 
# Stories from Elsewhere

### Solo Travels on Two and Three Wheels

## Carla King

### Contents

Introduction

1. Aren't You Scared?

2. Milk River: A Vision Quest

3. Pass on the Primate

4. The Cleansing Flames of Moderated Debauchery

5. Fête de la Musique

6. Alone, Illegal, and Broken Down in China

7. The Chinese English Teacher

8. The Hitchhiker

9. From Somewhere to Nowhere

10. Tips for Traveling Solo

About the Author

Also by Carla King

# Introduction

_Stories from Elsewhere_ is an anthology of stories about solo travels by bicycle, motorbike, and sidecar motorcycle in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I first put it together as a special edition for Overland Expo, a non-profit whose event profits ConserVentures, whose charter is to explore our world and preserve our heritage—a mission dear to any conscious world traveler. In 2016, I decided to release it in ebook format.

### Follow me

You can follow me at CarlaKing.com and sign up to get more stories from the road as I write them. Currently I'm writing about adventures in Baja, California. Let's connect on social media, too. The links are at the end of this book, or you can visit my website to find them.

### About the stories

_Aren't You Scared?_ is from my book about motorcycling around America on a Russian sidecar motorcycle, _American Borders_. It is a reader favorite I think because so many of us who travel have been asked the same question, and many who are only considering an adventure so often timidly ask it. (For that reason I also included _Tips for Traveling Solo_ at the back of the book.) Another story from _American Borders_ is _Milk River_ , popular for several reasons: the setting—historic Blackfoot Indian country—and the three little girls who adopted and charmed me, and for the surprising lessons and inspiration we offered each other.

_Fete de la Musique_ is about three very civilized experiences in the French cities of Paris, Lyon, and Nice during the annual music festival each summer solstice. _Pass on the Primate_ is quite the opposite kind of travel story, about a solo bicycle journey through West Africa. It was my first published travel story and an award winner.

I included _From Somewhere to Nowhere_ , about an incident that occurred while I was riding a Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle in India, because it reveals so many of that country's colorful and contradictory complications. But most of all I'm excited to offer three stories from my next book, _The China Road Motorcycle Diaries_ , about riding a 1938-era Chinese sidecar motorcycle through the country. China was both the most difficult and the most fascinating place I ever traveled.

I hope you enjoy this potpourri of stories and I hope to meet you on the road somewhere. Please connect with me on social media (listed at the end of this book) and sign up for my email newsletter so we can get in touch.

_— Carla King_

## 1

# Aren't You Scared?

### Livin' in the USA

I was twenty-four when I married a man who seemed to share my desire to travel, but four long years passed before we made real plans to go. Once the date was set, the arrangements were left to me, as my husband was busy with a big project at work. I rented two Honda 750's to be picked up in Milan, made lists of gear, bought guidebooks, phrasebooks, and detailed maps to plan our route. But when it came time to book the trip, he backed out.

We hadn't taken a real vacation in four years—since our honeymoon, and had been dreaming of this trip since we had been dating, but it had been delayed too many times.

Of all my emotions, anger won out. I booked my own airline ticket and cancelled his motorcycle, then presented him with the itinerary and motorcycle rental agency information so he could make his own arrangements. He conceded that he might join me for the last two weeks of the trip, if the project was completed. He didn't try to talk me out of going, or suggest a new date that would be more convenient for him.

I thought he would relent, but when the day came, he drove me to the airport and I boarded the plane alone. Several hours into my flight, panic set in. Until then, anger and disappointment had obscured all other emotions, most notably, fear: fear about the future of my marriage, and fear about traveling alone. I considered turning back once I arrived in Milan, but when the plane landed, I boarded the train, determined to keep my appointment to pick up the motorcycle, which was to be delivered to me at Milan's _Stazione Centrale_.

The man who rode it there was in a hurry to catch a train back home, so after a quick review of the features of the bike, I was left alone in the midst of people purposefully going about their lives. Trying to match their confidence, I loaded gear from my duffle bag into the panniers, arranged my Milan map in its place on the tank bag, and headed south to a large youth hostel where I had decided to spend the night.

Milan is a large, confusing city built in concentric circles, and no matter what I did, I kept ending up back at _Stazione Centrale_. The street signs, embedded in the stonework of the buildings, were nearly impossible to read in the fading afternoon light, and traffic was unrelentingly aggressive. It was dusk when two cars in front of me collided, stopping traffic. The drivers got out with voices booming and fists clenched. When a young man on a Moto Guzzi pulled up beside me, I took advantage of the delay to ask him for directions. When he realized that I could not understand him, he led me through a maze of side-streets to the hostel's door. There, I fell into a deep sleep, despite the excited chatter of the young travelers who shared my dormitory.

The next day I took the autostrada to Genoa, then turned west at the coast. I ate lunch standing up in a zinc bar-café crowded with construction workers who were gulping tiny cups of espresso, stopped at a market for supplies, and found a campground on a bluff above San Remo. I pitched my tent, enjoyed the sunset, and slept soundly. In the morning I packed up and, just a few kilometers down the road, crossed the border into France.

By then my anger had subsided and I was alternating between two emotional states: numbness and extreme self-pity. After all, I was visiting places my husband and I had planned to visit together—the Riviera, the casinos of Monte Carlo, the Roman ruins of Arles. Each evening I set up my tent in a campground filled with couples and families from all over Europe, cooked a quick dinner over my camp stove and washed it down with wine. I went to sleep early so I could rise early for another day of riding, of experiencing all the sights and smells we were supposed to experience together.

The day I was to visit Carcassonne—one of Europe's perfectly preserved medieval villages and the destination I'd looked forward to most—I'd been riding for a week. By then I had called home several times, and my husband had hinted that he might still join me at some point on the trip. Riding to Carcassonne, I saw a telephone booth and stopped, because suddenly, I had to know. Plunking in some coins, I waited for the clicks and silences that meant the call was going through, and the remote, tinny sound of a telephone ringing in California.

"Hello?"

"Hello... it's me."

"Hey, I've missed you!" His enthusiasm thrilled me for a moment.

"I've missed you," I responded automatically. It was true.

"I don't know why I let you go alone," he said.

Oh no, here was that again. The only way he could stop me from going alone, I'd told him, was by going with me.

"I don't know, either," I replied. "But you could still meet me for a couple of weeks."

There was a moment of silence, then a sigh. "I can't come," he said. "I'm really sorry."

I wanted to be brave and say it was okay, but my heart had just frozen and I said nothing.

"Hey—"

I cut him off. "Okay. I just needed to know. Well, I'm out of coins. We have to say goodbye."

I hung up the phone and stood for a moment in the glass telephone booth, sweating in my leather jacket. When I stepped out into the warm breeze, I felt disoriented, but strangely lighter.

Toward Carcassonne, the smooth black asphalt wound through small villages and farms, past fields dotted with yellow flowers where black and white dairy cows grazed. My map was neatly laid out in its holder on the tank bag, the route precisely highlighted. Ahead, the sky was dark, black clouds gathering, and when my turnoff appeared I surprised myself by veering away toward a sunny blue sky. The road became a series of switchbacks that led up a mountain, and soon deteriorated into a mere path that abruptly ended at an outcropping of rocks and a small medieval village.

My wheels thumped across a wooden bridge that was lowered over a moat and I passed under a wide, arched doorway to find that the village had been invaded by a traveling carnival. I parked the Honda in a crowd of motorbikes and scooters and proceeded to explore the town, an anonymous tourist amongst the clowns and the music. Children lined up for carousel rides and others gathered around a puppet show in the village square. I bought a pink cotton candy cone and strolled down some rough-hewn stairs to a wide balcony overlooking the surrounding countryside. Rain was falling on Carcassonne, but here it was cloudless and sunny.

When I returned to the Honda, two elderly Frenchmen were circling it, examining the luggage racks and talking excitedly. They wanted to know where I was going, but my French wasn't good enough to explain so I took my carefully marked map from the tank bag to show them my route. They gave me lots of nods and smiles and, with my limited French, I understood they'd been in World War II and had known some American soldiers. They wished me a _bon voyage_ and, as I left, I tucked the map deep into my pack instead of returning it to its spot on the tank. Heading down the mountain again, I again turned away from the clouds and up the first road that led to a clear blue sky.

I rode aimlessly for long time that day, traveling on country roads, chasing the sun. When the clouds shifted, I shifted with them. I crossed roads I'd crossed before, and even passed through the same village three times. On the third time through I stopped at the marketplace and bought a baguette, some Brie, Nutella, and fresh strawberries, assembling them into a sandwich to eat on a bench in the little town square by the fountain. Villagers passed, wishing me _bon appetit_. Back on the motorcycle, I circled around again. The clouds lifted. I followed the signs to Carcassonne, found a campground on a hill above town, and settled in.

Each night until then I had studied my maps obsessively and talked to no one. Each day I had kept strictly to the routes I had planned. That night I squeezed in between a German couple in a tent and an English family in a caravan. I offered them chunks of chocolate I'd bought in the market and was offered a beer in return. The Germans were going to the Algarve, the English family to the Amalfi Coast, both repeat destinations for them. I listened intently as they described the emerald green seas of the Portuguese coast and the charming hill villages of Italy.

That night I slept soundly until I was disturbed by something repeatedly striking my tent. Wondering if I'd camped underneath a nut tree, I unzipped the tent and searched around with my flashlight. A movement on the other side of the campground's chain-link fence caught my attention and I shone my flashlight onto a man who was masturbating furiously. He grinned lasciviously and didn't stop.

Outraged, I marched to the manager's house at the campground entrance and banged on the door. The bewildered proprietor answered and I went about the difficult task of attempting to describe the event in my very limited French. Finally, I resorted to miming—a short and embarrassing moment for both of us, but effective, because he suddenly looked at me with understanding and shouted, "Pierre!"

_"Pierre... il est fou!"_ he explained, twirling a finger around his ear. A harmless crazy, I understood him to mean and, as I stomped back to bed, the proprietor got dressed and went to deal with Pierre.

At breakfast, my neighbors were astonished and amused by my story, an entertaining tale that I would tell again and again in campgrounds all across France.

When the Germans headed for the Algarve and the English to the Amalfi Coast, I secured my tent and motorcycled the short distance to Carcassonne. It was all that I had imagined it to be. A thir­­teenth cen­tury UNESCO World Heritage site, the city had been restored to a pristine state. Walking up stone staircases, worn smooth by so many footsteps before mine, I was humbled by the long sweep of history, compared with the tiny blip my life represented. It put things in perspective and made me realize how truly trivial it was that my marriage had failed.

My marriage had failed.

That afternoon the deal was sealed because who should come rolling into camp but a lanky traveler on a bicycle, eyes wild and blue in a tanned, freckled face. His hair was long and streaked by the sun from nine months traveling in Southern Europe. As he went about a long-practiced routine of setting up camp, I admired the strength of his body from bicycling thousands of miles, the economy of his movements, his competence, independence, and calm demeanor. We made small talk that afternoon but by evening we were making wild love in my tent. It was as if I had summoned him; a pagan god to help me begin my new life.

We stayed in Carcassonne for two more days and then he climbed on the back of my motorcycle and we skirted the Pyrenees and headed toward the Atlantic Coast. The motorcycle engine rumbled as his hands lightly held my hips, wandering, searching, making me laugh hysterically. I rode aggressively, taking curves fearlessly, speeding on the highways and bumping down rough roads. We camped wherever we landed, on beaches or woods or outside the walls of ancient villages.

He was a quiet man who busied himself with cleaning the camp stove, meticulously organizing items in their proper places, and carving small shapes from bones he'd found on a Greek beach. He gave me one, a curved ellipse that fit my thumb. I rubbed it like a genie's lamp. His voice was soft but his words were deliberate, well enunciated, a habit acquired from having to speak slowly and clearly to foreigners for nine months. We did not talk about knowing each other in the future.

He was twenty-four and had already traveled nearly every continent. I was astounded at his certainty and confidence and also at his willingness to spend so much time alone in foreign places. He had many traits that I valued and wanted to cultivate in myself. I had longed to travel since my teens but it had never, ever occurred to me to go alone. I was here now only because I had boarded that plane out of pride and anger, and, maybe, a subconscious realization that my marriage was not going to work. Thanks to this new man, I was no longer mourning.

We lost track of time. One Sunday, because all the shops were closed, we gathered wild strawberries and stole some potatoes from the edge of a garden for our dinner. We camped in a forest and felt like vagabonds.

There was a storm that night with thunder and bolts of lightening that split the sky. We ran naked in the warm rain and slipped in the mud, scraped our backs against the trees, screamed and laughed with abandon in the woods. The ground shook with the power of the thunder, as if the entire earth shared our passion. Finally, we rinsed our shivering bodies in a swollen rushing stream, then curled up in our sleeping bags, exhausted, to get ready for whatever the next day might bring.

When I returned to California I packed up a bare minimum of possessions and moved into a cottage in Santa Cruz. My friends were disapproving, but they gasped when they saw me. "You look great! What happened? You've lost weight! You're so tan! What have you done to your hair?"

In less than a year, I was offered a technical writing project in France, and I wound up living in Europe for almost two years. When I came home I saw my country with new eyes, and started planning a motorcycle trip around the United States. Wishing to parlay my technical writing and travel experiences into a new career as a travel writer, I contacted an editor I'd met at a travel writing conference to propose a weekly series of dispatches to the Internet. Then I asked a new company called Ural America if I they might want a test rider for one of their new imports.

The motorcycle was designed in 1938 and built in 1994. While I could have chosen a more conventional and reliable motorcycle, the Ural enticed me with unique qualities from a previous era—the graceful lines, the sidecar, the sound of its engine. I'd ridden many bikes since I learned to ride as a teenager, but I had never actually traveled by motorcycle until I was 28, when I accidentally ended up alone in Europe. Because a woman traveling alone is an oddity, and doubly so if she is traveling by motorcycle, people often ask, "Aren't you scared?"

