Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

A Guangxi rice farmer, by Andy

After returning to Zhanjiang, where I left the guys marooned for almost a week while I wrangled with the increasingly capricious visa gods in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the trip was back on, and it was high time for us to get out of Guangdong. Around noon on the day after our departure, we were rewarded by a sign warning us not to bring improper out-of-province cars into our new province of Guangxi and the most unridable, full-of-holes national highway we’ve seen yet. Over the first few days, the landscape remained flat like Guangdong but was remarkably more agricultural and green than its industrial, eastern twin. We even saw the reemergence of row-planted trees, something we haven’t seen in such abundance since north of Anhui.

On a cultural-linguistic note, the dispersement of the Cantonese language has been very different from our expectations. We had gotten sick of being called “weigolo” (外國佬, derogatory for foreigners in a lot of Fujian dialects) and were really hoping the locals would start screaming “gweilo” (鬼佬, derogatory for foreigner in Cantonese) at us as soon as we crossed from southern Fujian, if for nothing but a change of pace. Alas, it turned out that the Hakkas reign over a territory that extends hundreds of km south to Huizhou, just north of Shenzhen, and they scream “waigolo” like the rest of ‘em. Then of course, we exulted in Canto bliss from Hong Kong through Guangzhou all the way to Zhanjiang, where apparently it’s all about the same, except for a few patches of Taishan dialect. Then as we lighted out from there toward Guangxi, we began to realize that the “gweilo” we had so eagerly wished for was now lingering like the smell of stinky tofu. The language remains 90% the same as Guangzhou all the 500 km to Nanning, but the “moral fiber / social etiquette” (素質) of the locals drops off dramatically after the provincial border, we’re told.

The only event to report from the four days to Nanning was from the one day that Andy again experienced the nine deaths of his stomach retaining water and we were forced to stop in a muddy, backwater highway town. As we sat drinking the tea I brought from Hong Kong, after about ten banal conversations and photo ops with all ten-plus members of the restaurant family, a firm, slim man with rugged facial features and a mustache approached us carrying a curved, segmented metal water pipe the size of an extra-large cucumber. He produced a Johnson’s baby powder case from his pocket, from which he extracted a pinch of long-leaf tobacco. “Try a drag? (抽一口吧?)” he proffered. Alexis and I both tried a hit, and just as it was in Yunnan last year and Hainan a few weeks ago, the strength of the smoke was overpowering. One puff, and I had to sit down, all dizzy. It was something had picked up from his coworkers in Guangdong, he said. “We Chinese love smoking tobacco, just like Opium a long time ago! (我們中國人愛抽煙，就像以前抽鴉片那樣)” Woah, man, but… there’s no opium around now right? “No opium, but back in Guangdong, there’s lots of white powder, heroin, you know? (沒有，可是廣東那邊很多白粉，海洛因，知道吧?)” I did know, since in the Zhanjiang hotel Alexis and I had both been individually offered “white powder” by a short, grubby man in an elevator who pointed at the inner pocket of his coat and projected the comical, frantic demeanor of a stereotypical junkie/dealer.

After a few more puffs from the pipe, he told us he was a local in town for Tomb-sweeping day (清明節) with his family, for the occasion of which they had set off fireworks over their forebears’ tombs, something we had been seeing and — much to our chagrin — hearing for the previous two days. A lifelong worker in concrete factories, the 38-year-old, stout little man had bounced all over the Pearl River Delta, Guangzhou, Yangjiang, Enping, and most recently Shenzhen working to send money home for his five-year-old son. When we told him we had ridden from Beijing to Hainan, he lost his color and said, “I’ve never been to either of those places. I don’t have enough money to go traveling like you foreigners. (北京、海南我都沒有去過，我不像你們外國人那麼有錢，想旅游都沒辦法.)” After a little more conversation about life in Guangdong, his wife called him to leave with the rest of the family. He told us he’d be on the bus again in a day, not to return to see his family for several months, and then wished us happy travels. A while later, Andy felt good enough to slug it out, and we limped a few more km to the next town.

A day and a half later we were finally in Nanning, the last “big city” we’d see for about two months. This meant that Alexis had to feed McDonald’s double cheeseburgers to the monkey on his back, I needed to get a fill of good coffee, and Andy had a chance to run to a local hospital for tests to report back to his doctor friend in the US.

