On the bus from Yangshuo back to Guilin, I realized I had six days left to do Lhasa and Beijing. I really want to see Lhasa. Plus a Canadian traveler Torben and Erika met on the bus informed us it could take a few days to get a Tibetan Tourist Bureau permit. In Guilin, Xue was her usual helpful, kind self and talked brass tacks with the CITS travel agent. Torben also ran by the local youth hostel to see if they knew anything (no joy). Long story short, the best option was to head to Chengdu (think pandas) and try to get a Tibet permit and flight from there. Since I thought we were parting ways there and then, I tried to give a present to Xue and Tao. They resolutely refused. Tao said they'd only accept it when I came back.
It's a funny thing to travel 7000 miles and meet people who feel like long lost friends. We went to a late lunch before the four of them caught the 4:30 overnight train to Kunming. At lunch, Xue serves each of us from her bowl. We are now a family.
With a heart both heavy and excited, I wave goodbye and catch a cab to the airport bus station. I need to get to Lhasa, and this feels right. I will be back to China, and probably wherever Torben and Erika land for grad school. Torben might get to CA within the year.
Onwards. I get out of the cab to a bunch of, I'm not quite sure, just people yelling offers at me. I've gotten better at just ignoring this: avoiding eye contact is key, as is not saying hello. I also feel much less targeted - the touts would assualt Xue and Tao as well. So, it's just life in a touristy area of China. In not looking at people, I see cabs and realize these are the drivers. "San shi kuai" jumps out of the verbal assault. Really? 30 yuan to the airport in my own cab? I paid 100 yuan inbound (guidebook said ~90 a year or so ago). The bus is 20 yuan. What the hell. I say "san shi" and go to the head of the taxi line (I don't want to get in an scuffle over which cab).
As we speed away, I wonder how this cabbie can do it for 30. There's a toll that's like 15 yuan. I quickly discover as we head out into the countryside - he's bypassing the toll road. For a moment, I did worry for the safety of my bags and/or kidneys (as in I might be "donating" one).
Actually, this was kind of a key moment. I decided that the anxiety is pointless. As Cheri Huber once said, it is not fear that keeps safe, but intelligence. I decided I would trust that I am up to the challenges, trust that people are basically good, and that my intuition would tell me when otherwise. I'd deal with that then and not until. The Canadian fellow on the Guilin bus had been traveling around south and east Asia by himself with only English - even buying a motorcycle in Vietnam and touring there, Laos, and Cambodia. Clearly, this can be done. And Erika and Torben had been in China a month, again, with no more Mandarin than in the Lonely Planet phrasebook. Plus, and maybe this was the key, the anxiety was familiar. I'd been here before. I felt it strike at my heart when I got off the bus in Tunxi on the way to Huangshan. I was standing in a small city well into China, in a bus station, by myself. I could take a step or I could collapse in a panic. It was entirely up to me. No script. No previous experience. Entirely new. And what is this fear? It's not for my phyiscal safety. It's not being lonely. Fingering it, it's almost as I'm trying to make myself feel overwhelmed, so I can collapse in self-pity because I am so overwhelmed. Wait a second - I'm like a dog chasing it's own tail, both creator and experiencer of the (unnecessary) suffering. Huh.
It's a funny thing to travel 7000 miles and meet people who feel like long lost friends. We went to a late lunch before the four of them caught the 4:30 overnight train to Kunming. At lunch, Xue serves each of us from her bowl. We are now a family.
With a heart both heavy and excited, I wave goodbye and catch a cab to the airport bus station. I need to get to Lhasa, and this feels right. I will be back to China, and probably wherever Torben and Erika land for grad school. Torben might get to CA within the year.
Onwards. I get out of the cab to a bunch of, I'm not quite sure, just people yelling offers at me. I've gotten better at just ignoring this: avoiding eye contact is key, as is not saying hello. I also feel much less targeted - the touts would assualt Xue and Tao as well. So, it's just life in a touristy area of China. In not looking at people, I see cabs and realize these are the drivers. "San shi kuai" jumps out of the verbal assault. Really? 30 yuan to the airport in my own cab? I paid 100 yuan inbound (guidebook said ~90 a year or so ago). The bus is 20 yuan. What the hell. I say "san shi" and go to the head of the taxi line (I don't want to get in an scuffle over which cab).