Back then the answer was yes, but today I can honestly answer no. On that first trip, I learned to face my fears, and not let them get in the way of my dreams.

My timing was perfect and both parties said yes. The importers of the Ural were anxious to see if the motorcycle, newly modified for import to the United States, could successfully complete such a long journey. They knew it was likely to have some problems on American highways at American highway speeds, and they promised to be constantly available by phone to support me, sending parts if necessary, while they addressed the root cause of the problems at the factory. The Internet travelogue was a new concept in reality-based publishing and the editor was thrilled that I was a computer-savvy technical writer; he was having a difficult time finding writers who knew how to connect to e-mail from the road. In 1995 e-mail was a new concept in communication and the Internet was not yet widely known.

My proposed route hugged the edges of the continental United States, on backroads following the coastlines and borders, and weaving in and out of Canada and Mexico. It was a long trip—up to ten thousand miles—with a loose estimated time frame of three to six months. With that kind of timeline, I didn't care that the Ural's top speed was sixty miles-per-hour downhill with the wind at my back. This was going to be a backroads trip and I didn't want to be rushed.

Bob Gerend, the founder and president of Ural America, met me at SeaTac Airport. As we drove to the Ural warehouse near Seattle he told me stories about his trips to Russia. He had experienced gunfire in St. Petersburg and snuck through border checks in Siberia by keeping his fur hat on and his mouth shut. He made deals sealed with handshakes over lots of vodka. It was a new era for that country, which was in its first stages of its move to capitalism.

"They've been working under the communist system for so long that it's difficult for them to get used to the concept of free enterprise and competition," Bob told me, "but now it's an employee-owned company, and it's in their best interest to build a quality product. What we've done so far is to make sure that the best of the best parts get shipped to America. But we want to do more."

The Ural warehouse in Bellevue, Washington was stacked high with wooden crates packed with straw, padding the partially disassembled motorcycles on their journey from Siberia. The place echoed with the clang of metal tools and the soft chug of an air compressor. We made our way around the stacks of machinery to an area set off by workbenches, and there was my Ural, dressed in sleek black paint that seemed poured over the curves of the tank, the fairing, the fenders, and the huge lump of the sidecar. It was everything I'd hoped for... unique and a little crazy.

I was introduced to the Russian mechanics and shook hands with Randy, the warehouse supervisor, who would be my technical contact. Then Bob and I rode to a nearby parking lot so he could teach me how to handle the sidecar. The bike rode more like a sports car than a motorcycle, requiring more upper than lower body action to turn it. On left turns it leaned heavily onto the sidecar wheel and on right turns the sidecar became lighter and could fly up into the air in a maneuver called "flying the chair" that was frightening and thrilling at the same time. It was important to learn how to handle it, he said, in case it happened unexpectedly on a quick turn at high speed.

After my lesson I loaded my gear into the sidecar to start my journey back to Santa Cruz on the Coast Highway. The scenery along this road is fantastic, making up for the fact that it is often foggy and cold, especially in summer. All along the road I returned waves from other motorcyclists, kids in minivans, old ladies, and truckers. It was a pleasant surprise. People loved this bike. It seemed to run nicely, and I quickly got used to its quirks, the way the sidecar pulled, its sounds in different gears, the kick-starter, and the handy reverse gear that would delight so many bikers during the trip.

Somewhere near Bandol, I passed a white clapboard church on a neat blanket of grass facing the sea, then pulled into a gas station. The attendant walked out to help me. He was an unkempt man in his forties, with longish gray hair uncombed under his baseball cap. The sewn-on label of his blue-and-white uniform was embroidered with the name Bob, finished off with a Singer sewing-machine flourish. He handed me the nozzle.

"I've seen those overseas," he told me, and then mentioned he was about to leave Oregon for Paris... again. He'd lived there for eleven years. "Can't get good work here," he said. "Hate to leave all this for Paris." He waved his hand toward the ocean, glittering slate-gray under the clouds, then pointed to the soft, green hills. "It's so peaceful here, but my wife is already there."

We practiced our French, and he surprised me with his accent—a northern, technical French that was fluent, slangy, and easy. He would work as a technician in a big new theater outside of Paris.

All the way back to Santa Cruz, people engaged me in conversation, curious about the bike and about my experience as a woman riding alone. And the same concern was almost always voiced: "Aren't you scared?"

I tried to explain that my desire to travel was greater than my fear of traveling alone. Some understood, but most shook their heads and said, "You're braver than I am."

_Aren't You Scared?_ is excerpted from the book _American Borders_ , available at all the usual retailers in stores and online. Learn more about this and other books at CarlaKing.com.

Liked this story? Get more free adventure stories, travel tips, and gear reviews by signing up at www.CarlaKing.com

## 2

# Milk River: A Vision Quest

### Sacred places. Sacred people.

The Native Canadians had made this a sacred place. They trekked over the windy, barren plains, attracted, as I had been, by the small mountain peak in the distance. After trudging day after day over the flat land, they must have been astonished to arrive at the lip of a river valley so abruptly that if they had been traveling on wheels at high speed they would have fallen right in.

I arrived just before sunset, in time to see the slow, muddy river below winding its way around the busy campground. In the valley lay clusters of twisted rocks like petrified tornadoes, laced with pits and holes that caused some to resemble faces. The tops of the rocks were wider than their stems, providing perfect perches from which to watch the subtle spectacles of nature. Children were chasing each other around the forest of miniature buttes and scrambling up the twisted, slender stems to hoist themselves on top.

I rode into camp and chose a spot by the river next to a group that included six youngsters, all girls. A man and a woman, who were cooking dinner, looked up and waved. The girls, who ranged in age from about four to twelve, all stared. I waved, and they waved back, and the man walked over to invite me to dinner. I accepted.

Moe and Kathy were on vacation with their granddaughters. They lived in Calgary and were here for a week. Before five minutes had passed it was clear that I'd been adopted by the three older girls, who clamored for my attention. I tried to excuse myself to go to the bathroom, which created a long negotiation during which it was decided that ten-year-old Melissa would be my guide. She took my hand to lead me there, chatting about the campground and the swimming and the rabbits. A thousand feet later we were best friends.

"It's so nice to make new friends," she said in her bright voice. "Sometimes you just don't know where you're going to find them." Her turned-up face was hopeful and confident.

She handed me a roll of toilet paper. "Here," she said. "I'll wait for you."

Back at camp, Chantal, who, like Melissa, was also ten, but "going on eleven," ran around energetically and told silly jokes to entertain the adoring grandparents. Christa, "eleven going on twelve," was engrossed in either a romance novel or a horror novel, which she picked up according to her mood. On one, the cover illustration centered on a woman dressed in a long pink gown, her hair spilling down her arched back, supported by the arm of a man whose face you couldn't quite see. In the background was an expanse of green lawn and a plantation home complete with gleaming white columns. The other book was covered in shiny red paper, the title framed by the drooling open mouth of a canine, its sharp teeth glistening.

It rained all night, but morning brought a bright, clear sky. Through my tent's screen window I watched a deer munching grass beside a table rock. I unzipped the door and startled two rabbits, who froze, except for their quivering pink noses, waiting for the right moment to bound away.

The girls were already awake and had signed up for an interpretive tour of the nearby petroglyphs and pictograms. When I said I was going too, Moe invited me to ride along in the truck with the family. The older girls, Melissa, Christa, and Chantal, spent the short trip arguing about whose "adult" I would be. They couldn't come to an agreement so as we walked along, one or the other, or all of them, would suddenly clasp my hand or pull at my shirt.

Boisterous as they were, the girls listened attentively on the tour as we learned that it was the Blackfoot who considered this a sacred place, and a useful place, too. They drove buffalo from the plains over the cliffs, and the animals' bones were still buried there, along with arrowheads and butchering tools. We also learned that the border between the United States and Canada had been called the Medicine Line by the Blackfoot. Having no concept of borders, they discovered that when they galloped south with contraband whiskey the Canadian Mounties would stop chasing them at a particular line. Likewise, the Americans would halt at the same line when the Blackfoot galloped north. Obviously, there was some strong but mysterious "medicine" happening there.

The trail was hidden from the vast grasslands above but we were in view of the wide river that looped and meandered in the valley below. We walked along a rock wall carved and illustrated by ancient hands. Some of the smaller children in our group whimpered; it was getting hot, and their mothers kept close to the shaded cliffs as Bonnie, our guide, told us about the art and Blackfoot culture. They had used every part of the Bison they killed. The bones were made into implements, the nose cartilage into chewing gum. They were our first environmentalists, she told the group. "Perhaps if we had studied how they managed their lives, instead of experimenting with environmentalism on our own, from scratch, we would be way ahead of our present situation," she said.

Bonnie admired the Blackfoot and had even been invited to some of the tribe's gatherings, which was quite an honor for an outsider. A true "interpreter," she consulted the elders about the meanings of the petroglyphs and pictograms on the rocks.

"Some people think a park interpreter is a language translator," she told us, but her job was actually to decipher the drawings, to figure out how the art related to Blackfoot culture. Sometimes a meaning was obvious, but sometimes the elders had to explain things to her. For example, Bonnie pointed out one pictogram where the end of a horse's nose was drawn with an opening in the line to indicate that it was breathing and therefore alive. If the nose was drawn closed, it was not breathing, so that meant it was dead.

However, the meaning of a small person drawn upside-down, with another, larger person standing over him, was less clear. Depending on the context it might be a birth scene, or maybe it was the spirit rising out of a person who had just died.

The drawings had played an important role in a ritual called a vision quest, in which young Blackfoot men would spend four days and nights without water or food on top of a hoodoo—the strange rock formations in this valley. During their time alone in the wilderness, the men would inscribe images on the rocks—but if a man admitted to making an inscription, his vision quest would be invalidated.

Blackfoot men are said to have looked forward to their vision quests for many years despite the required four-day fast and the threat from wild animals. It must have been much more frightening then than it would be today—back then there were many more wolves and cougars. The prairie wind would howl over the tops of the sandstone rocks and the imagination could run wild. Four days and nights fasting on a rock here would easily be long enough to conjure up a vision suitable for a secret soul painting.

Bonnie took us on a trail, closed to the public, where we were able to get very close to the drawings. "Just don't touch them, please," she requested, pointing out the damage already done. It was sad to see that modern initials and declarations of love had obliterated some of the ancient, sacred drawings.

After the tour, the girls rode back to camp in Moe's truck while I hiked back alone, wanting to quietly contemplate what I had just seen and heard. The trail was deserted, and I passed by groups of other pictograms. Only one set was fenced off—a large depiction of war with drawings of over one hundred characters.

Farther down the trail the hoodoos rose above me, protecting me from the wind, and I could no longer see the river. Tiny flowers tucked their roots into the rocks, their blossoms bright against the sandstone. Thick clumps of low-growing thistles bloomed purple around the base of the rocks; a cactus flower closed its waxy cream-colored petals around the moisture it had gathered the previous night.

I picked some Saskatoon berries, which were mealy, like old blueberries, and found some yellow currants. They were juicy and tart, like chewing tiny sweet lemons.

The only reminder of modern human presence was the occasional numbered marker that corresponded to a description in the trail guide. Over here was a rock shaped like a man's face. Over there were some more pictograms.

On the way back to camp I paused for a time to sit on a table rock in the sun and tried to imagine myself on a vision quest, restricted to that spot for four days and four nights. I realized I probably wouldn't have made it; it was hot, and I was very thirsty. Besides, I hadn't had a lifetime of preparation for the moment.

A noisy group of rafters came along and startled a deer that had crept up to the water, so I gave up the fantasy and followed the river back to my tent. When I arrived, I heard Moe talking. I didn't understand the first part of what he was saying, but the next part was clear:

"And she doesn't have to have a man around to help her do this, either," he said, in a stern voice. "You just always try to remember that."

_Milk River: A Vision Quest_ is excerpted from the book _American Borders_ , available at the usual retailers in stores and online. Learn more about the book at CarlaKing.com.

## 3

# Pass on the Primate

### Bungle in the jungle

At twilight it is difficult to tell the simple dwellings from the workshops, the brothels, the restaurants, the stores. In this quarter of San Pedro, a large dirty port town in the Ivory Coast, the buildings are all single room huts. They are built directly on top of hard dirt floors by nailing pieces of wood of various lengths and states of rot into a vague square, and topped with tin or palm leaves. At this time of the evening the women sit out front braiding each other's hair, and the men gather on certain corners, squatting over braziers to prepare the heavily-sugared tea, smoking cigarettes, and looking out onto the road.

Groups of children follow me at a distance, chanting _toubabo, toubabo, toubabo_ —their word for white person, derived from their word for doctor, the only white people they used to see in Africa. I am just a traveler, and I am looking for a restaurant, for something to eat.

" _Il y'a un restaurant ici?_ " I ask a woman who sitting next to a doorway that is ejecting great billows of smoke. She smiles and stands up and the bravest in my entourage of children rushes to touch my hair. Others hang back, fingers in mouths, staring at the white stranger. At first I'd found them amusing, but after two months of bicycling through West Africa I consider them as amusing as the constant buzzing of flies, or worse, the mosquitoes who had given me malaria in Guinea Bissau.

The woman beckons me inside the hut where an orange flicker of fire dances under a great iron pot. She lifts the lid and stirs a stew. "There is this," she says, displaying the white triangular skull of a goat; eye sockets, jawbone, teeth, ear holes. It has obviously been cooking for a long time.

I look around. There are no shop furnishings in the room, it's just a home. Another woman sleeps in one corner on the bare ground, swathed in bright yellow robes, and in the third corner a pet monkey also dozes.

