Matt is not here

Asian Music Playlist

2012-02-15T11:20:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of different layers that make travel to Asia so enriching, and music is a good example. Obviously the Lady Gagas and the Justin Beibers have huge followings, but the reach of global superstars is eclipsed by their local counterparts. The local songs are the ones that you hear over and over again - in buses, in restaurants, then again as cellphone ring tones - until eventually, even though you don't understand a word and have never actively thought about the song, it locks itself in your brain. For all its dependency on words, music has the ability to transcend language.

Of course, that also poses a bit of a problem when trying to figure out what you're listening to. Once, while hiking in China, I chased down a guy with a musical cellphone and took a picture of the screen that displayed the title of the track he was playing. Another time, at a restaurant in Burma, I bounded over to another table and asked what was playing on the radio. The result is a dozen or so tracks scribbled in the margins of my journals, sometimes no more than unintelligible symbols in the local language. As I searched them out on Youtube, I arrived at some conclusions about my taste in music (or Asia's taste in music), and you'll probably do the same when you give them a listen.

Faye Wong - Chess

Music flooded the halls of Leshan Foreign Language School every day as students returned to class. The administration changed up the selections every few weeks, ensuring that students got their balanced listening that included Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter, Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, and a rather profane Eminem number. Here's Faye Wong, who is apparently a pretty well-known name in the Canto-pop world (sorry it's a crappy version).

Chopsticks Brothers - Lao Nan Hai

Another song from school, this one I was committed enough to practice a few times to enrich my karaoke repertoire. It's apparently a nostalgic look back at growing up in the 80s, but really, how would I ever be able to verify that?

Tian Lan Lan

At karaoke one night, someone sang this real crooner about Tibet and the loss of the homeland and there was all this footage of trucks coming in and building a new road. I'd go as far to say that some of the best music in China comes out of Tibet. I didn't ever manage to track the song down, and it might be one of those things that is lost forever. Here's the closest I got.

The Bodyguard - Teri Meri

I had no idea, while watching the Bollywood blockbuster The Bodyguard, that a simple night at the movies would connect me with so many people on the subcontinent. I heard this main theme song, and a few of the other tracks, everywhere. You'd be in a town without a road in Uttar Pradesh and you'd hear the music coming from a stereo. If I was at a grumpy restaurant I could whistle this song and everyone would go crazy. Even in Nepal, on a bouncing bus to a remote kayak school, I yelled out "Bodyguard" and it was cued up in a few minutes and people were singing along. It's one thing to read that Bollywood sells one billion more movie tickets than Hollywood in any given year, but it's another thing to experience it up close.

Aung La - Apologize

Burma had a surprisingly developed music scene, with Burmese equivalents of every genre. It's always strange to hear rap in a different language, and even stranger to hear a Burmese equivalent of Nickelback. I wasn't biking in Burma, so I heard a lot more music on public transport than I did in some of the other countries I visited. This one came up at least once on every bus ride.

The Asia Cycle Tour Video

2012-01-30T09:31:00.000-08:00

Most days of my trip, while cycling, I pulling out the camera and recorded a minute or so of footage. The result: a hard drive full of boring videos of the road. Well, in the great tradition of wasting time with video editing, I have pulled some of the most interesting footage, cut it all down, and put it to music. The result is almost inspirational, and at the least a nice memory of all those days out on the road. Enjoy.

Just to give a little "making-of" insight: I never managed to get video of any of the terrifying dog chases in Tibet or the monsoon rains in India. I took a fall once with the camera, but unfortunately I was taking still photos so I have no video documentation to share. If a biker falls in the woods and no one is there to get video, did it ever really happen?

I can remember it all like it was yesterday. Some particular highlights:
1:29 - this is the boat ride across the Mekong River from Thailand into Laos
2:05 - a quick shot from my Chinese city of Leshan, during a rather exciting daily commute
2:38 - I was filming during a beautiful descent into the Chinese province of Qinghai, hit a lip in the road, and almost lost the camera
3:05 - my favourite shot, sunrise, during a brutal 220-km day to Jiayuguan that ended with heatstroke
3:34 - boat ride across Lake Attabad in northern Pakistan, formed by a massive landslide that blocked the river in 2010
4:29 - crossing the Ganges River in Uttar Pradesh, India

Home At Last

2011-12-21T05:59:00.000-08:00

I woke up at 4am this morning, an early start to my fourth day back in my favourite GMT -5. I hate to blame my fatigue on some ailment as imaginary as "jet lag", but I seem to have a more difficult time than most adapting to the 12-hour change, and some of the last few days has been a bit of a daze. Maybe it's an indication that I should never travel again. Ha! Good one!

The jet lag weariness is the final concrete remains of the trip, the only tangible proof that I was ever in Asia. The millions of pictures and the collection of currencies and the random ticket stubs document a fanstastic larger-than-life year, but are stuck collecting dust somewhere in memory; a trip is something we can remember but can never get back. Yet it's amazing how quickly I've switch back since stepping off the plane, how I've never forgetten how to live like a Canadian. It's amazing to think, while enjoying holiday festivities with friends and families, while talking about the dismal ski season and new apartments and bus strikes and Jimmy Kimmel, that less than a week ago I was sleeping the deck of a river ferry somewhere around the Tropic of Cancer with everything I needed acting as my pillow.

The only hiccup in my reintegration has been related to clothing. In the Seoul airport, I looked around at the waiting area filled with well-kept Koreans (they all look the same!) in tidy black pea coats and leather shoulder bags, playing on advanced new electronics. In my shorts and Bikenstocks, green sweater of many years, and sporting a goofy Ronaldo bum bag, I was overcome with a sense of my own destitution. This was only exacerbated while waiting at the Toronto City Airport terminal after arriving on Porter Airlines, where I bumbled my way to the ferry with a cart balanced with a huge dry bag and a dirty bike wrapped in plastic bags. After a year of dressing like a slob and being hailed as a rock star, I worry that I won't be able to blend in back home. I've been digging deep to recall how to coorindate shoes and socks and warm jacket and scarf and all the other little things.

For all the societal differences that confront the long-term Asian traveller returning home, it's surprising how similar our two worlds are. While walking downtown the other day I had a flashback to Kathmandu, to the cramped shops and simple merchandise of Asan Thole. Our shops are bigger and cleaner, but it's all the same game of buying. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, people come together to shop and to eat: humanity is united in its search for community.

What's surprising is how travelling around the world to Asia has given me so much more context for a place like Toronto. I called to make a dental appointment and got to talking about the receptionist about where she was from in India. An Afghan baggage handler at the airport reflected on my time in Pakistan. I hear Mandarin everywhere. I see Hindu temples now in places I've walked by hundreds of times. One upon a time, well-heeled British graduates went on the European Grand Tour, a loop through the many cultures of the continent that served the worldly education one couldn't get in school. How much better prepared for the future would Canada be, if all its future leaders had completed a required-reading Grand Tour of Asia?

And what have I learned on my circle tour? Lots. Lots about money, success, family, and work. Lots about what makes a place great. Lots about values. How lucky we are to live in Canada! Not because we are rich. Because all people are considered equal. Because we have free schools and hospitals. Because we pay people in the most menial jobs enough to lead a happy life. Because we have the luxury of being able to retire.

In the reflection of the trip I also see myself. I see myself as the person I've always wanted to be, someone who reads, writes, learns languages, and finds himself having a great time in strange places. I hate the "He's finding himself" explanation to my chasing of distant adventures, but on the other hand I do return home more aware of my place in the world. I've always thought that a love of travel was something I would eventually have to fit into the confines of a successful life. Now I'm leaning toward the idea that my future is the thing that has to fit around the pillar of travel. One thing is certain: the more I travel, the larger the world becomes.

Thus I bid farewell to a grand year in Asia. I will think of you every time I see the sun rise. And everytime I eat rice. And, come to think about it, every time I get food poisoning. I wonder what I'm going to do now?

Twenty Scenes from Myanmar

2011-12-20T22:15:00.000-08:00

Burma is a destination that feels like it's been designed by executives at Nikon as a playground for their high-end cameras. You've never seen a place with more budding amateur photographers, all taking pictures of scenes out of everyday life. But then again, everyday life has never been more beautiful, and the mouths of Westerners water every time we see a golden pagoda, or a group of monks walks by, or a fisherman does something on the lake, or a kid smiles at the camera. Indeed, we're all still searching for that Burmese Photo Holy Grail: the photo of the monks teaching a child in front of a pagoda during sunset with a fisherman silhouette in the background. That would be something special. In the meantime, here are twenty favourites of mine (with captions for once!).

Sandamuni Paya, a collection of hundreds of pagodas, each one filled with a stone page from some important Buddhist book. Just sounds like an excuse to build more pagodas!

Mandalay Hill

The Moustache Brother's comedy troupe is very critical of the military regime, and has ended up in jail on a few occasions. Now they just perform for tourists. Note: performance was not very good but it was exciting to imagine you were reliving that scene from V for Vendetta

Amarapura Teak Bridge

The air was heavy with stone dust in this corner of Mandalay where all those Buddha carvings are painstakingly created.

Hiked through a part of Shan State that must provide most of the world's red hot chili peppers. This child is obviously a fan.

On the road to Inle Lake, Shan State. Thankfully not as hilly as Nepal!

Tone Le, Inle Lake: this school, like the rest of the village, is on stilts and only accessible by boat. All the kids waved to us as we went by. Maybe someone had taken their boats and they were waving to try to get our help.

Even the dumbest photographer in the world can get a nice photo of sunset over Inle Lake.

Inle Lake traditional foot rowing technique. Not as easy as it looks!

There's a quiet moment every morning around sunup, where the monks walk (barefoot) through town collecting alms from the local shops. That warm feeling in my heart quickly subsided when I got back on the bus and we continued on one of the worst bus rides of the trip.

Burmese food may not be the most delicious in Asia, but it certainly takes the award for Most Side Dishes.

After touring the temple region of Bagan, I never want to see a Buddha statue again. This one is one of my favourites, likely inspired by Buddha's love of the movie Alien.

There are well over a thousand temples still standing in the Bagan region. Here are two of them.

This is Kaka, or attentive little tour guide we picked up during our first day in Bagan. He is 8 and spoke excellent English, knew all the major temples, and could operate all of our cameras.

Kachin State: teak wood likely bound for China or another of Myanmar's very powerful neighbours. Also, hungry cow.

Nuns returning to their nunnery after collecting food at the Katha market.

Cruising down the Ayerwaddy River: this guy stands at the front of the boat during shallow sections and touches that stick to the river bottom to give a depth range. We only ran aground once during the 24-hour trip.

Disagree. Burmese pop rock is alive and well

Shwedagon Pagoda, the mother of all pagodas in Burma. The very top is studded with over 5000 diamonds, which at night have the nice effect of twinkling high above a country that is one of the poorest in SE Asia.

Speak Your Mind on Burma

2011-12-14T09:49:00.001-08:00

Though it's not likely that the Burma secret police watch your web activities with any scrutiny, and though a rumour of screenshots taken of every computer every five minutes seems contrived, I thought it would be most prudent to save some thoughts until I was safely out of the country. It is, after all, a country where people are jailed for decades simply for delivering democratic messages. Perhaps their spies are everywhere.

So, Burma, nice place. It's an empire, really: though most people couldn't place this country on a world map, it has a language completely different than the Thai, Hindi, and Chinese ones surrounding it, a script that looks like alien symbols, a population double that of Canada, and lots and lots of natural resources. Hard to tell if it should be relegated to that list of "Countries That Would Have Been Better Off if the British Never Left", but ever since the military dictatorship jailed and dismantled the winning democratic party in the 1980s, the West has imposed economic sanctions. This puts Myanmar in the proud company of Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

It also presents some quirks that are unknown on the rest of the otherwise straightforward SE Asia traveller's circuit. There are no ATMs in the country; travellers need to make sure they have enough brand-new, un-creased $100 Benjamin Franklins to last them the trip. You exchange about half your money to the local kyat (obviously pronounced chat), since prices indescriminately alternate between dollars and kyat. You check into a hotel and pay for the night in dollars, then walk over to their restaurant and buy your meal in kyat. The government exchange rate for kyat is about 6 to the dollar. On the black market the rate hovers around 800. And it is the filthiest money I have ever handled.

With this in mind, I was expecting to get off the plane in a place that resembled Europe circa 1300. Instead, I was welcomed onto paved streets with streetlights, sidewalks, office towers, and a faded air of English regalty. Most Asian nations grumblingly do business with the oppresive regime, so there's no lack of electronics, vehicles, or crappy Chinese goods, even if there are no Mastercard and McDonalds. This all sort of turned my world upside-down at first, since Myanmar is a country with economic sanctions that is visibly much more prosperous than Nepal, which receives aid, and tourists, from everywhere. Furthermore, from my best understanding, China's violent suppression of protests, atrocious human rights violations, and unwavering single-party system seem of equal severity as that of Myanmar, but we've elected to punish this mysterious place with sanctions that don't work. Well done. And despite all that, the people love foreigners.

I flew up to the city of Myitkyina, in Kachin State in the north of the country, with the intention of taking a slow boat down the country's lifeblood, the Ayerwaddy River. It didn't come as a surprise that a two-day section of the river was closed to all passenger transit due to fighting with the Kachin Independence Army. It was safe enough to take a bouncing, British-era train halfway down the river to Katha, and continue the adventure from there. Maybe it was for the best, for sleeping "Deck Class" entailed camping out on a cold metal floor in an open-air galley that looked like a refugee camp, and I'm not sure I could have taken another night of it. It was a nice ride though, a great view of local river life. And I'll have you know that the ferry only ran aground on a shallow sand bar once in the entire trip.

The Kachin are one of the seven big minority groups in Myanmar, and I was told they have the third largest rebel army against the government. All the rebel groups hold the border regions.

A bomb went off in Myitkyina a week before I arrived (impossible for me to have known about this while I was in the country since no one seems to know anything about anywhere else in Myanmar). The rebels would appear to be a threat, until a Kachin guy explained that the site of the explosion was a very important Kachin park. The city is 70% Kachin, most of whom are sympathetic to the rebel's cause. So did they really set off the bomb? A man I was talking to told me that he believed in the Union of Myanmar, and the rebels were fighting for more rights and autonomy. In fact, most solutions to the country's problems seem to involve working with the government toward reform. This was enlightening, as Canada still calls this country Burma as a big F-U to the current government.

Anyway, the exciting thing right now is that Myanmar is changing very rapidly. A year ago no one spoke openly about the house-arrested democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. These days there are pictures of her for sale everywhere, and the newspapers have front-page coverage of her recent meeting with Hillary Clinton. It seems very likely that the democratic party will be running in the upcoming mid-termesque elections. Some say the sanctions may have only a few years left as the country moves toward reform. I had tri-sha drivers nearly wipe out in excitement as they talked about their charismatic leader, known simply as "the lady", who is realistically the only figure who could unite all the rebel groups in peace.

It was all very interesting, and shattered my notions of what a "banned" country looks like. Despite all this I still know very little about the place and will have to do much more reading and return one day. No doubt it will have already changed quite a bit.

Anyway, I think visitors are obligated to talk about what they saw, and that's my summary, as coherent as it can be in my current state waiting in the Bangkok Airport. Today was a busy final day in Bangkok, hurridly hitting the city's best: a teeth cleaning, a cooking class, a swanky rooftop bar, and a go-go bar. Even though I left Burma this morning, it feels like I've been gone for weeks. Yet the longest day of my life is only beginning: this December 15th will last 36 hours. My flight from Korea later today lands in New York City twenty minutes before it took off. Somewhere in there will be a cross-Manhatten epic, lugging around 56 kg of luggage. When it's all said and done I'll be sitting in Tim Hortons in downtown T.O., furiously trying to warm up hands that have forgotten reality. Yet at the moment I am brimming with excitement at the in-flight entertainment ahead, and at the only appropriate ending for this post: see you soon.

Burmese Daze

2011-12-11T02:13:00.001-08:00

Mengalaba and hello once again from sunny Mandalay. Yesterday, on a
slow ferry down the Ayerwaddy River (where I had spent the night
sleeping on the deck floor in the not-much-class "Deck Class"), the
first glimpse of Mandalay Hill from the river triggered a wave of
nostalgia. Although I still have five days out here in Asia, this
marks the end of strange new places and the beginning of retracing my
steps back to familiarity and eventually, back home.

The past two weeks in Myanmar have been, among other things, very
photogenic. Unfortunately, with my computer locked up in Bangkok (I
do miss it) I'm unable to easily share photos. You'll just have to
wait.

Despite swearing to myself that I would never trek again after Everest
(Base Camp), less than two weeks later I was lacing up the boots for a
short three day walk in Eastern Burma. If trekking in Nepal is the
prime rib of the hiking world, then trekking in Burma is...well,
something much cheaper than prime rib (God I miss steak). That wasn't
a bad thing, since there's a bit more "pressure" in the Everest region
with the altitude and tough days and costs. Here, the grades were
tame, the patchwork of crops on the hills colourful, villagers were
friendly, there was a good trekking crew, and we slept in quiet
village homestays. Did we sleep well? No, because homestay is
actually Burmese for "sleep on a wooden floor until the roosters
outside wake up at dawn".

The trek brought us to Inle Lake, a favourite traveller destination
and certainly worth the hype. Basically most of the villages are
built on stilts along the marshy borders of the lake, so instead of
roads of asphalt (or more appropriately, dirt) you have waterways as
the main method of transport. We boated past a school ending for the
day, a virtual flotilla of narrow canoes with kids in uniform paddling
home like it's the most ordinary thing in the world. It may not sound
exciting, but it was relaxing and really interesting. One day,during
an extremely pleasant boat ride back across the lake at sunset (our
driver pausing as we passed by fishing boats to get iconic fisherman
silhouette photos of course), I had a flashforward to the snowstorms
and darkness waiting for me in Canada. Can hardly wait to get home.

One horrifically uncomfortable bus ride later (thought I suspect I am
becoming a bit of "bus softie" after so many months cycling) we
arrived at a temple site called Bagan. I haven't even Bagan to
recount some of the great puns such a spot offered up. We biked out
to the first temple we saw, snapped some photos of the Buddha statues,
and I was about to chalk the whole thing up as over-rated until we
ascended a narrow, steep, unlit flight of stairs to the temple roof.
From there the scope of the site became clear, with the forest and
fields in all directions pierced by thousands of pointed temples of
all shapes and sizes, some as big as castles. It was a cool spot to
explore for a few days, but I did reach a point near the end where I
decided I never wanted to see a Buddha statue ever again. Seeing how
the trekking promise held up, it seems likely that there's still hope
to save my soul or whatever seeing Buddha statues does for you.

Not one to waste time with the end in sight, a
plane-train-bus-taxi-boat combo took me up to the north and through a
bit of a far-flung region. I think that one deserves some more
writeup, and certainly once I'm safely out of the country.

As always, the people on Myanmar are wicked and extremely friendly and
surely the highlight of the trip. One of my favourites was the old
guy who rented me a canoe to paddle around along the shores of Inle
Lake. I got back to town, and wasn't he waiting there with snacks and
tea. We talked about his family and work, and then on the walk back
we stopped for shots of rice whiskey. That's pretty par for the
course here, though not always the rice whiskey. Sort of related,
they do have local draught beer everywhere which is sort of out of
place but of course incredibly welcome.

Tonight, one last bus ride back to the principle city of Yangon for a
few days trying to procure a decent tailor-made shirt and a debate
whether to buy one of the male sarongs that are so popular here.
After that, there's 12 final hours in Bangkok that are getting busier
and busier. The next time you'll hear from me I should be somewhere
in the limbo of the five airports that will bring me back home. If
anyone needs any high-quality lacquerware or Buddhist oil paintings,
this is the time to let me know.

Tracking the Big Four in Myanmar

2011-11-27T01:41:00.001-08:00

There, I just threw all my expectations out the window as they served quite useless upon entry in Myanmar. Maybe I've in a permanent state of low expectation upon leaving Nepal, but I certainly was preparing myself for a country of dust and destitution. Instead, thus far at least, I've been very impressed by a clean, friendly, and bustling country. I haven't been in such a civil bus station for awhile, and without aggressive horn-honkers the roads seem so....quiet. Just wait till Hillary Clinton gets here in a few weeks, she is going to love it.

Anyway, this is just a quick note from Mandalay, the exotic-sounding centre of the country, a town that came grinding to a complete halt last night when there was some European soccer match on television. Don't know how this place equates with a massive upscale casino in Las Vegas, but then again I spied a few people gambling today. Christmas signs all over, which is a little weird in a place with Buddhist statues basically every twenty feet.

It's been three days of "normal" backpacking travel and already I'm missing the bicycle, and I'm beginning to think I'll never be able to return to travelling by bus. Today we rented a few cruisers and set off to visit a long teak bridge, providing a suitable destination for a journey to see some countryside. Myanmar has a few attractions, but it is talking to people here that has been the most rewarding so far, and certainly the most interesting. If you like monks and Buddhist stupas (and really, who doesn't?) then you'd love this place.

My only qualm thus far is that the limited number of permitted destinations makes you feel like you're on a packaged-tour holiday; it certainly isn't terribly inspiring to reach the top of Mandalay Hill for sunset only to find about two hundred European tourists snapping away (question: do Europeans do anything other than take holidays?). My next destinations, a rural area called Inle Lake and an ancient ruin-filled city known as Bagan, are both universally recommended by other travellers I've spoken to, but also quite central on the tourist circuit (painfully known as Myanmar's "Big Four"). I'll do my best to dodge the crowds, and hopefully there will be a chance during my final week here to venture off to somewhere a bit less popular. Happy Black Friday, good luck with all your big-screen television shopping.

It will always be Burma to me!

2011-11-23T09:58:00.001-08:00

My trip came full circle the other day, bringing me back to Bangkok where a shiny blue bike was unpacked and unleashed on the continent oh so many months ago. It's strange how my lens has changed in just under a year, and how arriving in Bangkok now is like setting foot in the world's most modern metropolis. I've spent several hours with my mouth agape like I'm at a World's Fair, and I find myself taking a lot of pictures of cars. I know, it does seem strange, especially when there are plenty of other things to marvel at. Skytrains. Street lights. Air conditioning. Hot water. Grass. Mattresses. Garbage cans. Soap.

It has made me wonder a bit about globalization and development and all that good stuff, if you'd allow me a paragraph. Are people happier in Bangkok or Kathmandu? Do we want Kathmandu to turn into Bangkok, or do people decry that as globalization and consumerism? Causes there's no garbage on the streets here. And people are reading and seeing films and eating all sorts of food. And if we can agree that consumerism is good for a place, what's holding Nepal back? Is it a lack of electricity? Small population? Weather? Failure to innovate? Complacency? The tiny, strangely-shaped flag?

