beer, and then I have a lot of pee to release, and have to go again almost immediately after washing my hands from the first time.

The shop at the pit stop had many different bagged snacks, but only one really stood out in my eyes: a bag that had a picture of deliciously greasy fried chicken on it. "Do you think there's really fried chicken inside?" I asked Wayne.

"I don't know." I bought it anyway to find out, hoping to crunch into freeze-dried goodness, or maybe crispy battered chicken skins, which I had seen at some food stalls in Beijing. I opened the bag and found these little orange square-shaped morsels inside. I popped one in my mouth and closed my eyes to use my imagination and it worked! With tasty ingredients of rice, flour, corn, edible palm oil (thank God they used the edible kind), sugar, grape sugar (is that like Grape Nuts, which has nothing to do with actual grapes?), and chicken powder (ah, there's the chicken!). I was amazed at the miracle of food science; they managed to package and sell a snack that tasted and felt just like packaging styrofoam.

CHONGQING, "SOUTHWESTERN CHINA'S DYNAMO" according to Rough Guide, is situated on a big peninsula that juts out and separates the Jialing and Yangzi Rivers. As the largest city in the region, it was no surprise that it was a big modern bustling metropolis, and we saw it right away when we were stuck in traffic.

"Look, they have skyscrapers on top of skyscrapers here," I said, pointing to the hi-rises being built on higher levels of a hill just above others, almost right where the tops of the buildings on the bottom ended. Wayne figured out it was because of the coming rise of the river water from the construction of a big dam downstream.

A team of four travel agents picked us foreigners up and put us in another minibus to take us to their office near the docks. We individually made our travel arrangements for the cruise and onward travel afterwards and then went out to explore what we could of the city, before our boat's departure that evening.

The only thing the agency suggested to do in the limited time was to wander around the city center and get some food supplies at the supermarket because "the food on the boat is expensive." Sean, Mandy, Wayne and I hailed down a taxi and told the driver to take us to the first of three things written for us in Chinese on a card: "city center." Five yuan later we were at Jiefangbei, the Victory Monument that celebrates the end of Communist and colonial rule, in the center of the commercial district, where about five pedestrian malls intersected in one point. We split up in pairs, and Wayne and I wandered off to find a place to eat away from the KFC and McDonald's. En route, we encountered a group of older woman rehearsing a traditional drum dance, the usual group of guys playing Chinese checkers, and a market selling live snakes, chickens and ducks (picture above) for cooking. Down another side street, we finally found a decent-looking small little noodle house that prepared bowls of noodle soups with ingredients we pointed to. It might have been a mistake to point to the Sichuan pepper chili paste because they added a bit too much than we could handle.

In the remaining time, we tried to find the Luohan Si Buddhist temple for photos, but with most signs not in English or Pinyin, we only found dead ends or construction sites building yet another skyscraper over where an old building had been demolished. Instead, we took pictures of the life-sized bronze statues in the pedestrian malls. We headed back to the Victory Monument to meet up with Mandy and Sean, got our groceries and then split a cab back to the office.

A funicular took us down to the docks and us foreigners boarded the ship, outnumbered by the Chinese, although people assumed I was one of them. The "cruise ship" wasn't one in the Carnival/Love Boat sense. It was more like a big souped up ferry with cabins in three classes: first, with two beds and a lot of space; second, with four beds; and third, with six beds. There was also a "stowaway" class, where peasants simply bought permission to be on the ship without accommodations -- they just slept with the cargo in what would have otherwise been a decent-looking lobby area.

Wayne lucked out and got his own second-class room while I shared a quad with Nicole and Sabine that had dodgy air-conditioning. At least there was a TV (each room had one), and we used it in conjunction with my iBook to have "Movie Night" since there wasn't much to see in terms of scenery at nighttime, after we had pulled away from the lit up buildings of Chongqing.

As far as food on the ship, it wasn't as expensive as the agency made it out to be. Sure it was if you ordered specific items off the menu, but the kitchen had a "budget" buffet of standard Chinese fare all the time for five yuan a plate, with tofu, chicken and pork dishes -- real Chinese food as opposed to the Westernized stuff in America. In the end, there really wasn't a need to pack food, although I don't really think that chicken styrofoam snack counted as food.

Submerged

DAY 320: Taking a river cruise on the Yangzi River, the world's third longest, was one of my must do's in this first visit to China for me -- it's impossible to see everything in one trip -- since a lot of people have told me to do it before it's too late. At the time of writing, construction of a huge dam was already two thirds complete and when it is finished, the waters upstream from the dam will rise and submerge the natural and manmade treasures along its banks in the same manner the Aswan High Dam of the Nile submerged a lot of Nubian sites in southern Egypt.

The first of these sites came sooner than we thought, at the ungodly hour of six in the morning. The reason for the landing so early was because the boat didn't stop at specific locations for the convenience of its tourists on board; when it just so happened to reach a point-of-interest on its way downstream, it docked. In this case it docked at 5:30 in the morning while we were asleep.

None of us could really understand was going on since almost no one on the boat spoke English, and they all came to me to translate to the Aussies and Swiss -- all I could do was say "Umm... " and smile. Fortunately Wayne had done his homework and knew basic phrasebook Mandarin, and one staff girl who was trying to learn English knew a little. We managed to figure out that the Chinese tour group had left an hour before, leaving us to see the first site, the Ghost City of Fengdu, on our own with our own transportation.

Wayne, Sean, Mandy, Nicole, Sabine and I disembarked and were immediately approached by a taxi driver by the docks who came to me with a proposition in Chinese that I didn't understand. With limited words, we managed to hear the driver say he'd take us up the hill to the Ghost City for one yuan per person, a total of five yuan.

MING SHAN, THE GHOST CITY, LIES ABOVE the little town of Fengdu. It was once the residence of Tianzi, the legendary King of The Dead, who never really went away; his face and body was sculpted and placed on the mountain, conveniently out of harm's way from the coming rise of water.

"It's like a ghost town around here," Wayne joked as we drove through the deserted streets of Fengdu of demolished hi-rise buildings, presumably so that when the river came higher, boats could cruise by without colliding into a submerged building underneath. We arrived near the front gate of Ming Shan as the sun started to peek from behind China's perpetual overcast haze (picture above), and had the driver wait for us for when we were finished.

I'm not exactly sure if it would be a total disaster if Ming Shan was totally submerged, although it was high enough to be out of harm's way too. The "treasures" inside were nothing old or historical; in fact, they were downright cheesy. To tell the story of the Ghost King, people had created a funhouse sort of exhibition of latex figures that would spin around or move their limbs back and forth if you triggered something. We walked through different rooms depicting torture chambers and Hell, and tried to scare each other by jumping out from behind the next corner. There were also some cheesy-looking Buddhas that may or may not have been sacred.

"I don't think you have to worry about offending anyone if you take of photo of that Buddha," Sean said.

After the cheesy haunted house we had the driver take us to get to get a closer look of Tianzi and then back to the docks before it left -- in our confusion, we weren't exactly sure when it would depart and we played it safe by going early. The driver, who suddenly knew another English word ("fifty") asked for fifty yuan, which we all argued over.

"You said one person, one yuan!" Sean argued.

"One yuan per person!" Sabine added.

The driver kept on trying to tell me in Chinese to translate to the others that it was fifty yuan for some reason I didn't understand. To be fair, we did alter the original deal -- to go one-way to the palace -- so I figured we at least owed him three each, one for the palace, one for the statue and one back to the docks. The rest paid accordingly, a total of fifteen, plus Sean, Wayne and I put in a little more to bring the total to twenty -- but the guy was still angry. A small crowd of locals gathered around the commotion.

"Fifty yuan!"

"No, you said one yuan a person," I said. "This is more." He almost refused it, waiting for the fifty, but we put it in his hand and walked away. He drove off and no one seemed to make a fuss afterwards.

AUSTRALIANS KELLY AND NATASHA HAD MISSED the adventure on land, but had their own excitement later on. None of the cabin doors locked from the outside and it resulted in Kelly's camera getting stolen. By some instinct, Kelly suggested that the culprit was one of the four drunk Chinese guys from the next room because she noticed one eyeing their stuff when they left the door open once. By that same instinct, Kelly somehow figured out that her camera was nearby, in a drawer at the reception desk. She asked to see what was in the drawer, and lo and behold it was there, in the back, inside a plastic bag. Apparently one of the drunk guys had it put there for safe keeping under the pretense that it was his, because he started yelling at reception when the woman there gave it back to Kelly.

With that incident, and the fact that the desperate peasants of "stowaway" class was now spilling into the second floor lobby where we were, we took the option that was suddenly available to us: rent our own room keys.

FOR HOURS THE BOAT CRUISED down the Yangzi, passing the white depth markers showing where the river would rise to -- it was two thirds full already. As the boat followed the current, there wasn't much to do but watch the scenery go by from the front deck: different bridges and many generic industrial cities that all looked the same. With our mixed communication from various people, us Westerners weren't sure if we were going to stop at any of the few sites as shown on the map I bought. We kept on wondering where we might stop; perhaps at a big pagoda near the city of Zhongxian we thought, but it only stopped briefly to drop and pick up passengers, mostly more "stowaways."

Around six in the evening, twelve hours after our first tourist stop on our first full day on the river, came our second: the Zhang Fei Temple, built in honor of warrior Zhang Fei who aided Liu Bei to come to power after the end of the Han dynasty. The temple was far less cheesy than the one we saw that morning, and it too was out of harm's way of the rising river water level. Only Wayne and I opted to see it, along side the Chinese tour group of about thirty people on our boat. We didn't understand anything and just wandered the temple grounds by ourselves, through its circle doorways, passed its numerous hallways of calligraphy scrolls, and to statues of Zhang Fei alone and with his two partners-in-crime, Liu Bei and Guan Yu, whose stories have been immortalized in the Chinese classic novel, Romance of The Three Kingdoms.

There wasn't much to the Zhang Fei temple, but it was nice to stretch our legs after being stuck on the boat all day -- plus, it was an opportunity to buy ice cream to bring back to the ship.

No more sights were scheduled for the rest of the evening, and so Nicole, Sabine, Wayne and I decided to have another movie night, this time in Wayne's room, which was still all for him and had plenty of room. After eating take-out dinner from the cafeteria upstairs (tofu, pork, chicken and rice), we gathered around Wayne's TV connected to my iBook to watch bootleg DVDs, M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and Anchorman. Kelly and Natasha thought they were in for more trouble that night when they heard loud screaming, but it was only the shouting coming from Wayne's room during a hilarious scene where Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Tim Robbins, Ben Stiller and Luke Wilson all get into a street fight.

After a day of mediocre sites and not much scenery, we hoped the next day would bring more interesting things -- as long as the price for seeing them didn't jump from five yuan to fifty in a matter of minutes.

Gorgeous Gorges

DAY 321: The Yangzi River stretches for over 3,960 miles from the western mountains of Chinese-occupied Tibet all the way to the East China Sea, but it is the 215 odd miles between Chongqing and Yichang that most tourists travel through. It is on this stretch that the mighty Yangzi cuts through the famous Three Gorges, a big draw for people to experience, much like The Three Tenors: Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and (if you'll allow me to borrow a bit from Seinfeld) The Other Guy. (Thanks, Jerry.)

Our little group of Westerners was starting to get the hang of the way things on the ship went, with its cruising passed points-of-interest at early hours in the morning. We were all awake by six to join the thirty odd Chinese tourists (and two Spanish Basque country tourists that recognized my San Fermin t-shirt) on the front deck to see the first of the Three Gorges, the Qutang Gorge, with its steep rock cliff faces that greeted us in shades of blue with the early morning light and mist. The passage was brief, only about ten minutes, but worth waking up in the morning. Needless to say, a lot of us went back to bed afterwards for a couple of more winks.

"DID YOU BOOK THE BOAT to the Little Gorges?" I asked Wayne.

"Yeah."

Back in Chongqing, the travel agency that set up our river cruise asked each of us if we wanted to pay extra for a five-hour tour of the Little Gorges of the Daning River, a tributary of the Yangzi, where the ship would stop for six hours. Their sales pitch (which I had heard from many agents in other countries): "You can't say you saw the [insert place here; 'Three Gorges' in this case] unless you've seen the [insert site here; 'Lesser Three Gorges' in this case]."

"They always do that," I told Wayne. "And they get me everytime. 'Yeah, you're right, I can't say I've been there if haven't seen that. Here's my money.'"

THE SHIP DOCKED IN WASHAN, the city at the junction of the Daning and the Yangzi, and with our pre-purchased tickets in hand, all of us Westerns got off the big ship and boarded smaller ships waiting for us to see the smaller gorges. These smaller motorboats journeyed up the Daning, passed little villages of the Three Little Gorges: the Dragon-Gate Gorge, the Misty Gorge and the Emerald Gorge, all three of which I couldn't really distinguish from the other.

The little boats docked upstream for us to board even smaller boats -- let's call them "mini-boats" -- to see three more gorges we didn't really know about beforehand: the Three Mini Gorges on the smaller Madu River. What was this, a big natural Russian Matryoshka doll, where you open one and find a smaller doll inside with an even smaller one in that one? At least, the mini-boat tour was included in our tour ticket price.

The Three Mini Gorges -- the Changtan, Qinwang and Sancheng -- flanked the Madu River, a much smaller and intimate river to see, although the draw of tourism forced villagers to "put on a show" for the foreigners and city folk passing through. Some villagers sang traditional folk songs over a megaphone. The music of clarinets sounded from above at one point, but only when the boat passed by. And even the Chinese-speaking guide on the boat sang a song. We didn't know exactly what about, but we applauded anyway, unaware if he was singing about how clueless the Westerners on the boat were.

BACK IN WASHAN'S PORT, I bought some fresh fried fish from a street vendor and boarded the big ship for lunch. Soon after leaving port we were engulfed by the second of the big gorges, the Wu Gorge (picture above), known for its twelve crazy mountain peaks. The third gorge of The Three Gorges came after the second one, but by that time I had been "gorged out" already, and therefore it was just known to me as "The Other Gorge."

THE CULPRIT (OR GODSEND IF YOU'RE A TOUR OPERATOR) in the rush of tourism on the Yangzi is the Three Gorges Dam, a huge engineering wonder that will control the flow of the river, causing the water upstream to rise and submerge its lower contents. For an additional fee (of course), we could exercise the option to tour the dam and the tourist attractions in nearby Zigui. Wayne, Natasha, Kelly and I got tickets and left the ship to walk and stretch our legs with the Chinese tourists, while the rest stayed onboard for four hours as the boat traveled through the dam from the upper Yangzi to the lower Yangzi with a series of locks. We saw these locks from a park overlooking the dam, where water poured through, forming a constant mist that rose and formed new clouds. The dam was not yet fully completed -- only about two-thirds so far -- with construction of another power generator well underway.

Our arrival in Zigui happened at night and I thought that perhaps nothing would be open, but everything around opened specifically for tourists. We were driven to a street of stores and food vendors where all the lights were turned off -- until the sound of the bus that magically turned everything on. We visited the Chinese Sturgeon Aquarium, featuring the many different species of fish found in the Yangzi, and then saw a horse show with guys dressed in warrior clothes. It was suppose to reenact battle scenes in Chinese history or something, but I'm not quite sure if the warriors of the past simple rode around in a circle pretending to fight other guys on horses to a cheesy soundtrack of music, voices and sound effects that never really synced up with the live action that was happening in front of us.

After snacking on fried dumplings and "peanut milk," a deliciously sweet drink Wayne and I were curious about because all the Chinese tourists seemed to be drinking it (and the fact that peanuts don't exactly have nipples), our tour bus took us to the Huangling Temple, the former home of King Yu of the Ming dynasty who control the flow of the river back then in a far-less engineered plan than a dam: by offering sacrifices to the gods. The temple, which also had an exhibition of corpses of ancient people found in the river, was a fine place to kill the rest of the time before the boat picked us up -- the docks were right across the way -- although we couldn't exactly sit around and wait without paying one yuan each to one of the many smart locals who rented time on one of their chairs.

THE SHIP CRUISED DOWN THE YANGZI through the wee hours of the morning on its last leg of the touristy gorge-a-plenty stretch between Chongqing and Lichang, passing through the locks of a smaller dam on the way. I'm not exactly sure of its name, but as far as I'm concerned, it was just The Other One.

The Tower in the Detroit of China

DAY 322: Wuhan, the capital city of the Hubei province, is another big "generic" modern Chinese metropolis, an inevitable stopping point for anyone traveling through the region; it is not only a place of industry but a major transportation hub. Although it has historical significance of being one of the meeting points of Sun Yatsen's anti-Imperialist society of the early 20th century, generally speaking, it is not a particularly attractive city to tour around; Blogreader F. Levente once called it the "Detroit of China," and I'm sure he meant that in a negative way with no intended offense to you readers out there from Detroit. (Then again, I don't know, maybe he hates your Detroitian guts and wishes both cities a plague of rabid beavers.) In any case, I found myself in this "Detroit of China" with others from the Yangzi River cruise when our bus arrived at a confusing bus station around eight in the morning.

Before arriving to Wuhan, everyone had a different plan of attack: Wayne would take a pre-booked train to Xi'an, Mandy and Sean would try to get to Shanghai, Nicole and Sabine would find a place to stay for the night, and I would try and get a train to Guilin. Executing the plan was the hard part because Wuhan wasn't exactly a foreign tourist-friendly place; no one spoke English and everything was written in Chinese with no Pinyin backup -- we couldn't even figure out the name of the bus station we were in so that we could locate it on a map.

