January 22nd: road to Rongjiang (roof of our bus dragging along the belly of heaven)

Day 128

We checked out officially from the hotel. the hot water went pants, so I ghetto-showered with an Old Spice handi-wipe. As soon as we stepped outside a bus pulled up and we climbed aboard, bound for Guiyang, the hub for our intended destinations in Guizhou province.

A lady two seats up in the next row vomited repeatedly into a garbage bag at the tail-end of the trip. A kung fu comedy ("Lion Princess"?) was screened instead of the Chinese Yanni KTV rot we were subjected to upon first boarding. At Guiyang, we ate some fried dumplings and a lady from a neighboring kiosk dragged her son over, forced him to practice English with us. She pointed and he recited: "Elbow, head, table, chair, etc." When she pointed at Heather and I, he said "Auntie, Uncle." It was highly endearing.

We boarded a bus to Kaili at 1:30. I filled the time writing, listening to Grandaddy and George Harrison and grinning at the landscape which was lit by the suddenly unreclusive sun. We arrived in Kaili (which seemed like a better Guiyang, the brief glimpse we got) and practically got right back on a bus headed for Rongjiang. It was only after we got our tickets that we discovered the bus ride would be seven hours long. The bus was filled to capacity and an alarming number of carsick bags were being handed out.

The ride itself was extraordinary and we quickly forgot the travel time as we ascended into the mountains on an endlessly winding road, at times perilously close to the edge and taking blind hairpin turns at an alarming speed, with a single report of the horn as caution. The terrain was similar to Colorado's rockies, splashed with autumn color and dotted with early 20th century villages, frontier clapboard, mixed with alittle Rohan. The vast view was breathtaking, with a mindblowingly tranquil sunset near the summit where you could watch the sun completely disappear like a pocketwatch pushed into a breast pocket. Incredible.

At the summit, we stopped to eat a brilliant stir-fry in a converted-barn eatery. The meat and vegetables tasted as fresh as the mountain air they were marinated in. Fantastic, even though the rice tasted a little like the fuel used to cook it. Thirty minutes after, we stopped to change a tire. This prompted a handful of gents to go ahead and light up. No one else was opening a window and I was suffocating, so I slid mine open angrily. I hadn't noticed that the guy ahead of me was sleeping against the stationary window, and when I shoved mine open, it bludgeoned him. His head jostled like a mannequin. I whispered "Oh shit." The blow woke him, but barely. He blearily looked around confused for a second, then went back to sleep. Heather and I tried to stifle our laughter in the back. I would have felt bad about it if it wasn't so godddamned funny.

Now that night had fallen, there was a bad kung fu film on, so I put my headphones on and listened to Queen II and Radiohead's "Kid A." I realized a vocal meoldy in my song "At the In-Between" was too similar to a line in "Optimistic." I began brainstorming changes to the vocals and some arrangement tinkering to make it dynamic. we then rolledinto Rongjiang, a total market town at the foot of the mountains. We checked into the nearest and consequently poshest hotel in town. There was a teahouse/bar adjacent to the front desk adn after dropping our bags off at our rooms, we cloistered ourselves therein, toasted to arriving safely. The bus ride's beauty was matched only by its danger.

A table across the way housed the owner and some suited cronies. Farther back, a table of 17 and 21 year olds hailed us. We gan bei'd with both parties throughout the night. A lot. The music piped in was soporific in a bad way and I talked the owner into letting me put something else on. I "DJ'd" Faithless "Sunday 8pm," Asian Dub Foundation "Community Music," and half The Stone Roses. The bar closed at 2am, proper closing time. Mike retired sometime eariler in the evening while Heather and I played "Suck and Blow" with the younger crowd. (For those who don't know, "Suck and Blow" is a a drinking game where you take a playing card and suck it to your mouth and transfer it to the next person's mouth in a kind of "Berlin Wall kiss" and whoever lets the card fall has to take a drink as punishment.)

Heather and I staggered out at closing and went to sleep in the most comfortable soft beds since arriving in China.