I had sort of a plan for how this post should start out. I was going to include a link to the Wikipedia entry on the phrase: "Only Nixon could go to China". Unfortunately, Wikipedia is banned by the Great Firewall of China, so I can't read what it says, nor can I apologize to the originator of the phrase as I am unable to learn that sort of information from an article I can't read. I'm not sure why Google provides search results that point to websites banned by the government, but there you go. I have a secret wish that The Wander Yonder is also going to get banned for all of this subversive bitching and moaning.

I've just re-read that first paragraph. Sorry. It turns out I can include the link in my post, I just can't read it myself. Nor could I come up with a clearer way of saying so other than this explanatory clause here. I really don't want to re-write the first paragraph as this is about my ninth attempt to start writing this update and I'd just like to get on with it.

Nine times? (Read that as though you're Ed Rooney from Ferris Beuller's Day Off) Yes, nine times have I sat down at these damn Guilin/Yangshuo (that is where we are right now) internet cafes and tried to write an update on what we've been doing since we got back from Mount Everest. I am close to tears. Normally when I write an update I upload pictures in the background, but I've been unable to do that here because none of the computers have cd rom drives or working usb ports. What the hell is the use of an internet cafe in a tourist town if people can't look at all the pretty pictures they've taken? Actually, I know the answer to that question and it kind of pisses me off. Everybody around me is playing computer games online that look really fun and violent. The guy on my right just blew up the guy behind me with a grenade, and the guy on my left is attempting to kill a sort of dragon looking thing. I'm really jealous. I haven't killed anything online for months. To add insult to injury, all the menus are in Chinese, and I can't figure out how to even get to any of the games so I can play along. Which is just as well, I have work to do.

Back to the beginning. With apologies to whoever said "Only Nixon could go to China", Only Big Bird could go to China. No other children's character really had a tough enough anti-communist image to really pull off a 75 minute public television drama about a desperate search for the Phoenix Feng Huang all the while being thwarted by the maniacal genius of the Monkey King in the magical land of Guilin and Yangshuo. Starting to make sense now isn't it? Yeah, I didn't think so. Oh and don't bother trying to Google the bit about Nixon, other than the Wikipedia article, everything that comes up on Google is about Spock saying that the Nixon quote is an "old Vulcan proverb" in Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country You see, it sort of also applies to Kirk and the Klingons, what with Kirk being their sworn enemy. Come to think of it, it hardly applies to Big Bird at all, but I still think its a cute title, so I'm sticking with it.

I think I've come a bit unhinged. Its quite warm here.

Way back in 1983, I was five, Big Bird and Barclay (the vaguely dog-shaped ball of orange, yellow and white yarn) took a trip to China after they found a scroll in a New York Chinatown shop that described a Phoenix. It turns out Big B. was having a bit of an epistemic crisis, wondering if he, like his own best friend Snuffalupagus, was in fact also imaginary. Obviously, the lack of other seven foot birds added to his self doubt, so the discovery of a scroll describing a giant yellow bird in China, gave him hope that he was not alone in the world. Naturally he had to leave Sesame Street to find his long lost cousin. His adventure took him to Beijing and the Great Wall, then to Zhouzhuang in Suzhou (recently seen in Looney Cruise's new Mission Impossible movie) and finally to Guilin and Yangshuo. I won't ruin the movie for you by telling you much else but, I highly recommend adding it to your queue.

I suspect watching this on TV for the first time was the moment I caught the tourist bug. It is certainly one of my clearest early childhood memories, particularly the scenes from the end of the film where Big bird travels through an area covered in dramatic pointy mountains, glassy rice terraces and a misty snaking river. Twenty four years on, I have been to 22 other countries, learned to abuse parentheses, FINALLY learned where exactly those scenes were filmed and I've arrived in the place that may have made it my dream to want to see the world. I am not disappointed. Despite the summer haze (which has ruined most of the pictures I've taken here) it is truly on of the most stunning places I've ever been.

Its hard to say more than that. Guilin and Yangshuo don't quite come across as shocking and aweing as Mount Everest, (which may have something to do with plentiful oxygen, I'm not sure...) but the towns and surrounding countryside are perhaps even more beautiful and at times I've had the odd sensation of being trapped in a classical Chinese water color. Oh and did I mention that they are the only towns in China where almost everybody speaks fairly good English? Other bonuses include a pretty good beer bar in Guilin and Yangshuo has restaurants with burritos and chicken fried steak! We've also been killing a lot of time with hour long foot massages for five dollars. Its not quite Thailand massage pricing, but its pretty close and the massages themselves are slightly less brutal.

OK, yes, I do realize there's still about a week missing between getting back from Everest and arriving here. Most of it wasn't very interesting so I'll provide a quick recap. Heather may wish to add something more about the Pandas later.

