Guilin and YangShuo

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Crossing the border at Shengzhen herded through scanning machines and filling in forms so they can trace me if I bring in the Swine Flu. Just make it to the bus and manage to get all my things on in time. Driver comments on the size of my luggage and asks if I didn’t wish that I played the violin. We laugh and I sleep on a bus with beds all the way to Guilin, arriving just in time to catch Bradford at his apartment on his way to work. He makes me comfortable and heads off to teach a class of university students.
Sit on his couch sipping green tea.
Later take a walk around campus. Loudspeakers blaring Chinese pop muzak and intermittent disk jockey’s singsong voice flowing out across basketball courts and classrooms.
Bradford comes home and lends a friend’s bicycle for me to use. We pedal around Guilin while he shouts interesting facts at me over his shoulder about the things we’re seeing along the way.
We climb a hill and look out over the city. Get a real view of oriental jutting peaks and mist like an oil painting. The folktale says that the hill we stand on was once one of two wild horses, tamed in the valley and tied to the spot by a local god who wanted to use them for their labor. I glance at the second horse in the distance and I’m sure I can make out the shape of its rocky head.
Trying to take it all in as scenery flashes by at bicycle speed while electric scooters overtake noiselessly.
Get lost in underground shopping maze amongst row after row of clothes and shoes and resurface in a park with a marble map of the world under my feet, big cities pinpointed by large round dots. Take a picture of Cape Town, then get our backs massaged for twenty yuen and drink freshly blended soy beans.
Next morning eat brownies from Brad’s freezer and get on bikes for a tour with a difference.
Climb a large hill with spiral stone staircase winding steeply upward. The stairs end and we continue toward the peak on a slippery mud tail. At the top on ankle-twistng rocks enjoying a panoramic scene. Decide to create our own path homeward and end up on sheer rock faces with camera swinging dangerously around my neck and getting clothes and skin torn by thousands of tiny thorns. We make it back to the bicycles just before sunset.
Eat a great bowl of steamed vegetables and rice at Brad’s apartment and fall asleep and dream about hills and horses and bicycles.
Play guitar with Brad in the morning and drink filter coffee.
Couple on the bus behind me in love and giggling in as Lau Tzu scenery flashes by.
YangShuo village with stone walkways and pagodas perched on rocky outcrops. Bamboo rafts on the river Men using birds with strings tied around their throats to catch fish like they’ve done for a thousand years. One of them agrees to let me take his picture for 5 yuen.
Rice farmers up to their knees in water are reflected in their paddies along with the mountain and the sky. Rain drips onto their shoulders from their broad-brimmed hats.
On the train to Shanghai old ladies gossip and babies cry. Strangers overhear each others conversations.
I read Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World until the lights go out.

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