"Wait an hour and I will cook you a special dish," the woman whispers conspiratorially. Her eyes glow weirdly through the combination of steam and smoke in the dark hut. With her gaze the now familiar sense of oppression begins to settle in my heart, along with alternating waves of anxiety, irritation, and guilt.

I do not want to eat in a hut again. I am finally in a real city and I want to eat in a proper restaurant. I thought she'd send a child to take me to a restaurant, but by eating here I'd be doing a great favor to this woman and her family. My 200 CFA, less than an American dollar, could be used to buy rice, manioc root, and other staples for her and her family. Or lipstick or nail polish. Or tea for her husband over there on the corner, joking with his friends.

I tell myself that I cannot always be concerned with how the family might spend the money. Tonight I do not want to be saddled with the welfare of a family or a village. I do not want to watch the women pounding grain and manioc for my dinner, I do not want to see the calluses on their hands, to see their skinny children, or to eat seated on a packed-earth floor or to be given the only chair and watched by dozens of hungry eyes while I am given the choices bits, knowing that when I walk away they will fall upon the bones I had so casually discarded to suck the last drops of nutrition from them.

After two months in West Africa I truly need a break. This is a big town. I want to sit at a table and be served, without any emotional baggage. I simply want to have a beer, and not become involved in a family's personal life. Just by sitting at someone's hut I would be face-to-face with this woman and the children whose economy I would be so directly affecting, face-to-face with the unbelievable hand-to-mouth existence of these people as they stare at me, not me as a person but as a piece of incredible luck that will bring them that pitiful 200 CFA, and maybe more if they are clever enough to win me over.

Of course the boy would escort me to my hotel that night, and another child, probably the girl, would be ousted in the morning, sent to bring me back for breakfast. They would lead me through the streets of this dirty port town, over the sturdiest planks that lie over stinking open sewers. If I eat here, I will be their patroness, and for the duration of my stay I will be pressed to take photos, to send money from America, or to be asked for gifts of jeans or portable music players. I would have to give them my address and promise to be a correspondent. Already I have dozens of addresses.

They know about the material things because this is a large town, unlike others so small and so remote that my only option was to call upon the chief to ask permission to stay and eat, and where I paid for my meal and my night's lodging—a tent pitched inside the village walls—in trade for cigarettes, sugar, candy, tea leaves, Nescafe, or, once, when I had run out of luxuries, my T-shirt. Money is useless when the nearest store is a hundred miles away down a dirt road.

I like the villages. In the villages there is no stench. In the bush, villagers are innocent of education, of cash, of technology, and of medicine. The food supply determines the size of the community. A malnourished mother will lose her child. The village will shrink or grow according to the abundance of the forest. It is clean, it is healthy, it is subject solely to the laws of nature.

Surveying the litter of San Pedro, inhaling the stench, avoiding the beggars with their oozing wounds and missing limbs, it is impossible not to feel shame for my culture, for the entire Western world, for pressing civilization upon these people. And it is impossible to reconcile myself to my guilt at feeling that the villagers who live in the bush—away from modern conveniences and subject to the laws of nature, and the cruel reality that only the fittest will survive—are better off.

Because here in a city, a family needs money. There is no jungle to hunt in, no forest where papayas and bananas grow wild, no plot of ground to grow manioc and grains. In bush villages, goats and chickens eat discarded fruit peelings, banana-leaf plates. Teeth, bones, and hooves are recycled into weapons and jewelry. Animal skins are used as floor coverings and blankets. The toilet is a hole in the ground which will be covered or composted.

There aren't enough goats in the city to eat all the cigarette and candy wrappers, oatmeal tins, and other manufactured garbage imported from the west. In the city, early in the morning, one is confronted with the sight of men, women, and children squatting over the sewers, or emptying buckets of sewage into the street. No, the Western world has not done a big favor to Africa by bringing it civilization.

Eating alone while being watched by a mother, her children, and all the neighbors in a city influenced by America and western Europe is more stressful than fulfilling. There is perhaps one metal spoon in the neighborhood, which is brought for me, because I am not expected to use my hands as they do. They watch my fingers handle the tool, bring the food to my mouth, they watch me chew, smile, swallow. In their eyes is respect, admiration, hatred, curiosity, jealousy, desire, and greed.

Farther north I came upon a village that had recently been blessed with electricity. An electric cord ran down from the top of a pole to an old color television set. The entire village gathered, about 50 people, mesmerized by _Baywatch_ and _Dallas_.

When I realized that they believe these shows to be documentary programs of American life, I tried to tell them that are just made up stories, but they didn't believe me. Probably they didn't want to believe me.

The static-ridden, blue-hued, flickering dreamworld was set on a low table smack in the middle of the dusty street. The neighborhood was gathered around, and Pamela Anderson bounced down the beach.

Several villagers looked at me, and looked back at the television, and at me again. "You look just like C.J.," one of them said, referring to the character Pamela Anderson played.

"What?" I said, astonished. And then I realized they don't see breasts. Breasts are everywhere, just like elbows and noses. Breasts are simply appendages for feeding babies, not sexual objects.

"It's just my hair," I said to the crowd of aubergine-skinned Woolof's, and knew it would be as difficult for me to pick out any one of them tomorrow as it was for them to distinguish between one American blonde and another.

Back in San Pedro, my eyes become used to the dim hut in the twilight. The smoke floats past in a stream out the font door. I look around. A back door. The woman stirring the stew and the woman sleeping in the corner. The front door. The pet monkey sleeping in the other corner. Kind of weird, considering the nervous skittering traits of monkeys, that this one still sleeps as the woman chatters to me about dinner in French and Mandike. She points to the monkey, so I look again.

The monkey is spread out, limbs akimbo, and its head, which I thought was resting on its side, is actually turned all the way around so that its chin rests on its back.

I step closer, unwilling to come to the obvious conclusion. Its pointy teeth glitter white and its eyes are open, dark, and soulless. The woman says, " _Oui oui_ , in a minute, I will cook the monkey."

Suddenly I flash back to all the stews I have eaten here in West Africa. Monkey stew. How many of them?

"No, _merci_ ," I say as I flee, rushing past, mumbling excuses in English and French.

Monkey stew. Not mutton from sheep or the skinny goats that roam the countryside or stand placidly munching in garbage piles in the cities. Or dik-dik, a tiny deer that live in the forest, or wild pig, or bush rat, an elusive night creature that a Peace Corps worker had assured me is delicious. A large, sleek animal, she told me, that eats leaves and grubs in the jungle.

I was hungry all the time while bicycling through the sub-Saharan bush and jungles. I'd eaten everything. Banana Fufu made from starchy roots or plantains, boiled, pounded, and stirred until it was the texture of uncooked bread dough. I even laughed once when I realized that the tough pieces of skin in my stew was porcupine hide. The woman who cooked it had shown me its quills.

I hadn't known the names of animals in Mandinke or Woloof, so I'd never known what had been in those stews. But most likely, for the traveler, a special guest, an entertainer who magically shuffled cards and carried a battery-operated lamp, a self-inflating air mattress, and other amazing wonders of the western world, I was served the prestigious delicacy of monkey stew—indiscernible to my palette from other flesh cooked in a tasty, pungent mixture of manioc chunks, yams, peppers onions, and garlic.

Wandering around this town now, my hunger is staved off by the horror of those dead limbs akimbo. The children must all be at home at this hour, for nobody follows chanting _tubabo_. I am grateful.

Finally, I happen into the French Quarter and see a restaurant. Adirondack chairs are pulled up to low tables and electric light bulbs dangle from wires nailed to the wooden ceiling. Refrigerators are in the dining area and I hope they are filled with beer. If so, this place will do very well.

Civilization, at last! I think, relieved, until the panicked bleating of a goat catches my attention. It is bound by the feet and hung upside-down on a hook in front of a hut directly across the way, writhing in the firelight. Before I can avert my eyes a hand appears and its throat is severed with a knife whose glint is immediately dulled with blood shining black in the faded light. The animal kicks and bucks and its back arches and writhes, even as it hangs there upside-down.

This is a common sight in Africa and I have seen this before. Raised an American country girl, I am no stranger to the wrung necks of rabbits and chickens, no stranger to the bleating of lambs and calves being led to slaughter.

Collapsing into a low wooden chair, I lean into its hard slatted back. I order a beer and it comes in seconds, the cold brown bottle coating my hand with cold sweat in the evening swelter. I gratefully drink from it as Willy Nelson sings "Georgia on My Mind," followed by John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High."

No. I am not ready for dinner. Just let me sit awhile, _s'il tu plait_. The patron bows and leaves me in peace.

I watch the goat's entrails unravel in a graceful spiral from the its stomach onto a cloth spread on the ground, and consider becoming a vegetarian.

Averting my eyes, I note my immediate surroundings. I see that all the tables and chairs are sponged clean, but bumpy with paint and varnish that has bubbled and peeled in the extreme humidity. I believe it never quite dries here. The dirt floor is pounded hard and level, swept clean of bottle caps, cigarette butts, and gravel from the street. I study the label of the beer bottle, and slowly peel it from the bottle. It's printed with the image of a man, not black, not white, holding a bottle of beer. It's a Bock Solibra. _La bier de l'homme fort_. The beer of the strong man.

The only other customers in the restaurant are three African men dressed in Western suits. They appear to be of different races. On a business trip, perhaps. The Woloof is distinguished by his purple-black skin and his height. The Mandinkes, who predominate in this area, are shorter and lighter-skinned. Perhaps they are entertaining their Senegalese business partner.

I've seen men like these in Dakar. They've been to Paris. Their accents are clear when they speak to me, the dialects faint. They know life on the other continent. I watch them eat, speak, do business. They laugh loudly and order more beer in curt voices and a quick snap of fingers. The beer comes at once and is served unobtrusively. These men... how do they feel about San Pedro, about Dakar, Abidjan?

The children are back. They peek over the whitewashed half-fence that separates the tables and chairs from the street. With my pale skin and blonde hair bleached nearly white by the sun I must look like a ghost in the light of the bare bulbs. One of the Mandinkes reprimands the children, startling them so that they jump and run away. The man laughs. He is polite, accustomed to Westerners, and he does not ask me my business, or invite me to join them. " _Mange, mange_ ," he urges in his deep, generous voice. " _C'est bin, ce soir._ " Nice evening.

His companions smile and raise their beers. They eat from plates piled with rice, chunks of meat, sauces. I watch the one who spoke to me. He gathers a little rice in his fingers and rolls it into his palm, adds a chunk of meat and then, with a quick flick of the wrist, shakes it back into his closed fingertips. He rubs the compacted mass into the sauce and pops it into his mouth.

Loretta Lynn's "Stand by Your Man" is on now. I raise my empty brown bottle of beer in the air and another bottle arrives. I drink deeply, the liquid cooling my throat and emptying my head of the inherent violence caused by my order for dinner.

Had becoming a vegetarian been a possibility, I would have entertained it. But however rich the soil and moist the air, the Africans are either unwilling or unable to tend vegetable gardens. Only in small areas of West Africa had I seen a fence enclosing lettuce, beans, and tomatoes. Maybe bugs or animals eat them. Manioc grows everywhere, but it has no nutritional value. Yams and rice don't take up the slack. Therefore, I am a carnivore. And soon, I will probably be eating that goat.

I had enjoyed goat, mutton, chicken, pig, and whatever was on those kebab sticks roasting at the roadside. At riversides and oceanfronts I happily ate fish and crustaceans. I had prided myself on being an adventurous diner and in my life had gamely sampled snails, frog legs, duck's feet, and even fried beetles. But now I know my limits. I draw the line at primates.

Country music hour is over and now they're playing disco. I drunkenly call, "What's for dinner?" to the proprietor. He walks to the stereo system to turn down a strange rendition of "Stayin' Alive" that I am sure was not produced by the Bee Gees, and returns to recite the possibilities.

Because it was market day today, he says he can send a boy for dik-dik, pig, or fish, as I pleased. My meat course can be accompanied by either rice or manioc root. And, for an extra charge there is a special dish. He knows it is expensive, of course, but this is a rare treat in a city and if I hadn't tried it—as a Westerner he was sure I might not have—he could even buy a monkey, just brought today from the jungle.

A version of _Pass on the Primate_ won first prize in the 1994 Book Passage Annual Travel Writer's Conference Travel Writing Contest and was published in the anthology _Travelers' Tales: Food_.

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## 4

# The Cleansing Flames of Moderated Debauchery

### An Irish dance

Standing on this cairn in the British Isles, my blood is warmed by the whisky and a simmering of recognition. Admittedly, the Celts have made generous contributions to my DNA over the centuries, so perhaps that is why everything seems so eerily familiar: the soggy ground, the voice of the man singing to the fiddler's tune, the straw-clad dancers, the embers now dying down and the feeling of cleansing and fertility. Anything could happen now, or tomorrow. Midnight approaches and I am conflicted as to whether to jump across the embers or just stand there transfixed by the glow, or kiss the man next to me, or do cartwheels down the hill, or lie down flat in the dirt and stare up at the stars.

I have done all this and more at the Burning Man festival, which has been compared to the Wicker Man ritual of human sacrifice practiced by Celtic pagans from these islands, but in fact is not related to this or any other such ritual, says founder Larry Harvey, who claims to have simply been motivated to burn an effigy as "an act of radical self-expression."

One can't help but wonder how many individual acts of radical self-expression have included fire and dancing and sex and drugs and music over the years, and happily caught on as an officially recognized pagan ritual. But since when does anybody need an excuse to burn off some energy? Wednesday is designated "Hump Day" in the working world from San Francisco to Belfast, and in Dublin town—eons away from the cairn where I now stand—Saturday nights are designated abandonments from the restrictions of the workday as evidenced by the bandaged knuckles and bruised cheekbones of half the young men walking to church on Sunday morning.

