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