The end of our collective gardening project, ’summer homestead,’ was bittersweet. Just as the tomatoes and peppers had started to ripen, it was time to break down the structure and give away the plants. On Saturday afternoon, Governors Island visitors descended upon our homestead: some timidly pointing to the plants they wanted, others savagely yanking bottles off the structure in a true New Yorker fashion.

a G.I. visitor brings some tomato and basil plants home on her bike

Upon breaking apart the structure’s panels, we discovered that thousands of earwigs had colonized the summer homestead. We were simultaneously touched by this and completely creeped out, as swarms of shiny beetle-like insects with large serrated pinchers poured out of small holes in the wood.

leftover plants

In the end, we were  still left with more plants than we knew what to do with, not to mention an over-sized wooden structure. Thankfully, Paula, nuestras  patrocinadora fantástica offered to keep the structure on her rooftop patio in Brooklyn, so that the summer homestead could continue. We brought the structure to her apartment on a truck last night and will help her put it back together later this week (photos coming soon).

some plants find a new home near my recently washed underwear

for more information on this and the UHP’s other projects, visit urbanhomesteadingproject.org

Pierre, Mary and I visited the Amityville Horror House on our way out to the demolition derby in Riverhead. I felt kind of like an asshole skulking around the house taking pictures. We ran into a guy from NJ and a dude from England who were also skulking around. They actually went up to the house and knocked on the door!
Pierre told me that the couple who claimed there was a supernatural disturbance in the house are both dead now, and that they retracted their story a few years ago. Were they really lying? You be the judge:

The demolition derby was preceeded by some pretty awesome stock car races. We stood right by the fence, which was kind of terrifying at first, and resulted in us being showered with tiny particles of burning rubber, but it was the best seat in the house!

Mary's photo of bits of tire in her beer

I’ve posted some Maya tutorial videos on my site:

http://www.laurachipley.com/mayatutorials.html

There’s a lesson on basic extrusion and how to apply textures using the hypershade window. A lesson on exporting polygons for Torque coming soon.

I’m still looking for a Mac DTS exporter for Maya 8!

If anyone finds it, let me know!! I know it’s out there!

Here’s a short video clip from our trip to Lubec, Maine earlier this month, to celebrate Pierre’s 36th birthday! Our adventures included getting lost in the woods after finding a mysterious birthday gift, sneaking into the bowels of an abandoned canning factory, listening to coyotes, eating blueberry flavored everything and fighting with a reptilian border patrol officer over the disheveled state of my passport.
(video includes music by Hasil Adkins)

Here are some highlights from a movie Pierre made with his middle school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem (with special effects by yours truly.)

I got poison ivy all over my body after this little escapade with Pierre last September to Ft. Totten, the former headquarters of the NIKE missle project in New York City.  Those terrifying insects on the ceiling are only cave crickets…completely harmless!

Check out the site for the Hunter College MFA/IMA spring exhibition HERE

On a bike ride through the desert a few days ago, poor Pierre managed to sprain his nuts. A mild discomfort soon manifested in an inability to walk, and even more terrifying than the consequences of damaged genitals, was the prospect of checking into a grimy Western Chinese hospital. Luckily, with the help of some bed-rest and advice via email from my uncle who is a doctor, Pierre’s testicular trauma seems to have resolved itself. While it is heartening to see him walking around again, I’m disappointed that the leopard skin briefs I bought him for added support are no longer in his daily rotation. Sadly he seems violently opposed to any more bike rides, and is even less enthusiastic about horse and camel treks.

As Pierre lay incapacitated in Turpan, I walked in the blazing sun out to the Emin Ta, an Afghani-style mosque surrounded by vineyards and Uyghur families selling mounds of grapes on blankets. After being invited for samosas and tea with one friendly family, I was sent away with such an armload of grapes that I ended up forcefully donating half of them to some Chinese tourists at the mosque, who seemed perplexed and suspicious of my random act of kindness.

The next day after some intense bargaining (which included some yelling, flailing and me storming away and being called back three times), I hired a taxi to drive me out to the Jiaohe ruins – an ancient Han dynasty capital built on a plateau between two rivers, hat had been decimated by Ghengis Khan in the 13th century. To my delight, this site had not been afflicted by the building of a typical amusement-park style Chinese tourist trap that inevitably smothers every aspect of culture, history and authenticity in a place. The sprawling city ruins were left largely untouched, except for a few informational placards and signs forbidding climbing, drawing, spitting and defecating on the structures. As I was there during the hottest time of the day (it was 110 degrees and the sweat evaporated off my skin so fast that by the end of the day I was covered in a thin layer of salt), I had the pleasure of wandering through the ancient temples, homes and original city streets without another person in sight for nearly the entire time I was there. It was silent except for the incessant echo of a donkey braying from a vineyard nearby. In one area, in front of a giant pit, there was a placard telling of how the remains of over 200 infants had been found buried inside a government building, a discovery of which no one has ever been able to find and explanation.

