Meaning Lite @meaninglite - Tumblr Blog

First Morning in Rwanda

Stepping out of the Kigali airport felt like stepping into a garden: clean, damp fresh air, the green of palms and other plants in every direction.

Packs on, we decided to walk the hour from the airport to our guesthouse. The day was fine, and I was eager to meet the city.

At seven in the morning, the streets of Rwanda's capital were lively: moto-taxis and cars buzzed around traffic circles, and foot traffic on the wide sidewalk outside the airport consisted of young and old in a colorful mix of western and African clothes.

Our clothes made us stick out as much as our packs and the color of our skin. Locals wear clothes of all sorts, but it's either very neat and stylish, or thoroughly worn work clothes. Our layers of tech-hiking fabric were out of concept here, and drew attention.

Seeking quieter passage, I led us onto a smaller street. Only the main roads in Kigali are paved; the rich red mud of this passage was deeply carved by rainfall. We drew immediate stares from the group of young men outside the canteen, the woman balancing a full sack on her head, the children on their way to school. A few brave kids tested shy "hi"s on us.

Kigali is a city spread out over several hills- you can see it in the way streets curve on a map to stay level. It's a terrace of buildings, but also crops: we found a plot of squash in the dirt between wall and road. The bottom of the canyon we contoured was green with vegetable fields, and a woman hoed tall purple stalks on land by the street.

Water carrying seems to be a common morning chore. Women balance the jerrycans sideways on their heads; men carry them in their arms.

People stared at us, but it was not unfriendly - more confused by the spectacle. Three young women approached me, and one held out her hand like a high five, which I wasn't sure how to handle. It turned into an awkward hug and handshake for each of us. They giggled as we continued on our separate ways.

In a schoolyard, young children were learning English with activity: "I am a-jumping, I am a-jumping! I am a-running, I am a-running!" As of 2011, all schools must teach in English, though previously instruction had been in Kinyarwanda (which everybody seems to default to here) in lower grades, and in French in high school.

The language change is meant to help Rwanda grow in international commerce (it worked in Singapore, and Rwandan president Paul Kagame is explicitly following the ideas of Lee Kuan Yew!)

In practice, it means that since we don't speak Kinyarwanda, we can count on younger people speaking English with us, but are better off trying French with older adults.

We stopped in at a small, no-electricity roadside shop for "apple drink" from the glass case under the counter, tiny sweet bananas, and fried dough balls. The owner carefully added the price in front of us.

The day warned as we walked, and we were soon pink-faced. I kept choosing side streets, because some of the cars on bigger roads made it hard to breathe with their thick black exhaust.

By the time we made it to our guesthouse, our bodies had fully remembered the forty or so hours since we'd last seen beds. We were still hours early for check in, but we hoped they would at least hold our bags.

Luck was with us. The young man who met us checked us in right away and showed us to our room: a double off of a grassy courtyard where laundry hung on lines.

We all but fell onto the firm beds with their lacy mosquito net canopies, and soon were dead asleep.

Seattle to Nairobi

When I left for college, I remember a strange anticipatory emptiness. My boxes were packed, and I'd said my goodbyes. I sat at the piano, filling time and feeling like there must be homework I'd forgotten. But there was nobody to assign homework anymore. There was only time before a flight- and whatever comes next.

This morning was the same. I finished my taxes, shut off my laptop, and put it in a drawer. My last-minute AirBnB guests checked out, so I cleaned the cabin. At the piano bench, I played Yiruma on repeat. I walked through the house, brushed the cats one last time. My blue backpack sat propped against the wall: ready.

As leaving time approached, Rick's and Eileen's packs joined mine against the wall.

Ten hours passed uneventfully on Lufthansa's Frankfurt leg. It was daylight when we left, then dark, then sunrise through the airplane window. The world spun west as we chased east, speeding time.

We bused to and from our planes, which had parked on the tarmac. We chased through a huge, windowed maze of terminals and security, descending a final stair to ground floor with our flight already boarding.

On the plane to Nairobi, Americans on mission trips conversed at takeoff, getting to know each other.

"You got orphanages you're headed to? I heard you were going to set up Wifi."

"Yeah, we got 'em wells, solar power, lots of good stuff."

"Got a lot of movies on this flight!"

"You see the Black Panther movie yet? Bit of an African flavor to that one."

"Shape of Water was a weird one, I guess it won a lot of awards."

In front of me, a niqabi woman made conversation with Eileen, her eyes crinkling often as she smiled.

I sleep a little.

My first view of the African continent is sunset from the sky. I sit up to see that the clouds have cleared and the view from my window is a vivid orange.

Moving map shows me we're near Khartoum, and through its direction I look past the wing to a dusk-darkened glimpse of the Nile.

The sky's orange streaks through with a last-hurrah light blue, then fades to black.

It's raining in Nairobi when we land, and we're in it, so I'm smiling. Fat, warm drops hit the back of my neck as I descend to the dark tarmac.

The airport shows signs of rapid growth: the area we enter is a long corridor of prefab walls and moveable dividers outlining completely empty rooms.

The main terminal is dim but clean, and peopled with tired travelers. Airport announcements start with "jambo" and end with "asante", though there is also English spoken and more light-skinned faces than I expect.

We take our daily malaria prevention pills; Eileen notes, "two down, sixty-eight to go."

We find an area near our gate- a few benches without armrests- and lay down. This is our accommodation; eight hours until our final flight to Kigali, Rwanda.

How I Spend My Time

It has been cold here, so cold the rounds of wood freeze where they lay, a tree in sections, on the hill.

The sunshine is yellow enough that if you didn't catch the glimmer of the frost you might think: summer. But I layer on two wool shirts, a sweater, work gloves. I wear my kevlar-reinforced jeans– they're thick, and maybe I won't use them to ride on motorcycles anymore.

Axe, iron splitting wedge, and heavy maul ding against each other in the gray wheelbarrow, bumping up the hill. My breath fogs the air.

The rounds are huge, so big I can't lift them onto the chopping block. I strike with the sharp end of the maul, making a dent. They wobble on the soft moss and wiry stems of salal. I set the wedge.

Frozen wood wants to bounce the wedge back out, so I hold it with my left and bring the maul up with my right, over and over pounding, striking choked up on the four-foot handle like it's a hammer with a very heavy head. I know I'm in when I've passed the frozen outside and dark moisture starts to seep up around the iron. Then I can strike at full strength, both hands sliding down the handle to its very end as I swing the long circle back, overhead, pounding down. The sound rings sharp in the air.