I will, however, hand it to Nepal for perhaps the greatest flights in the world. You sit on the left. It takes off about two hours late. Once you reach cruising altitude you see the wall of mountains rising above the clouds to the north. Unlike other flights where the mountains are way beneath you, these happen to be right beside you. And it only takes a few minutes to spot that hulking black mass that every trekker has come to recognize, the unmistakable Mount Everest. It was cool. I was also quite pleased that a $2 tip to the baggage guy saved me a fairly significant excess baggage few for my bike and gear, though I suspect the airline check-in has neither scales nor credit-card machines to facilitate such a payment anyway. Or maybe the Nepal Airlines staff really likes hair that falls into the "comical and clownlike" category.

So I have been enjoying Bangkok for a few days, exploring, marvelling, eating. I'm on board: this is one of Asia's finest cities. That said, it's already time to leave. In a surprisingly rapid unfolding of events, tomorrow I fly to Burma.

Burma is an interesting one, a place with an oppressive government, trade embargos, and a lack of development but with what seems to be unanimously agreed upon as the nicest people in Asia. It's off the beaten track, as all the good ones are, and it's devoutly Buddhist, also as all the good ones are. Most importantly, it seems to slowly be heading toward change: the military recently released democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi and a bunch political prisoners, and Hillary Clinton is visiting the place soon (though it sounds like sanctions aren't going anywhere just yet). And there is always talk that the southern beaches will be opened up to mass tourism and become "the next Phuket". I've been thinking about Burma for awhile now, and the possibility that it might lose something as it opens up to the world provided the push to go now. Remember, it's not where, Marty, but when.

The window of time to learn about this place before leaving is rapidly shrinking, and the more I research the more information there is to sift through. One big issue among the backpacking community seems to be directing your money away from government-run organizations and instead trying to pay for things directly with the people. I hadn't really taken a stance yet, since I wasn't sure if there was a point himming and hawing over $10 paid to a government bus company when Thailand is importing millions of dollars of Burmese natural gas every year. However, I then started reading about the Karin State and what sounds like a really cool multi-day river boat trip. Unfortunately, that province is currently engaged in over half a year of rebellion, to the point of being called a civil war. Not too long ago an orphanage was bombed. It sounds like the boat trip would be safe and fine (though I've since ruled it out, Ma and Pa), but it begs the question: what's the point of mingling with the locals on a local boat if the locals are terrified and have lost their homes? Even more troubling is that the conflict is so far removed, so infrequently discussed, and so ignored by the government, no one outside the country seems to even know it's happening. This ethical baggage hasn't at all diminished my desire to go, but it has brought my lofty dreams of far-flung adventure down to a cold reality.

This sounds like a melancholy way to embark on a three-week voyage to a strange land, and it really isn't. The big hitters I'm hoping to visit promise to be really rewarding, wicked experiences, and I couldn't be more glad that I'm getting a chance to travel to Burma. Admittedly I don't really have a game plan right now, just a visa and flight and guidebook. Surely that's the best way to travel. I'll see you on the other side.

Back on level ground

2011-11-19T19:50:00.001-08:00

Where do you start when writing about almost a month hiking through the Nepal Himalaya? At the middle, with a big, fat picture of Mount Everest. There she is.

It really was something. There were high passes capped with fluttering prayer flags. There were glacier crossings. There were snowfields that made your eyes burn and descents that made your knees jelly. There was sunrise over Everest and the golden light of sunset. The was the full moon, stars, and mirror-like lakes. And for seven days we didn't see a single cloud in the sky. Often a picture doesn't really capture a place, it's just a reminder that something I saw amazed me. And looking back at my pictures from the last month (all 1500 of them), I am astounded at the places we went. Moreso than ever, they are nowhere even close to what it was like to be there in the flesh.

We left Namche Bazaar and went up little by little. They were shorter days, but breathless ones as we journeyed into thin air (fittingly the title for the famed Jon Krakauer book that everyone on the trail is reading or has read). We were plagued by clouds for a few days, and when they finally cleared during a rest day in Dingboche, we burst out of the lodge to take in the white peaks that had appeared out of nowhere all around us. By November 5 we were positioned and acclimitized to begin the first of a string of long days above 5000m. We woke up before dark, trudging slowly in the crisp air to the first high pass, the Kongma La. Obviously the views were fantastic and the legs were weary and there was a group of French trekkers singing songs at the pass. The next day we arrived at Everest Base Camp and I juggled some rocks. The day after we saw sunrise from the peak of Kala Pattar. Each day only got better.

The wine. It didn't make it. Somewhere along the line I realized how much tougher the hiking was getting due to elevation. Around the same time it dawned on me that the last thing anyone would want to do at 5500m is take a swig of a cheap Australian unoaked chardonnay. I sold the bottle for almost cost to a very excited guide. Jokes on him when he realizes it's unoaked; you might as well be drinking grape juice.

This type of "teahouse-trekking", where you don't carry much weight and spend the night in lodges, is easy to get used to. Besides the obvious comforts of a wood stove and fresh food, it's a very social way of hiking. At night, instead of huddling in a tent with a headlamp, you sit in a warm room playing cards and swapping stories and trying to decide what combination of noodles, rice, and potatoes you'd prefer to eat. As we hiked we kept bumping into the same faces, and eventually, sitting in that warm lodge in Dingboche, it became clear that six of us were going to complete the rest of the trek together. It was easy to get used to having a supportive crew that shares jokes, songs, and optimism, and it wasn't until all that quickly evaporated at the trek's end that you realize how much you're going to miss them. Will they miss my crooning renditions of Jukebox Hero and Total Eclipse of the Heart? We will never know.

Was it all roses? Certainly not. My hands, grown soft from months in biking gloves, dried out and cracked like the surface of a volcano. There was a cold going around. And nothing heals at high elevation. More serious was a particularly sleepless night in Chhukkung, when my head felt like it was being pounded with a baseball bat. I usually get headaches at high altitude, but this one got me thinking that I would have to turn back. The next day I started taking Diamox, a miracle drug that alleviates these symptoms, and after that I was fine and sleeping much better. A nice side-effect of the drug was tingling hands and feet, giving me free reign to observe that "my spider-sense is tingling" when danger was presumably close by.

I had started the hike with a guy from Ottawa named Alex, and we got along famously. Unfortunately, Alex's knees started to give him problems around the second day, and after a few days limping downhill in Terry Fox fashion, he decided to hire a porter to carry his bag the rest of the way. We named the porter Chapter Two, in celebration of the start of a new chapter in the chronicle of our hike. A diminuitive, Samurai-looking chap, Chapter Two was a dream: he followed closely with us, taught us Sherpa words, and seemed gravely concerned if we slipped, but since he had another job to do he could only stay with us for two days. The second porter we hired in Namche, and he seemed alright until his second day when it became clear he had suffered some sort of food poisoning. After waiting 30 minutes for him to catch up, Alex went down and gave him his severance. The guy looked like he just wanted his mom and I think he was relieved to go and rest.

The third porter we picked up just for the afternoon, he was the very fast son of the lodge owner where we stopped for lunch. The father bemoaned "But who is going to wash my dishes?" as the kid shed his apron, donned the bag, and basically started running. The forth porter (by this point it was getting really annoying to accompany Alex on his porter hunts) was a bit of a pretty-boy but he seemed attentive enough. On the second day, however, we found him halfway up the pass, sitting in the sun, telling us he didn't want to go any further because he didn't have the right jacket. Then because he hadn't had breakfast. The excuses continued, with four of us bearing down on this guy to get back to work and finish the job. He finally shouldered the bag and continued to our destination, dropped the bag and left, not even sticking around to collect his pay for the day. I'll let you guess who begrudgingly carried some of Alex's gear for the last two days before he headed back down.

The forth porter drama sort of highlights my only real issue with the region: money. Prices are inflated to huge European prices which, at first, seems acceptable since everything needs to be walked in by porters. But then you find meals that are cheaper even though they are higher up the mountain, and you learn that the porters, the cooks, the servers all make very little. It's a bit tough to reconcile paying $6 for an awful noodle dish when you know that the average wage in Nepal is about $3 per day. The lodge owners have been blessed with owning land in a place that is in demand, and they are rather rich (though not rich enough to supply soap in their lodges). I remember talking to one lodge-owning family member, and saying how it must be annoying to have to walk to their lodge all the time. "Walk?" she said incredulously, "that's a once in a lifetime experience. I only take the helicopter."

Lodges will charge you huge fines if you don't eat at their kitchens, so you get this culture of vulture-ladies running their lodges who seem to have nothing better to do than monitor the activities of their guests. I am a hungry chap by nature, and most afternoons I'd sneak into my room like a criminal and take a few hits of cheese behind a locked door. I've heard it's almost come to fists when people arrive late and decide not to have dinner. This is in sharp contrast to Tibet, only a short distance away and culturally similar, where providing a full, bottomless cup of tea is part of being a respectable host, and I was welcomed with sincerity and warmth. I have thus concluded that tourism does have the power to destroy.

But you don't really hike around Everest for the culture. You hike for the out-of-this-world (almost literally) views, for a taste of the extreme, and to be humbled by the big world. It was beautiful, it was challenging, it was everything I could have ever hoped for in a hike. And I don't want to hike again for quite some time.

It didn't end with a bang. We arrived in Lukla with plane tickets booked, only to find that weather had grounded flights for two days, and was bound to continue for another week. A depressing, expensive town filled with frustrated hikers, Lukla is no stranger to bad weather. Last year flights were cancelled for 13 days, and earlier in November this year the place made international news when 2000 trekkers were "stranded". I couldn't take sitting around reading books about mountaineering any longer, and took off by foot, making my way rather quickly back to Jiri and the long bus ride to Kathmandu. As I write this, half my crew are still stuck in Lukla, waking up each day with optimism that is quickly eroded as the clouds roll in. The situation got me thinking about if I were on a plane that crash landed in the desert, I'd be part of the team that went out looking for help, I wouldn't be able to sit around in the uncertainty. Unless of course it was a plane full of food. Or pinball machines or something.

I was buoyed on by the promise of burgers and pizza and half-price pastries in Kathmandu, and eating my face off seems a great way to celebrate being 26. But the results of a month in the hills produced other surprises: the oddity of hearing a bus horn for the first time, the joy of fresh bananas, and the shock of how dirty Nepal is. Perhaps it is too soon to make sweeping comments about how I've been changed for the better, but you certainly come out of a month of trekking different than when you went in. Not just talking about tightening the belt either, maybe something more profound. Either way, it was a superbe experience, a highlight of the trip, and something that will be hard to beat. I imagine our man Edmund Hillary probably felt the same way while gazing out from the top so many years ago: "Now what?"

Namche Chill Day

2011-10-29T23:26:00.001-07:00

Made it....to Namche Bazaar.

But that's a hell of an accomplishment. Namche, besides having a cool name, is the biggest town up here in the hills. It has fresh bakeries, pizza, trekking gear shops, and even bars with pool tables and ice cold San Miguels. It's pretty cool, considering that the city exists in a place with no cars, a two day walk from the nearest airport and a week-long walk from the nearest road. It also makes it improbable that the postcard I sent it will make it anywhere in the next year or so.

I'll be thankfully brief here in the land of $6/hour internet. Most people fly to the airport at Lukla and walk up to Namche (2 days). We instead took a bus, the worst bus ride ever, to the end of the road at Jiri (Shivalaya) and then hiked the 6 days from Jiri to Lukla. This is the more traditional route, before planes made it to Lukla, and passes through many green hillside villages. It was a tough hike, with lots of ups and downs, but one that we look back on fondly now that we've rejoined the main Everest trail, which is sort of "trekking rush hour" with big groups and yak trains and lodges and reggae bars every few kilometers. I suspect that by the end of this walk I will be extremely annoyed with European hiking groups.

We have a good crew of interesting people that we met on the hike from Jiri, since it attracts those strange long-term traveller types who sell their homes to go to Samoa or try to spend half of each year in India. We're surviving on the lodge menus that I've pretty much got memorized by now: noodles, potatoes, eggs. I had a "pizza" the other day that may have ruined pizza forever for me, but in general anything tastes good. Apparently this region also has a burgeoning Swiss-style cheese industry, and we will be buying it by the kilo before leaving Namche.

Leading me to next two weeks: up. From here on in we climb steady, and there are a bunch of rest days built in to acclimitize to the altitude in places with equally cool names like Tengboche, Dingboche, Gorak Shep. I hear Halloween in Tengboche is a gas. Prices are sure to go up, so I'll be carrying some extra food, and that bottle of wine continues to hold a place of honour in my bag, waiting to be cracked open next to an iconic sunrise next to Everest. Enjoy the warm weather back home, see you from the top!

The Long Way Up to Everest Base Camp

2011-10-20T11:46:00.001-07:00

It's 11pm and the start of a long night of packing, emails, and all the little things you try to get done before a big trip. It feels like being back in Toronto, about to board a plane to Thailand, or back in China, about to get on the bike and head into Tibet: tremendous excitement. Tomorrow I'm going on a bus that will take me to the start of a 35-day trek up into the Khumbu Region of Nepal, to the Himalayas, Sagarmatha and many more strange buzzwords.

35 days. That's a long time to be out in the hills. It's not as remote as it sounds: these are busy trails with lodges to sleep in that will prepare you home-cooked meals. Beer, electricity, hot water are all available, for a price. But there are no roads. This land is my land this land is your land but you sure as hell better be ready to walk. The only other sizeable issue is altitude, since the lack of oxygen can be problematic if you ascend too quickly. I shudder to think about the price of a Snickers bar with those parameters in mind, and will likely augment my stash to 20, just to be safe. Or should I budget one per day?

The big highlight of the trek will be reaching Everest Base Camp, somewhere around November 7. Sometimes you tell people you want to hike to Everest Base Camp and they roll their eyes as if it's this big cliche. Maybe Everest is indeed the Paris Hilton of the outdoor world, but it still captures the imagination. I remember reading the illustrated world atlas (complete with the USSR) my parents gave me when I was in Grade 2, and looking at the pages that compared the longest rivers, the most population countries, and the tallest mountains. I remember tracing a route from the exotic sounding Kathmandu to the top of the world, and that's the dream that I get to realize starting tomorrow. Travel is about soaking up different cultures, and the culture of people who pursue the world's highest point is as much a part of humanity as any other place I've been, though it is likely much more vain, ambitious, and self-centred. All that aside, I imagine the views are going to be fantastic.

And, of course, if there's time, maybe we'll pop up to Everest summit to snap a few pics.

After base camp (EBC for those in the know), there are some other high passes in the region that make for a nice little loop. It all gets highly variable, and I can shrink the hike down a bunch if I'm tired of walking or, more realistically, have filled up 8 GB of memory with pictures of mountains and snow. If you're Jim Smith and you actually check these things out on a map, we'll be walking from Jiri to Lukla then up to Namche Bazaar, Lobuche and EBC. From there it's west to Gokyo, then Thame, back down to Lukla, and east a bunch to Tumlingtar. Ambition from an armchair, that's what tonight is all about.

Have I pointed out that I'm excited? Beyond excited. Anyway, there won't be much in the way of blogging for the next few weeks, except maybe something for the sake of novelty. I'll try to provide the odd Twitter update which you see up in the top right corner of this site, but otherwise you won't hear from me from the dark side of Everest. Enjoy Hallowe'en Remembrance Day Matt's Birthday and all that. On November 7 look to the east, and if you squint really hard you might spy me with a long-carried bottle of wine, waving from a perch in the shadow of Mount Everest.

Kayak Me a River

2011-10-20T11:40:00.001-07:00

I am writing this from the blissfully tranquil lounge of Sukute Beach, far from internet and cell reception, steps away from my tented camp, a swimming pool, and the powerful, seething river. This is my last night here, last of five heart-pounding days in the water, and as good a time as any to tell the tale of Whitewater Kayak School.

So let's begin with some generalizations about whitewater kayaking. Thrilling. Terrifying. Gives you the upper body you've always wanted. Much more difficult than it looks.

Day One: Manish, our short Nepali guide, teaches us the first skill of whitewater kayaking, the self-rescue. Flip the kayak, pull the spray skirt, and escape to safety. Looks easy enough. I enthusiastically slide into the pool and start rolling. Just before hitting the water I have a sudden realization that I'm going to be upside-down in the pool and my nose will fill with water. A half-second later I am flailing about underwater, a rush of pain to my head, and then gasping at the surface. Perhaps unlike any other sport, learning whitewater kayaking begins with a trial by fire, and I wonder if I will regret a week of this.

But it gets better, and I get better. By day two I've figured out the Eskimo roll and we're flying down the lower section of the Bhote Khosi, probably in water that is a little wild for a beginner. It's sort of a "sink-or-swim" experience, literally, but in keeping the kayak pointed straight and paddling like hell, we follow Manish through the waves. And it is a hoot.

We've run the river at least once every day, and it's always a wild mix of fear and exhilaration. It's tough to beat the feeling of pushing off from a big wave, getting some air, and then getting shot up by the next swell. That is sort of counter-balanced by the frustration of failure, since even a small whirlpool can succeed in swamping the beginner and flipping their kayak. I liken the whole thing to skiing, where the only way to improve is to run the hill, over and over again. But unlike skiing, where you can stop when you get overwhelmed, kayaking affords no such luxury. A flip means that you have to either contain your panic of being underwater and complete an Eskimo roll to right yourself (was only able to pull it off once in fast water), or you pull the skirt and swim to shore and eventually drain your kayak and try again. There's a terrific sense of accomplishment at reaching the end of the day, followed often by dumplings, then a hearty serving of pasta, and some of country's greatest hits during the evenings in the lounge. John Denver has never seemed more out of place than in rural Nepal.

Today we attempted a section upstream, that the cheerful Nepali guides have all built up as an intense section with Class II rapids, proving that by labelling something with Roman Numerals it becomes instantly more intimidating. There was a certain amount of trepidation as Manish and I scouted the rapids on foot, and he showed me the correct path we would have to run through the torrent of water successfully. Apparently, in real whitewater kayaking, there are these features called "holes", which you have to avoid, since the churning water will quickly flip your boat, or even trap you. Great. How will I recognize a hole Manish? "When we cannot see the water below a wave, that is a hole." Sounds obvious enough. A few minutes later, trying to follow our route through the melee, I learn to recognize holes more effectively when I am sucked into one the size of a minivan.

So it's been good. I would love to do more of this, and maybe will have a chance later on, or even back in Canada-the-frigid. It'd be cool to be good at kayaking since it's really fun, and the journey aspect of it, including lots of sunny afternoons floating downstream through steep valleys and past fishing villages, has a certain allure. In the quest for an infallible Eskimo Roll I am reminded of an old golf cliche: "You have to get worse before you get better." Add a "Practice makes perfect" to that and I've certainly got a long way to go. In the meantime I am looking forward to getting back to the city, where the only rolls I'll have to worry about are cinammon ones.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

2011-10-13T11:35:00.001-07:00

I'm writing to you live from possibly the cheapest room in Kathmandu, sitting next to a bicycle that has seen 8841km, a freshly laundered biking shirt that is remarkably white, and a disturbingly large pile of empty plastic water bottles. And what's that smell? Oh yes, victory.

Strangely enough, the final day riding into Kathmandu wasn't the sentimental tear-jerker I thought it would be. For starters, I had gotten little sleep the night before when I found bedbugs parading around the beds of my cheery homestay in Majyntar, and thus opted to "sleep" on a wooden bench. On top of that, the last 38km to the Kathmandu Valley was a solid uphill on a terrible road with tons of polluting trucks that like to honk horns. In fact, the nicest part of the ride was when a long boxcar truck stopped traffic for kilometers in either direction (just due to its size negotiating corners) and the only vehicles that could continue through the gridlock were bicycles.

Once in Kathmandu, I solicited a Spanish fellow to take a picture of me in the interesting centre of town called Durbar Square. He offered me a quick congratulations. And that's it. That's how a giant circle tour of Asia ends, almost as quietly as it started. I have been debating trying to sell the bike, but I think the urge has passed. Every time I look at the cycle, despite it's worn components and battered appearance, I see a call to adventure, a promise of long roads and freedom under blue skies. Whether it be big excursions into a new continent or a weekend jaunt along Lake Ontario, I think I want to keep this travel companion for the the time being. Probably until I learn how much it's going to cost to get it back home.

Today I went on a little walk-about in Kathmandu, which is a really interesting city once you leave the touristy neighbourhood of Thamel. I've only just begun exploring, and a longer post of my findings will follow. I also embarked on a mission to get things fixed, a nice sort of reduce-reuse-recycle grade 4 dream that is so painless in Asia. A guy on a street corner in northern Thamel fixed and polished my Birkenstocks so they are good as new for $4. I found a tailor to restitch some holes in my "adventure pants" and "adventure shorts", so named because when I'm wearing them, you can be sure that adventure is nearby. I replenished my book supply for a few bucks. What can't-a-man-do, in Kathmandu?

When you're on a bike touring trip there's no shortage of people who you meet on the way, and the challenge of biking occupies the rest of your attention. But now, retiring the bike does feel like losing a travel companion. Being in this booming neighbourhood of trekkers and tour groups is a little lonely, and I am a bit humbled to be back to two feet, buses, and the apparent ubiquity of travelling out of a backpack. Therein lies a challenge, since I have big trekking plans in mind, trekking plans that should be undertaken with a trekking partner. The search begins.

In the meantime, in a complete change of pace, I'm embarking on a week-long kayaking course! History: a few year ago I spent the weekend with some workterm friends on the Madawaska River, located in that large stretch of area south of Algonquin but west of Ottawa. We rented whitewater canoes, and under the leadership of one of the guys with more experience, we tackled a stretch of river, "played" in rapids, and dunked a whole bunch of canoes. It was spectacular. I've meant to go back for a while now and take some proper lessons, but the high cost and lack of time have never really let it happen. Until now. A week of whitewater kayak lessons at a secluded tented camp with meals included is a fraction of what it costs back home on the Madawaska. It's reputable, the water is warm, the weather is fine, and I can think of no better detente from 4 months of biking than a bunch of days eskimo-rolling (how politically incorrect!) in Nepali whitewater, followed by a good book on sandy shores under a crimson sunset. Sounds like I've moved on already.

Anyway, enjoy the best time of autumn back home, and remember that people out here in Asia have asked me when they should go to North America to experience the fall colours. I suppose the leafs are always brighter on the other side of the fence, especially when they hang on to a third period victory over Ottawa. Zing!

Pokhara Paradise

2011-10-12T00:19:00.001-07:00

The big thing about travelling in Asia are these sort of "foreigner streets" which cater to foreign backpackers. They do make big, strange cities more manageable, since all the restaurants, hotels, stores, and English-speakers are clustered in one place. And you can always find pancakes for breakfast. On the other hand, I wonder how much of Asia people actually see when they move from one backpacker ghetto to another. What I find most interesting is to consider what the locals perceive of these foreigner streets, since, surely, they must be a reflection of how these rich people from the West actually live. I shudder at the thought of what Thai people think about us, since their legendary strip of debauchery, Khao San Road, is like a giant outdoor frat-party. In Yangshuo, China the Xi Jie (West Street) is where you can find McDonalds since that's where we like to eat. In Agra, Taj Ganj has rickshaw drivers every few feet, since presumably we don't like to walk more than a minute to get somewhere.