Leaving Turpan we were unable to secure train tickets to our next destination, so we were diverted to the capital of Xinjiang Province, Urumqi. After being quoted ridiculous room prices at the train station hotel, we were led to a dirt-cheap flophouse by an old man. Our squalid room came replete with a large booger wall and a hot water thermos that smelled as if it had been refilled in the toilet.

The windows of the room opened onto the corridor, and as it was sweltering, we were forced to keep them open despite the parade of nosy hotel guests who stopped to gawk at us. The room next to the shared bathroom was occupied by a Western couple – the woman was about 8 months pregnant, and she and her shirtless boyfriend/husband were engaged in a slobbering heavy petting session in the hallway every time we passed by. Inside the bathroom the florescent light was on the fritz, bathing the room in an eerie green strobe. Naturally the room was also bathed in filth and there was about an inch of water on the floor in some places. During a late-night visit I heard mysterious sounds of something lurking in the toilet trough that ran under the stalls. I felt as if I’d wandered onto the set of a serial-killer movie, and I feverishly tried to finish my business and get away as fast as I could.

On the day we were to depart Urumqi we had about 10 hours to kill before our train, so we stowed our luggage at the station and walked around the city. We found ourselves in the city park, which was comprised of a pond, some benches, and several large stages on which animatronic Uyghurs on camels mechanically swayed. The Chinese government loves artificial displays of Uyghur happiness. Every major stop along the Silk Road has been marked with giant billboards of jubilant Uyghurs greeting Mao and Hu Jintao with open arms, gigantic statues of Mao in city centers, and in Hotan, a giant statue of Mao towering over a Uyghur man as they shake hands. The region of Xinjiang has been disputed for nearly 2000 years – the last 200 years have seen several attempted uprisings against the Chinese from the Uyghurs (most recently in the late 90’s), each brutally crushed. The resentment of the Han by the Uyghurs burns bright as more and more Han are transplanted to Xinjiang, and more traditional Uyghur cities are reborn in a mass of homogenized concrete and bathroom-tile. It is easy to see both the utter lack of integration between the Han and the Uyghurs, and the fact that Xinjiang is home to a culture that is utterly unique to the rest of China. Approaching the province one enters a realm where pork and beer turn to mutton and tea, Buddhism and Taoism become Islam, Mandarin becomes the Turkic-based Uyghur language, and the black hair and almond-eyes of the Han people disperses into a population of people that could pass for Irish, Italian, Turkish, Persian, Pakistani and Russian.

In Urumqi we were happy to find, for the first time in many weeks, an underground mini-mall selling thousands of dvd’s. I also picked up a pirated copy of the new Harry Potter book for $2.50, which except for occasional spelling mistakes and typos, is the real deal (unlike “Harry Potter and the Auspicious Dragon,” a popular knockoff that can be found in various Chinese bookstores).

As we waited in the station for our train from Urumqi to Kuche, the railroad attendants locked the gates to each seating section with chains, a scene reminiscent of a livestock market. It was a strange yet comforting sight, knowing that we would be able to safely enter our train car without being pushed and trampled. In China you are almost always assigned a seat, whether it’s on the train, bus, or even in a movie theater. Sadly this system does little to quell the mass hysteria that ensues when a clump of people all try to accomplish the task of getting to their seats simultaneously. Pierre and I have been forced to adapt to this system, and we have found that we are not above violently swinging our backpacks to knock the competition over when trying to navigate a crowd. I have also developed a new method for dealing with line-cutters. Quite often people will try to edge you out of the way when you are buying a train or bus ticket at the window, and finding that verbal protests are rarely of use, I’ve resorted to grabbing the line-cutter squarely by the chest and shoving them out of the way with both hands. The momentary look of shock on the culprit’s face is priceless, as they stagger backwards momentarily, only to turn around and try to cut in front of the person at the next window.

