by Chris Tharp
That’s right: there were no bathrooms, no outhouses, no commodes. The business of doing one’s business was all au natural. Xing La cleared up any confusion about this issue shortly after our arrival with this simple explanation:
“For pee, you can do below.” She pointed to the area of mud beneath the house that absorbed all manner of water and food waste, including urine, evidently. “For shit,” she continued, “you go to mountain behind village. Make hole in dirt. Be careful of pig. Pig want eat when you shit, so you take stick and hit pig.” She demonstrated the proper pig-beating technique with her hiking cane, just to be clear.
Before the meal, the French pair, along with Xing La’s mother, set out preparing the evening’s appetizer: the bee larvae from the market, steamed to tenderness in the hive itself. Tomas and Ben busily picked out the white proto-bees and sucked them down. I joined them for a while—more out of curiosity than hunger—along with Sam and Scraggs. Steve passed on the whole endeavor, looking on, arms crossed, scowling. But his prejudice was unfounded: the little larvae were actually pretty good. The steaming process made them good and succulent, with a bit of sweetness thrown in. It was the older, more developed larvae that were much harder to stomach; they were a lot further along in growth—pretty much whole, fully formed bees. They were kind of crunchy and bitter, and after chewing a up a couple and snapping a few photos to horrify my friends back home, I gladly bowed out of the bee-eating, leaving it to the French, who went at it with what can only be described as gusto.
For dinner, we sat around a low wooden table and were presented with a feast. The room was dark, lit only by a couple of candles and the flames of the cooking fire. Heaping plates of food were set out in front of us and, we all dug in, communal-style. We ate freshly picked stir-fried mushrooms, eggs with ripe tomatoes, fried pork, steamed greens, freshwater fish, and the most delicious of all, eggplant cooked up with searing chili peppers. Each dish was prepared with amazingly fresh local ingredients, which is the hallmark of any great cooking. However, the pièce de résistance came at the end of the meal, in the form of two tremendous wood grubs that had been roasted on the open flame. Forget the bee larvae: these things were massive—huge white worms the size of Cuban cigars. We passed them around the table with each of us taking a bite or two; Steve once again turned up his nose at the opportunity to dine on such a delicacy, which was surprisingly tasty once you got over the fact that you were chewing on half-developed insects. The sight of us munching on these titanic grubs was too much for our hosts to take in. They doubled over in hysterics and rattled away in their tribal dialect through eruptions of laughter. I couldn’t be sure of what they were saying, but imagined it to be something along these lines:
“Look at these stupid white people! They’ll eat anything we serve them!”
After dinner we bid our hosts goodnight, retired to our room and opened a couple bottles of baiju, a kind of Chinese firewater that tastes like it could power tractors. It’s gnarly stuff, but does the trick and does it quickly. We passed the bottles around and were good and drunk before we knew it. We exchanged a few traveler’s stories and insulted each other’s countries, a given in a roomful of French, Americans, and English. It turns out that the young Frenchmen were medical students on a break from their studies.
“We just finished volunteering at an orphanage in Laos for three months and now we are doing some traveling before heading back to Paris,” Tomas informed us.
“After here, we are going to northern Yunnan and then to Chengdu to see the pandas,” Ben continued. “We want to take the picture with the pandas… I know it sounds like the tourist thing but hey… why not?”
“Why not?” I shrugged.
“How can you come to China and not see the pandas?” Tomas added. “It’s like going to Egypt and not visiting the Pyramids.”
“Sure,” I nodded.
“I think the Great Wall would be a more accurate analogy,” said Steve.
“I’m sorry?” Tomas wasn’t following him.
“Well, I don’t think pandas work so well as a comparison to the Pyramids. The Great Wall is a more recognized symbol of China.”
“But we are not going to the Great Wall,” Ben protested.
“The Pyramids are to Egypt as the Great Wall is to China. Both are legendary, manmade structures.”
