Ain't Nothin' But a Cowboy...

We woke up at 5 am to try to hawk a ride from Litang to Tagong. We decided it worked pretty well to ride with other travelers since the drivers would lust after the money from 4 travelers more than they would for 2. The Romanians, Laura and Adrienne, and Grant and I went to the bus station to see what kind of ride we could get to our next location. We decided since the public bus was only 63 kuai, we weren't paying more than 100 for a private bus. Everyone basically laughed in our faces. Ha. But we decided to hold to our guns and I prayed hard that we would get a good deal. And lo! Even simple prayers are answered, because we a young Tibetan dude about Grant's age offered to take us in his brand new, 5 day old SUV. He had a meeting there the next day, so he said he'd love to make a little money on the way. He didn't speak any English, so he made sure I told everyone clearly that if the police asked, we were all strictly friends and he was taking us for free. Haha. Maybe a licensing issue?? But it was a pretty comfy ride, for much less than those terrifying mini-buses that we hate so much. Our Tibetan driver was crazy nice. I sat in the passenger seat and he talked all about the injustices of being a Tibetan person in China. About police beatings and arrests and interesting stuff. He wasn't your average driver, because he even treated us to a pretty expensive lunch. Ha, and WE were paying HIM to drive us to another city. The road sure did suck though. These are the type of roads you would drive on with maybe a four-wheeler for extreme sports or something, not your regular transport from city to city. There would be a crumbly rock-slide to our right, then a precipice immediately to our left, with a windshield full of dust from huge semis driving on all sides of the truck. The road was UNPAVED even! We bumped around like  the grasshoppers in mason jars that Rachel, Jessica and Michael used to shake up. haha.

Eventually we made it to Xinduqiao where we said goodbye to the Romanians and our nice driver. From Xinduqiao we negotiated a ride to Tagong, a nearby Tibetan village. But of course, they don't tell you until you put your crap in the back of their car that they have to scream in the face of everyone in town to find another passenger before you leave. So we sat on a curb watching the town do its thing. It was a pretty quaint place. It almost could pass as the American West. The men look live Indians with their long braided black hair, their wide brimmed hats and their riding boots. About every other person in the town was a monk in a maroon robe. We spied a trio of 11 year old monks eating yummy looking ice cream and decided that looked delicious. The little boys took Grant to the shop they bought the ice cream at and we lapped up ice cream while we waited for the driver to find 2 other people to cram in his tin can of a car. We saw the coolest contraption on the side of the road, it was an iron teapot suspended over metal sheet that reflected the sunlight on the bottom of the pot, making it boil! It was so cool. Finally, we had a full car and were blowing dust behind us in Xinduqiao on our way to Tagong.

TaGong was pretty insane. It was just a little village of one main street consisting of brick shops with colorful Tibetan style windows, ending in a roundabout and small monastery. I don't know what was up, but by this time, for some reason Grant and I were feeling like crap. I had got some sort of cold in Litang, which could very well have been altitude related since it was about 4000 km above sea level. It also made my stomach super queasy and killed my appetite for everything. Eating food sounded like the worst thing in the world. Grant had also caught something a little while back giving him the squirts and an upset tummy. Honestly, his was probably some sort of bug/parasite from India. I've been on every type of antibiotic in Thailand/India/China for this irritating UTI that won't go away, which probably massacred all the little pests in my guts even if it hasn't done anything for the infection. Anywho, we were feeling tired and crappy so we just hit the sack in the Khampa inn, which was a backpacker hostel run by a woman from Colorado who had married a Tibetan man. The next morning I surprised Grant with breakfast in bed: apples, stiff flat bread and jam, and dumplings full of super toxic oniony veggies. As nice as that hostel was, we wanted to save a little money and liked this adorable inn run by two jolly Tibetan sisters that got a kick out of saying "Ni hao!" So we moved to that place for a couple nights. They had round rosy faces and their home was BEAUTIFUL! The back yard was full of potted flowers and flowering ivy climbed up the back of the house. The room they gave us for about $12 a night was a 3 bed room that had probably been a room for their children at some point. There were soggy, sicky, stained stuffed animals propped up an dressers and storage boxes and trunks here and there. The room was painted so colorfully and hung with colorful fabrics. It felt just like home.

We basically slept for most of the morning, both feeling terribly tired, sick to our stomachs and uncomfortable. We eventually rolled out of bed and did our laundry in a tin basin in the flowery back yard. It feels kinda weird for an inn full of Europeans to see a long row of garmies flowing in the wind, but you gotta do what you gotta do. We hadn't eaten basically all day by the time we were done with the laundry and felt miserably hungry but with little appetite. Grant seemed up to Chinese food, but the thought alone made me want to puke up my empty belly. In the end we ate a *somewhat* Western dinner at the Khampa inn: yak burgers with a crumbly home-made bun and dry mashed potatoes. Not the best burger I've eaten, but it didn't come back up, so it was exactly what we needed. The burgers were super rare, which concerned us, but the Tibetan woman who cooked them assured us that if they cooked them all the way they would be tough and gross. Tough and gross versus eternal diarrhea...hard choice. On our way back to our hostel for the night we stepped into a tiny grocery store and asked if there was a pharmacy around. This Danish dude overheard us and pulled out a stack up papers in Dutch with all sorts of medical lingo. He said he was a med student and suggested that if we had the runs that wasn't too bad, BUT! If we say blood in our poo to get help asap! That was pretty nice of him--he even gave Grant some anti-diarrhea meds. Oddly enough, that night, Granty had pretty bloody runs. So we decided that it was probably time to check it out with a doctor the next day. That night we also realized that Grant had lost his nice blue rain jacket he'd bought for over $100 before we left that he liked so much. He had left it in the Tibetan dude's SUV. :( We were pretty bummed, but prayed like crazy that a miracle would bring it back.

The next morning we ate a tiny breakfast of dumplings or something. Honestly, anything was hard to get past my back teeth so I didn't eat much. We decided we'd figure out what to do about seeing a doctor. We were directed to a conspicuous blue building on the main street that didn't open until 10am. When it opened, we hardly knew what the heck we were doing. We wandered through the dirty hall until we found an office with a young-ish man and a middle aged man in white coats. It really was a test to my Chinese to explain Grant's symptoms, but it made it even more complicated because the doctor was most definitely not a native Chinese speaker. His Tibetan accent was thick but we eventually got across what was going on (or at least we hoped we did). The young doctor gave Grant a thermometer to put under his armpit. Suddenly there was a commotion in the hallway and a bunch of dudes bumbled into the little office. One man was terribly green, moaning all over the place and another man (who was evidently his boss) was doing some explaining to the doctor. The other 4 men in their hats and gawking stares were just there "to see what the goin' on!" We have found that in places where people don't exactly have established occupations they have plenty of time to nose in other people's business. The green dude slobbered all over the place saying he'd had bloody diarrhea for 5 days and that lost shot of alcohol gave him one heck of a stomach ache! We couldn't tell if the man really was in dire straits or if he knew that the man who yells the loudest gets attention first. The man was given some sort of water bottle and his blood pressure was pretty darn low. The young doctor turns to us and said, basically, "It's a good thing YOU guys came early! You could by DYING like him!" Somehow I can't see a doctor saying that in front of a patient in the states... The young doctor scribbled a prescription on a piece of paper and Grant was given a bunch of pills and packets of chalky something-strange. He was then given an order to get "treatment" from the nurses in the back. The whole visit, which included the meds, the "treatment", and the rx, was a whopping $11. Uninsured. Not too bad, but I suppose you get what you pay for. This was no IHC or St. Marks. We walked back to where Grant was to be treated by the nurses which was through a big open door, leading to a sort of open courtyard full of weeds. There was a concrete building on the right with a couple little rooms full of patients, sitting quietly, IVs stuck in their hands. The nurses were only a couple of young girls in their 20s, wearing the "traditional" trucker hat with the pink English nonsense that most Tibetan girls wear and big, white lab coats. The place wasn't "India dirty", but it wasn't exactly sterile. I prayed hard the Grant would get a clean needle. Since the main room was full, Grant was lead to the next door room where a toothy monk strapped to an IV flowing with dark liquid sat with his texting monk friend. The nurses hooked Grant up to a basic saline IV just to hydrate him, which took FOREVER!! We studied Chinese, read, and were crazy bored as his fluid dripped at an eye-glazing 36 drips a second. After 2 hours, a nurse came in with ANOTHER bottle of saline. Grant groaned and said in his cute Chinese, "Wo dengdao mingtian??" "We here until tomorrow?" Two hours later she came in with ANOTHER bottle of some other kind of liquid. By this time our toothy monk friend had already shuffled out and two college aged, smoking dudes with attitude took his place. When Grant's IV was done, they both looked at us and were like, "hey man, if you don't have them take out the IV you'll get air in your heart and you'll die." Then one of the boys started yelling for the nurse and she came in and unplugged Grant. It was a LONG trip to the Tibetan hospital, but Grant looked more hydrated for sure. At one point I had held his IV for him as he went to the bathroom in the concrete sicky sicky sicky John in the corner of the field. After the hospital incident, we ate some dinner in a little noodle shop. We hadn't eaten since breakfast so we ate a good sized bowl of noodles and *20* dumplings. I worried the shop-keeper was thinking, "American fatty" as she made a second helping of dumplings. But honestly, Grant and I have lost a decent about of weight. That night we tried to set up our little trip to the Tibetan village at the Khampa hostel and while Grant looked for the American woman to set it up, we played with her half Tibetan daughter Somsam who was hilarious! Her English was perfect and it totally threw us off. She wanted us to play "Lost in the Woods" with her. I have told Grant about Brittany's and my obsession with the idea of being "lost in the woods" as little girls so we were amazed that even a little Tibetan girl living in a Chinese desert without a tree in sight would also want to play "lost in the woods."