Fortunately for us, Nicole and Sabine had been approached by the one woman in the entire area that knew some English when they decided that Wuhan wasn't nice enough to spend even a night and would take a bus to Guilin instead, en route to Nanning. The woman, whose Western name was Shaninan was a godsend; she got Wayne on a bus to Xi'an after he found out his pre-booked train ticket had been botched. She directed the Aussies to a bus that would take them to the train station with departures to Shanghai. I was still undecided on what to do -- take a train soft sleeper to Guilin or join the Swiss to go to Guilin via bus. In the end, I figured it was just easier (and cheaper) to take the bus, since I'd probably be confused all to hell if I tried to get a train ticket without Shaninan's help.

My time with my Yangzi ship cabinmates Nicole and Sabine was extended another day since we were all booked on the same bus to depart that evening. We had the whole day to explore the "Detroit of China," which wasn't exactly on the top of our lists when arriving in China, but Shaninan suggested it might not be all that bad; she directed us to the No. 10 bus that would take us to one of the few nice-looking cultural places in town, the Yellow Crane Tower.

YELLOW CRANE TOWER, "the greatest of the Yangzi's many riverside pavilions" (according to Rough Guide), was just that. Its center point was the actual Yellow Crane Tower building itself (picture above), built in the Qing dynasty-style to replace the destroyed original that burned down in 1884. Although surrounded by the smog of air pollution generated by industry, the pretty tower atop She Shan (Snake Hill) flanked a pretty scenic park below with little pavilions, gardens, shops and swan ponds -- all of which paid homage to the legend of a Taoist Immortal who would summon a giant yellow crane to fly over and bring good fortune to the villagers (and perhaps to keep away any rabid beavers wished upon them since I didn't see any).

Nicole, Sabine and I wandered the tower and its surrounding grounds, from the big bell repurposed for Chinese tourists to ring (for a fee) to the "Street in Ancient Style," also repurposed for the sake of tourism -- and why not if the whole pavilion was the only thing really tour-worthy in a city like Wuhan? The three of us made the best of the rainy day afterwards -- despite the begging children grabbing our shirts and not letting go until other guys would yell at them to leave us alone -- and grabbed lunch at a non-foreigner-friendly restaurant after being "saved" by another godsend: a lone Chinese guy at a nearby table who helped us order.

THE CITY OF WUHAN CONFUSED US AGAIN when we tried to find an internet cafe back near the bus station. We went on foot but I got us lost, not knowing that the bus station on my map wasn't the same one in my book. In the end we just took a cab and found out that we were way off, but we had the time to spare though, so it didn't really matter. We even had time to sit in a coffeehouse and chill out before the upcoming overnight bus journey ahead.

We stocked up on supplies for the night trip -- I bought the mini-river crabs-in-a-bag snack which were actually quite spicy -- and then boarded the bus, thinking it'd be another uncomfortable night like the one before. However, the bus was a "sleeper bus," a big double decker bus where every "seat" was actually a bed with a fluffy comforters and video monitors at every vantage point. Playing was a VCD of the music videos of Chinese dance/pop Sony recording artist Coco Lee, who sang catchy upbeat tracks that filled the bus with music.

"This is the party bus!" I said, excited that we wouldn't have to sleep in chairs that may or may not recline.

"Yeah!" Sabine said. The two of them were pretty excited as well and couldn't stop smiling either.

And so, with my packs of peanut butter and chocolate-filled Oreos and my little crab snacks (not a recommended combination), we rode southbound to Guilin in our little bus beds to the groovy tunes of Coco Lee (4.2 MB MP3 file). Our day in the "Detroit of China" had ended, thankfully before the sight of any of those rabid beavers.

Mistaken Identities

DAY 323: As an American born from a bloodline from the Philippines -- the southeast Asian archipelago country once colonized by the Spanish -- I have a certain façade that has been mistaken for other nationalities, depending on what country I'm in. In South America, locals often approached me with words in Spanish under the assumption that perhaps I was one of them, and whenever I had trouble responding right away, they assumed I was just from the neighboring country. Ecuadorians thought I might have been Peruvian. Brazilians thought I might have been Bolivian.

Not only do I have an ambiguous Latino look, but an ambiguous Asian one as well. The same phenomenon from South America has happened to me in Asia, particularly in China. People often assume I'm Chinese at first glance and approach me in Mandarin, or in the case of southern China, Cantonese -- a completely different language altogether, "as different as Spanish is to French" says Lonely Planet.

FROM WUHAN, I JOURNEYED TO CANTONESE SOUTHERN CHINA to the city of Guilin via overnight sleeper bus. The name "Guilin" hadn't shouted at me when I originally entered China (nothing did really), but I knew that one of my must see's was to see the famous mountains that "look like big camel humps" (as I described them to people with the literacy level of a second grader) -- I'd wanted to see them since I saw them in the 1993 movie adaptation of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Blogreader oogy and Elisa (Xi'an) both directed me to the city of Guilin, but Mandy and Sean (Yangzi River) pointed me to the smaller city of Yangshou south of Guilin, the cheaper, more tourist-friendly way to see the "camel humps."

From Guilin's bus terminal I bid Nicole and Sabine goodbye and hopped on a bus for Yangshou. The 45-minute ride took me and a group of Chinese -- some of which tried to communicate things to me in Mandarin or Cantonese with no success -- giving me my first glance of the famous "camel humps" that are, get this, actually made of limestone. I was dropped off in Yangshou on an overcast day, confused as to where to go, and asked for directions for the nearest HI youth hostel. When I finally found someone who didn't reply back to me in Cantonese, it was a guy who was only trying to get me to stay at his hotel.

I learned right away that competition was tough in Yangshou -- the adjective "tourist-friendly" was an understatement. I don't know if it's because Yangshou was highlighted on the colored country map of Lonely Planet's China guidebook as a "backpacker haven," but it was definitely a huge tourist draw -- more so than upmarket Guilin I believe -- not only for Western backpackers but for the masses of Chinese tourists that packed the streets as well. The most packed of these streets was Xi Jie or "West Street," which was not named ironically because it's actually in the eastern part of the city, but because it was the main strip that catered to Westerners. Bicycle rental stands, bootleg CD/DVD stores and tourist agencies lined the pedestrian mall along side many souvenir shops selling everything from classic Chinese paintings inspired by the surrounding limestone peaks to kitschy SARS t-shirts. The many cafes and restaurants on the main strip and its smaller side streets offered foreigners familiar Western foods with something I hadn't seen in a long time: forks.

My experience walking up and down the street was a familiar one. With my squinty-eyed, brown-skinned façade I blended in fairly well, the way I had in South America, Mongolia and northern China, and as I wandered passed tour and restaurant touts I was often ignored and passed up for a Caucasian person. Shopkeepers approached me in Chinese until I spoke English to them in an American accent, and I often received responses like "You speak Chinese?" or "Oh, I thought you were Chinese." They all knew I had some sort of Asian background and thought it was odd that I couldn't comprehend even a little Cantonese -- I had to keep explaining that the Philippines was a Spanish colony. One woman in a CD store pegged me for a "mix of Chinese and some Western country," and I'm sure it was simply an icebreaker so that perhaps I'd buy something.

Not all of Yangshou was a Westernized goldmine for vendors selling cheap goods "made in China" to foreigners; the other side of the city was still a regular small Chinese town (picture above) with markets, locals zipping around by bicycle and kids going to and coming from school with their funny yellow school baseball caps. I suppose the whole town had a sort of yin-yang/east-west balance to it, but it was hard to explore it when a downpour came in the early afternoon and rained for most of the day. I took refuge indoors, which was fine by me; I had much catching up to do on The Blog.

"CAN I HELP YOU?" I asked the two Asian women who came into the hostel dorm room.

"Huh?" the older- (but still young-) looking one said in English. "We're staying here." I felt sheepish with my foot in my mouth after my apparent faux pas -- what goes around, comes around as they say. Just because they are Chinese doesn't mean they're staff, dummy, I thought to myself. That thought was another faux pas because neither of them was Chinese -- the older one, Sulan, was Taiwanese and the other, Jisong, was Korean and they had only met the day before in the dorm. (Three of those months were wisely spent in the relaxation mecca of Dahab, Egypt.)

"Excuse me, are you busy?" Jisong asked me. I was diligently working on my laptop at the desk. "Do you want to join us for dinner?"

"Uh," I started with the constant debate in my mind -- please The Blog or go out and do something -- "Sure."

ACCORDING TO JISONG'S LONELY PLANET BOOK, the big must-have dish in Yangshou was Beer Duck and/or Beer Fish -- not that there was much of alcoholic value in either since most of the alcohol evaporates away in the cooking process. There's not much taste of beer leftover either with all the chili peppers spicing up the meat, but it was a tasty dish nonetheless. Sulan was fluent in Cantonese and so it was no problem getting "authentic" Chinese food away from the tourist traps of West Street. The three of us East-Asian faced travelers -- none of us Chinese as much as it might have appeared at first glance -- sat around for the usual swapping of traveler tales. As a former government worker in Taiwan, Sulan had really milked her multi-lingual talents traveling through mainland China, often getting cheaper deals than any Westerner could try to negotiate. Jisong, like me, was also in her tenth month of traveling around the world -- three months of which were wisely spent in the relaxation mecca of Dahab, Egypt alone. Dinner didn't last all night because I had to run off to a night tour I had booked: to spend an hour with a cormorant fisherman to see how he did his thing.

CORMORANT FISHING HAS BEEN A METHOD OF FISHING the rivers in the Guangxi province for generations. I wasn't exactly sure what was involved; I just knew only that people cormorant fished nearby and that one of the things to do in Yangshou was to go on a short tour, which happens at dusk. I had anticipated fishing myself in old traditional ways along with an old, distinguished-looking Chinese man, but in fact, not even the fisherman we followed around actually fished. He was more of a "cormorant pimp" that piloted a boat with five cormorant birds who did the actual fishing, each attached to the boat by a string. The birds swam along side the main boat, like a web-footed cavalcade and dived into the water whenever a fish might be caught. The five birds swam like soldiers until it was "go time," sometimes coming back to the surface with a fish in its mouth. The fisherman would extend a bamboo pole for the bird to perch on and bring him back in to dump the fish out of the bird's mouth and into a basket.

At first I thought it was pretty cruel for the birds to be tied to their master to do his bidding, but when we docked on shore for a photographic opportunity, I saw that the birds were cared for properly. Even when they were untied they never strayed away, and they seemed willing to part away from their catch.

THE STREETS WERE LIT UP on West Street as they were every night, full of travelers both foreign and domestic shopping, eating, drinking and being merry. Jisong, Sulan and I each had early morning sunrise tours the next day and called it an early night in our dorm. I was confident I could go out any night of that week anyway to mingle with the town dwellers, no matter what nationality they thought I was.

A Couple of Monkeys

DAY 324: I've racked my brain for two days trying to find an funny angle for this Blog entry, and why exactly I don't know -- there are monkeys in this entry! I've always thought monkeys were funny ever since I met the orangutan from The Cannonball Run II (his name escapes my mind) who made a special guest appearance at one of my Cub Scout meetings. (He was already a washed out simian actor by that time.)

I didn't see just one monkey on this day, I saw two. Any day's a good one with a couple of monkeys! Of course when I woke up that morning, I had no idea that I'd encounter any; my only goal that morning was to get an overview of the beautiful scenery of the Guangxi province.

THE CLASSIC WAY TO SEE THE LIMESTONE PEAKS that the Guangxi province is famous for is via a boat cruise along the Li River. There are two times that boats generally go: early in the morning as the sun rises, or at mid-day when it's hot and humid. Hmmm... not such a hard decision to make.

It was already light outside when I woke up at six in the morning. I didn't have to worry about waking up anyone because my roommates Sulan and Jisong were awake to do a Li River cruise too, which they had booked with a different operator who gave Sulan an unofficial 10-yuan Chinese-speaking discount. We parted ways for the day and I went off to find my transport at my tour operator. A guy there escorted me to the bus for Xingping, the village 45 minutes northeast that my boat would depart from, but we got to the stop too late and the bus had left already. It was no big deal because the guy put me on another public bus headed the same way and I had the bus all to myself. As I rode with the driver and conductor through the countryside I saw the sun slowly rising above the steep rocky mounds and I knew it would was going to be a good "show" -- even without monkeys.

Once I was dropped off in Xingping, I was directed to hop on the back of a motorcycle taxi that took me on a narrow dirt road inaccessible to cars to the main dock in town on the Li River. While waiting for two other passengers to arrive, a woman there showed me that we were standing at the vantage point from where an artist drew the picture on the back of the 20 yuan note. Soon we were on the river and the boat cruise was just as I imagined it: peaceful and full of scenery. I swear I took a million pictures, all of which I knew would just look similar when I saw them collectively after the fact -- plus none of them would do the scenery any justice. I picture may say a thousand words, but there's nothing better than just being in a postcard shot, or in a money shot for that matter.

Our boat cruised by other river cruisers of tourists (Hi-Res), local ferry boats of locals, fishing rafts (Hi-Res) and even oxen crossing the river with no mode of transportation other than their own four legs. The entire cruise was only about two hours and it ended too soon, but at least I came away thoroughly impressed and satisfied with the landscape. The peaks silhouetted by the rising sun impressed by soul, still without the sight of simian.

I bought a skewer of fried river crabs from a local vendor and hitched a ride to the bus stop on a motor rickshaw taxi with a group of people who had just finished a tour cruise on another boat. On the bus back to Yangshou I befriended a guy I had noticed on the side of the road: Skye, who worked at the district attorney's office in New York City, on an extended week through China after a conference in Beijing. We went out for breakfast when we got back into town; he got the backpacker standard of banana pancakes and I got the "Chinese breakfast," steamed buns and meat dumplings. Skye and I got to talking about this and that as travelers often do, and he gave me suggestions as how to approach my afternoon to see more of the incredible landscape: rent a bike from one of the many bicycle rental stands and ride the southern road towards the famous peak known as Moon Hill. On the way I'd see several roadside tourist traps. He told me that one of them, the Old Banyan Tree Scenic Area, may or may not be worth the small admission fee and that I should use my discretion. To help me decide, he showed me a picture of the tree from his digital camera. As he flipped through the slideshow, I saw a digital still of two monkeys dressed up in circus clothes.

"Where is that?" I asked.

"Oh yeah, they have these monkeys there," he told me. "It's cool, you can just stand there and stare at them, and it's just funny they way they look back at you."

"Oh, I'm definitely going then."

A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER I found myself with a rented mountain bike at the ticket office of the Old Banyan Tree Scenic Area, a complete tourist trap surrounding a big old banyan tree. Despite the fact that the tree was so big that its branches had started to grow their own roots systems, it was the least focused thing in the area and seemed to be just an excuse to set up an enclosure for a permanent fair and bamboo raft rides and charge money for it. Women in traditional clothes wandered around for tourists to take photos of them, while others tried to sell the usual souvenirs.

The monkeys that I saw on Skye's camera (picture above) were easy to find as they were stationed on the main path to the banyan tree, also as a tourist attraction. Their master bugged me to take their photo for five yuan and I initially refused -- knowing that Skye refused the same offer and got a photo anyway -- but I caved when I realized I could get a photo with them on my bicycle. What's not to like about monkeys on bikes? The smaller monkey was particularly funny, not for doing anything more than being a little monkey, jumping from his stand to my bicycle. A woman across the path tried to get my money for posing next to her peacock, but I passed on that one. Peacock schmeacock.

MY TIME WITH THE MONKEYS was brief and I went on my way. A short bike ride later, I found myself at the desk of the New Water Caves, right across the street from the entrance to Moon Hill, just as Skye had told me it would be. I had arrived just after two Germans, Christin and Kyle who had also arrived by bike. I tagged along them for an expedition through the caves where an underground river flowed inside one of the limestone peaks. A motor rickshaw driver took us off the main road and through a small village to a meeting point where two young Chinese girls, Tameimei and Lisa led us to the entrance of the caves. The "New" Water Caves were "new" (as opposed to the "old" one) since they were only discovered in 1998, and not yet overdeveloped into a tourist trap like other nearby caves with fancy colored lights and safe boardwalks. Safety? Safety schmafety.

I thought the cave exploration would be a sort of in and out thing that would last 60-90 minutes tops, but the pitch-black trail (illuminated by our flashlights) led us up and down, left and right through low tunnels, many of which were flowing with streams of muddy water. Stalactites dripped and hardened from above while stalagmites came from below, both forming occasionally crazy shapes that Tameimei always said looked like the figure of a beautiful woman -- except for this one she said that looked like a bouquet of flowers (that looked more like a bouquet of female pleasure devices).

Our two Chinese guides tried to entertain us by teaching us Cantonese -- simple words for "turtle" (since one rock looked like a turtle) and camera (since one camera looked like a camera) -- but as much as Christin and I tried to remember the vocabulary when Lisa would quiz us, it was all in one ear and out the other.

The highlight of the cave exploration tour was a trip through a natural mud pool, which felt like walking through a bucket of fudge without the sugar or chocolately taste. Christin felt like she had re-entered her childhood sliding around the mud and absolutely loved it. Meanwhile Kyle didn't trust its sanitary conditions. I don't blame him for his wariness, but I didn't mind -- what's not to like about playing around in the mud with girls in bikinis? (Only the addition of a monkey could have made it more fun.)