“Supposedly manmade!” replied Tomas. “I absolutely think that extraterrestrials had a hand in constructing the Pyramids.”
“What bollocks!” chimed in Scraggs. “Extraterrestrials? Is this what they teach you in Froggy medical school?”
“Yes, that and which wines best compliment the cheeses during our three-hour lunches. It is all perfectly natural, no?”
“France…” Scraggs further taunted, “…the only country in the world where even the doctors go on strike.”
“Well why shouldn’t they? Are doctors not workers too?”
“You’re not the first commie Frog I’ve met, mate.”
“Me? A communist? Le Roast Beef calls me a communist? I am not a communist. You are mistaking me with my father.”
Tomas took this opportunity to tell us about his background. Though born and raised in France, his parents were actually Chilean. His father had been a prominent scientist—as well as committed Marxist—before the 1974 coup that ousted and killed then-president Salvador Allende. In the midst of the turmoil, his father fled the country, finding refuge from Pinochet’s torture rooms in the more tolerant environs of Paris.
It was a good night of travelers’ camaraderie. I remember a lot of laughing between hard belts of booze, but the heat and hiking of the day had taken its toll, and after the last bottle was tapped, we turned out the room’s lone light bulb and went to sleep.
*
“Tharp, you are a total cunt!”
This was my morning greeting from Scraggs, stabbed my way in a venomous southern English hiss.
“You were snoring the whole night, you bastard. I barely could sleep.”
“That’s a shame because I slept like a rock. Maybe it’s the altitude.”
Scraggs shot me a look like I had just diddled his sister and walked out.
“My revenge for you not bringing water yesterday!” I shouted after him.
After breakfast and tea, we threw on our packs and headed back out. This time we left the larger dirt track in favor of a footpath that cut through the hills. It had rained during the night and the abundant vegetation was now dripping. The wood smoke and animal odor of the village was now replaced with the sweet fragrance of summer’s bloom and damp earth. Everything was wet, and a light mist drifted down from the restless clouds above the trees. Before long, this mist turned into a steady rain, and we all donned our gear, covered our packs, and pressed on through a narrow valley of vivid green rice paddies. Farmers worked the fields in the rain, lifting their heads to check us out as we walked by, but, aside from a few smiles and waves, they just went about their earthly toil.
I walked in the front with the spritely Xing La. Though small and short-limbed, she kept an aggressive pace. It was obvious that she had spent her whole life walking these paths; she pressed on effortlessly, smiling and telling me about her father, who had just passed away the year before.
She said he was a teacher and made the very trail we hiked upon. The trail headed to another village, the home of the Wa Zhu people, who according to Xing La, were very poor. Her father would go there to teach, sometimes staying for months on end. The Wa Zhu could not afford to pay her father, but instead provided him with room and board. As she relayed the story, she swelled up with pride. It was clear that she missed him very much.
Throughout the morning, we hiked through more rice fields and tea plantations, passing through a village of the Akka tribe; the only visible inhabitants were an ancient woman and a big black dog that barked ceaselessly. Eventually the fields and paddies gave way to thick forest, and for the first time we felt like we were in semi-wild country. The light rain continued t
o drip through the trees, and the muddy ground became treacherously slick. Everyone but our surefooted guide slipped at least once. At one point we came to a clearing and stopped to fill our water bottles from a covered well, next to which was a stilted shack and a pond. We rested for about fifteen minutes, then got up and continued down the trail, deeper into the forest. Very soon after the clearing we came across a fork.
“This way,” Xing La said, going left.
The rain intensified as we silently trudged along the mucky path. After about thirty minutes of hiking, Sam looked around and asked:
“Where’s Scraggs?”
We stopped and took stock. Scraggs wasn’t with us.
“David! Scraggs!” we yelled, but no answer. Our shouts were muffled by the many trees. We were in the thickest part of the forest and sound didn’t travel far.
“Daaaaaaavid!”
Nothing.
“Where the hell is he?” asked Sam, annoyed.