But back to Burning Man—what is it then? It is Wicker Man and Beltane and Samhain, it is the Maypole and Christmas and All Hallows Eve. It is polytheistic—choose your gods and goddesses, pass around the whisky bottle, or whatever mind-altering substance that comes your way, circle the flames and then run off and do what you will.

We humans seem to need to get wild and perhaps anonymous and break the social mores of the society in which we normally live. Practically speaking, Beltane has been said to be an opportunity to temporarily put aside marriage vows in favor of desire, but sexual licentiousness also may have served to ensure fertility among non-fertile couples, not to mention genetic variety.

Psychologically speaking, the ways that religion and associated rituals serve people and society are more complex. A professor of psychology and psychiatry (Steven Reiss) determined 16 basic human psychological desires that motivate people to seek meaning through religion: power, independence, curiosity, acceptance, order, saving, honor, idealism, social contact, family, status, vengeance, romance, eating, physical exercise, and tranquility. Of course, each of us has these motivations in different doses.

One year at Burning Man I spurned alcohol in favor of a psychotropic cactus that made the hundreds of fluorescently-clothed creatures frolicking in the desert look very small and fuzzy, inconsequential, yet irritating, like psychedelic lint on the grand great earth. Fires dotted the desert for as far as I could see, and the moon was full and bright. The peyote created an environment that provided the ideal antithesis to a life lived in the highly organized city of San Francisco. I needed a ground connection, some tribal society, and a heavily nature-bound ritual, and so I latched onto some Native Americans, their faces smeared with ash and charcoal, drumming and dancing around a pile of flaming jetsam while chanting ancient mantras in deep voices. I circled the flames with them and, as long as I didn't look up at the bright fuzzy lint, the earth felt solid and the sky reliably fastened to it. And for months I felt I could survive until the next excuse to misbehave.

I don't know if it's the Celtic DNA singing in my veins or if it's the effect of the whisky but standing on the cairn with the blazing fire and the Irish landscape still lit by the midsummer sun below my feet, lakes and greenery and clouds in dark blue sky, I know that this thing we're doing here is the real deal, pure and purposeful and heartfelt and joyous. Suddenly the earth feels wobbly and the sky is a melt of clouds and stars. I stand stunned, on the brink of fainting or running off screaming into the dark, but a man with a flaming torch takes my arm to guide me down the muddy road back to the mummers hall where music and dancing is promised. I look for my friends and find them similarly led. That is, all but Cathy, who struts confidently down the muddy road with a flaming torch in her hand.

The whole village slips down the hill, laughing riotously. I couldn't keep up but for the man at my elbow. Finally, we reach the mummers center where a bar is set up over a laundry tub, the old folks are dancing, and the teenaged accordion player is text messaging between tunes. Suzanne is dragged onto the dance floor and proves her grace by gamely following an impossible jig, her long blonde tresses streaming around her as a nimble, elderly gentleman flings her expertly across the rough wooden floor. The room roars with appreciation, and so that I am not chosen for the next dance I flee outdoors where some men stand smoking and some girls in a cluster whisper secrets, and still the sky is indigo blue with the stars poking through and a lake glimmers in the near distance.

It's early in the morning when I drive our group the ten miles back to our beds, not without getting lost in a endless maze of single-lane country roads. We sing sixties folk tunes to stay alert and then everyone is quiet as the headlights illuminate a tunnel of greenery that magically envelops the road. There's time to recall the silent treks in hiking boots back to the tent at Burning Man at sunup. I reflect that fire can be cleansing, and it's good to cling to the feeling of anything-can-happen as long as you can.

It's not often that one has the opportunity to join the sort of organized misbehavior that is encouraged during the multicultural, disorganized abandonment of Burning Man or on a midsummer hilltop. However large or small, I appreciate the chance and silently congratulate the mummers for keeping these folk traditions alive. Someone told me up on the cairn that they'd only recently revived it after the great distraction of "The Troubles." A much better alternative to bombing one another, I said to myself as another straw-clad villager leapt through the fire. And then another whisky bottle came around.

_The Cleansing Flames of Moderated Debauchery_ was first published in _Ireland: The Sacred and the Profane_ , a multimedia e-zine that you can download for free from WildWritingWomen.com.

## 5

# Fête de la Musique

### A memory in three parts

**Paris, 1987**

I saw Paris for the first time in late June of 1987, having arrived by motorcycle after a camping tour of the French countryside. I was tired and dirty and in shock from trying to find my hotel in the insane traffic of Paris after experiencing the calm country roads of rural France. But I was looking forward to seeing the famous city and, as it turned out, my hotel was not impossible to find and after a shower and a change of clothes I set off on foot to the Latin Quarter.

The evening was warm and clear and I was glad to give my legs a stretch after so many hours of riding. I strolled, wide-eyed as only a first-time traveler can be, walking the cobblestoned streets of the Left Bank, in awe of the city's beauty and spirit. I had never imagined there would be so many cafes, so many people, and so much music in the air! There was a string quartet on one street corner, a saxophone soloist on the next. In this square there was a rock band, in another an orchestra.

I wandered for an hour, darting down side streets and alleyways, attracted by the golden glint of a horn, or the strains of a violin echoing off ancient stone walls. The music wafted almost visibly, like cartoon character notes, dancing over the heads of statues, circling round splashing fountains and darting under the legs of tables and chairs of sidewalk cafes. I followed the black threads that carried the sharps and the flats through the air. I wandered, floating through the afternoon, smiling at Parisians who, contrary to what I'd been told about Parisians, smiled back.

The huge wooden doors of a church were thrown wide so that people could listen to a symphony orchestra performing inside. From each public building spilled a chorus, a ballad, an anthem. Behind it all was the constant rhythm of people moving about, being pulled in every direction by the music.

All the walking made me hungry and I found a table just inside the door of a cafe on the Rue Mouffetard, where I ate a thick slice of layered terrine and half a baguette, and drank perhaps too much from a rough earthen pitcher of red wine. My table looked onto the street where Parisians, schooled in the fine art of strolling, maneuvered elegantly through throngs of manic tourists scurrying from one square to another, to capture every possible magic moment. I sighed and smiled at a group of Parisians at the next table, who invited me to join them for coffee.

"How do you like the festival so far?" asked one.

"You mean Paris isn't like this every day?"

It was only then that I learned I had stumbled onto France's _Fête de la Musique_ , held on the summer solstice each year. On this one day all the musicians, professional and amateur, come out to play in the streets and in the concert halls. And price is no object, because all performances are free.

Night finally fell on this longest day of the year, but the celebration continued and my Parisian companions made a toast to health and a toast to the day. We clacked our white china cups of cappuccino as the sound of a big band tuning up reached our ears, and giggled when the baritone of a tuba blasted rudely through the thin trill of a flute.

We finished our coffee and went dancing in the neighboring square. A big band was in full swing and we danced, whirling through the other couples around the fountain in the center of the square. It was my first night in Paris and the tiny white lights that were strung through the trees and the hedges seemed heavenly gifts of fallen stars to me, an earth-bound creature drunk with music and wine and the magic of Paris.

* * *

**Lyon, 1988**

I did not expect to experience another French _Fête de la Musique_ , but a year later I was working for a computer company in Lyon, France's second-largest city and the gastronomic capital of the world. By the time my contract was over I felt I knew almost all there was to know about the city's restaurants, proven by the extra pounds I'd gained since my arrival.

On the summer solstice a group of us sneaked out of work early to go to Lyon's old town. On our way we were distracted by the musicians who played on the banks of the Saône River. There was a also a band in each of the little parks we passed. Residents picnicked on baguettes and saucisson, Lyon's special smoked sausage, and plenty of red Rhône wine. Where there was a cafe, all the tables were pulled out into the street and the patrons serenaded on all sides. It was hours before we reached our destination.

In the old town, like the streets of Paris' Latin Quarter, I heard once again the chorus of string quartets, saxophones, jazz, blues, rock, and entire orchestras competing for attention in every square and on each corner, spilling from churches and tumbling from street-front balconies. My friends and I squeezed our way, single file, through the cacophony that reverberated through the narrow streets, to see if we could get into the cathedral to see the symphony orchestra.

But it seemed that most of the city had the same idea, so we wandered in the warm humid air until late evening when we found a table for six in a cobblestoned square. We sat under the awnings, sheltered from a light rain that fell occasionally through the evening which, far from deterring anyone's enthusiasm from the celebration, seemed to add sparkle to the romance.

We sipped champagne cocktails before being enjoying a typically magnificent Lyonnaise dinner, expertly prepared and exquisitely served on our al fresco table. The tinkle of silver on china plates and the trill of crystal wine glasses, raised in never-ending toasts to friendship, health, and love, created a melody of _gastronomie_ to the score. The throngs of people strolling by created a moving barrier, allowing little bits and pieces of sounds to reach our ears, a glittering mosaic of tunes, conversation, and laughter.

I fell in love with France again that evening. The night air was warm, the rain pattered on the awning and my friends chatted amicably. Soft lights glowed through the drizzle onto the first levels of the ancient stone buildings that surrounded us. Quieter now, the guttural grumblings of pigeons could be heard as they settled into their nests above us in a curlicued edifice. An upper window across the square was briefly illuminated by the flare of a match. Then darkness, and the orange glow from the burning tip of a cigarette.

A string trio played some ancient romantic tune. As I listened, a dove coasted to the ground from its perch on a balcony, pecked a crumb from a momentarily empty patch of sidewalk, and fluttered away. It's wings became transparent, underlit by the street lamps which seemed to buoy it upward. It soared past the balconies and the gray stone gargoyles, past the gutters and the roof tiles, and I imagined that its wings moved to the sad strains of the violin as it disappeared, as if by magic, into the misty black sky.

* * *

**Nice, 1993**

On each visit to France I landed further and further South. Nice is nice, but it's not romantic Paris, nor _gastronomique_ Lyon, but a city wedged between the Alps to the north and the Mediterranean sea to the South. It is a city influenced by mountain air and sea breezes, where people wear jogging suits or jeans, much more casual than chic.

In Nice, everything is light: the crisp dry rosé wine served ice cold; the cuisine, influenced by Northern Italy, Spain, and Africa; the summer sun glittering on the Mediterranean; and the moon shining from a cloudless sky. The mood is light, too, among its residents who are more _sportif_ than sophisticated.

In Nice, the festival has a more international atmosphere than Paris or Lyon, maybe because of all the young tourists in summer, their main objectives to flirt, to tan, to drink, and to dance.

The morning of the festival I attempted to go jogging on the _Promenade des Anglais_ , the wide pedestrian walkway that separates the rocky beaches of the Mediterranean from the street. Normally, at seven in the morning, it is a peaceful place populated by seagulls, other joggers, and locals led by poodles on their morning walk. But today the screech of the gulls and the yap of the poodles was punctuated with the staccato of workers hammering together bandstands, the squeal of feedback and the effervescence of electric white noise. It was evident that an auditory assault was being planned, and that I had better stay far away from there if I didn't want to rock and roll.

But rock and roll I did, that apparently being the program in Nice. My friends and I walked along the promenade that afternoon. Many people had staked their claims on sections of beach below, sandwiched between the surf and the stage. They picnicked on rosé and pizza-by-the-slice, entertained by the performance of the moment. The program changed hourly, but seemed limited to new English Rock, new American Rock, old English Rock and old American Rock. So we made our way to the old town. It being the height of the tourist season, the streets were jammed with people of all nationalities, many of them very sunburnt.

We gave up waiting for a table in the main square and bought a bottle of wine and six cups of yogurt for the glasses they were sold in. We stood a while in front of a particularly bad garage band attempting to emulate the loudest 70's rock groups, watching a group of college students chanted "rock and roll!" in loud voices and sprayed each other with beer. I took a sip of warm rosé, and, from a safe distance, reflected upon the days I would have joined in with them.

We lost our younger companions to the beer-spraying group, and the rest of us moved on to the areas where jazz and blues were playing to more subdued but no less enthusiastic crowds. Then we entered the maze of alleyways where soloists and groups of musicians played horns, wind, and string instruments, the tunes echoing along the cobblestones and up the narrow corridors to the balconies hung with drying laundry.

We stopped to watch a marionette artist performing to the tune of a clarinet. Everyone began clapping to the dance of the puppet until an old lady shouted "silence!" from a fifth floor window, and threatened to empty the _poubelle_ onto our heads. But it turned out she was only joking.

It was four in the morning when we started home. We retraced our steps of that afternoon, passing through deserted squares and streets. The scent of baking bread replaced the strains of music wafting through the air and we followed it to the screened back door of a _boulangerie_ to buy chocolate croissants directly from the oven.

I walked the long way home along the promenade past the stages that were now just large empty boxes facing seaward. In the silence the water lapped at the rocky shore, and the light of the moon made the sky that deep navy blue color you only see at night on the Mediterranean.

Ahead of me on the promenade a man in a tuxedo kicked rocks at the balustrade, ignoring the car that sped by, its still-enthusiastic occupants shouting from the windows. A bedraggled clan of gypsies with a mangy dog lounged on the beach; a girl sang softly while young man tapped on bongos, accompanied by the background rhythm of seawater gently clattering the rocks. I stopped to sit and dangle my feet over the edge of the sea wall, to listen to the sea, the song, and the soft staccato of the drum, and noticed that the stars had disappeared with morning's first light.

A version of _Fête de la Musique: A Memory in Three Parts_ was first published in the _San Francisco Examiner_ in June 1994. It was later selected for inclusion in the _Travelers' Tales: France_ anthology of travel stories.