Split rounds are still huge, but I wrestle them up to the chopping block. On a warmer day, drier wood, maybe I could switch to the lighter axe, but on a day like today it will stick in the stubborn wood. So it's the blunter maul I swing down again. High notes ting out of the cold wood as it splits and flies away into the bushes, firewood to be gathered.

In the house, I pour dry beans into a pot of water and set it on the woodstove. I poke up the fire, turn the bowl on the hearth where dough is rising.

In my room, three cats laze– it's the warmest place in the house. One has claimed the bed, one, the chair by the heater, the third, the top of the closet under the incandescent light. One of them looks up sleepily and licks her paw as I gather my books.

I work by pomodoro timer: twenty-five minutes on, five off. I'm reading, mostly. Twenty-eight pages a day of Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs; four or more cycles of research on climate change. In the breaks, I make tea, stretch and fold sourdough, change the laundry.

The house is empty but for me, the cats, and robots– the laundry machine runs often with the Airbnb. I have guests nearly every night, three rooms rented out, but they keep to themselves. I change the sheets for ghosts who muss the bed and disappear quietly in the morning. My vacuum runs itself at ten each morning.

Some days, I make progress; I am drawn in. I'm reading a report by the California Public Utilities Commission on how they'll meet state goals for renewable energy– why they'll have specific technical needs. I take notes, build out my glossary, re-publish by git commit several times in a day. Finding needs means finding possibilities– it's a space where someone can make a difference. I write.

Some days, I can't work still. A sadness comes and I find myself desolate, inconsolate, I cast my PDFs aside. I can't tell if it's the same sadness that made me need to leave, or the sadness of the leaving itself that overwhelms me.

I make a pot of tea, wrap myself in a blanket by the fire, one of the cats comes. I read and whisper fiercely to myself: I am in chrysalis.

I don't love routine; I love woods and freedom and the way it's okay for me to be anywhere at any time. But I have habits when I wake: practice Swahili and then French and then Chinese, then sit up one hundred crunches. Wake my mind and then my body before I rise and make the bed.

The timer makes it easier to move thoughtlessly, it lets me dedicate time to just one thing, I must focus for another so many minutes. Chop onions in the gap time and put them in a pan on the woodstove– it could be venison chili, but it's ewa agoyin today because I've decided to learn some African cuisines.

I go out, some nights. But nights I'm here are quiet. I practice piano and guitar, but I'm not up long once the sun is down. No light means dinner and bed, maybe pie from chopped apples if I've taken time to make it.

I'm careful, climbing into bed, to not disturb the cat; she's left my blankets warm. She's happy to see me.

I read, breathe, meditate. I fall asleep.

Climbing at the Emeralds

Stretches from the back of a motorcycle: Hold your knee out to the side and let the 80mph wind blow it back, a hip opener. Roll backward and forward slightly on the seat to change which part of the glutes go numb. Round your foot inside your shoe until the sole in contact with the foot peg vibrates out of phase with your foot. Let the engine thrum massage your plantar. Lift your fingers, palms down, and let the wind buffet your gloved hands into a gentle forearm stretch - a good stretch for climbers. We moved back to Berkeley in a week: decided on a Monday, got a rental car that Saturday and drove it up with our cat and all of our stuff. We didn't really tell anyone because it seemed inevitable. It's good to get out of the city. To use a weekend as though each day were not equally self-scheduled time. The flat center of the state is hot, black pavement reflecting up onto motorcycle-gear black leather. It's 9pm by the time we're through Sacramento, and still no evening chill. The cool comes suddenly: an hour out from the mountains, the cool air running downslope and bringing the heady vanilla smell of Ponderosas. Finally among trees, I tilt my helmet-heavy head back to see the sudden enormity of a sky deep with stars. It was hard to find Jia and Nic in the dark of the campground - we buzzed the loop twice looking for Nic's white Miata, wincing at the motorcycle noise. Finally, we walked down the hill to the lake, found our tent already set up behind the RVs, by the trail to the water's edge. In the morning, driving to The Emeralds, Nic and Jia look like a perfect California road trip: top down on their two-seat car, winding through canyoned PG&E land. Sweet peas are blooming at the edge of the redwoods; an aqueduct snakes down the valley and rushes cold under our road. The South Fork of the Yuba River is clear green and snowmelt-cold. Parking, we read Mountain Project descriptions of the trail to the climbing routes: "Pass a bench made of tree stumps and metal. Follow cairns across a talus slope." Someone has uploaded a hand-drawn map to the photos, but it isn't very good, so it's a treasure hunt to find the climbing routes. We hear voices through the trees, scramble up onto a ledge as described in the comments. Our routes are here; we see the little silver bolts dotting the wall. We snack, arrange our gear, set up. Outdoor climbing is not like gym climbing. The rock is sharper, sometimes gritty with dirt. Holds are less clear than the colored grips at the gym; you have to feel around to find ledges in the granite and quartz seams. I'm on lead for the first climb: I'm setting the gear, bringing the rope up with me. You hook in as you go, so if I fall, the rope will catch me. But it catches from below rather than above; a fall could be my bodylength or more. I don't want to fall, so I grip more tightly, move more cautiously than in the gym. I jam my hand in a gravelly crack, hard enough that the granite leaves indents in the back of my hand. The crux is an overhang, a crack like a triangle pointing down. I press my body into the crack, resting my weight as I scrabble for a hold above the lip with my right hand. It takes me a long time to find a hold I'm sure I have a grip on, so I'm here braced in that triangle for a while, my back to the wall, shoulders hunched slightly against the rock. I work my grip-soled feet up the little ridges on the face of the rock. Finally, I can reach a good grip with my left hand, so I hold tight, pull up and around the lip, above the safety of the triangle crack. Find holds for my feet, grab a quickdraw carabiner from my hip, clip in to the next highest bolt while holding the wall with one hand. A breeze blows down the valley, and I look out to see endless rock and trees, lovely wild-ish land for miles. At the top, it's a juggle of gear. I clip into the bolts, so I can rest as I set up an anchor, checking knots and locking carabiners. Unhook gear from my waist, clip and twist to lock on the bolts. Run the rope from my waist through the anchor rig, and I can unhook to rappel down. We climb until the sun breaks over our wall, blinding and roasting. We have to climb more to retrieve our gear, so everyone is too hot and thirsty by the time we're down to the shade of the trees. We seek out the stream, so cold nobody really wants to swim. We filter water and sit on big rocks while bluebottle dragonflies skim the clear green surface.

