Portrait of an LBX

After making the trek through the fields to the tomb of the father of our host, Old Nong (老農), the elderly villager of the previous post sits back and watches the proceedings.

An elderly villager of Danong (大農村) wipes off the tombstone of an ancestor's grave on the Zhuang Tomb Sweeping day on the third day of March on the lunar calendar (農歷三月初三). For most in the countryside there is no such thing as a "graveyard." The tombs are scattered throughout the fields in any un-planted spot available, and many are marked only by a pile of stones.

For the Nong (農) family children, the Zhuang (壯族) Tomb Sweeping Day (三月初三) seemed to be a celebration -- a reason to be out of school and romping through the fields with brothers, sisters and cousins. For the next generation, the day seemed to be more of an obligation -- a thing to be done because that's the way it's always been done, even though some admitted they didn't understand all the proceedings. But whether due to a greater attachment to tradition or the realization that before long their families might be burning money for their own use in the afterlife, the elderly generation took a much more reverent approach to the traditional holiday on which the living care for the dead.

An out-of-place-looking man reads to the side of the Xiazhai, Fujian street market.

Pretty much all the cigarettes I saw people smoking (and there were of course tons) in Xiazhai (霞寨), Fujian were hand-rolled. We haven't traveled very far lately due to visa issues and sickness. I promise we'll be getting the blog back up to date over the next few days!

After descending from one of the highest mountains we've ridden over so far, we passed through a small village where a funeral celebration (欢送, literally a 'farewell party') was taking place. The family invited us in to "add to the noise" (加热闹), of which there was already plenty due to a brass band. The women in the mourning family wore what looked like burlap coverings. Here the onlookers watch the band, which the family hired for the day for 1,000 yuan ($146) -- a hefty price for the Chinese countryside.

A man waits to cross the street in Shanghai.

An old peasant man stops to pack his pipe during our walk through the Chujiawangwu Village surroundings with Mr. Chu and Little Liu.

Big smiles from a grandfather and grandson team selling vegetables in the morning market in the Zhangguan old town.

The man in this picture is a Uighur elder in the soon-to-be-demolished Old Town of Kashgar, a southern Silk Road city in Xinjiang. Less than a month after my girlfriend and I left Xinjiang, a truly horrendous scene has erupted there. I don't want to get into it on this site beyond saying that I would never have thought any of the people we met there -- Han, Uighur, Kazakh, Tajik, whoever -- capable of committing such acts of violence. But when you put anything under sufficient pressure, you never know exactly how it's going to explode. I had intended to post a lot more Xinjiang pictures here over the past few weeks, but I've been busy with my last month of work and getting the apartment packed up so I can move my life onto a bike for the next year or so. When we're finally on the road, Evan and I will undoubtedly meet many of China's 55 nationally recognized minorities. As we've seen in the past few days, tensions between some of those minority groups and the Han Chinese majority is often simmering just below the surface. Our goal will be to get beyond that in order understand those people for who they are beyond how they are defined by their relationships with other ethnic groups or the ruling government. I look forward to sharing those stories here.