In Kuche, which is on the Northern pass of the silk road, we checked into a hotel near the bus station. Upon entering the room, it was only a matter of minutes before an audacious cockroach ran up the front of Pierre’s tee-shirt. This was ominous indeed, as we soon discovered that the entire room was crawling, not to mention the hallway, in which a frazzled hotel attendant tried to quickly stomp on the roaches and then quietly sweep up the carcasses before the patrons noticed. It was a futile task to say the least, and after being moved to a new room in which the roaches streamed steadily out from under a diseased looking carpet, we packed our bags and marched down to the front desk for a refund. In an act of unprecedented (at least in China) concern for the customer, the hotel manager showed us to a spotless newly-renovated room on he second floor, that she insisted had no roaches. To our surprise she was right. Sadly we were soon afflicted by vermin of a different kind, in the form of a fellow American teacher named Joel. Joel seemed delighted by our company, and as we are always happy to make new friends on the road, we invited him to share a taxi out to see some ruins the next day. This outing, unbeknown to us at the time, set a dangerous precedent of Joel attempting to be in our company every moment of every day, constantly changing his plans to get on the same trains as us, go to the same hotels, share the same dorm rooms, eat at the same restaurants and visit the same sites. His constant presence was underscored by his tendency for non-sequitur descriptions of his sex-life with his ex-girlfriend that were so repulsively illustrative that Pierre and I both wanted to gouge our eardrums out with chopsticks. Joel was an angry, sexually frustrated white man, who was trying to reinvent himself on the road, claiming expertise in professional photography (but he didn’t know what an f-stop was) and lecturing at length on everything from geology to break dancing and all things Chinese and related to Chinese travel. The harder we tried to get away from Joel, the more desperately he clung – he was impervious to hints and we were quickly approaching having to resort to the “get the hell away from us” talk. After he tried to ingratiate himself with some Muslim men by saying he and Pierre were off to the livestock market to sell me to camel traders, and then later calling a fellow traveler’s Chinese girlfriend a money-hungry prostitute, we decided to take action – waiting until he was committed to going on a horse-trek with a local so he couldn’t follow us, and then jumping in a truck full of old Kyrgyz men to double back to the previous town. Four days later, as we ate breakfast on a bench in a town hundreds of kilometers away, we heard a nauseatingly familiar voice behind us and turned to see Joel and an older European woman, to which he had undoubtedly attached his soul-sucking tentacles. Did I see a slightly desperate look in her eye? Regardless, we were off the hook and he was now headed in the opposite direction as us.

After practicing some of our newly learned Chinese profanity on some cheating cab drivers at the Kuche train station, we punched and kicked our way through the crowds to get on the early morning train to Kashgar – a famous trading outpost on the silk road, near the borders of Tajikistan and Afghanistan. En route we shared a compartment with two young Chinese university students who were on their way to work on a mining project in the desert. They spoke some English and seemed a little uptight, so just for fun we asked them what they thought of the Falun Gong (we have a friend here in China who is a practitioner and her life has been destroyed and some of her friends have been “disappeared). It was quite interesting to watch them randomly access the propaganda they’d been fed and spit it out verbatim- apparently the F.G. had attacked China’s equivalent to the White House (one said “how would you feel if someone attacked your white house?”), and China is not interested in religion and belief, only economy. When we pressed them for what they actually meant by “attacked,” and found out that the F.G. had sat outside and stopped traffic and held signs. When I told them that I had done the same thing in front of America’s white house many times, they looked uncomfortable and replied “This is China.” We could tell we had moved into dangerous territory. We steered the conversation toward a subject we knew would titillate and delight them, the 2008 Beijing Olympics. According to them, at present, the U.S.A. is #1 in all things in the world, but with the advent of the Olympics, China will be #1 and the whole country must pull together to strive for this top spot! Also, the country who controls Central Asia, controls the world (and apparently China was well on it’s way to doing just that). It’s understandable for people to be guarded and say the “safe” thing in a society such as this, but for the first time we felt as if we were talking to people who actually believed it (unlike the bored, robotic mantra of “we love our Chairman Mao” that I used to hear from my students.)

Kashgar is a 2000 year old city that has managed to retain it’s flavor despite the harsh concrete makeover that has afflicted all but a tiny part of the city. The Sunday market draws thousands of people – Uyghurs, Tajiks, Pakistanis, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz – all buying and selling everything you can imagine – from spices and fabric and silk to house wares, donkeys and fruit. Many of the women donned their best clothes, beautiful sequined hand-sewn dresses and colorful head scarves. The streets were frantic with honking motos, donkey cart traffic jams and even the occasional camel cart pulling an impossible load of goods.

Unlike many places where the people scream at you for taking photos, the people here seemed to demand it, following us around, curious to look through our lenses and see themselves on our digital cameras. We hopped on the back of a moto-cart and went to the livestock market – thousands of sheep and lambs – some being sheered for wool, others being squeezed and prodded and haggled over (one peed all over Pierre’s foot), and still others being beheaded and made into stew. Hundreds of bulls and cows were also lined up against the stables, while people anxiously traded wads of cash and then maneuvered the bulls onto flatbed trucks.

In Kashgar we ran into an Argentinean guy, Nicholas, who we had made friends with weeks before in the Tibetan region. Nicholas’ hot Latin temper had flared many times during his travels in China – he had been pushed so far by rude treatment that he had resorted to mooning a ticket agent at the bus station in one town, pouring water through the ticket window in another, and finally in Gansu Province, getting so angry with a ticket agent who was trying to cheat him that he savagely ripped the bars off the window. The police were called and they ended up siding with Nicholas, ordering the agent to refund his money. Although these episodes might seem symptomatic of a rude tourist with a rage disorder, Pierre and I completely understood his actions – our own experiences as tourists in this country have pushed us to the brink of violence on many occasions. As I’ve said before, personal interactions with people tend to be very positive in China, but as a tourist constantly undertaking the impersonal dealings of eating in restaurants, buying bus tickets, riding in taxis, checking into hotels etc., you are continually cheated, mocked, dismissed and ignored. As the two young students on the train told us, “In China we look at your personality and then we decide a price.”