The next day was our trip to "Yakville" as Grant lovingly called it. I had a little freak-out that morning when I woke up with a miserable tension headache that radiated from my shoulders to the base of my noggin. I also kept getting this weird heart flutters where I would suddenly feel out of breath and anxious, like some sort of panic attack. I started blubbering about feeling crappy, being homesick, and sad. Grant was very kind to me and gave me a blessing. Miraculously, the headache vanished right after the blessing. Oh, also miraculously, we found out the Grant's blue coat had been found by the Romanians we had ridden with and they left it in a Chengdu hostel for us to pick up! Miracles! Anyway,  I was still feeling queasy and could only bear the thought of eating oreos and milk for breakfast, which didn't seem very sustaining. I began to doubt if I could make our trip. We had hired a guide who would lead us to the summer pastures high in the hills where the yaks and tents of the nomads would be. We would stay a night there in their tents then come back the next day. Our guide was a 13 year old boy named Grizme or something. He was super funny. He walked as if the trek was nothing, while I was practically dying on the path. We first walked a dusty road out of town, past some grazing ponies and a winding river. It was not too bad, but I still felt weak and crazy. I think my lack of food was making me emotional. Then we started going up this really big hill and I started getting those weird little heart flutter panic attack things. I really think that it was altitude related. Or culture shock? Who knows. But the idea of being stuck in Yakville while I felt like a psycho made me start to freak out. But we finally made it over the hill and it was okay. The kid stopped every 10 feet or so to pick berries, and blow dandelions. After the hill, it wasn't too bad. He took us past a field where some military dudes were doing target practice. They followed us, asking us basically, what the heck we were doing there. We told them we were just dumb tourists seeing the grasslands. They seemed satisfied. We took off our shoes and forded a river then had a yummy half-way lunch at a Tibetan lady's house. She gave us some super dense buns dripping in yak butter and some buttery fried greens with some yak butter tea. It was all pretty darn good and thankfully I got a good amount down. We played with her baby and the little cat for a while, then went on our way again. The hike took a million years. It was BEAUTIFUL, sprinkled with a variety of wild flowers that changed every half hour of walking or so, and Grizme sometimes showed us something interesting, like a freshwater spring, edible wild raspberries, flowers that popped when you twisted them. But it was a freaking 7 hour hike in dizzyingly thin air. We finally made it to the high pastures where Grizme showed us into a big brown, yak-wool tent and had us sit next to a cold fire pit. One tent wall was lined with huge stacks of flat packed yak poo, the other wall was stacked with supplies, and the other wall was lined with 10 or so baby yaks, tied to a long rope. We sat in the middle of this, not sure what the heck was going on. Grizme and a pack of little boys aged 3-10 rough housed around us, picking fights both playful and serious. Then suddenly all the boys disappeared and we were sitting there alone, looking at eachother, totally exhausted. We decided we'd go out of the tent and figure out what was going on, but there was not a soul in sight but a 7 year old quiet little boy. We gave him some sun flower seeds, but he was still pretty silent. Grant spotted a 5 year old boy so he came up and picked him up by his legs, holding him upside down. In the US, that boy would think Grant was so cool. But this boy FREAKED out and started crying and threw grass at Grant. We found out his name later was "Gerr". Eventually we smoothed things over with the kid when we used a tent pole to play limbo, jump rope, etc. Then Gerr picked up the stick and went "guh guh guh guh guh!!" like a machine gun. This was another "lost in the woods" moment. Yes, even Tibetan boys in the middle of no where pretend everything is a gun. Suddenly, there were 5 boys with huge 6 foot wooden tent poles running around shooting eachother. I didn't have a pole, so I was always the poor target that pretended to die over and over. Grant got down and dirty and even threw a couple yak crap grenades. There was a lady way across camp the whole time meanwhilst who kept yelling like crazy. Finally I asked Gerr what she was saying and he made a motion like, "ignore her." I decided to ask a less naughty kid who made a motion like, "oh, well, she's saying put the poles down." Oops, we probably undid years of training these boys to NOT mess around with the tent poles. We then just sat in the yak baby tent, waiting for whatever was coming next. Eventually, a woman came in and started stoking a yak deng, dried weed fire. She asked if we like yak meat and we said, "sure!" We asked if we could help with whatever she was doing. She had Grant run to the spring with her two little boys, the 7 year old we called "the sweetheart" and the naughty Gerr. She had me pick up piles of yak deng that were drying in the sun and stack them in the tent. I also peeled some chives and she seemed to think it funny that i didn't know what the heck she wanted me to do with those chives. We were soon joined by a young Swiss couple who had made the trek as well, but on ponies. The Tibetan lady kept calling them the horse people. We hadn't had a chance to get a good look at the camp site so while she talked in her broken English with "the Swiss" we looked around the site. We found ourselves beckoned into a tent with a woman, her elderly mother, and 3 little kids. They wanted us to eat with them, assuming because they would be the ones to get paid, but we apologized that we were already eating somewhere else. I felt extremely awkward because I was pretty sure the elderly woman was the one who had yelled at us to stop messing with the tent poles. She gave us a sour-lemon face for a little bit, but warmed up to us when she saw my little yarn Buddhist bracelet I had gotten in Thailand and when I gave my headband to the little 3 year old girl. She seemed to dote on her grandkids, so we won her over in the end. It was funny, we started talking the mom, then in mid sentence she lifted up her shirt, exposing her boob and the little baby comes waddlying up and clamps onto her nipple. It was one of those instances the only thing you can focus on is NOT seeming shocked. We soon excused ourselves then ate a delicious dinner of noodle and potato soup with our Tibetan lady and "the Swiss". After dinner, the four of us foreigners were just left alone in the baby yak tent with the Sweetheart and Gerr. Deciding it was lame to just sit staring at the little kids, we played games with them and taught them how to play "memory" with some face cards we had. They thought it was the best thing that had ever happened to them. Later we were led to a separate tent we slept with the Swiss and Gerr, who was wrapped in a bundle of yak fir blankets. He was super super cute. He had the worse bull cut ever.

No food and no pavement make Nicole and Grant something something....

So where we left off we had just arrived in Kunming and were very
happy to have arrived in relative civilization. Kunming was actually
very nice; our journey for better or worse got successively less nice
from then on.