Tameimei and Lisa led us through more claustrophobic paths and through the underground streams until we found a cave opening to the outside -- a different one than the one we entered. We hiked down the mountain trail, passed grazing oxen and farmers on their way to work on their farms (Hi-Res) and rice paddies (Hi-Res). A motor rickshaw brought us back to the office where we washed up before riding our bikes back into town.

AFTER WASHING UP AND HAVING A DRINK with Mike, the Irish guy I met in the yurt camp in Mongolia a month prior who had randomly showed up at the same Yangshou hostel as me, I went out for dinner with Kyle and Christin at the cafe on West Street next to the hostel. Chicken, duck and rice was followed by beers, beers and more beers and in the end, it was a fun night out -- I dare say, more fun than a couple of monkeys.

Chinese Spider-Man

DAY 325: The summer before I left for this trip, my friends (and Blogreaders) Cheryl and da Rzz had started to get into indoor rock climbing, going practically every weekend to an indoor rock gym in northern New Jersey, somewhere between an industrial factory and a mafia safe house. They had invited me several times to join them so that I too could experience the hard-earned endorphin rushes of accomplishment after reaching the top of a completely fabricated rock face with colorful fake rock holds bolted up to them.

I didn't really get too into their newfound hobby -- mainly because I didn't want to get hooked right before leaving the country for sixteen months (or until money runs out, whichever comes first), and besides, rock climbing used up every muscle in my body and it made me feel like I had been run over by an eighteen-wheeler for the next couple of days. Don't get me wrong, I liked going rock climbing with them, especially the part when we descended down the wall, took off our harnesses and went down the road to the Tex-Mex place down the road to get some beer and sizzling fajitas.

ONE OF THE MANY THINGS TO DO in and around the Yangshou area is (you guessed it) rock climbing. With the fair amount of tourists in Guilin and Yangshou and a virtually endless amount of surrounding limestone rock mounds in the Guangxi province, the rock-climbing scene was inevitable. A few climbing companies had sprouted in Yangshou over the years and choosing one was a no brainer for me; I booked an excursion with the one whose tagline was "the name you can trust": Spider Man Climbing, found on a busy street off the main drag across from the Hotel California. The proprietor of the company was a local guy named Paul who had earned the nickname "Spider-Man" in the local rock climbing community for his speedy ascents up rock faces like a certain comic book superhero.

I met Paul and three other clients at the Spider Man Climbing office -- the one with the toy Spider-Man doll in the window -- and we took a van ten minutes away to Jiu Ping Shan, otherwise known as the Wine Bottle Crag, named for the wine bottle shape on one of its peaks. The Wine Bottle Crag wasn't as crowded as some of the other climbing sites used by the other companies -- in fact, when we got there, a previous group was just getting out of there, leaving us the whole area to ourselves. A shady-looking local loitered around soon after, eyeing our bags, but Paul paid him off and he left.

I WAS THE ONLY MALE CLIENT in the group of four, not that that gave me any physical advantage over the three female Chinese clients. As I learned in that summer of 2003 before I left the States, girls in the rock-climbing scene, can -- and often do -- kick my ass. I was the heaviest of the clients though, plus I had some indoor experience, which was probably why Paul picked me to harness up so that I could belay him as he free-climbed up the rock face to install the guide safety rope. Just as his nickname implied, he climbed on up like it was no big deal, like that superhero bitten by a radioactive spider, and latched the rope to pre-existing rings installed into the mountain. He rappelled down (picture above) and prepared to belay me. I curled my toes and put on my climbing shoes and stood at the base for my first climb outside of a rock gym.

The first of two different trails was about as high as a six story building up a relatively easy section of the rock wall -- I heard it classified as a 5.8, whatever that is -- with its big nooks and crannies that made it easy as climbing up a monstrous stale English muffin standing on its side. That's not to say the ascent wasn't simple for a guy like me who didn't have exactly a superhero physique like Paul the Chinese Spider-Man. (My physique was starting to look like I had been bitten by a radioactive walrus.) Rock climbing involves every ounce of energy in every muscle in your body -- even ones you didn't even know you had -- so that you can lift your body higher and higher to new levels and avoid the embarrassment of being called a "girl" -- by a bunch of girls who are most likely better than you.

The one thing I enjoyed about real outdoor climbing was that whenever you found a place to grab onto, you could use it -- any nook or cranny was fair play. I often hated the rules in the indoor rock gym where you had to reach out and grab specific holds on your designated trail, regardless if an easier one was closer to you. In the real world, anything goes, as long as it prevents you from falling off and pulling a Wile E. Coyote.

I climbed as best I could and managed to make it up to the top of my guide rope with all the energy in my body. Looking down from the top was a great feeling because it's only at those perfect times that you realize how high you had climbed with your own four limbs, and it's such a feeling of accomplishment. Feeling of accomplishment in the mind that is, but not in the body. I rappelled on down, bouncing down the wall with my feet to the wall and landing back on earth. My forearms were sore and tight and I couldn't make a fist. "I can't even take off my shoes," I whined, trying to get my climber shoes off.

The three other girls, Karen (from Shanghai), Angel and Cherry (from Chongqing) went after me one at a time. While Angel and Karen could only climb about two-thirds of the way up before getting too discouraged to go on, it was Cherry who, without any previous climbing experience, zipped up like a Chinese Spider-Woman. Apparently some people just have a natural knack for climbing, and everyone applauded when she made it to the top in a much faster time than me.

I BELAYED PAUL AGAIN when he used his superhuman talent to climb higher than the first rope to set up our second one, a class 5.9 (whatever that means) on a section of the wall without so many nooks and crannies. The surface was like sharp coral that at times just went straight up, without many places to grab onto. I harnessed up, tied in and started the second climb -- a much more difficult one than the one before. I climbed up to an area where I didn't know which way to go because I couldn't find a hold.

"Okay, left," Paul directed me from below.

"Left?" I beared left. "Okay now what?"

"Okay, just go up," he said. Just go up? In front of me was a flat wall with hardly anything to hold on to.

"It's okay take a rest."

Rock climbing is amazing; it teaches you that if there's a will there's a way, that if you just wait and think, a solution usually presents itself. The key is not to give up. As much as I wanted to give up right then and there, with my arms like putty and my inability to produce a fist, I stuck to it, and amazed myself that, given time, I managed to make it up myself. I rewarded myself at the top with a couple of photos of myself in action poses.

OUR GROUP WAS SOON JOINED by another group from another company (not named after a superhero) that set up a line near ours. "Which way to I go?" came the British-voice of a girl who had started her ascent and didn't know where to grab onto next.

"Up," her guide at the base joked.

"I bet you say that all the time," I said to him. He smiled.

Meanwhile back on our ropes, Cherry the Spider-Woman zipped up the second rope with ease. Karen and Angel attempted the first climb again and had finally succeeded. The three of them had came down to earth with similar expressions of tired, but hard-earned happiness and it was clear that rock climbing doesn't just get you all buff, it makes you feel good inside too.

"Do you want to climb again?" Paul asked me.

"I know if I try again and I don't make it, I'll just be pissed off," I told him. "Let's end on a high note."

At the end of the day, I came out with a new persective on rock climbing. Rock climbing definitely has its redeeming qualities, not only physically but also mentally. And even outdoors in the Chinese countryside, it comes with beer and sizzling fajitas right afterwards.

Dishes

DAY 326: When I arrived in Yangshou three days prior, I was approached by a tout trying to sell me on the perks of his hotel, so that I might give him business instead of giving it to a place listed in a guidebook that didn't need any extra publicity. This has been a fairly common thing in my travels when arriving at a new place -- someone tells me I'll get a private room with a private shower and hot water (24/7), etc. for a price just as good as any place listed in a guidebook. While these unlisted places might be a steal, comfort exactly isn't the most important thing I look for as a solo traveler. The most important factor is finding a place listed so that perhaps I'd meet other fellow solo travelers with guidebooks to hang out with. If you've followed The Blog for a while now, this strategy has been the reason why I've met so many "characters" on the road.

The latest character arrived in the morning after a night of having the entire dorm room to myself: Veronica, a young backpacker from Slovakia with a brown belt in karate, traveling for a little over a month through China and eventually Japan in time to see the World Karate Championships in Tokyo. We got to talking and she mentioned something about Lonely Planet books being for simpletons, and I knew immediately that we'd get along.

"You want a cup of tea?" she asked.

"Sure." I put my laptop down for a while and got to meet this latest character, explaining to her that the reason why I was cooped inside on a computer on a nice day was because I was a writer and had some work to do.

"Wow, you're a writer?" She was impressed at anyone who could write more than a couple of sentences per day in a journal like she did.

Tea Time eventually led to Bike Time, and soon we were both on rental bikes to see one of Yangshou's must-see mountain peaks, Moon Hill, just about a half hour bike ride south of the city center. We parked and locked our bikes by the entrance -- where we ran into Chinese Spider-Man who had just come down from practicing for an upcoming rappelling competition -- and started a short hike up a series of steps through lush tropical vegetation and bamboo trees. One stone staircase led to another, which led to another, which led to another and it was felt like we were endlessly walking up an escalator perpetually going down. Every now and then there would be a clearing so we could see what we were burning our thighs for: Moon Hill, a limestone peak formed in an abnormal arch formation. Sight of our goal made the hike less discouraging, although Veronica had to be wary of the occasional poisonous millipedes walking across the path since she was wearing sandals.

"This is like Tomb Raider," she said, walking up the next flight of steps. "It's a stairway to heaven."

"A stairwell to the moon," I said.

Sooner than I thought we were passing under the naturally-formed archway, only to be greeted by somewhat aggressive tout women who followed us in attempts to sell us sodas and water. The two of us politely declined and then posed for a photo, and then went looking for a way up to the very top. I remembered Skye, the New York DA worker I met the other day, telling me that there was a way to the peak via a path where someone had knocked over a "No Admittance" sign. We found this trail and ten minutes later we were at the top and sat out with a handful of other hikers to take in the spectacular views, some marred by the eyesores of satellite dishes. We were all careful to stray away from the edge of the sheer vertical drop.

"So how are you going to make this into a story?" Veronica asked me. "You can say that I was hanging onto a tree branch [over the edge] and you had to come and save my life." I explained to her that my Blog wasn't fiction, but perhaps I'd figure a way weave her idea in somehow.

We came down from "the moon," grabbed our bicycles and rode around the area, checking out but not participating in all the nearby tourist traps, including a guy offering rides on his two-humped camel. It was the first day for Veronica to see the famous limestone peaks of the Guangxi province and she was constantly impressed with the landscape and couldn't stop taking photos of the mountains and the farmers standing out in big green rice fields. Eventually we grew hungry and decided to head back into town for a some food.

Rough Guide says that many Chinese tourists to the Guangxi province make it a point to experience one of the famous culinary specialties: dog. Dog as a meat is a controversial food -- even for people who aren't vegetarian -- because the thought of feasting on the flesh of Benji or Lassie just seems wrong. It wasn't our intention to go out for dog when Veronica and I sat at a table at the Old Neighbours' Restaurant on West Street, until we saw that it was available on the menu.

"Should we eat a dog?" Veronica suggested.

"Yeah, let's try it." I told her that everyone that I'd met that had tried the canine meat raved about it. In fact, Justine Shapiro, one of the hosts of Globe Trekker said it was pretty good.

"I can't believe we are going to eat a dog," Veronica said as we patiently waited for our meal to arrive. About ten minutes later, a platter holding half a kilo of dog meat sautéed with vegetables (picture above) -- including the bones of two paws -- was staring us in the face. Steam was still rising from the plate and its aroma was surprisingly rather appetizing. Adventurous and a little reluctant, we lifted two pieces of the meat with our chopsticks and put them in our mouths to let our taste buds be the final judge.

"It's good," Veronica said. "It tastes like duck..."

"Duck and beef," I said, trying to figure out how to describe its taste. One thing, it didn't taste like chicken.

"Yeah, duck and beef!"

The two of us finished the entire platter, with a side bowl of rice and coconut juice drinks. In the end it was one of the better tasting "exotic" foods I've had to date.

"They should really give dog meat another name," I said. "Like beef is cow, but no one says you're eating a cow. Pork is pig, but you don't say 'pig.' I think if they gave it another name, it might take off." The only word that came to mind was "woof," which probably wouldn't catch on. Looking back at the plate I saw that we had left the bones of the two paws and thought that maybe it would never catch on whatever it was called.

WITH DOG IN OUR STOMACHS, we took the bikes out again to explore the smaller villages around Yangshou. We rode to the east, down a road that went passed villages, farms and more rice paddies. Veronica, the Slovakian amateur photographer, couldn't stop taking photos of the scenery and the people who lived there -- although she hated the fact that a lot would only allow photos for a fee. We pedaled up and down hills far removed from the tourist scene -- and far from the local scene for that matter, because we ended up on a remote road in between two villages with no one really around at all. We stopped and turned back -- and just in time too because we had to get the bikes back by seven.

With my body still sore from rock-climbing the day before, and the hike up to the top of Moon Hill, and all the bike riding, one thing was in order: a traditional Chinese massage. Conveniently the massage center in town was right across the street from the bike rental stand and we didn't hesitate to go there first before anywhere else.

The traditional Chinese massage is based on the Chinese science of acupuncture, as it focuses on the acupoints on the body. Pressure is applied to the different pressure points to help blood circulation and get rid of sleepiness and general fatigue.

Veronica and I were led to a room with two beds and two masseuses who rubbed us, poked us and stretched us from head to ankle for a whole hour. I closed my eyes for most of the session to relax, hearing the slaps and snaps of my body being worked on like an automobile at a mechanics garage. All my pressure points were hit, resulting in a rejuvenating experience, although some points just got me all ticklish. Veronica said she felt the same way.

The one-hour "full body massage" ignored one important part: the foot, which required a whole hour in itself. We paid the extra money to get them done and sat in another room on big comfy chairs where our masseuses did their magic with herbal foot baths that soothed and exfoliated all the dead hardened skin off our feet. We sat there while the masseuses did their magic of rubbing and poking the pressure points, and watched Chinese soap operas on TV. Chinese soap operas are similar to American ones -- with synthesized background dramatic music and overly dramatic storylines -- only that they manage to integrate kung-fu fights in every episode.

THE REST OF THE EVENING Veronica and I just chilled out with food and drinks at the cafe next to the hostel. Dog was not on the menu, not that we had any sudden urges to dine on canine meat again very soon. It's not that we didn't enjoy it, but with our Western upbringings, it was just, for lack of a better term, weird to accept it as an everyday food; we just wanted to try it at least once. Maybe one day in the future we'd cross paths and eat it again, right after I rescue her from almost falling down from a tree branch at the edge of a dangerous cliff of course.

Forgotten Names

DAY 327: "I know you," I said to a passer-by in the restaurant/cafe next to the hostel the night before. We had made eye contact two nights prior at the hostel's little computer area.

"Yeah, last night at the internet," the voice of the familiar-faced woman said. I knew that I recognized her face from somewhere, but couldn't exactly place it right away. I'm absolutely horrible with names -- I forget almost immediately after I hear them -- and I only really remember if I write them down so I have a crib sheet to look at. It's cheating, I know.

"No, before that," I said with certainty. "Listvyanka. I was in your apartment."

"My apartment?" she said with a puzzle look that quickly transformed to one of realization. "Erik?"

Gilly (pronounced "Jilly"), a financial consultant from London that I met on a Lake Baikal boat cruise from the village of Listvyanka in Siberia, had arrived in Yangshou too and it was a coincidence that we ended up at the same place again. She was embarassed that she didn't recognize me right away, even when I did -- perhaps it was because my hair was longer. Little did she know that I couldn't place her face and name right away either -- I had to look up an old Blog entry at my computer to jog my memory when she wasn't looking. How's that for cheating?

THE SUN CAME UP to start another hot and humid day in Yangshou. I woke Veronica up at eight as she requested, just before our Argentine/French roommate (whose name I never wrote down and therefore forgot) left to check out of the hostel. He was replaced by a new roommate, a woman from Holland, whose name I also forgot because it was one of those atypical Dutch ones that I never wrote down. Just like the day before, introductions were fast and soon the three of us were out at a small local place off the main strip for dim sum, the Cantonese breakfast.

We made plans with Gilly to rent bikes around three that afternoon and go on a bamboo rafting trip on the Yulong River for sunset. In the meantime that morning, Gilly did the Chinese massage thing while I packed up my bags to check out of the hostel by noon, to keep my bags in storage before my sleeper bus to Shenzhen that night. Veronica and the Dutch woman rented bikes early to ride around and explore more of the sights outside of touristy Yangshou -- the two of them hit it off really well with the common bond of always trying to find a way off the beaten path. I've met a lot of their type on the road, people who would rather starve than do something "touristy."

THREE O'CLOCK CAME AROUND and Gilly and I waited for the other two at the nearby cafe. While waiting, we debated whether or not we should just rent bikes and find the starting point of the bamboo rafts ourselves, or pay the extra money to have the hostel reception desk arrange it for us. Half an hour went by with no sign of Veronica and the Dutchie and I suggested we just ditch them, since they were probably far off the beaten path and had lost track of time.

"I don't mind paying the seventy [for setting it up with the hostel,]" Gilly said. I didn't either and we just signed up for the three-hour biking/rafting excursion with Apple, the girl working the reception desk in the afternoons. It was a good thing too because the guide she set us up with who took the lead on the bike ride that led us down little village roads and through rice paddie paths that weren't exactly on the map.

"Good thing we hired the guide," Gilly said. "We wouldn't have found this place ourselves."

"Yeah." Not only that, but our guide was also our raft pilot, which was a good thing because the put-in point wasn't full of eager raft pilots like I thought.

