the path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom

GETTING HIGH

i woke up at 5:15am yesterday exhausted, with sore legs, a blister on my right heel, and a can-do attitude.
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in a way i re-climbed the mountain to rectify an incongruity in self-perception. not in a negative way, like 'oh i failed' (i have an almost unshakable sense of self-belief/love and i'm not afraid to admit that - what are we without self belief?), but in a positive way, like "yeah bondy you can do this! so go for it!" i felt excited to see what i was capable of.
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i watched dawn from a temple 70 minutes up the mountain, then powered another 5 hours to the top. at the summit of zhonghe shan, (the third highest mountain in the region) there's a tv tower, where two men do 10 day shifts maintaining it before hiking back down. one guy invited me in and gave me a bowl of hot water and a towel. i didn't know what to do with it, so he said "wash your face". ugly doesn't wash off, but i washed my face anyway and left.

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the weather was perfect, and i felt so pumped that i took a 2 hour detour and climbed the second highest mountain in the region as well - yuju shan, at 4097m. there i am sitting by the cairn at 4097m! either the second or third highest point i've ever been on! (bit of confusion regarding how high fil and i actually were at pico bolivar in venezuela). i had my usual spell of crying and singing and dancing at the top of the mountain. climbing at altitude is god.
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i was a one-man fart factory all the way down. all in all, it was a solid 12 hours of hiking, but i returned to dali full of energy, with a deep down feeling of sublime contentment.

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didn't sleep a wink because the really fat ugly couple next door were having loud sex (which made my stomach turn to think about) and then started snoring like pigs until i hammered down the walls at 3am and told them to shut the fuck up.

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heading off to do the tiger leaping gorge trek over the next few days, and then might disappear for a while into western sichuan, so i'm not sure when i'll next blog. please keep sending me your updates! i love hearing from you all :)

moderation is a dirty word

i'm just going to rant for a while, because i'm in that sort of mood. if you're after a short blog, check back again some other time.

MORE ON FOOD

1) i didn't include a picture of 'gou rou' in my last blog, so here it is - ready and waiting for any watering mouth that happens by.

2) the word for animal in chinese is 'dong wu' which literally means 'moving thing'. as we have already learned in china, 'things' are good to eat, better to eat when they were once moving, and best to eat when they still are.

3) i've been asked what doggies taste like, but i have a lot of trouble distinguishing between the taste of different meats. for me it either tastes like chicken, or non-chicken. doggies taste like non-chickens.

4) most vegetarians i meet are broken by china. when you tell people that you don't eat meat, they look at you as if you've just told them that you enjoy touching your arsehole. a mild disgust, but an overwhelming curiosity at something so seemingly normal yet strange at the same time. it's a stream of consciousness that simply doesn't exist in china (vegetarianism, not arsehole touching - sniff your palm after shaking hands with any villager and you'll realise that they've most recently had the pleasure. they probably sniff their palms and realise the same of me...)

i've also included a picture of the pigs' penises (very rubbery) and a popsicle which made my stomach heave to even think about.

SINCE YANGSHUO

so i escaped the karsk mountains of yangshuo and caught a train to kunming, yunnan province. we arrived a massive 10 hours before i thought we would, so it was all a bit confusing. i think when i asked the ticket inspector what time we would arrive, she thought i was asking what time we wouldn't arrive, and gave me the correct answer to that question.

as soon as i got off the train and put my bags into a hostel, i headed for a nearby mountain range and scaled the highest peak i could find. the little trek taught me two things about china:

1) the chinese are disgusting litter bugs. disgusting horrible nasty little litter bugs.
2) the chinese hate hiking/love convenience. everyone complains that you can't get a moment's peace in china, but as soon as you walk 30 minutes into any forest or mountain range, you're almost assured of solitude. there's a lot of catching buses or chairlifts up mountains, but as soon as you've cleared the chairlift or bus-accessible areas, you won't see a soul.

for this reason i'm not too concerned about the opening of the beijing-lhasa railway in july this year. goodbye lhasa - yes - but until they build a chairlift to the top of mt kailash, i think the rest of tibet will be safe (for the time being)