We spent one day in Kunming just veging.  We were super excited to
just sit back and watch movies for a day or something.  It's nice when
you are in a foreign country and also happen to not be a missionary,
you can do lots of comfort activities, like sleep all day or watch
secular but familiar looney toons or disney.  Doing something like
this proved way harder than we thought, though, since in China we
can't watch youtube because it's censored, and we can't download
movies on Nicole's Kindle outside of the US, we found out.  We thought
we had some salvation in our Hostel's "movie room" but after spending
way too long drooling over the movie list trying to decide what we
would watch first, the front desk said that they had none of the
movies we had picked, but had a large selection of Kung Fu and Anime
movies.  We finally found a dusty copy of "Stranger than Fiction" and
relished the ease of the television's glowing loving, loving glow.
Other than that we contented ourselves in walking around the nice
town, indulging on a Dairy Queen chocolate dunked soft serve ice cream
cone, and watching the Chinese masses wander around on their weekend.
The Olympics are usually on at the hostels we stay at and that has
been fun to watch.  Like most countries, I suppose, the Chinese only
seem to show the clips where their athletes are winning, so we end up
watching the chinese destroy their opponents in Ping Pong and
Badmitton.

At length we figured out how to continue on our journey northward.
Our bus left late-ish in the afternoon the next day so we didn't get
to our next destination, Lijiang, till dusk.  So we found out that the
summer time is heavy tourism time for the Chinese.  Chinese tourism
has exploded the last few years, and Lijiang was packed with Chinese.
It's very unlike Thailand in that tourism there was dominated by
foreigners, and unlike India in that there were any tourists that
weren't religious pilgrims.  You would have thought Lijiang was
Disneyland with the number of people that were there, and the number
of hotels that were full.  Nicole and I felt like Mary and Joseph of
old as we lugged our enormous bags from guesthouse to guesthouse
begging for a place to stay after a long journey.  Finally we went to
one place that said they were full, but they knew of another place
that had an open room.  This other guesthouse even said they'd send
someone to meet us and take us there!  It was a blessing.  However,
the walk ended up being about 20 minutes and we were still totally
exhausted.

The streets got really crowded as we walked through the "Old Town"
where there is a lot of traditional architechture.  We were pushing
our way through the crowds, probably knocking over inocent children
with our backpacks at every turn, when we came upon a street food
festival we refferred to lovingly as the smorgesbord.  As soon as we
got a room at our new place to stay we threw our bags on the bed and
headed straight for the smorgesbord.  We hadn’t eaten much other than
cookies and peanut milk on the bus, so we were basically to the
“crazy” hungry point.  We got ourselves shishkabobs of 4 mystery
meats—we never found out what they were—dumplings, and fried rices
steamed in a pineapple bowl.  It was delicious.  After the food fest
winded down I started to feel really dizzy and faint, though, and by
the time we got back to our guesthouse, I knew something was really
wrong with me.  My bowel movements have been like flood or famine
during our whole trip.  I’d usually go 3-4 days without ‘going’, but
around the end of India up to Lijiang it had been about 3-4 times a
day and not pretty.  We assumed it was a stomach bug and Nicole gave
me some extra antibiotics that she had and said a sweet prayer that I
would get better.  Nicole continues to be my miracle girl like she was
before her mission, and we have been constantly blessed by miracles
that happen at her petition.  True to form I woke up the next morning
feeling like a new man, so we went out to see the city, now that we
didn’t feel like the world was coming to an end.

Lijiang was beautiful.  Our guidebook said that it has one of the best
collections of traditional architechture in the country.  All of the
buildings have the terracotta tile roofs that slope down and scoop out
at the corners like you see on pagodas, and all of the shops and
guesthouses have wooden signs with golden characters carved on them.
The stone walkways are all too narrow for cars, so thankfully it’s
only foot traffic.  The alleys are all lined with a small canal of
clear water and there are fun carved bridges over creeks running
through the middle of town.  It was really a neat place that would
have been fun to stay for a bit if it wasn’t so crowded and thus
expensive.  But that second day we were there we did get a chance to
see a lot of it.

China has I don’t know how many several minorities all over the
country, and the local tribe in Lijiang are the Naxi.  It’s actually a
female dominant society where family name and inheritances are passed
along through the female, and the villages are/were run by female
elders.  Traditionally, the ladies wouldn’t get married, but would
have “walking” marriages.  When a girl turned 13, she didn’t have to
sleep in the common room any more, and she got her own bedroom.  She
would then be able to have as many lovers as she wanted for the rest
of her life.  Her current lover simply had to “walk” to her place in
the evening, then “walk” back to his mother’s place in the morning.
When the child was born, no effort was made to determine who the
father was, and the child would live with the mother and her family,
and so forth.  Pretty strange, and I guess less and less common—we
didn’t seen anything like it—but Nicole and I thought it would be kind
of a bummer to grow up without a male role model that a father should
be.  Likewise a man should have a chance to raise his child.  Oh well,
the more we see, the more grateful we become for the gospel.

We did however stumble upon a Naxi cultural center of sorts, and
watched some ladies in their blue aprons and blue sort of flat caps
doing a traditional dance.  We also bought some sweet potatoes that
they sell here as street fare from an ancient lady shaped like a box
sitting in her traditional garb under an umbrella on an alleyway
corner.

We tried to find an internet place before our bus departed, and
finally managed to wander into a cafe that had computers in booths
with curtains for privacy (gross!).  The kid at the front desk didn’t
really know what to do with us for some reason and then didn’t end up
charging us when we left.  We found out later that you need to give
them you chinese government issued ID to use public internet.  I guess
they like to keep really close tabs on whos doing what on the web.
Since we don’t have chinese IDs, we can’t use the cafe’s unless the
person behind counter happens to be a confused teenage boy.  The
government is weird here.  That’s one of the reasons (besides just
shortage of technology in general in the places we have been) that we
haven’t been able to write.

Nicole let me have my first ticket-buying-in-Chinese experience in the
bus station, and the girl behind the glass smiled as I waded through
one of few full sentences I’d said in Mandarin up to that point.  But
she told us there was no bus to our next stop Qiaotou (Tchow-toe).  We
were devastated.  But Nicole, with her infinitely better language
skills, was able to get us seats on a bus going to Shangri La, which
passed through Qiaotou.  Yay!

We got on the bus and got our first taste of windy mountain roads on
our way.  The scenery was absolutely gorgeous.  We climbed quickly on
switchbacks and soon we were looking at steep, green mountains, huge
canyons at the bottom of sheer drops just off of the road that the
40-person was carreening on at high speeds.  We Utah people like our
mountains, but I honestly have never seen mountains like we’ve seen in
central China.  The busses honk as they go around every curve just to
make sure whoever would know they were coming.  Still way more honking
than we do in the US.  In America, the horn is sacred, only to be used
on very special circumstances.  Not to sound incessantly every time
you overtake someone on the sidewalk just make sure they don’t all of
the sudden decide to jump out into the road as you pass.  Oh well, not
a big deal.

We told our driver that we were getting off at Qiaotou just in the
nick of time.  He apparently had no idea we were going there and
wouldn’t have stopped.  We got off the bus and a taxi cab driver told
us he could take us to our hostel for just over 3 dollars (a fairly
big price for a taxi).  Luckily we had a map in our guidbook and knew
that the guesthouse we were after was about 50 feet away.  Tricksy
taxi drivers. False! They wants our money, preciousss. However, I will
say that taxi drivers here are practically saints compared to the ones
in other countries we’ve been to.

Qiaotou is a little, tiny one-street town that sits on the beginning
of the trek along Tiger Leaping Gorge.  Nicole and I had read about
the hike before and thought it sounded like a lot of fun.  It was a
chance to get out in nature, exercise a little bit, see some beautiful
scenery besides museums and temples.  We definitely got all we
bargained for.  The town itself is surrounded by towering mountains
and has always the crash of the river below as backround music.  It
actually reminded me a lot of camping in Jackson where you’re never
out of earshot of the Snake River (wish we could have come with you
guys this year!  One of my life dreams is to get Nicole out of the
boat at Octopus, hehehe…)  The guesthouse we stayed at was really
quaint, we got some soup and talked about the upcoming trek while two
mangey kittens jockeyed for room on my lap.

We started out early-ish the next morning and the day was beautiful.
We were still amazed at how much we packed for a two-day trip (it
wasn’t a ton, but we still had other hikers ask if we were carrying
everything we brought for our 2 months of travel), and our excitement
for some exercise quickly faded as the trail got steeper and the
altituded started setting in.  The hike goes along the gorge that
claims to be one of the steepest in the world, in terms of mountain
peak to river level.  The trail we hiked was about in the middle of
the height/depth/whatever of the gorge and the view as we looked at
the sheer but green face of the mountains on the other side of the
river was staggering.  I found myself getting vertigo just by trying
to take it all in.  The first day of hiking was the toughest.  Luckly
we brought plenty of water and goodies to keep us fueled along the
way.  The hardest part of the day was at the 29 Bends (isn’t that just
a perfect Chinese name?  It’s like the stuff of legend)  We got passed
by a really nice couple from the US who hired horses to take them up
the trail. Jerks.  J/K.  We took a lot of pictures, and I imagine
they’ll end up all looking like the exact same picture, but it was
pretty cool, and hard to capture with a camera.