After a few days in Kashgar, and a failed attempt to renew our visas, we got on a bus headed for Pakistan – sadly we were unable to make it all the way there because of complicated visa issues. The Sino-Pakistan Friendship highway winds through the Parmir mountains – a beautiful range that spans from arid cliffs to enormous snow-capped peaks. We got off the bus near Lake Karakul, a glacial lake beneath a 7500m mountain. Around the lake were several Kyrgyz yurts – we ended up staying with a family in their cozy circular abode – in which the husband had actually been born. These people were not allowed to return to Kyrghyzistan, because they ended up on the wrong side of the line when the borders were drawn. We spent the afternoon drinking tea and talking to the wife, Nusaroot, before setting out for a walk around the lake.

It was probably the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever seen – an ocean of snow caps with a crystal blue lake. Occasionally we passed grazing camels on the hills. As dusk fell, an unbelievable swarm of mosquitoes descended on us – hundreds of them, biting any flesh they could find, our cheeks, eyelids, fingers, even crawling up under my hat to bite my scalp. We frantically ran through the fields, swinging our arms until we finally made it up onto a road and out of the tall grass.

That night Nusaroot tucked us in, tickling Pierre’s feet and making bawdy comments about the hanky-panky that might ensue from everyone sleeping on the floor together. As we were back in high altitude (3600m), it was hard getting to sleep. Late at night everyone awoke to Pierre yelling and moaning – I tried to wake him up but he wouldn’t snap out of it. Finally he sat straight up in bed and awoke – he was having a horrific dream that a child’s hand had clamped onto his throat and wouldn’t let go. In the morning we were awoken again, this time by a shaggy goat with huge horns who had snuck into the yurt and was nosing around in the dishes. The goat soon realized it had been discovered and slinked out of the tent.

We had to double back to Kashgar to continue along the silk road, and after a day or two of rest, continued on to the small southern silk road of Yarkand. When we arrived, we were turned away by the bus station hotel, then another hotel, and another. Apparently only one hotel in town was allowed to take foreigners, and when we finally got there they were quoting ridiculous prices. Evidently some official had decided to make some money with one of the local hotels, barring foreigners from all but one establishment, and thus eliminating the competition. The snarky woman at the hotel desk refused to bargain, thinking we didn’t have much choice – Pierre and I made the split decision just to leave town, but not before Pierre said loudly to theclerk “Yarkand” and then grabbed his crotch. There were no buses out of Yarkand until the next day, so we haggled with a taxi for a while, walking away and pretending to start hitchhiking before finally settling on a price.

Now we are in Hotan, site of the most fascinating and lively market we’ve seen yet. If it’s possible, the livestock market is even more chaotic than the one in Kashgar – ill-tempered cows trying to kick people as they run away screaming, and donkey carts plowing through the crowd at warp speed. Sadly, the famous museum in Hotan has been closed down, the mysterious and ancient red-haired mummies that were found near here have now been sent away to Beijing (In fact, every museum of antiquity in Xinjiang that we’ve tried to visit has been closed down.)

Yesterday we embarked on the frustrating task of trying to get our visas renewed. When we were turned down in Kashgar, we were told that we definitely could get them renewed in Hotan. The official who told us this would not back this claim up officially, but we managed to copy her name and phone number down for future reference. When we showed up at the PSB yesterday, we were told to go away and come back at 4pm. When we returned, some people made some phone calls and said to come back tomorrow at 9 am. This morning at 9 am we were told to wait outside a locked office. Eventually a woman showed up and looked at our passports and filled out some forms. She then sent us to another PSB office – a dank, smelly concrete mass with wet drippy walls and no sunlight – when we found the right room, the official said that we still had five days left on our visa and had to wait to renew it. When we told her what was said in Kashgar and gave her the name of the official, she changed her mind and said “no, the computer’s broken – it’s been broken for seven days, come back in two days when it’s fixed.” We argued and told her we were headed off to a very remote part of Qinghai province where we couldn’t get it done. She chatted with her coworkers for a while, made some phone calls, sorted through some files and then left the room. About 20 minutes later, two Pakistani guys came in the room and told us to come back at 3pm. At 3pm we returned, only to find that the office was still closed for lunch and wouldn’t open for another hour and fifteen minutes. After sitting in the drippy, moldy lobby for a while, an official brought us to a new office where we explained our predicament once more to a new person, and were then directed by the new official to go wait in the first office we’d waited in. A while later, a woman approached us saying that we would have to prove we had enough money to travel in China, and wanted to see a bank statement. We pretended not to understand her at all, which was successful in frustrating her to the point of giving up. We then were sent to go and redo all the paperwork and Xeroxing we’d done before going to the first PSB office, and then waited a while longer while 3 PSB officers had an involved discussion about different stamps and visas in our passports. Late in the afternoon we were unceremoniously handed our visas!

okay, if you’re still reading this, Pierre and I will now backtrack along the silk road and then across Eastern China to Beijing, where hopefully we will be able to get on a plane and fly home!