THE TROUBLE WITH PEOPLE (THEY ARE DUMB BASTARDS)

sometimes when i pass groups of chinese people and say 'ni hao', i am met with deadening silence and staring, then scoffing and laughing as soon as i've walked away. fucking rude. it doesn't happen often, but it really started to get to me, much more than it probably should have. so i enacted my 'i can be a rude bastard too' action plan. these days if i say ni hao to a group and am met with silence, i repeat 'ni hao'. if there is still nothing, i call out 'doesn't anyone here speak chinese?' and then stare at every member of the crowd. if there is still nothing, i say 'oh my god! that's so embarrassing!' and then walk away. usually people are shocked or just pissed off when i say it. i know it's all a bit childish and not a good way of making friends, but i am left with a feeling that is most satisfactory.

now you may say 'oh it's cultural'. culture shmulture. there's a difference between culture-based behaviour and being a dumb bastard, and these people are dumb bastards.

dumb bastards are not only chinese of course. i met an american boy a few days ago (who wanted to start his own school of philosophy after taking mushrooms and having some sort of an unholy communion with a tree in amsterdam), who asked me what 'ni hao' meant (after having spent three weeks in china) and saw fit to refer to the chinese as 'those bloody chinks'. i had to remove myself from his presence immediately before i punched his fuck-ugly head in. clearly, there is no shortage of dumb bastards in the world, and china and america both contribute amply.

DALI - the mountains, ondrej, the mountains!

recipe for happiness: head to the highlands. climb mountains.

i arrived in dali yesterday. it's an old town which has been wonderfully restored, has a largish ethnic minority group population, and a really lovely laid-back feel. it's situated between a massive lake and a snow-dotted mountain range - yum.

this morning i wanted to conquer the nearby mt zhonghe, so i set out at the crack of dawn (with very little idea of where i was going). i strayed into a restricted military area, but two gorgeous uniformed boys came and set me straight (if that's at all possible), and i was soon heading up the mountain full speed.

the only hiccough was that i forgot toilet paper, but was given a whole roll by a man who owned a guest house about 2 hours up the mountain. not a minute too soon. for those of you who don't know, ondrej is actually an old slavic word for 'he of the unpredictable and often watery bowel motions'. a painful legacy to endure.

the trek took about 9 hours. it was one of the most varied treks i've walked. i wandered up through a large grave-yard area (in the country, people bury their dead on the mountainside among the trees. very nice). and then headed up a rock-scrambling dusty area into a pine forest. those amazing pine-needle carpeted forest floors hold a secret to my heart! before long, the scenery changed to an open grassy area - whole mountainsides covered in yellow grass, and then a steep area covered with azaleas, a massive outcropping of rocks, and finally into a wet moss-covered forest area, with areas of slate-grey boulders extending to the limits of vision. at this stage it started getting really cold, and i was walking through dense mist and pockets of snow. i had ascended nearly 2000 metres from dali (2km above sea level) to the mountain-top (4km above sea level), and at times was struggling to catch my breath because of the altitude. i was exhausted and my vision was a little bit 'different'. not quite blurry, but almost.

the final leg of the ascent was fucking cold, windy and i couldn't see much at all. i didn't know whether the stretch would take 30 minutes or two hours, as my (hand drawn) map and directions were really unclear. about 20 minutes up from the final turn-off, i reached an area where the wind almost blew me off the cliffside. the air was frigid (see picture of plant with horizontal ice on it, and picture of small mammal that died of exposure) and i was by myself, at least 4 hours walk from help. i saw the headline in my head 'australian dies in brainless mountain climbing attempt', so i did something that i thought i would never do: i turned back.

i turned back!

and so it was that i have returned to dali, exhausted, and found out from my hostel staff guy that the exact point where i turned around was only 15 minutes from the peak. oh!

on one hand i am proud of myself for turning back. for letting my instinct for self-preservation kick in and prevent some sort of harm.

but i can't help feeling a sense of disappointment - as proud and childish and silly as this may seem, ondrej doesn't like to believe that ondrej gives up. ever.