There are guesthouses all along the trail, but we took our halfway
stop at the Tea Horse Guesthouse.  I don’t know how any of these
villages exist so far up the mountain, but Nicole and I took some time
to wander around the town of about 8 houses to see what was going on.
The guesthouse ended up being the biggest thing, but we did get some
good views of traditionally built houses with pigs, cornfields, dirty
kids chasing each other around their yards and wrinkly bent grandmas
yelling at them harshly and then smiling warmly in the next instant.

We had dinner with a couple probably in their 60s from Quebec.  She
was studying Chinese in Shanghai just for the heck of it and they were
doing some touring after havind been apart for 3 months.  They were
really nice and we had a good time with them.  We noticed the room was
kind of stuffy before we went to bed, but there must have been some
serious mold in there or something because Nicole and I both woke up
having had nightmares of claustrophobia and being extremely congested.
 Mine was something like hocking taxi drivers running around on narrow
paths with cliffs on either side threatening to push me off.  To our
dismay it was only 1 in the morning, so we walked out in the light
rain that had started to the outhouse to pee and not be in our gas
chamber of a room.  We ended up resorting to our old standby sleep
strategy of taking some benadryl.  We woke up the next morning feeling
great!

After some breakfast we hit the trail again, still sore from the day
before but encouraged that the rest of our route would be mostly
downhill.  The second day’s hiking was more beautiful that the first.
The peaks of the mountains on the other side of the gorge were jagged
like a giant saw blade that cut into the fluffy clouds hovering around
them (ya like that simile? I’ve been reading a lot on this trip, the
most recent auther being especially flowery). We also passed several
waterfalls and really interesting parts of the trail along the way.
Towards the end of the trek, with way more walking than we were used
to doing and the last of our goodies reserve used up as lunch, we were
feeling a bit gorged out.  We hit the trail’s end at about 3:30 and
hung a bus back to Qiaotou where we had stored our bags for the trek.
We rode with some Spaniards in a minibus who said there was some
problem with the canyon road we would be traveling on, but didn’t know
exactly what the deal was.  The deal ended up being boulders as big as
houses that had come loose from the caynon rock face and smashed about
100 feet of road to smitherines.  So the process was that a van took
us to where the road stopped, and we got out and scrambled across the
boulders and loose dirt and rocks that had been part of the landslide
to where the road started again and there waited cars to take us the
rest of the way.  It was a bit precarious, and one of the Spanish
girls had a panick attack the whole way across, but we made it through
our last mountaineering challenge of the day without major incident.

Once we were back in Qiaotou, we didn’t quite know how we would get to
our next destination, but as happened many times on this trip, we were
just walking on the road and someone ran up to us yelling the name of
the city that we wanted to go to.  This meant that they had a car or
truck or van heading that way and were looking for people to pay
passage.  We got some dinner and our luggage and jumped in a minivan
with a group of joy-riding Chinese twenty-somethings.  The next stop
on the journey was Shangri La.  Eventually, the van driver lady
stopped the van in the middle of nowhere.  When Nicole and I got out
and looke at the 3 buildings within walking distance, we looked at
eachother and said “Is this Shangri La?  Definitely different that we
were expecting”.  We found out that the Chinese guys we were riding
with thought it would be a kick to get really into the Western China
experience and ride some horses.  Nicole and I were not excited about
waiting around for the kiddies to go for their pony ride, so driver
lady said she’d take us to the real Shangri La while they giddy’d up.

The real name of the town is actually Zhongdian, but somebody in a
tourist scheme decided to claim that it was the fabled Shangri La.  It
kind of worked, cause we found another bustling mass of Chinese
tourists when we got there.  We actually didn’t find too much
interesting about the city itself, but there is an enormous monastary
just outside of town that we got to visit.  It was enormous and
beautiful from afar.  I kept telling Nicole that we had arrived at
Lhasa, the sacred city (capitol of Tibet, center of Tibetan Buddhism,
watch Seven Years in Tibet to get the joke).  The monastary was kind
of its own city, with alleyways, lots of buildings, stores selling
prayer wheels and Buddha sculptures, and prayer flags and burning
incense sticks everywhere.  There were several mini temple things on
the complex with huge elaborate murals.  Tibetan architechture and art
is fabulously colorful; you should just google it as your reading so
you can get what I mean.  But Nicole and I found the murals painted in
the mini-temples to be totally horrifying.  I don’t know all I should
about their religion, but I do know they have good and bad gods.  I’m
guessing what we saw in the monastary were bad variety, engaged in
such activities as trampling humans and other animals, eating people,
eating brains out of the tops of human skulls like a bowl, and always
wearing a face with the expression of “I just smashed my thumb with a
hammer” or “I’m passing a kidney stone.”  It will be nice to go to
church again.

We’ve also noticed that monks tend to be conspicuously well off.  I
went into a little souvineir shop on the complex wanting to get a bit
more of the lowdown on what this Buddhism thing was all about.  As
seems to be the case in general, the monks running the cash box were
pretty much unable to explain anything to us, not even what their
mentras that they mumble hundreds of times a day even mean.  Maybe its
just a language barrier, but Nicole speaks Chinese, you know?  This
whole exchange went on with one of the monks while the other played
Bejeweled on his iPad 2.  I don’t know what downside there is to
monkhood, but they’re definitely not going hungry.  Again, I don’t
know everything about their religion, but it made us think about the
purpose of devoting your life to God.  We’ve had the chance to talk
about the church and our missions with many people we’ve encountered
traveling, and I love talking about how we dedicated our lives to God
for the duration of our missions so that we could TEACH people; so we
could HELP them.  Everything we learn in the Gospel is about making
the world a better place to live; about sharing knowledge; about
serving; about bringing peace.  Again, I’m not trying to be closed
minded or arrogant—there’s a lot about these people’s beliefs that I
don’t know—but I have really grown to appreciate the Kindgom of God as
predicated by revelation.  It just makes so much sense!

So it was also in Shangri La that we started freaking out about
various elements of our journey.  First, Nicole’s guidebook is 6 years
old, and in China that’s a long, long time when it comes to prices.
Prices have in many places doubled and we had to do some serious
recalculation.  Secondly, one of the DVDs we burned in India had
gotten some serious scratches and we had deleted many of our pictures
on the camera’s memory card.  We don’t know exactly what we’ve lost,
but it was a bunch of stuff from Thailand   Hopefully we can get it
back some how.  Thirdly, we had both been feeling sick for the past
few days.  We repacked the DVDs so as not to get so damaged, ate a big
brownie a la mode at a western cafe (food is always our comfort) and
replanned the budget so that we’d be a little comfortable.  But Nicole
was still feeling extremely sick, and we couldn’t find the drugs or
the chinese words to even talk about it with the pharmacist. Things
were feeling pretty dire, and our options seemed few (TRAPPED, trapped
like rats!!) I gave her blessing that night in our room, and she
experienced one of several miraculous recoveries that we’ve had on
this trip.  God is really looking out for us, even though we are often
putting ourselves in these stupid situations.  He sure loves us.

After two nights in Shangri La we got on a bus to Xiencheng, our last
stop in the Hunnan province. The trip’s windy roadness, dangerousness,
mountainness, and crappy roadness was bumped up a notch, coupled with
most of our fellow passengers being chain smokers.  Maybe I shouldn’t
have been, but I was amazed at how they just smoked any time and no
one around seemed to mind.  “Get on the bus, light it up!” “Oh, my
neighbor’s smoking? I should smoke too!” “Hey we’re stopping to take a
pee? Pull out a ciggy!” “Hey now that we’re back on the bus, let’s
smoke some more!” “Uh oh, there’s no one smoking on the bus.  Better
fix that!”  Basically Nicole and I took turns riding with our heads as
far out the window as we dared and I’ve never been so car sick in my
life.  We’ve had to take all of the China part of our journey city by
city because there is no railroad and no buses going long distances
(meaning longer than 10 hours or so).  It makes sense since the roads
are so crappy; they probably don’t trust the busses to last longer
than that kind of a stretch.  A super nice lady snagged us as we got
off the bus and led us to her wildly colored tibetan styled
guesthouse.  There we met a Romanian couple who kept inviting us to
drink with them.  They were really nice and ended up travelling with
us to the next few stops we went to.  Xiangcheng was nice and clean
and Nicole and I celebrated we don’t really know what by going to a
Hot Pot restaurant.  It was my first real china hot pot, and very
exciting.  It was even within our newly prescribed budget!