New Jack City

we went motorcycle camping the other night and let me tell you motorcycles are not at all like cars when you are on them for three hours (which turns into five or six hours because you stop to stretch)

your butt gets numb while you are riding and so you pull over at a gas station and you get off and stretch and it's hard not too look cool in your padded leather but I assure you it can be managed

it just feels good to move a lot of ways when you have been sitting in one position. so there's me and Jon and a bag of peanuts and he decides to skip and hop across the empty parking lot in order to get moving, and I'm standing there with the bike eating peanuts and then suddenly there are cars coming into the parking lot and Jon keeps skipping because he's committed now, gotta stay cool, sometimes motorcycle dudes frolic

and then back on the freeway, it's night now, and my jeans are reinforced with Kevlar but at 70mph it's still a chill wind. so when we stop and get a rotisserie (which we eat in the parking lot as dinner), I don't want to let go of the warm plastic bag it came in all full of warm chicken fat so I just stick it in my jacket and it's like a small cuddly animal except that it's really a bag of bones in my shirt while I ride on the back of a motorcycle

you can't really do anything on the back of a motorcycle, just sit there and look at things and everything is the sound of wind. so I'm just staring into the dark landscape, watching ridgelines backlit by city glow. and then a while later, a different ridgeline, but the glow is so bright that I'm trying to imagine what type of city would have so much light as this

the light behind the ridge is so bright, lighting purple into the clouds from below, and it looks like a storm in the tropics, but frozen in a flash, hot lightning suspended in humid air. then suddenly I see an edge and realize all in a moment that what I'm watching is the rising of the giant moon and it hangs there full and so bright that everything now has shadows

when we get to the desert it's already late at night, orion in the sky behind us, and the road turns instantly to sand. we're foolish on our city motorbike and take that sand road anyway, tires so smooth they don't even kick up a dust cloud

the sand gets deeper and we fishtail a little but we keep going because we've already committed to a bad idea and yeah we could turn around but you know how it goes- you start, and say to yourself: well, I'm already doing this. and you don't stop even though you know you're digging yourself deeper

we keep going until we can't see the lights of any towns, finally can't hear any cars, and the cold smell is all sand and sagebrush. it's moonscape in moonlight, sharp-relief hills sloping distant like a lava plain, joshua trees reaching skyward, outlined in silver

sometimes when the sand gets deep I have to get off and walk so Jon can take chances with the motorbike. The bike is quiet, and on this road I can walk faster than he can ride sometimes. it feels good to move, and breathe, and feel the emptiness of the place we've found. I feel like an astronaut walking the cold sand in my padded gear and motorcycle helmet

we are getting to the campsite on the access road, and it's nearly midnight but we're almost there. but suddenly the road slopes up and it's just straight up in front of us, like 70 degrees. the bike slips back a little. I hop off, walk up. I'm giddy-tired. it's really our road, and we really can't take it.

it's a desert, though, so there's lots of soft ground. we back up some tens of meters, to a boulder maybe thirty feet tall and standing alone. and there's a campfire ring, and some clear ground. so we stop, dismount in the moonlight. I gaze up at the cliff of a ridge that blocks us but is so tall and close I feel a frission just to be here under it like it might crash down on me. in the shadow of the boulder, we pitch the tent and go to sleep

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New Normal

We're at the rock climbing gym every day. I pull back my fingers to stretch my forearms every couple of minutes, then get back to typing.

We work on our laptops in the upstairs area of the Mission Valley Mesa Rim. It's a 20-minute commute on Jon's motorcycle, and it gets us out of the house. It defines a work schedule: when we're here, we're working towards startup ideas to counter climate change.

We're reading reports, data tables, stats, lists, legislation changes. We're feeling out the pinch points for climate change. What can we kick to move the system? What can we do to maximize impact?

Every book, link, site, spawns endless more references. There's more to fact check. This data, presented in a table or as an API, needs to be graphed and interpreted. The reports are massive, hundreds of pages of dry documentation. But if you can focus, get your head into it, these reports tell you where to pay attention.

I lift my leg onto the stool and stretch as I read, laptop sitting on the standing bar looking out to the bouldering area. Climbers reach, pull, jump fall. It's background noise that energizes and blends with the ongoing indie gym music beat.

Every couple of minutes, one of us turns to the other with an idea, an insight:

–"Look how much of our domestic energy use is consumed by paper, this is crazy."

–"Apparently the renewable energy portfolio requirements are only met because our demand is increasing. Does that mean that if demand falls off, we cripple the entry of new renewables plants?"

Did your eyes glaze? It's a lot of terms, facts, systems within systems.

We dip naan chunks in hummus, crunch red bell peppers with our eyes on the screen. Eventually, we lose focus, shift to physical, climb until our hands can't grip anymore. And back to the laptops again.

We're still in a between place, traveling, but San Diego is like a home. We're here for a full month. It feels like forever to a couple that, for months, hasn't slept five nights in the same place.

It's family, holidays at the house. A full house, with Jon's niece Emmy at two and a half now speaking strung-together words, his sister, his mom, their two other housemates.

Weekday mornings, you can hear each person get up at a different hour.

I come downstairs, practicing Mandarin with my phone, while Jon's sister gets ready for work. Emmy's at the counter, drawing, looking at card books, staining her mouth grey-blue with frozen blueberries. She quietly repeats the words I'm saying to herself: new sounds, since I'm reading Mandarin flashcards aloud while heating tea.

Emmy throws words together, and sometimes they make sense. Some words, she just throws out every once in a while: "Unka Jon!" greeting Jon, or sometimes just something she likes to say.

We always get a slower start than we mean to, so our work time feels short. But it's concentrated, intense with our laptops at the gym. No distractions, I shift foot to foot, stand, sit, sway while I read and think.

We're getting somewhere.

A Conference in Singapore

It's a rainstorm in Singapore. We sit in the glass-ceilinged Capitol Plaza sipping craft beer and listening to thunder crash. The air in Singapore has been heavy and humid for three days, so it's a relief to see the water fall, sheets of water overflowing from the gutters.

It's good, too, to be done with our talks. JSConf Asia 2016 is nearly over. I gave my talk yesterday morning, demonstrating the basics of digital communication on the Capitol Theater stage. Jon and I spent all day today teaching a class of 25 how to read datasheets and build hardware libraries.

Kesley doing hardware surgery in front of a audience of 500 - @SelkeyMoonbeam at #jsconfasia #minitheoryatjsconf pic.twitter.com/XVaFHXIvIo

— Jacob Tan 🤓 (@jacobtyq) November 25, 2016

It's hard work, but it's fun. Our learners are eager and engaged. The conference is supportive, and we're supplied with everything we could need.

You would think the transition from backpacking in rice paddies to teaching firmware in Singapore would take more time, but both experiences are immediate. Both have an edge of surreality.