## 6

# Alone, Illegal, and Broken Down in China

### Finding solace in the unlikeliest of places

It is my first day alone on the road and I am lost. The mountains of northern China beyond Beijing are vast and enormous. There are no road signs, only larger roads and smaller roads, paved roads and dirt roads. When I stop to ask directions the peasants simply stare because I am the first foreigner they have ever seen, and a woman. Putting myself in their place I can sympathize. I ride up on a big black Chinese sidecar motorcycle, the most expensive motorcycle in China. Then I remove my helmet. A blond braid tumbles down the shoulder of my black leather jacket and I mutter something incomprehensible and then look at them with slightly crazed green eyes.

" _Wo mílù le_ ," I say. "I'm lost."

But most villagers have never traveled farther than their network of about a dozen villages all of their lives. And there are no taxi drivers or buses or truckers to ask.

Nearly out of gasoline, I am sure that Liajang, the town I had targeted for my first night on the road, will not appear anytime soon. The going is slow not only because of the dark but because of the potholes and badly banked curves and the asphalt that ends without warning.

Where might I be? I might have looped back to where I began. I could be far, far away. I remember how the land looked in daylight: the jumble of pyramid-shaped mountains covered in soft green foliage jutting through the landscape, the crumbling hillsides, the plunging cliffs.

Another tiny village passes; windows covered in thick, oiled paper glow with the flickering light of cooking fires. Exhausted, I consider stopping but would they be friendly? How could I tell them what I want? If I stop here it might cause an uproar. Do they have food to spare? A bed? Certainly not. My thoughts loop on the problem of where to sleep that night and on the problems that hadn't yet come. In the background the unfamiliar engine rumbles. I am still working out its idiosyncrasies. I don't yet know this machine well enough to take comfort in its working noises, its hard clunk down from third gear, its slight pull to the left.

Shadow trees fly by and another village appears. I shift down, slowing in anticipation of the many potholes a village brings, and a small animal suddenly bursts into the road. A rush of adrenaline prepares me for hard braking, for swerving or impact.

I hold my ground, trusting my instincts. I can't tell if the side of the road dives off into a five-foot ditch or heads straight into a two-foot wall. The animal races alongside and, improbably, others join in. Finally I realize they are piglets. We travel together down the road for several long moments of dark indecision. I hold my breath while they grunt and squeal hysterically, invisibly.

Several times it seems that they will move off the road and out of my way, and several times it seems that they will run under my tires. Finally, I gently let pressure off the throttle, decelerating very slowly. The engine noise deepens and, in response, one piglet lets out a sudden, long, high-pitched squeal. The others squeal in response and follow it off the road into darkness.

Heart racing, I am alone again. Dirt road. Dark night. Miles later I notice that my fingers are still stiffly poised above the brake lever. The icy night air leaks up the sleeves of my jacket and between my collar and helmet. My joints ache from working the clutch and the gears of this heavy beast of a motorcycle, bumping along a barely paved road in the pitch black backwoods of China.

That afternoon my friends back in Beijing, the four Chinese bikers who formed my send-off party, led me through Beijing in a complicated route into these mountains. They turned back at the Beijing-Heibi province border with regret in their eyes and I rode on. They were tied, without specific government permission to travel, to the province where they lived. Before I visited China I'd had no idea that people living in one province were forbidden to travel in other provinces without special permissions and special license plates. Their plates were the blue provincial plates, mine was the special black plate that allowed me to cross borders. We said goodbye and I traveled on, alone.

I had spent the previous week in Beijing trying to get my papers in order. Permissions. Signatures. Chops. Both the American embassy and the Chinese government proved useless in helping with permits. I was required to obtain a Chinese driver's license to ride outside Beijing province, but that required residency, a driving test, lots of paperwork. First of all, I had no residency. It seemed that, though the Chinese government was newly eager to welcome independent travelers, they didn't know how to accommodate them.

My expat friends, people I'd met through the embassy, explained that since the tourist policy was in a transition period, the lawmakers wouldn't know what the rules were. It would probably be safe to go, even without papers, they said. "They won't put you in jail for more than a day if you get caught," one explained. "And you probably won't get caught...at least not for a while."

It had been a hot, humid Saturday, a particularly auspicious day for weddings, it turned out. Brides in layers of white silk and chiffon perspired in the back seats of economy cars trailing red and white streamers, their drivers honking incessantly in celebration.

My new friends rode Chang Jiang sidecar motorcycles that belonged to two Chinese members of the international CJ motorcycle club in Beijing. We crawled along Beijing's third ring road until, right in front of us, a truck plowed into a taxi and slid out of the intersection. For a moment, all was still. Then, suddenly, traffic on all four sides lunged toward the center. Within seconds every car was touching the bumper or door of another car, resulting in a tightly woven fabric of glittering metal.

We escaped by riding into a shallow ditch and onto a railroad track that our sidecar bikes easily managed, for they were designed for use by messengers through the rough terrain where World War II was fought. They are essentially carbon copies of the 1938 BMW motorcycles, built hastily with inferior materials, yet still robust.

I was sweating in the deep heat of polluted urban Beijing, though I'd stripped to my tank top. Our leader, Jiangshan, had to be steaming in his Harley Davidson jacket, but he kept it zipped up. His girlfriend, Yang Xiao, sat slightly away from the leather back of the sidecar chair, one hand gripping the edge of the car and the other held up to her aviator glasses. Every so often she'd turn around to smile and give me a thumbs up. Her glossy black hair tangled in the fringe of the brown suede sleeves of her American-Indian-styled motorcycle jacket. People driving, riding bicycles, waiting to cross the road, stared. Beautiful, wide-eyed Yang Xiao. She always had a slightly haunted look, except when she was riding, and then her black eyes sparkled, and her movements were almost careless. Jiangshan, an unusually tall, dignified man of around fifty, also brightened when he rode. His movements became larger, his voice louder. On the motorcycle, they seemed almost American.

Lee and Liu followed on another Chang Jiang through the ruthlessly dense Beijing traffic until we rose above the city into the relief of a beautifully paved single-lane mountain byway. The air cooled as we passed farming villages, a lifestyle in harmony with nature. I glimpsed grain drying in courtyards behind village walls made from mud and straw. The traditional curlicue roofs seemed carefully maintained in the old style, with protective demons painted on doorways. Here, I forgot about the problems of urban life, enjoyed the scenery and dodged donkey carts full of twigs, maneuvered around diesel tractors pulling into the road from the fields, a dusty wind in my face.

Country roads, sunshine, and the camaraderie of fellow riders should have made for a perfect Saturday, but the realization that in a few hours I would be riding alone for as long as six months through this strange country sent bolts of fear shooting through my heart and stomach. The Heibi Province border appeared.

Our moment of separation was inevitable. My borrowed bike, with its expensive black license plates, was authorized for operation in any province, though its rider wasn't. These black plates, an indication of importance, of guanxi—their term for power, freedom, prestige—would keep me from being harassed by the police—or so I hoped.

Jiangshan gave me some extra wheel spokes and told me I would be lucky. Yang Xiao game me a hug, and Lee and Liu shook my hand.

I rode alone with a knot in my stomach trying to enjoy the first few hours of my solo journey but I was completely cowed by the wildness of Northern Heibi province. I still had the vague impression from childhood that all of China was densely populated. But this lonely country backwater was riddled with potholed roads among jagged mountains covered in soft brushy bushes and trees. The air was fresh and cool in the late afternoon, and the green mountains gave the atmosphere a healthy glow. I never imagined that China had such wide-open spaces, and then the road forked into three with no signs to mark the way. I switched the engine off and, for the first time since I arrived in the country, experienced absolute silence.

After a while, I pulled the map from the sidecar to consider it seriously now for the first time and to search, unsuccessfully, for my three-pronged crossroads, when a peasant wearing ragged cotton pants and a peaked cap appeared. He pushed a jumble of tree branches in a wooden handcart, his arms and shoulders straining against the slight decline of the road.

" _Ni hao_ ," I said to him, expecting him to return my hello. He stopped and I shoved up the visor of my helmet, to be better understood. "Ni hao," I repeated carefully, intoning as properly as I could in my basic Mandarin. " _Wo mílù le_ ," I said, slowly. "I'm lost."

He stared, as if he understood, so I continued, asking the way to Liajang. " _Zěnme qù Liajang_?"

The man was tiny, and looked eighty but was probably only sixty, badly bent from work and probably mineral deficiencies. His face was tan and flat, lightly wrinkled, and his eyes, though bright, were sunken deeply. I saw that he was a little startled when he stepped nearer to me to peer up into my helmet.

" _Liajang_?" I repeated, rattling my map and punching the name of the town with my finger. Its name was clearly written in Pinyin, the Roman characters that appeared under the Chinese pictograms, but I really couldn't tell how to pronounce it correctly and it's possible the man couldn't read. The paper rustled, ignored in the gentle breeze as the man continued to stare at my face with the bald curiosity of a child.

I'd been stared at in Beijing but this was absurd. The man acted as if I was a statue in a wax museum. He studied my jacket, then bent down to study my jeans and my boots, and rose again to take a look at my helmet and gloves before walking all around the motorcycle.

At least it gave me time to stare back. So this would be the peasant so reviled and absolutely dismissed, usually with a disgusted sneer, by the Chinese middle class. In his peaked cap with his wrinkled old face he was a museum piece himself, a caricature of the Chinese peasant in his blue Mao clothes, with his stringy gray hair, pushing his battered wheelbarrow. I asked one more time the way to Liajang, but he continued to stare, slack jawed and glassy-eyed.

Starting off again I chose the middle of the three equally unlikely looking roads. The middle way seemed appropriate as a spiritual path, at least. Not that I was practicing moderation just then, but it wasn't a heads or tails situation.

The middle way twisted around and down and up and around again and I no longer had any idea of the direction it would lead. It didn't really matter, I told myself. I wasn't on any particular deadline and I needed only to head roughly west, toward Tibet and the setting sun. With that thought I settled into a not unpleasant resignation. The scenery was wild and serene and the tension knotting in my stomach dissipated. I had chosen Liajang because it was a fairly large town with a few hotel choices, according to my Lonely Planet guide, but surely another town would appear. Or so I thought.

The joy of exploration waned with the fading daylight, the absence of a road sign, a gas station, or a town. I continued to choose my way randomly at forks in the road and, like the first road, they followed the contours of the mountains to take me on a tour of all the directions of the compass. By the time darkness fell I had passed only the tiniest of villages. The peasants performed their end-of-day tasks. They were poor, desperately poor. Their windows were covered in oiled paper. Their water was fetched from who knows where in buckets hung from sticks carried on their shoulders, and their grain was sorted and ground by hand and their small gardens protected from the animals by fences of bricks made of mud and it seemed impossible that anything would change for them tonight, or tomorrow, or in the years after.

Ten kilometers of empty road passes between the village where the piglets had run beside me and here, where the road narrows and deteriorates into dirt and gravel. The dark shapes of trees hover above on either side. Long ago Kublai Khan had traveled through China and was dismayed at the unbroken monotony of the roadways. He ordered trees planted on every roadside to give solace to travelers.

The trees do not give me solace as my headlight shines on one after another after another white painted tree trunk giving me the impression that it is they which move past me, and that I am sitting still like an actor on a movie set, the wind machine blowing in my face.

What does give me solace is the sudden appearance of two gas pumps under a brightly-lit shelter. Beyond it stands a building strung with white lights that I hope is a hotel. I pull up to the pumps and after a moment a woman peeks out of the doorway of the attached shack. She hushes the two small children peeking out behind her to walk toward me. Her outfit is garishly illuminated under the fluorescent lights. She sports a shapeless lime green dress sprinkled with large white polka dots and opaque knee-highs that have left a sharp dent halfway up her short fat calves, and bright pink rubber pool sandals.

She decodes my rough Mandarin as she pumps gas into the tank. Yes, she nods, smiling. The lit building is indeed a hotel—her _luguan_. I can stay there, and it will cost twenty yuan.

Equipped with a full tank of gas and this happy information I follow the road she traced with her finger. I would otherwise have never found the entrance, a steep dirt and gravel driveway that passes over a shaky wooden bridge built over what seems to be a very deep ravine. The sound of water running far below me quickens my heart. It will be interesting to see in the morning what death-defying feat I am performing by crossing over these rickety beams.

I pass underneath a concrete archway and through a pair of open wooden gates into the compound where a low, cheaply built stucco building stands. It is L-shaped and there is a glassed-in hallway with motel-style doors in regular intervals, each painted bright red and illuminated with a bare bulb.

I pull up to a partially open doorway that I figure is the manager's office and switch off the engine. It is difficult to unfasten my helmet strap with cold, stiff fingers. My back aches and my left ankle throbs from the constant shifting through gears. I toss my helmet, gloves, and scarf into the sidecar and dismount, only vaguely aware of the rush of people emerging from the door in front of me. I step away from the bike, allowing several people to push it closer to the building. My forehead itches, my hair is stuck to the skin.

Despite my aches I feel a profound gratitude for having found this place, for the reward of having pressed on without panicking. It is dark and cold, but I'd soon be safe and warm. Finally my eyes adjust to the dim light and looking up, I meet the gaze of a dozen young ladies dressed in pajamas. When I smile they burst into giggles, covering their mouths with their hands.

So many maids! Why would there be so many maids for such a small country motel? I look at them more closely. Their black eyes flash. So much makeup! They giggle some more, then, suddenly shy, lower their eyes heavy with liner and false lashes. Their lips glow with thick red lipstick and their lurid peach-colored polyester uniforms shine. They aren't maids at all, I finally realize. I'll be spending the night in a brothel.

A man pushes his way through the girls and speaks in sharp tones that makes them stop giggling and stand aside. He is very young and so thin that his brown wool pinstriped suit hangs on him in folds as though on a coat hanger. His hair is carefully clipped and gelled into a stiff American fifties-style flat-top, with one lock left long to hang rakishly in his face. He tosses his head back to fling the lock out of his eye, and says something that makes the girls laugh nervously and flutter a little farther away.