We discovered a new way of travel the next morning, which is basically
get up around 6 am, go to the bus station, and pit the ever present
crowd of minibus drivers against each other till you get a price that
you want.  With the Romanians going the same way we held some
bargaining power, and eventually we were on our way in a dingy minibus
to Litang.


Litang, which was our first stop on the Sichuan-Tibetan Highway is
described in our guidebook as a “paradise abounding in photo
opportunities, nestled among grassy meadows and snowcapped peaks.”  We
found it to be a dusty, unaccomodating, hell hole that I only wish we
could have skipped in our town hopping.  Our original plan was to go
north over Tibet among these small cities, but we scratched that when
we revised the budget.  We assumed, just by being close to Tibet that
Litang would be just as enchanting, but we were sorely disappointed to
find it like a mean Chinese version of Fillmore.  I’m sure I sound
over dramatic, but this is how it played out.  Our guidebook’s “Top
Pick” for the town looked promising from the outside, but the rooms
were diabolical.  The first the bed actually only had 3 legs and the
mattress and bedding were smashed up in the corner on the broken side,
another room had nasty sheets on a cot – by then we had pretty much
seen what we needed to.  Nicole and Laura the Romanian waited on a
street corner while Adrian and I hoofed it around town looking for a
decent plact to stay.  After about an hour of looking, we settled for
a pretty cheap guest house that had okay beds, but a nausiating
bathroom.  It was the only one in the price range.  Since we quickly
found there was nothing to do, we looked around our guesthouse for
services, tours, anything.  Not finding any at ours, we went to the
first dingy place we had looked at.  Nicole found the girl who had
shown us around behind a computer and asked in chineses if they had
any homestay programs or something.  The girl told her that they
didn’t have anything for us, that we weren’t customers, and so they
wouldn’t help us.  We said okay and went to the lobby to regroup after
her assault, when Brat 2 came over and told us to get out, that we
weren’t welcome there.  Nicole was totally blown away and said that we
weren’t there looking for freebies or anything, but they just kept
telling us to get out.  It’s really frustrating being told off in
another language because you can’t ever really stand up for yourself.
We went to our hotel to lick our wounds.  Nicole was feeling the
effects of the altitude (Litang is at about 15,000 I think) and so I
went out to see about bus tickets for the morning.  I managed to find
out with my rudimentary chinese that the only bus out of town in the
morning was sold out.  Having been rejected in so many ways, and faced
with the prospect of stay in that place another precious day weighed
heavily on me.  I went back to Nicole as a failure and snuggled up to
her. Time and time again, just as my strength peeters out, Nicole gets
up and puts me back on my feet.  She suggested we go just walk around
town to see what was out there with renewed vigor.  I was very
doubtful that we’d find anything interesting, but I’m sure Nicole had
a prayer in her heart that we would.  We walked out of the front door
of the guesthouse and saw a tibetan grandma filling a big jug of
water.  We watched her for a moment, and when she saw us we offered to
help.  She refused, but motioned for us to come with her.  She barely
spoke any chinese, but we communicated with spares words and gestures.
 She struggled with her jug of water carried in a basket on her back
up the hill, refusing help all the while.  People who saw us walking
with her would make jeering comments or something, we of course didn’t
understand, but she eventually lead us to her house.  There she gave
us some yak butter tea (hot water with a huge chunk of yak butter and
some herbs blended up and boiled – Nicole was able to make pretty sure
it was word of wisdom approved), yak cheese that was hard as a dirt
clod, and tibetan flat bread.  We sat on her floor as she served us
and we tried to find out about her family and life.  It was so
special, and such a huge blessing when we were so depressed.  She just
invited us in to her home and fed us, not even being able to
communicate with us in words.  Seriously, a tender mercy.  It turned
our whole experience in that town around.  An angel!

Lady Fingers and Power Outtages

So picking up where we left off, Grant forgot to mention that our little guesthouse that we were staying at in Varanasi had a non-profit school for poor children attached to it. It is run by the family that owns the guesthouse: Arti and Lalu, and Arti's brother Bohloo who runs the guesthouse (he was a pretty cool guy. Great English, funny, about 4 foot 6, often only wearing a towel.) Since we've been in India and seen the terrible poverty, we've kind of been interested in doing some humanitarian work ourselves someday, so we decided to volunteer for a day (only a couple hours, really). The school had 4 or so teachers to 40 kids. We sat in on the English and Math class. It was pretty unorganized...it didn't seem like the teachers really had any fire or training or both. They would scribble the alphabet or a couple math problems in a notebook and send the kid away to copy it down or solve the problems and the kid would come back to get corrected. By ILP standards, the English class sucked. The kids couldn't speak at all, probably because the teacher's English stunk. A kid pretty much stood at the front of the room reciting the ABCs while all the little kids chanted them back. So Grant and I kind of took charge for a little bit and taught them "Head Shoulders Knees and Toes" and it was fun! The kids caught on quickly. There were these 2 little boys in the back of the class that I fell in love with. They were 5 and 3 years old and were brothers. Basically the 5 year old brother would copy things in his notebook with his arm around the 3 year old who just looked on. I couldn't help but give them constant noogies. In all, we felt like more of a distraction than a help in class. During the lunch break, class broke up and some kids went home for lunch and some ate packed lunches. It broke our hearts when this little girl in a worn out dress opened a little plastic box that only had a small cube of some sort of corn cake and a handful of crunchy noodles. It was really hardly any food and it looked very different from our school lunches of fruit roll-ups, pudding, sandwiches and squeez-its. We eventually donated a little bit to the school, although the school's biggest deficit seems to be in the faculty, not the texts...but it was an awesome experience to see how we would do things if we ever opened a school in India.

 

We had kind of a hairy incident our last night in Varanasi. Grant was writing the last email and I got bored so (for the first time in our trip) I went off by myself to look for a Saree (big strips of cloth they wrap around as a skirt then throw over one shoulder) to purchase. It seems all saree shops are run by men, which made me kinda nervous. I saw one with 3 dudes and didn't feel comfortable with the 2 to 1 ratio. So I found a shop with just one dude, out in the open. It basically just went down hill from there. I pretty much just made one dumb choice after another, ignoring the better sense that kept ringing warning signals in my mind. Basically the guy showed me different sarees in the back room and while showing me how to tie the saree he stuck his hand a little too far down my pants. I pulled his hand out and he apologized a million times but I ran out of the shop in terror. I went back to Grant and explained that I'd been violated by a saree shop dude and Grant immediately marched us to the police. There are police ALL over the Varanasi alleys, just as a precaution to protect Hindu temples and sites from potential Muslim agression. Working with the police was laughable, because nothing was discreet at all. If one man couldn't understand clearly, he repeated it (very loudly) or had Grant repeat it (very loudly) to other cops on the street, allowing the annoying hoverers to hear everything. I was mortified because I was sure everyone in Varanasi knew now. I was blushing all over the place. We were eventually helped out by a tall, mustachioed middle-aged man who seemed to really take the situation seriously (many others didn't). He didn't speak English so another cop translated and it turned into an awkward game of charades acting out the whole event, prying men wandering too close and eavesdropping or even asking, "duh, what's going on?" This officer and another man ended up marching over to the man's store with us and drug him to the police station. They had him face me to "apologize" but the man only said I was imagining things. Jerk. The police told us to go back to our hostel. So in the end, we have no idea what happened with the guy. To be honest, what was done really was not that bad. In the grand scheme of violations, it was nothing. But still, I began to understand the mentality of sexual victims because in the end, I felt like I was the one who did something wrong, and felt like I had committed the sin. I felt super ashamed, which was strange. Whenever I see a saree I can't help but feel stupid about the whole event. I was creeped out because I knew the Saree Shop Dude was scared...we could see it in his face when the cops came. We'd already established that the police weren't very careful so we were sure they would blurt the name of our hostel for the whole world to hear. I started to worry the dude would come to our guesthouse to get revenge or something so as soon as we got there we packed our bags and started to head out. Bohloo asked what the heck was going on and basically rang the story out of us. It was really sweet because suddenly his whole family --him, Arti, his terrifying crotchety mother, Bohloo's elderly father and uncle (the ones who were always warning us about "da monkeys")-- were saying how they would protect us and pleaded for us to stay. So we stayed and the next morning we made it to the train station without any problems.