This conference, like most of the others, I'm seeing friends again. All around the world, the cast of speakers includes a few familiar faces. I see Ruth from England, Myles from New York, Raquel from Oakland, Thomas- who we met in Beirut- from here. We move around the world and meet each other again and again. We try to remember what city we were in when we last spoke.

And new faces too, always: attendees with eager questions, seeking inspiration. Newer speakers and conference staff all busy and nervous and excited.

In the city of Singapore, we explore with this strange cast. Dinner places are chosen, groups form. Some speakers go to see the science museum. I go salsa dancing at the National Gallery with the MC who introduced me, who I met this morning, and his girlfriend. We stay out late and inhabit the city in the short time we have.

Conferences tend to end abruptly. This one ends, as most do, with a party tonight. We'll have music, and drinks if not dancing (programmers tend not to dance). People will filter out slowly and without goodbyes. We'll see some of these people again. Jon and I will be off in the morning on our early flight.

Singapore

It's a shock to the system to arrive in Singapore. Yunnan is dusty roads, exposed diesel engines, trash on the street, amazing street food, people everywhere. Singapore is a futuristic city by anyone's standard, but with the contrast it's like stepping into a privately owned theme park.

The effect is enhanced by the fact that we're here for a tech conference. Devfest.Asia is a top-of-the-line programming conference, and they've put us up in style at a quirky boutique hotel– a lofted room that feels more like an apartment.

But even outside, Singapore is weirdly clean. There are tall buildings, conversations in English, and huge variety of skin color and dress. We walk down to the Gardens by the Bay, and for the first time in months, I take my shoes off and walk barefoot outside beneath the Supertrees.

Singapore as a city is so cohesively designed that it's like a single architect used to building interiors for business hotels was given free reign to build a city. LED lighting moves and colors just on the edge of classy and tacky. People walk around like it's normal for everything to be perfectly clean and groomed.

It's surreal right now: I'm sitting in a coworking space updating my microcontrollers in preparation for a Tessel workshop. The panoramic window to my right is so well-composed that I mistook it for a photo when I came in. I can see the huge ship-like Skypark on top of the three Sands towers, the dome of City Hall, an enormous ferris wheel by the marina, the modern lotus-like architecture of the Art-Science Museum.

Inside, people are working on Macbooks, talking quietly about proposed ventures while sitting on the modernist furniture, helping themselves to glasses of cucumber-apple-basil-lime water.

I would have been sufficiently impressed with the soft bed, toilet where you can flush the paper, and tap water you can drink.

Kunming and Goodbye

Steam curls from each of our cups of tea. We pass the teapot around on the lazy Susan of our round table.

Our packs are propped against the wall: my blue, Jon's orange, Rick and Eileen's gray ones in classic backpacker style; Ert's blue one incongruously cubic in shape despite its Osprey branding. The packs are a weathered pile, showing dirt and wear from sweat, bus holds, long trails.

It's a typical dinner scene. We've pointed at vegetables that appeal, and they appear as hot spiced dishes. We pass around rice and stir fried vegetables and local meat until we're full.

In the kitchen, a stand near the open entrance of the restaurant, a hijabi woman runs the show. The whole family is involved, chopping, frying, steaming.

A little boy and girl, maybe five and eight, alternately pull at her skirts, read magazines, chase each other. Other family members come and go, passing around children, sitting to eat at one of the tables.

After dinner, we board our overnight train back to Kunming: one day left before we all board planes. The passage is less than eight hours, so there's no time for convenient noodles or cards. We go to sleep early and are woken to disembark in the early hours.

The city is still asleep– the buses not running, the metro closed. Down quiet streets, we walk with our packs. The sidewalks are dark, but the billboards are blindingly bright, lighting the street.

Along the river, first signs of daylight appear: senior citizens are performing early-morning calisthenics alone. The sky begins to lighten as we arrive at our hotel. Since it's China, check-in time is so flexible that we are allowed up to our rooms right away. We sleep a few hours, and wake still drowsy.

Our last day traveling China together is mild. We go to a nature park in the city. We see a temple carved from the marble cliff. We ride buses and walk packless.

In the evening, we exchange brief goodbyes– Jon and I have been traveling with my parents for two months, Ert with us for two and a half weeks. All three have early flights, so we won't see them in the morning.

By the time Jon and I wake up, it's just the two of us again. We read, practice Mandarin, eat, pack. On to the next country.

Weishan

Firecrackers are going off down the street in a barrel.

The morning is cold: our breath fogs, and I wish I had gloves as we walk through the empty courtyard of the hotel to the street in search of hot breakfast.

The local specialty is translated "muddy flesh ersi"– a soup noodle dish made with fatty meat and self-serve selection of red pepper, garlic paste, green onions, MSG, ground star anise, and some other pastes and powders I can't identify. I add them indiscriminately to my bowl. It's delicious. We eat streetside, soup steaming into the chill.

Down the street, we look into an alley and see a man with a huge fire in a metal stove. At his feet is a tarp with easily identifiable pieces of a pig: the head, one eye slitted open. A leg. The tail, pink and uncurled. We approach and see that several other pieces of the pig are charring, fat bubbling out, directly in the fire.

It's a wood fire, driven to great heat with a blower. The blower's cord runs across the street and into a window.

The man smiles at us in response to our "zao shang hao" greeting and invites us to warm our hands. We watch a while as he turns the blackening roasts in the fire. Across the street, men wind rebar in a yard. We watch, then move on.

Down the street, Jon wishes "zao shang hao" to an old woman. She smiles and licks her lips toothlessly, turning to watch him as we continue on.

At the edge of the wide sidewalk there is a dead horse. It's steaming in the morning light. We come around and see that the neck is hanging over a grate in the street so as not to make a mess of the blood. Looking back from up the street, two women emerge with kettles of boiling water and pour it on the carcass to loosen the hair from the skin.

We are headed uphill to a temple. The road switchbacks up, but we take the footpath shortcut. To our right and left, stalks stand rotting from harvested fields of corn. It's resourceful use of space: the hill gets good sun, and it takes a few minutes before I notice that the crop-covered hillside is dotted also with gravestones.

Two people are coming down the hill. Squinting into the sunlight, it's hard to discern their forms from the massive loads they carry on their backs.

Closer, I can see that it's an old woman and man carrying cut eucalyptus, firewood, I think. The woman is in front, and she greets us cordially. We don't understand her past "zao shang hao," but she chatters to us in a friendly singsong as she descends until she's out of earshot.

On the breeze, we hear the music of a wooden flute. It lilts through a scale and a few Chinese songs.