Enter Pokhara; Nepal's #2 city has a sprawling bacpacker area called Lakeside. Now maybe I'm biased after two weeks on the quiet plains of Western Nepal or maybe I'm just getting tired trying find a hotel in a new city, but Lakeside has got to be one of my favourite rest stops in Asia. It's touristy, like the rest, with tons of hotels, restaurants, and little souvenir shops. But it's clean and open, it's by the lake, very peaceful, and there are no rickshaw drivers harassing you every few minutes. Plus all the shops sell either books and maps or fake trekking gear, so it's like being in a mall designed specifically for me. And I had my first beef steak in over a month, even though I thought they were illegal in countries that are mostly Hindu. What a Thanksgiving!

It's certainly not the "real Nepal" experience. In the real Nepal you can't get most things on a menu and half the buildings are in a permanent state half-completion. But then again, what is real Nepal? This country's bread and butter is tourism, and the closer I get to Kathmandu, the more far-reaching effects: I've seen busy quarries that build Lakeside's impressive hotels, tour buses parked outside highway restaurants, well-paid guides returning home to their villages after escorting a dozen guests through the mountains. Lakeside is a fake area that Nepal has created for wealthy visitors, but by my reckoning it's a creation to be proud of.

Anyway, I really liked the place, and had to resist the siren call to stay there several days. Must....finish....biking. In fact, I bet staying there longer would ruin my memory of the place as this welcoming, dreamlike paradise. Tomorrow I turn east, for one final ride, to the last destination on my biking list, the only one left: Kathmandu. I have about three gear combinations left on my bike that still work, which I suppose means I have two spares. Or it could mean I'll be finishing "Cool Runnings"-style. Either way, Kathmandu is a two-day ride from here, as the Nazgul flies, and you'd better hope we don't have one of those on our tail. See you at the finish line.

Learning to Rest in Tansen

2011-10-07T00:13:00.001-07:00

Well, my Birkenstocks are broken. I didn't know German-made $100 sandals could fall apart but lo, they can. Some Germans at this hotel have been telling me how Germany is in the process of shutting down their nuclear plants and replacing them with alternative energy and also how they lowered university tuition from 800 euros to 200 euros. I marvel at this advanced society. But they still haven't perfected robust sandals. How am I going to continue to develop my epic sandal tan now?

I was in Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha. It's interesting how such an important Buddhist spot is in one of the most Hindu parts of the country; I almost went deaf from the amount of Hindi-pop I heard coming from the temples. Amazingly, though Buddha was born over 2300 years ago, they know the exact stone on which he was birthed. It's covered with a glass shield which helps distinguish it from all the other stones. I'm sure Buddha would be rolling in his grave if he saw all the hooplah they've made about his life.: the area around his birthplace was a bit of a Buddhism World's Fair with temples built by Buddhist communities from around the world. It is sort of cool, they have a long waterway with temples of the two different brances of Buddhism on either side. I of course walked down the middle way (ha, Buddhist joke!).

Leaving Lumbini, at an elevation around 190m, I knew I was in for some agony. I did't have great Nepal maps, and there wasn't much info out there about the highways, but I did know that my next stop, Tansen, was at an elevation around 1400m. It was an absolute scorcher of a day, and also the height of their festival of Dasain so most places are closed. I stopped in Butwal, the town at the base of a foreboding valley that goes up to Tansen, bought some chips and huddled in a shaded hallway, the only shade I could find, as I delayed the inevitable climb.

It wasn't so bad, it never is. Certainly not that many bikers, just lots of motorcycles where the kids yelled "You will be tired, man." The road was alright and the views were nice and there were little water spigots at the villages along the way to cool off.. A couple stopped me from their motorbike, shouting "pump! pump!" and I tried to tell them that my tires were fine before I realized that they wanted to use my pump on their motorbike. The road levelled out a bit before a solid, 15km uphill to end the day. You know when a 15km hill is most welcome? Right at the end of the day when you're tired, hungry, and thirsty. A beer and two big entrees weren't the welcome relief I expected, and I collapsed in my hotel room in a heap of fatigue.

So, the next day would be a "rest day". Great. I slept in a bit (8am....pathetic), mosied down for some breakfast, read a bit of my book. Not one to sit around for an entire day, I decided to go for a little loop around town and up to the top of the hill overlooking the valley. Then, what the hell, why not do a short little hike down to Ranighat, some famous Nepalese temple that is called the Taj Mahal of Nepal. I had read about it in the guidebook and it was a 3-hour hike.

It was shortly after 2 hours on the trail - a very steep and hilly trail I might add - that I realized the guidebook probably meant a 3-hour hike one-way. But I was already commited and had to continue after coming so far. Thus my relaxing rest day turned into a 18km epic through villages, across ridgelines, down steep steps, and finally to the fabled Ranighat. It was closed. And it was no Taj. Sustaining myself on chips and cheesies, the journey back to Tansen was a speedy, sweaty race against the sun. It was a nice enough hike, since all the families were out dressed up celebrating Dasain, but the whole time I felt like a huge idiot for leaving so late for such a long stupid walk.

So today, a day when it is difficult to ascend and descend stairs, will be a true rest day. I will not do anything. I wince at "wasting" a day, especially when I know how much work it is to bring these big trips to fruition. But sometimes a day to slow down and sit (on something other than a bike seat) is a welcome change. Tansen is a nice spot too, not terribly touristy as I expect the coming weeks will be. And for the first time I caught a glimpse of the Himalayas, a wall of pointed white peaks sitting above the clouds. As my final destination and climax to almost a year in Asia, those mountains are heralds of a journey fulfilled.

What to do now after writing this blog post? It's not even noon. I suppose I can spend the better part of the day reading about Saint Steve Jobs. Tomorrow I'm hopeful for a big downhill and push to Pokhara, and maybe just maybe some turkey in there. Leafs win and Dalton's back, Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Behold the pale elephant, and on it sat Matt

2011-10-02T07:58:00.001-07:00

Progress? Not so much. I took a rest day in Attariya after making some new Nepali friends. The Civil War is over, and Atariya has become queen of the highway boom towns where the latest Pairs fashions are sold from the backs of wagons. I was graciously welcomed into the home of Deelip, a radiologist from Kathmandu. Many people have returned to their villages during this time of year, since it is the 10-day festival of Dasain. Day One involved a parade of women with potted plants on their heads so it's off to a good start. After that Deelip took me around the village, showing me the community forest (where contributors are entitled to fell one tree for wedding ceremonies), some other village homes, and even the butchering of a goat. Neat-o!

The next day I biked to Bardia National Park, a big track of land that is home to tigers, rhino, and elephants. There was a 20km stretch, approaching the park (but after the world's most out-of-place suspension bridge), where the road got quiet, narrow, and boxed in by tall grass. I saw some deer by the side of the road and then got very nervous about being stalked by a tiger. I learned later that my worries were unfounded, but at the time I looked like somebody had just walked over my grave. That night, the electricity was out between 9 and 11, so with nothing to do I decided to watch a movie from the collection on my computer. I chose the 1993 Kurt Russel western, Tombstone. It was bad-ass. So bad-ass, that for the next two days while tracking big game (and writing the subsequent blog post) I had Tombstone on my mind.

The nice thing about Bardia is that it's very quiet, so you can relax in the jungle environment. You look up and you think, "God made all this and He remembered to make a little speck like me." The lodge where I'm staying is clean and tranquil and very reasonably priced. The park sees maybe 5 visitors a day this time of year so it's very peaceful. You fall asleep to the sounds of the forest.

On my first day I took a late afternoon elephant ride. Elephants are big animals! The driver didn't speak much English except "monkey" and "deer" but they say he's got the fastest hands since Wild Bill. A few times he spoke Nepali and I tried to express that I didn't understand before I realized that he was speaking to the elephant. There was one word that sounded like an impression of someone sneezing, which made the elephant grab and remove a tree branch in its path using its trunk. It was pretty cool, I felt like royalty sitting on my little elephant thrown. We saw some deer and monkeys, and well, lots of grass.

Today I was up early for a walking tour with Ram, the quintessential frontier type who has the look of both predator and prey. This time of year, walking tours are a great way to learn about a new annoying insect: leeches. Admittedly, I'm not big on blood and the thought of leeches has always made my skin crawl. But seeing them crawling around, these little inchworms, sort of reduces the fear. They are annoying certainly, around dusk and dawn, but they don't carry disease or infest your luggage so what's the big deal? At one point we stopped and I realized the big dirt blotch on my sock was actually blood from a leaky leech bite, but whatever: you gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?

Did we see anything? Well it ain't no daisy. During 12 hours in the bush we saw fresh tiger prints, trees that had been recently downed by elephants, places where animals are usually spotted, and deer. Let me be perfectly clear: I don't really care for deer. If I wanted to see deer I'd drive 10 minutes to Rouge Park back home. I've since lost a bit a faith in safaris and wildlife viewing, as I've seen more up-close animal life while biking through Asia. You want wildlife? Grab a box of Animal Crackers and curl up on a sofa watching BBC's Planet Earth on an HDTV. The views don't get much better and your guide is Richard Attenborough. Pushing television over travel? It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Anyway, it was a nice few days of rest. Tomorrow begins a 4-day stretch to Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha and my gateway to central Nepal. You called down the thunder Buddha, and now you got it. You tell 'em I'm coming, and Hell's coming with me!

I dreamed a dream that was Nepal

2011-09-27T20:13:00.001-07:00

Great first day cycling in Nepal. Of course, it was a rather short day. The good ones always are! I'm in the decent-sized town of Atariya, just had a little map powwow with the son of the "hotel" owner.

Crossed into Nepal yesterday at quite possibly the world's most relaxed border crossing. You wouldn't even know it was there if you weren't looking for it. The Indian immigration treated me to tea and we discussed the price of sugar in India. When I approached a guard station expecting a search, the guard looked at my passport, lifted his arm toward the dusty road and said "Go to Nepal". Fine by me. There were little villages 100m on either side of the border and people were walking all over the place, so I guess no one cares what the locals do (I saw my money-changer from India at my hotel reception in Nepal that night and was like "but wait, weren't you...over there?"). The Nepal immigration was a guy's house: we sat down at a table, I gave him $110 for a 90-day visa, and he took the calendar off the wall and counted out 90 days. And that was it, I can stay here until Christmas Eve.

The Nepal side wasn't terribly different from my last few days in India, maybe fewer trucks and machines and simpler houses. Mahendranagar was a rather large town with way more ammenities than I expected: I had fresh cake this morning! But the real difference is the people. Almost everyone I pass is so excited to see me, and they wave and shout "Hello" with these infectious smiles. In India there is more shouting and staring and when you stop at a shop you have about 30 seconds before there are 50 people surrounding you watching your every move. Here it seems so relaxed, people wave and go about their business. Kids shout "bye bye" as I bike past or run up to the road, bring their hands together and greeting me "Namaste". I really like this place so far.

The only real unfortunate thing is the plunge in hotel quality. There's a bit of charm to these places but much more grime and wall cracks. But they're cheap, part of the adventure, and survivable: this one has a small poster of a beach-scape which livens the room up a bit; I'll include a picture next time and you can decide exactly how much.

I'm realizing that everything I own is starting to break. My bike pump kicked the bucket today, and I was lucky to be in a town where I could get a (much larger) replacement. The bike has held up beautifully, and nothing catastrophic has befallen it yet, but slowly things are getting damaged. Shifters are coming loose and brake levers have been tossed around. The most serious is severe wear on the chainrings, to the point where the chain doesn't grip at all in certain gears. Tomorrow I break the 8000km threshold, and I suppose that sort of distance is hard on a machine. I'm hopeful that Betty the Bike can survive another 10 days or so to Kathmandu.

Anyway, tomorrow is the start of some big festival called Dasain. Can hardly wait to see what happens. In a few days I enter Bhardia National Park where I'd like to stop for a bit and go tiger-spotting on an elephant. Camping seems to be more possible in this country but then again there are leopards and tigers running around so maybe I'll reconsider a bit. Animals don't attack people once they're endangered, right?

The India Grande Finale

2011-09-25T10:16:00.001-07:00

When we used to watch fireworks as a family, Dad would always whisper
"this is the Grande Finale" during the end bit, when the sky was
ablaze with more fireworks than you've ever seen at one time. I don't
know if anyone else uses this expression, it might rank up there as a
"Colautti"-ism. I mention it because if all goes according to plan,
tonight is my last night in India. And though the past few weeks have
been fantastic, the last two days have served as a definitive Grande
Finale.

I made the decision to visit the Taj Mahal during sunrise, to escape
the crowds and the heat. I forgot how much I dislike waking up before
the sun, but somewhat groggily I made it to the East Gate at 5:30am.
It was then I learned that you have to buy tickets about a kilometer
away, and then come back. This little detour, a slow security lineup,
and thinking that I had missed the sunrise had me a little grumpy when
I finally entered the courtyard past security. It's also worth noting
that tickets for the Taj cost 20 rupees for Indians and 750 for
foreigners, though they throw in a free half-litre water bottle.
Despite the cost, the guys checking the tickets don't have any
uniforms and look like two guys who just wandered over from a used-car
dealership.

I went through this elegant red sandstone gate and, seeing the Taj
Mahal framed through the opening, all my annoyances sort of
evaporated. And then, as I scrambled for pictures amid a growing
crowd, the first rays of golden sunlight fell on the east side of the
building. It was unbelievably beautiful. I might even say that
seeing the Taj Mahal at sunrise should be something you do before you
die. Believe all the hype.

Some fun facts from the audio-guide (yeah, whatever, I audio-guide sometimes):
-Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his favourite
wife who died giving birth to her 14th child. I guess he couldn't
have been happy with just 13 children, or even, say, 4.
-The four minarets, the white towers at the corners of the complex,
are inclined slightly so if they collapsed they would fall away from
the tomb.
-The Muslim rulers called the Mughals - who have built a lot of the
incredible stuff I've seen in India and haven't even gotten around to
blogging about - started to disintegrate after building the Taj,
reminding me of a line from Lord of the Rings: "Kings made tombs
more splendid than the houses of the living".
-Lastly, the rumour that the emperor cut off the right hand of all the
labourers so that they could never again build something as beatiful
as the Taj, is not true (and no he did not cut of their left hands
either).

After taking a few hundred thousand pictures I set off for the Nepal
border, a three day ride. This route passes through the state of
Uttar Pradesh (specifically the towns Kasganj and Bareilly), a very
non-touristy part of the country. I've probably seen more oxen than
cars the past few days, a few too many little kids without pants, and
a country's worth of corn being husked (sometimes all three of those
at the same time). I've almost collided with a cow. I've also had
one of my best meals while in this country.

The only issue is the reoccuring theme of people asking for money.
Not begging, mind you, but instead usually college or high school kids
who cycle up next to me, ask the usual bunch of questions, and then
ask for 500 rupees. Then they keep asking until they get tired. It's
started to get really annoying, certainly subtracting from the visit a
bit, maybe even detracting from the Grande Finale. It's strange
because it's happened to me all over India, but here, in an area where
I've been told I'm the first foreigner people have ever seen, I wonder
why people think I would hand out money willy-nilly. I wish I had
some Monopoly money. Anyway you do get a few who are so excited to
see you and practice English and never resort to the money question,
and those are the more meaningful encounters. Oddly enough, those are
the ones I stop and buy drinks for.

Tomorrow I aim for the Nepal border (two days before my visa expires),
likely the last country of my Asia escapade. This should be an
interesting one, as based on the difficulty of finding meat, small
bills, English-speakers and internet in India, I assume entering into
Nepal will be like falling off the face of the earth. I'll be
crossing tomorrow at Mahendranagar, a small isolated outpost at the
far west of the country, and biking about two weeks to reach the
capital of Kathmandu (which apparently is the only place in the
country with ATMs). I don't yet have a map but it probably doesn't
matter since the country has basically just one road. I assume the
blog will be quiet for a little while. Despite the challenges, I am
beyond excited. Nepal is a country I have dreamed about for a long
time, and a slow meander through its heartland seems like the best
introduction one could ask for. We'll see how things go, I just read
that a plane full of tourists went down in Kathmandu so that's an
auspicious start to the journey. Also there was a major earthquake in
Eastern Nepal recently too. Come think of it, how much good news do
we ever hear about from Nepal? Edmund Hillary maybe?

Crossing the Ganges today and dipping my feet in the water of the holy
river was a fitting end to a month in India. I bid farewell to the
world's largest democracy, and wish it the best of luck making its
billion people happy, holy, honest, and prosperous. Namaste,
Hindustan.

Camel country

2011-09-21T23:58:00.000-07:00

There are entire guidebooks dedicated to the Indian state of Rajasthan, so my six days certainly wasn't going to do much justice to the place. I did see a snake charmer though, which I thought was a big score.

What can I say about Rajasthan? I liked it. All the men wrap their heads in curtain cloth so they look like they're from the movie Aladdin. The women wear the brightest, most colourful saris they can find so they jump out from the green landscape, unless they are balancing a bunch of branches on their head, then sometimes they startle you: "hey that shrub is moving!" There are camel-pulled carts everywhere, which is of course very 13th-Century of the place. In fact, besides public buses and cellphones, there probably isn't a whole hell of a lot separating modern-day rural Rajasthan from that of antiquity.

The countryside is very beautiful and the people are interesting, I look at my photos and can't believe I biked through such an area. Most sizeable towns have an old decaying fort perched on a hill overlooking town. There are always higlights in between biking. I felt like Indiana Jones exploring the overgrown stonework and faded importance of the Alwar Fort. I was shocked to find wild peacocks and even more shocked to learn that they can fly. I visited the tiny, simple village of a young high school student who offered me tea. And I kept my eyes open for tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve (which apparently has no tigers anymore). My search for a tiger pelt continues.

I spent a few days in the state capital of Japiur, also called the Pink City because all the walls are painted a uniform puke-red colour. Had some delicious food and all that and then headed to the 9:30pm screening of the latest Bollywood extravaganza, The Bodyguard. The movie was in Hindi, which wasn't as big a deal as you'd think until the tremendous number of plot twists in the last 3 minutes. The whole experience was pretty wicked, since you're in a beautiful old theatre that is packed and that goes wild when their favourite stars come onscreen. And now I realize that most ring tones I've heard while in India are the theme song from The Bodyguard.

While I was in Toronto last month pleading my case for a new visa, I bumped into an Indian lady named Reena who needed to go from the consulate to the visa office as well. I knew the way, she had a car, and we became a team. We were reunited in Jaipur, and what followed was a memorable two days zipping around the city and surroundings. It was nice to have a guide and a vehicle, and someone as animated and funny as Reena, to show me around.

One day we were navigating the streets of Jaipur and she pointed to an iconic fort on top of the hill. "We're going to go have a beer up there." Her friend, Rajpal, was driving us, and apparently he was a bit of a well-connected man. Several times we came to a ticket check and all I heard was something something Rajpal and then the ticket guy retreated and let us through. Another day we journeyed a few hundred kilometers away so that Reena could visit the niece she is putting through college. Together we went to a temple and they made a prayer and the niece said that it was one of the happiest days of her life. Think about that next time you go to church.

All in all, a great stay in Rajasthan. I am now on the road to Agra, the third and final city of India's Golden Triangle. Except for one little monument you might have heard of, I am told Agra is an awful place. I'll find out in few days, when I've got a sunrise date with the Taj Mahal.

D is for Delhi

2011-09-21T23:35:00.001-07:00

Delhi is the third Asian capital city I've biked through, and it surprisingly felt like a big accomplishment when I arrived. Part of the reason might have been the exciting last 20km into the city, with enough horns to make you go deaf and enough action to give you a seizure. Strangely enough, not one vehicle came close to running a red light. There is order in chaos.

I stayed on this "backpacker street" called Pahar Ganj where the price of a room was a third of what it had been the past few nights. You know how a street in Toronto looks after a parade or a festival? That's Pahar Ganj. It was pretty central though, had lots of food options, and many Bob Marley towels for sale, which of course came as a relief. From there I journeyed around the leafy green streets of New Delhi and the through the hectic bazaar of Old Delhi. Also had a chance to visit the Ghandi Smriti (pronounced 'cemetery') and basically read an hour's worth of Ghandi quotes. What a guy. At one point, in the garden out back, I had to walk across the "Final Steps of Ghandhi" that are marked on the ground, and I was worried I'd be arrested or something for disrespecting the national hero. Favourite quote: "I am prone to as many weaknesses as you are. But I have seen the world. I have lived in the world with my eyes open."

One evening I went to the Red Fort (the city's best known landmark) for the excitingly-titled "Sound and Light Show." I arrived early, cheerfully bought my ticket, and then wandered into the deserted old fort and chose a spot at the front. What a deal, I thought, only 50 rupees! Maybe 6 or 7 other people wandered in, which seemed a little low. When the show started it took about 5 seconds to realize I had made a terrible mistake. I knew immediately why it was so cheap and so empty. Sound and Light Show does not mean fireworks. The lights were a few spotlights on the (admittedly, very nice) old architecture of the fort, but the sounds were a really cheesy narration with sound effects that described the history of the city. So goofy. I sat through the entire thing. Sometimes I read a bunch of reviews for a place and then think I'm becoming too rigid a traveller, that I need to relax and just jump into things without any prep. Not the case here.

Coming home after a Delhi-cious Murg Mussalman dinner another night, I wasn't in a rush so I opted for a cycle rickshaw, which is a bicycle with a rider named Rick attached to a small carriage for passengers. Now maybe I'm a little starry-eyed, after several months of biking, from the novelty of having someone do the pedalling for me while I sit and watch, but a cycle-rickshaw ride at night was my favourite experience in Delhi. You just sit there enjoying the fresh night air and shadows of the streetlights, and watch the world go by. At the same time, you're part of that city portrait. Your mind wanders.

It's on that cycle-rickshaw ride that I noticed the staggering number of people sleeping on the street. I saw people just lying on a blanket on the sidewalk with barely any clothes or possessions, totally oblivious to the traffic noise. And then I saw the little kids, curled up with their parents in a doorway, and was filled with sadness. I've been confronted by poverty during my trip, but never on such a scale. And never in such a pathetic state. In Laos the villages were poor but at least the people had homes and neighbours and dignity. Here, the large population of stray dogs is more active. How is a child raised by parents living on the street ever going to have a chance at life? How can anyone talk about India's progress when they've seen the streets of Delhi? Indians are really proud when they describe their country, and they sneer when they compare it to China. Well people aren't starving in China. Not like this. Maybe one day India will cut down on its gargantuan plush military and start doing something about its citizens, because the way they beg to us foreigners, it doesn't seem like the country is doing much for them right now. I pay my guy double what we agreed on for the ride, and still he wants more. A country should be able to take care of its people, especially during boomtimes.

The other sort of heavy thing arose while I was reading the newspaper this morning. As you might have heard, a bomb went off outside Delhi's High Court a few days ago, killing a bunch of people. There are posters up all over the city with pictures of the suspects. According to the newspaper, restaurants and cinemas are empty because people are afraid to go out of their homes. I never felt threatened during my short stay in the city, more annoyed at the number of security measures, but maybe I should have been. I thought about all the police and military guarding the the city's iconic structures, the Parliamentary sites, and the lavish residences of the elite. The thing about 'terrorism' is that the heads of state aren't in danger. We are. It's that random act coupled with being in the wrong symbolic place at the wrong symbolic time. Police are searching hotels and the airport is on high alert but there's a horrible reality to the whole thing. How do you stop random acts of killing in a city of millions? For India, this isn't the first time and it won't be the last. Man we're lucky that we can still walk around Queen's Park or take the subway without baggage scans and armed guards.