 

Our next destination was Gaya, about 4 hours away by train. When we got there we ate at a little restaurant and were joined by a very strange Austrian dude with rotting teeth, who guzzled a whole pitcher of black tea and complained about how terrible Indians were. He said it is impossible to have an Indian friend because in the end, they only see your wallet. And I completely agree. In the end, I think we've made very few friends, because once you start a conversation, it turns into, "so uh, I have this uncle who owns a guesthouse and a sister who owns a restaurant and a mother who owns a travel agency and I am just a nice helpful person who wants to take you to ALL these places" but really gets a handsome commission. It's so annoying. You'll be walking when suddenly this boy/man pops out of no where and follows you, hovering over your shoulder. The conversation always went something like this, with very little deviation:

"Hello, Friend!"

ignore

"Hello, FRIEND! What country?"

guh, "America"

"Ooo! America! Where America? New York, LA, Chicago?"

"Utah"

"Utah! Dat's good friend, dat's good. My uncle/sister/cousin/friend/mother is in San Francisco."

"Great."

"Where going?"

"We don't know."

"Where staying? Need a guesthouse? I know GREAT place, vedy clean, vedy cheap."

"No thank you."

"oh, you go dis way? I follow you forever trying to force you into my commissioned hotels and restaurants until you yell at me to leave you alone."

 

So exhausting.

 

We took a very bouncy bus from Gaya to Bodhgaya, the famous birthplace of Buddhism. While walking to our hostel, we had a similar conversation as the one above with a kid curiously named Santos. A Spanish name? We tried to shake the kid, but he was more smooth talking and persistant than most. We checked out a hostel NOT recommended by him first. It was nice and clean but was run by the witchy-est lady I have ever met. Santos later called the woman, "dangerous". haha. We went to a bunch of this kid's other recommended hostels and they all sucked --either too expensive or disgusting-- so we eventually just went with the "dangerous" lady's place. Bodhgaya is a charming place because it really is TINY. Just a village, really. It is a big tourist attraction, so it can get quite bumping, but since it's apparently off season for India, the village was peaceful and sleepy. The alleys around our hostel were all bumpy mud swamps and there were actually grass and trees which was a wonderful break from the brown of the concrete everywhere else. Goats ran around in packs, the adorable little ones bleating like crying babies, the adults perched on the strangest, most amazing places. After checking into the hostel, Santos invited Grant to play soccer with a big group of Indians ranging in ages from Jr High to mid-30s. I sat with Santos and his friend Santos (strange...), while Grant played soccer on the slick, bumpy, grassy field with at least 35 other guys. Grant got really into it and even assisted in a goal! He was popular with the guys and we often ran into them around town, begging for him to play again the next night. Grant had painful stumble so he thought it best not to. While I watched the soccer game, the Santos's explained the village orphanage they volunteered at and how the children were starving. I told them we'd check it out later. After the soccer game we went to a cafe with wi-fi for a little dinner and watched Looney Tunes on my kindle. We especially liked the "Hassan CHOP!" episode, since we saw Hassan's human incarnates everywhere. "Open, saddle soap? Open, septagenarian?" That night the power went out due to a thunderstorm so there was no ceiling fan to cool us off, but it wasn't too bad. I woke up sometime in the wee hours of the morning to Buddhist chanting on a megaphone. I guess there's no time to sleep when there's a chant to be chanted.

 

The next morning we had a 40 cent meal that was pretty yummy from a road side shack. The food was served by a 12 year old girl from her front "door", her parents lounging on cots in the backround, the home basically made of wooden poles and plastic tarps/bags. We went to the Mahabodhi temple afterwards, which is the temple built beside the holy Bodhi tree that Buddha sat beneath when he was enlightened. The story goes, that Buddha fasted for 40 days/nights under the Bodhi tree, was accosted by some demon, then after confounding him Buddha became "Enlightened", destined for Nirvana. Sounds oddly similar to Christ's experience, doesn't it? We meditated beneath the tree about how we didn't understand Buddhism. Since Bodhgaya is a major hub of Buddhism, 17 countries have set up their own Buddhist temples there. We visited the Thai, Chinese, Nepalese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Bhutanese, Bangladeshi, Japanese, and other temples. They all were similar in many ways, but were different in their "feng shui". We really liked the modern simplicity of the Japanese temple and the HUGE bohemoth of the Tibetan temple, with its awesome gardens and stuff. The Vietnamese was the only one that was tall (6 stories or so) and pagoda-like, but we didn't get to see inside since a grumpy man at the gate said it was under contruction. The temples were really neat, beautiful and awesome to see. Honestly though, we missed Christianity. There is a hollow, restless feeling when you are surrounded by idolatry and worship of strange gods. We really miss the peace of the gospel. That night we read some General Conference talks and sang primary hymns. It was soothing to the soul. It was pretty warm and we got so lazy and lethargic. We stopped at a cafe just to relish in its AC. We decided to try an Indian dessert which was terrible. It was a white round ball that was squished sweet water when you bit into it. It was like a sweet sponge. Gross. On our way back from the Tibetan temple, which was WAY out there, we were picked up by a straaange but funny rickshaw kid named Babalu. He drove the bicycle rickshaws and said he didn't care how much we paid him. During the day, we ran into that Santos kid everywhere. It was kind of annoying since despite his smooth-talkiness we still suspected him of the same old same old routine of scamming tourists.

 

So there are beggars everywhere. It's very sad, but it's hard because you know that half of them have other options, but would rather beg because they make more money...like the US. We also don't want to perpetuate the idea that begging is good and therefore keep the children who beg out of school. Still, our consciences ached with turning them down, so we bought about 25 cookies from a little stand run by a raggamuffin middle aged couple. We tried the cookies after we bought them and found that they tasted like cat food. But if someone is starving, they can't be too picky, right? It proved to work out, since most beggars took them gratefully. Some looked at the cookie like an insult and either asked for yummier food or money. We figured these were the "professional" beggars.

 

At the Mahabodhi temple that evening there is a big call to do "puja" or prayer at the temple by the bodhi tree. So we sat with a nice monk type man, then walked around and watched the chanting and bowing and praying of monks from all different countries. Each different monastery has a dozen or so of their own monks who all have different garb. It was pretty fun to see the different methods each country had of praying and dressing, although it was obvious the Indian monks ruled the roost a little bit. 

 

For dinner we decided to splurge a little and eat at a hotel restaurant. The meals were still only $3 even though it was considered "fine dining." We ordered "fresh lime soda" which sounded yummy, but the dude ended up just handing us a bottle of fizzy water with a plateful of tiny sliced lemons and packets of sugar. It was gross. Haha. The dinner was incredibly rich, and incredibly delicious. We were in heaven. Indian food is GOOD. SO good. 

 

On the way back to our hostel that night some scooter rental dudes pleaded for us to sit and chat with them for a while. One of them spoke Chinese so we chatted in Chinese a bit. Interesting to speak to someone, both of us with our own accents. There was another English girl who was travelling alone who sat with us and Grant observed what seemed to be a scam on the poor trusting girl. They had taken her train ticket and said that it was no good and it would be better to take a bus with them in the middle of the night. So it would be 3 of those dudes, versus just her. Grant felt like he smelled a potentially dangerous situation for her, so we lured her away from the crowd of Indian dudes and warned her, telling her she should just take a train the next day for cheaper. She said that now that she thought about it, it could be a dangerous situaition, but she was very trusting and in the end, she probably just went with them anyway.