Our guide (whose name I also forgot) set up a bamboo raft with two chairs on the river and tied our bikes onto it so they wouldn't slide around and fall in the water. Gilly and I boarded the raft and let our guide pilot us downstream (picture above), passed the Yulong's surrounding limestone peaks, the other rafts, the cormorant fishermen and the vendors on rafts selling items such as corn on the cob and makeshift water guns made out of bamboo stalks. Our guide occasionally serenaaed us with Cantonese songs that were stuck in his head, except for the time he just let the current take us for a while so that he could chat on his cell phone.

"We're always meeting by water," Gilly said to me. "First on the lake [Baikal] and now here."

Cruising down the Yulong wasn't always smooth sailing because every half a kilometer or so there was a cascade that we had to navigate over, some higher than others. A couple of times we were too heavy to clear the shallow underwater rocks and had to lift the raft; other times we cleared the cascade with no problem. Deep drops submerged the front half of the raft for a while, but we always kept afloat.

The sun started to set as we cruise on through the tranquil scenery without the sound of a motor and only the ocassional sound of the falling water of an upcoming cascade.

"It's times like this that I look around and wonder why I work in an office in a big city," Gilly said. She worked in finance in London and would have to return in about a month. Although I hadn't been in the corporate office space scene for a while, I could still relate. I took another photo with my feet up in a totally relaxed mood.

"Look," I said, showing her the playback. "This is the picture you show the guys back at the office."

AFTER ABOUT THREE HOURS ON THE RIVER, we disembarked just as the sky was beginning to change color with the dramatic solar reflection of the pink atmospheric particles of dusk. Gilly and I got back on our bikes and rode around through a little village to capture the moment on digital film and then rode back to Yangshou and went out for dinner and drinks. We had beers until it was time for my overnight bus.

I wished her farewell before we departed ways. She was to stay in Yangshou for another couple of days, while I went off to head south for Shenzhen. Perhaps our paths would coincidentally meet again, and as long as this Blog entry is up, I'm sure I won't forget her name.

Keeping Up With The Raichelsons

DAY 328: When the British Empire defeated the Chinese and took over Hong Kong in 1898, little did they know that 99 years later it would eventually be taken over by the Starbucks Empire. Regardless of the British handing back Hong Kong to China in 1997, Hong Kong has remained the gateway for international business in Asia (and therefore trendy coffee shops), attracting all the major international banking and financial institutions. You know, the big boys like Citigroup and HSBC -- and even smaller guys like Bob's Piggy Bank and Barbecue Emporium (that's not actually true). While Hong Kong has been losing business to upcoming Singapore and Shanghai lately, it is still the shimmering showcase of sleek post-modern architecture that pays homage to the perpetual sharp and sophisticated wheeling and dealing going on inside its shiny glass façade.

Because of Hong Kong's big city high-priced profile, it isn't exactly on a budget backpacker's must-see list. In fact, it wasn't my original intention to go there -- unless I had a place to crash. That place to crash became available though, at the apartment of the sister and brother-in-law of Blogreader El Zee (a friend and former co-worker who was smart enough to jump ship before our New York dotcom sank), who had just moved to Hong Kong two weeks prior. My stay in Hong Kong would not only be a chance to meet them, but an opportunity to see a city I was always curious about since I'd gotten mixed reviews. Not only that, but my stay would serve as a sort of break period on The Global Trip 2004 so that I might "catch-up" to the modern hi-tech world I had not seen in a while. I'd get to, as they say, "Keep up with the Joneses" or in this case, "Keep up with the Raichelsons."

THE DAY BEGAN NOT IN HONG KONG but in Shenzhen, the last city in the People's Republic of China before the border with the Hong Kong territory. Contrary to what I previously thought, Hong Kong had not been integrated as a part of China when the British handed it back over in 1997; it is considered to be one of two "Special Administrative Regions" (SARs), with its own local government, currency and immigration/customs laws. While mainland Chinese propaganda may claim it was foreigners that brought SARS in the country (according to Blogreader Levente), China has had SARs since 1997.

I was confused when the bus dropped me off in an unofficial alleyway in Shenzhen. I thought I was going to be dropped off right at the border but I was a couple of blocks away, and I wasn't exactly sure which way that was. I ended up wandering aimlessly for about an hour, lugging all my gear, until it dawned on me: a series of obvious arrowed signs that seemed to say, "Duh, Hong Kong's this way, dummy." The walkover border crossing was just like one at an airport with exit and entry forms and long lines that zig zag through a Tensa-Barrier maze. My beat up passport looked fake once again, and I had to hold up the line to retrieve my driver's license inside my money belt, inside my portable safe, inside my bag full of clothes, for additional ID.

Two public trains took me through the northern territories of Hong Kong and to the waterfront on the southern end of the Kowloon peninsula. Across the way was Hong Kong Island, holding the city center with its famous skyline of hi-rise buildings and boats sailing beneath -- considered by some to be the perfect backdrop for a wedding photo. When looking around for a phone I stumbled upon the Avenue of Stars, a walk of fame for the action stars of Hong Kong cinema such as Raymond Chow, Jackie Chan and of course Bruce Lee, whose wing chun style of karate (indigenous to Hong Kong) has been popularized in his many films, like Enter the Dragon.

Just like the beginning of Enter the Dragon, I took a boat across to Hong Kong Island for that classic approach (instead of taking the subway). Boats of all sizes cruised back, forth and through Victoria Harbour, the waterway in between Kowloon on mainland Hong Kong and Hong Kong Island. I arrived seven minutes later at the pier and was soon met by my hosts, Aviva (El Zee's sister) and her husband Maurice (we call him Moe), who had seized the opportunity to take a six-month rotation with Citigroup in Hong Kong. Citigroup in New York City had sent Moe to Hong Kong to work and live with his wife in a company-paid furnished apartment. One of these pieces of furniture was a comfy couch, my place to crash for a week, which was much better than the usual seedy hostel in Kowloon. In a financial world capital like Hong Kong, where people are constantly coming and going for overseas contracts away from their home countries, what more "authentic" way to visit than by staying at an apartment courtesy of Citigroup -- and not actually have to go to work.

"WATCH OUT WHERE YOU'RE GOING because they're not going to," Aviva told me when we walked down the street full of pedestrians of Hong Kongese (or is it "Hong Kongers?"), not only of Chinese descent but of many races and nationalities from around the world. Aviva had only been in Hong Kong for a short time, but learned the ground rules right away; walk like you're in a rush even when you're not, and expect others to be thinking the same way.

"It's a free for all out here," Moe said. I tripped over myself and took a couple of mis-steps a few times in the madness of Hong Kong pedestrian traffic (picture above). "Wow, it's like watching myself walk," Aviva said.

I settled in and showered in their cozy modern apartment, complete with TV, DVD and hi-speed internet -- Hong Kong is the largest territory in the world where everyone online has broadband -- all courtesy of Citigroup. Within an hour I was already joining them and friends for Saturday morning brunch on a Saturday that Moe had off. (Hong Kong businesses usually only give Sundays off, but the Western companies keep two-day weekends sacred.)

At the restaurant we were met by Meg, Moe's co-worker and upstairs neighbor who was also a new overseas transplant from Citigroup in NYC in town for a six-month rotation; and Moe's old friend Amy from University of Rochester. Amy was born a Hong Kongian (or is it "Hong Kongi?") and ordered a variety of dim sum dishes for the table from different types of dumplings, steam buns and Chinese pastries. It was great; I had only been in central Hong Kong for a couple of hours, but was already integrated into an ex-pat circle. Amy hadn't seen Moe in a while and Meg was almost just as new to Hong Kong as I was (she had only arrived three days prior) and it wasn't just me that was catching up with the Raichelsons.

"WHERE ARE WE GOING?" I asked Aviva on the way walking somewhere. I was still adjusting to the oncoming pedestrian traffic while gaping at the amazing post-modern skyscrapers around me.

"We're going to do the cultural thing of shopping for cell phones," she said with a smirk.

I had been away from cell phones for quite a while. Unlike many backpackers I've encountered on the road, I didn't bring a mobile phone, thinking that it's "cheating" on a trip around the world. Besides, I knew myself; if I had brought a cell phone, I'd probably end up spending a fortune on drunken long-distance phone calls so that I could make random monkey noises at odd hours in the morning to friends back home.

That's not to say I hadn't seen cell phone use everyday on my trip thus far, not only by backpackers texting gossip back and forth with friends home, but by practically every other local in practically every country I've been to no matter how poverty-stricken it may be. Many of you readers in touch with technology probably know about the latest features of mobile devices, but to me cell phones had really advanced tenfold since my departure from the States: one Sony Ericsson that Moe was eyeing had web mail access, a camera with zoom, a 41 MB internal hard drive -- all things that Meg, Aviva and I didn't think would catch up when they were introduced. "Does it actually make phone calls?" I asked. Forty five minutes of video, BlueTooth technology, etc. -- technology has come a long way since my first cell phone in 1996, which was about the size of small shoe and as heavy as a bowling ball.

Passed more post-modern skyscrapers -- including the HSBC one that appears on one of the $100 Hong Kong Dollar bill (the government prints only the $10 [HKD] bill and private banks print the rest) --- we did a little more Saturday afternoon shopping, from department stores to buy a bed sheet and comforter set for me to use on the couch, to one of the HMV media stores. It was my first time in a long time to actually be in a store with legitimate CDs and DVDs (as opposed to the bootlegs all over the world), some familiar, some completely new to me.

"I don't know what this is," I said to Meg, picking up the DVD set of season one of a reality show I had heard about but had no idea of what it was. (Mind you, I didn't know who William Hung was either.)

"Wow, you don't know?" Meg said. She looked over to Moe. "He doesn't know what The Apprentice is." They explained to me that the Donald Trump reality show was a huge phenomenon back in the States -- one that I completely missed from beginning to end, and it was already on DVD with plans for a second season. I suppose missing entire pop cultural phenomena is something one traveling long term must deal with; Ted (Moshi, Tanzania) told me he was abroad for a while and missed the entire Monica Lewinski thing (and its subsequent late-night talk show jokes) when that was going on.

"I keep on telling people to keep me up to date with pop culture so I don't feel out of the loop when I get back, but no one ever writes."

CENTRAL HONG KONG WASN'T ALL BIG BUILDINGS and Western shopping, and it was evident when we went through the more "authentically Chinese" markets (one selling Osama masks next to Spidey masks) and the Cat Street Bazaar, full of old Chinese trinkets such as Mao timepieces and porcelain sex figures (collect all sixty nine), and the Man Mo Temple, one of the main houses of worship on Hong Kong Island. Built in 1847 by the Qing dynasty, it was dedicated to the duality of the Taoist gods of literature and martial arts -- "Man" translates to "civil" while Mo translates to "martial." It was a place where locals came to pray and burn incense, some in beehive formations hanging off the ceiling.

For a cheap thrill and an excuse not to walk up the steep San Francisco-like hill of Hong Kong Island, we took The Great Escalator, the longest outdoor escalator in the world, which would have been cool if it was one continuous ride. To my and Moe's disappointment, was just a series of short escalators after each other, integrated with the layout of the city. Aviva played tour guide, pointing out things on the way up, passed the shops and restaurants of SoHo and Mid-Levels neighborhoods (residential areas for local and ex-pats)."Look, a Spanish restaurant, Starbucks, Heineken," Moe said. "We could be anywhere."

We continued up passed the Jamia Mosque, serving Hong Kong's Muslim population and reached the top of the escalator to say we did. We took the stairs down back to the apartment on Peel street, one of the little streets in Soho with a Chinese market of vendors selling various goods from fruits to dried fish.

HONG KONGANS (OR IS IT "HONG KONGITES?") are known for their offerings of world cuisine; almost every type of food is available, from hot dogs to vegetarian soybeans molded to feel and taste like hot dogs. Out of the many options, we chose Nepalese and dined in air-conditioning away from the humidity of the night. The four of us (Amy went home and Meg tagged along) got our Nepalese fill and then went off to Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong's party district, about six blocks of bars and the characters that frequent them, from the host of one bar with incredible mutton chops to the wandering prostitute to the ambiguously gay man who looked like he might have been stood up on a date. We drank out on the street with beers and people-watched for a bit -- the ambiguously gay guy was waiting on the wrong corner the whole time -- and then head back home. You never really felt far from the party scene in the apartment building though because the elevator speaker was always playing a groovy lounge soundtrack to get you going.

At the end of a day, it was a great introduction to the pulse of Hong Kong life; it had only been a day and I had already felt like I was one of the Hong Kongers, or Hong Kongans, or whatever it is that they're called.

A Day Away With A Big Buddha

DAY 329: "Are you in on the Buddha?" Aviva asked me. Out of context that may sound like a request to try some wild hallucinogenics, but she was referring to a plan she and Moe had to spend their Sunday away from Central Hong Kong to see the sights of nearby Lantau Island. Any chance Moe could get away from the skyscrapers of Hong Kong to see more of this part of the world, he was all for it.

"Sure," I said. Moe's co-worker Meg and upstairs neighbor was in on the Buddha too.

SUNDAYS IN HONG KONG are the one-day weekend for most professions, a day to get away from the crowded (but surprisingly organized) madness of Central Hong Kong. On our way to the ferry terminal, we walked passed the Filipina maids -- there are about 150,000 in Hong Kong -- who flock by the hundreds to the covered walkways of the central district every week on their day off for a big long picnic to hang out and eat, play cards or mahjong, and gossip with family and friends.

The Fast Ferry was running a buy-one-get-one-free deal for the day and we boarded the transport to Lantau at half price without having to wait at all. The ferry took us westbound away from Hong Kong Island and it reminded Moe and me of the fighters in Enter the Dragon leaving Hong Kong to go to Han's private island.

LANTAU ISLAND, THE LARGEST ISLAND in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), is a popular getaway for Hong Kongers, an island twice the size of Hong Kong Island with more than half of it classified as a "country park" -- and just less than a half hour away. It holds peaceful hiking trails, fishing villages, waterfalls, and more noteworthy, the Po Lin Monastery and the Tian Tan Buddha, our sightseeing goals for the day. However, the complete serene vibe of Lantau wouldn't last long; Hong Kong Disneyland would open on the northeast section of the island in 2006.

After arriving at the Lantau ferry port near Silvermine Bay, we used a suggestion in Aviva's Lonely Planet Hong Kong & Macau guidebook to hike to the Silvermine Waterfall, about forty minutes away through a small village. It wasn't such a frequented place and it took us a while to find the way since there weren't exactly signs pointing the direction.

"We should have rented bikes," Moe said. "That would've been cool."

"Yeah, we could get lost a lot faster that way," Meg said.

We asked directions from an old security guard and an old Irish guy with a hairdo like Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future, who led us with his dogs through the greenfields hugging the bay. We eventually found the waterfalls in a scenic area where a small group of other Filipinos on their day off were having a barbecue. We hung around at the site of the falling water for a while to chill out and take some photos -- Moe even put his feet in the pool at the bottom to relax after a tiring week at the office. "This is so far away from Central," he said in peace.

After an ice cream stop at 7-Eleven back by the bus station -- there is no shortage of 7-Eleven's in Hong Kong (even in a place like Lantau) -- we hopped on a public bus to the other side of the island with the other daytrippers. We were dropped off at the entrance of the Po Lin Monastery, the largest temple in the Hong Kong SAR, built in 1924 and frequented by not only the Buddhist monks who live and pray there, but also the crowds of local tourists in town for the weekend. On the grounds of the monastery was a famous vegetarian restaurant run by the monks as a means of an income to support their cause, where we sat down for a pre-set menu of their regular fare of mushrooms, Chinese vegetables and soy bean products.

"I think this is the most amount of vegetables I've had in the past six months," I said.

"Your mom would be proud," Aviva said. "Actually, she's paying us."

We walked through the main gate and explored the temple buildings of the monastery along with other day trippers -- one of which was passed out on a bench sleeping. "I should hang out with that guy," Moe joked. "He looks like he's in an MBA class."

After walking amidst the others not sleeping in the area, burning incense and kneeling before statues of small Buddhas in the various shrines, we went to go see the big Buddha next door: Tian Tan, the largest outdoor bronze seated Buddha in China for that matter (picture above). Our meal tickets got us entrance up the 260 steps to see the massive religious icon up-close, standing (sitting rather) at 26.4 meters tall high atop a hill that overlooked the surrounding Lantau countryside. Up there we walked right under Buddha's nose and inside its podium, the location of a museum with many calligraphic paintings that none of us could understand. From atop the hill we were able to see the island mist on one side of the island that made smaller surrounding islands look like mountain peaks in a cloud forest, and the construction development on another side.

"What do you suppose that's going to be?" I asked.

"Looks like maybe a racetrack," Aviva said. Along with 7-Eleven's, Hong Kong had no shortage of horse race tracks for ever popular hobby of horse betting.

"Or a shopping mall."

"Either a hi-rise office building, a shopping mall or racetrack," Meg added.

"That's pretty much all there is to Hong Kong," Moe said. Lantau may have been his escape for this one day, but perhaps in the future it wouldn't be the same.

A BUS TOOK US TO THE SMALL CITY of Tung Chung, with the train station of Lantau for the subway that would take us back to Hong Kong Island on a long high-speed train with no doors in between cars. I had paid the fare with my new Octopus card, Hong Kong's electronic debit card system for the public transportation (and 7-Eleven's), elevating me to "local" status as Aviva told me.