In other news, on page 5 next to all this terrorism stuff: police rescue a porcupine (http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-14/delhi/30153550_1_porcupine-rescue-animal). Indian newspapers are pretty funny.

Anyway, I'm out of Delhi and on the long scorching road to Jaipur. The next week or so I will be in Rajasthan, the celebrated desert state of forts and conquerors and snake charmers. Just before ending for the night I saw my first camel-pulled-cart so I have high hopes about where this will go.

A Break From India in Chandigarh

2011-09-11T07:52:00.001-07:00

I was enjoying a well-earned downhill section after what amounted to almost an entire day of climbing. I passed a sign that said "Welcome to Punjab". And literally just past that sign the ground became level, marking my return to the plains. I had been wondering if there was something wrong with me, since my speed in the hills had been so slow and the progress so arduous. Was I sick? Not getting enough sleep? Bike trouble? Back on the plains I was relieved to discover it was none of those things, that I could still put "the pedal to the metal" so to speak.

Shortly thereafter there was another monsoon. It strikes so fast. There's a telltale few drops and suddenly it's like being underneath a waterfall. I made it to a gas station to take shelter, but after half an hour of chilling with some new Sikh friends, the rain wasn't letting up so I went back out there. Again, biking in the monsoon is really enjoyable since it takes the edge off the heat and the roads are quieter. It's just the strange, gigantic puddles it leaves behind afterwards that are a little gross. Puddles that engulf the lower half of my front panniers.

I arrived at the biggest city I've been to so far, called Chandigarh. After Partition a new capital was needed for Punjab so Le Corbusier lent a hand and designed this experimental city of grids and self-contained neighbourhoods and a numbering system. I suppose it's a bit of a pilgrimage if you're a Corbusier fan, I'm not really, more a fan of his neighbor Corvoisier. Zing!

Each sector in the grid is one kilometer square. In most cases you have to enter a sector to access the homes and shops of that little self-contained neighbourhood . How novel. I wandered around Sector 17, which is obviously the downtown. Know your sectors, people. Indian people seem to think the place is like a Western city, probably because of the proliferation of roundabouts. While that's not really true, it was nice to be in a city that was organized, clean, and well presented. It was a pleasant stop.

The key attraction is the Nek Chand Rock Garden. If you're going to come to Chadigarh one day, don't look at the pictures, as I feel they might ruin the surprise. I didn't know what to expect, I just read that it was a park built of garbage from old shattered houses. What it ended up being was this surreal sort of Tim Burton-Pan's Labyrinth-Gaudi world of waterfalls and little doorways and gardens. It's tough describe but the big thing is that everything is made of garbage, but it's not immediately obvious what type of garbage. I was walking through a tall corridor for a while before noticing that the walls were made of bedding and couch cushions, covered with some sort of asphalt or grout to keep them from decaying. Then it took a turn for the very weird in the final section, where the guy has built hundreds of figures and animals. You walk through these gardens of little people with faces made from shattered porcelain, all staring back at you. There were no lost tribes lurking behind the trees to capture me and make a blood sacrifice, but the thought did cross my mind.

Chandigarh represents a bit of a decision point. Due to time constraints (I could only get a one month visa, expires at the end of September) I won't be able to make it to Haridwar for my spiritual enlightenment. I'll buy a Buddha keychain or something to make up for it. I've cut back a bit, to a route called the Golden Triangle that connects Delhi (the capital) to Jaipur (the gateway to the desert state of Rajastan), to Agra (home to the Taj Mahal). I've concluded that it's better to cycle without a heavy time constraint, and this gives me a few days leeway in case there are some exciting stops or detours on the way. After Agra it's a beeline for the Nepal border and what dreams may come.

For the moment I'm flying across the plains of the state of Haryana, and in a few more days I'll arrive in Delhi. My first hotel choice for tonight was a busy place labeled "resort" attached to a Reebok outlet store (that really contained more Rockport stuff) and is right on the highway in the middle of nowhere. The price was way higher than any other place I've stayed in India, so I biked on to the nearby town, where I learned there were no hotels and my best options were 5km back near the Reebok outlet store. I ended up in another overpriced "resort" where the guy at the desk studied my Chinese visa page of my passport for about five minutes before concluding it wasn't what he was looking for. Tomorrow I will be sure to stop for the night in a city with some more options. Travel can be a waste of money sometimes.

Memories of Himachel Pradesh

2011-09-07T20:19:00.001-07:00

Emerging intact from Pakistan's KKH, I promised myself that there would be no more hill climbing; India would just be a pleasant saunter from city to city. Obviously that was a huge falsehood. My body's response to this betrayal has been noncooperation, taken from a page of Ghandi's playbook. The climbs are challenging not only because of the heat and humidity combination, but also due to the roller-coaster terrain. In Tibet, I'd spend the first half of the day climbing and then the second half descending (and forgetting the climbing). Here, in the Himalaya foothills, you go up and down and up and down and on and on. I could start quantifying my water intake in gallons.

That being said, I'm really glad I took a more challenging route through the hills of Himachel Pradesh (Dharamsala to Balaspur via Mandi) instead of the boring plains of Punjab. I think this may me one of the more beautiful parts of the country. Cresting the top of a another high, steep ridge, you can see valley after valley of forested hills in the distance. Small towns cling to the more impressive locations, but there are still farms way down at the valley bottoms. Then, I'll round a corner and boom, massive waterfall. Or Hindu shrine. Or a parade of some sort. Or gigantic lizard. All are a treat.

It's becoming clear that I know absolutely nothing about Hinduism. But it seems to make a lot of people happy so it must be a good one. At sundown yesterday the main square in town echoed with the ringing of a bell to prayer. Down by the temple I could make out a gathering of women praying, an iconic sight in their saris of different colours. As with other spots I've biked through in Asia, I am quite struck by these daily practises of religion. From what I gather, there are hundreds of important characters in the Hindu playbook, each with their own quality, (like patron saints) and each with their own animal. I'll pass one colourful shrine after another, this one with a blue deity riding a peacock, that one with an orange one wrapped with two snakes; the whole thing takes on a bit of a Pokemon gotta-catch-em-all atmosphere.

It's religion that gives India so much of its charm. I visited Rewalsar Lake today (a surprisingly steep 25km uphill), a lake considered holy by the Tibetan Buddhists, Sikhs, and Hindus that is lined with their places of worship (and a cell-phone antenna, which is sort of also a religion). That's pretty cool, that all three religions can live in harmony. It's not just at the lake: in other cities you've got mosques on the same block as temples. Obviously it's not all roses, but here's a country that is trying to make it all work. I suppose we have religious tolerance in Canada, but here in India religion is everywhere, and such a huge part of who you are. It gives the country a colourful diversity. It also reduces the cooking options. Since the Hindus don't eat cow and the Muslims don't eat pig, the country is essentially vegetarian and the only meat you can get hold of is chicken. Let's just say I've been eating a lot of chick peas.

My bike after two weeks in storage was still in one piece, and I spent a few hours repacking and installing some new parts I had brought from Toronto. I now have a Schwalbe Marathon "flatless" tire on the back, we'll see how long that pipe-dream lasts. My route over the next few days still involves hills as I move eastward to Haridwar, a really important Hindu pilgrammage site on the Ganges, not far from Rishikesh (of Beatles fame). I'm hoping for some spiritual enlightenment once I get there.

Vacation from Vacation

2011-09-04T19:06:00.001-07:00

It's been two weeks since the completing the 40 hour journey from the Himalaya foothills back to the order and opulance of Toronto. That trip, which began with a cancelled flight due to bad visibility (who knew the monsoon caused so much fog?), turned into a bit of an Amazing Race ordeal. As stranded passengers split into taxi teams, three gap-year Brits who reminded me of the Harry Potter kids suggested a free option that the airline would arrange: a 6-hour taxi ride back to Amritsar in time to make a just-in-time propeller-plane connection to Delhi. Some stale cookies, Thor, and a few complimentary German beers later, I was home and already receiving comments about my hair.

It was a nice two weeks to be home at the end of summer, spent, well, mostly eating with family and friends. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to eat chicken until you could eat no more. There was fresh fruit, cheese, salads, Pizza Hut pizza, and all the good things you do without while on the road. I'm realizing now that I didn't quite get to chicken wings or a Big Mac, but I'll be sure to go next time I am summoned back to Canada for two weeks. Of 12 days at home, 4 days involved visits to the visa office to procure a new Indian visa. A few of those were nervous days where I was not sure if they would waive the requisite 60-days between Indian visas, which would have stranded me in Canada and my luggage in India for two months.

Profound thoughts on Canada after being in Asia for 7 months? Not too many. Boarding that final flight home I was comforted to hear what must be described as the Canadian accent, which I've argued for a long time doesn't exist. Earlier, during July, I'd had a bit of regret that I was missing the Canadian summer; being home in August you quickly remember that summer is over and fall is coming and what a cold country we live in. But mostly, I was just glad at how organized our road system is.

A few times my mind drifted back to my last taxi ride in India, sandwiched in the back next to Harry and Hermione. I remembered the warm humid wind as we weaved through traffic. Against the backdrop of green fields I saw people fixing cars, carrying baskets on their heads, lounging in the afternoon sun. How quickly I integrated back into my home environment, with Asia just a dream that was so different it could hardly be real.

That's the dream I'll be returning to. In a few short hours I'll be back in the air, headed toward the East. If all goes well, my bike and luggage will be where I left them and by Monday I'll be back on track across northern India, refreshed after a little siesta back home. Once again, the world is waiting.

How Things Change

2011-08-19T11:47:00.001-07:00

Has McLeod Ganj been good? No. It's been great.

This has been an ideal spot to stop and smell the roses for a little bit. I set out to write a bunch of articles, and hunkered down in front of this little desk I've been very productive. I think the biggest aid has been the fact that it rains almost all the time here. It just pours for hours on end. The sound of falling rain is especially calming, but more importantly, it doesn't make me feel guilty about staying inside working during a sunny day. The other plus is that, as a traveller town, there is a wide variety of internet cafes and restaurants with a good choice of Indian, Tibetan, or Western food (and even Thai and Chinese food, but they just never really seem to get those right here). And many, many freshly made desserts. Enough to lead to a dessert problem.

I realize now that I came to India without much of a plan. All it consisted of was something along the lines of "I want to see India". Whereas I've been inspired by photos of Tibet and stories of the KKH and hiking in Nepal for a long time, all I know about India is the Taj Mahal and the Bhopal accident. I've been doing lots of reading and altering my first stab at a bike route. Cut out Lucknow in favour of the erotic temples of Khajuraho? Is a journey to India complete without a few nights at one of these "spiritual communities" called ashrams? A few more days of editing my work and I've got a nice little route planned across the top of India.

Then, this morning, 83-year-old Mary Moody, one of my 4 favourite grandparents, passed away silently in her sleep. She will be missed.

I'm alright, so don't worry about clogging up the comments section of this post with anything, but I imagine my mum and my grandpa aren't great. It's odd for something like this to happen when you're so far away. It happened so quickly, to be sure. But the last time I saw 'Mama' was around Christmas time over 8 months ago, and there's a disconnect from all of this that doesn't make it seem real.

Travel is all about decision making. Whenever I have a hard time justifying a big expense on my trip, I turn to the classic reasoning that in the long run you'll forget about the money but you'll remember the place. It's always been true. I applied that same reasoning here: that the support I can (hopefully) offer my family now is more important than the cost and time to make it all happen (and there will be some help from travel insurance).

So in a strange twist of fate that doesn't even seem real, by this Sunday I'll be back in sunny Toronto sipping beers by the pool and doing whatever a son is supposed to do during a time of tragedy. I guess I'll see you all there!

I leave tomorrow, once I figure out what to do about the bike, and shorty after a morning walk to the village chorten (that's a Tibetan sort of tower that represents Buddha) to make an incense offering for the old lady who made us soup, made us laugh, and made us proud: our beloved 'Mama'.

A Passage to India

2011-08-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

Breath a sign of relief Aunties, for your nephew is now safely in India. And what a crossing it was.

The day began late, with Malik, the owner of my guesthouse in Lahore, trying to convince me to stay for a few more days: "God does not want you to go" he said, referring to the light rain. Apparently God had a real problem with my departure because as soon I had assembled my bags on the bike an immense monsoon rain had begun. I really didn't want to carry the bike back up the steep steps to the guesthouse, so I plunged into the deluge.

Imagine the heaviest rain that happens at the peak of a summer thunderstorm. Now imagine that intensity of rain lasting two hours and you'll have an idea of the monsoon. I can't imagine a drainage system that could handle such huge amounts of water, and the streets soon become rivers and puddles of uncomfortably brown water. I fear that my cherished Birkenstocks will be added to the list of things that will be thrown out as soon as I get home. You might think that such a rain would be torture to bike in, but it was surprisingly enjoyable. I was dreading another day of biking in the heat, so the rain was perfect relief. It was that warm rain that doesn't chill you to the bone, that type of rain that makes you want to forget what you're doing and go running through the streets (sort of like the first snowfall, since I'm explaining this to Canadians). You're soaked within a minute but everything is waterproofed so you just raise your arms in the air and take it all in.

Well, almost everything was waterproofed. Unfortunately my money belt's plastic lining was not closed, so it's contents were completely soaked. Not a big deal since there wasn't much in my money belt to worry about, except of course my passport. And so it came to pass that even my dirty underwear were safely waterproofed but my passport, the one thing you can't live without while travelling, looked like it had spent a rinse cycle in the washer. Completely soaked. And on a border crossing day no less. I wish I were pulling a Greg Mortenson and making this all up. I was tsked-tsked by every guard on the way, shaking their heads in disapproval as they tried to open my passport, often just giving up and waving me along. Pakistan stamped me out (no electricity at the border station). On the other side, in India, the head guard told me "your passport is completely spoiled" and started on a lecture about the importance of that document. I don't know what happens in such a situation: can India force me back to Pakistan even though my visa is no longer valid? Is this how Tom Hank's The Terminal happened? As it worked out, apologetically listening to the lecture improved the man's mood and he heartily welcomed me into the country. Seeing that I was soaked, another guard invited me for tea, where we talked about India, women, and money, which seem to be the three favourite topics in this country. I then indulged in my first beer in months, a Thunderbolt, which the label assured me was Extra Strong. I think I can safely say that the Thunderbolt will only strike once on this trip.

Every evening at the Wagah border - that is, the only open border between Pakistan and India - the flags are lowered and the gates are shut in an elaborate ceremony that has become a bit of an attraction. It's almost like watching a sporting event, for there are grandstands and flag-wavers and busloads of fans on either side. After an hour of Hindi-pop pump-up, the drama began. Both sides have their tallest soldiers decked out with tall fan-type hats, full uniform, and clicky shoes. They march around in a scene that must have been the inspiration for Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, kicking their feet up to to touch their hats. It was all the more funny cause there were some puddles from the monsoon so the Indian guy was splashing water all over. They get right up in the face of the soldiers across the border, eyes wide in serious stares. There's some bugling, some load grunting, and the flags are lowered simultaneously before the gates are slammed shut. The entire time the crowd is chanting and cheering. India and Pakistan aren't exactly friends, so I don't know if the ceremony is a fierce stand-off between enemies or a big show for the people. Either way, it was quite a show.

I arrived in the nearest town, Amritsar, after dark and proceeded to the Golden Temple, the holiest place in the Sikh religion and one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen. I think it would be culturally insensitive to make any Sikh puns, since I'm not Sikh-ing to making any enemies with this blog (couldn't resist!). The big thing with the Sikhs is inclusiveness, so the temple has a big free hotel open for pilgrims and serves free food to any and all who are visiting. I was quickly ushered into a small crowded room for foreigners, complete with fans, washing machine, and filtered water. It's certainly a quick way for a religion to make some friends. I admit that I didn't know much about Sikhs before arriving and well, don't really know much after leaving, except that they like to cover their heads. They seem like a good bunch of people, very friendly and relaxed. Inside the temple, in the centre room there are a bunch of people singing a hypnotic sort of chant that seems like it might have inspired the Beatles during their Seargent Pepper Days. The central room had a man with a long beard, sitting next to a fan and an emergency light just in case of power loss, just reading a large book. Walking around the pool that surrounds the temple afterwards, I couldn't help being pleased with the whole day but also really swept up in how foreign everything felt. And I think that's sort of the essence of travelling in India, just letting yourself get swept off your feet by something you know nothing about. Nah, maybe that is the essence of life.

I've now biked two days from Amritsar, back into the god-damn hills again, to a place called McLeod Ganj. This is the home of the Tibetan government in exile, and a spot where many Tibetans trek to (in secret) from China. Having heard so much about this place while I was in Tibet, I feel that the circle is now complete. It most certainly is not Tibet, more like Disneyland does Tibet, and a hugely popular backpacking destination. It's strange to be back in a popular tourist area after so long out in the mountains. Today I bumped into some guys I met in Amritsar who are just out of high school, I feel like they should have a chaperone or something. This place is big on holistic stuff and meditation and from where I was sitting at lunch I watched a wooden pipe flute vendor do a solid stream of business which is funny because probably the last thing I'd want to buy would be a wooden pipe flute.

You can't really not come to this place, especially after spending time in Tibet, and it's pretty much on the way to my next destination. I was looking for a place to rest for a week and catch up and try to do some writing, and this fits that nicely. There's fast internet, good range of food, and it's much cooler than the plains. And there's always the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I'll bump into the Dalai Lama on his way to work and he'll give me a dirty look or rather, the Buddhist equivalent which I guess would amount to a pat on the back and an invitation for tea. Ah yes Happy Belated Indian Independence day to all of you, hopefully you had a butter chicken and played some cricket.

Reunion in Karachi

2011-08-11T13:24:00.001-07:00

Here on my final night in Pakistan, the electricity has yet to fail. An auspicious event.

I just arrived back in Lahore from Karachi, where I visited my friend Salman, a wily old coot from my donning days who happens to share the name of a popular Bollywood movie star. Apparently when I emailed Salman the first time and told him I was going to be in Pakistan (well, more specifically, I wrote "I am coming to Pakistan and I am coming to find you") he dismissed it because he thought I had been out drinking and then sending drunken messages. But, on the other hand, it is pretty remarkable to bump into a friend on the other end of the world. (And oh yes, Lahore is a nice place too and deserves its own post but alas, is not going to get one).

Karachi is a massive metropolos of 18 million, way down on the southern coast of the country. It's a shorter flight from Islamabad to Kabul (Afghanistan) than it is to Karachi. It has bigger buildings and more Pizza Huts than the rest of the country, and in an unrelated vein, an elegant mausoleum of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Jinnah. Complimenting the Pakistan city-touring itinerary of "see a mosque and eat an ice cream", in Karachi we made a point of stopping to dip our feet in the Arabian Sea.

Salman's family welcomed me as a son, and for a few short days it was almost like being back at home: a stocked fridge, home cooked meals with the rest of the family, playing video games with Salman and his younger brother, driving around the city to meet friends for dinner, celebrating birthdays with cake and candles. It reminded me of what I have to look forward to when I go home. For all the incredible memories and breathtaking sights you experience while travelling, it's being inside a happy home when you truly reflect that, yeah, life is good.

An apt segue, cause life in Karachi the city is not actually that great right now. For the past six months there has been an outbreak of ethnic violence that has gripped national news and left thousands dead. Stuff like kids getting mowed down by gunfire because of the language they speak. During our phone conversation before I booked my flight, Salman, usually all jokes, took on a rare serious tone when we discussed safety. A city as large as Karachi is always unpredictable, but in an established neighbourhood to the east of the city, their home is thankfully a world apart from the strife. Salman was careful to keep me far away from anywhere that might present some sort of risk, and the Karachi I saw was chic and lively, highlighting the fact that I have barely anything in my traveling wardrobe that passes for chic or lively.

Ramadan continues to fascinate me, and every day I learn a bit more. Today I joined the family for Sehar, the first meal of the day that is consumed before sunup. The 4am wakeup is not kind, especially when a power outtage has knocked out fans and lights. Not much was said during the meal, though it was pretty iconic being lit only by candles. I am again struct by how religion manifests itself in such quiet ways. Here is an honest, working family, like so many other families, that without complaint will spend an entire month enduring not only a strange eating schedule but also a strange sleeping schedule. Waking at 4am, a night of uninterrupted sleep is unthinkable, and even though we all disappear back into beds after eating, I think you basically spend the entire month fatigued. Words like patience and self-control take on new meaning. This is all of course coming from a guy who has not had a successful day of fasting yet, and I remain a tourist on the sidelines, cheering everyone on.

I'm now filled with that eve-of-a-new-border-crossing excitement. The shakeup that comes with new money, new language, new culture and new food is what makes travel so engrossing, and crossing on land with everything you need hanging from a battered bicycle is this sort of T.E. Lawrence-esque dream. Tomorrow starts a new phase of the trip, a 1500km ride across the north of India and eventually up into the mountains of Nepal. I have a map with a scale not much better than a map of the world, a fresh stock of Snickers bars, and a robust attitude that knows there are going to be a lot of things that surprise me in the coming weeks. Goodbye Pakistan, you'll always hold a special place in my heart. I look forward to the day when you achieve the greatness you've almost given up on, and the respect from the rest of the world that you so deserve.

Wheels down, Lahore

2011-08-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

There's this dream of pulling into your final destination triumphantly and holding your bike above your head in success. It never really seems to work out that way. We arrived at Lahore yesterday in a whimper, trying not to collide with something - vehicle, person, or donkey - as we navigated the unmarked streets. We were hot, hungry, thirsty, and tired; but we had made it.

Islamabad and Lahore, about 300km apart, are linked by the Grand Trunk Road (GT Road). It sounds like any old highway or Brett Hull-sponsored toboggan but it's actually an ancient trading route across the subcontinent dating back 2300 years. That sort of history astounds me, most of all because unlike the Inca Trail or the Acropolis, the GT Road is still doing what it's always done: connecting people across vast distances (so that they can sell carpets and stuff).

Most people were astonished that we would try to bike the GT Road, as it traverses the hot, humid plains. Early on we were told the heat is "pathetic", like "standing in front of an open furnace". All good things to hear. The situation was complicated by the start of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting from dawn until dusk. Trendy city dwellers told us that restaurants would be open, which is completely true, in the city. In the rural areas along the GT Road, every promising eatery was closed. We took frequent breaks to gas station shops to get out of the sun and into some shade, if not some air conditioning. We survived on cold drinks and chips and chocolate, which we had to eat like criminals while hidden in a corner or in the trees off the road.

