The TravelJen Blog

My days in leafy Hanoi – a drizzly, unphotogenic place in early March – were spent rooting around in its past reporting on an enormous archaeological site right across from where Ho Chi Minh rests in pickled perpetuity (against his wishes, I might add; he wanted to be cremated). When it appears in print, you’ll find a link in the Articles section of this website.

The site is near the Lenin Monument.

The site is the original royal fortress of the Great Viet empire, which ruled Vietnam from Hanoi beginning in A.D. 1010 for nearly 900 years. The city was then called Thang Long, a name you still sometimes see on banners or advertisements around town. It means “ascending dragon,” which the king who built it claimed he saw emerge from the Red River. I saw gorgeous five-toed dragons and coil-tongued phoenixes rendered in terracotta and ceramic, artifacts in such amazing condition that it was hard to believe the artists who made them had been dead for centuries.

If the Ascending Dragon was the honorary beast of my days, my creature of the night was the Descending Chicken.

You see, I was quite the social butterfly in Hanoi, thanks to Hospitality Club, the network of travelers and hosts I’ve mentioned before. I’ve come to rely on HC more than I thought I would. Every place I’ve been, the people I’ve met have given me access to their lives, perspectives, and hometowns that I never could have experienced otherwise.

Case in point was Yen, a manager at a garment company who replied to my email almost immediately, with proper nouns in ALL CAPS, which seemed fitting, considering the level of noise in HANOI. She offered to pick me up at my hotel, the Lotus Guesthouse in the French Quarter, and bring me to her home across the Red River to have dinner and stay overnight. I wrote back happily accepting the invitation, but I wondered how we would recognize each other.

“I am very fat and short,” she replied. “I go by motorcycle in pink color.”

She was not so fat, but she was short, and the bike was a nifty rose-pink Honda. We joined the traffic, one of the tens of thousands of motorbikes on the Hanoi streets. There are comparatively few cars – so few, in fact, that my first night in the city, I was sure a festival or a parade was going on, some sort of two-wheeled motorcade I was never quite catching the front of. But it was just the everyday glut of machines.

As we blew over the Red River across the Chuong Duong Bridge – however short and fat and pink-biked, Yen was a speed demon – I couldn’t stop grinning. The motorbike was noisy, but it was so much fun. Over the next week, I would wind up hopping on motorbike taxis to get around the city.

Her boys, six and twelve, were sweet, making fun of my foreigner ways only a bit. Like most Vietnamese, her husband was a huge soccer fan, and was dressed in the athletic gear to match. We dug into noodles and pickled cabbage, rice, nem – meaty spring rolls – chicken wings, and steamed prawns. I didn’t know how to politely dispense with the prawn heads. I know I’m supposed to be testing my boundaries and all, but I’m not eating eyeballs. It’s just not happening.

I buried the noggins under my rice, hoping I wasn’t being rude.

Yen, her younger son, Dui, and I took an after-dinner walk through her neighborhood with the loose goal of buying a gift for Dui’s teacher – the next day was International Women’s Day. Dui would periodically headbutt me in the hip. I fuzzed his head.

I slept on the top bunk of the boys’ bunk bed, the window looking out on tall, once stately French-colonial buildings whose coiling columns and leaning balustrades were patched with black mold and high-rising exhaust. Hanoi is a humid place.

Yen and I would have dinner in the city once more, on my last night in Hanoi. I took her for Indian food, which she gamely tried to eat but clearly didn’t like. She so disliked it that she wondered about her ability to travel to other countries – her first trip abroad, to South Korea, was in the works. What would she eat? How would she survive?

I tried to tell her she’d adjust, as I had to China and Vietnam, but she seemed dubious. Instead of expanding her horizons as she had mine (well, minus the eyeballs), perhaps I had helped to shrink them.

Damned too-spicy saag paneer.

I spent even more time with Lan, a Hanoi native who works for a company that produces dance, film, and other arts projects, often in conjunction with foreign embassies looking to fund local artists.

After reading her profile on the HC website, I emailed Lan a note that was perhaps mopier than I had intended. After a month away and a week spent trying to get my bat on the knuckleballs the Vietnamese were throwing at me about my press visa, I had arrived in Hanoi feeling homesick and harrassed.

She replied with sympathetic sentiments and invited me to no less than three events in the next four days: a movie, a performance art show, and dinner and drinks.

I hoped to go to a movie that night at the Hanoi Cinematique, a small theater near me in the French Quarter. Run by an American expat, it features films from all over the world. (I missed at least two day-long film-and-food festivals, one featuring the films of Sweden, the other the cinema of India.) So after apologizing for my maudlin email (“I swear I’m still fun to be around!” I whined pathetically), I suggested the performance art.

It turned out Hanoi Cinematique was closed, so I wound up just getting some dinner at a Bia Hoa (Beer Hall, I think), tucking a book under the edge of my plate, dripping cheap, delicious beer on the pages. (Which led me to consider a new category: Reading in Restaurants. Stay tuned.)

Two nights later, Lan buzzed by the hotel on her motorbike to pick me up. She was stylish in a wraparound scarf and funky boots, with the thick, glossy mane of hair most Hanoians seemed to have. I felt dowdy in my backpack-limited combo of jeans and a button-down. For one pure, overwhelming moment, I wanted to be wearing the heeled prairie boots I lived in at home and to be flaunting a bit of breastbone where other women have cleavage.

At her office, we met with two German expats: Ines, who worked for the arts-oriented Goethe Institute, and a boy whose name I can’t remember, but who had recently returned from doing anthropological work with hill tribes in the north. We ate bread and jam; Vietnam is known for its tres bon baguettes. A DVD of season 4 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer sat on Lan’s desk.