We’ve been traveling for a few days outside of Chengdu, back up to the highlands of the Sichuan/Gansu provinces. We are now in the Tibetan/Hui Muslim town of Langmusi, and it was not without many hours of traumatic bus riding that we arrived here. From Chengdu we had to travel three days over land, and the first leg of the trip took us out of idyllic, pristine China and into the ecologically raped, hazy, and dam-riddled China that we hear so much about in the West. For ten hours we passed an endless chain of mountains on which every last tree had been cut down. The earth was eroded and scorched, and on the highway it was evident that landslides are extremely common, especially now during the rainy season. Of course the dingy wasteland along the highway was given a surreal touch – certain sections along the road were inhabited by carefully groomed gigantic white fluffy yaks covered in ornaments, on which tourists could sit and have their photo taken in front of a mudslide or a hydroelectric dam. As we sped by these curiosities, our bus driver honked his horn on the average of 250 times a minute. Pierre and I tried to steal bits of conversation between honks but it became exhausting. Ten hours later we arrived in Songpan, a Tibetan town surrounded by mountains (what Tibetan town isn’t?), that would have been quite peaceful were it not for huge exhaust belching buses speeding down the main street, leaning on their horns and nearly mowing down children, monks, sheep and yaks.

Feeling tired out and suffering from the same flu Pierre had in Litang, I went into a massage parlor that was lavishly covered in Tibetan decorations, but should have been adorned with whips and restraints. The little Tibetan woman who worked on me seemed to think that viciously punching me in the spine was the way to make me relax, and for several days after the massage I was completely out of wack.

The next morning, not so feverish, but semi-paralyzed, we boarded the bus for the Tibetan town of Zoige, another mandatory stop on the way to Langmusi (which was where we were ultimately trying to go.) Pierre couldn’t fit in the seats, but the shrimp sitting in the front of the bus refused to trade with him. An old man in a Mao suit and cap insisted on blowing smoke in my face for the entire ride. At first I pointed to the no smoking sign, and when that didn’t work, I asked him to kindly open a window, which he refused to do. Other people on the bus were getting upset with him, but no one would step forward and confront him (typical for china) My only recourse was to take out my video camera and make a little movie about him and his impolite smoking habits, which didn’t stop him from puffing but made him extremely uncomfortable, which of course made me feel much better. Outside, hundreds of yaks grazing on the plateau, and a few nomads whizzed by. I noticed that many of the nomadic tents had huge billiards tables outside them and wondered if they strapped the pool tables to the yaks when it was time to move.

We checked into a trucker’s motel in Zoige. The ceiling of our room seemed to be afflicted with leprosy and the communal toilets were constructed in such a way that no bowel movement would ever be lost or forgotten. Zoige was not a happy place – the town was comprised of new shiny Han style buildings, but the people appeared to be very, very poor. The abundant friendliness we experienced in Litang was scarce, and although we met a nice English-speaking Tibetan guy there, many of the locals looked at us skeptically as we passed them on the street.

In the morning we tried to wash up with some of the hot thermos water we’d been given for making tea. We then got back on the bus for the final 4 hour stretch to Langmusi. The road was entirely unpaved, and we flew over a foot out of our seats on a few occasions, as the driver gunned it over huge bumps. After a few hours the bus suddenly pulled onto a smooth new highway. After about three minutes of driving on pavement, the bus pulled over at the crossroads of two huge highways and the driver yelled “Langmusi.” We were unloaded on the side of the road, in a huge valley surrounded by enormous mountains with no town in sight. The driver gave a vague impression that the town was somewhere to the west, so we set off walking into the valley along the side of the highway, dragging our packs (we were also back up to an altitude of about 3100m). Luckily a bus full of Tibetans, watermelons and peaches drove by and rescued us, and drove us into the town.

Langmusi’s streets were scattered with crimson-robed monks, Hui Muslims, Tibetans in long fur-lined jackets, and small black pigs gleefully snorfling through the garbage. The buildings were unremarkable, but the surrounding grasslands erupted dramatically into rocky peaks and red jagged cliffs.