Ramadan is an interesting event to be part of. From my Catholic upbringing, I've always associated fasting with suffering: Jesus had a bad day, so, you're going to have a bad one too (or, more accurately, you're going to have a great day and eat meat anyway). Ramadan is based on the moon, and everyone must be pissed off when it falls during the long daylight days of summer. But as one guy told us piously, Ramadan is his favourite time of year, as it allows him to be closer to God. The most interesting part is after the sun goes down, when the first meal of the day, Iftar, is consumed with friends and family after praying together. The streets go quiet except for a few security guards mowing down small plates of food.

Did the plains defeat us? Maybe. We relented after a day and a half (halfway) and took a shared van to the outskirts of Lahore. As soon as the bikes were loaded a police cruiser appeared and seemed to solicite some sort of bribe for carrying us. After, we were told they asked for 10000 rupees ($10), but then that the driver only paid 400 rupees ($4). That was more than alright with us, though it was a fortune by Pakistani standards. We handed our driver the money, there was some debate among the crowded van, and then they handed us back a bunch of change: "we give you a discount, only 100 rupees extra [$1]". Pretty honest people here. It's tough to say if the ride was an improvement: the van was low so we had to hunch a bit, we were hungry and thirsty and it would have been very rude to indulge in front of all the fasting people. And then they stuffed 26 people into that van, four people to a bench seat. It might be the most uncomfortable I've ever been.

Islamabad and Lahore couldn't be more different. Islamabad is a planned city, built in self-contained grids with utilitarian numbering. Each grid has its own market (where I found some very current Lonely Planet guides, see picture) and mosque and the streets are quiet and pedestrian-friendly. But with no clear downtown it seemed a bit soulless, like a giant Scarborough (or more appropriately, a giant Brampton). Thinking back to the mess of vehicles in Bangkok, and the gridlock in the highways around Beijing, Islamabad is certainly one of Asia's most organized cities. We biked around the government area, past quite a few road checks and soldiers in sand-bag enclosures. The Parliament and Prime Minister's House were enclosed by a wide fence with serious armed guards every 30 ft, and it got me thinking about democracy being something that needs to be defended with guns.

We haven't seen much of Lahore, but what we did see was a mess of people, cool old buildings, and an air of the old British days. It's impossible to follow all the activity on the streets, or to photograph it while you're passing through; you just kind of live it, adding your own objectives to those of the thousands of moving people. It's a long way from the tidy SmartCentre plazas of the Toronto suburbs. I look forward to exploring a bit more, but after a day of rest. We are staying in the second nicest place in town, called the Avari. We came through high security into an opulent foyer filled with well-dressed staff. In a white shirt stained permanently grey, pants with white sweat stains along every seam, and basically looking like homeless people, we were greeted warmly, upgraded to the business floor, and treated to complimentary cookies, cake, and mangos. The internet works, there is a sitting area with snacks out in the hall, and I have yet to explore the swimming pool. I realize that I have been away from the comforts of home for quite awhile, and the pancakes with maple syrup, omelette, hash browns, and cereal were all luxuries I haven't been able to get my hands on for six months. I like to think that I ate enough this morning to make the hotel regret giving us the free breakfast buffet.

Tim flies home late tonight, after totalling 1200km across Pakistan. I can only hope he'll one day want to ride a bike again. I'm going to wait around for about a week, exploring Lahore, picking up my passport in Islamabad, and then visiting a friend down in Karachi. None of that, for a change, will be on bicycle.

A night in "the Galis"

2011-08-01T03:03:00.001-07:00

Feeling good after a great day of biking today. There are two ways from Abbottabad to Islamabad: one along the busy, smoggy end of the KKH and the other through the hill stations, which were British summer retreats to escape the heat of the city. Despite an intimidating 1600m climb, we opted for the route through the hills. I doubt any of my descriptions of the roads here are convincing anyone to plan a bicycle trip to Pakistan.

Climb we did. By our first break after 19km we were both dripping in sweat. Ice-cold Pepsi and Halal Lays chips never tasted so good. As we got higher the road got steeper but the air became cleaner and noticeably cooler. We were geared up for a climb and it was for the most part over after 30km, when we reached the top of the hills and a chic vacation city called Nathiagali. There we had delicious pizza and were preached to a bit about religion and were given free Mountain Dew. -Gali means mountain pass and most of these little towns are at the top of a big hill, with all sorts of impressive villas scattered in the forested slopes below. It's not a fru-gali area, think of it as Pakistan's Muskoka. Kashmir is a stone's throw away. And there are monkeys, which seemed friendly enough as we fed them apples. That is, until Tim tried to feed one by hand and it growled menacingly. All my monkey-fear came back. We are in a spectacular hotel at Changlagali, this would be a $300-a-night property back home. It's right next to the Prime's Minister's brother's house; well, one of them.

Once again we were welcomed as heros wherever we went. A few times we were basically mobbed by people wanting pictures, along with the requisite questions about our trip and looks of shock when they fully understand the distance we are travelling. I think I waved to every single vehicle today. Fun quotes: "you are very silky people" and "I love Jesus!" Some people drive by and just ask where we are from. After we respond with Canada, they cheerfully and sincerely say "Thank-you" and continue on. I wonder what happens if you answer with the USA. Many people here have an uncle or sister or something in Canada, often in Toronto. I imagine that even though these wealthy people in Pakistan are leaving beautiful villas behind to live in a semi-detached in Mississauga with a low-paying job, it's still the ultimate success. Canada is well-known and well-liked and I've never been prouder to live in a country that provides such a welcoming home to so many people of the world. In fact, the more I travel the more I conclude that Toronto is one of the best cities to live in. But then, food factors a lot into that choice and it's still unclear exactly how much damage Rob Ford can do.

On our first day in Pakistan we spoke to a Karachi reporter, and he took some footage for what we thought was some sort of documentary. Apparently not, as several people told us that they saw us on the news and on the sports channel. Internet (as well as electricity and the availability of beef) continue to be unreliable so I haven't had a good chance to look for the video online. In the meantime we're trying not to let the fame go to our heads.

Now, Abbottabad. Easily the biggest city we have been in so far, the bazaar is a busy, network of colourful shops. Many cloth vendors. Though not big cloth buyers, we liked the place. The approach to the city was sort of bleak, and the smog, piles of garbage, and heavy traffic are likely a preview of what is to come. We did a bit of half-hearted searching for bin Laden's encampment, but apparently it's a bit out of town. We've met a few people who say he's been dead for awhile, and a few who have property near his encampment that has plunged in value. There's never been a better time to buy in Abbottabad!

We were approached by a man, claiming to be a plain-clothed cop, who asked to see our documents. Now in "Safe Travel 101" that's a big no-no, and I held out saying that we could go to the nearby police station. He correctly guessed that we were staying at the nicest hotel in town (the Hotel Sarban if you are wondering), and his words "We'll see you at the hotel tonight" made us more than a little uncomfortable. The hotels that we stay in have big gates and 24-hour guards usually so safety wasn't a concern, it was just a bit unnerving. The hotel guys explained that there are a lot of police in the city after the whole bin Laden thing, and sure enough, I was questioned by another "cop" just outside the hotel later that night as I was enjoying a few kebabs (well maybe more than a few, but at 6 cents each it's hard to hold back). This guy immediately produced a badge and was very friendly after I explained our bike route. He was most concerned why we were in Abbottabad, and I think the country is just on the lookout for reporters and such, which is fair. The bin Laden raid was pretty embarassing for this country, and I imagine if the US did something like that to China there would be police and tanks and censorship everywhere. I guess we should just consider it fortunate that they got bin Laden before hitting the debt limit and defaulting and sending the entire planet into economic chaos.

Tomorrow we plunge back to the plains, and the heat, for good in what should be a day of only downhill. They never are. We'll be pulling into Islamabad, the capital, sometime in the afternoon, and maybe we'll see a mosque and have an ice cream. Doesn't get much better than that.

Out of the tandoori oven

2011-07-30T06:37:00.001-07:00

Let's start with the story of the day: as we were eating breakfast this morning a vacationing family from Gujranwala came by the introduce themselves. The kids asked us a bunch of questions and told us about their XBOX and quizzed me "what is 2+2x2?" to which I incorrectly replied 8. The youngest girl asked is we liked wrestling (the WWF) and then pointed out that my name, Matt, was the same as one of her favourite wrestlers, Matt Hardy. After some coaxing from their proud father, two of the kids sang, in perfect American rap accents, the theme songs for their favourite wrestlers. You imagine a bunch of things coming to Pakistan, but that wasn't one of them.

To continue from last post, from Gilgit we continued south on the KKH to a town called Chilas. It took two days that were short in kilometers but long in hours. Something we read uses the word "cauldron" to describe the area, and that is a pretty bang-on description. Gone were the villages perched on high ledges, the apricot trees, the cold glacier fed streams. Our water was as hot as tea and the wind was like standing in front of a space heater. The road reached its worst condition so far, and all told, I would conclude that biking the KKH, though spectacular, is a really tough ride.

From Chilas, we reached a Pit Stop as Phil Keoghan would say, "a choice between two options, each with their own pros and cons". Here the KKH continues downhill through hot, rather barren terrain along the Indus River, through a region called Kohistan. One valley over from Swat, Kohistan has a history of being difficult to control and apparently has an "anti-foreigner" sentiment. Even the area around Chilas is supposed to be similar, though we found people were as friendly as ever. Other cyclists have cycled Kohistan without any problems. The other option was into the Kaghan Valley, a popular domestic tourist region that is very relaxed, but no longer counts as the Karakoram Highway. The only issue with the Kaghan Valley is the entrance: Babusar Pass, towering around 2500m above Chilas would take two to three days to reach if we wanted to avoid any altitude sickness worries.

So we cheated a bit, and hired an old-school jeep with overheating bearings and a panels of gauges that didn't work, to drive us the 50km up an incredibly steep, bumpy road to "Babusar Top". There was snow at the top, and the cold air was a welcome break from the previous day's heat. The road was terrible for about 20km, and back on bikes our descent was painfully slow until we reached the alpine Lake Lulusar. From there, besides some great rivers of water across the road, we were on asphalt.

I don't want to jinx the trip, but it appears that us in the West really have it wrong about Pakistan. Of all the places I've travelled these people have got to be the most inviting. The Kaghan Valley is loaded with tourists, as this is high season, and our progress has slowed because so many vehicles stop to talk to us. There are handshakes all around and photos but moreso just a gratitude to see foreigners travelling comfortably. We've seen men singing, we've been hugged, and our day is full of big smiles and cheering passengers. Most people ask us in absolute sincerity "is there anything we can do for you?" and I have a wallet full of business cards of people offering us places to stay and meals. Tim was unable to refuse drinks from one family yesterday, and on the single road out of the valley we've crossed their path several times now to the point where it's like seeing old friends.

There are a lot of sights and sounds of Pakistan that I'm not mentioning. A 15-cent lunch of freshly fried samosa, thick potato wedges, and chicken pakoras wrapped up in newsprint; biking past glaciers that come down to the road and then continue on the other side; cricket being played both on and off the highway; children chasing the bikes; standing at a monument denoting the intersection of the Karakoram, Himalaya, and Hindu Kush ranges; brightly painted trucks with horns that sounds like sound effects from a old video game; the smell of garbage; restaurants with wicked views; old-school Jeeps; bridges in various states of disrepair; handing out pens because all the kids yell "one pen"; lightning-quick hands cooking naan in a tandoori. Did I mention the apricots?

Last night we stayed in Naran, the tourist heart of the valley, with a late-night bazaar and lots of families having fun. Our hotel was very close to the mosque, and it felt like a dream at sun-up to hear the melodic call to prayer. Tonight we are at Balakot, which is disappointing in comparison. For such a beautiful valley, Balakot is an eyesore and dreary, as it was obliterated by the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and is now a bulk a tin structures that will probably never be improved. I continue to be grateful that we live in a country with easy access to hot water, sufficient power resources, and most notably, outside of earthquake danger.

We leave the Kaghan Valley tomorrow, and continue into the hills north of Islamabad, the capital. If all does well we will arrive in well-to-do Abbottabad, where there is of course a big tourist stop to make!

Rush hour on the Karakoram Highway

2011-07-30T06:30:00.001-07:00

Asalaam alaykum from sunny, hot Pakistan. We are now three days into the northern area of the country, in a regional centre called Gilgit. It's apricot country out here!

Our first day involved a bus ride from Tashkurgan, the Chinese border town, up to the Khunjerab Pass between the two countries. We had hoped to get off the bus at the border, where the road abruptly ends and drops off to a badly worn track of gravel, but the driver was committed to delivering the full passenger manifest to Pakistan immigration. He even resisted my poor attempts at bribery. It was frustrating to sit on a slow, bouncing bus for such a long descent, and even more frustrating to have to pay a "national park fee" several times higher than what local people pay, for a national park we never really saw.

We finally arrived in Sust, the Pakistan border town. In the creaky visa office, the cheerful immigration officer opened up a big book and showed us a page listing the cost of a visa on arrival. Canadians pay $98. He also happily showed us that Americans pay $150, people from Luxembourg pay $3, and Japanese pay nothing. It was all taken care of quite quickly and without the usual border bureaucracy: he handed our visas to "the boss", who, sitting at a large wooden table topped with a felt flag of Pakistan, signed in heavy ink. We had arrived.

All frustrations evaporated the next day as soon as we got on the bikes. Concerns about the road condition, heat, and the daunting distance ahead of us just faded away once we started moving and felt the wind in our hair.

It's worth mentioning the people of Pakistan, who have been fantastic. This is a strange new place, to be sure: you have to be careful about talking to women, wear long sleeves, and avoid using your left hand for things. But every child, truck driver, cricket-playing youth, lounging farmer, or road construction crew beams when they see us coming. Even the sketchiest-looking youth grins and gives us a big "How are you?". Most people speak manageable English, loads better than in China, and begin a conversation with a hearty handshake.

We have been staying in nice hotels, mostly because the currency is so weak and because Tim's accommodation standards are a little higher than mine. Most places have a sort of "old-English" air about them where it seems like Phileus Fogg or the bad guy from Jumanji will walk in and go smoke cigars in the lounge. I've been getting used to being called "Sir", and also getting the hang of the frequent tipping. We hear stories about the days before the September 11th attacks when the hotels were filled with foreign guests. Now their grand sitting halls stand empty, adorned with old photos of visiting Queen Elizabeth that are memories of an simpler age.

The food is very good, though the fresh curries do take some time to be prepared. As Tim put it as we were mowing down a chicken masala: "it's amazing that President's Choice actually gets it right". Meals are eaten with your hands, though they often give us forks. Carpetting, decorated rooms, high-backed chairs, and outdoor terraces are a nice change from China, where you sit in a glorified cement closet on a tiny plastic stool. We ordered beef one day, and the proprietor informed us that there hadn't been beef at the bazaar that day, so it wasn't available. How bazaar.

Now, the road: calling the KKH a "highway" is a rather gross exaggeration. This is a gravel path that deteriorates to a mess of sharp rocks. Sometimes it shrinks to almost less than one lane wide due to rockfall or water damage. It's the perfect jeep road, or maybe mountain bike. As it is, we have had a jarring few days on the bikes, but everything continues to hold together, and today ended with a blessed 20km of fresh asphalt. You have to give them credit as the road traverses through impossible rocky mountainous terrain, basically following river valleys since that's the only way to navigate the mountains. Last year especially severe flooding (you might remember from the news) did a lot of damage to the region, including creating a huge 20-km lake that submerged a good chunk of the road and cutting off the northern villages. The only option is to traverse the valley by boat, which was a nice break. Sure doesn't look like anyone is in a hurry to make a new road around the lake, so I think our boat operator will enjoy high foreigner fares for quite some time (it was $5 each to take the hour+ boat ride, so no one is complaining, though locals pay about $1)..

We will continue south, slowly leaving the highest mountains of the world behind and entering one of the world's most densely populated plains, all the while stuffing ourselves with chapattis and mango juice. The adventure continues.

The place where Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan meet

2011-07-22T09:27:00.001-07:00

So it's now 10:30pm and quite bright outside. Here at the extreme west of China we're still on Beijing Time so the days are oddly lopsided. I guess that's the way Mao would have wanted it.

Beijing has never seemed further away here. Arabic text is everywhere and seeing Chinese people is rare. Just as I was getting used to "Yakshum says", my closest effort at "hello" in Uygher, we've moved into areas that are populated by Kyrgyz people and then today, Tajiks. All very friendly people, all with very interesting hats. Our collection of minority people continues to expand.

Often the only way to communicate is in Chinese, though it's not anyone's first language. We had an incredible pasta meal the other day where the 8-year old daughter was the principle translator to her mom who only spoke Kyrgyz. I can't imagine speaking French that well in Grade 3. We showed her Canadian money and when we gave her a quarter her face lit up with a gratitude words could not describe. I think I will carry Canadian money when travelling from now on. And then her mom brought out one of the best meals I have had in China so far. The food in this part of China is very very good, maybe because it's not Chinese food.

It's also nice having another person to bike with, at the very least so the pictures of the road have something in the foreground. Tim arrived seemingly without any effects of jet-lag, though his bike suffered a few more dings than mine in transit (Hainan Airlines). You have someone to talk to when the road gets boring and someone to complain to when the road goes up, but you do chew through raisins and pistacchio snacks much faster.

Not that the road has been boring (though it has gone up). Biking past mud houses and courtyards it sometimes feels like you're looking at ancient Inca towns. The terrain is dry, barren desert punctuated with welcome leafy oasises (oasii? oasisees?), all against a backdrop of massive whitecapped mountains. Sometimes it looks like their may be avalanche danger even in the middle of summer. There are horses and mules around, and random camels grazing at the side of the road. It is spectacular.

So here we are, in Tashkurgan, in a far corner of China within sight of the Tajik, Afghan, and Pakistani border. Tomorrow we enter a new frontier: Pakistan.

Now there has been no mention of Pakistan in this blog up till now, and these plans may come as a bit of a surprise to some readers (of the three or four that there are). Maybe I take things too seriously, but I imagine there will be a few grave expressions of concern: Pakistan gets a lot of news coverage, and very little of it is good.

We are going to be biking a route called the Karakoram Highway, a 1300km-long piece of tarmac linking China and Pakistan. It is the highest international border crossing in the world, crossing the Karakoram Range, which is like the western range of the Himalayas and the home of K2 and a bunch of other really high peaks. The road took decades to build, and I think primarily links China and Pakistan politically as friends against India. Needless to say, it is supposed to be an incredible ride.

It is also supposed to pass through a very stable and safe part of the country. We are nowhere near the "war-zone" with the Afghanistan border, and the recent violence in Karachi is at the opposite end of the country. We have researched the route and will tread carefully, but from all previous accounts the Pakistani people are very friendly. I am hoping the scariest part of Pakistan will be just a few hours ago, explaining it all to Ma and Pa.

Onwards and upwards. The Chinese government requires us to bus up to the border tomorrow, and from there it's downhill on "the KKH". Couldn't be more excited to see what the road has in store. We had a great final meal in China tonight, and tomorrow ends a memorable five months in the red country. Zaijian China, you've been quite a place to explore. May you live to fulfill another Five-Year Plan with great communist efficiency.

The Long and Winding Silk Road

2011-07-17T19:23:00.001-07:00

Triumph! Three days ago I was standing (barely) in the early evening sun at Jiayuguan Fort after having endured a 230km-day in the blazing desert heat. I solicited a rather well-to-do Chinese tourist to take a photo of me, and it was only afterwards as I was holding my head under the running cold water in the washroom that i saw just how hagrid my appearance was. Yesterday, when I was doing a much needed laundry, I inquired when my clothes would be ready for drying. The hostel owner told me that they have washed the clothes three times but still the water was still coming out black. My white biking shirt, though much improved, is still a shade of grey.

Anyway, everything was going so well on my last day of biking: on the road by 5am, a decent breeze, lots of food. That's the one thing about biking: you can eat whatever you want, how often you want. How many lunches can you fit into the average day? This one had three. Then, about 15km from Jiayuguan, the day's exertion finally caught up with me. I pulled over to the side of the road and doused my head and then feet in a nearby stream. Is this what you would call "hitting the wall"? The last hour was a crawl, little by little; too close to give up and hail a pickup truck, but too far to be able to walk. And Jiayuguan, the legendary end of the Chinese Empire and the end of my 2500km ride across Eastern Tibet? It was okay. Some things are best left to the imagination.

Since Jiayuguan I've taken the wimpy way (bus) to a few Silk Road stops. The first, Dunhuang, is famous for the Mogao Grottos, ancient Buddhist shrines over 1300 years old. As you'd imagine: just a bunch of caves, though very impressive caves. A big part of the tour is a pavilion explaining how most texts from the famous Library Cave was taken by foreign archaeologists in the 1900s. Chinese Nationalism knows no bounds, and I got a few dirty looks in the pavilion. Yeah, I'd have taken a scroll if I had the chance.

The other stop, Turpan, sits at 154m below sea level and is the third lowest exposed spot on earth, and I of course get very excited about that sort of thing. I spent the day at the expansive ruins of an old city named Jiaohe, learning about the labour-intensive system of tunnels used to supply water to people's homes (called karez), and of course eating. Should I stop eating these delicious grapes? I see no raisin not too. I also say the largest aptuwa, or hand-washing kettle, in this province, of which I have included the photo for bragging rights. Is it possible there's a larger one somewhere else in the world? The search begins.

Then thing about the Silk Road is that you're pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Highlights from the bus windows have been sandstorms and wind turbines. Outside of the oasis towns, the landscape is the bleak nothingness of the Gobi desert, not terribly far off from the surface of the moon. In fact, the moon might be an easier tourist sell, especially if the roads were comfortable. What's incredible is that it's been the middle of nowhere for so long: people were following this arduous route across the desert over 1000 years ago. It's hard not to be out here and captivated by that spirit of adventure.

It was a bit of a surprise to arrive in Urumqi (that 'qi' is pronounced 'chee'), the provincial capital of this region. The guidebook absolutely crucified this place but it's a clean, bustling city with lots of nice parks and pleasant summer weather and friendly people. It's in the northwest of China, not too far from where the Russian, Mongolian, and Kazahk border meet. In fact, this area is celebrated (?) as being the point on Asia furthest from the ocean. Something to feel good about, no doubt.

The best part is the food: this region of the country is dominated by the Uygher people (pronounced 'wee-ger') who are Muslim and all look like they are from Greece. They bring a much needed alternative to Chinese food, including naan bread and kebabs. The mix of Chinese and Uygher gives the city a cosmopolitan feel and it occurs to me that this is something I value in a city. I ate a lot, relaxed, ran a bunch of errands. I had hoped to end the day with the new Transformers or Harry Potter movie, but alas, movie studios like to wait a bit before they let China work their pirating magic.

From here, after Tim arrives today, the road turns west to Kashgar, at the far, far west of China. The road doesn't turn slowly, as it's a 24-hour ride. We'll have to talk to the driver: lets see if we can get that down to 23.

The Race to Jiayuguan

2011-07-13T08:47:00.001-07:00

Just set my alarm to 4am. That's going to be painful.