Back in the city of central Hong Kong Island, we stopped in the International Finance Center (IFC) to go to the "C!ty Super" Japanese-owned gourmet supermarket, so super they had to use an exclamation point for the "i" in their logo. We walked out to the walkways passed the thousands of Filipinos still out on the walkways at their picnics, and then up The Great Escalator to get take out dinner at "Ch!cken-On-The Run," an Australian eatery so great they too had decided to use an exclamation point for their "i." The two roasted chickens we ordered (and the beers we got next door) would balance out the too healthy vegetarian meal we had from the monks.

At the end of a tiring, yet relaxing day away from the craziness of the city, we just had dinner in Meg's new apartment. We sat around and drank our beers and reminisced about our day on Lantau !sland, its Silverm!ne Waterfalls and big seated T!an Tan Buddha.

The Greens Under The Glass

DAY 330: Everybody goes back to work on Monday in Hong Kong. The movers, the shakers, the wheelers and dealers, Moe, Meg and the 150,000 Filipina maids -- everyone except Aviva and me. While Aviva would eventually look into more productive things to do for her six month stay in Hong Kong with Moe -- fundraising for the local Jewish Community Center, possibly teaching English or learning Cantonese, planning vacations -- this week she would be my tour guide in Hong Kong. Besides, she wanted to be out of the apartment when the maid came (courtesy of Citigroup) so it wouldn't seem like she was a loser with nothing to do; the week before she was in and out of the apartment to run errands but always managed to coincidentally be home when Julia the Filipina housekeeper made her daily rounds.

After our usual morning "dueling laptops" session at the dining table that made us look like we were at work (God forbid!), we left the building and went down Peel Street to the crowded downtown area during lunchtime, or "Black Storm," when all the suits went zipping around for food. We left the chaos in the canyons of glass and steel, passing St. John's Cathedral, to one of the oasis's of the urban jungle: the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens, a little zoo built in 1864 containing flamingos and other caged birds, a jaguar and--

"Uh, wait, I think that's--" Aviva called to me.

--a handrail with no sign to tell me it had been freshly painted.

We stopped by a little garden area where all the benches looked like cute fairy-tale animals held them up, and stumbled upon a nearby greenhouse full of many green plants and colorful orchids. There wasn't much to it and then went to go explore some more.

"It's getting hot outside," I said.

"Now it's hot?" Aviva said. True, whenever you're not in air-conditioning in Hong Kong in September it's always hot and humid. Leaving the apartment each morning to the outside was like entering a steam room.

Nearby the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens was another area of green surrounded by glass and concrete, Hong Kong Park, home of a man-made waterfall and a little scenic pond of lilypads and turtles. It was probably the backdrop of little turtles having sex that prompted the queue of wedding parties lining up for photos. Up a hill we found the Edward Youde Aviary, a huge walk-in birdcage (picture above) big enough to hold a couple of basketball courts. Instead of that though was a beautifully landscaped rainforest with elevated pathways reminiscent of an Ewok Village where different tropical birds flew around freely.

The biggest, most obvious section of greenery in central Hong Kong was the big Victoria Peak, the mountain towering higher than any of the corporate buildings on the north shore, sending a symbolic message that nature can and often will be bigger than anything man made -- in the bigger picture, greens towered over the glass, not the other way around. The Peak, as it is often called, was where the rich ex-pats during the days of British occupation lived to escape the heat since the temperature at the higher elevation was often five degrees cooler. The way up was via the Peak Tram, an old-fashioned trolley that climbed up the hill so you didn't have to. At the top was The Peak Tower, holding tourist traps like a Ripley's Believe It Or Not Odditorium and a Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, all inside a building that reminded me of a big watermelon. There was also one of the many Hong Kong/Singapore-based Pacific Coffee Company cafes -- almost always seen next to a location of its rival Starbucks -- where we sat out in the air-conditioning to cool off. (Five degrees cooler was still pretty frigging hot.) Perhaps it was a bit too much of a cool down because I got a brain freeze from my Cookies And Cream iced coffee drink.

Back out into the steam room we took some pictures of the skyline below and then head off for some more greenery on nearby The Peak Trail that hugged the mountain just under the summit. We thought the paved hiking trail through tropical vegetation would us up to the very top where the radio tower was, but soon discovered that the trail just looped around the mountain. A guy told us that the view from just a little farther down the path was just as good and when we found the clearing, it was. We looked out to the view by a railing that conveniently wasn't still wet with new paint.

"It's great that there's all this green in the middle of the city," Aviva said.

SUNSET WAS APPROACHING in the west, on the other side of the mountain. We walked back to the other building by the Peak Tower, the Galleria shopping mall with a rooftop terrace to see the setting sun with a handful of tourists with cameras. Most of the tourists however were on the other side, waiting for the show to start: the lighting up of the cityscape as the sky got darker. We plunked our cameras down for overexposed and flashed shots of the city lights with other the amateur photographers. Meanwhile down below, somewhere in the Citigroup building, Moe was still working at his desk to blend in with his Chinese co-workers who regularly stayed at the office until nine o'clock or later, giving them a couple of overlapping hours to work with the beginning of the day in New York.

Aviva and I arrived back at the apartment at the around same time Moe got there and then we went out for Mexican -- yet another one of the selections in Hong Kong's international restaurant scene. Aviva and I told Moe about our day wandering the more natural areas of central Hong Kong. Despite my original notion that central Hong Kong was all buildings and crowded streets, there existed places of green tucked under the cityscape -- and a little still left on my hand from the green paint that didn't fully wash off.

The Six Days Between Dawn And Dusk

DAY 331: Travel has a weird effect on the perception of time. When you're doing so many new things out of a daily routine, everything becomes a blur; every experience is in one ear and out the other. Seconds feel like minutes, minutes feel like hours, hours like days. In the eleven months I've traveled thus far, it feels like I've been away for at least three lifetimes already. Days seem especially long when you pack activities in right from the crack of dawn.

WHEN I WAS STAYING at the Beijing Gongti Hostel in the Workers Stadium inside a big sports and leisure park, fellow traveler Toni was excited because he had heard that in the mornings we could see big groups of people practicing Tai Chi just by looking out the window. However, the groups of Tai Chi always were out at the crack of dawn and finished before any of us could get up from the going out the night out before. Tai Chi, the peaceful simplified exercise taken from the Tai Ji Quan boxing fighting style, is often performed in groups by old people in attempt to rejuvenate their old bodies. No wonder Tai Chi was done so early; old people, from my experience, go to bed so damn early right after going out to dinner at Denny's at 4 p.m.

Despite Hong Kong being Denny's-free, old people (along with younger folk) were up at daybreak anyway for the meditative exercise. One of the more populous areas of early morning Tai Chi'ers was at Victoria Park in the Causeway Bay area of town. Aviva and I were willing to do as the old folk and wake up at 5:30 to go there via taxi to see the Tai Chi "show."

Tai Chi'ers of all types flocked to the city park, some solo, some in bigger groups, each with the similar goal of relaxing the mind and body. There were groups in uniform, groups using swords and groups that were obviously new to the Tai Chi scene because they kept on looking to the leader to see what the next move was supposed to be. One guy took the meditative exercise a step further and performed with a fighting stick, while another really skinny old guy just gracefully moved around on a big grass field. The guy's skin-and-bone physique was actually a bit repulsive and we didn't stay long after seeing him. We left and went back to the apartment, all before an early morning false fire alarm that sent us and Moe outside for a couple of minutes.

THE GOAL OF THE DAY (other than to be out of the house again when the maid came) was to see the other side of Hong Kong Island (HKI), both figuratively and literally -- the southern coast was a different scene from the northern coast of big buildings and skyscrapers. Aviva and I left the apartment by lunchtime, walked passed the fresh fish displays and roasted ducks hanging in the windows of Peel Street and went to the central bus station. We hopped on a double-decker public bus that took us to the smaller town of Aberdeen on the other side of Victoria Peak. On the way we were "infotained" by flat TV screens running advertising promotions in the guise of TV shows -- one was a Top Five countdown of the most popular mobile phone ring tones in Hong Kong.

Some of Aberdeen's 60,000 residents still lived the way before the arrival of the British, residing in sampans, old wooden house boats used for fishing and living. Several of these sampans still exist today, many of which are available for short tours so that foreigners may have the authentic experience of riding in a sampan for the purpose of seeing other sampans just like it.

It was still lunchtime when we arrived at the Aberdeen harbor, with its little docks and salted fish hanging out to dry. The official sampan tour company was out to lunch. "Let's just wander around while looking at a map," I suggested. "That usually works."

Immediately we were approached by a tout like the guidebooks said we would, just like magic.

"Sampan Tour?"

She gave Aviva and I a 20-minute ride around the harbor for a reasonable price and showed us the other sampans just like hers. We circled around the Jumbo Restaurant, the famous floating restaurant and then went to see more similar sampans -- some stationary houseboats, others zipping along to get somewhere. The boat we were in seemed simple enough to drive and I asked if I could steer for a while and take a photo. The woman turned me down and said that if I took the controls, we'd go "boom."

ANOTHER PUBLIC DOUBLE-DECKER BUS TOOK US to our next stop on our tour of the southern shore of HKI: Repulse Bay, home of some of the richest families of Hong Kong, named not for the the big wavy hi-rise with a square hole in the middle (for better feng shui) which Lonely Planet thinks is repulsive, but because the bay was once a battleground where the British Navy constantly repulsed harboring pirates disrupting their trade with China. After a lunch of dim sum at a beachfront restaurant, we went looking for the one main reason why visitors came to the otherwise sleepy town: the Tin Hau Temple, which wasn't your regular run-of-the-mill Chinese temple. This one had sections that were pure kitsch and reminded Aviva of Rye Playland. The kitschy comment isn't a knock to ancient Chinese culture; most of the shrines (picture above) and statues were commissioned by the British who probably didn't know anything about Chinese deities at the time.

But the statues weren't the big draw for the tourists that come here; that honor belonged to the Longevity Bridge, which linked two pieces of ground that weren't really separated by anything at all. It was said that each time you cross the bridge, three extra days would be added to your life. Although I could have just walked around the bridge on a sidewalk, I walked back and forth, resulting in six extra days added to my life.

As we continued our southern shore tour from Repulse Bay to the village of Stanley -- home of a covered, air-conditioned outdoor market and the colonial Murray House, which had been moved piece by piece from central Hong Kong to make way for the Bank of China (five pieces were mysteriously left over) -- I thought about how I'd spend those extra six days. Sure there are things I'd want to do that eventually I'd get to with one of my regular life days, but there are certain things that I'd only probably do if I really had the extra time added to my life:

• 1. Watch the additional content on all my DVDs. Seriously, who has time to watch all this stuff? Sometimes the additional content is ten times longer than the actual movie! Do we really need to know what was going on in the director's head during that first day of filming when he was taking a dump in the morning? The answer is yes; which is why I'd spend a whole day watching my extra DVD content.
  
• 2. Floss. I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly a saint when it comes to flossing. Sure I brush everyday, but flossing? C'mon, really. When did dentists start becoming obsessed with flossing? "You don't have to floss all your teeth," they say, "Just the ones you want to keep." Not that I have anything wrong with flossing; it's just really time-consuming -- that time in the bathroom could be spent doing something more constructive, like reading a newsmagazine while taking a dump. I'm sure on my extra day I could floss for a full 24-hours and make up for all the days I haven't. Then maybe my dentist would be happy enough to tell me the real reason why he runs away whenever he pushes that button to x-ray my mouth.
  
• 3. Follow a squirrel. That's not even a joke; I've always wanted to follow a squirrel. Seriously! And I don't mean follow him from this lawn to that lawn and then stop when he climbs a tree, I mean really follow him and see what he does all day. Does he hang out on the electrical cables with his friends and practice gymnastics? Does he hold meetings to discuss traffic patterns so that he and his fellow squirrels can avoid get run over? And does he climb the tree and hide in the leaves so he can play with his nuts?
  
• 4. Find out how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. If not for me and my extra day, the world may never know.
  
• 5. Watch Top Gun. I am going to admit something that may shock some of you. I am a child of the 80's and I've never seen Top Gun. There I've said it. I'm up to the point where I think I might just go for the title of "Guy From 80s That Never Saw Top Gun." I've seen bits and pieces when it comes on TNT's The New Classics, but never really sat down for the whole thing to know what it's about. I think it has something to do about guys wearing pants.
  
• 6. Spend an entire day at an All-You-Can-Eat buffet. You've all had the same idea. Why not get the most of your money by staying all day at an all-you-can-eat place? Get there at opening and just hang out all day for all three meals -- all at one low price! I'll make sure to bring something to occupy my time in between meals -- perhaps a small TV or a Game Boy to play Tetris -- and some Tupperware to bring home leftovers (or hold the vomit from overeating).
  

AVIVA AND I RODE ANOTHER PUBLIC DOUBLE-DECKER BUS at dusk and made it out to the mainland at the flashy Tsim Shan Tsui district in time to catch the lighting of the Hong Kong Island skyline at a different vantage point, the mainland waterfront promenade near the Old Clock Tower. Afterwards we headed back home to meet Moe for dinner and tell him about our long day that seemed like a week -- this time at a Manchurian place a couple of blocks away. I'm sure particles of food got in between my teeth, but I had a whole extra day allotted to take care of that already.

The Big Bang / Getting Money

DAY 332 (Part 1): "Just go ahead, I can't run in these [flip-flop sandals]!" Aviva called to me as we were running through an underground pipeline tunnel in the Causeway Bay district. I quickened by pace. There was no time to respond. There was about to be a very big boom within seconds and we had to get there before it went off.

Aviva and I had been rushing around like confused deer in a frenzy just before a coming explosion that we knew would be inevitable at the strike of twelve o'clock. High noon. Getting to the site of the blast was our only mission objective that morning and I felt like we were bomb squad officers on a quest to save Hong Kong before the proverbial digital LED clock reached "0:00."

The upcoming blast was to come from a cannon in the Causeway Bay harbor known as the Noonday Gun, which was fired each day at noon for no real practical purpose. Historically, it was fired each day to declare the time, followed by an announcement of the day. Its tradition, immortalized in the song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" by Noel Coward, still continues in modern day as a tourist attraction. However, the tourist attraction wasn't so intuitive to get to, at least not for Aviva and me.

We had been in sight of the cannon from a cafe across the highway from it, thinking it'd be easy to get to with a clearly marked underground walkway, but that wasn't the case. Signs pointed towards the "Noonday Gun" but the arrows didn't lead us to an underground subway tunnel like we thought. We rushed through streets and pedestrian malls, up and down escalators in a train station, looking for the right way like a couple of frantic American tourists -- but always came to a dead end. "It's like The Amazing Race," I said.

We ran up another escalator with the theme song in our heads and eventually made it back to the cafe from hence we came from to rethink our strategy. Time was running out. It was 11:57.

"We could cross the highway," I said.

"Yeah, but I want to live."

She was right. There had to be another way than to run into fast oncoming traffic. "Alright, let me ask this guy." I asked directions from the turban-wearing valet at the nearby Excelsior Hotel.

"It's there," he said, pointing to a not-so-obvious door that led down into an underground parking garage under the highway.

"Thanks," I said, dashing for the entry point.

"Hurry, you've got less than a minute!" he yelled back, but I was too far away for a response already.

Inside the parking garage the direction was a lot more obvious with all the "Noonday Gun" signs that stood out like yellow and red Amazing Race markers. They led us to an underground pipeline tunnel that traversed the lanes of the highway safely underneath them.

"Just go ahead, I can't run in these!"

I hurried ahead and passed her. We can make it, I thought. We can diffuse this bomb before Greater Hong Kong explodes! Go Go GO!

I turned the corner and saw the light and stairwell at the end of the tunnel. Almost there! I made a break for it up the stair--

BOOM!!!

The blast was bigger than I expected; I felt the vibrations in the stairwell. We had missed the blast at high noon by just a couple of seconds. Game over.

"Sorry we missed it," Aviva apologized when she caught up to me outside. There was still smoke bellowing from the cannon.

"Don't worry, it's more exciting this way."

And so, my fifth day in the Hong Kong SAR started off with a bang.

Getting Money

DAY 332 (Part 2): If you've seen the movie Swingers, you know the jargon used by the swingin' bachelors played by Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn. One of these terms of slang was the word "money," which they used over and over to compliment how great things were, from slick-looking outfits to a guy's confidence in dating. "Money" was what a status they had to achieve before entering a Las Vegas casino, so they could look like a couple of high rollers and get stuff for free.

I knew I'd be in a casino that night in the other Chinese Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Macau (known for its casinos) and just like in the movie I wanted to go in all "money" with a new dressy shirt and haircut so that I could march into the blackjack room with the outward confidence of a high-roller and be up five hundred by midnight.

Hong Kong was the perfect place to get a new shirt -- or an entire new look for that matter -- as it is one of the centers of high-end fashion in the world. You know, the kind of fashion you see on runway shows but never seen in real life. There is no shortage of upmarket shopping malls in central Hong Kong, with its All-Weather Shopping Link of over a dozen indoor malls connected by covered walkways all over town so that one may still by fancy clothes in the event of a hurricane, typhoon, freak occurrence of a blizzard or a plague of locusts.

All the big brand names in fashion were present and accounted for in Hong Kong, from Gucci and Prada to Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani -- even the no name brands were a brand. Luckily Hong Kong fashion wasn't exclusive the big international fashion names; local and significantly cheaper ones like Giordano and Baleno existed, which was a good thing because I wasn't up to taking out a small loan to buy something like a pair of socks. Private tailors are also a big thing in Hong Kong; tailors came here from overseas to make customs suits -- usually when they're not dozing off in the shop.