We hiked up a nearby hill to the monastery and met a young monk en route who showed us to the sky burial grounds. A tangle of prayer flags were strung at the base of a small hill, and in front of it a smoldering funeral pyre. To the left was a large rectangular area which is used to hack the bodies into smaller pieces for the vultures. The area was littered with large knives, rubber gloves and the discarded clothes of the deceased. There were also several large concave rocks on which skulls are smashed and the brains mixed with barley. The surrounding fields were scattered with tarps and baskets and bizarre trash including a plastic hospital toilet. At first the human remains were not so apparent. The ‘chopping’ area was scattered with bits of bone fragment and flesh, but nothing specifically recognizable. However, behind this area down the hill was a gigantic pile of skulls, ribs, spines, femurs, jawbones, pelvises, hair and even a set of false teeth.

Huge black flies swarmed about, but to our surprise the stench of death was not present – instead the air was filled with a pleasant pine scent. On the way back up the hill we came upon an entire body with the long flowing hair of a Tibetan woman, that was in the process of being picked clean by the vultures. We were struck by how un-macabre and un-horrifying it was to see such a mass of corpses and skeletons. The Tibetans see the feeding of their dead bodies to the vultures as a final act of kindness, and as the ground is usually too hard and rocky to dig up in these areas, the practice has a practical aspect as well. On the way back down the hill towards the monastery we noticed that human remains were scattered everywhere – teeth and bits of jawbone ground into the path probably dropped by vultures.

The next day we were supposed to do a horse trek into the mountains, but the horses we were to use were usurped by a snarky Scandinavian family, so we set off into the hills on our own. We followed the river through a grassland valley filled with beautiful wildflowers – tiny orchids, irises and daisies, and scores of varieties we’d never seen before.

We found our way into a nomadic encampment and asked some of the inhabitants the whereabouts of some Buddhist caves that were supposed to be nearby. They pointed into a nearby gorge and said that we could cut through their camp to get there. As we walked through the camp, an old Tibetan followed us with an utterly perplexed look on her face. We also noticed that two of the gigantic herding mastiffs had taken an offense to us, and were barking and growling. To our dismay, the dogs were unchained. Tibetan mastiffs are notoriously vicious, and are allowed to roam the grasslands at night, making conditions extremely unsafe. Tibetans traveling long distances through the grasslands carry long poles with large maces attached to the end to defend themselves against vicious dogs. The dogs followed us out of the camp into the gorge, snarling and growling. We began to hurl rocks at them, but they were undeterred and began to close in. When they were about 15 feet away from us, Pierre threw a big rock as hard as he could at one of them. It grazed the dog’s backside and it yelped and ran off, the other dog following. We climbed further into the gorge, but the caves were nowhere to be found. We looked up to see some shepherds on top of the mountain, motioning for us to join them.

After a frantic scramble, we joined them on top of the ridge and they gave us a rhubarb-like reed to eat that was so long and hard that it could simultaneously be used as a snack and a walking stick. We hiked back toward the town on the ridge, escorted by hundreds of goats. We snuck down the opposite side of the mountain from the camp to avoid the dogs, and began the long trek through the grasslands back to Langmusi. The entire hike was about 20k with lots of climbing, and we were so tired and hungry when we got back to town that we could barely speak.

The next day we headed to Xiahe, site of the Labrang Monastery (one of the most important outside Lhasa and home to 1200 monks and nuns) and where we thought w could get visa extensions. We went to the PSB (Public Security Bureau/immigratio police), but the foreign affairs office had been closed and the officer we talked to told us to go somewhere else. We were disappointed, as Xiahe was a fascinating town and we wanted to spend more time there. We got on the bus and had a rough trip to Xining in the Qinghai Province. The bus kept picking up more people, including a nomadic Tibetan lady lugging a gallon of yak’s milk who stood in the aisle and for some reason decided to clutch my head to her bosom for stability. She was all wet from the rain and emitted the strongest scent of rancid yak butter I’ve ever smelled (yak butter is used in candles and lamp fuel.)

Driving into Qinghai was like entering yet another country. The grasslands turned to red clay mountains, and the tents turned to red clay huts. The inhabitants were Hui Muslims (a group descended from Arab and Persian traders), the men all wearing white skullcaps and the women black velvet headscarves. We arrived in the capital, Xining, which is a not such a glittering example of Han-style communist architecture. Even the mosques were made out of concrete and bathroom tile. The city seemed to be covered in a gray varnish, and the river that flows through has become a poopy-cesspool of raw sewage.

It seemed like the kind of place where it would be easy to contract Cholera, but the people were nice enough. We had serious problems finding the PSB office, and after asking for directions at a local police station, were treated to an exciting ride in a police van to the right office. They were more than happy to give us an extension – it costs a whopping 400 yuan for Americans!