We find the flautist standing at the edge of a pagoda-roofed pavilion on a spur. He nods to us. We sit and listen for a while.

Up the hill, there is a courtyard by the temple. Locals are drinking tea from thermoses at low tables. Several mules are standing saddled with baskets, steam curling from their nostrils. They are patient and unmoving as they are loaded with scoops of red dirt and stacked slabs of flat stone.

The temple is Confucian. Like all the temples we've seen, it appears fairly small at first, but there is passage past the altar and up the hill to hall after hall of altars with statues of the panoply, kneeling places, walls painted with religious scenes.

Each hall here has its own solar powered plastic lotus chanting or singing loudly and continuously. Incense smoke curls up into the rafters, whorling white where a sunbeam breaks through a gap in the roof.

In one side room, a man bows a screeching one-stringed instrument. Sometimes he sings a high off-key falsetto with the rasps. He smiles at us magnanimously when we poke our heads in.

There is a trail which takes us through the woods, past red-mud earth covered in bright moss. Mules are being unloaded, red dirt and flat rock piled for use in paving the trail. Men and women "hssht" to herd the mules back for further loading.

We find another temple, Buddhist, up the path. At the base, a middle-aged man and woman are playing wooden flutes. They have hung their music over a signpost and seem to be practicing a duet. She smiles and plays faced away from the music; he repeats a phrase several times until the tone is right.

In the temple, there are great vases, gilded statues, incense (incense always burns at every altar), stacks of fruit and packaged junk food laid before the gods in offering.

In one of the Buddhist halls, a puppy is hiding under a drum on a stand. Jon sits on the lintel and coaxes it out. It licks my hand; I pull burrs out of its fur.

The path continues past the Buddhist temple. We wind down the mountain and pass a temple to Ancestors, where a percussion band plays out of sync. Giant sticks of incense taller than me and as wide around as my arm burn at either side of the gate. A family stuffs paper offerings into an incense burner, which flares brightly. A young man sets of a set of very loud fireworks, presumably also an offering.

Back in town, we weave through traffic with the new practice of pedestrians in China: wait for or assert a break in traffic, then walk steadfastly across. Cars, trucks, carts, and motorcycles swerve around as needed.

Weishan has a higher than average quantity of motorcycle rickshaws on the streets. One parked rickshaw hosts three men, leaning to face each other in the seats, laying down cards in a heated game.

There's more to see: noodles hand-pulled, more temples in the hills. But we only have a day, so we catch our bus and begin our return.

Gaoligongshan to Weishan

Taxi rides in China are incredibly cheap. Coming out of every train station, we're mobbed by taxi drivers. Ert smiles. He relishes the haggling process – and a few kuai more or less is not a lot regardless of the outcome. 100 kuai is about $15, and we've gotten fairly long rides for as little as 10 kuai for the five of us and our packs.

In nearly any little town, as long as there is a road, there is someone who is interested in driving us. There are few opportunities missed to make a buck in China.

The same holds true the morning after Gaoligongshan: the young owner of the hotel loads us into his leather-seated new SUV and happily drives all morning.

We're surprised to learn that the area we've hiked into is all coffee plantations. China is more Nescafe 2+1 than dark roast arabica, but the hills here are covered with thriving coffee plants with clusters of green and read coffee berries all down the branches. Our driver tells us it's all for export.

Down the road, we take a detour to a famously old bridge over the angry river. The boards creak, and some are rotted out, but the suspension chains let it swing pleasantly over what's known as the Angry River. Our driver, walking with us, obligingly takes our group photo.

We start on towards the nearest big city, where we'll catch our train. Our driver stops at a roadside stand and, unasked brings back bottles of water for each of us. He gives us Mentos from his car stash.

I think he's enjoying the drive, long as it is. He and Ert are chatting in Mandarin, and he has played every song he has with English lyrics, some twice: early Taylor Swift, an obscure Ed Sheeran, some club-type songs.

As we approach the city, he decides to take us on the particularly scenic route. He turns up the wrong side of a divided highway, which puts Eileen on edge but on the whole seems like an okay thing to do in China. Then he left turns abruptly onto a bumpy dirt road between farmers' fields.

He went to school here, he says; he used to go this way all the time.

Farmers give us perplexed looks; when the road bends around a house, I see a man watch dubiously as our car barely misses his building. We parallel the airport on a road that's really not wide enough to support traffic in both directions- which it has.

We pull out onto a bigger road, but it seems someone has constructed an aluminum wall there. We pause, and our driver looks perplexed. But there's a parked car in front of us that appears to have been similarly annoyed. As we watch, they dismantle a couple of panels of the wall, dragging them to the side. They get back into their car and drive off. We follow, and eventually get back onto a main road.

I think we all feel like it's a proper goodbye when we reach the train station and our driver leaves for the long drive back home.

We board our train, then bus out to our next town: Weishan.

Gaoligongshan

Our last major hike in China is our most intense: Gaoligongshan, straight up a mountain and back down the other side. It's a through hike with our packs on, and the elevation will be above 10,000 feet. The trail is a section of the old Southern Silk Road, paved in 400 B.C. It was the site of some fighting between Japan and China in World War II.

The way to Gaoligongshan's trailhead is an adventure in its own right. Ert has booked a taxi, which shows up as scheduled at 7am on the dot. The five of us pile into the sedan with the driver, and we're off in the gray morning light.

Ert and the driver have agreed on a price, but it's soon clear that the driver does not know how to get where we're going.

After an hour or so in the right general direction, the driver stops by a store and asks directions. The woman points. We drive on.

In a town, we get more directions. We turn and drive through a market street, honking to move all the pedestrians.

The driver stops and asks directions again from a man on a motorcycle. The man points back, and we ride through the market again, looking with covetous eyes at the steaming bao zi (stuffed buns) out the window.

The driver begins to stop with every person he passes, asking directions that seem cohesive for a while.

Eventually, we arrive at a bumpy dirt road. A family is standing outside in the cold, sipping tea in the early morning.

The conversation intensifies, and the driver parks the car, stepping out. One of the women outside, uninterested in the discussion, pokes her baby's face in our car window so he can see white people.

After a while, we get out of the car too. It's cold, but it's good not to be squished together anymore. We dig in packs for more food and put on more layers.

When I turn around, the baby has been thrust into Jon's arms, and smartphones are out for pictures with the family. The baby is as stunned as Jon. He passes the baby to me, and I hold him awkwardly as we obligingly pose with the group.

A truck pulls up, and its driver joins the conversation with alacrity. Rick passes out little oranges, which we peel with cold hands while waiting for the rapid Mandarin to subside.