After seeing that a shirt at the Japanese upscale Sogo department store was HK$900 (about $100 USD), I went and bought a shirt (HK$69) at the Baleno that Aviva spotted in Causeway Bay, right across the pedestrian mall from a stage in front of the World Trade Center building. On stage was a lunchtime cultural show of live music and dance set up by the Consulate of Mexico in Hong Kong to celebrate the similarities of the Chinese and Mexican cultures.

HONG KONG IS NOT WITHOUT A SHORTAGE of places to get a new hairstyle -- in fact, Meg told me she knew a hair stylist in the States who had to consult Hong Kong each year to learn the latest trends. My budget didn't really allow me to go to a fancy hair salon, so I took the recommendation of Moe, who got the recommendation of his American boss, to go to a regular but decent barber in central that they knew about. An old man cut my hair as I sat in an old-fashioned barber chair and in fifteen minutes the silhouette of my head finally looked a lot less like a cotton swab.

To get out of Aviva and Moe's hair during the Rosh Hashanah Jewish New Year celebration (which started that night at sundown), I decided to go off to Macau, the other SAR in the area, one hour west by hydrofoil ferry. I showered and dressed up in my new digs with my new haircut feeling pretty money and walked to the Macau ferry terminal. Lonely Planet recommended that you should book a hotel from a travel agent before arrival to get a significant discount, and finding a travel agent wasn't so hard because they found me. An agency right near the ferry entrance sold me a ticket for the ride to Macau and booked me a room for a five-star hotel within walking distance of the big casino at a price comparable to the cheap hotel listed in the guidebook that was farther out (about $40 USD).

AN INFRARED CAMERA MONITORED ME and everyone else as I walked through immigration and custom, which highlighted and scan each body like something out of a futuristic science fiction movie. I filled my form and got my passport stamped and had officially arrived in the Macau, the other SAR which is not a former British colony but a former Portuguese. I noticed all the signs in Cantonese and Portuguese as I waited in the warm humidity for my free shuttle service to the hotel.

Wow, I'm staying here? I thought to myself when I entered the lobby. The Hotel Royal was definitely one of the fancier places I've stayed -- they were probably running a cheap weekday special since half the lobby was sectioned off for renovations. I arrived in the lobby just as about five busloads of Chinese tourists came, and it took me forever to get an elevator to my room on the tenth floor.

I wandered nighttime Macau for a bit, wearing my new shirt and new do of course, walking passed the flashy neon signs of the casino area and the nighttime fisherman trying to catch a bite from the promenade of the bay. I had grilled filet of Macanese sole and a couple of Macau Beers and then head into the Casino Lisboa (picture above) -- one of the bigger ones on the mainland peninsula -- with the confidence of a high-roller. So money baby.

The confidence simmered down when I was really confused with the way Macanese casinos work. From a distance, blackjack looks like regular Vegas/Atlantic City blackjack, but the rules are a little different. For example, all the cards are dealt faced down, only to be flipped over and revealed by the player to everyone -- for no reason really that I can think of other than to have that feeling like it's your hand. You can also bet before hand to win 11 to 1 odds if you get a pair.

The biggest change I noticed was that a blackjack didn't automatically give out a 3 to 1 payout. I thought it was going to when I revealed the blackjack I had, and the dealer said something in Cantonese. I was waiting for the payout to come when I showed my hand, just like I get in Atlantic City, but nothing. The dealer said "[Something something]" in Cantonese and I was just like, "Uh, yeah. Where's my money?" He held out some chips and I motioned him to fork it over -- meanwhile everyone was rolling their eyes at me. I didn't know what was going on -- the eyes rolled in Cantonese too -- and I said, "Yeah, just give me the money." Eventually I figured out that I was suppose to wait -- blackjacks are not automatic payout; you still have to wait to see if you draw with the dealer.

I was at the blackjack table a lot longer than I planned. I was at a 100 pataca (about $14 USD) minimum table and usually bet 100 or 200. (I tried 150 once and apparently another rule was not being allowed to bet other than multiples of 100.) At my highest point I was up a net profit of 680, enough to cover my ferry and hotel stay -- don't ask me how I managed to get a multiple of 80 -- but in the end, I lost it all. I quit with a net of 80 pataca and called it a night before I beat myself up for being in the hole.

Good thing I didn't spend too much money on my new clothes and haircut in Hong Kong after all.

Portuguese Chinese

DAY 333: Great Britain, as great as it was before the break-up of The Beatles, wasn't the only European power meddling in places on the other side of the world. During the hey day of seafaring trade, Portugal was also a major power of international commerce, particularly in Asia after they had wisely decided to rent a piece of land from the Chinese government in 1557 at the strategic location where three major Chinese rivers fed out into the ocean. This colonial port, known as Macau, became a major hub of trade in between the east and west and propelled the Portugal in the import/export business -- eventually other countries used Macau as a port too. Some Portuguese settled in Macau, importing their language, food, architecture and religion to an otherwise Chinese area. Macau was handed back over to China in 1999 -- two years after the UK handed back Hong Kong -- but the Portuguese legacy can still be felt today as it stands as one of China's Special Administrative Regions (SARs), with its own currency, immigration/customs regulations and unrestricted gambling laws.

Using the one-day walking tour itinerary in Aviva's Lonely Planet Hong Kong & Macau guidebook, I saw these Portuguese remnants in southeast Asia. The tour started me down the road from my hotel at the Largo do Senado (Senate Square), the heart of Portuguese architecture with its arched-filled walkways, little alleyways, cobblestone pedestrian malls, shops and cafes to do the Portuguese thing of people-watching. Although most of the signs I saw were written in Portuguese, it seemed most of the Cantonese majority that I encountered spoke none of it. And I thought I might be able to use some of the Portuguese I picked up in Brazil.

I walked passed the 17th century Baroque Church of St. Dominic and the Cathedral of Macau (picture above) and continued to follow the flow of traffic of guys zipping by on Vespas to the Portuguese Consulate. The path went up a big hill along the Calçada do Monte to the Fortaleza do Monte, a protective fort built in 1568 with cannons pointed outwards in defense of the city. Nowadays the fort has no military importance; the cannons remain but point out towards hi-rise buildings and the top of the fort is now a small park for strolling and Tai Chi. The main building on top of the fort had been converted to the Macau Museum, an impressive exhibition of the culture and history of Macau before, and after the arrival of the Portuguese.

The head security guard by the entrance noticed my face and was excited to meet me. "Filipino?" he asked. His name was John.

"Yeah."

"We are all Filipinos here working at the museum," he told me. When I walked into the first exhibition hall he had radioed the other guards to tell them that there was a Filipino tourist coming -- I was greeted by others as I walked through who stopped to say hello.

"Salamat," ("Thank you,") I said in Tagalog to John as I left the building. Still no Portuguese yet.

DOWN FROM THE FORT, I walked passed the 17th century Church of São Paolo -- once hailed as the "greatest Christian monument in east Asia" (according to Rough Guide), which was now just a façade since it burned down in 1835 -- and then down into an area where classic Portuguese streets slowly gradually turned into modern Chinese ones as I walked from block to block. The walking tour took me passed the Church of Santo Agostinho, the Dom Pedro V Theater, the Church of São Lourenço and the former Moorish barracks, now the offices of the Maritime Police.

WITH ALL THE EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE ARCHITECTURAL INFLUENCE, it was hard to remember I was in China -- except for maybe the lack of spoken Portuguese since I hadn't used it yet -- but that all changed when I arrived at the famous A-Ma Temple, a Chinese-style religious house of worship built before the arrival of the Portuguese. Prayers were said and incense was burned in honor of the goddess A-Ma, the Queen of Heaven and Goddess of the Sea much revered by the indigenous people of Macau -- in fact, the name "Macau" came from "A-Ma-Gau" or "Bay of A-Ma." I wandered around the temple grounds for a bit but felt a bit annoyed at the overcrowding of Chinese tourists, and went to check out the nearby Pousada de São Tiago, a beautiful five-star hotel built inside a former fortress.

MACAU ISN'T CONFINED to the mainland peninsula near the Pearl River Delta. Also included in the Macau SAR are two islands, Taipa and Coloane, the former connected to the mainland via a really long bridge, and the latter connected to the former via "reclaimed land" -- which is just a fancy word for "landfill so big it's become land that we can build on." For my afternoon in Macau I went to see what was there.

Taipa, once an island of farming communities, had no escape from progress. It too had a period of Portuguese architectural construction, most notably the lime green Portuguese houses on Praia Avenue near a small bay of lily pads. They once served as residences for Macanese and Portuguese traders, but are now museum and exhibition spaces.

Coloane, once a safe harbor for pirates -- much to the Coloaneans chagrin -- had been pirate-free since the defeat of the buccaneers in 1910. In my visit to Coloane I saw just why the pirates had stayed for so long; it was a quiet little place with black sandy beaches and palm trees. I took a bus to Hác Sá Beach, where the beaches were still dominated by Chinese (tourists, that is). I walked up and down the shore and then took Lonely Planet's advice to have lunch at Fernando's a local culinary institution named after its owner, a distinguished-looking man from the Portuguese Azores. Fernando was people-watching at a table in the front dining room near me and was happy to meet me when I told him I had Portuguese friends. The trilingual Chinese staff served up food cooked up by Portuguese cooks and I dined the standard but delicious Portuguese seafood fare, clams and grilled sardines, with fine Portuguese wine.

"Bom apetite," the owner wished me as he was on his way out.

"Obrigado," ("Thank you,") I called back -- finally in Portuguese.

NOTHING WELCOMES YOU BACK TO CHINA from a former Portuguese colony than going from Portuguese cuisine to Chinese -- and no Chinese cooking style is more of a wake-up call back to how spicy China can get than Sichuan, which is what we had when Moe, Aviva, Meg and I went out for dinner back in Hong Kong that night.

"...and the chicken with chili peppers," Moe ordered at the fancy Chinese restaurant with dim lighting and a staff dressed in cosmopolitan black.

"Are you sure you want it?" the waitress asked.

"Yeah, the chicken with chili peppers." She asked again about three more times and when it arrived we saw why. The "chicken with chili peppers," a dish the establishment was famous for was more like "chili peppers with a garnishing of chicken."

"What is that, a joke?" I asked. "Is this a hidden camera show?" In front of us was a shallow punchbowl filled with about a hundred dried Sichuan red peppers hiding about eight small pieces of chicken underneath. The chicken was obviously no match for the overpowering chilies because half the meat was shrunk off them.

"It's like a children's ball playroom," Moe said, mixing the chilies around

We gave it a shot anyway -- even trying the peppers alone -- and it immediately sent all our mouths to Hell. I mean, sometimes "spicy" is so spicy it actually takes away from the actual flavor of the food, but this was way beyond that. It was, as Emeril Lagasse would say, "kicked up a notch" -- about a hundred times. "Notch" was an understatement; it was kicked up so high the US Department of Homeland Security might raise the level to orange if there was any credible evidence of its presence somewhere. I immediately began to sweat after burning my lips on my first nibble. "Isn't this what pepper spray is made of?"

Meg took a bite and actually felt a little high. "Some chilies are so hot it's like a natural high because of the endorphins," she said. Aviva wisely passed and stuck to our other dishes instead.

As for Moe, these three pictures -- intake, impact and digestion -- pretty much tell his story. Needless to stay, Aviva was a godsend when she put a bottle of Tums on the dining table back in the apartment that night.

I'm sure if the British or Portuguese found those chilies right at their arrival in southeast China, they might never have settled into Hong Kong or Macau after all.

Cubes and Triads

DAY 334: "I suddenly remember that I don't miss this," I said to Aviva. We were sitting in a familiar but frightening place to me: an office cubicle, Moe's desk and workspace on the 50th floor of Hong Kong's Citigroup building (near the famous Bank of China building, designed by world-renowned architect I.M. Pei). Aviva had to drop something off to her husband and I tagged along to see the inner workings of Hong Kong's high-paced financial world -- only to discover it was just like the generic American office environment, the battleground in the modern classic film Office Space.

"I feel really underdressed here," I told Moe's co-worker Ian, who had dropped by with Meg. I was wearing a t-shirt, shorts and hiking boots.

"Don't worry, it's casual Friday," Ian joked.

Funny, it looked to me that people were still having "a case of the Mondays."

THE TRIADS, THE ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE IN HONG KONG evolved from the rebels who brought the end of Imperial rule in 1911, has been publicized as the bad guys in many Hong Kong cops and robbers movies, and even some Hollywood ones like Lethal Weapon 4 and Rush Hour. The Triads aren't fictional; they do exist in the shadowy underworld of Hong Kong with a total of about 100,000 members. But unless you owe them money, as an outsider you may not know of their presence; it is illegal to even claim you are in a Triad group in Hong Kong. The Triads strive anyway, running drug and prostitution rackets, and if they're anything like the mafia on The Sopranos, they probably have legitimate-looking storefronts in markets where you might not suspect them.

One of the Triad neighborhoods is Mong Kok, a residential neighborhood on the Kowloon mainland side of Hong Kong, a place filled with many cheap markets that the locals (and tourists like me) who don't really have the money to blow on something like a Coach money clip come to buy stuff.

After walking by the seafood and vegetable vendors of Peel Street and paying a visit to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center -- where the 1997 Hong Kong handover ceremony between Great Britain and China took place -- Aviva and I started the walking tour as shown in her guidebook. It brought us through the main markets of Mong Kok, beginning with the Yuen Po Bird Market, where one could buy any one of a multitude of caged song birds (picture above) -- the song bird is a Chinese symbol of good luck -- plus bird accessories and bird food (mealworms, crickets) to feed their fine-feathered friends. Although caged up, the birds are treated with the utmost respect so that in return they might bring good fortune in life -- and at the horse racetrack. Amidst the stands I looked around for any sign of the criminal Triad underground -- but only saw jailbirds instead, in cubes reminiscent of a stuffy corporate office.

Near the Bird District was the Flower District, a street of florists selling flowers in lavish floral arrangements or just in do-it-yourself bunches. Aviva shot some more photos of orchids for her father, an orchid enthusiast. I on the other hand was still on look for "the bad guys."

"You think these stores are run by The Triads?" I asked Aviva.

"I don't know."

The Flower District turned into the Goldfish District -- an entire street of goldfish aquarium pet stores since goldfish too are a symbol of good luck in accordance with feng shui -- which turned into the Bicycle District. Nearby were stores selling hamsters and guinea pigs.

"Oh, the rodent district!" Aviva said.

Rodents turned to turtles (figuratively, but wouldn't that be cool?) and turtles turned into candy when we entered a Chinese candy store that sold sweets and snacks, including Duck Gizzard flavor. We walked through a market of cheap goods and eventually made it to a multi-level mini mall called "Trendy Zone" that sold not-so-cheap nostalgic toys and gadgets, from Monchichi to Yu-Gi-Oh! From there we walked down to the Yau Ma Tei district, another neighborhood known for its historical Triad presence. Yau Ma Tei was a seedier but more "authentic" part of Chinese Kowloon, with a lively nighttime market and little Chinese restaurants (and possible Triad storefronts?) -- a scene very far-removed from the corporate cube farm I had seen that morning at Citigroup. The centerpoint of the neighborhood was not an office cubicle but a big Public Square, with its big banyan trees and old men playing Chinese chess, near the Tin Hau Temple -- another Chinese temple with more beehive-shaped incense burning to honor the Chinese deity. The presence of the Triad wasn't seen in that neighborhood either; the cops were probably doing their best to crack down on them, with a big van and banner stating, "STOP PROSTITUTION!" parked outside for all to see.

After a quick stroll through the jade markets, where a guy tried to sell me a pendant with my Chinese zodiac symbol on it (Tiger), Aviva and I were exhausted and just went down to the Tsim Sha Shui district near the harbor (known by ex-pats as "TST") for a bite to eat. Beers and finger snacks curbed our appetites before we went down to the Kowloon waterfront to catch the sunset -- my first good one since my arrival in Hong Kong since every dusk thus far was usually covered in haze. Aviva and I hung around, watching the boats go by until the skyline lit up again and then we took a train back to Hong Kong Island -- still without ever encountering one of the Triads.

I suppose that's a good thing though -- you really don't want to get mixed up with the Triads after all -- although there are things that could be worse: you might be stuck in a corporate office with "a case of the Mondays" every day of the week -- even on a casual Friday. Now really, what could be worse than that?

The Last Village

DAY 335: Modernization has really taken its toll on Hong Kong Island since its colonization by the British in the seventeenth century. Skyscrapers have sprouted like weeds on the northern shore, filling every hole in the Hong Kong skyline. However, as tall and modern these skyscrapers may be, they were built with an age-old method; all scaffolding was made out of just bamboo sticks tied together. The rickety bamboo scaffolding is still in use today, even at eighty plus stories up.

In that sense, modernization hasn't completely taken over. In fact, Peel Street, the street Moe and Aviva lived on, was still an old "authentic" Chinese market street with old school butchers and produce vendors instead of the bigger Western supermarkets down the hill. Hong Kong Island as a whole also wasn't completely developed; there remained one place where modernization "missed a spot."

That spot was Shek O, known by some as "the last remaining village on Hong Kong Island," located on the southeastern shore. It was a beach getaway spot for surfing, paragliding, sea kayaking and sunbathing where "modernization" only came in on the weekends when central Hong Konger city folk went there with their hi-tech mobile phones -- just like the new ones that Aviva and Moe got the day before, a Sony Ericsson model that could make me a monkey in an instant and send it over the internet. (How's that for technology?)