I was among my kind.

Eventually we joined our own motorcade, meeting up with at least a four other bikes and nearly twice as many people. Most were European expats, though an unusually high number of Americans were part of the group, too.

We crossed the same bridge I had been on with Yen the night before. I was still grinning, but this time I noticed how little water was in the river. Boats moored forlornely on silt. Lan told me it was the result of a drought, and that it boded ill for the summer. Hydropower keeps Hanoi in air conditioning in the hot season, when both the mercury and the humidity soar to levels that make the city virtually unliveable, she said.

I wondered how the 11th century inhabitants of Thang Long had dealt with the weather. By sweating and dying of tropical diseases, most likely. I was happy to be on a motorbike in the air-conditioned 21st century. I tried not to think about whether said motorbike was part of our 21st century problems.

We drove on and on, into the darkness, where the street lights ended and large, quiet houses hunkered behind the ancient sycamores that green Hanoi. We walked through a narrow lane where local vendors sold popcorn.

No performance art I had ever seen was as democratic as to serve popcorn. Cheap-ass box wine, sure. But popcorn? Way too prole.

Sixteen years in NYC have exposed me to a good amount of performance art, though not much in recent years. (That sound you hear is my husband, Steve, sighing in relief.) In my experience, the best that can be said about most performance art is that it has the merit of being sincere, even if not intelligent or comprehensible. All those twisting limbs and wide-eyed screams, the flashing lights, strange hair, and semi-nudity? It’s the artist’s vision.

The worst that can be said about most performance art is that lacks even sincerity, and instead is a pretentious snarl of narcissism and noise. It makes you have no valid response when your unimaginative cousin in sales sneers at “artists.”

But when your first intake of culture in a foreign land is performance art, these guidelines go out the window. I wasn’t sure what to expect when we entered the enormous sets the artist Dao Anh Khanh had set up in the acres of fields surrounding his home.

Lan knew Dao, who to my eyes was a slight man in a white jumpsuit wearing a monk-saffron cape and blue-tinted teased hair. He is a quite famous multimedia artist in Vietnam who in recent years has gained fame for large-scale outdoor dance performances with a cast of dozens.

When we approached the first set – there were four enormous sets, several a few stories high – Dao was speaking softly into a microphone about how, Lan translated, this performance would be his last annual show, because they were getting predictable; something like that. He seemed to say he was getting bored. Hanging above him was a papier mache airplane about 40 feet long.

It’s a strange thing to encounter an artist for the first time as he’s giving his swan song performance. It’s like accidentally wandering into a stranger’s funeral. You don’t belong, but you can’t leave because the widow is weeping at the podium.

Dao handed the microphone to a representative from the Danish Embassy, who spoke about Dao’s contribution to art. Like many a good-willed patron of the arts, he spoke about how it is the artist’s role to provoke, even when we don’t understand them.

So it was going to be like all the performance art I had seen before!

On three sides were crowds of people; more than I had ever seen at a performance show, but then again, David Blaine probably draws as many. It wasn’t the bohemian horde I was expecting, and there were a lot more foreigners. Teenagers, parents with kids, giggling.

A half hour after we arrived, the performance began. There were more jumpsuits, mostly worn by lithe female dancers, who all had gorgeous locks. (What is with the great hair? Is it in the genes? In the water? In the scissors?) They held tree branches painted white. One rode a bike. The lone boy torched the border of the set, and the audience retreated rubbing their eyes, making choking noises that were the marriage of laughing and coughing.

There was writhing. Some shrieking. Someone dragged a resistant puppy around. It seemed seriously freaked, and I wondered if the poor thing had been given enough notes from the director. One woman did interpretive dance in a small pool of water. She flailed gracefully. Her white top turned sheer. A clutch of photographers surrounded her.

Tits: the great unifier.

“Do you understand what’s going on?” Lan asked.

“No,” I said. She nodded. I waited, then said, “Do you?”

I prepared myself to find out that this was the reinterpretation of some 17th century artist’s painting, perhaps, or maybe a response to the effects of Agent Orange. Something that would lessen my vast ignorance of Vietnamese art.

“No,” she said, and laughed. “I have no idea what this means.”

“I think it’s supposed to be abstract,” I said diplomatically.

Following the swooning dancers, we trampled through the first set to the second, or at least to a holding pen between the sets. We had been made captive in a way I found both clever and annoying. Elbows and asses were everywhere. The shoving was convivial, but still, it was shoving.

And then the performers started shoving too. They had changed into red unitards, and there were more boys. Headlamps illuminated their faces from above. They felt their way through the crowd, putting their palms on shoulders and fingers on faces. The audience giggled and reeled. The performers yelled and moaned, their eyes rolling.

“What are they saying?” I asked Lan as one performer shouldered past me, his teeth shining in the headlamp.

“Nothing,” she said. “They’re not words.”

Ah, gibberish. Of course. Because, you know, artists spend the majority of their time foaming at the mouth in an existential crisis, like a Dostoevskian antihero. They’re craaa-zy.

Suddenly Dao himself was next to me, a whippet of a man, tensile energy in a ballet-gone-feral pose. His hand thrust at my face. I leaned back. He moved closer. I leaned more. His fingers tangled in my hair. I smiled. I felt special.

“They really like you!” Lan teased me.

Eventually the dancers pushed all the way through the crowd. They disappeared briefly, then reappeared on the roof of an adjacent building. Backlit by a prawn-red light, they danced. With the wind tossing the sycamore branches around them, it was quite beautiful.