An old woman appears from down the road, hears about our mountain destination, and urgently plucks at her coat. "Leng, leng," she repeats. Cold! She says a lot more things, and I pick out "wai tao": coat. I reassure her as best I can: "wo men you wai tao," I say, pointing to our packs. We have coats! She shakes her head at our foolishness.

It transpires that the road ahead will be too much of a challenge for our city taxi. Motorcycles are suggested, but the obvious contender is the truck.

The truck driver knows he's the only option, so he scalps us on the price. But it's rural China, so it's not a terrible burden for us– poverty level around here is about $1 USD/day.

We pile into the cab of the truck: the three guys on the back bench, Eileen and I in the front seat. I don't really fit on the seat with her, so I brace with one arm on the headrest and the other on the dashboard. I lean forward so my head doesn't hit the windowframe.

We pick up another passenger, a friend of the driver's. He squeezes into the back so they're four across.

The road bumps mercilessly. As everywhere in China, there is construction in progress. The truck neatly skirts villagers carrying rocks and pouring cement to line the road. People don't pause in their cement mixing endeavors, but some of their eyes follow us as we drive through. Some piles of gravel cover most of the road, so the truck drives over parts of them.

We emerge, after much bouncing, on smoother pavement. The new-looking road winds up to our trailhead: a ranger station that is very clearly closed. Ert bargains some lighters for us to carry just in case of an emergency campsite, and the driver and friend wish us good luck and good health before setting off.

Inauspiciously, we false start. We misread the first signpost and descend for fully fifteen minutes before realizing our mistake and returning to the trailhead.

People in China don't generally hike for pleasure, so I'm surprised by the thorough and modern signage along the trail. Not only are there signposts for the trail, but sites of historical interest are marked out along the whole path in both Mandarin and English.

We see no one. Our group spaces out along the steep and steady climb until I hear only the chitter-echo of birds.

It takes only three hours for us to summit. We ignore the sign that urges us to hold our breaths and pass quickly, presumably a precaution against altitude.

Injudiciously, we loll on the grass in the sunshine for half an hour. It's too pleasant to pass quickly.

We start down the other side of the mountain. There's a commodious stone complex called the South Alms House, which used to give succor to travelers in need of rescue. It's empty now, and we poke around and joke about sleeping here if we don't find our way to a village by nightfall.

We're not seriously concerned. We've made good time thus far, and at two in the afternoon, it's windless and sunny. I expect us to arrive by six in the evening, an hour before sunset.

We go downhill for a few hours, appropriating walking sticks to lessen the stress on our knees.

One part of the trail is called Heavy Wind Hill. It's still when we get there, but there is evidence of prior landslides. In some places, the trail is wiped out and there is a path around. In others, we are obliged to scramble through downed trees.

The way down is much longer than the way up. By the time we emerge onto a road, we have been hiking for eight and a half hours in steep terrain with packs.

We don't really have a map, since the trail was supposed to be well signed (and is, for the most part). But there's a choice between a paved road and a trail that looks like the paving stones we've been hiking on.

We try the paving stone path, which runs cliffside. I think it's right, but it has fallen into disuse. We abort and hike back up. This time, we take the road.

It is jarring to see people after all day alone. But just down the road, on the benches of a bird blind, sit a cluster of men in fatigues. They have a fire with a kettle, and they're smoking and laughing.

It is riotously funny for them to see a group of white backpackers emerge out of a trail at dusk. They are duly impressed that we have come from Tengchong. They request a group picture. Then they tell us, to our relief, that the village we seek is just three kilometers down the road.

The sun is setting for the final stretch, and a road that feeds into ours carries the traffic of locals coming home. Several motorbikes and scooters carry long-haired young women downhill. They giggle at our greetings, some knowing the word "hi".

We have a reservation for a guesthouse somewhere in the town, but we aren't sure how to find it- especially now that it's dark. But on the left side of the road we've been watching people laughing in lit outdoor areas, and we decide we'd better join the party.

We trudge up towards the lights, our mouths watering. A man appears, and it's like a miracle: yes, they have food. Yes, they have rooms. He leads us through the courtyard and opens doors to hotel rooms with hot showers and rich furniture. We're to come to dinner when we're ready.

Tengchong

There is a village near Tengchong that is famous for jade. But the jade shops are crowded with Chinese tourists, and not nearly as interesting as the old town where the people live. There's a woman washing her laundry in three successive cement vats built into the street, water flowing in one side from clearest to soapiest. A man sits outside in the afternoon sunlight building low chairs from slabs of wood. Tengchong itself has no old town, we learn the next day. The area was bombed in the second world war, what is here called the Anti-Japanese War. We read about this in a large and modern museum funded by the government. Yunnan, it transpires, was crucial in that war. The people sacrificed greatly, pleased to lay down their lives for their country. Britain, an ally, is called cowardly often on the plaques for failing to defend Burma from the Japanese. The United States is hailed in glowing terms for its aid via the Flying Tigers' supply routes over the Himalayas. The museum has a section on Gaoligongshan, which will be our destination the next day. It talks about thick vegetation, year-round cold, and fighting referred to as "the battle in the clouds". We walk around Tengchong, which is close enough to Burma that some of the men wear sarongs in the streets. We eat hot pot and jiao zi and shao leng bao. Jon practices asking age on dumpling sellers, who giggle and hold up fingers, not trusting his grasp of numbers. Children play peek-a-boo with us down alleys after school, whispering to each other, giggling in their red-scarved uniforms when we notice them looking. We walk down a street of fruit sellers, cart after hand-pulled cart piled with apples, bananas, dragonfruit, the little oranges that taste like candy. Dusty pomelos sit piled high on a pallet in the street. We rest. We eat. There's a long hike tomorrow.