Back In Lhasa
We tried to go see inside Potala Palace but couldn't manage to get tickets. Lhasa is packed these days and apparently the ticket procurement process is three days long. We were bummed about that and we also lost Heather's account book in which we have tracked everly last dime we've spent since August 29th 2005. It was kind of a bad day. The next day we flew to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province.

Chengdu
Visited the Panda Research Center and ate a lot of spicy food. For the most part the Chinese food we've had here hasn't been very different at all from the chinese food we get at home. Sichuan cuisine was a big exception. A lot of the dishes used ridiculous quantities of Sichuan peppercorns (a type of black pepper, not a chile) that is not really all that hot, but it numbs your mouth. At home, sichuan food has a lot more chile heat and I've never had my tongue go numb. I think I prefer the americanized non-numbing but spicier version, call me crazy, but I like to be able to taste what I'm eating.

Yangtze River Cruise
We took a river cruise through the Three River Gorges area and saw the big new dam they're building that will flood the area in 2009 or thereabouts. We mostly wanted to do this because the dam will radically change the area in a few years and we wanted to see it before that happened. The highlight was the side trip to the "Little" and "Mini" Three River Gorges, which are just what they sound like, increasingly narrower river gorges. Lovely scenery etc. We spent four nights on the boat mostly sequestered in our somewhat dank cabin. None of the excursions off the boat provided any English language guidance whatsoever. Which is a little odd, because there were certainly enough non-Chinese on the boat to justify grouping us together and getting one of the tour guides who spoke English (of which there were several) to take us all around to sights together. Instead, the guides actively separated us whenever we seemed to clump together, like we were dangerous or something. We did have a pretty good time at all the food stalls when we got off the boat though. Since we couldn't understand the guides anyhow, we snuck off and ate dumplings and Chinese sausages while we had time because on the boat our only option was instant noodles, of which, one can get very tired. On the fourth days the boat docked in Yijang, we got up early and flew to Guilin that day.

Guilin and Yangshuo
Arrival in Guilin filled me with a huge sense of accomplishment after waiting so many years to visit this place. Naturally something had to go wrong, so all the ATMs decided to stop working and we found ourselves with about $10 in local currency and all the exchanges were closed for the day. Eventually, we did find that Bank Of China ATMs were still working, but not before we ran around stressed out in the heat, fighting off touts of all kinds and English skills, to find a stinkin' internet cafe so we could email our bank. The next day we visited the city parks, booked an English speaking river cruise (just a half day this time) and Heather had a rather remarkable shampoo in the middle of the night. The river cruise the following day took us to Yangshuo. Aside from the horrible maddening internet cafes here (which Lonely Planet audaciously claims are the best in China - unscrupulous twits.), Yangshuo has been very good to us. We've had lots of delicious food and yesterday we took a lovely bicycle/bamboo raft tour around the outskirts of town. The haze probably means that none of the pictures I got will probably do this place justice, but thats what coffee table books are for. Tomorrow we return to Guilin for a couple of nights before flying to Hong Kong for five days.

Heather has just completed a thorough itinerary of our last forty days on the road, so email us if you want us to send it to you.

Q: Why did you poke that anthill with a stick?
Q: Why did you touch the plate that the waiter said was very hot?
Q: Why did you eat the whole pizza even though you were full?
Q: Matt and Heather, why did you go visit Everest Base Camp while in Tibet?

Okay, so once we got to Lhasa, we immediately met up with two other people that wanted to do the same four-day trip to Everest Base Camp (EBC). (Hi, David and Yumi!) You get charged per Land Cruiser, so it's best to have a group. We got ourselves signed up and headed out bright and early on Tuesday morning. Much of the trip consisted of very boring (but pretty) driving, which I will gloss over below.

Tuesday:
Departed Lhasa at 8:30 am. Off-roading, off-roading, paved-roading, off-roading, monastery, lunch, off-roading until 8:30 pm. Slept in very icky place in Lhatse.

Wednesday:
Departed Lhatse at 6:30 am. Off-roading, breakfast, off-roading...

Caught our first glimpse of Mt. Everest. Wow! We could see the peak poking out through the clouds. It was a perfect white triangle just that much taller than everything else around it, so we knew in an instant that we were looking at Earth's highest point.

Second glimpse of Mt. Everest at the Pang La Pass at 5,100 meters*. Good picture spot, but too many souvenir stands.

More off-roading until we arrived at Rongphu Monastery around 1:00 pm. We got our stuff loaded into our room (again, not spectacular), used the world's most disgusting toilet (seriously, I've seen some nasty things before, but...puke noise), and set out to find a horse cart to take us the final 8 kilometers to EBC. We had a very bumpy one-hour ride along many switchbacks, which took us from 4,900 to 5,220 meters.