That Saturday morning while Moe was getting a morning dose of his Ali G DVD instead of sitting at an office cubicle, it wasn't our intention to go to Shek O -- but a call from his Hong Konger co-worker Ian was an invitation to go with him and his family for a day at the beach.

A cab took the Raichelsons and me to modern Causeway Bay -- so modern that egg drop soup sometimes came from a dispenser -- to Ian's apartment, a really nicely furnished three-bedroom with a nice big flat widescreen TV and surround sound speakers inside an old classic building. There we met Ian's Japanese wife Nariko (whom he met at U. Conn.), their little daughter Hana and her live-in Filipina sitter Priscilla. The seven of us got our beach gear together and hopped on a bus that took us to a minibus that took us to the other side of the island. The minibus driver sped like he was on some sort of a suicide mission along a mountain road that overlooked the southern bay's turquoise waters. "It's great that there's all this here," Moe said. "Most people think of Hong Kong and think it's all buildings."

There were no tall buildings in Shek O -- no office skyscrapers, no big apartment hi-rises -- just a bunch of small houses, condos and shops, none taller than two stories. It was quite a nice change of pace. We walked down one of the main roads that led towards the beach and stopped at a little restaurant Ian and Nariko raved about, The Black Sheep, which served a continental menu in decent-sized portions. After dining, Nariko and Priscilla went ahead to take little Hana to the beach while the rest of us sat at the table to settle the bill. Moe was playing around with his new cell phone, the way boys do when they get new toys.

"You can download videos," he told us. "You can download news reports from Reuters, and there's even porn. I found it the other day." He clicked a few buttons and pulled up a menu for different snuff videos and selected one. It took a while to download.

"Just think, in two years we'll be sitting here and saying 'Remember the time when we had to wait to download porn into our phones?'" I said.

One minute later (while Aviva was in the bathroom), a full-motion video came on the little screen showing an Asian woman -- for lack of a better term -- "getting boinked." Ah, technology, where won't you go?

WE GATHERED AROUND a spot on the beach under two umbrellas and sat out while Hana went around making sand cupcakes in the shape of Hello Kitty for everyone. Moe and I went to check out the swimming scene -- the water was really warm -- and I did a swim out to the outer platform. It was a pretty chilled out day for swimming (within the shark nets of course), sunbathing and watching the paragliders fly off the top of nearby Dragon's Back hill, which flanked the west side of the bay. On the other side, mild ocean waves crashed into the rocks as sea kayakers rode by (picture above).

I took a stroll around for a bit to explore the "last village," which wasn't as "authentic" as one would think since it seemed like nowadays the villagers just worked the souvenir shops and cafes built solely to service the Hong Konger city folk on the weekends. On my stroll down one of the little streets, I noticed a model posing in a dress with about six professional-looking photographers surrounding her with snapping cameras.

"Do any of you know any Chinese models?" I asked the gang back at the beach. I showed them the photo I snuck in as I walked by.

"It's the girl on the phone," Ian joked.

"Who?" asked Aviva.

"Uh, nothing," I said.

THE BREAK FROM MODERNIZATION ended when we took cabs back to Causeway Bay, where we were surrounded again by the neon lights and fancy department stores of progress. Ian and Nariko got us into the Hong Kong Japanese club, where we snacked on Japanese beer and fried tempura finger foods before we went back to the modernized apartment in central, with its DVDs, broadband connections and groovy elevator soundtrack -- all just less than an hour from the slower and more relaxed Shek O.

I wondered if the villagers of Shek O knew of our modern conveniences on the northern shore. I'm sure they did though -- "the last remaining village on Hong Kong Island" is in Hong Kong after all -- and they too were probably waiting the two years for instantaneous cell phone porn like the rest of us.

Last Time for Tea Time

DAY 336: If there's one thing to mention about the influence of British imperialism in the Hong Kong territory, it's the concept of high tea, or "tea time." You know, drinking tea and eating krumpets and scones with posh British accents and saying things like "Cheerio" and "Good day." While having high tea isn't exactly a mainstream thing that every Hong Konger does everyday, it's still a ritual that is practiced, particularly on weekends. According to all the guidebooks, the place to have it is at the Peninsula Hotel, a fancy luxury landmark opened in 1928 in the Tsui Sha Tsim (TST) district of Kowloon, so fancy that if you have a reservation there and want a transport from the airport, they send out a Rolls-Royce.

Having high tea at the Peninsula (Rolls Royce not included) was the only thing we had planned for my last day in Hong Kong, especially since it was raining pretty hard most of the day with thunder that sometimes sounded like a building was imploding on itself. When it cleared up in early afternoon we ventured out, passed the yelling fish guy on the corner, the thousands of Filipina maids out for Sunday urban picnics and the subway billboards for fallatio lubricants.

FANCY CHANDELIERS HUNG DOWN from the ceiling above fine classic wooden furniture adorned with nice tablecloths and doily-type things (picture above) when Moe, Aviva and I arrived in the lobby. There were about a dozen people already on line but it went by pretty fast since a lot of the tables were emptying out. While waiting for our table we met Tonya, a forty-something Scottish woman traveling solo on business for Ethicon in Edinburgh. She had a one-day layover in Hong Kong and decided to do the classic thing of having high tea. She was born in Hong Kong and had vague memories of high tea at the Peninsula and came that afternoon for spark up some childhood memories.

"Would you like to join us for high tea?" Aviva asked her.

"Is that okay? Are you sure?"

"Yeah, no problem, you're alone here," Moe said, extending the invitation.

We were seated at a table for four by a Chinese waiter wearing fancy British digs who set up our placemats and dinnerware with a classically elegant style (i.e. no sporks). We each ordered the "Peninsula Classic Afternoon Tea Set," which included scones, finger sandwiches, tarts and other goodies to have with a tea of our choice -- Moe, Aviva and I chose the lychee tea while Tonya, despite coming from British heritage, chose coffee.

As we ate our fancy scones, fruits, mini quiches and sandwiches, we chat with our new friend of the day. Tonya told us her story, how she had grown up in Hong Kong until the age of seven and hadn't been back since. She told us how amazed she was at the changes in the city, from the rise of skyscrapers to the multitude of chic boutiques and fashionable malls. Life was different when she was a little girl in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Then it was still a British territory, which meant that being so close to mainland Communist China, it was swarming with refugees trying to escape the regime of Mao. Tonya's family, who grew up in the posh neighborhood on The Peak where the wealthier British ex-pats resided, actually harbored and fed one of these refugees from the mainland.

"We always had to [keep him hidden] because of my father's position," Tonya told us. Her father was a civil engineer with the Hong Kong government and having a lost Chinese illegal in the house wasn't exactly a good thing careerwise. They kept him anyway until he eventually got on his feet.

HIGH TEA WAS A NICE LITTLE SLICE of high society and afterwards the sun started to come out, giving me the one last opportunity for a sunset stroll. We made our way to the TST waterfront, site of the Avenue of Stars -- Michelle Yeoh, John Woo, Jet Li -- and on the way we encountered a dress-up baseball guy and some street performances, the biggest one being a big martial arts demonstration by the Shih Chen University Sung Chiang Battle Array from Taiwan. Lanterns were hung up for the upcoming Autumn Lantern Festival, giving my last sunset in Hong Kong a little more panache. Sunset was followed by the usual, but never tiring lighting of the Hong Kong skyline.

"I don't think I'll get tired of this," Aviva said, gazing out at Victoria Harbour. For a little poetic justice, we took the Star Ferry back to Hong Kong Island -- the same ferry I took on my arrival -- and it was a lovely ending to my stay in the former British colony of Hong Kong: good company, good scenery and high tea.

THAT OF COURSE IS A LIE because I couldn't have ended my days in Hong Kong without going out drinking one more time. We called up Meg back at the apartment and the four of us went back to Hong Kong's party district, Lan Kwai Fong for dinner (Malaysian) and drinks. It was there that we had my farewell toast with not tea, but with beer. Tea Time in Hong Kong might have been the classic social gathering the British in the colonial days, but Beer Time does it anytime, anywhere.

Fugu Me

DAY 337: One thing I never expected this Blog to do is actually have influence on the course of The Trip; usually a travel Blog is just a report on stuff that happens without ever actually being a part of the story that it is telling. Of all the incredible things The Blog has done for me, one was introduce me to new people, faithful readers of my (mis)adventures. (At the time of writing, I believe there are more readers that I've never met than people I know -- and even more if more of you SBRs would speak up!)

One of these unknown Blogreaders -- neigh, Blog Hogs -- was Liz, who opted to be on "The Trinidad Show" by inviting me to her home in Japan, a country I always wanted to go but wouldn't unless I had a place to crash since it's so expensive. Liz, a Canadian ex-pat from Windsor, Ontario provided me that place to crash in her humble apartment in central Tokyo, which she shared with her Japanese husband Hiroshi. She told me to come on over so she could play host for me -- she even had episodes of The Amazing Race saved up for me to watch. She also entertained my idea that one night we'd go out for fugu, the poisonous blowfish immortalized in an episode of The Simpsons, a food that could kill you if not cut and prepared properly due to its inherent natural presence of tetrodotoxin. (There is a 50% fatality rate according to an FDA report. Some regard eating fugu as playing the culinary equivalent of Russian Roulette.)

THE DAY STARTED AT MY ROOM TO CRASH not in Tokyo, but 1800 miles away in Hong Kong. I said my goodbyes to Aviva and Moe and head off to the Hong Kong airport before Moe even left for work. The Airport Express train took me to the airport on Lantau Island and soon I was high above Hong Kong bound for my next destination. I flew to Tokyo via Taipei on Cathay Pacific, which entertained me with a whole bunch of in-flight movies to choose from, from Ghostbusters, Van Helsing and Shrek 2.

Immigration formalities were easier than I thought; I had no address to write down on my entry form (and no guidebook to provide me with one), but the immigration officer didn't seem to care as long as I wrote down Liz's phone number. The only worry I had during my official entry into Japan was holding in my sneezes; with the fear of the spread of SARS, all the Asian airports have been on full alert for suspiciously sick people. In fact, you must declare if you have a fever or diarrhea at one of the checkpoints.

Can you imagine what an interview would be like with a border health official if you declared diarrhea?

Government Health Official (with clipboard in hand): Okay, Number One... Actually, Number Two. Ha ha, get it?
Traveler with Diarrhea (holding it in): Just ask me the goddam question... Grrrr... Uh... Ohhh...
Government Health Official: What countries have you visited in the past fourteen days?
Traveler with Diarrhea (still holding it in to the point of grunting): Uh... Oh... Aaah --China-- OH... Can I please go to the toilet now?
Government Health Official (calmly): When we're done.
Traveler: Oh... Oh... Oh God... Nooo.... (farting noise) Uh, too late.

A train took me from Narita Airport to Tokyo Station in Central Tokyo. Out the window I saw that Tokyo's suburbs were perhaps more familiar than I thought they'd be, with stores like The Sports Authority and Toys "R" Us whizzing by. I arrived in central Tokyo about an hour later and it too was a familiar scene, a big modern city -- but hardly "generic" being arguably the most modern city in the world. Technology was used every which way for the convenience of Man -- that is, if you knew Japanese. It took me a while to figure out the pay phone/calling card system, but eventually managed to call up Liz's mobile phone without any major faux pas.

"Hey Liz, I'm here by the turnstiles at the Yaesu Exit," I said.

"Okay, I'll be right there."

Liz and I found each other almost immediately and she was the great host and guide she promised to be from the get go. She taught me how to use the above-ground train debit card system and took us to her stop not too far away. On the way we zipped by different neighborhoods, each one looking just as flashy as the previous with the neon lights of advertising billboards, restaurants, arcades, karaoke bars and Pachinko parlors.

"Before we go to the bank we have to go to the supermarket," Liz said. I put my bag on a shopping cart and we zig-zagged through the aisles of Japanese goods. "If you see anything you like, just put it in the cart and I'll pay for it," Liz said. Wow, how's that for hospitality? I thought. We filled a cart up with assorted Japanese goodies -- chocolate and cookie "Pocky" sticks and seaweed flavored potato chips to name a few -- and then walked over to the local Citibank for me to get some cash. Two more blocks of walking passed restaurants, a five-story karaoke house, a couple of 7-Elevens and a Denny's family restaurant, we arrived at Liz's apartment complex on a smaller, quieter street away from the Tokyo neon. Her husband Hiroshi was away at his mother's to handle some private family matters, leaving the apartment for just me, Liz and those episodes of The Amazing Race that she saved for me.

"What should we do for dinner?" Liz asked me.

"I don't know," I said. "It doesn't matter, I'm not picky."

"Well, I can cook or we can go out for fugu," Liz suggested. In her five years in Japan she hadn't tried fugu either -- which was probably why she lasted those five years.

Wow, fugu so soon? I thought. I just got here. But it didn't take me that long to make up my mind. "Fugu me," I said in the immortal words of Homer Simpson (before he later thought he was going to die). Whether or not I'd end up dead or in a hospital (or in an interview with a witty Government Health Official), I didn't know yet. Perhaps my first day in Tokyo would be my last.

AS WE WAITED FOR THE FIRST COURSE of our ultimate fugu meal set to arrive at the table in the Genpin Fugu restaurant down the block, I noticed another thing about the Japanese. They don't say yes, they shout it. The Japanese word for "yes" is "hai," but no one pronounces it "hai." No, they shout "hai!" and it sounds like they are either: A) about to attack you with a samurai sword; or B) choking on a chicken bone. The phrasebooks and translation dictionaries really need to add the exclamation point at the end. When the word is said in the middle of a sentence, all of a sudden the tone of voice gets louder for that one syllable. "[Something something something] HAI! [something something] HAI! [something something something] HAI! [something.]"

It probably gets confusing for a man dying from fugu poisoning to tell someone he is in pain:

Maitre d': Hello there, how is everything? Ah, sir, I see that you have selected the fugu. Fine choice.
Patron (gasping for air): HAI!
Maitre d': Oh, wonderful, wonderful. I'm glad you are enjoying it--
Patron (feeling the poison spread through his arteries): HAI!
Maitre d': --because our usual chef called in sick and we had to have his roommate Sato prepare it, even though he hadn't really done it before in his life.
Patron (starting to feel paralysis in his legs): HAI!
Maitre d': You seem a little flustered sir, would you like me to get you some water?
Patron (starting to go blind): HAI!
Maitre d': Okay, just a-- what the...? Wait a minute, are you choking on a chicken bone?

Patron falls to the floor, producing the sound effect you hear when Charlie Brown falls after missing kicking the football.

Our fugu dinner set was prepared not by an amateur, but by a chef who went to school specifically to master the preparation of fugu without killing anyone -- or so I hoped. The chef prepared the fish in every which way a poisonous blowfish could, each style with a unique taste: cut up in slices as fugu sashimi (tastes like yellowtail); cut up in pieces to be placed in a boiling hot pot of fugu broth with tofu and Japanese vegetables (tastes like squid); and breaded and fried as fugu katsu (tastes like chicken). Some of the raw pieces (picture above) were so freshly cut from the fish that they were still twitching and "breathing" (that's not a joke) while some pieces (the fins) were broiled and placed in my fugu-flavored hot sake.

Each bite was a test of bravery, that game of Culinary Russian Roulette, but for some reason I just had good faith in the restaurant since it did nothing but specialize in fugu preparation. Besides, fugu tasted good. Funny, I don't feel like I'm about to die, I thought to myself. If the chef did call in sick only to have his inexperienced roommate to prepare it, I didn't want to know.

In the end, neither Liz or I died that night, which was a good thing because I had all those episodes of The Amazing Race to watch.

We Gonna Rock Down To Electric Avenue

DAY 338: Japanese technology can be seen all over the world, from a mobile phone in a remote town in Africa to a big home theater in Chicago, USA. Chances are that the very computer you are using right now to read this very Blog has some Japanese parts in it, if not all Japanese parts. Japanese technology has put the "modern" in "Modern World" as many everyday indispensable things originate from the electronic über-companies that are based in Japan, particularly Tokyo. In fact, Liz's apartment was just across the street from the backside of Sony World Headquarters, with a windowless R & D wing guarding so many secret prototypes like a secure fortress -- you couldn't even park you car on the street outside.

Sony's secret products eventually are made public and leave the factory, along with other hi-tech products produced by the other Japanese electronics companies, for worldwide distribution -- as well as in the home country of Japan. In Tokyo, all these electronics can be found in the Akihabara neighborhood, a district full of so many multi-level electronics stores and video arcades that it is also known as "Electric Town."

Going to Electric Town was a major culture shock to me, having been in really undeveloped places the past several months -- Ethiopia and central China for example -- and walking through its canyons of neon lights (picture above) I was reminded of a TV special in the 1970s, Rescue From Gilligan's Island, where the castaways of the popular syndicated TV series are finally rescued after fifteen years from that uncharted desert isle and must adjust to life back in modern society. I remember the Professor (who never had a real name, am I correct?) was having an especially hard time trying to get back into inventing new things in his lab because he had missed out on so many leaps in technology since he left for that ill-fated three hour tour (three hour tour). Why he had problems I don't know; the Professor could make radios and metal detectors out of dried up palm leaves and a couple of coconuts.

Anyway, one scene that came to mind was when Gilligan (played by Bob Denver, who will always wear that stupid fisherman's hat if he wants a steady income) goes to visit the Professor in his lab. The Professor is sitting there in a lab coat, still stumped on ideas, probably due to the lack of coconuts. Gilligan tries to cheer him up by showing him something that had been invented since that the day the tiny ship was lost: a frisbee.