Lijiang to Tengchong

After a hike, a van ride, three hours on a train, and three more on a bus, we arrive in Baoshan at 10:30pm. We're very ready for sleep. Fortunately, Ert has reserved rooms for us at one of the brightly lit hotels near the bus station. Vouchers in hand, Ert walks up to the front desk and begins the usual lengthy check-in process. We walk around the lobby, which is oddly also a showroom for massive wood carvings, clever wooden vanity chests, and jade jewelry. A group of men comes up and chats with Ert, ashes from their cigarettes falling on the white marble floor. They are boisterous and jovial. They say ni hao to me as well, but I'm too tired to practice Chinese conversation. After fully half an hour of paper shuffling and passport checking, the woman behind the desk tells us that there are no rooms available of any kind. We will have to stay somewhere else. Jon wants to check online for other hotel options, but Ert knows already that only two hotels in all of Baoshan have an online presence. We will have to take our chances walking down the street. There are lots of hotels within view of the bus station; the problem is that most are not equipped to rent rooms to foreigners. Government regulations require hotels renting to foreigners to take copies of our passports and register them to central information, for both tax and tracking purposes. This is true for bus and train tickets as well; we are forever pulling out our passports to be examined and photographed, sometimes cell phone photographed by guards who then text them somewhere. Here in Baoshan, however, we have a stroke of luck. A woman eating a cup of convenient noodles calls out to us as we seek hotels from the sidewalk. She runs a hotel, and would be delighted to rent rooms to us. The place is well located but not very clean in the lobby. Part of it has the feel of being her living room, complete with coffee table, rice cooker, and well used couch. She says we can go see the rooms before deciding, if we'd like. We troop up to the fifth and sixth floors with our backpacks on and take a look into the open doors. The carpet is a little sticky, the walls have brown splotches from water damage, the bathrooms are squat toilets with disconnected shower heads on the walls. But the sheets on the bed are crisply white and clean, so it's good enough for the night. We're leaving on a bus first thing in the morning. Ert goes back down the five flights of stairs to purchase our rooms, and Jon and I stand in the hallway waiting. A few guests emerge from their rooms on evening errands of their own, and stare at us like we might be ghosts, to be present here. We stare back; they walk on. Ert returns up the five flights of stairs with keys. There's one window in Jon's and my room, and it faces the hallway– adding no light, but removing some of the privacy and sound insulation. We pull the curtains. There's a place where there used to be a hole, but it looks like someone has shoved a plastic bag into it and held a lighter around the edges to fuse the synthetic curtain fabric to the melted bag. It works. We go to bed. In the morning, we say goodbyes to the very friendly hotel owner, eat spicy rice noodles for breakfast, and head back to the bus station. Before noon, we are in Tengchong. The walk to the place we're staying in Tengchong is short. We're on the edge of town, and the sun is shining. A small bridge crosses a manmade lake, and in the lane there is a neighborly crew out pruning the ginkgo and ficus. We find our Holiday Villa under a canopy of bougainvilleia and a climbing orange flower. Our hosts (there seem to be many) welcome us like we're family, chatting and inviting us up onto the pavilion for coffee and tea. There are two black birds in cages, which respond if you whistle at them. They'll puff up and sing short birdsong melodies, or sometimes croak out "ni hao". Our rooms are a connected set of three, with the softest beds I've yet encountered in China (the typical style is quite hard). Big windows open out two sides onto courtyards, and they've provided the fixings for tea. We're happy to be staying two nights.

Tiger Leaping Gorge: Part 2

We set our alarms to 6:55 to catch sunrise in the morning. Bundled in blankets, we stood on the rooftop and watched as the sky purpled down the gorge. Hazy and orange, hills in the distance gradually grew light as we sat, shifting, in the cold of our valley. Hilltops gilded with new light far away down the gorge, but we were still waiting for sunbeams to reach us ninety minutes later. We ate breakfast and stared out the window. We packed up and began the hike, still in the shadow of the peaks. The second day of our hike was flat or downhill. By the time full sun overcame our pace, we had skirted mule trains on narrow ledges, bypassed a village, and begun our approach on the waterfalls near the trail's end. The Upper Trail is a hiking route, but the Lower Route of Tiger Leaping Gorge is a road full of tourist buses. The two meet at the ends, and we reached the road around noon. A couple of kilometers down the road, we found our guesthouse, chosen for the best-reviewed food along the route. We put down our packs and sat to lunch. Ert began to order in Mandarin as usual, but our host stopped him: "I don't speak Chinese!" The guesthouse, aptly called Tibet Guesthouse, was an enclave of Tibetans. Our host didn't have much Mandarin, but his English was good. He showed us how to eat tsambe, barley meal like a breakfast slurry in pungent yak butter tea. We stayed at his guesthouse so we could hike packless for an afternoon and a morning. He brought us local hard pears from the trees, some to eat and some to take. The two hikes we took from the Guesthouse were extraordinary: one down to the Yangtze, to the place where the legendary tiger leaped to escape a hunter, the thinnest point in the gorge. Eileen stays back to put up her feet and read; Ert, Jon, Rick and I descend. It's an overgrown path, steep, warm in the afternoon. Two cows and two calves are grazing, and we wait quietly off the trail so they will pass. They're a clean, lovely red-brown, so shy they wait for us to move a while, standing in the middle of the path. The path carries on down the hill. We come to cliffs. We're at the middle height of the face, but someone has carved the path into the rock: an open-sided tunnel, deep enough to feel safe but not high enough for Jon to walk upright. Where the tunnel opens out, someone has built a cage of bamboo and an iron-grilled door. A woman stands there, pointing to a sign. The sign claims there's a fee to continue on, fifteen kuai per person, or five if we just want to turn around. It's a scam; we've paid for passes to the park already, including all its features. But the local folks know that every tourist will want to see the rock where the tiger leaped. And this woman, cleverly, has put us in a cage where she controls the door. So we pay while rolling our eyes, she opens the door, and we continue the descent to the river. The river is roiling, rapids seething by the large rocks of the riverbed. Ert says no one has survived these rapids, and it's easy to believe. River currents crash into each other, sending up spray. A rock right at the thinnest point is sometimes covered in water, sometimes exposed to fifteen feet down. One eddy swirls and sinks continuously, funneling to a lower height. After several minutes' contemplation, it's time to ascend again, a much more direct route. There is a ladder, called the Sky Ladder, which takes us quite directly up a cliff. Ert counts fifty-eight rungs on the curving metal. We climb ever upward, passing stands with sedan chairs cobbled together with bamboo and rebar– it looks like something else you can buy, a ride up the treacherous path on someone's shoulders, but it's too late in the day. It's hard to imagine anything more terrifying than trusting two other people to carry you up this particularly winding and cliff-edged path. In the evening, we watch the moon rise again, brighter and more full even than the night before. In the morning, we hike again: uphill, above all the buildings, to the aqueduct which serves the villages. We follow it back to its source: a pounding, clear waterfall into a pool. I take my shoes off to wade closer, and they tingle from re-warming when I step out. Ert tries the sluice gate at the aqueduct's head, closing the flow downhill and spilling the water into the side channel, where it waterfalls in great splashes onto the rocks. He brings the gate back up and creates a wave rolling down the open cement trench. Back down the hill, we run into herds of goats out grazing. Two men, tiny, very tan, carrying ropes pass us on their way up the trail we take down. They double take and stare to see us foreigners out pleasure hiking on their working trails. We take lunch at the guesthouse, and are whisked by van to our train far down the road in Lijiang.