“Right after our water stop we came to a fork in the trail, remember?” I said. “He may have not seen us and taken the trail on the right, instead.”
“In which case he’s screwed,” added Steve. “He could just keep hiking all day, trying to catch up to us.”
Xing La looked to us nervously. “What we do?”
“You tell us,” said Steve. “You’re the guide.”
“We gotta go back to the well,” I interjected. “Hopefully he’s waiting for us there. If he did take the wrong trail, he may turn around and head back to the last place he saw us. After all, that’s what we’re doing.”
We changed directions and double-timed it back toward the pond, stopping every minute or so to shout his name, only to be met with silence.
After about twenty minutes we approached the clearing. Sam was working out the likelihood of Scraggs’s location.
“He probably didn’t even see us take the left fork. He’s always stopping to look at birds or different plant life. Half the time he’s lost in his own head. We’re always waiting for his pokey ass.”
But this time he was waiting for us. There, in the clearing, next to the well, with his leather Aussie hat, fanny pack, and sky blue muscle shirt, sat Scraggs.
“I’ve never been happier to hear your loud American voice in my life,” he said to Sam, getting to his feet.
“What the hell happened to you?” Sam asked.
“I went to ‘ave a shit and when I came back, you lot was gone. I walked up the trail, but seeing as how it forks and all, I thought it best to come back here and wait. And thank God I did.”
We watched as the muscles in Xing La’s face visibly relaxed. Her grimace transformed into a beaming, toothy smile.
“We go,” she said, performing an about face and marching on.
We went back into the forest and climbed up and down muddy hills through the rest of the afternoon, pausing at one point to eat a meal of beef, spicy eggplant, boiled eggs, and rice, wrapped entirely in banana leaves—perhaps the best packed lunch of my life. The landscaped then opened back up as we passed through more tea and corn fields. The rain had since ceased and the sun was doing its best to break through the clouds, succeeding every few minutes with vertical blasts of light and tropical heat. Eventually the trail intersected with a much larger dirt track, which led us into a ramshackle village full of grubby children, chickens, and clapboard houses. This was the village Xing La had mentioned earlier, the home of the Wa Zhu people, where her father had come to teach all of those years ago.
“There is the school,” she pointed. “And my father… he live in there.” The humble, thin-planked abode stood as a testament to his good work. Xing La proudly paused to show us and absorb it herself, smiling, her eyes shimmering with hints of tears.
After passing through the village, the track wound down the mountain, toward a village at the end of a green water lake. This village was occupied by Dai people, and was our destination for the day. As we descended, we came across some local women clothed in brilliantly colored tribal garb. Xing La stopped to chat with them. They spoke softly and smiled coyly, obviously shy in the company of so many foreigners. Both of them carried lidded baskets, which they opened for us, exposing a bounty of wild mushrooms in each. The mushrooms were black, brown, yellow, red, and orange; long and short, with stems and caps of all sizes. They were beautiful and looked delicious. The people in this part of China ate well, it seemed. The surrounding land had much to give.
The Dai village was more of a small town, with some nice, modern homes made of stone and polished tile. The roads, while not paved, were more dirt and gravel than mud. Our lodgings, however, were humbler than the night before. Again we stayed with a family in a wooden stilt house, but our mats were thinner and the space more cramped. Underneath the house lived a bristly black dog chained to one of the wooden beams. Her teats sagged with milk and she guarded a litter of pups that squirmed in a basket. Every time one of us went up or down the stairs—the house’s only entrance—she growled and snarled and lunged at us in ferocious desperation. The patriarch of the house—a man of about sixty named Ah-la—pointed to the dog, made a biting motion with his hand, and shook his head as if to say, “Don’t mess with that bitch.”
