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Articles Tagged ‘Sichuan’

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Sleeping with the beasts

Friday, August 10th, 2007

The morning I left Litang the industrious street cleaners were already at work: two tubby pot-bellied pigs sniffing at the pavement curb and meticulously consuming all the rubbish in their way. It gives recycling a whole new dimension…

The bus dropped me off in Kangding, a forgetable but convenient cross roads town used for passing through and not discovering. The town equivalent of a one-night stand. Nestled deep in the folds of a valley, its life force is a torrentious river coursing through its centre.
The only notable event happened on my last night just before I fell asleep. I kept on hearing scraping, shuffling noises outside the window, I thought it was people coming back to their rooms. Finally I got up and looked through my window which overlooked a narrow alley. To my utter horror I looked down on a man’s head, climbing up the wall (I was on the 2nd floor), towards my open window. With the volume pumped up to max, my voice was my only weapon: “Hey, what are you doing??”, I hollered at the faceless intruder. Thank god spiderman didn’t think it necessary to answer my idiotic enquiery into his crepuscular activities. It was enough to change his mind and he lurched onto the other side of the alley wall, scrambled onto the roof, and melted back into the amorphous darkness.
I had to tie the window closed with my shoelaces, as the iron pegs were missing (from a previous burglary?). While doing so it dawned on me that I have no problems in dealing with a prospective burglar, but confronted with a cockroach in my room, I’m reduced to a pathetic, hysterical wreck who has to accost complete strangers to kill or get rid of the harmless ‘tresspasser’.
I’ll be the one in the safari park that would rather throw herself into the jaws of a lion than stay in the car with a grasshopper. [read on]

The sound of an endangered people

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

Thurs-Sunday, 14-17 June

The hope of an easy day’s ride to Xiancheng vanished with the end of the paved road, just outside Zhongdian. The lady selling tickets to Xiancheng, under 200km from Zhongdian , informed me it would take 9 hours. I naturally assumed there was a misunderstanding.

But an hour later, sitting at the arse end of the bus, I realised there had been no mistake. My ordeal had just begun. Full of bumps and potholes, the road followed the contours of the land, up and down mountains, scraping around the rock faces and boulders, horn hooting. This route is known as the Sichuan-Tibet Highway (the bus was wider than the road, so “Highway” must be refering to the altitude…). Lonely Planet describes it as “one of the world’s highest, roughest, most dangerous and most beautiful roads”.
Every now and then the driver had to stop to remove a rock from the road. Another time the bus slammed into a ditch and its rear end swung out 45 degrees towards the precipice. I looked out the rear window. The back wheel was 1 inch over the edge of the road, below the sheer drop the river raged like a caged lion. The driver made a joke, some polite passengers giggled nervously. It was bump and grind all the way. At times I levitated so high from my seat, it felt like I was competing in the Calgary Rodeo. All I needed was a wet bikini and a beer in one hand. [read on]