Portrait of an LBX

Jour 223 (03/05/10)

Guilong(规龙)-Qingtou(箐头)

Province du Yunnan(云南省)

- 95km -

Tôt le matin déjà, nous entendons de la musique tourner à fond, sans doute dans le but de nous réveiller. Mais trop crevés, nous ne sortons pas de la chambre. Ce n’est qu’à 9h passées, avec une bonne gueule de bois, que nous rangeons nos affaires. À part le père, personne n’est à la maison. Celui-ci, d’ailleurs, nous accueille avec un peu de froideur. Pas de « Vous avez bien dormi? » ni de « Vous prenez un petit dèj? ». Il se contente d’ouvrir la porte d’entrée de la cour afin que nous puissions sortir nos vélos, et nous dit seulement:

• “你们要走了？” (« Vous partez? »)

Le grand lit de Petit Li

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By Evan

Mr. Ma making a booze run on his Forever, by Andy

So after leaving the market of Lüchun detailed in the last post, we rolled out of town past several farm vehicles packed to capacity with Hani women and into the valley below. Only half an hour of riding later, Alexis was invited into the house of an older Hani man named Mr. Ma for tea. We didn’t know it then, but we were in for one hell of an LBXperience, one that would end much more wildly than anybody expected.

Mr. Ma sat the three of us down on a couch in the middle room of his snug, three-room house and made us some of his own tea. His traditional wife, with deep wrinkles on her face and a protruding belly, and wearing a black turban with red tassels and deep purple shirt, busied herself in the kitchen and outside the house with this and that. Mr. Ma then embarked on what would turn out to be a half a day of the most exquisite BS’ing (吹牛) I’ve ever witnessed.

Before I get into all that, I should tell you what kind of a person we were dealing with. Mr. Ma was tall for a person in this part of the world and built solid. His wispy but full mustache and lively eyes served to accentuate the stories he told us in his erudite yet still crudely accented Mandarin, which he spoke in the same bubbly rhythms and intonations as Nigerians speak English. (more…)

Jour 220 (30/04/10)

Huangcaoling(黄草岭)-Lüchun(绿春)

Province du Yunnan(云南省)

- 44km -

Levés à 7h30, nous allons prendre un petit dèj sous forme de… (je vous le donne en mille!)… Café? Jus de fruits? Céréales? Tartines beurrés? Confiture? Pains au chocolat? Croissants? Chaussons au pommes? Pains au raisins? Rien de tout ça, évidemment… Même pas un Pépito, Petit Écolier ou un Prince! Seulement un bol de nouilles… Pas le choix!

Andy ne sentant pas bien, allant même jusqu’à gerber une galette derrière le boui-boui, nous traînons un peu. Une fois qu’il va mieux, nous décollons de nos chaises et reprenons la route. Très vite, nous attaquons une très longue montée. Je me détache assez vite, d’autant qu’Evan fait des poses répétées auprès d’Andy, qui n’est pas totalement remis.

C'est pas dans "Inspecteur la bavure" que Coluche se retrouve dans ce genre de situation dans sa caisse?

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By Evan

“You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Tiger's Mouth rice paddy terraces

When we left the brand new yet decrepit county capital of Yuanyang (元陽縣) sitting at 300 meters elevation on the bank of the dammed Red River to climb to the mile-high old county capital of Xinjie (新街鎮), we knew we were making a huge down payment of sorts. Fortunately the steep price for entry into the world of the Hani people turned out to pay extraordinary dividends.

After what seemed like an eternity of climbing, including one brief stop to help some women of the Elderly Council (老年協會) plant corn along a mountainside for villagers too old to work their own fields, we rounded the corner of a hill covered with buffalo and beheld the first city. To look at it, Old Yuanyang is just a dense line of dirty old buildings aligned along a winding ridge reminiscent of a Portuguese mountain village. The mountain dwelling Han Chinese of Zhejiang and Fujian tend to build their settlements in valleys near sources of water, and in fact, not a few include the word keng (坑), which means depression. The Hani and Yi of these parts, on the other hand, prefer to cluster villages on peaks overlooking their fields — at night lighting up the valleys like a Christmas tree laid sideways. This living arrangement is convenient for defense and landslide management, but it means that life revolves around permanent cycles of hard work. The difficulty of their situation, like a grain of sand in an oyster, has actually caused them to transform every aspect of daily life into something of pearly splendor. (more…)