Now we’re in Lanzhou, a big city in Gansu province, trying to get north to the desert an into Xinjiang province. The sooner we get out of here the better, as the people we’ve ha to deal with, especially the women working the ticket counter at the bus station, have all been devil-spawn. Pierre has taken only one photo here in Lanzhou – a pile of human feces ato a mound of lettuce on the street. We feel that this photo is a perfect and complete representation of this place! Luckily, tonight we leave for more interesting and friendly places..

We have finally left Kunming and have now been on the road for about two weeks. Thanks to the “Guanxi” (connections) of a friend, we avoided having to return to Hanoi for our visas, and instead were awarded new ones from the immigration police for the small price of 160 yuan ($20)and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. We began by heading north to Lijiang, an ancient town of canals and traditional architecture inhabited by the Naxi people.

The Naxi are a matriarchal society in which women control all of the finances, business, and do all of the hard labor. The men raise the children and contribute to the community’s arts and crafts. We stayed in a small Naxi guesthouse in a pleasantly quiet part of the old city. Sadly, much of Lijiang was in chaos when we were there, as the Chinese government had called and impromptu holiday in celebration of some economic summit being held in Kunming. This resulted in mobs of cowboy hat-wearing, bellowing Chinese tourists, armed with video cameras , stampeding through the narrow cobblestone streets in their matching tee-shirts. As usual we (Pierre) were a major attraction, and many people cackled and pointed at us and snapped pictures of us while we were eating. Our friend Daisy in Kunming taught us some Mandarin phrases that could be quite handy in these situations, including “fuck you and your ancestors backwards and forwards for 18 generations.” I felt that maybe this phrase was a bit too severe of a reaction, so I instead reciprocated the photo-frenzy and laughter, which proved to be effective. The collective mentality of the tourists we encountered in Lijiang seemed to be that of a spastic free-for-all in which they were purely spectators, on a different plane of existence than us. This is a common experience for us in China – in personal dealings we are treated with kindness and hospitality, but at large we might as well be flipper girl and bobo the dog faced boy.

After some aggressive bargaining, we took a minibus out to Baisha, which is a traditional Naxi village and former capital of the ancient Naxi kingdom. There we observed life as it has existed for centuries,save the few tourist stalls that have erupted in the town center. Not wanting to go through the bargaining process again, we decided to walk the 15km back to Lijiang, through a spectacular valley encircled by immense mountains. As we walked, we at first thought the valley was merely a grazing area comprised of old farm fields filled with strange looking craters. We later learned that the area was actually a gigantic airstrip used by the Flying Tigers during WWII.

Before we left Lijiang for Zhongdian, the people at the Naxi guesthouse we’d been staying at gave us bags of herbs to wear around our necks for health and good luck. Driving north into the upper Yunnan province away from Lijiang was like entering an entirely different country – the Naxi villages transformed into small Tibetan towns, surrounded by fields of yellow rapeseed and barley. Flustered Yaks trotted across the street in front of our bus, and torn prayer flags were strung from poles on every hilltop. Arriving in Zhongdian we were relieved to be in a place where the locals outnumbered the tourists, and were given our first glimpse into Tibetan life in China.

It is very yak-oriented; yak meat, yak cheese, and yak butter tea are served at meals on yak fur table cloths. The city is overlooked by a giant golden prayer wheel that takes the hard work of several people to spin. On the outskirts is a huge Tibetan Lamistry and temple complex with 780 monks in residence. We encountered a forceful 16-year-old monk in a temple who screamed at us “SIT DOWN!” He then aggressively questioned us on our age, nationality and height, and then commanded Pierre to help him drag a huge tank of water across the temple floor so he could change the water bowls on the alter.

Back in town we visited an old man who inhabited a 16th century traditional Tibetan home. He had been imprisoned and his home partially destroyed (ancient Buddhist murals scratched off by soldiers and replaced by political slogans) during the Cultural Revolution.

Somehow the man had managed to hide some priceless artifacts from the Lamistry in his home, saving them from certain destruction. He showed us all around the house, including the spectacular family alter, spouting his disapproval for the regime who had destroyed his home all the while. He was quite different from any other old men I’ve met in this country, as he seemed to have no reservations about kissing me all over my face and grabbed me on my butt. At night in the town square a giant celebration was held in which hundreds of people danced in a giant circle around a single flute player. A local told us that it was a covert celebration of the birthday of a certain exiled Tibetan religious leader, whom I won’t mention by name lest this email be mysteriously deleted. Zhongdian is at an elevation of 3200m, and the next day we tried to prepare ourselves for the long journey up onto the Tibetan Plateau.

The trip is done in two legs which adds up to about 17 hours of bus riding. The first leg, to Xiangcheng was on entirely unpaved mountain roads. Luckily our driver was cautious (an unusual quality here) and the trip took us by towering mountain peaks and through countless interesting Tibetan villages, and to a marijuana farm where we had lunch (but we didn’t get to eat any marijuana).