We were sticky with sweat and covered in mud. After a hot day’s hike, the lake looked inviting. Xing La said that it was good for swimming, so she marched us about a half hour away from the village to a peninsula jutting out into the middle—a good spot for a dip. We changed into our trunks and jumped in the cool green water, our vitality restored as the day’s grime washed away. The sun now peeked out from the fat white clouds, and the water felt as if it penetrated the skin and cleansed our very souls. This was not enough for Ben and Tomas, however, who brought along soap and shampoo and proceeded to have a proper scrub-down.
“Well that’s a sight rarely seen,” Scraggs remarked. “Frenchmen bathing.”
Steve forgot to bring along his swim suit, so after banishing Xing La, he stripped down to nothing and made a naked sprint from the shore to the lake, his pecker comically flopping all of the way. The ground was slick, of course, and just before the water’s edge he slipped on the mud, falling straight onto his bony ass. Our laughter reverberated around the lake, as there’s nothing more amusing than a naked guy falling down. After a very quick dip, Steve went back up on the shore and donned his hiking boots, along with a straw sunhat, and proceeded to prance around in a silly nude burlesque straight out of an episode Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a performance that will forever be seared into the flesh of my brain.
That night we ate decent meal—though not as stellar a banquet as the evening before—and sat up with Ah-la drinking baiju and smoking cigarettes that tasted as if they’d been rolled out of dried dung and grass. Tomas had picked up a good deal of Lao during his time at the orphanage, and attempted to communicate with the old man over shots of booze, as Lao and Dai are quite similar languages. The rest of us were helpless, however, knowing no Lao or Dai and barely more Chinese, so we drifted to sleep to the sound of Tomas try to pronounce the impossible, while the women watched a dubbed version the Ice-Cube/J-Lo action thriller Anaconda on the old room’s very modern TV.
*
We were up early the next morning to a chorus of roosters and barking dogs: the alarm clocks in rural China double as home guardians and mealtime protein. The women cooked a breakfast of last night’s leftovers on the fire while our grumpy crew stirred and packed. I sat with Ah-la on a slight terrace outside of the main door, watching sunlight seep through the trees as mist rose from the smooth green waters of the lake. He smoked in silence and we both sipped from cups of hot green tea.
After breakfast we took some photos with Ah-la and his family and said goodbye. We hiked along the rock-strewn road along the lake, out of the hills, and into flat, farmed country with power lines, a few cars, and motorized farm equipment. It was here that the road became paved, and for several hours we walked a monotonous line back into civilization, ending up in the
proper town of Mengzhe.
We ate a large lunch at a scruffy, white-walled restaurant in town and afterwards walked over to the local Dai temple. The place was full of people; some kind of festival was on. Xing La told us that it was a “celebration for old people,” and she was right: scores of elderly folks milled about. Some talked and laughed, while others danced to the traditional music piped in through loudspeakers. I broke off from the group to check out the scene on my own, and soon came across of pack of old men at the far end of the compound. They sat at a table crowded with dishes of food and bottles of beer and baiju. Upon seeing me, they vigorously waved me over and offered me a seat, greeting me warmly in Chinese. The man to my right wore an old green army jacket; he sloshed some beer into a filthy glass and slammed it down in front of me. I obliged him with a warm sip, igniting half-toothless smiles from around the table. Army Coat Man then handed me a set of chopsticks and motioned to the food. The dishes in front of me were unrecognizable—alien in content and appearance—and looked as if they had been sitting out all day. They were half or mostly-eaten, and had obviously been drunkenly picked at for hours on end. But this was Asia—China at that—and despite my already-full belly, I knew that I had to eat, lest I insult this band of tipsy grandpas. I thrust the chopsticks into a bowl containing hunks of tough-looking meat wallowing in congealed black goo, grabbed one, stuffed it into my mouth and chewed with fervor. The old boys immediately broke into a cheer, and a white-haired man with the face of a dried orange filled another glass with a deadly pour of baiju. This too was thrust my way, and I took it down in one burning gulp, which seared away the gamey meat taste lingering in my mouth. Again the men cheered, with Army Jacket slapping my back and cackling.