 

The next morning we met the Santos's like we agreed to and went to see this orphanage they spoke of. Again, the kid's smooth talking was getting a little much and started to make me suspicious. He kept saying things like, "once you see these children, they will melt your heart. They need the help of kind hearted tourists." On the road there, we ran into a sweaty kid that had also tried to take us to his hostel (meaning, at this point, we already knew that all 3 of these boys were in the commission game). He suddenly seemed to be Santos' best friend and then run the show, like it was HIS idea to take us to the orphanage. He said other syrupy things about the poor children's plight except he didn't sound half as convincing or kind hearted as Santos. Once we got to the orphanage, everything seemed like a rehearsed routine. The building was an unfinished, basic concrete structure, and we were lead first into a bare room with a blanket on the floor and told to sit in a few plastic chairs. The sweaty kid went through the routine of the children having no school supplies and how the summer was so hot, yet there was no ceiling fan. "A ceiling fan is 6000 rupees, if you can make a donation, these poor, hungry children can have a ceiling fan." Then about 16 kids were round up and sat down on the blanket in front of us and began singing some sort of Christian song in Hindi. They seemed extremely bored and unamused by the whole thing, as if they did this all the time. Then they got up and left and never looked at us again, just wandering a doing who knows what. It was a holiday that day, so they said the teacher conveniently wasn't there to teach them. They then lead us upstairs to the unfinished roof, where they hoped to build more room. "You, my friends, can help build more rooms for these poor children. Just $1,000 American dollars will build one room." I started getting more and more suspicious when I saw that there was like 8 or 9 dudes just standing around watching the whole bit, interested to see what we'd say. Who the heck are they? What was THEIR business with the school? It all seemed so contrived. We were then sat down in a little office with the "Pastor" who ran the orphanage. The sweaty kid handed us a little receipt book and said, "now friends, please write down your information and your donation." We said we'd think about it and maybe come back later. Or donate when we were in a better position to do so...like when we were actually employed. The kid's voice rose and he got impatient and was saying, "no, it MUST be today! The children! They NEED a new ceiling fan!" We kept asking why it HAD to be today. They kept saying dumb things like, "who knows what will happen in a year? We need it TODAY." That sounded very odd to me and it seemed so transparent to be some horrible scam, or at least, a heavily commissioned plot for donations. When they saw we weren't going to donate 6000 rupees for a ceiling fan, they changed tactics and said that conveniently, the children's rice was going to run out TODAY and they MUST have rice! They kept saying there were 100+ kids who had schooling at the orphanage, but we only ever say 15 or so. They said the other kids traveled to the school, but when they showed their little photo album, it only ever had the same 15 kids in it. I felt my blood pressure rising and I wanted to yell at them and punch them in the faces for creating such a scummy lie. If the best kinds of people are those who create orphanages to help kids, then the worst kind of people are those SAY they are but really are stealing from kind hearted people. We just played the whole, "we'll discuss it at our hostel, then let you know." The Santos's followed us to our hotel then gave a final pitch at the doorstep about the suffering children and how they themselves often volunteered at the school/orphanage. Grant said he hadn't completely been sure if it was a scam, but we talked and decided it would be best not to get involved in it. It was way too fishy and I'm still convinced it was all garbage.

 

After the orphanage fiasco, we hung a ride from a couple 14 year-old, tobacco chewing kids driving an auto rickshaw to the cave where Buddha "meditated and fasted for 6 years." There are little figurines all over the village of a skeleton-like Buddha sitting in a cave. It's grotesque. Apparently, the normal route to the cave had been washed out by rains and was under construction so we had to take the LONG way there. It was a 45 minute, BUMPY ride through tiny villages. The villages were incredible. It was REAL Indian rural life, right up close. The homes were built of anything from bricks and twigs, to mud and thatch. Kids pooed and peed on the side of the road everywhere, running around in packs, some half or completely naked. Cows ruled the narrow roads and goats feasted on everything green. Seriously, it's a tragedy that these skinny people find cows to be holy...there are steaks and hamburgers everywhere, hogging their living space! They don't know what they are missing! The villages were surrounded by fields of rice, being plowed by shirtless boys and cows. Ladies in sarees lounged everywhere. It was hard to tell what people did all day. It got us thinkiing about how you would even begin to help that kind of community. They seemed innocently content enough. The kids were running and playing and would wave to us as we passed by. Eventually the boys dropped us off at the bottom of this desolate path that lead up the hillside. We were afraid we would be robbed by mountain bandits, but we were only accosted by an old beggar lady that we gave 2 cookies to. At the top of the path, there was a big Tibetan style monastery that was pretty desolate and we were casually pointed to a stairway leading to the cave. The cave was literally 5x5 feet. There was a Buddha statue in it and a couple lumpy statues of who knows what and some burning candles and that is it. The LAMEST cave ever. Definitely not a "must see" warranting a 1.5 hour round trip. Grant walked into the trees to take a leak and we chuckled that maybe he peed in the same place where Buddha peed 2500 years ago. Back down the hill we were accosted by 3 boys that begged for us to give them money or buy them balloons at the monastery's hut/shop. We gave them each a cookie and the boys were later joined by a gaggle of little ragamuffin girls. Suddenly the boys were walking with me, holding my hand, and the girls were surrounding Grant. We got in our rickshaw and got the cookies out to give to the girls and suddenly pandemonium broke out as the kids clawed eachother for the cookies. The boys kept trying to take the girl's cookies, which was infuriating. 

 

For lunch we went back to that hotel restaurant that was so delicious the night before. Bad choice. That meal ruined Indian food for me forever. I had some sort of "lady finger" (ochra, basically) masala and Grant ate some stuffed mushroom curry. It was VERY good, but it seems that there is an internal Indian food meter and I had reached critical mass. We both over-ate a very rich meal and there must have been something else wrong with the food because we were both very uncomfortable the rest of the day. The word "lady finger" sent me (and still does) into a fit of shudders and gags. We both barely ate dinner and the sight and scent of Indian food was repulsive. Sadly, for me, this never went away. To this moment, I can't bear the words: masala, curry, samosa, paneer, chipati. All the street food that I adored so much now looks like deep fried diarrhea. A sad end to my love affair with Indian food.

 

After lunch we saw some more temples and roused a sleeping monk from slumber to inquire about meditation classes, but apparently they take meditation seriously and they only offered 5 day/8 hour a day courses. So we did our own version of meditation and went to the hotel and showered and napped since we had to catch a late train to Kolkata that night. We checked out of the hotel, and haggled for a cheap ride to the Gaya train station. We ended up crammed in an auto rickshaw with a few other Indians and a tipsy driver. We were getting nervous that we'd miss our train since we were cutting it close. But we got to the station in one piece and with half an hour to spare.

 

When we got to the station, we found it kind of odd that there seemed to be an army of homeless people sleeping all over the station. We entered the station to see which platform we should catch our train on, when a nice man who spoke good English said that all trains were delayed. Grant elbowed his way through the throng and got the official news that our train which was supposed to arrive at 9:30, wouldn't arrive until 3:30 am. A SIX hour delay! There was nothing to do but wait. Then the many people slumbering on the train station parking lot suddenly made sense. There were men selling sheets of foil about 5x5 feet large for 10 rupees (20 cents) for people to sit on. We bought one and found that it said "crunchies: toffee and sponge nougat" plus ingredients and nutrition facts all over it. It was a big sheet of candy bar wrapper foil! haha! We found an empty spot to lay our candy bar wrapper waiting area and saw that the neighboring ladies were sleeping on some sort of cheetoh foil. I don't how these dudes nabbed these wrappers from some factory somewhere. Grant and I pulled out the playing cards which suddenly attracted a crowd of 10 or more men. We taught them the rules and let a few of them play Polish Poker with us. Who knew Americans playing cards would be so fascinating? We know they have card games, so cards can't be that novel. Fortunately the crowd broke up and we eventually moved our spot within an indoor waiting room within the station. It was probably no less dirty and it was definitely hotter than outside where there was breeze, but it felt more secure and seemed to be less mosquito-y. By this time it was past midnight and our train was announced to be delayed to 5 am now. We trying sleeping every so often but it was really just too uncomfortable. There was also this kid who was blaring the most annoying, high pitched Indian music from a hand-held music player about 30 feet from where we sat. Grant was getting so frustrated at the kid and didn't know why the heck he at least didn't turn it DOWN! It was soooo annoying! There were over 100 people in this waiting area trying to sleep and he was cranking up his irritating Indian tunes. I was convinced that only someone with "special needs" would be so oblivious to such social protocol. Grant eventually couldn't take it anymore and walked over to the kid and tried to find a volume switch but couldn't find one. The kid apparently misinterpreted Grant's interest in his little music machine and slowly mosied over to us and sat down right next to Grant, holding his music player to him as if he were doing him a favor by letting him enjoy his music right up to his ear. Grant tried to ignore him by burying himself in his book, but the kid kept looking over his shoulder, smiling at Grant. Sure enough, the kid was a little "special". Grant and I laughed at the irony of the situation. Of all the people in the station, Grant hated that machine the most, and now it was blaring in his ear. The kid looked so innocent and sweet, as if he were helping out a friend by sharing his favorite music. Grant was patient and then just held his hands too his ears, smiled and said, "Too loud!" The kid got the hint and turned it off, which was wonderful. He turned it on again later, but at least he wasn't right next to us.