A bit later the first night, Alexis and I checked out the local nightlife scene and were disappointed to find it dominated by two big, loud, smoky bars where it would be impossible to talk to anybody unless you squeezed their head against your mouth with both hands and screamed — not the easiest way to make friends. So we abandoned and walked into a tattoo parlor, where we found an odd crew of characters sitting around smoking butts. Deng Wei, a fat guy with a soft voice and an earring, started talking to us through his Cantonese accent while we admired the pictures of tats on the wall. A few minutes later the whirring sound of the tattoo pen — along with the intermittent screams of a skittish girl getting her first ink — stopped from the back room, and the skinny owner of the shop, old Sun, bade us sit and join them. Old Sun, middle aged and originally from the Northeast (東北), told us in his craggy northern accent he’ll live the rest of his life in Nanning, since it’s the perfect combination of big city and nice people, nothing like Shanghai or Guangzhou. Next to me was a skinny outdoorsy guy named Yuanhan — we immediately renamed him John — who was sketching anime-like images of his pretty girlfriend, who sat smoking next to him. John reflected the archetype of a little guy who feels like he has to show off a bit of knowledge of every subject, but in reality, he did know a little of what he was talking about, and he was pretty fun to talk to. Once we were seated, he ran to the store across the street to buy a case of tall beers, which we divvied up before settling in.

The fat guy, Deng, raises Schnauzers to AKC standards professionally with his girlfriend, which explained his self-made 17698 tshirt (一起遛狗吧, the Chinese sounds like “let’s walk dogs together”, really pukesy cute in the same vein as Hello Kitty), but didn’t explain the wrap-around tattoo of a witch on his left arm he had just had augmented with black flames on top and bottom. Eventually Old Sun mentioned that the biggest bar in town, a place we had walked into for a second just down the street, was controlled by local mafia, at which point the otherwise very cuddly Deng perked up saying, “You’d never know who’s mafia and who isn’t. I bet you didn’t know that I am? (很難看得出來誰是黑社會的。你們剛看到我應該不知道我是.)” Everybody just nodded their heads and confirmed that the mafia are generally nice people unless you infringe on their business… so we knew on the spot not to mess with any stray Schnauzers we might encounter.

Since everybody in the room was chain smoking, I decided to pull out the Drum I bought in Hong Kong Duty Free for just such an occasion, which unexpectedly turned into a rolling competition. To my great surprise, all the Chinese in the room put me to shame with their skills. At some point, Old Sun also mentioned that lots of local girls love marrying old white men. I explained that most of those old white men have generally failed at life back home, thus driving them to Asia to find a wife. He looked around the room as if everybody knew somebody in this situation and said, “That’s about right, since most of the women who marry them are failures here too,” and everybody erupted in laughter. Over the course of the conversation, we talked easily just like that about everything, music, fun, nightlife, sex, and all the other stuff that normal people from back home like to discuss. It was fun to hang out with some fringe element Chinese, even though they’d be considered mildly conservative by comparison to a high school rock concert crowd in the US.

It goes on like this forever, by Andy

Getting back to what’s important, less than half a day’s ride out of Nanning, we found ourselves shuttling between jaw-droppingly stunning karst spectacles of giant limestone spires that looked like rocks that had been rolled between the fingers of some creator and then tossed onto the plain like jacks. While at our jobs in Shanghai and Beijing, or while rolling through the depressing waste flats of a week before, we completely forget that all those Chinese landscape paintings (山水畫), the kind you see en masse in cheap reproduction at fake markets or hanging in art museums, and for which the country’s artistic tradition is so renowned, aren’t just figments of some vast collective imagination. Finally we we have entered the most riotously awe-inspiring segment of our trip, the great southwest! Rather than revile against our environment, now we revel in the comfort of the valleys that splay out between those green pillars of eternal strength. From here on in, every day promises to escalate the road’s precipitousness (險峻) and correspondingly our fatigue, but all the same we wouldn’t have it any other way!

