A Year of Firsts

Everything in China has been a little bit of an adventure and stufffed with firsts from first time being hit by a moped to the first time wading through buckets of live frogs and turtles in a Chinese grocery store. The end of my tenure as an English teacher in Shanghai (and my temporary disappearance from the blogging world) is the beginning of a five-week trek through China with two of my closest childhood friends.

I never realized what I have already grown accustom to until I saw my friends experience it for the first time: the hard beds; the power structure of Right of Way going from biggest to smallest so pedestrians are defintely at the bottom of the food chain; the poetry-worthy deliciousness of street food like xiao long bao; the distaste for forming lines and fondness for shoving; and the absolute insanity of Shanghaiese taxi drivers.

After 50 hours in Shanghai (in a hectic whirlwind that they probably don't remember in their jetlagged stuper) we headed to Yangshuo. Completely bypassing the city of Guilin, I led my friends to one of those odd places commmon in China: a modern art sculpture garden in the middle of nowhere among the unusual mountains of the area. The park was completely empty except for us and dozens of diligently working gardeners.

The village of Yanghshuo has some of the most breathtaking scenery in all China. Tree-speckled mountains pop out of the earth like multi-shaped mushrooms while every sliver of semi-flat land is used for argriculture. I've been here before, and I love the slow pace of the countryside so I arranged a stay in a blink-and-you-will miss it village outside Yangshuo. My friends knew we were staying at a 'farm, but I'm not sure they were expecting freely roaming chickens, sun-baked brick structures that were identical to the home the chickens picked to roost, and wood everything that never fit or closed quite right. Oh, and mosquito nets draped over the beds. The inns were rustic, and I loved it though we weren't expecting an additional cabin-mate in the form of a four-inch long hunter spider, which would rival Roadrunner in a foot race.

Yangshuo morphed into a number of firsts for me the second time in the area. I went rock climbing for the first time. I spend the majority of my time hugging the mountain face as tightly as a sailing mast of a hurricane tossed ship. My legs are covered with bruises to prove it. I did strike up a conversation with a New Zealander while I was stuck about seventy seet up. Turns out he was also a teacher in Shanghai. Funny where you meet people. Regardless of his advice though, I still couldn't get pass the slight overhang above me and slipped. I figured I shouldn't let the professionals holding my rope get too bored since they seem to be able to manage their duties of anchoring the rope and talking on their cellphones at the same time.

In the evening we took a sunset hotair balloon trip, which was the first for both of my friends. We had a little trouble taking off as we hit and almost knocked over a structure on stilts in a rice patty. We also had six people crammed into a basket that could comfortably fit four so that our balloon operator sat on the edge of the basket (half the time also on his cell phone). In addition, the burners were very low so that everytime the operator turned them on, I felt the little curls on the top of my head melting. We were told we had the second best balloon operator in China so I wasn't worried.

Eventually we did make it completely over the top of Moon Mountain and witnessed some of the most unbelievable views. If Doctor Seuss and the location selector of Lord of the Rings combined talent, they might have the right amount of quirk and eye for beauty to create the army of droopy, pointy, and floppy mountains in Yangshuo.

I've ridden in a hotair balloon before, but this experience was the first time we almost took out a water buffalo when we came to a bouncing stop in its muddy pasture.

With our first leg of our trip in China successfully completed, we are leaving the countryside of Yangshuo and heading to the sever, middle-of-nowhere Chinese countryside of Longji Rice Terrace. The rest of the trip will be all first for me.