So apparently my last post was a little misleading as I was not yet done with the Tibetan plateau. Or rather, it was not yet done with me. Qinghai Lake is actually at about 3200m so it's still way up there. The thing is, the Tibetan plateau has been really unforgiving lately. It's been about a week not only with overcast skies, but lo, rain as well. Rain in July anywhere else would be a dream, but with the cold wind it's been a bone-chilling few days. There's been some surprising steep climbs and some surprising sections of gravel too, and all the while I've been putting in long days so morale has been a bit low. I did discover something called "Milk-juice drink" which has helped counter that: it's the freshness of milk with the flavour of juice. How do they do it?

Morale hit an all-time low arriving in darkness at a small farmhouse where I hoped to ask to pitch my tent. The occupants immediately fled inside their home, bolted the door, and sat watching TV, waiting for me to leave. I have included a photo, so if you ever see these people you can publically shame them. A little further along, a nice Tibetan family not only accepted my request, but invited me in for noodles, tea, and the Mummy 3.

There have been other moments. The other day, after basically 40km of climbing, I reached a pass. I talked to a nice family from Shandong and we did the picture dance. Then I rolled a few metres forward and saw the lake. Qinghai Lake! It was spectacular. I mean, it wasn't the most beautiful lake I've ever seen, and the weather was cloudy, but it was like seeing the ocean for the first time. I'd never recommend that you visit Qinghai Lake if you were touring China, you wouldn't have time for it. But biking turns points on a map into destinations, and seeing that destination come to life after so much anticipation is oh so inspiring. I camped that night next to the lake and was lulled to sleep by crashing waves (and rain of course).

Then there was today, which I would describe as "what goes up must come down". 120 km of downhill. That's the stuff dreams are made of. I had a late breakfast huddled around a wood stove trying to defrost my freezing socks and numbs hands. How far away that seems now, in perfect summer patio weather under blue skies and a scorching sun. The hotel has a shower and running water. And after 3 weeks of every variation imaginable of noodles and meat, I plowed into the first Dico's I could find (that's a Chinese fast-food chain) and inhaled two burgers. Followed that with a milk-juice drink, which isn't as good in warm weather: milk was a bad choice!

The town I stopped in, Linze, is small, but really cool. It's clean, along the river, and very busy. I went to the night market for some post-burger snacks, and was happy to see the area abuzz with vendors and families under fluorescent lights. I picked up some fresh fruit and enjoyed a perfect night to be outside. It was a pleasant evening of normalcy before I head into the desert into some other weird locale where people are enslaved by the Chinese and just throw their trash outside.

Enter tomorrow. After some long days, I'm back on schedule. I had alotted two days to get to Jiayuguan, the end of the Great Wall, and the end of my ride. But there are a few Silk Road sights and some transit difficulties ahead so a day early would be ideal. My goal is to hit the 200km relatively flat ride tomorrow, arriving at Jiayuguan sometime before 7:30, when the old fort closes. It'll be a race against the clock, and one that starts in a few short hours. If successful you'll get a triumphant post tomorrow, if not you won't hear anything about it. I should be sleeping. Of course, I was just called downstairs to surrender my passport to eight policemen who were going through the hotel records. It seems crime, and foreigners, never sleep.

Goodbye Tibetan Dirt Road

2011-07-09T07:14:00.000-07:00

First up, the sky burial didn't work out. Not much to elaborate on, except a little disappointment. You win this one, sky.

Biking across Qinghai has been a world apart from the good old days in Sichuan. For starters, it's colder. Most nights I'm sleeping at around 4200m, and I guess that sort of elevation turns July - what one would think is the warmest month - into November. I realize I have not seen trees in some time. And the wind, at times, is enough to make you get off your bike, curl up into a ball on the ground, and give up on the whole thing.

The biggest difference is that it doesn't feel like Tibet anymore. Geographically, this is still the highlands, and there are still plenty of Tibetan people around. But they're more...integrated. There are fewer nomads and many more vehicles (mostly trucks en route to Yushu). Red robed monks on motos are few and far between. In the towns many of the shop owners are Chinese, and my "Tashi Delek" Tibetan greeting has been getting very little use. A Tibetan family I visited in one town had big posters of Mao on the wall, along with photos of the father's distant days as a nomad herder. I get the feeling that the area of Western Sichuan I biked through earlier is a very strong Tibetan region that hangs on very strongly to its roots. If it's doomed to turn into this, you should book your plane ticket to visit now.

The other thing about Qinghai, which apparently is called the "Siberia of China", is that it's really bleak. For two days I biked through nothing, just empty, dry, cold, plains. Not even nomads live in some of these areas. There aren't many stops on the way, and the towns (or truck-stops, depending on how you look at them) are very basic, but great if you like snooker and throwing garbage on the ground. I'm getting closer to civilization as this hotel has running water and yes, a shower. What's next, a Western-syle toilet?

And it is worth mentioning the stares. Obviously, in China, one has to quickly get used to being gawked at. In Leshan, many parents would bring their children over to show them what a foreigner looks like. Well they're not quite so polite about it in Qinghai. I enter a restaurant, order noodles and meat (can't count how many times I've had that one) and then sit down, maybe write in my journal. Someone else comes in, almost hits the floor in surprise. Not really friendly about it, they come over, move right in over my shoulder, and watch me write english words on paper for a few minutes. Not a few seconds, like three minutes of intense scrutiny. Then they sit down, at the opposite end of the restaurant, and just watch. While biking, I'm used to the familiar sound of a moto approaching from behind, then slowing down so the riders can follow and watch for a few minutes. Today was the first time a moto went by in the other direction, turned around, and then tailed me for a few hundred meters. Case in point is the kid sitting next to me right now, just watching. I don't really have an issue with the rock star treatment, but this is getting a little bit rude and a little bit annoying. When I'm back in Toronto, if I ever see a Tibetan person, I'll get 'em back.

There is beauty in this place of wide open spaces and dramatic skies. And the experience is still awesome. A monk gave me another peach drink today (they must love that stuff). Did I mention I taught a grade 5 class?

Anyway, so I've been rushing through Qinghai but don't feel terribly bad about it. The past four days have been huge days: yesterday I arrived in the dark, cold rain after 159 km on the road (note: rain is awful). It's all been worth it, as tomorrow is a "mostly downhill" day which should bring me off the Tibetan plain to the shores of Qinghai Lake. After telling people for the past two weeks that my destination is Qinghai Lake, arriving tomorrow will feel like quite an accomplishment.

Then the old man died

2011-07-04T23:13:00.001-07:00

Greetings from Qinghai. I arrived here two days ago in a textbook final day in Sichuan: a monastery, two high mountain passes, some rain, and lots of noodles. The climb up to the Qinghai border wasn't as demanding as I expected (only had to eat half a tray of Oreo cookies as motivation) and it's true what they say about Qinghai, the roads are better. Much better. The switch happens immediately: unbroken, smooth pavement, appropriate signage, lane lines, barriers on dangerous curves. It's strange because I think Sichuan is a relatively rich province, and Qinghai is fairly remote, poorer place. Whatever the reason, that ride down from the border, hitting 62 km/h, was one of the best descents so far.

In Xiewu, the crossroads town where I'll be making a big right turn away from Tibet, I ran into a Chilean chap names Sergio who is teaching English at a nearby monastery. It was nice to have some free food and drinks and of course, rant about teaching with a fellow foreigner.

I'm about 2 days behind where I want to be, and I was planning for a few long days in the next week to get me back on schedule. So it would seem a little counterintuitive to take two rest days in Xiewu, but that's what happened.

A old man died on Xiewu on Sunday, and the funeral is scheduled for 4 days later. Now in Tibet, they don't creamate or bury bodies, usually they do something called a sky burial. It's worth reading about, my understanding is that they go up on a hill, cut the body up into pieces, and then let the vultures have their way with it. It sounds awful and it probably is, but in a place where the ground is too frozen or rocky for a burial, and in a religion that believes in the cyclical bond with nature, it's a very respectable way to go out.

The opportunity to witness a sky burial first hand is difficult to resist. It's an incredibly sacred part of this culture and according to the government, strictly off-limits for foreigners. The chances of stumbling upon one and getting permission to attend are very low, yet it seems all the cards have lined up for me. And so I will wait till morning of the forth day.

Yesterday we went to Yushu, a jewel of a city in this region. I hadn't been planning to go because, unfortunately, Yushu was wiped off the map by an earthquake last year. The city is enormous, or was enormous, and a year after the quake, is still a mess. There are very few buildings, and most of the rubble is gone. There's a lot of construction and road work but the most striking sight is the tents. There are tents everywhere. Imagine a city the size of Barrie made up only of tents. I can't imagine having to survive a Tibetan winter in such an home, and a new city still seems ages away. Life goes on, and there are tents and temporary structures selling everything you would expect to find in a Chinese city: cell phones, sports shoes, monk robes, you name it. It was a humbling day and my heart goes out to the people of Yushu.

Today I slept in and wandered around Xiewu a bit. Like many Tibetan towns, there's an impressive-looking monastery perched on a hill above town, begging to be explored. After tomorrow it looks like there will be a few dawn till dusk rides to try to get back on track. We'll see what wins out: determination to stand accomplished in Jiuyuguan after having biked the entire way, or fatigue confining me to a bus for a little bit of the way. Look to the sky.

Last Night in Sichuan

2011-07-02T09:27:00.001-07:00

Hello from Shiqu, also called Shershul, also spelled Serxu. None of those I do a very good job of pronouncing. People ask where I am going: I point down the road and mutter something with two syllables that starts with "sh-".

It's been three days in a fairly remote part of the world to get here. Sometimes it feels a little bit like Heart of Darkness, going deeper and deeper into Tibet. Yet the further I go the friendlier the people are; at this point there isn't a vehicle that passes me that doesn't have its occupants grin and give me a big "hello!". Today a motorcycle stopped and took out a rope and gestured that they wanted to pull me. A passing van of monks gave me a peach drink. It was delicious.

The first night I stayed at a Buddhist retreat centre called Dzogchen, in a location not terribly unlike Lake Louise. It was interesting because there were a lot of Chinese people there; I don't peg the Chinese as terribly religious but there are quite a few who make pilgrimages to sacred areas of Tibet. It was there I got my first "Do you believe in Buddha?", which I was not ready for. It was also interesting because one of Tibet's most important universities is in the same valley. I went in to take a look and the students were really excited, inviting me into their dorm rooms, giving me food, and taking lots of photos. Obviously I can't resist taking pictures of the red-robed monks, so in the ensuing photo barrage I think everyone walked away happy.

While biking through these rural areas, the plan is always to tent, ideally in someone's yard. But yesterday I was offered to stay with another nice Tibetan family. Only the guy my age could speak Chinese (which is our only means of communication), and when you're tired as hell after 100km of biking you don't always want to do sign language games (nevertheless, my Tibetan parts-of-the-body vocabulary has been steadily improving). Tibetans are gracious hosts, never letting your glass of tea become empty or even get cold. They gave me the biggest bowl and the first serving of food. They gave me the best blankets and tucked me into bed. But the total attention and small quarters and lack of any privacy until after dinner at 11pm can be tiring. I just need some time to sit and relax.

Enter Shiqu. I was expecting a city that had seen better days, and it certainly delivered. I settled down in a nice hotel room with a mediocre shower down the hall and someone else's wifi providing me a chance to catch up on all of Will and Kate's antics. Today was a relaxing easy ride with a stop at some village party where the main singer told me to look around at all the men eating lunch with us to confirm that he was indeed the most handsome. Later, while waiting out a storm at a weathered monastery, the head monks thought it would be cool to take a picture of me with a random belt of ammunition. When you get on that bike in the morning, you know where you are going, but you really have no idea what the day has in store for you.

Tomorrow is an exciting day, as I'll be passing north into the province of Qinghai (pronounced Ching-high). I spent lots of time dreaming over maps of Sichuan, but I know really very little about the Qinghai leg. People I've met from Qinghai have told me proudly that their roads are better. That's a good start.

I should also mention that I did have a rest day in Manigango where I bussed over the 5000m Chola Pass to Dege, toured the Dege printing monastery (that houses 70% of written Tibetan history or something like that, in case you were wondering), and then bussed back. Buses are agony. I banged my head on the ceiling, I felt nauseous, lightheaded, it was bumpy the entire tire. Give me a bike any day.

I'll be eating those words tomorrow when the air grows thin around 4700m at the border of the two provinces. Regardless, what I wouldn't do for a good hearty BBQ burger and a cold beer. Happy Canada Day friends!

Alive and well in Manigango

2011-06-28T04:12:00.001-07:00

Alas a blog wouldn't be a blog without these: blog posts. Admittedly, the big wide web has been tough to get at in some of these towns, especially when I arrive late. I do miss it. Nothing about biking is lonely except arriving in a strange place and not having access to the outside world.

I am currently sitting in a internet place in a little backwater town called Manigango. What an incredible name! There is a steady stream of Tibetan people sitting behind me watching me write this. I think seeing someone use the keyboard for writing text might actually be a bit of a novelty.

Tibetans are pretty funny people. They all wear these robes and cowboy hats, which helps the place live up to the "wild west" mantra. Most women have these azure stones woven into their braids, and many men wear strange earrings things. Most people over the age of 40 have at least one gold tooth. They are much taller than Chinese people. The result is these rather intimidating characters, sort of a Captain Jack Sparrow meets Genghis Khan, but every single one of them has a smile on their face and gives a hearty hello when they see me. Three times I've leant my bike to Tibetans who have wanted to try it.

The past few days it's like I've been in a National Geographic magazine. One day a red-robed nomad with an umbrella beckoned me inside his canvas tent to have milk tea, butter, and this barley powder with his family. There are daily yak crossings on the road. I met a Tibetan schoolteacher who showed me around the village school. I've gone into monasteries and there have been monks chanting some sort of scripture. I've gone into golden temples (is that the right word?) where a senior lama is giving blessings by candlelight. I was having a snack way up in the mountains with two monks the other day, but apparently one was really important because two women came up and were bowing down before him asking for blessings. I've seen contraband photos of his holiness the DL. Then there was last night when I was late getting to town so went and spent the night with some nomads.

And then there is the scenery. I'm not organized to get photos up but let me tell you, it has been spectacular. There are a lot of grassy hills stretching out forever and then sometimes really high glaciated peaks. I suppose it could be similar to Switzerland except that it's all at 3000m. Plus, there are the prayer flags, stupas, and monasteries making every vista truly Tibetan. It hasn't been all blue skies, but the days that are clear are unreal. Last big city I was in, called Ganzi, now holds the distinction of being the city most similar to Minas Tirith.

The biking has gotten easier, partly because the passes are more manageable, partly because my body is getting used to it. There were two days of awful rocky road, which is sort of soul destroying. The bike has been holding up but the weight is causing some concerns to the racks that hold all the luggage. I just try to keep everything balanced and stay on top of things when they break. I have run out of Snickers bars which is a shame.

My point of no return, as the Doc would put it, is probably about 4 days from here. From there, the town of Yushu, I'm only heading out of Tibet. If this area erupts in strife and the police shut it down to foreigners, I don't think it will impact my trip. But really, I think I'm already past the point of no return. If they were going to stop me anywhere, it would have been Ganzi, a place where "there has been fighting". There were two checkpoints coming into town, and the place may have well been under martial law for all the riot police and tankish things I saw there. I was ready to beg to book a bus to Yushu or something, but at the checkpoint the police were very friendly (we had tea together) and just told me to get out of Ganzi and be careful on the road. The whole issue is really interesting and not black and white and probably something to write about some day.

And there we are. I'm on a rest day now, staying with a nice Tibetan family and sharing my western films with the kids. Tomorrow I take a bus to Dege, a pretty reknowned stop close to the Tibet border. Then I bus back here and continue on. Bus is an easy call as the high pass to Dege is like 5000m (we're at 3900m right now) and doing that twice in two days sounds like a really stupid idea. Some might say this whole bike thing is a stupid idea but we'll save those comparisons for another day. Tashi delek! (which means hello)

First Pass To Kham

2011-06-22T06:41:00.001-07:00

Well if there were any doubts that this was not going to be an
incredible trip, today shattered them.

What didn't happen today? The climb from Kangding to Zheduo Mountain
(the First Pass to Kham) went from tough to excruciating over the
course of 35km and maybe 6 hours. Perhaps it should be called the
Wrath of Kham? As we went higher the forests gave way to rocky slopes
and the powerful river lower in the valley dwindled to a trickle. The
fog and wind picked up and it was sort of like reaching the end of the
world. I had a steady supply of water and food, but nonetheless the
last kilometer, at an elevation around 4300m, was pretty bleak.

Close to the top there were two Chinese bikers, around my age. They
immediately asked if I had any food. I felt like I was saving two
people stranded in the desert when I produced a tray of Oreo cookies.

The top had a Tibetan stupa and a bunch of prayer flags and a little
commemorative rock. Apparently this is one of the tougher climbs of
the ride to Lhasa, so it was quite an accomplishment. There was a
neat moment at the top when a police car drove by and the occupants
tossed out small prayer papers. This is a Tibetan tradition that I
think is meant to seek a safe journey. It was a nice gesture coming
from the police, who I had assumed are always at odds with the Tibetan
people, but is clearly not the case.

From the top we saw ferocious clouds approaching lightning fast and
also with lightning. And it suddenly became frostbitten-fingers
freezing. We sped down, eventually getting pelted by hail and rain.
The descent smoothed out and we followed the river through grasslands
with these strange looking Tibetan houses that are enormous, many
yaks, and lots of friendly Tibetan people.

To end it all off: the sky to the west clears for a wicked sunset. We
pull into the Yak Inn and being with Chinese people, we get Chinese
rates. And, they have internet! What a day!

Kangding: happy for some almost-level ground

2011-06-21T05:38:00.001-07:00

I'll preface this post with the fact that I am a little grumpy. I've been getting a lot of "no"s recently, and I don't like to hear the word "no". Especially when I've biked over 300km to get here. Thus far my hostel has told me I can't lock the door to my room, the post office has told me I can't mail a package, and a recommended restaurant has told me they're not serving food. Up is down in this part of the world, apparently.

Speaking of which, if there was a theme to assign to the past three days of biking, it could only be "up". It would appear that I *sort of* underestimated the degree of difficulty of this little route of mine. Surprise!

The first day I biked to Ya'an, a 120km ride that was long for a first day, but also relatively flat. I don't think the human body likes going from schoolteacher to mule overnight, so it's a bit of a shock to the system. It felt similar to my first day in Thailand: the heat, the smog, the weight of the bike gave me a hell of a headache. Unlike Thailand however, the final 50km to Ya'an were quite hilly, and, well, it was a tough go. I must have kept all the places selling drinks in business that day. I met up with some other teachers in Ya'an, which is a cool city. We ate a sort of korean BBQ thing, probably not called that in China. The opening item were fried rings of onions, with a quail egg cooked inside the ring, right before our eyes. What will they think of next?

Day two it was raining, and the climbing started in earnest. The light rain was quite welcome for it kept down the dust and smog and was a break from the heat. Plus, my nifty new mudguards kept my legs nice and dry. The road went up, at a comfortable incline, along a forested river valley. It was quiet and really nice and had a bit of a "Lost World" feel to it. I saw the biggest butterflies I've ever seen and some beautiful birds, if you're in to that sort of thing. A day and a half later I was at the first mountain pass, Erlang Shan, at 2300m.

Can you call Erlang Shan a real mountain pass? You don't go over it. Instead you get close to the top and then burrow through a 4km tunnel to the other side. As far as Chinese tunnels go, it wasn't bad: it was well lit, well ventilated, and flat. But that doesn't ease the sound of a truck bearing down on you in an enclosed space.

Surprisingly, there are tons of Chinese cyclists on the road to keep my company. They are all on a difficult, well-worn route to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Bike tourers share a bond when they meet on the road, and the Chinese ones were especially friendly. In the case of the tunnel, well, lets just say I positioned myself so that another vehicle would have had to go through them to get to me.

The highlight so far has been emerging from that tunnel. The rainy cloud forest was far behind, replaced by dry, rocky bluffs. The low, bleak clouds of Sichuan Basin were gone at last, and the blue sky was dotted with fluffy white clouds, and, what's this, the sun? What do I do about that? Best of all, the reward of all that climbing was a blissful, exhilarating 30 km descent on a beautiful road. What goes up must come down.

Some construction and some awful climbing later I am at Kangding, for a rest day (or, as it happened, half a rest day). Kangding is sort of the frontier Chinese city, from here on it's all Tibetan. The city is sort of nice, and a welcome stop to refuel and eat. What's cool here is the mix of people on the street: on one street corner you'll see Tibetan monks in aviators and red robes, women in some traditional black clothing selling vegetables, Chinese people in cowboy-type hats watching the world go by, and military people going somewhere in a hurry. Note: there are a lot of police here, it feels like we're under martial law.

This is also a good stop to let my body adjust to the altitude. At 2700m, Kangding is one of the lower points for the coming week and a half. Tomorrow the road climbs to 4200m before descending to a more reasonable point for sleep. Sounds like a surefire headache. I continue to play Where's Waldo and shed excess stuff wherever possible: the laundry detergeant and hair conditioner got nixed in Ya'an. Yesterday I sacrificed a ratty UW tshirt at the side of the road as a symbolic gesture to give myself some energy (not really effective). I've been eating lots of my food rations, so that bag gets lighter. I fear my Chinese language textbook (book 3) is next to go.

I began this post talking about all the "no"s I've been getting recently. They are all overshadowed by the ultimate shut-down: being stopped and told to turn around and go home. Tibet is downright closed to foreigners, but this region is often locked down too. It happened not too long ago when a monk lit himself on fire and there was a stand-off at a monastery. These days are the 60th-anniversary of something important so there could be trouble. I didn't think much of this until I was questioned about my plans when I came out of that tunnel. I'd be super bummed to have to turn around (but think about what a great downhill ride it would be), but there's really nothing I can do about it. For now, using a bandana thing that a Chinese biker friend gave me along with sunglasses and a helmet, I can only hope that I blend in a bit with the other bike pilgrims. Other than that, I'll cross my fingers, set off tomorrow bright and early, and hope for the best.

I won't have internet for awhile. My next stop is Tagong, an area of beautiful grassland and Tibetan nomads. From there, barring any military restrictions, the next big city of Ganzi is probably five days away. Until then, stay frosty.

The road ahead

2011-06-17T11:18:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow begins as any other day with a morning wake-up by Arcade Fire and then some oatmeal. Does it get any better? However, tomorrow when I get on my bike and wave goodbye to the gatekeeper, I will be turning left, not right, and leaving Leshan and teaching and my happy apartment behind for awhile.

The plan, on the eve of departure, is to venture westward, toward Tibet and the roof of the world. Biking in the Tibetan Autonomous Region is impossible because Tibet is closed to independent travel (and as of this week, Tibet is closed to all foreigners). However, the Tibetan plateau spills out onto the adjoining provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan, and those areas are open to anyone. The land is still sparse and high elevation and there's still the possibility of snow all year. But it looks incredible. After one day of riding west I'll be in the mountains, after about 10 days I should be in the far northwest corner of Sichuan. If all goes to plan I'll continue north to Qinghai Lake, a large saltwater lake that is pretty famous in China. Apparently there are lots of birds there. One can only hope.