I greet him with a Chinese hello and a look him straight in the eye, and the girls giggle again, their hands flying up to cover their mouths. Sighing, he beckons me to his office, a lit doorway just in front of us, and takes me by the arm to guide me inside. Surprisingly, he is a few inches taller than I, perhaps 5 feet 10 inches tall.

The girls follow us in but after few sharp words from the boss they recede into the darkness and we are left alone in the office: a square concrete box with a steel desk and a ratty Naugahyde couch bursting at the seams. I fish through the pockets of my black leather motorcycle jacket and hand him twenty yuan, the amount the woman at the gas station had quoted. He laughs and pushes it back to me. I am too tired to go through an extended haggling process, and too tired to remember that I am desperate for sleep. After riding all day in the heat, after the stress of being lost, the uncertainty of the motorcycle, finding gasoline, night falling unmercifully black and those tiny villages with fires and stray pigs and white-trunked trees, I am exhausted, and I could strangle him for what he is doing, opening drawers to find a pencil so that he can write the digits 200 on a piece of paper, ten times the price the woman at the gas station quoted.

I hold the paper and we stand silently together on the stained burgundy carpet. It is as thin as denim, and glued badly onto the concrete floor. The walls are covered in crackling stucco, and the sagging ceiling is stained with water. The black and white television set is turned on full volume, the sound horribly distorted. Two attractive anchorpeople, a man and a woman, report the news. Their announcements are a combination of guttural and singsong nasal whining. Footage of a public execution flits across the screen: two kneeling men, blindfolded with hands bound behind their backs, a mass of enraged or excited people. Would they be shot or beheaded or hanged? Then they show blond Russian children digging through a vast garbage dump for scraps of food, followed by stills of President Clinton who is due to visit in a few months. I'd seen the same footage in Beijing, over and over and over again. It is 1998, the year that China would remove borders and other barriers to sharing in first world wealth.

I study the piece of paper. I could counter with thirty, and he would insist upon 100, and I would write down thirty-five, and he would then write fifty, and then I would hand him forty. He would take it, and I really should do all that except that the woman at the gas station already gave me the price of twenty yuan and in my exhausted state I'm not thinking about all the trouble I will cause here with paperwork and lack of language and writing skills and my need for hot water. I shove the paper back at him and explain in succinct English that the owner told me it was twenty yuan and twenty yuan was all I was damn well going to pay and hadn't he heard that the days of Foreigner Price are over. I wave the twenty toward the gas station and tell him that if he thinks I'm going to pay two hundred for a dump like this he is crazy and I push it into his hand. He takes it with a little shrug and a smile that means, "Well, I had to try," and I stomp back to the motorcycle but it's not there anymore. Stunned, I look around and see, with no little relief, that it has only been pushed away into the crook of the L-shaped compound near the wooden gates. I feel the manager watching me as I stomp across to it. I jerk my suitcase out of the sidecar, unlock and open the trunk to get my computer case and camera, and two of the girls appear to escort me to my room.

The hallway is glassed in, and we step up two shallow stairs onto the same thin, wrinkled burgundy carpet that was in the manager's office, and even more blotched. Standing by each door is a little yellow pot decorated delicately with pink fleur-de-lis, a quarter full of water. As I puzzle over the purpose of these, moths bash themselves to death on the bare light bulbs in front of each door, falling in the collected heap in front of each threshold. Every tiny impact creates a tinging sound that is just audible over the sound of a river.

The room is a concrete box. One of the girls pushes by me to rush in and turn on the television at full volume. The other girl walks in behind me bearing a thermos of hot water and a small, thin towel. I walk into the bathroom—it was built into the corner of the room like an afterthought, with walls that fall short of the ceiling by a foot. The hot water tap runs cold, as does the cold water tap. I request more thermoses of hot water, and she returns shortly with three more.

I put my suitcase on the double bed and the girls come closer as I unzip it. I had packed very little but carefully; a Gortex rain suit, a fine-gauge, bicycle-weight wool sweater, long silk underwear, thick hiking socks and boots, sports-bras and tights, quick-dry shirts and a toiletries kit with neat little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, moisturizer and sunscreen and a clear plastic bag full of bottles of medicines I might need.

I wonder how to get the girls out of my room so I can have some privacy, and then the manager strides in, barking at the girls, who wander out reluctantly. Alone again, he looks at me and sighs, then hands me a form, knowing that this is going to be an ordeal for it's in Chinese and I'm illiterate. We settle ourselves down at the fake walnut desk at the foot of the bed and study the form and my passport, attempting to figure out which information goes in which box. After studying each other's documents, we look up at each other, shrug, and begin.

I ought to have asked a clerk in a Beijing tourist hotel to give me a form that was printed in both English and Chinese, as a reference, but I didn't, and so with a combination of my phrasebook, sign-language, grimaces and some laughter, we manage to fill out about a third of the boxes when he abruptly pulls the paper away. Either that's all that's required or he's fed up. I expect the latter.

Now that we're done I realize how much trouble I am, and sympathize. He really is just a very young man and I create a lot of hassle because of the form and demands for many thermoses of hot water and the motorcycle parking and the uproar.

I put my passport away and we walk outside together. He returns to the office and I walk over to where they've moved the motorcycle. Suddenly, a large blue truck roars in at an alarming speed to screech to a stop exactly in the place I'd parked the bike. No wonder they'd moved it. Two girls in peach polyester pajamas run to the door as the truck door opens. One literally catches the driver as he falls from the cab. The moonlight illuminates the empty liquor bottle in his right hand. Even though it's empty he struggles to keep it upright during his fall. The other girl knocks it to the ground where it lies, empty and unbroken in the dusty light, as they escort him, stumbling, to the room next to the manager's office.

I'd been warned that these big blue trucks were piloted by drivers fuelled by amphetamines and alcohol. They'd be my most frequent companions on the road, but that's changing, fast. Though private cars have been allowed for many years, most Chinese haven't been able to afford them, and so trucks and official vehicles make up ninety percent of the traffic out here in the country.

The excitement over, I finish locking the bike up, covering it to keep the dust out and to hide the attention-getting black Beijing plates. Back in my room I notice that the door doesn't have a lock. But I'd brought a solution for that—an alarm that slides into the doorjamb. It works on a circuit breaker—if the door opens the device also springs open, activating a piercing alarm.

I pour the hot water from the thermoses into a red plastic basin on the bathroom floor and take a sponge bath. Brushing my teeth, I peer out from between the tattered curtains to catch the action in the compound. Apparently I have arrived just ahead of rush hour. Blue truck after blue truck roars in, their drivers and passengers falling out of their cabs, spilling empty bottles of high-octane liquor. I am forgotten.

This is my first night on the road, and my mind busies itself on the problems of my trip. I am traveling without a license, nor permissions of any sort from the Chinese or American government, and risk arrest at any moment. Just a few hours into my trip I discovered that I couldn't rely on road signs or local people to tell me the way. Since I just generally want to head west, that doesn't matter so much. I have no particular place to be at any certain time. But it is also now obvious that hotels are difficult to find. Is this at all dangerous, or simply inconvenient? Since I feel perfectly safe—even in this brothel—I don't feel it's too risky. But tomorrow would be the time to turn back if I'm going to, only one day's ride from Beijing.

I miss Beijing. In Beijing people interacted with me. Foreigners are not rare, and they laugh good-naturedly when I practice my Mandarin. They willingly look at maps and point me in the right direction. I miss hanging out with Teresa, the agricultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy. We rode together through the countryside once before I left, and the farmers were astonished at us, the motorcycles, and at her fluent Mandarin. She talked endlessly with them about the state of the crops, the weather, and whether the government had paid them in cash or pink IOU slips. Tonight, at the brothel, I long for Beijing.

In the morning it is eerily quiet, which makes me nervous until I remember that, of course, a brothel operates at night.

In the bright morning light I see that the short red carpet is a puzzle of dark splotchy stains. The walls are stained with moisture and the bathroom tiles are caked with mold. The tiles themselves have been shattered with a hammer to let the plumbing in. Caulking does not seem to be a talent the local handymen possess. Neither do they seem to have a grasp of the force of gravity—the bathroom drain is located at the highest end of the room so that a puddle of stagnant water sits in a corner with drowned bugs floating at the edges.

I half-fill the red basin with cold water from the dripping sink faucet, and uncork one of the green plastic thermoses of hot water they gave me the previous night. Amazingly, it is still piping hot, hot enough for a cup of instant coffee. I check my skin for bedbugs. None. I hope that this will be the rattiest place I ever have to stay in.

Seeing my face in the mirror, I'm shocked at my puffy eyes and pallid skin. Riding a motorcycle for so many hours at one stretch is never healthy, and I am still also recovering from the effects of Beijing pollution.

In Beijing my expat friends were still sleeping in their luxurious, American-style homes and apartments with filtered water and filtered air before a day of work in offices with filtered water and filtered air. Maybe they will think of me this weekend when they ride out to the Ming Tombs on one of their forays into the countryside. Last week the little trips seemed the height of adventure.

I take my cup of coffee outside, passing the other rooms where pairs of male shoes sit neatly outside each door. These black shoes made of leather and so carefully polished cannot be truckers shoes. The little yellow pots of water had been moved to the other side of the hallway. I peer in cautiously. They don't look like chamber pots but there is something in them. What can it be? I look closer to see globs floating on top of the water. Gross. They are spittoons.

Suppressing a gag, I hurry outside. The courtyard is empty except for a small Chinese motorcycle leaning on its side against the opposite wall: there are no trucks in sight. I surmise that the drivers pumped themselves back up with amphetamines and continued on their route.

Now to see where I am. I hear the river and try to find a way out of the compound to take a look at it. Tiptoeing down the hallways I find an unlocked door that leads outside onto a natural terrace overlooking a beautiful river cutting deeply into a stone canyon with a deeply striated stone cliff rising to the mountain behind.

All this hidden behind a crappy stucco compound, valueless in contrast to the income-generating brothel. In the West this place would have been the site of a luxurious resort with a terrace overlooking the river where one could sip coffee in the morning and beer in the evening, enjoying the spectacle of nature. It would have at least been a campground. But who wants to visit such a place here, in Northern China? Heibi Province is the poorest of the northern provinces, the mountains offer no weird and spectacular rock formations like those in Gualin and Yunnan, so tourists don't come. This is merely a relaxing, beautiful, natural place, only a day's journey from a major city. But in the United States it would be swarming with backpackers, kayakers, and mountain climbers.

Back in Beijing, an American friend, Rick, had told me a story about camping that illustrated the Chinese attitude toward nature. Jiangshan, the leader of my send-off party and the owner of a camping supply shop, had led the group on an overnight outing. Jiangshan had described beautiful mountains and clean air and a perfect riverside campsite. The group had been thrilled with the ride but the "perfect place to camp" was an asphalt parking lot with bright streetlights standing sentry all around. Rick had difficulty explaining diplomatically why their faces had all fallen flat. Jiangshan was quite taxed to understand why they'd rather pitch their tents on uneven ground in the messy, dark woods.

Jiangshan's adventure shop is stocked with a few tents and sleeping bags but only Western visitors buy these things—the students, teachers, and expats who discover that China has amazing and beautiful countryside. They camp, and inevitably a group of locals comes and stares at them as they cook their meals and fish and put up the tents and bed down. It is a concept absolutely and completely foreign to Chinese villagers, and when I look at their lives I see why. Most of them are already camping, with their coal stoves and hand-carried water. They see the forest as a source for wood to burn and food to forage. It's easy to understand how they would wonder why wealthy people would make themselves so deliberately uncomfortable.

Back in Beijing most of Jiangshan's customers are nouveaux riche who buy Patagonia jackets and Swiss army watches as status symbols to wear on the streets of Beijing, or on touring vacations to Guilin or Yunnan where they tiptoe along the trails in designer shoes.

After the stress of the past twenty-four hours I welcome the surprise of vast nature. There are probably some pretty little villages in the hills here. What if I left the motorcycle behind for a few days, put on my hiking boots and tried to find them?

Not on my first day out.

Or can I?

I'm lost already, much too early in the trip. And my plans are vague. The general idea to cross China from east to west, heading south through Sichuan and Yunnan is just a sketch. I now realize the roads are not as mapped, and that I have some hardcore dirt riding ahead of me. If the bike holds up, and I can get to the south, how will I get back? That's the part I can never figure out when I look at the maps. The coasts are too crowded and the interior impossibly mountainous.

Sitting by the rushing river against the high coppery cliffs provides an anchor. There will always be the force of nature. If the human face of China is impermeable, threatening, nature renews and relaxes. Confronting foreign nature has always been more comfortable to me than confronting foreign cities, and today's ride promises spectacular scenery.

Suddenly I can't wait to get back on the road. Who cares which road? I need only head generally west. And when I hit a barrier, south, then when I reach my destination, north.

But first is a ritual that will be repeated each morning.

Back in the parking lot I unlock the motorcycle cover and fold it up into a big red duffel bag. Nothing had been touched. I'd been told that the Chinese are scrupulously honest. The more generous claimed it was an innate trait; the less generous claim it's because there are so many tattletales around and the penalties are so harsh.

I try to open the trunk with as little noise as possible but every creak and bang echoes from the walls of the enclosed compound. I stand still in the stark yellow sunlight on the stark yellow dirt, and listen, but no one stirs.

First, the spokes. Sure enough, a lot are already broken from the deep potholes I'd hit the night before. The asphalt had ended abruptly several times and I'd ridden miles of dirt before the road was paved again. No road hazards were marked so I'd gone careening off the edges a few times.