Tiger Leaping Gorge: Part 1

There is a long line of cars and a fairly empty visitor's center at the Quiaotou entrance to Tiger Leaping Gorge. "This wasn't here five years ago," remarks Ert. "Last time I was here, there were just a couple of parked cars." The road itself is new, too. Apparently, they have demolished the hillside where the trail used to begin. We walk the road instead, winding through the traffic of waiting vehicles. Around a bend, seven perfectly spaced peaks appear, all equal in height. The gorge opens up below, two cliffed sides framing the Yangtze. We stand aside as enormous trucks rumble past, loaded with construction materials. Down in the valley, roads are making headway up both sides of the river, and a winding scar of a road leads up towards what looks like a hotel in construction. I'm used to seeing all parts of China's land in use: hillsides terraced for crops, or gouged for rock, valleys laid out in vegetable grids. The scale of industry in China is staggering, from enormous concrete plants to roads and apartment complexes spanning wide swaths of land. So it is stunning to see how comparatively little of Tiger Leaping Gorge is inhabited and in use. It's not that the Gorge is a conservation area, by any means. We watch new efforts down below to build a tunnel and carve out a road. But much of the gorge is too steep to support the usual means of exploitation, and plans for a dam which would flood the pace have recently been canceled. Most of the gorge is just too steep to be worth the challenge of making it un-wild. After over an hour on the road, we reach the foot of the trail. The air is hot and dry, the sky a flat blue. At the trailhead, a woman works a hard sell on bottles of water. "The trail is long," she exhorts us in surprisingly good English. She is the first of many such women we will encounter on this trail with wares to sell. They lead mules or carry baskets on their backs. Some set up stalls in well-placed locations, having hiked a day's worth of wares to this regular sale spot. They come on the same trail as us. At the stalls, stacks of empty gold cans cover the ground. The characters read "hong niu", literally "red cow". The English for Red Bull is written underneath. They seem to have a corner on the Leaping Tiger Gorge stalls– Red Bull umbrellas and banners adorn sales spots. Women also sell fruits, proffering apples and hard asian pears. They look delicious, but we can't spare the water to wash them, and it's prudent to peel your fruits in China. Unlikelier goods are also for sale; a woman hiking the path towards us tempts us with "ice creeen", though I wonder how she could possibly keep it cool in the basket on her back. Marijuana is also for sale, incredibly. The penalty for cannabis sales in China is death, but on this backwater trail, the tables of wares have whole stalks of dried buds and piles of pipes right next to the fruit, water, and Snickers bars. Chinese tourists tend not to hike for pleasure; the sales tables are catering to the mostly white audience that seeks the strain of Tiger Leaping Gorge's upper trail. There must not be much law enforcement out here. Most of the trail is unpeopled. A herd of goats crosses our path, and on impulse, I hold out my fist to an interested-looking black ram. He gratifies me with a head butt, then gets excited and shoves a few other goats. As we climb, the gorge unfolds to our right. The seven evenly spaced snow-capped peaks that jab the sky open out as we pass hills that blocked our few. A few more snowy peaks emerge to either side. Below us, the construction projects have given way to steep hillsides, a straight-down gorge to the Yangtze river, thinner and more powerful closer to its source. The trail was built not as a tourist attraction, but as the most pragmatic transit route available to connect the villages that dot this side of the gorge. It's a footpath, often narrow when that is all the passage permitted by the cliffs. The villages are spaced every couple of hours, nestled into the habitably sloped places. Each has guesthouses with places to eat, catering to the small but present financial opportunity presented by hiking groups like ours. We had originally planned to spend the night at a guesthouse in the first village along the trail. But our bus to the town arrived hours ahead of our planned time due to a new and much faster expressway. So we decided to continue to a guesthouse further on. The next part of the trail was the 28 Bends: twenty-eight consecutive switchbacks to climb way up the hill to the trail's highest point. Ert counted out each bend in Mandarin: yi, liang, san... all the way up to er shi ba. It wasn't as steep as our climb from the trailhead, but neither was it early in the day. Our packs were growing heavy, and we were relieved to summit the trail. At the marked highest point, the Himalayan peaks across the gorge were catching the gold of sunset. The trail was technical enough to keep an eye to foot placement, but we made sure to pause and look across to the mountains every few minutes, the sky fading to dark blue behind golden mountains, the slate gray of mountains and sky blending, the dark outline of peaks against the purple of the last light. We were still on the trail after dark, but it wasn't long before we saw the light of the next village. Contouring with the trail, we made our way to our intended guesthouse within the hour. Our hostess showed us to a room with six individual beds, perfect for our group of five. We borrowed blankets from a pile in the room and sat on the roof to watch the supermoon rise: white rays peeking from behind a crag, a shooting star, the moon shadow on the hills behind us shrinking, and finally the searing light of the bright white moon climbing visibly by slivers to round and full.

Shaxi to Tiger Leaping Gorge

The rooster begins to crow as we leave our hostel. In the road out of the village, we catch up to a cart with the four feet of a pig sticking up splayed to all four corners. It's still steaming, the fatty flaps of its opened belly jiggling as the cart bumps across the paving stones. A bowl of cubed liver rests in the carcass, balanced on the backbone where all the organs used to be. At the bus station, a taxi van is nearly ready to depart. "Jianchuan?" Ert asks. The driver grunts assent. We peer inside. Five of the seven seats are taken. "Wu ge ren," Ert clarifies: five people. With obvious patience, the driver nods again. We put our packs in the back and slide in to overoccupy the seats. The old Bai woman next to me takes my arm and smiles as I slide in next to her. We fit. Some way down the windy road, the driver reaches over the old man in the front seat and puts his seat belt on him- the first seatbelt wearing I've seen in China. The old man puts the shoulder strap behind his head. The driver reaches back over and puts the shoulder strap in place again, then returns to texting and driving. The old man lights his third cigarette of the taxi ride and gives another cigarette to the driver. We catch a bus in Jianchuan. We head further north and higher altitude. Out the front window we can see the snow caps of the edge of the Himalayas. We're close to northern Myanmar now. Our bus stops in Lijian, and we change onto one bound for Shangri-la. The street signs in Lijian are in Chinese kanji but also in Naxi, the only hieroglyphic language still in use in the world. The mountains are increasingly sharp, some forming perfect sixty degree peaks. The bus passes the first bend of the Yangtze River, then crosses over the slow, brown water. The bus pauses for us to disembark, a side of the road in the small town of Quiaotou. We're ready to begin our hike.

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