Why all this work to see Tibet? Good question. There's something about Tibet that calls to every traveller. The idea of an independent kingdom that has been hidden for so long in the high places of the world is fascinating. Theirs is a culture very different from the rest of China and many parts of Asia. It's religious, it's devout, it's colourful, but it's also difficult, nomadic, and ultimately, being overrun. No doubt my intruiging image of Tibet will change during the trip to match the modern reality, but I don't think that will make it any less spectacular. However, if I don't see some weathered faces and prayer flags I will be a little disappointed.

From there I'll return to Han China into the province of Gansu. I don't think Gansu will be as beautiful but I think the geography of this region is really interesting. Gansu is a long narrow corridor with mountain chains on either side. In Chinese history, this was a critical corridor to hold as it was the only realistic route from Central Asia to China. North of Gansu is the Gobi desert which is impassible, and south is the Tibetan plateau, also impassible. It sort of appeals to the imagination, harkening back to a time when nations were defended with armies and horses. Appropriately, the Great Wall ends in northern Gansu, serving as a symbolic and practical end to the ancient Han Chinese empire.

Continuing northwest, I'll enter the large desert frontier area of China, dominated by a Muslim population called Uyghers. I probably will have to cheat a bit and take a bus to meet my friend Tim in the regional captial of Urumqi In mid-July. We'll be exploring more of the area, by bike (is there any other way?) but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'll save sharing that plan for a month from now when I'm sitting at a dusty noodle stand in a place that is the furthest on the continent from any ocean, looking at giant tree-trunk legs and brushing aside possible shoulder length hair.

Biking is a great way to see the world. It's cheap, it's simple, it requires pouring over maps on a daily basis. Being free from bus schedules and taxi touts is inspiring. Grabbing lunch at a small backwater stop or waving to children in lonely villages gives it a human connection. It's healthy, it's unpredictable....there are a ton of reasons why it's my new favourite. And in a few days I'll be able to tell you a bunch of reasons why it's torture. All I remember from Thailand was sunburned hands.

I don't think internet will be available for large swathes of the ride, so this blog's moniker may be more truthful than usual. I'll do my best to keep you abreast, though you might just get short updates in the box in the top right corner that come in via Twitter, the social media sensation that makes everybody roll their eyes.

This evening spent packing was an exercise in self-loathing at all the new crap I've accumulated in the past few months that will be carried to 4000m and beyond. On top of that it's 2am and I was hoping to leave at 8 tomorrow so I'm off to a good start. The world is waiting.

Go buy The Star today!

2011-06-15T17:01:00.001-07:00

Was it the happiest day of his life? We'll have to wait and see if the Canucks win:

http://www.thestar.com/travel/asiapacific/article/1008587--the-most-beautiful-spot-in-china-you-ve-never-heard-of#article

Return from Exile

2011-06-14T01:30:00.001-07:00

This story begins two weeks ago when we were given a surprise long weekend due to GaoKao. GaoKao is a very intense three days of university entrance exams for the graduating class, probably the most important three days in a high school student's life. The school goes into lockdown and all other classes are cancelled. They cover the classroom walls with green cloth and wrap a police line around most of the school entrances. So I went to Guilin.

Guilin is a city in southern China, not too far from the Vietnam border. The area around the city is known for stunning landscapes of karst rock towers set along scenic rivers and rural village life. In fact, pictures I saw of the Guilin area years ago were part of the reason I wanted to come to China. Of course it's the reason why everyone else wants to come to China too, and the whole area has a tourist-mecca quality to it. This was no problem for me as I've been in China for long enough that real bars and non-Chinese food are a welcome break.

Despite all the tourists, the quiet surrounding countryside felt a lot like the "real China" you imagine from a Chow Yun-Fat movie. This goes beyond seeing villagers working their green fields in triangular rice hats; it's the feeling a place leaves with you. It's what you see when you peek inside open doors and see what the homes look like. It's following a trail of villagers carrying live chickens home in order to find the market. It's swimming in the river with a water buffalo. I loved the place and would go back in a heartbeat. For now I'll just have to make due with the image on the back of the 20 yuan bill.

Going to Guilin was a bit of a spontaneous thing. Going to Xi'an last weekend had been in the cards ever since I had bought really cheap flights, over a month ago. It ended up that the two trips were separated by one day of teaching in Leshan. It's all a bit ludicrous, especially if you had any idea how complicated all the connections were. I'm almost at the point where I've taken more flights in China than in Canada. But, when I'm back home and far, far away, I'll be even more glad I made the most of the free time presented to me here.

In Xi'an I met up with Eugene, a classmate from Waterloo, and some of his friends. I was excited about visiting the city, known as being the ancient capital of China. They say that if you want to see the China of today, go to Shanghai; if you want to see the China of 100 years ago, go to Beijing; and if you want to see the China of 1000 years ago, go to Xi'an. Obviously whoever 'they' are must know lots about China.

Well I wasn't super blown away with Xi'an. The town has a vibrant Muslim Quarter but is pretty much like any other Chinese city, with a little less honking than Leshan but many more homeless, agressive touts, and lots of garbage. It's one of the few cities still enclosed by a protective wall, which is nifty enough to walk on until you realize you are a few kilometers from an exit, without water, and getting cooked in the heat.

The city is most well known for its Army of Terracotta Warriors which you might remember from an episode of Carmen Sandiego. They are a big deal, part of a huge burial complex for the first Chinese Emperor and over 2000 years old. But with all the hype, and being called "the Eighth Wonder of the World" (heard that one before), I was a little underwhelmed. No doubt the statues are incredible and well preserved, but something about their presentation, seen from high up in a huge airport-hangar type of building, subtracts from the mystery. Some sights, it seems, are best left to National Geographic.

My highlight of the weekend was a trip up (yet another) holy mountain of Hua Shan. Apparently night hikes up Hua Shan are all the rage, and we started with some excitement and high spirits at around 11pm. We were surprised to see Chinese people hiking at all, let alone through the night, and our surprise turned to shock as we discovered hundreds of trekkers along the route. Little restaurant stops were packed with what must have been high school graduating students newly freed after finishing their GaoKao exams. Red Bull cans were everywhere. The hike itself was much more interesting and challenging than others I've done, and in some of the steeper sections - with names like Heavenly Ladder or 1000 Foot Staircase - there were huge queues. The sunrise from the top felt like a sort of Chinese parade, and the crowds were as memorable as the wicked views from the rocky, sheer cliffs.

Mistakes always happen on the way down. Thankfully we had none, but the thought crossed my mind a few times during the Plank Walk, a terrifying narrow walkway thousands of feet in the air along a rock face. You thankfully wear a harness, which I'm sure meets all the not-so-stringent Chinese safety standards. Pictures might do it a bit of justice. If not, this video certainly will:

This combined post doesn't do justice to either Guilin or Xi'an, and even with many pictures it doesn't cover some of the smaller moments: eating snails, rice terraces, eating frog, angry flight delays, psychedelic cave lights, and a music show on the river. Regardless, it was a great two weeks. The only misstep was neglecting to consider weather, so shoes, pants, and even long sleeves were a bad choice for the steam bath of Guilin and the desert of Xi'an. Returning to Leshan for rest, laundry, and to try to save my dying plant feels like coming back from exile (or going back into exile, depending on how you look at it). Either way, this is the last week of school and almost all my ducks are in a row for the coming month of biking. I sent home 10 lbs of junk which is making my legs happy already. The end is near.

Who is the real Monster?

2011-06-02T06:33:00.001-07:00

We have been doing a truckload of exams this week, trying to listen to every student before the rapidly approaching summer holidays. Listening to 800 students individually talk about the same thing for a minute is like taking your brain, tossing it around like a baseball for a few hours and then putting it in a washing machine. I don't know up from down anymore.

Students come to our office and present in groups of four, though they speak one at a time. Only one student has honestly tried to bribe me (a 20 yuan note, about $3). I remarked to Sean last week there are more effective ways to cheat: a weak student could pay a smart student to present on his behalf, based on the classic assumption that we wouldn't be able to recognize the impersonator.

Well, yesterday the prophecy came true. The details are boring, though I did feel like a bit of a detective unmasking the whole operation. What you need to know is that a good student named James pretended to be a weak student named Monster. The whole thing is more ridiculous because in all the ensuing discussions I need to be serious in calling a student Monster (some other favourite names I've come across are Akon, Death, and Steakhouse).

There are challenges I've encountered in teaching that seem much easier on paper, and this is one of them. What do I do about James and Monster？As far as I've always been taught, this is cheating and cheating results in a zero. For Monster, it's not a big deal since his actual oral exam was abysmal…or wait for it, monstrous. James, the student who impersonated Monster and lied to me, has much more to lose. Today he apologized, and is obviously upset at getting zero. It's hard for me to be confident in my decision when he keeps pleading "give me a chance". Am I being too harsh? Is giving him zero going to further his education? Would I be second guessing myself if he wasn't a good student?

In general I'll be glad when exams are over. Everything about subjective marking like this is difficult. The hardest thing is listening to a weak student trying really hard but knowing you have to give them a low mark. Just as awful is listening to a very active student who loves oral English class give a bad exam. At this point in my life, I wonder why marks are important to students at all. How on earth did the big world trick us into taking our grade 8 marks seriously? But for these students, well, they are really nervous about how well they do.

Would love to know what you think about these strange times. I may have unmasked Monster yesterday, but could it be that the real Monster is the one I see in the mirror?

Life as a student in China

2011-05-30T03:17:00.001-07:00

If you want proof that a Chinese takeover of the world is inevitable,
look no further than their work ethic. They work hard! The day for
most people starts at around 8am and continues well into the evening.
Stores close at 10pm, even on Sunday. Just how many sales does the
neighbourhood bathroom fixture shop makes after dark on a Sunday?
Many families own their own restaurant/store/mahjiang shop so they are
present, without any semblance of a vacation, every day from morning
to night. Even on a Friday night, Leshan is effectively asleep before
midnight so that everyone will be well rested for another morning of
progress.

Yet I can't imagine anyone in Leshan works harder than middle school
students. During my first few weeks I was pissed off when I saw
students sleeping or doing other homework in my class. I would take
away books and shut textbooks to try to get them to focus. I stopped
doing this when I learned exactly what is expected of students at my
school.

Students are crammed into classes of 55. They have to be at school,
in proper uniform, by 7:30, where their first class is silent reading
in English or Chinese. From there, classes of forty-minutes continue
until lunch, interrupted only by a mandatory 800m run complete with
marching music and commands barked from the loudspeaker. Students
have a Phys. Ed. class a few times each week; easy to recognize since
afterwards they look like they've just been pulled out fo the sauna.
The classes have a few noisy fans but no heating in the winter and no
air conditioning in the summer. The really crippling hot days here
are kind of nice, since the students don't have the energy to
misbehave.

Lunch is a 12-2pm siesta when the school is empty and students go back
to their dorms for what I've been told is very awful cafeteria food
followed by what I suspect includes a nap. At 3pm there is a
fifteen-minute break where students are supervised in their classroom
as they perform some sort of eye exercise routine that involves
rubbing their eyelids in a circular motion. Sort of funny to watch,
though I usually just hear the instructive music that repetedly counts
to ten over the loudspeakers (I've since become very good at counting
to ten). Afternoon classes end at around 5.

There is a dinner break and then evening classes run from 7 until
after 9. I've journeyed back to the school at around 9:45 and been
surprised to see students still in the classroom. The electricity to
the dorms is turned off around 11pm and doesn't come back on until the
morning wake-up.

Classes continue on Saturday, though there is no running on the
weekends (a break!). There are no Saturday evening classes so they
often leave the school with their parents until Sunday afternoon when
classes start up again. If there is a special holiday it usually
means that there will be extra classes to make up on Sunday.
It's an incredible amount of work for these kids. Since most students
are the only child, they bear the full brunt of pressure to succeed
from their parents. This is understandable, since parents pay the
school upwards of 20,000 yuan per year which is an obscene amount of
money in China. The school has no qualms with lowering the workload,
since it's reputation is based on test scores. Obviously more work
means better test scores! When I tell people in Leshan where I am
working they say that it is a very good school, the reasoning seems to
be because of the test scores and the high dollar cost.

Imagine how twelve years of school comes down to three simple days of
exams. In a country as big as China, it's all about test scores.
Every grade has very serious tests, culminating in the university
entrance exams in the graduating year. By contrast, university seems
a bit more relaxed.

The result of all this education isn't necessarily smarter students.
I've sat in on several classes and I can confirm that they learn much
more math than we do in high school. And they learn a lot of English.
However, the classes are just lectures with minimal feedback from the
students. The homework is usually fill-in-the-blanks with
memorization of numbers and facts. For example, in history class it
seems more important to know in which dynastry something took place,
not how or why something happened. The English tests focus less on
writing and understanding and more on which word is correct: whom,
who, or which. This may help separate the wheat from the chaff on a
test, but I don't think it really teaches proficiency in a language.

It's into this system that we are thrown. We teach each class of 55
once per week. We have no materials to teach to, no testing of the
students, and really no incentive for them to pay attention (we read
about some ESL teachers who give treats but that seems ridiculous).
Why should they pay attention when they have so much homework and all
this other pressure? The older the students get, the more
disillusioned they become about learning English, and, paradoxically,
the more timid. It's a very common occurance to call on a senior
student and ask a very easy question and have the student stare at me
dumbfounded. There have been some SNL Celebrity Jeopardy moments when
I have basically said "Say anything" and still gotten nothing. They
look to their neighbours for help. Sometimes another student pipes in
"He doesn't speak English" which makes me angry because they study
English every single day at this school, a school that is called the
Foreign Language School.

Where am I going with all this? I don't know, I've just been thinking
about the value of education. For all the hours of learning and the
celebrated successes of this school, I still had a better education in
Canada. Education is much more than a textbook and exam, it's giving
a student all the necessary skills to succeed in the real world. In
Canada we teach independent analysis and how to present ideas in front
of an audience, we discuss and question things and learn problem
solving. We have sports teams and clubs for students to develop their
interests and take on leadership roles. We let students make
decisions about their future and study what they want. We may learn
less, but what we learn we learn smarter. If you want proof that the
Chinese takeover of the world will never happen, look no further than
their education system.

Pretty slow weekend, went to Chengdu to buy some things for the bike
trip and settle some paperwork. Sort of sketchy trying to hide
camping fuel in my pockets while passing my bag through the subway
metal detectors. The end of school is near even though everytime I
ask about our finish date I get an ambiguous response. Even today, my
teacher friends answered: "school is over sometime before July". A
lack of planning? Is that another fault in the education system here?
Don't even get me started.

The many steps of Emei Mountain

2011-05-23T08:10:00.001-07:00

Happy Victoria Day, I hope your kickoff to the summer was full of
barbecue and cold beer and some sort of healthy food as well.

After three weeks cooped up in Leshan, Sean and I decided it was time
to pay a visit to Emei Mountain, one of four holy Buddhist mountains
(do all religions have holy mountains? If they don't I'm sure they
could claim a few in China). Unlike many legendary spots in China
that take days to reach by train, Emei is right next to Leshan and
accessible by an easy 30-minute bus ride.

Though the route up Emei is a careful track of stone steps, it is a
little more significant than other places I've been in China, nay, the
world. The peak of Emei is way up in the clouds, and at 3077m is high
enough to cause altitude sickness issues. To trek from the bottom to
top is a 50km walk with an elevation gain of 2500m which is about the
same as walking from Toronto to Burlington while climbing 5 CN Towers.
I was doing the math for 10cm steps and 2500m elevation and that gave
me 25,000 steps and at that point I stopped doing the math. We were
trying to do all of it, save the last two hours, in one day. And in
the rain.

It began Friday afternoon. Just before my last class I returned to
our office, where Sean had been waiting during a free period. I tried
to open the door but it was locked, even when I used my key. I
shouted obscenities through the glass window as Sean walked over to
open the door from the other side. To our suprise, the door would not
open for him either. At this point I threw my hands up in a "Sucks to
be you" gesture since I was not trapped in the office, unable to
teach. We called our supervisor who sent his assistant, a nice enough
girl but, sorry to say, as dumb as a stump. She arrived, tried the
doorknob, and concluded "It's locked". Thanks Cherrie. Eventually I
coaxed Sean to climb up through a window near the ceiling. He jumped
down with a loud thud, amusing the passing students. I mention the
story because history repeated itself the next morning at 6am when our
hostel owner couldn't figure out why the U-bolt locking the front door
was on the outside of the doors (and inaccesible from the inside).
Was Buddha trying to tell us something?

Emei is famous for many things, and one of them is monkeys. Troups of
Tibetan macaques inhabits many areas of the mountain. Accustomed to
worrying about wolves and bears back home, I didn't really read the
monkey information in the guidebook. Or the warning signs as we went
up the mountain. As we started up a narrow river gorge toward "Joking
Monkey Zone" we passed plush monkey souvenir stalls, benches and
handrails adorned with monkey busts, facilities to safely check your
bags, and many more warning signs. We attributed it all to Chinese
exagerration and figured we wouldn't even see a monkey. If only that
had been true.

There was a little group of people gathered at a swinging wooden
bridge that seemed to be the start of monkey territory. I dashed past
them without much hesitation and crossed the bridge. I spied a monkey
to my left. Cool! Well this is a story, we saw monkeys after all! A
big guy was in the middle of the path, so I banged my stick on the
ground to make noise and veered to the left, expecting him to cede the
trail to me. Not the case. The monkey looked at me and bared his
teeth and then I suddenly realized how big monkeys are. Then the
monkey rose up on its hind feet and started to grab at my backpack and
pockets and he was not happy. If you could have seen the look on my
face it would have probably been priceless terror. And I ran. I ran
to a little pavilion with a cluster of Chinese ladies who seemed to
have experience with monkeys. From this place of safety I laughed at
the whole situation. It wasn't until this determined monkey bounded
past my shield of ladies that I realized this might have been a
mistake. Suddenly there seemed to be a lot of unpredictable monkeys
everywhere, so I began a retreat across the swinging bridge. The only
other visitors, two young Chinese girls, were equally terrified but
were not moving fast enough. Some monkey started chasing me and I
pushed past on the bridge, not quite shoving the girls aside but
pretty much casting "women and children first" out the window.

After that we kept our distance from the Joking Monkey Zone, following
a trail on the other side of the river. We had three further monkey
encounters over the course of the day. My favourite was when Sean,
who had lived in India for a time and was no stranger to agressive
apes, interrupted my light-hearted babbling and said nervously "Just
keep walking don't stop". Apparently a huge monkey was beside the
trail and was growling.

Besides monkeys, the hike is pretty epic. The route climbed past
villages and up river valleys and beneath towering waterfalls and onto
high plateaus. There were some immense staircases, and pictures don't
really capture the feeling you get when you see stairs literally
climbing up into the clouds. There were a few little shops here and
there manned by people who live in the hills, but other than that it's
just you and Sean and the mountain and your new Dutch and Danish
hiking friends. One lady has become something of a legend as she
makes superb pancakes. It's a little known fact that a long-term
traveller in China will pay just about anything for pancakes.

Did I mention the rain? Oh yes, the rain. From the moment we stepped
out of the taxi to the moment we got on a bus home, it was raining.
The progression of everything getting wet - first my sweater, then
boots, camera, and eventually even the waterproof pockets of my jacket
- did wear down morale. Our views of surrounding hills became
obscured by clouds. Mist shrouded the Buddhist temples we passed,
raindrops falling loudly in empty courtyards eerily devoid of
visitors. Everything had a cool atmospheric, Resident Evil kind of
appearance. As the entire trek was nearly devoid of Chinese tourists,
I would gladly go back in the rain.

On Sunday morning I woke up at 4am, donned wet boots, and made the
final two-hour hike to the summit in foggy darkness, on high alert for
monkey attacks. The final staircase was flanked by elephant statues,
silent sentinels heralding the approach to the top of a holy mountain.
Out of the mist finally appeared the immense golden four-sided statue
that Emei is known for. I had reached the top in time for sunrise,
another Emei favourite, even though the clouds meant there would be no
sun. I marvelled at the most opulent Buddhist temple I had ever seen.
And then it was time to descend: by bus (Chinese people don't like
hiking holy mountains).

We arrived home to the nicest day we've had in Leshan, a far cry from
the cold and rain just an hour to the west. We found a new steak
place which was incredible and also had a life changing salad bar. It
was right next to the Apple Store. The discoveries in Leshan
continue.

This week my legs are reluctant to climb stairs. We are doing oral
exams with some of our classes which I expected to be a breeze but
thus far I am finding it difficult to be objective and consistent.
This is a surprisingly unenjoyable part of teaching, especially when
you're a big softie like me! With my other classes I'm still teaching
food, along with a word game that is basically the drinking game Kings
without the drinking. And they love it, which suggests that maybe
drinking games are the key to teaching ESL.

Interesting websites in China

2011-05-19T20:06:00.001-07:00

Imagine you're looking at a perfectly still lake, and the sky is so
blue that you can see a perfect reflection in the water: the trees,
the hills, even the clouds. That's sort of how I'd describe the
internet here. Everything we have in the English-speaking world
exists as a mirror image in the Chinese-speaking world. (Well, almost
everything)

Here's a good example:http://www.baidu.com/
This is THE Chinese search engine. Take a look, it helps if you have
google translate to help you out. Isn't it amazing how Baidu
resembles almost exactly the Google search page? You'll notice an
image search, map section, and video. If you do a search the first
result is usually a Baike page, the Chinese Wikipedia that has met
some controversy by stealing information from Wikipedia.

The one original thing on Baidu is an MP3 search function. This is
really handy as it allows you to find .mp3 music files on the web
without any sort of complicated file sharing. The entertainment
business has big problems with this function, but then again the
entertainment business probably has a lot of problems with copyright
in China.

But my favourite website for getting into the heart of the Chinese
internet world is here: http://www.chinasmack.com/
This is well worth a visit, it's all in English. Basically the site
finds stories on Chinese websites and then translates the stories and
the comments. What you get is a really insightful look into how some
Chinese people think about certain issues. Now usually the stories
are chosen because they're funny or controversial, but this is
nonetheless an eye-opening site. The first time I found it was just
after the earthquake in Japan. If there was any doubt that Chinese
people hated Japan, comments like "Good" or "Sichuan sends its
regards" soon dispelled those doubts.

This is also a funny post from the site, don't know how they have not
been shut down here:
http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/pictures/funny-rural-chinese-advertising-depressing-propaganda.html

Lastly, the state-run news sites are always an interesting look into
China's view on the world:
http://www.chinaview.cn/
http://english.cntv.cn/01/index.shtml

Lately there's been front-page news over here out of my hometown of
Markham, Ontario. Congratulations Markham on your International Sedan
Chair Race! We can only hope that this event does become the premier
sedan chair race in North America, nay, the world.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/culture/2011-05/15/c_13875463.htm

My apartment

2011-05-18T06:41:00.000-07:00

As we wind down toward the summer break, it occurs to me that I have
shared nothing about where I'm living. Sit on the edge of your seats
no longer!