Once we got up there, it was clear that Mt. Everest wasn't going to come out and make an appearance. The clouds just seemed to hang perfectly in place. It was very cold and windy, too, as you would expect. But probably not as cold as you would think. There is actually a summer here, and it's not that bad. Which was a good thing, because I already sent all of my warmest clothes home. Matt bought some turquoise worry beads, and I hung out in the shelter of the China Post shack and sent postcards from the world's highest post office. I tried to send them to everyone I could think of, but stopped short when the man selling them started smoking. Being in a closet at 17,000 feet with someone smoking in your face is not pleasant, so I had to leave and I didn't get to send all of the postcards I wanted. Apologies if you didn't get one.

I should mention at this point that I was not having a good time on this trip. While I fortunately didn't have any altitude sickness, I did have very serious lower back pain that started on the train and just got worse with all of the off-roading. 2400 mg of ibuprofen per day barely seemed to be helping at this point. The awful accommodations and lack of running water and toilets just made matters worse. The only thing that would help was to really see the mountain in all of its glory. On the way back down in the horse cart, Matt asked if I thought it was worth all the trouble getting there. I said it wasn't, but that I was probably just cranky from my back hurting. I just really wanted to see it.

We got back to the "restaurant" and met some folks that were hitchhiking around Tibet, but were stranded for the night. We had a good time decompressing with them and it made me feel a little better. Since we had cellular service on Mt. Everest, we figured some calls were in order, so we called the folks. At first my dad thought we were at Space Camp, which would also be cool. Finally, we each sucked down a can of oxygen and went to sleep.

Thursday
What a difference a night makes! We were scheduled to leave at 8:00, so we got up at 7:30 (not much to do in the morning to get ready when there isn't any running water). I looked out the window and my jaw dropped. There was a completely unobstructed Mt. Everest in the pink glow of morning, before the first light from the Sun had even hit it. We threw on clothes and were out the door with the camera in less than a minute.

Now, in an unprecedented move on The Wander Yonder, we are giving you a sneak preview at a photograph (click it to go to the bigger image):

Guess what I had to say when Matt again asked me if it was worth it.

We couldn't stay all day and drool over Everest, because we had a lot of driving to do. We left around 8:30 and stopped for breakfast around 9:30. At some point Matt realized that he couldn't find his special Mt. Everest worry beads. Always the believers in karma and the balance of the universe, we assumed that losing the worry beads was payment for waking up to such a beautiful sight. Boy, were we wrong.

We were forced to take a very long, off-road detour due to construction on the main road (or so our driver said, I never trusted him). He said we would get to Lhatse for lunch around 1:30. Well, around 2:30, we were still off-roading, and the expletive deleted driver drove straight into a small lake with the world's most slippery mud. Of course, we were stuck. This was a stupid move as there was dry land on either side. He just thought he was cool enough to make it through I guess. Grrrr. It was at this moment that I told Matt we would find his worry beads. This was our payment for seeing Everest at dawn.

There was a Land Cruiser right behind us, but we were too far in for it to reach the tow cable to pull us out. They eventually left and said they would send help. Another Land Cruiser did exactly the same thing about thirty minutes later. Then, nothing. This was the definition of the "middle of nowhere." Even the nearest village was a four-hour walk. Eventually, a pony cart appeared with two guys. Our driver and his friend, who we agreed to take along because he only needed to go "across the street," had been jacking up the wheels and putting down stones all this time. The old passenger was getting close to hypothermia as he had stripped down to his shorts and was laying in the mud trying to dig the car out. I kid you not, they tried to use the pony to pull the Land Cruiser out of the mud. Not successful. Instead the pony cart left with its owners, the old hypothermia man, and David, because he could speak Chinese and get us help. He was going to get to the nearest landline or cell coverage and call the travel agency, then the US consulate. It was 5:30 when they all left.

Matt and I were the only people involved that were dealing with the reality of having to spend the night out there. Everyone else had taken off their shoes and gotten themselves wet and muddy and cold. We stayed in our GoreTex boots, nice and dry. The driver used bottled water to clean his hands. We suggested that we might need to reserve the bottled water. He constantly got in the car and gunned the engine to try to drive out, usually making things worse. We suggested that he might save the gas to run the heater overnight. Things looked very gloomy at this point. There hadn't been a car in over two hours and nobody was pretending there would be one. But there was one Land Cruiser, finally. But it passed by and didn't stop. There is a very special place in Hell, I tell you.