I squat in the dirt and begin work as the sun's rays rise over the mountain.

With a pair of needle-nosed piers, I pull the broken spokes from their seats in the wheel. Seven of the long ones are broken but all of the short ones are intact. I stop in astonishment. The day before, when we'd finished replacing three spokes that had broken on my bike, Jiangshan handed me all of the extras in his toolkit as a parting gift. His spokes were made of steel and not the cheap aluminum that I had packed in my kit. Lee translated his message, eloquently presented with a small bow: "Seven is an auspicious number, and I predict you will break no more than seven during your trip."

With seven of them broken on the first day out, it would be a miracle.

I take each end of a spoke and bend it slightly, maneuver it around a cross-spoke, then bend it back straight, pressing both ends into the threaded nipples sunk into the wheel. The nipples depress slightly into the wheels for this purpose. They're threaded, and when I twist the spoke it catches the thread. It takes some work with a pair of pliers to thread each spoke in all the way, until the nipple pops back out again when it's seated. Now it's only a matter of banging the spoke straight. Easy enough, if you aren't too attached to the definition of "straight."

The sun beats down hard on the compound. It is difficult working bent over so low to the ground, forcing the spoke rods into the nipples with the tip of the needle-nose pliers. I sit back on my heels and spot one of the girls walking across the compound. Her hair is a rats-nest of black tangles falling out from the pins that had probably, the night before, formed an elegant coif. She glances furtively at me as she passes, holding her thin blue robe closed with tight fists. Her eyes are raccoon-black from smeared mascara and a red streak of lipstick stains her chin. She disappears into a darkened hallway and I hear the sound of water running.

Checking the oil is next. It needs about a quarter of the quart bottle I'd packed in my trunk. That isn't bad, really, for the distance I traveled yesterday.

Then I touch all the nuts and bolts—some are loose and, not surprisingly, so is the electrical connection to a turn signal.

Back in the room I take a quick sponge bath with the remaining thermos of hot water and scrub the grease and dirt as best I can from my fingers. It would be interesting to find out a little more about the brothel, I'll have to ask Teresa when I get back. I already know that, like most places, China has interesting and conflicting views on sexuality. For one thing, the government insists that homosexuality doesn't exist, and even claims that HIV isn't a problem. Condoms are not routinely used, and the condoms manufactured in China are of the poorest quality. Abortion is the most common method of birth control and is provided at no cost by the state, which supplies traveling doctors in medically-equipped vans for this purpose. As for the brothel, I surmise it is state-run, like everything else in the country, but still I'm uncomfortable with the thought of cops dropping by, just in case it's run like the ones at home—an illegal activity sporadically enforced and profitable for corrupt officials.

I haul my suitcase, a soft-sided convertible backpack, from the room, and slide it into the toe of the sidecar. The motorcycle cover goes into a duffel bag with the tire repair kit and pump, which rests in the seat. I shove my maps (with town names printed in both Roman and Chinese characters) between the duffel and the seat back of the sidecar for easy access, and there is also room in the duffel for food. A trunk located behind the seat back is lockable and holds my valuables in its two-by-two foot compartment.

First into the trunk is the video camera, which lies on top of miscellaneous spare parts like an extra headlamp, signal bulbs, oil filter, voltage regulator, cables, and spark plugs. My laptop computer in its padded case slides upright against the back wall of the trunk and the toolkit against the opposite wall. This leaves just enough room in the middle for two cameras—one film, one digital—in their padded cases. A quart or two of oil can easily be wedged in the odd small spaces and a couple of rags keep the leakage from spilling onto everything else.

In the pockets of my motorcycle jacket is a small packet of tissue, small amounts of money for purchasing food, my passport and a phone number to call in case of emergency, the trunk key, and a phrasebook.

One final ritual look around the motel room for forgotten items and I am ready to go. However, the big wooden gates to the compound are still closed and locked. Just as I consider knocking on the office door, the compound gates are pushed open toward me as if I'd said "open sesame." An adolescent boy walks through, key in hand, and stops, startled, when he sees me.

" _Ni hao_ ," I say, casually, and push the bike through the gates. I quickly put on my helmet and start the engine. The cacophony of the engine warming up rattles through the canyon and echoes from the cliff walls. Without waiting for it to warm up I take off over the wooden bridge, peering carefully over the side. Shuddering, I can't believe that a constant stream of heavy blue supply trucks roar over it. It is even more rickety than I had imagined the night before. If it collapsed, I'd be immediately swept away in the whitewater that rushes through the rocky canyon two hundred feet below.

Without thinking about my doubts of the previous night I turn west, away from Beijing. From a height I can see the brothel in its U-shaped configuration and some other buildings, also sloppily made from concrete blocks and plaster, scattered on a very flat area of dry dirt between the river and the road. It would have been a perfect escape, the setting for a fishing lodge or a campground and a base camp for hiking trips. But the only travelers in China are truckers.

Suddenly, I can't stop laughing. If I had wanted to alter my reality, achieve a true escape from my life in San Francisco, I had certainly succeeded. It's so far away I can barely imagine it—my apartment on Nob Hill on the cable car line, my boyfriend Michael making coffee after an all-night party in some Multimedia Gulch warehouse with electronic music and designer drugs, not to mention the everyday realities of refrigeration and indoor plumbing. And for fun, an afternoon at Baker Beach under the Golden Gate Bridge, a motorcycle ride to wine country, or a weekend at Harbin Hot Springs for baths and massages.

I rumble past the now-lifeless gas station and head into the green mountains, passing a village with houses made from mud and straw. It's a tight jumble of rectangles standing on a natural shelf between the road and the river with smoke rising lazily from metal pipes sticking sloppily out at angles from red-tiled roofs.

The sun is bright and hot but the air is still cool. The only other person on the road this morning is a man in blue Mao pants, jacket, and cap pulling a cart of twigs toward the village. He must have been up to gather them before dark.

Centuries ago the peasants lived the same way, in mud and straw houses with wood-fueled cooking fires. I catch a whiff of smoke and then it's all wilderness again, only mountains and trees as I make my way up a series of switchbacks.

_Alone, Illegal, and Broken Down_ is excerpted from the upcoming book, _The China Road Motorcycle Diaries_. A version of the story was first published in 1998 in a series of realtime dispatches from the road during Carla's journey around Northern China.

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## 7

# The Chinese English Teacher

### A hard-found friend

I stop for lunch along the northern edge of the Yellow River at a café next to a bus station. They only serve one thing—ravioli stuffed with freshly minced vegetables sautéed with ground meat. I sit down at a huge round table, one of three that look like they belong in some Italian tavern. The floor is hard dirt scattered with straw. It's about a third full of Chinese men who sit with their heads down gulping the raviolis as fast as they can. In sharp contrast, one of the men at my table moves exceptionally slowly. With a small penknife he peels clove after clove from a papery head of garlic that sits next to his plate. When a clove is peeled he puts it in his mouth and chews it slowly, then he takes a bite of ravioli and starts peeling the next clove.

Four cooks work at a massive wooden rectangular table and a huge steaming pot of water boils over a propane stove next to an open window. It looks to be a family operation. The mother waved me to a table with her knife when I walked in. She and her daughter mince a huge pile of vegetables, scraping carrot tops and green trimmings to the floor while grandpa sautés meat in an oversize frying pan next to another cauldron of boiling water. The minced vegetables go into the pan once the meat is cooked through and then dumped into a large metal bowl placed next to grandma.

I love Chinese food. Everywhere I've been it's cooked fresh and made with vegetables just out of the ground that morning, and meat slaughtered that day. Last autumn there had been squash and nuts and fish, persimmons and apples, a spectrum of yellows and oranges. Now, in spring, the array of greens is astounding from broccoli to beans, peas, collards, chard, young carrots and onions, sprouts, and edible leaves of plants I don't recognize. The fare changes from place to place, from altitude to altitude, and from sub-culture to sub-culture. Here, by the Yellow River, there is abundance.

Grandma makes a pyramid of flour on the table, puts her fist in it and pours water in the hollow it makes. She quickly mixes it into a pasta dough, kneading and then rolling it out into a sheet, and I remember a trip to Italy where I saw a pasta chef do exactly this same thing. She plops dollops of the filling onto the pasta in regular intervals, then slices it into small squares with a sharp knife. Her grandaughter helps pinch the sections into triangles. They work quickly, talking and paying no attention to their hands so used to their task. Finally, the grandpa, a wizened old man with a map of happy wrinkles crinkling his eyes, plops a pile of the raviolis into the huge pot of boiling water. A get a pile of them on a big plate with a bottle of red pepper sauce for less than a dollar.

I'm happy when I ride out even not knowing if or when another breakdown will come. It will, but for now my stomach is full and ride happily along under a weak cold sun just hoping to reach a town of some size or to find a nice tourist guesthouse by the river before dusk. However, the sun sets and I am once again doing what I had sworn not to do, which is to ride in the dark, but slowly, taking care not to outrun my headlight.

As soon as I notice that oil is pouring out of the right side of the engine onto my boot a building appears, the only building I'd seen in miles—a long, low-roofed rectangular structure with gas pumps out front. I cut the engine and glide into the lot.

Even though I've lucked into this place--I figure I can sleep here if I need to--I'm so mad. Since there's nobody around I stomp and kick around the bike in the pitch black, shouting at it and talking to myself. At the height of my temper tantrum the lights come on and a young couple walks out of the building to see what all the commotion is about. I show them the puddle of oil and my boot and they beckon me inside.

The place is, in fact, very occupied, doing triple duty as a gas station, a motorcycle dealership, and a family home. Inside, on a very clean white linoleum floor, a long red couch like something you'd see in a hotel lobby curves around the room, separating the family's living quarters from the showroom where a variety of motorbikes are lined up neatly. They're all incredibly shiny in bright candy colors, mopeds and 125cc and 250cc motorcycles.

They sit me on the couch and I sink back into it, gratefully. The kids sit nearby and stare. In front of me there's a new imitation wood coffee table, the laminate gleams almost black, and far away across the expanse of linoleum floor sits a brand new color television set, the first one I've seen in China. The volume is turned down—also a first.

The family gathers around and tea is served. I find out that the boy is three-years old, the two girls, 10 and 14. All of them have brown flyaway hair and golden brown eyes.

The man speaks slowly in clear Mandarin, using plenty of hand gestures so I can understand him. A few minutes away there's a town, a mechanic and a luguan.

We have tea and hold together somewhat of a conversation. To help, I go out to get my flip book of photographs to show them my family and the snapshots of me in Bejing with the motorcycle gang who had brought me here the previous autumn. They ooh and ahh at the Great Wall—they'd never visited.

After a while we go out to fill the crankcase with oil and he hops on one of the shiny new moped, a red one, and I follow him into town, about a half-mile away where he sets up in the luguan, asks someone to go get the mechanic, and says goodbye.

I sit down at one of the four large round linoleum tables in the adjoining, brightly lit restaurant and order a beer. Everyone in the whole place stirs, the women titter. I'm used to this because women in China don't drink beer, at least in public, which at first surprised me because I'd thought one of the whole points of communism was equality. After all there were women bosses and community leaders, or at least that was what the propaganda portrayed. It was wrong. Still, the men smoke and drink and work and the women take care of the children and work and don't smoke or drink but cook and work harder while the men smoke and drink and expect them to clean everything up.

I'm not in a good mood, and I want to be left along, but there's no chance of that. A very fat, very drunk man at a nearby table, raises his glass and loudly toasts me. We drink. He raises his glass again and again, toasting to something or maybe nothing in particular. In China it is mandatory to match drinks with your companions, but he wasn't my companion and I wasn't about to get drunk here, and besides, everyone else ignores him, probably ignores him every night, so I do, too.

The mechanic arrives and I am taken aback. He is an astonishingly handsome young man with long slicked-back hair and almond eyes brown verging on gold. I think there must be some kind of mistake. There is no way a beautiful man like this could be a mechanic, but he is, because, after all, what else is there to do, here?

Explaining my problem to him is weird. He doesn't really seem to be listening. Still I go on and on, showing him the manual, and making drawings in pencil to communicate the history of my problems and the current one. I point at the piston in the the exploded view of the engine in my motorcycle manual and draw lightening bolts and X-marks through it but he looks at me with more interest than understanding, and so I give up.

Finally we just push the CJ into his shop which is attached to the luguan, to lock it up. He and the owner of the luguan, a very short fat woman with gray hair and only half her teeth, helps me bring my bags in. We arranged to meet first thing the next morning at seven o'clock sharp.

The rooms are behind the restaurant, three rooms with the feeling of a big, messy youth hostel. One large room is crowded with tattered couches and chairs all facing toward a large black and white TV set high up on a cabinet. Three men sit smoking, staring at it, turned up to maximum volume and crackling with static. Next to the television room a dormitory holds a dozen single beds scattered about in no particular arrangement. The owner peeks in, frowns and jabs my chest with her finger, shaking her head in a definitive "no."

We drag my bags down the hall to a separate and much smaller women's dormitory with only three beds and a high window with bars across it. Prison-like, but secure.

Zipping open my big green fabric suitcase, I grab my towel and toilet kit and, understanding, she leads me out the back door. It's a short but confusing hike through a maze of alleyways past a German Shepherd violently straining at his chain, and over an open sewer. This was the outhouse and, next to it, a building with locker-room style showers all in white porcelain and smelling of mold and steam. The woman yells that the shower costs extra. I gave her the thumbs up and respond with "okay hello," the only phrase they like to hear. She waved me in.

I stand under a very hot, very strong stream of water for a long time. The old woman keeps peeking back in but I am beyond caring, not only because I am tired but because I am now accustomed to the semi-public atmosphere of toilets everywhere in China.