(moderation is a dirty word): tomorrow i climb again!

pic 1 - gou rou
pic 2 - pig's penis
pic 3 - vomit popsicle
pic 4, 7 + 8 - ondrej in the mountains (check out filthy rubbish on ground in 8)
pic 5 - fields of dali
pic 6 - food time
pic 9 + 10 - near the top of zhonghe shan
pic 11 - this one forgot his thermals
pic 12 - alpine flowers

hooray for china!

hello :)

so i'm still in yangshuo, the little town just south of guilin in guangxi province, southern china, but am spreading my wings and heading to yunnan province at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning. but first:

1) THE 10 WEEK TEARS: ONDREJ CRACKS THE SADS

recipe for sadness:

- avoid foreigners
- try to speak only chinese
- study whilst surrounded by karsk mountainsides exploding out of rice-paddies and ignore them
- mix ingredients for one week, reject the temptation to add a dash of annoying horny german boy, and allow to simmer on a background of sleep deprivation that leaves bags under your eyes that would have to be checked in (separately) as over-sized luggage at the airport.

for ondrej, it was a case of 'here's one i prepared earlier'.

certain ways of life cannot be transplanted, and i was bullshitting myself if i thought i was going to keep studying (hard) whilst on the road. i signed up for 5 classes at a chinese school here in yangshuo, but after one week, i had only got around to 3 of them, and i ended up cutting my last two in half and heading off (with my teacher) to eat apple crumble and drink beer at a local cafe. no - i've reverted to travel mode, but my study has not been in vain! since releasing myself from the shackles of self-expectation, i've been involved in chinese ping-pong tournaments, sitting with farmers at riverside campfires, having tea with villagers high in the mountains, and getting much more chinese practice than i was getting before. turns out you can have your cake and eat it too :) (grin)

i'm still keen as mustard to learn chinese, and every other evening, i can still do an hour or two of study - slowly slowly is the way with languages isn't it? but i felt that life is just too short not to get involved in all the rest of if as well. gotta have fun.

often it's the worst times that teach us the most about ourselves; i learnt some really valuable lessons last week, and then, coming out of my depression, i regained a sense of adventure and self-confidence that i don't think i've had since the end of 2004. a sense that life - everything about it - is just amazing, a sense of my own life being exactly that, a sense of having emerged from a rut (a cave, a hole), a sense of deep down contentment not marred by complacency, and a sense of regret that i signed that damned contract with queensland health that forces me to cut short my travels and come back to australia later this year :( if anyone can find that document, destroy it, and 'neutralise' all the queensland health people who know about it, i would be much obliged.

happy easter to all who celebrate it! i didn't realise it was easter until my hostel owner came to me and started talking about 'the guy who died'. i felt awful until a few minutes later when i finally realised what he was talking about. he asked me if i celebrated and i said:

O: "well no...i don't have a god"
M: (grins) "neither do i! want a beer?!"

though i saw many buddhists in beijing, i have yet to actually talk to anyone in china who believes in any sort of god. it's one of the many reasons i feel so safe here, on many levels.

and i do. i love it here. go china! hooray for china!

2) SO A SWISS-GERMAN INSURANCE CLERK, AN EX-ISRAELI ARMY OFFICER AND AN AUSTRALIAN DOCTOR WERE WALKING THROUGH A RICE PADDY IN THE SOUTH OF CHINA...

heard that one already? that pretty much sums up what i've been doing for the last few days and with whom i've been doing it. one of these guys (nir) has been on the road for a year now and the other (rene) has been going for 2 and a half with a tent in his pack and everything - puts my petty wandering to shame, and inspires me to see so much more. the people one meets...incredible.

so what have i seen? renting some bikes, we went up and down the yulong river, a tributary of the mighty li. this is basically a valley surrounded by karsk mountainsides filled in with rice-paddies and fields of every vegetable imaginable.

we hopped on a boat and floated up and down the li itself north of xingping - an area considered by some to be the most beautiful place in china, and even the world. a huge river with bizarre peaks shooting out of it covered in lush green foliage. beautiful without a doubt, but i think the bogong high plains have still got it beat. and on and on through rice paddies, hills, fields and other such lushness. most of the pictures from this blog entry are from these wanderings.

3) FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD!

i went to a silk workshop and saw silk-worm cocoons being torn open, the worm expelled and the silk stretched over a special cane silk-worm-cocoon-stretcher-thingy before being hung up to dry and silk woven from it. interesting. on my way out i speared a few fried silk worms with a toothpick and threw them down the hatch. yes - it's china - and if anything has ever lived and breathed, then it will be available for consumption at the local eatery. lock the door at night.

to date i've eaten the said silkworms, chicken feet, pig's penises, entire frogs and a variety of other nameless animals (including their faces), but nothing prepared me for the exquisite pleasure of my latest find:

practicing my chinese, i went to a little eatery that operated out of a butcher's market. i asked if they had 'gou rou', and the woman said 'of course' and pointed to a pot. inside, slices of man's best friend lay glistening in the afternoon sun - pearly with fat, dripping with the promise of flavour.

i sat at a little table and took lassie between my twitching chopsticks. i could barely contain myself. man bites dog. he melted in my mouth - succulent, tender - and my eyes rolled back in ecstasy as he slid past my palate.

i felt like the child actor kristen dunst in 'interview with the vampire' after she drains her first victim of blood as i turned back to my plate of pooch and thought "...i want some more".

and so it was that i devoured my first big bowl full of dog, vegetables and rice. a delight as pure as the driven snow. it has been a turning point for me, as i've never really liked dogs before. but now i love them. it's true what they say, and fido knows this better than anyone else: a way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

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pic 1 - mother is close, father is close, but no-one is as close as chairman mao

pic 2 - farmer near xingping

pic 3 - rice paddies near xingping

pic 4 - the mighty li

pic 5 + 7 - karsk mountainsides

pic 6 - in the paddies

pic 8 - the boys on the rooftops of ...

pic 9 - rene and ondrej on board

pic 10 - froglicious

pic 11 - chow down on the unrecognisable

pic 12 - cutey

PART THREE - back to china :)

after getting myself sorted on many levels, it was time to get back to china.

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after only 3 hours sleep, on wednesday morning i caught a train from hong kong to guangzhou (business visa in czech passport a complete success).

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my train didn't leave until the afternoon, so i put my bags into storage and went wandering around the hot little city. there was a nice park and a cool 9 storey pagoda temple, but nothing too amazing.

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as soon as i crossed the border into china, i instituted my 'zero english' policy. using the czech passport helps, as i can claim that i don't know any english at all, and though it's already been really difficult at times (during the last two days of being here), it's those frustrating occasions when i think it's most important for me to keep calm and not try and find someone who speaks english for help. despite everything else, the main reason i'm here is to learn chinese.

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instead of getting a sleeping car ticket (like the handful of other westerners on the train) i got a normal hard-seat for my 14 hour train ride from guangzhou to guilin. when i saw where i had to sit - a rigid seat squashed between two other people in a carriage filled with chinese people screaming, squatting, spitting and wide-eyed with wonder at the white curiosity, i could only think one thought: 'ondrej, you are about to have the single worst experience of your entire life'.

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admittedly, it was uncomfortable, but no-where near as bad as i thought it would be. the chinese word for 'everyone' is 'big family', and i soon came to realise why. as i sat on my seat with the chick opposite me's feet in my lap, my own legs wrapped by the legs of the guy next to her (who was listening to my mp3 player) whilst the guy next to me tried to read my book and the guy on the other side leaned on me in his sleep while i ate the food of the people behind me, i thought: this is the 'real' chinese experience. this is the real deal. people shouting, food sellers blasting through the carriage every minute, everyone sprawled all over each other, everyone so friendly...

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i didn't sleep a wink and for the record: the next time i catch a long distance train, i'm taking a sleeper - i don't care what it costs...

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when i was a child, i saw a documentary on some people who were riding their bikes through china. there was one place they went where there were these limestone cliffs, covered in greenery, that just came jutting straight out of rice paddies at bizarre angles, and it looked like the most amazing place in the world. i mistakenly thought it was in sichuan province, and though i don't have many things that i've 'always wanted to do', since seeing that documentary as a boy, i have dreamed of going to that place - of 'riding a bike through sichuan province'. it's not in sichuan, it's here in guangxi province - around the hip little town of yangshuo where i've set up camp. the cliffs are truly amazing - they're all around us, with the town crammed in between peaks, and they're EXACTLY like i remember them from the documentary! as soon as i saw them from the mini-bus from guilin to yangshuo, i started crying like a little boy - the same little boy who had been awestruck in front of the tv 15 years ago...

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i have to say that achieving your dreams is everything it's cracked up to be. everything. and more.