They moved to yet another set, this one four stories of bamboo and fire. Stripped nearly naked and painted head-to-toe in silver, Dao twisted in a cage like a malfunctioning mechanical bird. A row of boys lifted torches. The girls contorted provocatively from platforms high up, fronds of their red gowns waving dangerously close to the flames.

It was all very King Kong.

And that’s when something hit me from above, slamming into the side of my head. It was a noise as much as an impact, a ringing attack that muddled me. What the – ? Huh? Who – ? A hole opened up around me and two others: a woman frantically brushing her lips with both hands and Lan, who was clutching her neck.

“What happened?”

“It was a chicken!” a man next to me shouted in delight. “Look!”

He pointed at something waddling away through the crowd. I had been dive bombed by a descending chicken.

The sacrifices I make for art!

As people laughed at us, we trio of victims commiserated. Where had the chicken come from? Was the chicken part of the performance? Had someone thrown the chicken at us? The puppy had been in the show earlier, and I suddenly remembered seeing a tethered cow and a lost-looking duck at the perimeter of the first set.

I held my head, Lan massaged her neck, and the woman relentlessly brushed ghost feathers from her face. As much as my temple throbbed – it felt like an NFL quarterback had pegged me with a football – I suspected having a mouth full of live chicken was worse.

We looked to where Dao writhed, oblivious or perhaps just pretending.

The show ended shortly after that.

“Did you understand what was going on?” Ines asked.

“Not a clue,” I said. “You?”

“No.”

I had dinner with Lan, Ines, and their friends a couple more times – wine and fascinating conversation – though unfortunately I missed their invitation to a classical music event at the glorious Hanoi Opera House.

I made sure to eat some chicken at these dinners.

My last day in Hanoi, in my hotel room I leaned into the mirror and felt the side of my head to see if it was still sore. Painless. Instead I found I was getting increasingly bad roots. The tropical sun had lightened my hair considerably. The difference between the scalp and the ends was dramatic.

The second floor of the Lotus Guesthouse housed the Oz̩ Salon. I wandered in, wondering if I could afford to get my hair dyed. I showed the owner my roots, and she showed me the price sheet. It was going to cost a lot to dye my hair Рas much as it cost me to stay in the hotel for three nights. But it was still cheap by US standards.

I debated, fingering the price sheet, knowing I would be meeting my friends Katie and Amélie in Thailand the next day, knowing I would spend more money with vacationing friends.

And that’s when I saw a flier for Dao’s show sitting on a shelf.

“I did his makeup,” the salon owner told me. It had taken her two and a half hours to give him blue hair and a silver body.

Sold! I sat down in the chair, price be damned.

As she combed the bruise-purple dye through my hair from roots to tips, I told her I had been at the show.

“Oh? I didn’t see you there,” she said.

I considered locating myself at the event by the descending chicken but then decided against it.

It took much less than two and a half hours to dye my hair red – a plush red of fantasy raspberries that are never-ever to be eaten unless you want to be tormented by the bad witch – and blow it dry. (“Do you want Vietnam straight or New York straight?” she asked me. I chose New York.)

She gave me a mirror and spun the chair around so I could look at my hair from behind. I cooed at the color, and she spun me back.

“You look like Julia Roberts,” she said. She translated this sentiment into Vietnamese for her assistant, who lit up with recognition and gave me a big grin.

I’ve been getting the Julia Roberts thing since high school, but really, I only look like Julia Roberts if you were to subject her to a funhouse mirror or a car accident. Something grotesque and potentially maiming.

I guess if you covered me in silver paint and moved some of my ass to my lips, I might pass as the robot Julia.

Anyway, I wasn’t sorry I had the dye job. Because on my last day as a temporary Hanoian, my last day as a patron of the Vietnamese arts, I had great hair.

CAN YOU HEAR ME?! HELLLOOOO?

HANOI IS ASTONISHINGLY LOUD. I HAVE TO SHOUT IN MY OWN HEAD TO HEAR MYSELF THINK.

MOST OF MY THOUGHTS HAVE BEEN ERADICATED BY THE DRONE OF MOTORBIKES. IT’S LIKE VIETNAM HAS BEEN INVADED BY GIANT MUTANT KILLER BEETLES.

ONLY THIS LONE THOUGHT REMAINS: THE VIETNAMESE HAVE GREAT HAIR.

A SOUND FILE OF SAID NOISE TO FOLLOW WHEN MY COMPUTER GETS REPAIRED – THE LOGIC BOARD HAS FAILED AND IS AWAITING REPLACEMENT.*

HELLO? CAN YOU HEAR ME? WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE AM I? IS THIS REAL?

* and here it is, briefly, me being overwhelmed:

Hanoi Noise short

Now I need to lie down in a quiet place.

Edward Norton is my international stalker.

He has replaced Ice-T, who has stalked me for years, despite the fact that I am not black and not from the ‘hood—as his detective character chastized a not-getting-it honky on one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

In 2002, as I was shopping for a vintage (AKA cheap and used) dress on the Lower East Side to wear to my year-and-half-late wedding reception, there Ice-T was waiting for me, his ruse a visit to a leather shop on Orchard Street. A week later in Brooklyn, as I headed down to Fort Greene Park, he stepped out of the driver’s seat of a gleamingly expensive car and strode up the stairs of a brownstone. He didn’t make eye contact, but I was onto him. It took him a year to track me down again, this time at a random corner in midtown Manhattan. He just avoided running me over as he squealed an SUV through a louie before the light turned red. I was relieved, because thwarted love can turn hostile.

I figured that once I was on the other side of the globe, I wouldn’t have to worry about such attention. In China, I have about as much sex appeal as a book on Victorian landscaping.