As we speed away, I wonder how this cabbie can do it for 30. There's a toll that's like 15 yuan. I quickly discover as we head out into the countryside - he's bypassing the toll road. For a moment, I did worry for the safety of my bags and/or kidneys (as in I might be "donating" one).
Actually, this was kind of a key moment. I decided that the anxiety is pointless. As Cheri Huber once said, it is not fear that keeps safe, but intelligence. I decided I would trust that I am up to the challenges, trust that people are basically good, and that my intuition would tell me when otherwise. I'd deal with that then and not until. The Canadian fellow on the Guilin bus had been traveling around south and east Asia by himself with only English - even buying a motorcycle in Vietnam and touring there, Laos, and Cambodia. Clearly, this can be done. And Erika and Torben had been in China a month, again, with no more Mandarin than in the Lonely Planet phrasebook. Plus, and maybe this was the key, the anxiety was familiar. I'd been here before. I felt it strike at my heart when I got off the bus in Tunxi on the way to Huangshan. I was standing in a small city well into China, in a bus station, by myself. I could take a step or I could collapse in a panic. It was entirely up to me. No script. No previous experience. Entirely new. And what is this fear? It's not for my phyiscal safety. It's not being lonely. Fingering it, it's almost as I'm trying to make myself feel overwhelmed, so I can collapse in self-pity because I am so overwhelmed. Wait a second - I'm like a dog chasing it's own tail, both creator and experiencer of the (unnecessary) suffering. Huh.
Turning my attention back to the external world, except for a few harrowing passes on nearly-blind curves, it was another great ride on country roads. When I was snorkeling in Hawai'i for the first time, every time we dove, I'd see new species of fish. I was - and I mean this literally - struck speechless by the sheer diversity. Similarly in China, everytime I head into the countryside I see new species of be-wheeled contraptions. On this trip: electric motor-trikes with a pallet of car batteries under the bed and uber-rickshaws with advanced weather-proofing.
It will take at least a day to get a permit, so while waiting several hours in the Guilin airport for my flight, I reserve a room at a backpacker's haven in Chengdu, near a Buddhist temple. I'm not Buddhist, but I do want to meditate (granted, this can be done anywhere, but it's more fun with incense and the overall vibe). I've always been drawn to mystic branches of major traditions - Sufism, Gnosticism, and the like. I believe we are souls, and so even if you are, say, severely brain-damaged in a car accident, you are still you, in a similar way a secularist would probably believe you are still you even if you lose your leg. (BTW, Flowers for Algernon is a great short book on this without any religious/spiritual overtones.) So the mind is not me (Buddhism may refer to the mind, the preceiver, as illusion). But trying to see "me" with the mind is like the illusion trying to see itself as illusion. It cannot: by definition, anything experienced by the mind/illusion is real. Hence, meditation - trying to quiet the mind so that other...there's not even a good word for it (transcendental states? too loaded) ...that other ways of being can be entered.
Five times in my life this has happened, entering this other way of being. Each time, it was like sitting in your living room, and all of a sudden a familiar stranger enters through a door in the wall you've never noticed before. But as soon as the door is opened you realize it's been there all along and you've been purposely not noticing it. Each time this "part" of me came to the fore, I had an unbelievable compassion and seemed to say just the right thing without having to think about it or knowing how I knew it. I just did. Another tradition might call it a moment of grace, when something "else" acts through you. One of the five times, I was playing Pachelbel's Canon in D on the piano. When I reached my favorite phrase, I suddenly felt like I was riding the rapids. I wasn't making the music, it was somehow flowing through me from some place to some other place, I was just a channel, and man, oh man, was I working hard to stay out of it's way, to let the flow be.
Okay, this is the kind of blog you get when I sit in an airport for four hours by myself :p Longwinded way of saying I'm looking forward to Chengu and a comfy, bohemian hostel near an ancient holy place and its requisite vegetarian restaurant. Then down to Renmin Square for old-school teahouse culture.
And yes, I appreciate the irony of talking for several paragraphs about something those self-same paragraphs claim to be un-talk-about-able.
Outside of, but including, beginnings and endings, was Brahman. One of its aspects, Lord Brahma the Creator, was bored. Shiva the Destoryer danced by and said, "Let us play a game, but I can only tell you the rules once you have agreed to play." Unharmable, Lord Brahma replied, "Let us play." Shiva touched him, and he shattered into a million million pieces, scattering throughout the myriad worlds of Brahman. "The game begins," said Shiva, "Find yourself."
Dan
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