MY METAPHORICAL "FRISBEE" CAME NOT in the form of a flying disc but in the form of a mobile phone. Mobile phone technology had skyrocketed since I left New York in October 2003 and as I walked on through Electric Town I saw just what cell phones in Japan are now capable of. Not only could a cell phone be a low-resolution digital camera, an MP3 player and a PDA, but now it could come with optical zoom, simulated surround sound and videophone technology. One flip phone I saw actually doubled as a camcorder; the top part opened up then swiveled to the side so that you could use it like a traditional camcorder since the lens was mounted on the side of the hinge. Another phone I saw was actually a color television (antenna broadcast only though). My stroll through Electric Town showed me that phones are getting smaller, sleeker and smarter and one day we might push buttons through an easy-to-use interactive menu to order a pizza with mobile internet technology -- so that we may never have to actually use the phone function to simply call and order that pizza from an actual person.

ELECTRIC TOWN WASN'T JUST ELECTRONIC STORES but electronic playgrounds with multi-level video arcades from Taito and Sega. Inside were titles of each respective gaming company, both new and old, attracted not only teenage boys and girls, but suited businessmen on their way home from work. Most of them went to play MJ2 -- Mahjong 2 -- although I had to wonder if they were really there to try their luck at a skill crane where one could win a dress.

After wondering around the video arcades and stores and with items I couldn't yet afford to buy -- but definitely drooled over (hey, I'm a guy) -- I met Liz by the train station near a couple of street performers, a girl wailing out Japanese lyrics to the riffs from an electric guitar. Liz and I took a crowded rush-hour train out of Electric Town, sitting next to a middle-age man reading the porn section of a regular Japanese newspaper, and then went out to eat tonkatsu (food breaded and fried Japanese style) for dinner -- real food that is, not the convincingly real plastic kind seen in the window of almost every restaurant in Tokyo. (Japan even has technology to make fake food look real.) After dinner we took the train back to the apartment using the train system's electronic sensor debit cards -- cards that will soon be placed in cell phones so that one can just use his/her cell phone to get around.

I may have been thirteen hours ahead in the future of North America's eastern seaboard, but being in Tokyo felt like I was at least two years ahead. I'm sure if any company from another country tried to surpass the leaps in Japanese technology, they wouldn't be able to do it. And even if they did, the Japanese would come back and surpass them again anyway -- no matter how many coconuts they have.

Things to Do When Your Wallet is Missing

DAY 339: People came from the left, right, north, south, east, west, northwest and north north west. Everywhere I turned there was another person speeding along on two legs trying to get somewhere. I stood in the middle of the random chaos and just observed with no rush of my own, spinning around and shooting them all with my camera. From above it probably looked like a game of Asteroids or something.

I was at Tokyo's Shinjuku Station, arguably the busiest in the world, a place I went at Liz's suggestion to experience the concentrated one-hour Japanese morning rush, much more hectic that afternoon rush, which was spread out over four hours. Commuters poured in from different train lines, kept orderly by red stick-toting, white glove-wearing conductors on the platforms, as they went to their offices in the Skyscraper District or to the nearby architectural marvel, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building -- the other thing I went to see that morning.

I HAD HEARD SOMEWHERE that Japan is so crime-free that if you were to leave your wallet out somewhere, you could go back an hour later and it'd still be there with all its contents, because it's not in the Japanese upbringing to take it -- in fact, most people would go out of their way to give it back to you. As an experiment I bought a second wallet at the 100 Yen Store (A Dollar Store) -- where I resisted as much as I could to jokingly ask the cashier "How much is this?" -- and filled it up with a frequent flyer card, a passport photo of myself, one US dollar and 2000 yen (about $20). Liz had a mid-day break from her job as a corporate trainer and English teacher and met me at the Excelsior Coffee shop near the Tamachi station on the JR line.

"Okay," I whispered. "The wallet is on my chair. I'm just going to leave it there." After a couple of coffees, we just got up and left like normal people.

I figured if the wallet would still be there an hour later, why not a whole day? And so my plans for the day were to do things to kill time before I went back to the cafe that night to see if my wallet was still there with the $22 worth in items.

LIZ HAD SOME TIME TO KILL before her next training appointment and came with me to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, established in 1993 to "preserve the historical heritage of Edo-Tokyo" (according to their pamphlet). Nearby, we watched a couple of juggling buskers that impressed me by rolling a square tea box around the top of a spinning umbrella, amongst other feats. "Arigato Gozaimaaasu!" they'd say after every feat.

Up the curvaceous escalator that didn't stop when it leveled off mid-way, Liz and I entered the museum. The fairly large exhibition hall, right next to the Sumo stadium went through a chronological history from the ancient feudal days of Edo to the modern post-WWII days of Mega-Tokyo, using small models and life-sized reconstructions of buildings and moving shrines.

"Wow look at her [big] shoes," I said, referring to a statue of a Kabuki theater actress.

"Uh, that would be a guy," Liz corrected me. She went off back to the office, leaving me to my own devices -- with a bunch of much bigger guys.

RIGHT NEXT TO THE EDO-TOKYO MUSEUM was something larger than life. Larger than my life at least. It was the Ryogoku, the big Tokyo sumo arena, and it was just my luck that the big Grand Tournament in Tokyo coincided with my travels. You really have to a sport like sumo wrestling; I mean, what other sport does training actually involve the possibility of eating two pizza pies, a whole chicken and a gallon of gravy with pats of rich creamy butter on top -- all before filling up on bread before the main course arrives.

I wasn't a Sumo wrestler myself, but before making my entrance into the arena, I decided to bulk up to get into the mood. Right across the street there was just the place to do so.

"This one or this one?" the cashier asked me, pointing to two different options on the menu on the counter.

"This one," I said, pointing to the one with the bigger red box. "Super-size me."

SUMO WRESTLING IS NOT JUST AN EXCUSE to get men who could never land a basketball marketing deal a chance to shine under arena spotlights. Japan's national sport is actually rooted in Shinto Buddhism, when the sport was actually a ceremonial ritual to appease the gods for a good harvest each year. The excitement of it transcended religion though and became an entertaining spectator sport of fat guys slapping each other silly and get their revenge for being teased as "the fat kid" as a child -- to other guys who probably had the same experience. Nowadays, professional sumo wrestling involves a league that travels from city to city in Japan where the best, brightest and heaviest rikishis (wrestlers) compete for the title of Musashifuji (grand champion).

I had a general unreserved-seat pass, which meant that I could sit anywhere there was an empty seat in the nosebleed section -- while others that played more for reserved nosebleed seats officially had to stay in the same seat, even if it was bad. I got to the arena before seats filled up though, giving me time to see the gigantic warriors enter the arena gates to a crowd of spectators cheering them on. Alone or in small groups at a time, they came in their kimonos and wooden slippers like gladiators the shapes of panda bears draped in silk. Underneath the glamour, sumo wrestlers were just regular guys though; before the tourament, I had seen them around just running errands, some even on bicycle.

Early afternoon was for bouts of the Juryo wrestlers, the first division which not many people cared about. For me it was exciting anyway being my first live sumo experience -- and the fact that I could sneak down closer to the dohyo (ring) for a while to watch the matches.

The object of the game is simple: when the match starts you are to use all your body weight to attack the other guy and either knock him down (without falling yourself), or out of the boundaries of the inner circle of the ring. If you are lucky your opponent will fall off the dohyo and embarrass himself even more than the fact that he is wearing nothing more than a big baby diaper.

A typical match went like this:

1. The guys size each other up (picture above) by staring at each other and then slapping their own asses.
   
2. The guys decide they aren't ready and go into the corner to stretch some more. There is more slapping of the asses.
   
3. The guys go back and size each other up again (after another couple of ass slaps), this time stretching their legs out and stomping their feet like they're doing a very bad line dance.
   
4. The guys go back to their corner to stretch and then back to starting position, this time spreading ceremonial salt on the floor.
   
5. Go time! The guys are released towards each other and either start a really rapid bitch-slapping contest, or grab each other in tight wrestling holds -- sometimes for four or five minutes -- trying to shove the other down. This second choice wouldn't be recommended for non-sumo wrestlers, especially for someone like Calista Flockhart. Can you imagine someone like Calista Flockhart in a sumo match? She'd be knocked over like a toothpick by a bowling ball. Anyway, the match ends when one of the guys is knocked over or outside the inner circle. In the event of that might be a draw, the gyojis (referees) gather in the circle to determine the winner of the match.
   
6. A winner is declared by the gyoji who announces the winner by "knighting" him with a ceremonial fan. The winner has a smug look on his face like he is "the man." He leaves the ring and pats himself on the ass.
   

After a while the matches got a bit repetitive -- except for the "interludes" placed in the day-long "ceremony," including the prancing of sponsors around the ring, the introduction of new wrestlers, and the going to the bathroom because of all the beer I had. In the later part of the day when the Yokozuna wrestlers (grand champions) entered the ring, things got a little interesting. The crowd really fired it up in the arena to cheer on their favorite wrestlers, much like in WWE but without the signs and foam (middle) fingers. One wrestler, who I take it was the public favorite, had a sort of catch gimmick like a WWE wrestler: when he spread the ceremonial salt on the ring, he'd throw a whole pile out, making the crowd go wild.

At the end of the last series of matches, a winner was declared, who performed the yumitori-shiki, the winner's ceremonial dance with a big bow to show off his victory and to wish the audience to come the next day for more.

IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME I left the sumo matches (and the monk outside) and I immediately went back to the Excelsior Cafe near the Tamachi station to see if my wallet was still there with all the money. The seat I sat in was occupied with no trace of the wallet, so I went to the cashier.

"Saifu o nakushimashita," I said with help from my phrasebook. The girl gave me a confused look. "Uh, my wallet. I lost it."

"What color?"

"Blue."

She pulled it out of a drawer and all the money was inside too. In the end, it wasn't such an interesting experiment at all -- I should have known nothing would have been missing. I went on my way to explore Shinjuku at night and then to Liz's place, with my wallet in my back pocket not only holding my money, but keeping my ass protected from any surprise sumo ass-slaps -- well, on one cheek at least.

See No Common Sense

DAY 340: Tokyo is a huge sprawling metropolis with the area of 2,187 sq. km., almost 400 times larger than a football field. With so many buildings spread out over such an expanse, it's no wonder Tokyo was chosen to be the battlefield for Godzilla and all his monster movie enemies. It's so big that it is often called "Mega-Tokyo" in Japanese sci-fi anime films.

However, there is a retreat from Mega-Tokyo, just a couple of hours north by train: Nikko, "one of the most popular day trips from Tokyo... Worth to slot into even the most whirlwind tour of Japan" (Lonely Planet). Nikko is the site of sacred shrines and temples dating back to the 17th century, all in a mountainous countryside where bright colors come not from neon signs but from foliage.

Like most Japanese, Liz had the day off for the Japanese national holiday celebrating the Autumn Equinox, and led the way to Nikko on a day trip we'd extend to a day and a half trip since she didn't have to do another corporate English training lesson until the evening of the next day. We packed up weekender bags and head on out to Asakusa, the old area of Tokyo where the train to Nikko departed from, its beginning marked by what my friend Sam (Moscow) called "The Golden Turd," a poorly-rendered golden flame sculpture atop the Asahi Brewing Company building. Asakusa was also the home of a shrine within Tokyo, the Kannon-do Shrine.

We killed some time in the Asakusa area while waiting for the next train. We strolled around the shops of souvenirs and Japanese sweets, most made of mochi (rice dough) and sweet red bean paste. We wandered the Kannon-do Temple, crowded with people on their day off -- some people treated the sacred shrine as a tourist attraction while some others legitimately prayed at a building under the towering pagoda. At the entrance of the shrine was the traditional cauldron of incense, emitting sweet smelling smoke into the air -- smoke that is supposed to give good luck if you surrounded yourself in it as much as you can.

"A lot of students come here right before exams," Liz told me. Made common sense.

THE NORTHBOUND TRAIN TO NIKKO sped down the train tracks through Mega-Tokyo. "Watch how long it takes before we see the country and you'll see just how big Tokyo is," Liz told me. Building after building after building whizzed by with no break in between as we ate our bento box lunches that we got at a department store in Asakusa that sold big sushi rolls and assorted katsu pieces. We finished our food and our beer all before Tokyo ended. In fact, it wasn't until I woke up from a decent nap that I noticed we were riding through the countryside, over an hour after departure.

Liz and I didn't have any hotel reservations in Nikko yet so we went to the tourist office at Nikko Train Station. The older Japanese woman there made some calls for us and got Liz and me a reservation at a guest house in town with its own on-site onsen, the traditional Japanese steam bath, at roughly the same price if we roughed it in a youth hostel and had to pay for the public municipal onsen. Liz's Japanese skills contributed to the discount we got, although the Japanese woman wasn't completely devoid of some English-speaking ability.

"You have a very beautiful face," the old woman told me in semi-broken but comprehensible English. "You have very big eyes. Mine, very small." She was at a loss for English words to continue complimenting me and pulled out a dictionary -- she appeared to be quite keen on learning and practicing new English words. She spoke to Liz in Japanese and tried to tell me that I looked -- according to her dictionary's translation -- "smart." She and Liz had more words to each other in Japanese.

"Oh, you mean 'common sense'," Liz corrected the old woman. "She says you look like you have good common sense."

"Arigato," I said. "Thank you, but I really don't."

Liz continued to translate. "She says you look like you have the eyes and the common sense to explain things to people, like a teacher."

Common sense? Explain things to people? Little did the old woman know that just a couple of minutes before, when we had arrived in the mountains, I asked Liz, "Are we higher up?"

"Uh, yeah. Because we're in the mountains."

"I'M FEELING REALLY CALM IN MY SOUL right now," Liz said as a bus took even higher up the mountains to the shrines. "I like it here." With Liz's erratic work schedule back in Mega-Tokyo, seeing green countryside and forests was always a welcoming treat for her.

Touring the temples and shrines of Nikko was indeed a relaxing retreat for us and the Mexican couple we met on the bus who looked just as confused as I would have been if not for traveling with Liz. Liz invited them to join us and the four of us walked to the first shrine, the Rinnoji Temple. Sulin and Arturo from Baja California were day-trippers from Tokyo on their three-week vacation trough Japan. Liz planed tour guide for the three of us taking us through the shrine grounds, with its scenic gardens and pond full of big hungry fish. She took us all afternoon from shrine to shrine, the main one being the Toshogu Temple, near the tomb of Ieyasu, the shogun who united Japan from the many different groups of feudal society in the 17th century. The shogun (and the relief sculpture of him) may have been the center point of attention, but that honor went to the other well-known relief carving of three monkeys, depicting the famous "hear no evil, speak no even, see no evil" saying (picture above) -- which inspired many souvenirs to sell tourists.

AFTER JUST ONE AFTERNOON, all the temples and pagodas, as great as they were with their architecture and guardian demons, started to look a bit the same to me, coincidentally when the rain started getting a bit heavier. Sulin and Arturo took a bus back to Nikko for a train back to Tokyo, while Liz and I head back into town for dinner. We had our meal at a family restaurant reminiscent of Sizzler at a table with an interactive screen with many colorful attractive buttons with Japanese letters on them that I couldn't help but push, since it made pictures come up of Winnie the Pooh. This was all going on out of Liz's eyesight who was at the front desk trying to arrange a transport after dinner to the guesthouse.

"I think you just charged [a bunch of games] to our bill," Liz informed me back at the table. It didn't even occur to me that that might be the case, but it turned out I had been pushing the "Yes, I accept the charges" button in Japanese over and over. So much for having common sense.

A TAXI TOOK US to the Pension Sunshine, a nice cozy guesthouse with a room for us with two beds and a TV that ran an Autumn Equinox Day TV special, a variety show that talked about the biggest things in the world: tallest man, biggest eel, etc. At one point they found the two heaviest babies in the world -- a massive 6-year-old from Russia and a massive 4-year-old from Georgia -- and pit them together for an in-studio wrestling match. The younger boy slapped the older one who ran off crying.

As funny as it was to see that, the main To Do at the guesthouse was use the onsen, the traditional Japanese steam bath. The guesthouse had two individual ones, one indoor, one outdoor (but covered from the rain). Liz gave me the outdoor one for the quintessential onsen experience. The onsen was in its own little building in the backyard.

I did the traditional onsen procedure as Liz had described it to me: strip down to my bare ass, shower myself clean in the shower room and then enter the onsen for a hot, relaxing soak. If I had been in a public onsen with other naked guys around, I might have felt a little more self-conscious with my nudity, even in the water because it was so clean it was crystal clear. But with just me, I took full advantage of the steamy one-man nudist colony. I set up my little camera at the edge of the hot water tub to take a bunch of onsen photos of myself. There was no way to really get a good shot unless I really chanced putting the camera on the edge of the pool -- leaving it susceptible for falling in or steam up or getting drenched with the water level rising from displacement of my own body -- but I did it anyway for my own stupid amusement. Not very good common sense -- I don't know what the old woman at the Nikko tourist office was talking about -- I completely ignored the fact that I had a camera that broke because it got wet at Victoria Falls.

I posed in silly poses that one can when he's in an outdoor Japanese hot steam bath by himself in the middle of the countryside: pretending to be a Vietcong soldier, as a hippie about to drown, and the gratuitous ass cheek shot. Common sense? Really now; that old woman had me all wrong. If only she could have seen me then, she would have completely retracted her comments.

(With a photo like that last one, it's no wonder that third monkey was covering his eyes.)