And then Edward Norton was suddenly, literally, on my trail.

Let me set the scene. I was in northwest Yunnan province, just beginning the 50-kilometer hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge. It had taken 11 hours of bus rides—stomach-twisting turns, secondhand cigarette smoke, wide-eyed gapes at the lone laowai (foreigner)—to reach the trailhead. The Yangzte River—here in gentler form as the Jinsha tributary—was a soft teal sprawl, like melted green tea ice cream.

Almost immediately, I screwed up, following one, then another, and then, goddamnit, a third misleading trail. The touts murmured at me from atop their mules. Annoyed, I ignored them. I had come 9,000 miles from home to check out the view, and I still couldn’t get five freaking minutes alone?

Yet it was the touts who saved me, pointing out the correct trail, which is called the “high road.” Ashamed, I thanked them.

After going up and up the mountainside, if all went well, by late the next day I would have worked my way back down to the narrow gorge. There I’d find the Tiger Leaping Stone the eponymous feline is supposed to have jumped from across the gorge to elude his hunter.

My stomach roiled from the bus-induced motion sickness. The altitude took my breath almost immediately but returned it just as fast. Once, to save time, I cut across a wheat-colored expanse of prickly brush. My knees bushwhacked the thorns. When I returned to the path, my first sight was a used hypodermic needle.

I’ll take the thorns, thanks.

Soon the ground became too steep for such off-trail adventuring, sloping with alarming sharpness down to the river and up to the snowy crags.

After a few hours, I caught up to the Edinburgh University students I had shared a minivan with from the Mama Naxi Guesthouse in Lijiang. On winter break from their Eastern Studies program at a university in northern China, they were four boys whose names started with J and a fifth who claimed another letter, as well as Kay, the lone girl in the group. She was clearly the “adult”—the one who made sure others had their stuff, watched their step, kept their heads.

The boys were a gaggle of puppy energy and good-natured self-satisfaction with their own cleverness. Three years into school, they were experiencing what, if you’re lucky, can be the most abiding lesson of college—the fun that can be had with your own brain. They reminded me of the exceptionally intelligent boys I went to school with, who notched their belts with philosophy courses, sexual ecscapades, slave-wage jobs, and psychedelic drugs. (Okay, I did too. But anyway.)

Like the boys I had known, these Mandarin-speaking kids from the British Isles had an opinion on everything. Nothing could be processed without being assessed: yay or nay, and then a full debate. Their opinions were not so much reflections of personal taste or experience but assertions of identity—flags planted in the ground that claimed territory and allegiance.

Many of those opinions were on American TV, which is apparently broadcast everywhere. Lost, CSI, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, 24, and of course Law & Order—over and over, Chinese and foreign fans alike got perky about their favorite show.

I haven’t seen most of these shows myself. People have been a bit disappointed in me, as if when it comes to crosscultural bonding, I’ve failed to hold up my end of the bargain.

Where they’re getting these shows is hard to say. The Europeans watched them back home. In China, people are probably downloading, as Leo in Xi’an told me he does to get Lost, or buying DVDs. This is China, so there’s a good chance they’re bootleg.

If hotel-room satellite TV can be trusted, the shows aren’t broadcast in China. TV here seems to offer mostly shot-on-video costume dramas, some set in Japan; musical extravaganzas in which peacocks, Lycra, and/or cowboy hats figure prominently; or talk shows that might be about finding love and/or a really good washing machine.

When I’ve needed to understand more, and sometimes less, I turn on the English-language channel, which is dominated by cultural coverage and world news. Both subjects have been rendered anemic. In February, two news stories were in constant rotation. One was the 2008 budget proposal from George Bush to Congress. The budget was repeatedly described as including $141.7 billion for “his war in Iraq” and “less money for the poor.”

I’m convinced the Bush Administration is one of the most destructive US entities the world has ever seen, and even I found this a tad reductive.

The other big story was President Hu Jintao’s tour of eight African countries, a brokering of trade agreements and political handjobs. Each African country swore its support for the “One-China Principle”—no independence for Taiwan. I can’t say I know much about the situation between the Mainland and Taiwan, but I do know that if you need Namibia to do your smack-talking for you, perhaps you’re feeling a bit insecure.

All of this TV talk was not what I had in mind for the hike. I had hoped for some one-on-one time with the mountains and not much else – not even a comb.

Conversation mostly ended at The Bends. This is the toughest part of the hike, a series of nefariously twisting ascents. The number of actual elbows in the path is ambiguous—on the handdrawn maps you find in backpacker hostels, it’s variously totalled as 24, 25, 26, or 28. Most people are probably too busy wanting to die from exhaustion to make an accurate count. Or perhaps the number refers to the amount of hours it seems to take to finish. I was weighed down by two shoulder bags, which swung in front of me with the momentum like enormous pendulous breasts. I also didn’t have a walking stick, which would have been a third “leg” to put weight into. Adirondacks hikes have taught me how much energy they save you.

There were frequent pauses to catch our breath. There was always a good excuse for it, too—the view.

Eventually we made it to a guesthouse, where we ate and drank hot things under a Milky Way backbend. The students chatted in Mandarin with Chinese hikers from Shanghai. There weren’t many Chinese trekkers; most domestic tourists take tour buses along the low road, an asphault band thousands of feet down that is prone to becoming the finish line for landslides. However, those who do hike the high road have better equipment than any of the foreigners. Their well-made tents, ergonomic thermoses, and gleaming aluminum walking sticks reminded me of the gear I’ve seen Germans hauling on Adirondack trails in that cheerfully brisk Teutonic way.