Xiangcheng, while surrounded by beautiful mountains, has mostly been converted to mud from 200 simultaneous construction projects, and the one road through town is in a perpetual horn-blaring traffic jam.. We stayed in a spectacularly ornate traditional Tibetan family home and watched a violent thunderstorm over the mountains (which incidentally knocked out all the electricity and made venturing down three flights of ladder-like stairs to the outhouse quite treacherous – Pierre ended up peeing in a bottle to avoid this trip.)

The next day, armed with altitude sickness medicine, but not being able to find anything to eat except crackers, we got on a Litang-bound bus and braced ourselves for the climb to nearly 4700m (almost 1000 m higher than Lhasa). The first leg of the trip took us around hairpin turns on guardrail-free roads that overlooked drops of several thousand feet. Slowly the ride became less frightening as we entered the other-worldly landscape of the Tibetan Plateau. Covered in glacial rocks and completely devoid of trees, only grass, tiny yellow flowers, yaks, marmots and nomadic Tibetan people exist here. At one point the air seemed so thin that the engine of the bus could no longer drive at normal speed, and we chugged along the winding roads, dizzy and confused. The bus overheated and we ended up having to siphon water out of a nearby stream to get it going again.

Litang is one of our favorite places that we’ve visited in Asia. The town has largely been reborn in a mass of bathroom tile clad communist blocks with Tibetan style roofs and murals. Many of the Tibetan men here are tall and intense, clad in yak skins and Tibetan cowboy hats with wide grills of gold teeth, dreadlocks and gigantic knives in their belts. The women all wear traditional wrap-around dresses called chupas, and have intricately braided hair and rosy cheeks. Curious crowds formed around us on the street and followed behind us as we explored the town.

People yelled “tashi dele” (hello in Tibetan) from nearly every doorway, and burgundy robed monks cruised by us on gigantic Harley Davidson style motorcycles covered in plastic flowers with ghetto blasters strapped to the backs. We shared a yak-noodle lunch with a group of Tibetan cowboys who went crazy playing with our digital and video cameras. we then all proceeded to watch a gory propaganda movie about “the war of Japanese aggression’ together.

The food in Litang is simple and good, although we were not always so lucky to have such charming companions at our meals. As we ate boiled eggs and tea for breakfast at an open-air restaurant one morning, a small boy squatted down directly in front of our table and proceeded to defecate right on the ground. Children doing “#2″ in public is not a completely uncommon sight in China, but never had I experienced such a graphic and technical demonstration. He completed his mission and stood up, while his mother dutifully jogged over to sweep it into a dustpan. To our dismay, what we had witnessed could not be so easily erased from our minds.

We were a little worried about our ascent to 4700m, as the altitude can quickly become a big problem. We met some travelers who had gotten so sick that they had to be evacuated to a lower altitude. Armed with some herbal medicine, we thought that our gradual ascent via Zhongdian and Xiangcheng would save us from serious problems. The first day and a half we felt relatively ok – out of breath, fatigued,
and awakening in the middle of the night gasping for air and with a splitting headache, but still able to function.

By the last day, Pierre was incapacitated in the bed with a high fever, and I barely able to make it to the pharmacy to buy him aspirin. We knew we had to leave , and at 6:00 am the following morning we dragged ourselves to a bus headed for the lowlands (2500m). As the bus rolled over the seemingly endless grasslands, we waited with great anticipation for the oxygen that would make us no longer feel like we were slowly dying. But instead of descending, the bus began to climb hundreds of meters into yet another set of high rolling hills. As we reached the top, the bus driver suddenly turned of the ignition and coasted to a stop in the middle of the road. Both the rear tires on one side were flat, and we could see the downward slope of the deserted road in front of us. It began to snow. One of the passengers lit a fire in the wheel well of the bus because two of the bolts had melted into the wheel and could not be removed (and he thought somehow this would help). A construction truck stopped to help us , but their giant wrench could not get the bolts off. The driver got back into the bus, shut the door, and stared off into the distance for a while, before deciding to make the best of the situation and pulling a giant ball of yak cheese and a knife out of his pocket. The only thing to do was wait for another bus to make the 4 hour trip from Litang and pick us up. Pierre and I pulled our bags off the bus and decided to take our chances on the road. It was freezing cold, there was no air to speak of, and a leaky water tank in the bus had soaked our shoes. Luckily two Tibetan guys drove by in a minibus and picked us up. From there we took an extremely roundabout trip, from tiny Tibetan village to village to pick up different people and cargo to bring to Kangding (our destination). During one stop, the entire village came out to the van, one by one, to check us out and make friendly sign language/broken Chinese conversation. In another town, I went to the market for a few minutes only to return and find that the men in the village had all decided to get together and lift Pierre to see how much he weighed. We’re now down off the Plateau in Chengdu, a huge city far more modern than Kunming, and we’re breathing normally. In a day or two we’ll head north, back into the Tibetan world, and then north to Xingjiang.