Banana trees before mist-shrouded mountains, by Andy

At different points over the last several days of riding, we’ve felt like we were riding into either Jurassic Park, the Land of the Lost, or the Lord of the Rings, and have hummed corresponding theme songs. As usual, whom would we find in the most fantastic places of China but ethnic minorities (少數民族), the closest thing to 55 tribes of elves and orcs we’ll find around. That said, the Zhuang — weighing in at 30+% of the province and China’s largest minority — we’ve met have been pretty tame and similar to the Han, with the exception of slightly more pronounced facial features, darker skin, and a language that sounds nothing like Chinese, though it sure is spelled pretty close to the same (see the Rosetta Stone). So far we’ve seen no signs of their previously savage nature that earned them their ancient, politically incorrect, moniker “ethnicity of wild dogs (獞族),”

This scene has been acted out for centuries, by Andy

Speaking of the Zhuang and their territory, one of the most magical spectacles we’ve witnessed of late has been the spring planting of rice. All the way back in Anhui and Jiangsu in early November we crossed that Mason-Dixon-esque line where wheat fields give way to rice paddies — and just as the rice harvest was getting geared up. For over a week we saw from our mounts thousands of farmers reaping their green rice and shaking the brown kernels out onto the sides of the highways to dry before being taken to a local factory to rend the white starchy center — for humans — from the dark husk to feed the animals. Since then, we’ve taken in the majority of the calories that propelled us across the southern half of the country from the grain — as either boiled white rice, or niangao (年糕), or our greatest culinary love/hate relationship, rice noodles. Even all the local alcohol we’ve had, red or yellow, weak or strong, distilled or not, has been brewed from glutinous rice. As for the scenery, from Shanghai south, most of the paddies were full of shorn, yellow stalks where the rice used to grow, which have subsided as we progressed into small patches of green grass from which the innumerable water buffalo graze. Once we hit Hainan, months ahead of the continental agricultural schedule due to its tropical climate, all the paddies were almost full-grown and stand out in my memory like fields of emerald wands waving under the close sun.

Dart-tossing the seedlings, by Andy

Now for the first time, we’re just in time to experience the beginnings of the annual ritual that has kept Asia fed for thousands of years. Scores and scores of men and women, barefoot or in tall rubber boots, wade through the muck of their segmented portion of a sloping valley, hands gripping a plow pulled by sometimes a machine but usually a lumbering buffalo, which otherwise wander languidly around in friendly little groups between the fields. After the earth is stirred to perfection, they — usually women at this point — fetch an armful of rice seedlings (稻苗) from the narrow plastic-covered temporary greenhouses along the side of the road, where they grow packed tight in bunches. Then the coolie-hat-donning farmers again plod foot-holes in square-dance patterns at the bottom of their paddies as they adeptly toss the short, green seedlings into the mud like darts, managing to space them all perfectly. It’s all done with such adroitness that even if we were just arrived from Mars, we’d know that they’ve been observing the sacrament since they could walk, when they learned it from their parents and on back through the generations for millennia. Though we’ve heard over and over from young rural-escapees that the planting of rice is the single most laborious activity of traditional Chinese life, the farmers mostly wear big smiles on their faces when they look up at us, the kinds of smiles you’d never find in Shanghai even if you scoured the streets for a week. It is worth noting too that even though the process is laborious and requires intricate coordination between the farmers to flood the fields from the top of a terrace to the bottom, not much area of planting is required to feed one person. As one 70-year-old Zhuang man told us on the side of the road, usually only 4/10 of a mu (四分田) [1/15 of an acre] is plenty per mouth.

Good clean fun, by Evan

Two and a half days into the paddy-patched, pre-historic terrain, we finally pulled close to our first international border, Vietnam. A stone’s throw from the border, a young Zhuang guy on a motorcycle told us we should go swimming in the swimming hole fed by a waterfall running down the mountains through a — no surprise here — hydroelectric facility, but warned to stay away from the bigger river it feeds since it’s, “full of flow-off from a mine (都是煤礦下流的水).” Sure enough, there it was, and we had ourselves the second fresh-water swim and rock jumping session, and in limestone-rich water as deep blue as a Yellowstone sky. As we were winding up our little aquatic show, a group of young Zhuang guys showed up in ratty jeans with a case of beers. Rednecks are the same everywhere!