The chat struck me for two reasons. The first was that the more Chinese tourists forgo the package tours and do their own thing, the better chances there are for environmental care in China. At least, this is what the foreign travelers tell each other in backpacker venues.

The second was a bit more perplexing. Here’s the strange thing about many of the expats I met in China: most don’t like China very much. Yet they stay. They complain about the dirt, the noise, the food, the manners, the spitting, the toilets – but they extend their teaching gigs and cram Mandarin lessons into their schedules. They are both compelled and appalled by China. And they stay.

Trapped by monolingualism, I wrapped myself in a blanket and went to gawk at the stars. (I recorded some thoughts, but the file isn’t uploading properly. I’m trying…)

Kay and I shared a room that night. It was a concrete square with two clean beds and no heat. The view from the window was casually astonishing. The boys had electric blankets to cut the cold, but we had no such luck. Someone brought us extra blankets. Kay filled up a plastic bottle with boiling water she got from the guesthouse kitchen and slipped it into my bed. I came back from the miserable squat toilet to find a delicious pool of warmth under the covers.

I slept so hard I turned soft. I awoke as muscle jelly, reduced human, blissful blob. But once I was out of bed, the cold made me solid again. My fingers and toes were like dead sticks as I hunched over a bowl of oatmeal with bananas while the dozen or so hikers at the guesthouse readied themselves to leave.

I wanted them all ahead. I would wait until the sun had risen; they would be long gone by then. Because the gorge is so deep, the sun doesn’t appear over the eastern peaks until 10 am—three hours after it first breaks on the hidden horizon beyond.

Once the sun came out, so did the laundry.

I packed my bags and left. I walked through a village of 10 houses, passing three old women hauling a live pig into a barn. Its frightened, knowing squeals—oh god, they’re going to kill me, oh god oh god oh god—ended in a sudden, ambiguous silence as I passed the last house.

There, I found a loose pile of tree branches, like oversize pick-up-sticks. I pulled a five-foot-long, slightly bowed limb from the pile. I put the blade of my swiss army knife against it, then stripped away a foot-long section of crackling bark and small knots to find sweet-smelling pine the color of honey. I closed my palm around it. And so I had the walking stick I had yearned for at The Bends the day before.

This minor act of transmutation was deeply pleasing somehow. As my side of the earth wheeled towards the sun, the handle got slicker in my palm. I walked faster.

The trail wasn’t built for visiting hikers. Actually, it’s a path that links several small Naxi villages, a few hours’ hike between each. After an hour or so a Naxi woman and three kids under 11 appeared behind me. I was in a photo frenzy, snapping gluttonously at the remarkable view—

—so they eventually caught up. When I said “Ni hao” to the three-year-old, he ran ahead shrieking in delighted terror. He ran so far I started to feel real fear—what if he fell? I looked back at the woman and pointed beyond me, where the path seemed to curve off the edge of the earth. She smiled in acknowledgement, but didn’t call the boy back. He bumbled those still-awkward feet along the path’s edge, where unreliable roots cling in devastating angles.

Like this.

If, as it has done at so many rivers before, China builds a dam to tap into the massive hydropower potential of Tiger Leaping Gorge, the footloose kid, his family, and their neighbors – about 80,000 people, mostly Naxi – will have to be relocated.

I’ve read that because the government will pay people relocation fees based on the size and quality of their property, people are busily developing their lots. I don’t know if that’s true, but I did notice a tremendous amount of construction. Logs, wood chips, and sawdust were sometimes foot hazards on the path. Felled trees were being turned into enormous A-frames in every village.

It’s also possible they are building guesthouses to cash in on the constant march of hikers, who are a captive market if there ever were one. In such an isolated place, the guesthouses offer more than food and shelter (though that’s clearly the foundation: I can imagine being so desperate in that harsh mountain environment that sleeping with four bored villagers in return for a horse-blanket bed and a meal of fried kittens would seem like a great deal). They also serve up re-contact with humanity, which, I was learning, becomes increasingly appealing the longer you walk with the knowledge that a minor slip can mean you’re dead. And not only will you be dead, but your death will have happened in a beautiful void. No one will have seen it. Your remains will probably never be found. You’ll probably just disappear.

That’s why the terrace at Halfway Guesthouse was so appealing – people and snacks, plus the view.

And guess what I found at Halfway Guesthouse? The Scenic Toilet View advertised on the trail. Here is what you see when you assume the proper position:

Tiger Leaping Gorge is not an untouched paradise. It has the beauty – sometimes a thing of such immensity that it seemed to buffet me from all sides. It was a wind knocking me around, a nonstop white stream in my chest, a laugh on my lips purpled with too-much.

Sometimes I just had to sit down.

But it is not untouched. The last dozen or so kilometers of the trail are chaperoned by electrical poles festooned with wires and fat water pipes like enormous sea slugs.

The people who live in the mountain villages want electric lights, reliable water, and satellite TV.

You may want to get lost, but they want to get Lost.

I kept imagining the guys who erected the poles, ran the wires, and laid the pipes. How on earth did the construction materials get up there? There are no roads. How on earth did did the guys stand, let alone drill or wire? The angles are so sharp, the heights so deadly. China isn’t exactly known for OSHA-approved industrial safety standards. Had anyone died?

The last of the high road trail passed a black patch of slash-and-burn farming on its way to the low road. It was another 45 minutes to what the trekkers call Walnut Garden. The village was situated in an area more like a walnut shell, or like cupped hands offering green to the verdigris mountains across the gorge.

I chose the last guesthouse in Walnut Garden, passing by Sean’s and Tibet House. A room at Woody’s with two twin beds, a private bathroom, and a hot shower cost 40 quai, or about $5.