At the same moment, five figures appeared on the horizon. They were five teenage Tibetan boys that looked like they were walking somewhere. It seemed odd, with the nearest village a four-hour walk away, they must have been walking for a long time, with a long way to go. By this point, I was cold and had gotten back in the car. Matt was standing on dry ground and the driver and Yumi were still collecting rocks and digging under wheels. I got a little nervous about being in the middle of nowhere, outnumbered by some teenagers, so I locked the doors of the car, got out my knife (blade open), and started figuring out how to MacGuyver a flame-thrower out of the cans of oxygen we had in the car. With the help of these five kids, the car actually got out of the mud. It was 6:30. I was still very suspicious of them, especially once they started going back and forth with the driver about their compensation. In the end, two of them got in the car with us. It wasn't long before we caught up with the pony cart, David, and old hypothermia man. They got back in the car, so there were now eight of us and our luggage crammed in there with all of the mud. Eventually, the driver made the kids get out in the middle of nowhere, but I guess they were ahead of their friends. We drove straight to Shigatse, where showers (our first since Lhasa on Tuesday morning) supposedly awaited us. Somewhere along the way, I reached into one of our bags and found Matt's worry beads. Do I know karma or what? It was 11:30 pm when Matt and I got into our hotel room.

Friday
At 9:00 am, we headed to the Tashilhunpo Monastery, which is the seat of the Panchan Lama. I've been kind of templed out, but it was actually pretty cool. There is one chapel that houses a sitting Maitreya Buddha. The statue stands 86 feet high and is decorated with gold, copper, pearl, amber, coral, diamond, and other precious stones. The statue was handcrafted by 900 craftsmen in 9 years. Finally, we met the crew, had lunch and hit the road. It was a better day of driving on paved roads, and we were back in Lhasa around 4:30 pm.

Now it's almost midnight, and the yak enchilada (seriously) I had for dinner isn't keeping me full. I'm extremely tired after such a marathon trip to a place that so few will ever see, and such a marathon blog post about it. It's time to convince Matt to head back to the hotel for some well-deserved shut-eye.

*Apologies for all of the metric use, but that's how I've been forced to think for eight months, and it's starting to stick. At least I haven't started spelling it "metres." I will quickly enroll in a re-education course upon our arrival home. I promise. For now, go to Google and type: convert Thing1 to Thing2.

Greetings from what everybody around here seems to call the roof of the world. Lhasa sits at 3700 meters. Which is fairly high, we've definitely gotten winded just walking up a flight of steps, but so far we haven't had any major symptoms of altitude sickness. Which is good, because tomorrow we leave for Mt. Everest Base Camp at 5200 meters. That's about 17,000 feet, almost 3000 feet higher than the summit of Mt. Ranier. We'll spend the night at Mt. Everest Base Camp before returning to Lhasa for a couple of nights. Then we fly out to Chengdu in Sichuan province to visit the Panda sanctuary.

We got to Lhasa via the new express train from Beijing thanks to some serious help from family, friends and a complete stranger. We are very grateful. The train was an interesting experience. We frightened away one couple from our sleeper cabin and they were replaced by a man travelling with his grandson, who shared a bunk, and two full grown humans were moved into the extra bed. That's 8 people in a six person sleeper. Fortunately one of the full grown humans found an empty bed next door, but we still had 8 loads of luggage and 7 people in a six person sleeper. It would have made for an interesting ride anyway even if the child wasn't a complete disaster. He had a rather explosive amount of energy which we suspect was exacerbated by the coffee drinks his grandfather fed him in the morning. Which in turn made him have to pee rather a lot, which he did into an empty water bottle. That worked out OK when grandad was awake and could supervise the process, but grandad got a bit sleepy from the altitude on day 2 and the child naturally didn't want to wake him up for such a mundane task. Unfortunately, this resulted in some spillage.

Oh, and later there was spewage as well. Tell me this, if you operated a train that ran at high altitude, which makes some people queasy, and still others get queasy just from motion sickness, you would provide some kind of bag like one finds on airplanes right? I thought so. Man would that have made the morning of day 2 a lot cleaner. All three sinks were clogged and the bathrooms had taken some hits as well. It was pretty gross. So then the terror child goes and pukes in our cabin. To be fair to him, he did try to make a run for it as he drooled a bit on the floor in a clear pre-spew signal. Then Grandpa did the unthinkable. He restrained him, and went to clean up the measly saliva that had hit the floor. Serves him right, 6 seconds later he had puke on his pants. I have no idea how he didn't see that coming. Our belongings were mostly spared. Heather's backpack got just a tiny bit on it. Heather also had some fragrant wet wipes that managed to mask most of the smell.

I just reread all this and it sounds like it was a 47 hour nightmare, but it really wasn't all that bad. I spent most of the trip asleep in my berth and there was some stunning scenery in the last 6 or so hours of the trip. Heather had a little bit more trouble than I did since she was on the bottom berth, but she doesn't seem too scarred.

I had better leave it there for now, we have a few more things to do to get ready for the trip tomorrow, like buy some Oxygen.