Hey, where is that? by Andy

Then it was a dart to the border town Shuolong (碩龍鎮) for a late lunch and a cruise down the frontier highway (沿邊公路), a nice asphalt strip next to a very diminutive metal fence. Beyond the fence was the Black Water River (黑水河), and across from that was the parallel rusty brown dirt frontier highway of Vietnam, rimmed by a flimsy bamboo fence. Around 4pm, we came upon a place where the river was extraordinarily low across a flow valley of maybe a half a mile, easily traversable on foot, right up to a ten-foot-wide, two-foot-deep creek that represented the last obstacle before that bastion of freedom — we’re all allowed to dream — to the south. It looked as though we could do our version of Steve McQueen in the Great Escape by just removing our shoes, wading across, climbing up onto the dirt road, and taking some pictures in front of the Vietnam side — but you’d have to be really stupid to do something like that…

Wandering across the dry river bed, by Andy

So anyway, a brief while later we sat on the China side a moment to let our feet dry, and a motorcycle whizzed down the dusty road. I threw up my arms and screamed in Chinese “nihao! (你好),” at which the young, thin man driving screeched on the brakes. He and the old man on the back got off of the bike and waved at us, exhorting us to come up on his side and waving a pack of cigarettes at us. We tried to communicate in every language we know, “Nihao, hui shuo zhongwen ma? Hello, English? Parlez-vous français? Leiho!” but it was all for naught. Borders really are mystical things — here we were one kilometer away bantering on with the locals in Mandarin, even though that’s not even their native language, and just across a piddly river, all those years of cramming Chinese into our brains became as useless as an English pick-up line in a bar. For the first time in a long time we remembered that we’re in Asia, a place we don’t actually come from, damn! We also felt ashamed at this point for not knowing one single word among us in Vietnamese, especially Alexis since it’s his old colony and myself since it’s the third fourth most spoken language in Louisiana. A minute later, seeing that everybody was wasting time, they waved, lit up smokes, and jetted into the dusklight around a mountain.

The Black Water River that separates China and Vietnam, by Andy

We crawled across the border a few more km that night before collapsing into an overpriced hotel next to a tacky, touristic Vietnamese-goods extravaganza! The next morning we clipped the Detian cross-border falls (Southeast Asia’s answer to Niagara), picking up yet another pack of Viet fruit chips (God, they’re delicious). Then it was up and up and up the least horizontal mountain roads we’ve hit yet on the trip. Alexis sped ahead, as he is wont to do in such occasions, and took his lunch in a little village on the frontier highway. Andy and I maintained the easy pace, gliding into a little valley right at noon. Off to the left, a bizarre sight lured us from the highway like a siren — half of a village submerged under a lake, the roofs of several houses jutting just above the water’s surface. We rolled down the one foot wide dirt path into the village to the water’s edge for a photo op, whereupon a shirtless old man and a middle aged woman with short hair and deep wrinkles carrying a baby on her hip called to us, “Come eat lunch with us! (來跟我們吃飯吧!)” The time we spent with the Zhuang family will be covered in the next post.

Closest thing to a traffic jam that happens out here, by Andy

Around 3 pm, we finally took our leave from the mini Atlantis of Guangxi, needless to say a little addled on rice wine (it’s the culture, mom!). Of course, we had over 40 km of butt-kickingly abrupt mountains to defeat, and the skies started dropping a torrent on us, just in case we didn’t know how they really felt about us. So we waited an hour for the rain to subside ever so slightly and heaved and ho’ed up and onward, through the rain. It was actually going not too badly before Andy’s bike yelped out again with a loud “KRRRRKKKKK!” Bags off, bike flipped, and we two sotted novices poked around like monkeys until we realized that his chain had snapped inside the derailleur, which with the help of the diabolic forces that work against us caused the whole thing to bend into the spokes of his rear wheel, rendering the bike completely unridable. We sat there stupidly in the middle of nowhere, darkness descending, rain falling on our dopish faces before a nice guy rolled past in a QQ car and offered to dispatch a motorcycle wagon from the next village back to find us. We agreed, but five minutes after he left, a bus headed straight to the county town of Jingxi (靖西縣城), where Alexis had already found a hotel, plunked up the mountain. Sorry, motorcycle wagon driver, we thought, but there was no way we were passing up that heavenly ass-saver. Twenty kuai a pop and 45 minutes later, we were in the hotel room with Alexis gloating over the noontime luck and lamenting the evening misfortune.

So yesterday, Andy spent 11 hours on buses between here and Nanning to have his entire rear derailleur and chain replaced, and now today Alexis has fallen sick, crunching our schedule even more than it was. Now we face 24 days and over 1000 km of mountains, rising as high as 2000 m on our way to Devi (girlfriend to Andy and supply mule/angel = mangel to the rest of us), elephants, and Thai minority (傣族) of southern Yunnan. Wish us luck!