But it was the terrace at Woody’s that really kept me there. It hung over the green cornfields cut in steppes down to the lip of the gorge.

It was at Woody’s that I finally realized what was so different about the mountains of Tiger Leaping Gorge. It’s that you look them directly in the face at every moment. Generally, if you’re this close to a mountain, you’re standing at the base of it, watching it slope upward, seemingly away from you. But here, you’re looking at it directly.

You find yourself respecting the mountain.

The stars began to stain the sky bleach-white on black. There was too much laughter from Brit expats and too much lascivious sneering from the Naxi teenagers. I wasn’t interested in others’ good times, or others at all, really.

I wandered off the terrace to the street. Up and down were village homes and guesthouses, yellow lights and it’s-getting-late murmurs from moms. There were no cars, so I sat in the road. The dog from Woody’s, a smelly, bad-eyed mutt who had befriended me despite my lack of Chinese cute talk, settled against my knee. He scanned the darkness around. I scanned it upward.

Dpwn the street was Sean’s. And that’s where Ed Norton was staying.

He had arrived a few short hours after I did. It’s amazing he hadn’t caught me on the trail, considering how I had dawdled to take pictures and notes, or how I had wept near a waterfall for a good half hour about how grateful I was to be weeping next to said waterfall, and who exactly I was grateful to. (Everyone I had ever met, pretty much, but mostly my husband and my parents.)

If Ed Norton had left Sean’s, he would have found me sitting in a dark patch on the street with a dirty but companionable dog. And I would have said, Ed, I traveled 9,000 miles from home to get some solo face time with the mountains and stars. So do you mind shoving off? Coming all this way shows real American stick-to-it-iveness, and you probably have rock-hard abs. But I really hated Fight Club. I thought it had a rotten, disingenuous soul. But more importantly, I’m just not that into humans right now. I’m happiest with the darkness and stars.

And Ed, despairing but respectful, would have gone back to Sean’s to have a Dali beer and make small talk with the other guests, who would have no idea that he was thinking about how glorious it would be to disappear into the vastness of the universe, so tolerant in its utter indifference.

If he knew who I was, of course.

The next day I would make it down to the Tiger Leaping Stone. I had exhausted my camera battery the day before, so I couldn’t take photos. It took me another five hours of hiking to get down to gushing rapids of green tea ice cream.

But this posting has been way too long and overdue. You’re just going to have to make it to Tiger Leaping Gorge yourself to find out what lies at the end of the 50-kilometer haul.

A sick bear had been in the facilities before I was. That was the only possible explanation. No human body could have survived such an evacuation intact.

I had just staggered out of a wooden building behind the Naxi Family Guesthouse, one of the several refuges for weary hikers along the Tiger Leaping Gorge high trail. The plates of vegetables and meat had been delicious and nourishing. The orange soda had boosted my low blood sugar. And the view! The eastern mountains were bolted to the sky, as fierce and immortal as forever.

But the toilet. Dear lord, the toilet.

It was a ten-foot-long, two-foot-deep tiled channel that had been cut into the side of an unforgiving mountain slope miles above anything that could be called a town. Each end of the channel sloped to a central catch over which squatted the wood wall that divided the men’s and women’s sides.

As with the sun, no sane person should look upon this catch. I hadn’t meant to. But my eyes fell there.

Oh, the horror. My soul wailed. My brain burned. I wanted to plead to some higher power, “Please, I didn’t mean to look! I’m sorry! Take it back! Take it back!”

As I recovered outside, Kay, one of the Edinburgh University college students I had hiked with for a couple of hours, neared. “Don’t use that one,” I warned her, pointed to the door on the left. “The other one must be better. It can’t be worse. Nothing could be worse. Someone—something—was near death in there. I’ve never—I mean, Christ…” I trailed off, abandoning words. Kay nodded solemnly and closed behind her the door on the right. Only then did I notice the hot-pink lips painted on the back of it. I looked at the door I had gone through. It had no icon at all, let alone a depiction of a grizzly clutching its tortured gut. I must have been in the men’s room.

In China, visitors come to know the effluence of the Chinese long before they know their hearts. Eventually it dawns that these things are connected.

First there is the spitting. At first the spitting seems tolerable; it’s not as bad as you’ve heard from other travelers, and if something gross is inside you, it makes sense to get it out, right?

But then you realize how pervasive it is. Even stylish women teetering in $400 heels will hock a loogie at your humbly shod feet without even a sideward glance.

Eventually, your eye will pinch shut at the sound of someone gearing up with that unmistakable hucchrrphgh sound, and though it is safer to find out where the load might land, you simply can’t bear to look anymore. You will start to suspect that every surface is glossed with a gelatinous layer of phlegm. And there will come one moment when it will seem that there has been a splat on the soft thing within you that tries to have compassion for the plight of suffering that is existence. And you will lose it.

“Jesus Christ, that is so fucking disgusting!”

Well, that’s what I did.

Beijing has started to fine people 50 yuan for spitting. As the official news agency Xinxua snarkily notes, 50 yuan—about $6.50—can buy a hundred packs of paper hankies.

And then there are the toilets. Americans have a reputation for being overly—even wastefully—attentive to personal hygiene. With my tendency to linger every morning in the hot shower until pruned, I’m no different. There are good reasons to care about public sanitation. People—usually poor people—get sick when it’s lacking.

Yet, if there were ever a time to be philosophical about such matters, it’s when you’re taking that step up to the squat toilet ubiquitious in China. There are holes in us, and there are holes in the ground. Everything is substance. Stuff goes in, and stuff goes out, ad infinitum. The evidence is all around you.