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the only other place i've 'always' wanted to go is north-eastern siberia, but i'll have to wait a few years for that.

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i haven't taken any photos yet in yangshuo (all of these are from guangzhou), so i'm sorry about that, but i'll upload a heap next time i blog. i'm going to do some chinese classes here, ride my bike through the rice paddies, walk along the legendary li river and just relax.

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life's great :)

PART TWO - hong kong

the waiting finished last sunday, when it was time to go to hong kong. the main reason i went was to renew my visa, so i'll tell you about that first.

i jumped on a plane and flew to shenzhen, then boarded a ferry to hong kong, where i mistakenly entered on my australian passport. to update those who have forgotten or didn't care in the first place, i have a one year tourist visa in my australian passport that only allows me to stay in china for 30 days at a time. how inconvenient! my czech passport had nothing in it.

when i tried to get a new chinese visa at a private company on monday morning, they told me that i couldn't use my czech passport because i didn't have a hong kong entry stamp in it, and couldn't use my aussie passport unless the current (useless) visa was cancelled. (i knew i had been rolled by the consulate-general in melbourne).

i went to chinese embassy in hong kong for the cancellation. the elevator doors swung open and suddenly there i was in the biggest 'waiting place' in the world. dr seuss would have been thrashing in his grave. there were about a million people there waiting for their numbers to be called, some with the lemon-sucking expressions of people who have been waiting all their lives. i took my number - 140, and went and sat down to fill in my form. the screen was blinking '40'. when i finished 5 minutes later, i looked up to see a big number '41'. i thought: fuck that, tore up my application form and 30 minutes later i was on a jetcat cruising to macau, where i spent the day before re-entering hong kong on my czech passport, in which i successfully got a visa the following morning.

the person i dealt with was a teeny bopper with black nail-polish and big fuck-off boots called 'miss kiko'. she disappeared with my passport in the morning, and reappeared hours later with a 6-month business visa plastered at a rude angle on one of the pages of my czech 'cestovni pas'. her company was in a tiny room on the 13th floor of a building in an obscure part of hong kong, which i only knew about because my local contacts had scanned the newspapers for me the night before and found it. the company was called 'profit reap international'. i just love the honesty of that name - don't you?

macau was great with its fusion of portuguese and chinese architecture and slabs of pork to be eaten as the local delicacy (see picture). i even climbed onto the roof of one church and found a full skeleton lying around - bizarre and weird...they probably don't think people climb on church rooves in that part of the world...

the pollution both there and in hong kong was just horrendous. i'm told that 3 people died after the last hong kong marathon, but i'm suprised anyone actually crossed the finish line. it just hangs over everything and obscures your view, gets in your eyes, your clothes, your lungs...everywhere.

the weather, however, was perfect. really hot and humid, so that when i went out walking, it would only take a few minutes before my clothes would be plastered to my body and the sweat would just run off me. i was positively transported to a new level of happiness. at night i left the air con off and slept like a baby as the temperatures soared. maybe i'm hypothyroid. i'm sure that's a better explanation for the gut than the fried chicken and snickers i can't stop eating. (the horror...yes...the horror...).

the part of hong kong i lived in - causeway bay - was heaving. people packed onto the streets at all hours of the day and night, more so than any other place i've been in. awesome - just awesome. i have always maintained that as long as i have a room or a place i can go to where i can shut the door and have my own little space, a city can never be too busy. my boundaries were certainly tested with hong kong, and at times i almost felt like there were too many people...(for someone who had just been diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer and returned home to find their house burnt to the ground and their own mother implicated as the arsonist).

on tuesday i crossed the island by bus, only 12 hours after doing the same thing in the passenger seat of a porsche with the top down and the wind in my hair.

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the bus was pretty crazy, but to be fair...the porsche was better.

having said that, if adam had been around, there would have been no contest as to the preferred means of transport. none whatsoever.

i visiting some beaches on the south side of the island, including a temple with a bridge in front of it that is supposed to lengthen your life by three days every time you cross it (hopefully it gave back the three days i lost from inhaling the poisonous air). then i hiked across the island to the city in the north. one minute you're surrounded by sky-scrapers - some of the tallest buildings in asia and the world - and 15 minutes later you're in a lush mountainous national park with eagles soaring overhead. just wonderful.

i watched the nightly light show from the deck of the famous star ferry as it crossed the harbour, and the following morning headed back to china.

general comments:

1) hong kong is suprisingly un-multicultural, despite calling itself 'asia's world city', and i was suprised by how many people didn't speak english. surely they haven't forgotten the language since the handover less than a decade ago? i reckon more than half the people i talked to on the street spoke no english whatsoever...just not what i expected.

