Saturday, 1 September.

Longji

The winds picked up over night, and I woke several times in the dark to wind whistling through the gaps in the walls. Li Xu knocked before dawn so that we could hike up to a hill top and watch the sunrise, but the sky was cloudy so we all went back to bed. After breakfast, we hiked up to View Point Number Two and tried a bit of kung fu and tai chi, including the Dividing the Mountains form, Crane Spreads Its Wings, I Wish I'd Brought a Jacket, and Li Xu Almost Falls Off a Terrace.

I then headed up to the top of the adjacent mountain with our host's brother as a guide. (Our host, who with his wife and family runs the B&B, is also the schoolteacher for a nearby village.) The hike starts out along the same path as View Point Two. Was a bit of a challenge as it was fairly wet from overnight rains, and I kept slipping. Each time, as my guide turned at the sound of my scrambling, I felt obliged to say, "mei wen ti," no problem. After maybe half an hour of moderately steep climbing, we left the terraces behind. Yes, what would have been a brisk but fairly brief morning hike for me was and is a morning commute for village farmers. We also passed a cave, and I learned the sign language for "big snake lives there."

After an interminable number of false peaks, we had cornered the peak of the mountain and were within twenty minutes, I'm told, of the peak. But we were also in the clouds, soaking wet, and I was pretty tired. So I bailed, and we headed back down. Eventually I took point, and then my guide got to watch my constant loss of traction. Since he started snorting with laughter every time I slipped, I stopped saying "mei wen ti."

Coming back to the village, my guide (I eventually wrote down his name, but lost it) asked if I wanted to traipse over to the other View Point, which was maybe a mile away across the mountain face. I was skeptical of his plan, until he pointed out that there were other foreigners there. *Shrug* Why not?

I quickly learned that the shortest distance between two points of the same elevation on a terraced hillside is not a straight line, but rather an isometric line with constant Z and continously, smoothly varying X and Y. Nonetheless, by the time we reached Viewing Point One, the other foreigners were gone and only a crowd of proximity-activated Juang women remained; we skirted around their sensor perimeter and so didn't have to fend off any merchandise. To go back to the house we then plunged right down the terraces and into the main village.

Lu Dan at Longji, 1 May 2001 http://aufrecht.org/picture/photo-view?photo_id=8231

In the afternoon I went back up to View Point Two and read more of Purgatorio, the most fitting book imaginable for a terraced hillside. Later I taught Li Xu, Liu Tao, and our host The Mao Game. Despite the language barrier, Liu Tao picked it up enthusiastically; our host did well with the "xie xie" rule but never really got the hang of it. (See vocabulary.)

Before dinner we watched most of a VCD. I don't have the title, but it was pure Straight To Video. The plot concerned some angry men with guns, a satellite ground station, and ... well, I don't think there was any other plot. It was astonishingly bad. Later, when Liu Tao recounted the story to somebody else, they had also seen it. *sigh* There was a shower stall, but when I saw the inch-long beetle on the floor I opted for security over cleanliness. It's a tradeoff that I've since made many times, and almost always the same way.

We were there for some sort of major Juang festival, the visible difference being that we joined a dinner table covered with different dishes, instead of a more typical handful of dishes. The festival honors the dead, and it's traditional to burn paper effigies of presents, for example fake paper money, or paper jewelery, as gifts to the dead. It's not clear if this is to propitiate the dead and avoid negative consequences, or simply to show respect. Although we didn't see any of this, I'm told that the rituals have been slightly modernized; gifts now include paper refrigerators and paper televisions. I can just imagine the reaction of the dead ...

"What did your kids give you this year?"

"Well, I got that mobile phone I've been wanting, but the phone card doesn't match. What good is this going to do me?"

"Your son never was that bright. Me, I got a beer fridge and a six-pack. And since I'm dead, that should last a long time."

Late in the evening a bunch of tourists, probably students from GUET, showed up and that was the end of the sedate atmosphere. The next morning we took the morning shuttle back to Longshan and then the long-distance bus back to Guilin. I left one of my Nalgene water bottles up at Longji. I see a lot of knock-off Nalgenes everywhere, but mine was the real deal, made by the same company that (according to one of my sister's hippie friends) manufactures high-impact plastic head restraints for animal testing labs. I miss my authentic animal-testing-plastic water bottle, but I still have one more left, as well as my San Diego Mountain Bike Warehouse water bottle.