There is never paper, so bring your own.

Being philosophical is helpful for dealing with the shockingly intimate facts you learn about the person who visited before you, whose face you will never see. Be grateful for the small mercy of never having to look in her eyes and have her know that you know, and that both of you wish you didn’t.

The squat toilet is no more unsanitary than a public “Western-style” seated toilet—which few dare to actually sit on—and in the, er, end, I found myself heading for the squat variety. When clean, it’s neater and faster. When it’s not—think bears. Bears with dysentery. Bears with miscarriages. Bears in shame.

There is a scene in Martin Scorcese’s The Aviator that is worth recalling. Played by Leonardo DiCaprio, germaphobe Howard Hughes cannot bear to handle a restaurant’s bathroom door. He plasters himself to the wall adjacent and waits, sweating and tense, for someone to open the door so he can dodge through before it closes.

It’s not a bad idea, really.

When you have the same plumbing but not the same language, you’re bound to encounter the baseness of each other first. China reminds visitors that this essential part of existence can’t be overlooked or ignored.

This fact is instructive for travelers, who have ventured off to be touched by others, and by otherness, which is far scarier. In China, it can be a hard lesson. You are jostled and shoved and elbowed. People yell in your ear and cough in your face. They cut in front of you at the supermarket and take your seat on the bus. They put their chins on your shoulder to get a better look—particularly if there is someone to be laughed at—and jam their fingers into into your side.

When you are truly uncomfortable, you know you’re fitting right in.

And people will notice. It is then that people may begin to try to make you more comfortable. They may not excavate your ear canal of wax with any suitably probing object—a multigenerational grooming I witnessed everywhere—but give it some time. For now, someone will probably slide over companionably, crowding you with curious attention, and grab the book out of your hand. Maybe they’ll even buy you lunch because you were brave enough to venture into the noodle shop where no foreigners dare to enter. (It happened to me four times.)

Around will be women and girls—mothers and daughters, friends, co-workers in matching suitpant uniforms—holding hands or walking arm in arm. Men and boys—fathers and sons, friends, co-workers in overalls or pinstripes—will be companionably strolling with their arms around each other’s shoulders, or squeezing each other’s necks. There is much leaning and lounging on one another. Everybody uses everybody else as furniture.

You can’t get this fiercely affectionate—or make 1.3 billion people—without a pragmatic acceptance of all that is crotchy about life. Lesson # 1: Touching is inevitable.

Leo, my pal from Xi’an, told me a story about how how an American friend of his was deeply distressed one night when they were sharing a two-room flat. Each room had a door. The friend shut his. Leo left his open.

But the American knew Leo’s door was open. He found it impossible to handle. “Why don’t you shut your door?” he asked Leo.

Leo said, “I never shut the door. I don’t mind the door open.”

“But you’ll have privacy,” the American said.

“I like the door open,” Leo said.

“But anyone can see you,” the American insisted. “If you shut the door I won’t be able to see you.”

“I don’t mind if you see me. You can shut your door if you want to.”

“But if I open the door I’ll be able to see you,” the American complained.

Leo found this all very amusing. He and his parents had been living in just two rooms for his entire life. And he had never once shut the door.

My last day in China, I went for a massage with two people staying at my hostel in Kunming. Jaime was a Bolivian-German computer scientist working for six months at a university just outside of Hong Kong, and Bella was a Dane who had been sent to China by her boss to scout out a selection of tea for a new café he wanted to open in Copenhagen.

It took us three hours, but eventually we did track down a massage parlor with a reasonable price. (Ninety minutes for $7.) Fully clothed, we each lay on a twin-size bed, and then a giggling teenager in a long skirt attacked each one of us. For the next 90 minutes I was bent and squeezed and rubbed and eased. It was not gentle. But it was thoroughly meant.

Not surprisingly, it was a deeply practical rubdown. Any part of her body that was suitable for a tool she used. She kneeled her way up my spine, her hair tickling my neck. Standing on the bed, she lifted my leg in the air and thrust the arch of her foot into the back of my thigh. She stood on my butt and chatted with the other masseurs.

China’s tough love makes me understand all those mincing little steps of Chinese women in classic opera and film. It’s hard to be dainty in China. It is loud and dirty and noisy here. There is no halting the assault with, “Will you stop touching me?!” Such a desire is met with uncomprehending disbelief.

The door is always open in China—even when the only thing to look at is the sad residue of sick bears.

Chinglish often mutates perfectly functional Chinese into English with an extra chromosome. But that isn’t the case with “scenic toilet view,” which I saw advertized on a glossy boulder along the high trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge.

However huh?-inducing it may be, “scenic toilet view” is a grammatically correct phrase in English. But I can’t help but dwell on its individual components. Scenic. Toilet. View. A better summation of my experiences in China I’ve yet to encounter.

Let’s break this down in three installments. I’m tempted to start from the, er, bottom up, but maintaining order is key to building a harmonious society. So I’ll start with Scenic.

***

Spinning slowly at the northern tip of the Old Town, Lijiang’s waterwheel is in a scenic setting. The chipper throngs of Chinese tourists posing for photos in front of it certainly think so. After all, the slate roofs of the Old Town houses—many of which have been rebuilt since the town was shattered by an earthquake in 1996—undulate the eye east, west, and south to the mountains circling around.

To the north, Jade Dragon Mountain flaunts 18,000 feet of snowy crags garlanded in clouds. Orange carp and polka-dotted trout get fat in the slow-moving creeks bordering Lijiang’s UNESCO-certified cobblestone streets. The willows are just beginning their charming spring droop. And the wheel itself is a modern reconstruction of a medieval technological marvel which—wait for it—churns water. Behold its liquid-agitating majesty!

