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ever dumbening
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Erhai, surrounded by mountains, doubly reminds me of Tahoe when we meet the stereotypical skier sharing our room at our "hotel." The hubs of the southern-China backpacker groove have great, cheap accomodations; you just have to roll with it.
The sex seeping through paper-thin walls gets the two of us at each other's throats, because _we're_ not the ones doing it. Though being in the midst of the bottoming out period known as six-months-into-whatever-crazy-fucking-country-you're-living-in syndrome didn't add to our cordiality either.
Beating the sun to the punch, we walk (after rousing the guard at the gate--lots of guards at gates in China) to John and Anna's considerably nicer, but still cold (south of the Chang Jiang), hotel room to watch the Patriots and Packers duke it out for world domination. The Superbowl in some backwater-ass town in southern China. Who'da thunk it? Touchdown on the first play from scrimmage, if I remember correctly.
Ayurvedic tea from Anna couldn't soothe the bicker field Colleen and I were tending. She didn't make it past halftime. But I guess at that point neither of us really knew that it was the fucking next door that had us torqued up. Lisa's "plans" that changed with the electrons only added propane.
So, game over, Pack wins (?), and I head back.
We decide to bike around.
Dali is know for it's marble. We pass slabs, and piles of colored gravel and dust. We pass men who mold two-ton pillars of marble with only a steel spike and a hammer. I try my hand, failing miserably; again, I am dumbfounded by the scope of what hands do in this land.
We pass mustard-gold fields full of rape. Let's eat that tonight--wanting a break from the food that was giving us a break from the FOOD that we normally ate.
At some point the rarity of the air's freshness slaps our minds and genitals awake. NOW it's clear, now the scratching nerve stew of the morning makes sense.
Following the irrigation streams up the hillside, past a very small man climbing from the stream bed with a monolith on his back, we become aware that we _must_ make love. The day has asserted itself.
Unpeopled space: you will not find it in China. We merely sought a brief--we knew--pardon by the second hand, just a sweep or two. Higher on the hill, voices still linger. Finally, nestled in a dent in the earth, surrounded by burial mounds, we too, suffer a fleeting death.
The bus ride out of Dali was as close as I have gotten to touching the center, ever.
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