 

I very much have yearned to make an Indian friend here, but girls just don't talk to foreigners. Actually, it seems girls keep pretty quiet altogether. They are so mysterious! A young, normal, friendly looking Indian girl sat next to us while we waited so I awkwardly got up the courage to ask her as simply as I would have as a kid, "will you be my friend?" haha. I got her info because I just really want an Indian pen pal. Kind of like how Rachel has that awesome Norwegian pen pal. I want a friend from another culture and I felt like this girl could be that.

 

Our train FINALLY came at 5:45 am, about 8 and half hours late. We were wasted and starving. We slept some but food was only available when the salesmen happened to walk by. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from the terrible lady finger masala so although i was hungry I couldn't bear the thought of eating anything remotely Indian. We ate some hard boiled eggs that were sold there and some crackers, but that was really the gist of all we ate for 28 hours. Once on the train, we kept making long stops that drove us crazy with claustrophobia. It reminded me of the magpie on Rock-A-Doodle: "we're trapped! Trapped like rats!" At one point we were stopped for 3 or 4 hours in the middle of a green countryside. Men got out of the train and chatted, sat around, smoked. Somewhere in the greenery around the tracks there was some sort of well so people ran through the grass to fill water bottles. We asked what the heck was going on and people just shrugs. Some kid said it was probably a signal problem or a power issue. Nobody seemed to care. Like this was all normal for the train to be ridiculously late and stop for hours and hours between stations. We finally got going but after a couple hours we stopped AGAIN for a couple more hours. It was getting dark by this point and people were getting off the train and walking to the station to try to catch a local train that was apparently running. Suddenly the train moved, but it went BACKWARDS, to the last station where it dumped everyone out and we all waited for the local train to take us the last leg of the trip. The local train was mostly empty except for a few old ladies that snoozed under their sarees. We felt bad but they were forced to sit up and we all filled the rest of the seats in the train. I sat next to an ancient old lady in a ratty white saree who kept dozing off then leaning against me. She would wake up then adjust and hold herself upright by holding onto the window sill. I tried to tell her she could sleep on me but she wouldn't. We FINALLY got to the station in Kolkata at past midnight. We were supposed to get there at 6 am, 18 hours earlier. Despite the insanity, no one seemed to care, and no one seemed to be worried at all. We squished into a cab with a bunch of Indians and were dropped off in what looked like Zombie Land. The streets were dirty but the buildings looked like old European style relics. There were sleeping bums EVERYWHERE. More so than anywhere else we'd been. So it looked like some European city where the zombies come out at night. Somehow, still, even at 1 am, we couldn't escape the familiar, "hello, friend! What country? where going?" Some random guy hassled us into staying at his "uncle's" overpriced, disgusting hostel, called the "Shams hotel". While checking in, I chatted with the owner of the hostel and the commission dude and told them of the previous day's fiasco on the train. they said the power was out all over India. I asked if that was normal and they both shrugged/nodded with their Indian sideways head wobble.

 

The next morning we switched to a hotel that was cheaper and much nicer, despite the minor infestation of small, flat, brown bugs that seemed to love our pillows. We checked email for a little bit and I found from Mom, Jessica and Matthew on facebook that there had the "biggest power outage in the world" or something. They were saying they were worried that we were in trouble or something. Ha! We thought it was funny that the whole world knew about what the heck had happened with the train but we had no idea! While eating breakfast at a yummy omelette toast stand a man came up to us selling newspapers, the headline being "Powerless and Clueless". And that really, is what it was. Maybe in other places like Delhi it was a bigger deal, but nobody that we met seemed to even notice or care. It was not a big deal and most people had no idea they were in a major power outage. Power goes out all the time here. So much so that most businesses and hotels have their own generators so that when the city power goes out they run to they storage room or shed and turn on the generator. No biggy. So the whole event for most people was just "same old, same old".

 

During breakfast I was attacked in smothery hugs and caresses by this lady on the street who said how she liked me so much and how I MUST come and get henna done by her. Hmmm...this was a tactic we hadn't seen before. She had us take pictures with her and had me pinky swear I would go to her shop later. She had burn scars all down her neck and a burned, missing ear. Later the next day she refused to let me go because I Pinky Swore!! So we caved and got henna done and tipped her and her friend a bit too. They were obviously living on the street and we respected that they actually tried to earn their money instead of just beg.

 

Funny, Kolkata was a miserable zombie land at night, but when the sun came up, it was nice! The down town area was slightly cleaner than other places and there were lots of modern buildings. And there was a pizza hut! and Dominos and Mcdonalds and KFC and subway! All sorts of places we hadn't seen anywhere in India. We took full advantage and ate at Pizza Hut and Subway, which was a bit of heaven, especially since no amount of hunger could get me to eat Indian food.

 

Kolkata really was nice. We went to the Victoria Memorial which was a mammoth building looking like a cross between the Taj Mahal and the White House. It had an interesting museum with some art and information about English Imperialism that was quite informative. We later saw a pretty cathedral called St. Pauls, which was nice and peaceful. We also went to Mother Theresa's Mission which we thought was way cool. We sat in silence by her tomb, where nuns and Indians and tourists came in and laid their heads on it and prayed and crossed themselves. The sisters in their white, blue trimmed robes were having their little services in the other side of the room. It was neat. Unfortunately, due to the services for the sisters, the Mother Theresa Exhibit was closed, which was so sad. We asked a nice Sister if she could tell us a little about the Mission and Mother Theresa, who this nun had known personally. She was so sweet and so kind. She said she would just unlock the exhibit and let us in anyway. She also gave us free laminated pictures of M.T. and pendants and prayer booklets. It was the nicest anyone has ever been to us in India. I felt at that moment that if I were an Indian and not LDS,  I would have been a nun. It was a sweet, peaceful, good atmosphere. The nuns and the young nuns in training were so full of kindness and innocence and probably the happiest ladies we'd seen in the country. The exhibit was touching and talked all about Mother Theresa's big contribution to aiding the sick and dying and destitute in India. She opened over a hundred "Missions of Charity" just for the aiding of poor. It was really inspiring. We felt strongly that a belief in Christ inspires people to do good. I had had a conversation with a Korean girl that was totally fed up with India who had brought up an interesting point. She said that even though the Indians donate much money to Hindu temples, never do you seen Hindus serving or giving back to the community. We never saw Hindu schools or orphanages. The Hindu monks only went on pilgrimages and begged for food, all for the guarantee that they would receive salvation. Yet there were plenty of Christian and even Buddhist schools and sanctuaries. I really think Christianity in particular does motivate people to do good things and to serve others. Grant really wanted to make a donation to the Mission, which we did.

 

The rest of our time in Kolkata really was just buying souvenirs. We hadn't gotten a chance to do any of that and we wanted to get just one thing that would represent our trip. In the end, we left India with mixed feelings. Of all the countries we visited so far, it was by far our favorite, but by far our least favorite too. It was so different and exciting, beautiful and exhilirating, yet so dirty and despairing, exhausting and frustrating. It just seemed like India made even the most simple things complicated. Like going potty. ugh. So complicated.

 

We took a midnight flight to Kunming China last night and here we are! It's been a long time since I have been here. China is a spotless piece of heaven on earth compared to India. And it is MUCH more expensive than it was in the past. Exchange rate aside, it just seems like everything costs more. Food, transport, etc. A bus across the city was $4! It cost that much for an 8 hour train ride in India. Oh well. It's worth the clean, uncomplicated, kind, wonderful place the China is.