The tourists dutifully click their cameras.

All of Old Town Lijiang is scenic. To the north, the much larger New Town offers a collection of unremarkable modern buildings, branches of China Construction Bank, supermarkets, and KFC.

But there’s a problem with “scenic.” It’s the apologetic refuge of tourist agents, real-estate brokers, autodidacts of obscure historical facts, and hopeful highway authorities. From provincial charm (AKA small-town ignorance) to panoramic vista (side of the road, hill), what’s called scenic is often boring. Scenic is the beige of travel.

Nine hundred years ago, Lijiang was the capital of the matriarchal Naxi culture, one of two dozen ethnic minorities found in Yunnan province, which is home to half of all of those in a China that is more than 90 percent Han. Now it’s an EverBright Fun Zone for what seems like 7.9 million domestic—and perhaps 79 foreign—tourists. Those who don’t wear the cowboy hats for sale in the cloned shops wear identical baseball caps—often at a tragicomic ghetto angle—provided by their flag-waving tour guide. They are cheerful and loud and pushy.

They are in the distance in this photo.

The throngs can be worth the hassle for something as impressive as the Terracotta Army Warriors, for instance. But most of the time, what you’re encountering is the scenic. I’ve dodged the boredom in a perhaps unorthodox fashion: by not going. I’ve seen almost no scenic places at all.

There it is. Cat’s out of the bag. I am a lousy tourist.

I’ve visited only six locales in four weeks. I buy almost nothing beyond food and shelter. Fun facts about the political machinations by some Iago to undermine Emperor He-Had-It-Coming have only fleetingly passed through my brain. I’ve yet to step inside a temple; when it comes to getting my Marx on, I apparently fit right in.

However, I did capture this shot of incense outside a Buddhist temple in Yunnan with a very, um, scenic overlook.

Part of my lack of sightseeing has to do with the fact that China is, sensibly enough, for the Chinese. A lack of Mandarin and the travel infrastructure don’t make it easy for a lone Yingyua-speaking woman to venture too far off the beaten track—and I don’t like that track so much. Though 126 million foreigners visited China in 2006, travel is still overwhelmingly oriented to the package-tour domestic tourist. Foreigners aren’t above this, of course, frequently arranging themselves in likeminded clumps, whether they’re fanny-packing Britons with peeling shoulders staying at “four-star” hotels or twenty-something dredlocked Aussies in backpacker hostels who like to opine that air travel isn’t “real.”

I also need to get over my aversion to guides, which is based on pride, being a New Yorker, and Egypt.

But for the most part, I walk a lot. I take notes and notice and public transportation. On the way to the scenic I get lost in the view.

I can tell you a lot more about the bus drivers than the places they drive you to (men with bedhead and cigarettes who love pop music, coasting to the stoplight in neutral, and slamming into second gear with gleeful force). In public parks I watch men and women of a certain age walk small dogs and wonder if perhaps they have empty-nest syndrome. Grandfathers stoop for hours to help toddler toes get a feel for that walking thing.

These are the sorts of things I pay attention to. In Lijiang, I spent one afternoon studying the sun-soaking loll of the restaurant staff where I was eating chicken noodle soup. Entirely female, the staff lounged around in that almost animal luxury that can follow physical labor, which I remember so well from my restaurant days. They had their feet up. Their knees poked each other in the side. Their arms were slung across the backs of the chairs. One girl neatened the pony tail in another girl’s hair, and then gave her own a tightening yank. It took me 20 minutes to get the attention of my waiter, who was resting her the side of her face on the table in a cradle she had made of her hands. With half-closed eyes and a faint smile, she listened to the loud commentary of the chef, a middle-aged woman with strong shoulders and a sarcastic laugh. It was Friday night, and the dinner rush would begin shortly. There were still two days left to the New Year holiday.

I knew that nearby, in Sifang Square, old Naxi women were singing traditional songs. Old men were watching, the infants strapped to their backs taking in the crowds with that furrowed-brow baby skepticism.

Around the corner, young women were watching Chinese soaps as they waited for customers, wearing the traditional blue-and-white tops meant to indicate the cosmos, and jeans and sneakers. Around a different corner, young men were painting vaguely erotic tropical scenes on canvas and burning intricate bird designs into wood discs the size of commemorative plates.

As I waited for the check, lingering in the sun’s warmth, a tall Chinese man aimed a huge, snout-like zoom lens at me. Near him, a young woman in a traditional Naxi dress followed his focus. She seemed surprised to find me in it. I gave her a wry look—you must get this all the time—but she just stared back at me. I am a tourist attraction, too.

I’ve had some great contact with locals I met through Hospitality Club, a travelers’ networking site, but largely I remain on the outside. Chinese-speaking foreigners who live here tell me they feel the same way. I’d like to think I’m cultivating loneliness, but perhaps I’m just leaving some things unexplained because I prefer it that way. Imagination over anthropology. Fictive musings may not make for accurate reportage, at least not when it comes to the facts. But maybe sometimes I’ll get lucky and instead hit on the truth.

Here’s one last thing about scenic. It’s used by “nice” people who fear of expressing any negative sentiment about anything or anyone, no matter how vile or dastardly, for fear of offending or, worse, being wrong. These people have the beige of hearts. They’re holding something back—there’s something you don’t want to know. Here “scenic” is nice-person code for their abhorence of alien cultural practices they’re too sensitive to mention.

And that brings me to my next topic: Toilet.

Take attention. The tasty is coming.