2) after having pampered my ear with mandarin for the last month, i found the sound of cantonese to be just awful.

3) even though i was having a pretty wild time, i coudn't help feeling excited about the prospect of getting back to the mainland. yes the rumours that i have a new love in my life are true! i'm head over heels for china :)

PART ONE - down and out in wudaokou, beijing

dr seuss was right when he described his horror as 'the waiting place'.

waiting around just saps your energy...you invest it all in what is to come and have nothing left for what still is.

that pretty much sums up my general state of mind in the last two weeks of beijing-bondy. well...a bit. it was definitely a down-time. what was i waiting for? well i was waiting to leave beijing...

the weekend i moved out with my 'friend' into the suburbs, sibastian arrived in beijing (rather unexpectedly but delightfully) and we moved into a hotel together. the poor thing had to put up with me day and night until we got different rooms in the second week. i cited exhaustion as my main reason for the move. though i'm precious at th best of times (and we all know it), with bastion breathing like a freight train in the next bed (technically it wasn't snoring...) i found that i slept lightly if at all, and i was zombie-like during the day. my weekend excesses and indescretions didn't help.

to add insult to injury, when i did wake up in the morning i did so with my eyes shut, and couldn't open them until after my second fried chicken burger, if not fourth (oh the horror...the horror...)

during the days we attended the korean focused mandarin school, but i found the classes to be so devastatingly slow and boring that i spent most of my time fantasising about rugby tackling my teacher and punching her head in, and would alternate between states of irrepressible giggling and frank paranoia. it was absurd. in the second week i dropped out.

we attended a beijing opera, which was fabulous. the highlight for me was an acrobatic act involving a girl riding a 1 and a half metre unicycle. she put one bowl on her head, three bowls along one foot that was stuck out in the air, and then gave a kick so that the three bowls flew up over her body, spun around and then stacked themselves neatly onto the head-bowl, all the while balancing on this fricken 1 and a half metre unicycle! it was crazy, but that's how they do the dishes here in china.

on my last day in beijing, bastion and i went out to the summer palace, a huge complex (75% covered by lakes) used by the royals to escape the blistering heat of the forbidden city in the warmer months. it was one of those places where you feel this really deep sense of calm coming over you as you stroll by the weeping willow-lined shores of the chinese garden lakes. i felt that it was no wonder that in the setting of agressive western military provocation at the turn of the century, dowager empress cixi misappropriated funds meant for building a navy and used them to spruce up a bit of the lake. at least someone had their head screwed on properly! as an aside, this cixi was one mean bitch, but you can google her if you're interested.

i'll make four general comments about beijing:

1) JOBS FOR CHINA. it seemed that in every store, restaurant or hotel we went into, the number of staff always outnumbered the clients. it was crazy. you'd walk into a restaurant and get served by three waitresses, or walk past a phone shop and there would be (at least in one where i counted in wudaokou) over 50 members of staff in an area the size of 4 standard high school classrooms. our hotel had so many live-in staff it was a wonder they had any room for patrons...

2) people. there are so many people in china, and i just love it. even in the suburbs of beijing where we were staying (and that is the last time i live more than 10 minutes walking distance from any city centre), the streets were just heaving with people at all hours - it's so alive, such a wonderful feeling.

3) it was really nice hanging around with bastion. even through my pall of fatigue and general irritability, a good friend is like a warm blanket that just wraps around you and keeps you snug. hmmm.

4) all the photos here are of the summer palace, except the last two pictures, which are of some of the things on sale over here. the first is a blanket-load of endangered species' bits and bobs that i found on a street corner (next to a box of dogs). you might notice the piece of wood with the nail in it (to hit the animal?) and the tool used to saw off its paws (presumably whilst it was still alive). the second are seahorses and scorpions - the latter impaled but still alive and wriggling - waiting at a street stall to be fried for general consumption. anyone else crawling up the wall?