Most buildings in Leshan have six floors. Obviously we're on the
sixth floor. It's debatable if they pay more or less for an apartment
so high up: on one hand every trip home ends with a hundred-step
climb. On the other hand six is a lucky number in China. To sweeten
the deal they threw in access to the roof, which isn't as exciting as
I initially thought it would be. In another world it would have patio
chairs and a little swimming pool but for now there are just some
bricks and weeds and what one might call "the best view in all of
Leshan".

The apartment is a pretty good size, and I think fairly typical for
China. There are two bedrooms with uncomfortable sagging boxsprings.
The windows are very large, since judging by the other apartments
nearby, the kitchen and second bedroom are actually just balconies
that have windows. Everything is furnished as promised, including a
washing machine that makes a little song when it finishes washing, a
crappy computer, a TV, and a few couches. There's something about
China where they have been too busy stealing high-speed train
technology (and planning to build a Beijing-London line, google it!)
to bother stealing a plan for a comfortable and geometrically-correct
couch, and ours are no exception.

The washroom is a squatter and doesn't look too flattering in that
photo. That's partly because it's an ugly bathroom. I spiced it up
with small Chinese and North Korean flags that I accumulated in my
travels. If only I could get Cuba and Burma I'd have the full set.
We have a natural gas 'in-line' water heater that is noisy and finicky
and a strong argument against 'in-line' water heaters for those of you
with younger brothers who vote for the Green Party and think we should
all buy solar panels.

As I mentioned before, there is no central heating here, so at times
it's like indoor camping. In the winter the apartment was as cold as
outside, and like everyone else in China we wore warm jackets all the
time indoors. At night I'd be writing these blog posts under the
orange glow of a small space heater to keep my fingers from going
cold. Those days seem a long way away, and we now make use of the
arsenal of fans as relief from the crippling humidity. Good news is
that both bedrooms have heater/air-conditioner machines, so sleeping
is usually comfortable.

The place is quite clean and seems fairly new. The walls of all
buildings in China are usually this white coated concrete, which is
tidy, if a little utilitarian. I have done a bit of decorating to the
place, adding a poster of Mao here, some Tibetan prayer flags there,
and of course my plant that is very difficult to keep healthy (you
might even say that it is actually slowly dying). The kitchen has two
gas burners and gets the job done. I think the previous teacher took
all the cups with him, and the game of who-will-buy-cups-first chicken
between me and Sean continues.

What's more interesting is our little walled building complex, made up
of maybe ten similar buildings. In terms of area it's the size of
maybe a football field which is impressive considering the number of
people who live here. Most people in our city live in similar
complexes. When you take taxis around town you always tell the driver
the name of the complex you want. I don't know the name of ours but
we're next to the Electricity Garden which sounds like a nice place
but looks run down so as you can imagine we try not to associate with
Electricity Garden people.

Our complext has a gate-keeper who lives with his wife in a small unit
by the gate. He opens the gate at 6am and closes them at midnight.
If you get in after midnight you have to pay an extra yuan (15 cents)
for waking him up. I pay him $3 per month to watch my bike at the
gate and cover it when it rains. There's usually a crowd at the gate
keeper's table, it's like a gathering point for our little community.
That same crowd is an eager audience when I return after grocery
shopping and I pull items out of my bike bag: and this foreigner likes
to eat.....bananas! I do get lots of Chinese practice in these
encounters, and people are very friendly even if their accents are too
strong to follow. I've dabbled in mahjiang a few times with the old
ladies, and that usually cleans me out of one-yuan notes.

And that's that. For all its oddities, this place has been a nice home.

Enter another week. It is Wednesday night here, and now through a few
very long days the week is almost over. It's strange how an 8-4 of
teaching is so much more draining than an 8-4 in any other job I've
had. But then again in those working hours I am jumping around in
front of 55 students, trying to project my voice over the sound of all
the whirling fans (and today, arm-wrestling students). The level of
energy required to be a teacher is very high. Maybe because of the
students sneaking photographs and the primary school kids rushing me
for autographs (not joking), a few times I've thought about
professional musicians on tour, and how those few hours require so
much energy. How difficult it must be to be feeling tired from the
day before but still have to go out on stage and muster up the energy
to give Cinncinati a good show.

Last weekend was a chill weekend sitting around. Well no that doesn't
sound right. On Sunday I set out on the old bike, chose a direction,
and got lost. I went through some really nice rolling farm country,
and was having a good time on the small, quiet roads. That was until
the roads deteriorated to something worse-than-gravel if you can
believe it. And there were trucks. Everything got very, very filthy.
It is time to buy fenders.

Since it rained a lot last week the sky was clear. I could see the
huge mountains of Eastern Tibet like a serrated wall of teeth just off
in the distance. I have a really exciting route planned into those
mountains after school ends in June, but for the moment they remain
distant dreams that I can only trace on the map in our apartment.
While no help to itchy feet, they serve as a rallying call for this
last month of teaching. This week I'm teaching food and I think it's
a crappy lesson but the students seem entertained enough. And lets
face it, we can all eat a little healthier.

The requisite blog post about learning Chinese

2011-05-13T21:19:00.001-07:00

Maybe I didn't explain before leaving but one of my goals while living in China is to learn to speak Chinese. I daresay that I sort of like learning languages. It is inspiring when the veil of confusion is lifted and you can start communicating again. Travel is much easier and much more interesting with language skills. Also it makes for a great party trick. Other than that, I am learning that knowing another language is actually a pretty useless skill.

You know that Simpsons episode where Bart is in France and wonders why he can't speak French and then all of a sudden is speaking French perfectly? That's a great feeling. And that does not really happen with learning Chinese.

Foreigners learn Chinese through a system called pinyin, which acts as a pronunciation guide using the English alphabet. For example, the character 书 means 'book' and the pinyin is shū, pronounced "shoe". That line over the u indicates that the syllable is pronounced with the first (or flat) tone. Chinese is a tonal language which means the sound your voice makes is part of the meaning. 树 (shù) means 'tree' and 鼠 (shǔ) means 'mouse' and it goes on from there. Early on someone told me that if you use the wrong tone you may as well be speaking a different language. This is difficult to believe but it is true, there is no forgiveness in a wrong tone. Even people who know that I'm a beginner can't figure out what I'm saying if I don't use the correct tone.

I did have a bit of a head start since I took two Mandarin courses during my time in Waterloo. The teacher was very Chinese and saluted us each morning with "hello comrades". My memories of those classes were pronunciation repetition, singing song, slow progress, and humiliating oral examinations. In four months of Chinese classes you basically learn less than you do in one week of Spanish classes. In retrospect the classes were incredibly beneficial if for nothing else than the pronounciation of the pinyin. You can't butcher pronunciation in Chinese.

In terms of grammar, Chinese isn't all that difficult. The killer obstacle is learning characters. There are some stats like 1500 characters means you have basic literacy, with 3000 you can read the newspaper, 5000 means that you are educated and it goes up from there. The mind can only soak up so many characters in one day and for each character you need to learn three things: the character, the meaning, and the pinyin. At any given time here there are words I know how to say but don't know what the character looks like. Recently there are more and more words I can read but don't know what they mean. And every food, every sport, every geographical feature has a different character that bears no resemblance to English. It is like being an archaeologist.

That being said, there is some logic to the whole deal. I remember seeing for the first time the word for 'train', 火车, pronounced huoche. Huo (火) means 'fire' and looks a bit like a fire and che (车) means 'car'. 'Fire-car' makes a lot of sense for 'train' and is easy to remember. Another interesting one is 'clever', 聪明, pronounced congming. The character on the left, 聪 (cong), is made up of the symbols for ear, eyes, mouth, and heart. The character on the right, 明 (ming), is made up of the symbols for sun and the moon. As someone explained to me, being 'clever' means that we should use out ears, eyes, mouth, and heart through night and day. Of course none of your computers have the Chinese fonts installed so all of this elegance is probably lost on you.

Anyway, with my Chinese textbook and the accompanying workbook and audio tapes I am pretty dedicated. On top of that I have an online learn Chinese show I watch every morning, a weekly tutor, some flashcards, and I sit in on a random middle school class every Thursday. Some nights I spend quite some time deciphering characters I wrote down from a menu or that were in a text message from a Chinese friend. All this is finally starting to pay off and in the past month progress has started to happen more quickly. One day I was just walking through the school and suddenly realized I could read a bunch of signs on the walls that I walk past everyday. Travelling during weekends used to be a break from studying but are now the opposite since I can have rudimentary conversations with people I meet on the road. At this point, I have enough Chinese to usually explain myself...eventually. And they always like when I wish them that all their dreams come true: 万事如意.

The biggest surprise is that people here don't speak Mandarin. Every region of China has its own dialect, and in Leshan they speak Sichuan dialect, or even worse, Leshan dialect. You'd think dialect would mean a different accent and a you-say-chips-we-say-fries sort of thing but it is essentially a different langauge. Sichuan dialect has five tones instead of four and half of the vocabulary is different. I shudder to even consider learning Leshan dialect, which sounds more like Thai. There are dialects all over China, the most well known being Cantonese, or Guangdong dialect. I think it is only for political reasons that the other dialects aren't considered separate languages. Mandarin is the common speech that everybody learns in school and is used on television, and that's what I am learning. But I am not immersed in a Mandarin environment, I'm in a Sichuan dialect environment. If a taxi driver switches over to Mandarin we can carry out a conversation. If he doesn't then he may as well be speaking Swahili. The best situations are when people from different regions are talking to each other, since they have no choice but to speak in Mandarin. Actually, let me correct that: the best situations are where someone can speak English.

So travelling during the summer holidays will be substantially easier than my arrival in China a few short months ago, and I am looking forward to it. And when I leave China eventually I can most likely expect to forget everything I have learned which of course makes me very pleased.

Yesterday marked the end of our nine teaching days gauntlet, and I couldn't be more relieved. This week we talked about movies, which everyone found pretty interesting. I also treated them to a few clips from Jurassic Park (as if there was any other film option), and then we discussed what happened. What a great movie. Both clips were edge-of-your-seat intense, scary, and still funny at times so there were some good reactions from the students. I may have distributed quite a few copies of the downloaded file so hopefully Leshan Foreign Language School doesn't run into any copyright lawsuits in the future.

Taking it easy this weekend, maybe I'll write a few more informative and not really entertaining blog posts. Congratulations on your new government by the way, you all earned it.

The Chinese Boat Cruise

2011-05-06T03:08:00.001-07:00

This past long weekend I went on a boat cruise through the Three
Gorges of the Yangtze River. You have probably heard of the Three
Gorges Dam, currently the largest dam in the world and subject to much
controversey. Well the Three Gorges, the impressive part of the river
leading up to the dam, is a national icon. I gorge-d out on pictures.
And took some dam good ones. The scenery was gorge-ous. God I miss
travelling with English speakers!

The launching pad for the cruise was a city called Chongqing, worth a
blog post in its own right. Once upon a time Chongqing was part of
Sichuan and then it got too big - big as in 30 million people - so in
1997 Chongqing was hacked off Sichuan and became its own
city-province. It's sort of a regional rival to Chengdu as the centre
of the West, but I don't think it will ever really take off in
popularity since it's name is so odd to pronounce.

Compared to Chengdu, Chongqing couldn't be more different. The city
is built on a bunch of hills at the confluence of two rivers, so it's
mesmerizing to arrive at night and see lights and bridges and elevated
highways up and down and all over the place. Where Chengdu looks like
a Western city and has an easy layout with wide, spotless avenues,
Chongqing is a mess of narrow streets and stairs. Though it has a
developed downtown, most of the city doesn't feel modern, it looks
more like Leshan but way bigger.

Of course I loved the place. Compared to any other city I've visited,
this felt like a proper Chinese city and had a lot of character.
Stairways zigzag up the mountains and are peppered with little
neighbourhood shops. Around each turn there is another building
courtyard weathered beyond belief that surely dates back to Mao's
days. We'd be walking and all of a sudden there'd be a truck
container's worth of boxed TVs sitting on the sidewalk waiting for
pickup.

I also saw a humongous centipede in the nice part of town; in the
hostel I saw a wasp that could probably take on a dozen other wasps
and win. And so the bugs get bigger.

Anyway, before long I was on a Chinese cruise boat on the river, the
cheapest way to take it all in. I bought a third-class ticket so I
was down at the bottom of the boat in a little cabin with 5 other
Chinese people. "Are they going to seat the lifeboats according to
class?" No need as I didn't see any lifeboats. Good to know that the
Chinese missed the only real moral of Titanic.

Now some say that since the water levels have risen up to 100m with
the building of the dam, the Three Gorges are not worth the trip. And
I say to them nay! The Three Gorges were really impressive, it's
humbling to be puttering through this narrow gorge with very steep
cliffs rising up on either side. And the side trip to the Lesser
Three Gorges, and of course, the Lesser Lesser Three Gorges, only got
better since in the smaller boats we could navigate even narrower
canyons.

Besides all that, a Chinese cruise is worth it as a cultural
experience unto itself. You never really know what's going on since
all the announcements are in Chinese. You just sort of groggily look
up at 6:30am and think WTF are they playing drums right now? Another
highlight was while reading Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" (very
good) alone in the cabin and I heard a noise and there was an
alarmingly large rat on one of the lower bunks. It scuttled pretty
fast, but embarassingly, I was faster.

Chinese people lineup for things and run to be the first one there.
It must come with living in a country that is so populous, but it sure
is funny to see people push to get onto a plane when there is assigned
seating anyway. Yet at one point I found myself running in this small
town to get to seat on a little golf cart bus. What have I become??
(Subsequently, I was pushed off that little bus by Chinese people when
they noticed my seat was on fire due to a battery explosion. Wow,
this isn't coming off as that enjoyable, but really it was a fun
cruise)

When I bid farewell to my third-class crew on the last day, it was
with a bit of sadness. There was the old guy who chuckled when he
pointed out that I had Bed #4 (the number 4 is bad luck in this
country), the couple from up north who couldn't get tickets in first
class, the room of teachers from Xi'an, the grad students preparing
for a long distance relationship as the girlfriend was accepted at a
prestigious school in....Pittsburgh. I was the only foreigner on
board and usually regarded with curiousity but more often with a lot
of kindness. At every step of the weekend I was taken under the wing
of a group of Chinese people, they invited me to share stories, gave
me beer, bought me noodles, loaned me an umbrella, helped me get a
train ticket home. Sometimes in confusion of flights and tickets and
all those details, I forget that the joy of travel is the people you
meet along the way.

Back at school, after this long break, the students are very
distracted. That's not a good start to 9 days of consecutive teaching
(because in China, a four day holiday means you work weekends before
and after). We're doing storytelling in class, where I show an
interesting picture and ask the students to provide a caption. Then I
draw some stick figures on the board and we try to give the people a
backstory. We ended up having James meet his wife Two-Fat as she was
cleaning toilets in the washroom and then having 100 children. And we
wonder why there aren't more famous movies coming out of China!

I bought groceries for dinner and well they just gave me a free
cabbage that weighed about 5 pounds and even though I don't know what
to do with it I couldn't be happier. Let the week of cabbage begin!

Matt's World Religions Weekend

2011-04-26T09:43:00.001-07:00

Happy Easter and God bless and for he's a jolly good fellow. I hope
your holidays were filled with good turkey as I was unable to find
anything remotely close here in China.

So what did you do this weekend? I climbed QingCheng Mountain, which
is where Daoism (that is, an entire religion) was founded. No big
deal.

The weather here has now reached the "hot" stage and it was a sunny
weekend to go climbing. For practical purposes, a holy mountain in
China seems to mean that there are cable cars and stone steps to the
top. And although it can sometimes be discouraging to round a corner
and see another towering flight of stairs, I don't have much to
complain about next to the dozen people I saw walking it in high
heels. It's a nice view from the top and the greenery on the way up
was a nice break from the city even if it was a wee bit crowded. The
climb is neat because you have to pass through many Daoist Temples on
the way up, so you get a healthy dose of incense and gold-leaf statues
staring down at you. Do you like Yin-Yang symbols? This place is for
you.

Since I once again underestimated the Chinese crowds I ended up
getting an afternoon train to QingCheng, so I spent the morning at the
Wenshu Monastary in Chengdu. I was pissed off for not getting up
earlier to get an early train but alas, it was a famous Buddhist
Monastary and well, you can't really stay angry in one of those.

It's hard to understand a religion by just reading a few paragraphs
(or starting on the wikipedia article and then giving up). How do you
explain a belief? Certainly the history, stories, and philosophy
don't seem to get me very close. Buddha attained enlightenment by not
seeking teachings on enlightenment. In Daoism you practice action
through inaction. And now I've gone cross-eyed just thinking about
it. But besides the mythology, how does a religion shape a country?
One of my enduring images of religion since coming to Asia was an
early morning procession of young monks through the streets of Houay
Sia in Laos: our hotel owner diligently sat outside with the other
townspeople and gave out alms. Amid the chanting and rustling there
was a profound silence to the whole experience, an honest devotion
that begins everyday before the town wakes up.

There, I'm sounding religious already.

Anyway, yesterday we went for duck soup (apparently pronouced soap if
you are Chinese) with some Chinese friends. There was beef tongue and
a few other treats involved but it was all rather tasty. Afterwards
we went to a Taiwan ice cream place. I ordered the recommended
red-bean ice cream which is a perfectly good bowl of ice cream ruined
with a layer of red kidney beans on top. Imagine my surprise when
they brought out long, thin, grilled fish complete with skin and eyes
to accompany the red bean. It wasn't as bad as it sounds, but it begs
the question just how did these people get ice cream so wrong?

This week I am reusing last week's preachy Earth Day lesson since many
of my classes had three days of exams last week. Today one of my
classes asked if they could sing to me Yesterday (by the Beatles),
which we had discussed in detail a few weeks ago. They must have been
practising because it was great, I felt so honoured. It will be good
inspiration for tomorrow which includes my worst class ("mutual
dislike" is probably the most appropriate phrase) and my monthly
40-minute kindergarten lesson (one of my endeavours that I am so
grateful no one at home will ever be able to witness).

Next week is THE holiday between New Years and the summer: May Day. I
am stalling on making plans since, like any holiday in China, it is
the busiest time to try to do anything. I shudder to think of the
innocent tourist who goes to see the Giant Buddha on a holiday, where
the lineup is 2 hours long on an average overcast weekend in March.
Lesson learned. We'll see what happens.

A short lesson on the word "Ganbei"

2011-04-17T07:09:00.001-07:00

I spent the weekend in Leshan, recovering from several weekends on the
road sleeping in airports and catching early morning connections. I
was attacked by thorns while hiking the Great Wall, and something's
been jammed in my calf muscle since that hike, sending a jolt of pain
through my leg every time I go upstairs. This afternoon I finally
pulled out the thorn, a quarter of an inch long. Free at last!

In Leshan, if you're not shopping on Sunday afternoon, you're playing
mahjong. Tea houses line the river, and they're packed on weekends
with wizened old faces puffing on cigarettes and betting big money on
blocks. I drove a bit out of town to the countryside with some
Chinese friends to enjoy the quiet scenery, "breathe the fresh air",
and of course, play mahjong. It's a religion here! I won a few hands
but I'm afraid to get serious as there is significant money involved
in most games. And noise. You haven't really travelled in China
until you've been kept up at night by a game of mahjong.

We haven't been able to find a bar in Leshan, and with the arrival of
patio weather it's heartbreaking to not have a local watering hole.
But drinking in China is a sort of all-or-nothing approach, and the
idea of a bar where you share a few casual drinks with friends doesn't
exist. On the other hand, at a big dinner with friends, everyone
drinks until they're quite boozy.

"Ganbei" is the Chinese word for "Cheers", but beware of casual usage!
Ganbei translates to English as "dry glass" and if you don't down
your little shotglass of liquor you risk some sort of disrespect.
I've had dinners here with strangers who have thrust their empty
glasses in my face when I haven't finished my shot. A meal with
liquor means you Ganbei with everyone at the table individually, and
often in rapid succession. Being a guest only means more Ganbei-ing.
If you say something particularly funny or inspiring (tonight I
mentioned that Canada burned down the White House during the War of
1812) you can expect to Ganbei the entire group. Even with the
relatively weak beer, the whole thing goes south pretty quickly.

Yet this blog entry is remarkably well put together!

Anway, this week I'm teaching about the environment, since Friday is
Earth Day. Does anyone care about Earth Day anymore? Is it just a
thing for public school students to talk about recycling? Anyway, I
doubt it will get much reception, as all of my classes have mid-term
exams this week. Three days of exams sounds like agony for the
students but means a short holiday for us. Now there's something to
Ganbei about.

Go to Jiuzhaigou

2011-04-12T08:22:00.001-07:00

Thursday afternoon I found a cheap flight to a place called
Jiuzhaigou. Jiuzhaigou is a place of legend, sort of like China's
Banff National Park and one of the most popular places for Chinese
tourists. The most beautiful place in China? Possibly. Flights
prices triple starting May 1 so it seemed like as good a time as any
to go.
Jiuzhaigou is located in the north of Sichuan province, which is the
province that I am working in. The middle of Sichuan provine, called
the Sichuan Basin, is essentially a very flat circular area that holds
most of the people and large cities, including Leshan and Chengdu.
This basin is ringed by some of the highest mountains on the planet,
so travelling to the extremes of the province takes a long time even
if the distance is not great. I woke up near the end of the flight to
be treated to a vista of huge white-capped mountains as far as the eye
could see. One day, all of this will be yours.
The pictures speak louder than anything I can describe but still don't
do it justice. The massive waterfalls and emerald blue lakes flowing
through tall narrow valleys were spectacular. It was sort of
"packaged up" nicely for visitors, and none of the Tibetan villages
really felt authentic, but that didn't subtract from the beauty of the
place. Plus there were Tibetan prayer flags all over. Oooh, so
exotic.
I took the long 8 hour bus ride back to Chengdu on Sunday, which was a
nice way to see the countryside. Pretty dramatic scenery as we passed
small villages along the river valley. We were on a very new road
that workers were still putting the finishing touches on as we drove
throw Wenchuan, well known in Sichuan as the epicenter of the 2008
earthquake. A lot of building going on in that city, but situated on
the river it looked like a really nice place to live. Difficult to
imagine the nightmare that unfolded in those tall valleys a few years
ago.
The Sichuan Basin is known for its lack of sunlight, and true to form
it was sunny for most of the way back to Chengdu (I need sunglasses
now anytime it gets sunny). Then we went through a very long tunnel
with air quality that seemed akin to a coal mine. When we came out
the other side the skies were overcast once again. Welcome home.
Anyway, this week I'm doing a music lesson, and the students go batty
when they hear about that. We talk a bit about their favourite
artists and music (Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, and Justin Bieber) and
then work on organizing the scrambled lyrics to the Beatles'
"Yesterday". Would you take it as a compliment as an artist if your
music was being used to teach ESL? It's going really well, and also a
little funny to hear the students recite lyrics in their "Microsoft
Sam" monotone voice. Can't say I'm tired of hearing Yesterday yet,
but it's only Tuesday!