By the time I'm done the place is foggy with steam, and I just want to lie there on the bench and breath, but the woman comes in again and yells something, so I figure I'll go back and at least have some privacy in my room.

I prep for a quick walk back in my flip-flops My hair is dripping and I'm just wearing a T-shirt and short nylon running shorts but about 20 people are outside waiting for me. I say "okay hello! okay hello!" over and over again, waving and smiling and they part to let me through like a movie star on her way to the limo across the plywood plank over the open sewer by the straining German Shepard into the luguan where I close the door and sigh, finally, clean and warm with a good night's sleep ahead.

I spread my sleeping bag liner on top of the dirty sheets and settle into the sagging mattress. The springs creak, but I am warm and cozy and secure in the knowledge that the bike will be fixed tomorrow and I can motor on west toward the foothills of Tibet, to find who-knows-what who-knows where.

It is not to be. There is a knock on the door and all those people and if it's possible even more stream in until the entire room is filled and then the people outside push and everybody is wedged even tighter together. Nobody has the quite the nerve to get onto the bed with me it won't be long, I think, in helpless despair as I count 30, maybe 40 black shiny heads.

I consider pulling out my flipbook of photographs and am trying to figure out how to get to it without causing a huge commotion when there is a ripple through the crowd and a woman is squeezed and pushed to the front. Improbably, she is wearing a long, red velvet evening dress and beach sandals. Her hair is a long, dark mess of tangles and her thick black eyeglasses are askew.

"Hello," she says. Her heavy glasses push her flared nostrils toward a crooked mouth. She tossed her head back at the crowd and said, in perfect English, "How can I help you?"

"Thank you but I don't need any help," I reply, as politely as possible, trying to ignore the fact that possibly an entire village was in my bedroom. "My motorcycle is broken, the mechanic will help me repair it tomorrow and now I am ready to sleep."

She translates for the crowd, who respond by talking all at once in loud voices and literally shove her closer to me. She snaps at them, then sighs. They had obviously dragged her out of bed.

She looks at me with pity. "I am very sorry but they want to know... how old are you?"

I just stare at her.

"They are country people," she said." They will leave you alone when they know these things."

There are four questions, and I would answer them one by one, allowing the crowd to absorb the information, talk amongst themselves, and then return their attention to me.

"They want to know, are you married?" The no brings much conversation.

"They want to know, do you have any children?" The no brings more conversation.

"They want to know," what country are you coming from?" The answer brings a few murmurs. Maybe they'd figured that.

"What are doing here?" I say I am writing stories about the countryside, for Americans who want to visit China.

"Tomorrow you can stay at my house," she says me, as the now-satisfied crowed disperses. She shoos the last people out, closes the door behind her, and in moments I am asleep.

If you're not already awake by six in the morning, which most people are, the public address system is here to help you out. Like the television sets, the systems are set to their loudest volume despite having long since blown out the subwoofers which means that behind whatever is being said, or whatever music is being played, there is a strong background of static and popping. Mostly they play Chinese music: opera or some classical love song sung by a woman that sounds, to the western ear, as if she has a particularly bad sinus infection, but today's wake-up call features the German classic, Edelweiss. Therefore, even this rendition, played too loudly on the bullhorn speakers nailed to the telephone pole next to the luguan is, in some sense, soothing. I fade back into sleep, enjoying the follow-up, a Christmas carol. I wonder vaguely if this western session is being played in my honor, and go to sleep again until a few minutes later when someone begins scraping a shovel in the courtyard outside, directly under my window. A few minutes later a cloud of coal smoke wafts in through the bars.

I breakfast on noodle soup and green tea and wait for the mechanic but it is eight before he shows up dressed in a clean crisp white shirt and meticulously pressed pants. He calls himself Frank and his nails are clean and his hair is oiled and swept back artfully except for the front part which has been fluffed and sprayed in some sort of fluffy do. Ridiculous as it is, he is still handsome, even more handsome, if possible, in the bright daylight. But there is something I don't like about him. His two assistants are very young, maybe 15 or 16 years old. They wear grimy blue pants and jackets and hang back like kicked dogs.

Frank unlocks the garage doors and we roll out the CJ. Then, we dilly-dally. I am frustrated and try to start with the repairs, showing him diagrams and trying to point to the place on the engine that's broken but he shushes me. Finally, a young woman, a local reporter, shows up with a camera. Ah ha. Irritated and helpless, I pose for photographs with Frank, and then, finally, we get started.

Frank begins his work by yelling at his assistants, who scramble to follow orders. About a half-hour goes by before I figure out that I'm a lot of the problem. I am helping, which Frank doesn't like, and he yells at the boys to try to do things before I can. It does not happen that way. I'm the boss, and I want to see what is wrong with the piston. Eventually Frank relaxes a little bit, letting me work at my own pace while the two mechanics assist.

It is difficult. First of all, they don't work neatly. I want to put every screw, nut, bolt, washer in separate containers so the ones that belong together stay together. I want to put each tool back where it went when I'm finished with it. They simply scatter everything in the packed dirt, brushing things aside as they need more room. Their tools are in a shallow metal box. My tools, neatly arranged in a proper tool box, my wrenches were organized in sleeves from smallest to largest, get mixed in with their tools, which is not malicious, they're not trying to steal them, they just do not have the mentality of neatness. I have to keep checking the box. There's nothing I can do about the screws.

I make a point of segregating our tools, of putting them away carefully and eventually they get it. They don't have the right tools for some tasks, so start asking me for them. I look over to see what they're doing, and give them a tool, and they laugh, I don't think they can believe I know what's needed. After a while we're working together, with mutual respect. They start using my tools then, asking just with their eyes, and with my eyes I say okay, because by now they are carefully putting them back in their proper place.

We pull the piston out and I see what I knew I would, the oil ring is cracked through and the piston is scored. I wonder how it failed twice in a row, in the same way. Maybe the new cylinder as mounted slightly askew. Maybe the entire right side is slightly warped. I can't tell. The head gasket looks okay, and there is no crack in the metal.

Frank takes a look--he touches things using a paper towel--and says it's time to go into town for parts. I wash up and we get on a bus to Linhe, the nearest large town. It's the first time I get a look at where we are. Just a small main street with a few stores and residences. Across a field, to the south of the main street, toward the river, is large residential area with houses made from adobe mud, the same color, the same mud, from the surrounding earth. There are maybe fifty single-family homes crowded together in neat rows.

The bus ride is short, maybe twenty minutes, and Linhe is bustling even at the outskirts of town where the motorcycle shop is. It's huge, stocked beyond my wildest dreams with cables hanging thick from the ceilings and glass counters stacked so high with boxes that we had to peek through them to talk with the woman behind the counter.

Frank talks and talks for what seems an unnecessarily long time to the woman behind the counter who becomes confused and uncomfortable with the conversation. What can be so difficult? I wonder, and I know I'm about to get ripped off. Finally, Frank turns to me and explains that she won't sell the right side of the engine only, that I would have to buy the left side too. I turned to look at her, but she blushes and turns away, obviously unwilling to meet my gaze. She really hadn't said much. Certainly not that.

I'd seen another CJ in Frank's garage that morning and so now I'm wondering what other parts I'll be paying for, along with the parts I need. It's ridiculous, but he doesn't know I'm prepared to be generous, I mean, I'm so rich in this context, I would have happily paid for parts for his bike, and a tip for him, and for his assistants, and he's undermining all that, creating his own little underworld of dishonesty. I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him, tell him that it will be okay, that we can be friends, that it can be mutually beneficial and that the world is a pretty good place. At home I'm a starving artist but here I can be flamboyantly generous.

But I look at him, so handsome and realize he's already formed his opinion. I wonder how it is to be so striking, and so limited. Someone who looked like that in America would be on a bus to Hollywood right after high school but this guy is not even allowed to cross the county line and he's getting older and there's no chance of training and he's stuck here and I'm stuck here with him trying to be compassionate with him but also trying to take care of myself.

It is exhausting to work out the details in Chinese. I know the language better now and I have the exploded diagram of the engine and I can point to those parts, and I also have a list of names of various motorcycle parts in both Roman and in Chinese characters that someone had written out for me in Beijing, along with certain phrases with blanks to fill in the part name, like "I want to buy some ______," and "Can you repair my ______?" It was so easy with Liu back near Baotau. With Frank it seems very much too complex. He won't let me communicate.

The woman rummages around doing something, I think she looking for our parts. Frank keeps talking to her. Every time I try to get in on the conversation he moves to physically shield me from her. I can see that she doesn't like looking at me but she doesn't like looking at Frank, either. She shrugs a lot and I realize that she's not responding to him, she's just doing what she was doing when we came in; making notes on her inventory and not looking for our parts.

Frank talks and talks and smiles and smiles and looks at me and looks at her. Now he's making it look like he is negotiating for me. I end up buying both sides of the engine. The woman rummages around for one part, and then for another. Each side of the engine comes in a separate package, clearly, meant to be sold separately. I try to make Frank meet my gaze but he won't. We ride back in silence, Frank studying his clean fingernails, me looking out the window, looking beyond the stares of the people in the bus, looking over the alluvial plain, looking over at the mountains so small from here, looking at the mud huts and the people working in the fields, wondering what it would like to be them, and being glad that I'm not.

Nothing really has been accomplished by the time Jin Zhi arrives at lunchtime to rescue me from the luguan. She wears the same long red velvet dress and plastic sandals, her hair is still a tangled mess and her glasses are still askew. I would soon learn that this is just Jin Zhi.

"Is the mechanic successful?" she asks. I say I think so. My feelings must be transparent because she says, in a low voice, "Yes, you must be careful of this man."

Frank is visibly relieved that I'm leaving. Jin Zhi translates a list of tasks I'd like to get done beyond replacing the right side: set the timing, change the spark plugs, and whatever else is necessary. I ask her to tell him specifically that I would trust him to do whatever else needed to be done to make a successful long trip. I lie and say I'll be coming back this way. By then, I say, the engine will be broken in, and so he could give it a check-up. Jin Zhi has some trouble understanding what I mean by the mechanical terms, but otherwise, her English is excellent.

By now, even though I don't like Frank, I do respect his mechanical abilities. Though he hardly touched the engine he directed his assistants and he did a good job. He was a perfectionist. I should have already see that by his dress and hair and nails. Maybe he wasn't a bad guy after all, maybe he was just like everyone else. Stuck, and of course, here I am, a mere woman, a foreigner, doing whatever the hell she pleases in his country. Riding in my leather jacket and cowboy boots on this big expensive Chang Jiang 650 with black license plates that mean that I can cross provincial lines through the entire country.

Jin Zhi's house is one of those I had seen from the window of the bus earlier that day. It is built of mud and straw and surrounded by a five-foot high wall of mud and straw to separate it from the fifty other houses and walls made of mud and straw. The houses are in varying states of decay but Jin Zhi's is arguably the worst. Before we enter the yard Jin Zhi turns around to take me down the road to the toilet, a mud and straw lean-to stinking so badly that it was impossible to suppress my gag reflex, and with an ammonia smell so strong that my eyes watered. I'd experienced some pretty bad Chinese toilets, but this was the worst. Usually they're shoveled out regularly to fertilize the fields.

The brick path to the front door crosses a small yard of mud still wet from a recent rain. Next to the door a bucket of slop sits next to a rusty, old-fashioned water pump. I look at it with a new appreciation, thinking about Lily with her big containers of water in the pantry, carried from a mile away.

Jin Zhi wrestles with the front door. It's wooden slats barely hang together and they sag so much that she has to pull up on it violently to unstick it from the threshold. Inside, the sagging roof of rotting black straw looks dangerously close to collapse. The whole place smells of dirt and mold.

The bricks on the floor are arranged in a zigzag pattern and settled well into the dirt. On the left side of the hall a doorway to a small room holds a cabinet piled with a few clothes, some jars and toothbrushes, and a bookcase filled with paperbacks all labeled in Chinese. A quick look at the collection reveals many in English, titles by Shakespeare, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck as well as collections of short stories and novellas by British and American authors, and a dozen lesson books in the English language.

The room beyond is larger with a linoleum kitchen table placed by a window looking out at the muddy yard and the sagging property wall. On the other side of the room sits a kang and a black pot-bellied stove. A rickety wire stand holds a plastic basin filled with dirty water, and filthy rag and a wrinkled radish had fallen on the floor next to it.

"Excuse me I am bad housewife," she says, picking up the radish and the dirty dishcloth. "And my house is very bad because my salary and my husband's salary is only five hundred yuan a month each, so we get bad house."

Jin Zhi finds her job teaching college students at the agricultural school frustrating. She wants to start her own business, a kindergarten in town.

"They say I am not a good teacher but I am a good teacher. Trouble is students don't want to learn," she complains. "I am not bad teacher. I have bad students. They are supposed to know English but they are bad students and they don't study," she said.

She pushes her glasses up to the bridge of her nose and sorts through dandelion greens while I looked through her notebooks. Her written English is perfect, much better than mine, with neat handwriting. There are pages and pages of grammar, of sentence diagramming. I am impressed and I say so. She smiles, showing her crooked teeth.

"If you stay three months more my speaking English will be very good, too," she says. I smile back and say nothing.

But Jin Zhi and I are both starved for conversation. I haven't had a conversation in a month, so I listened to her frustrations about the college teaching students who don't have a chance in their lives because they don't have connections. They know it, she says, and it makes them bad students, she said, because they re ambivalent about their future. The administration is corrupt, too. Whether teaching or administering, it is all about connections. Jin Zhi herself has no connections, so she gets no support.

On Steinbeck, she says he is a good man, and she likes his writing. It is easy—not like Shakespeare, which is beautiful but difficult, and she can see that the lives of the people he wrote about were true. They are all so different than Chinese writers.

"You are the only foreigner I have ever seen," she says, abruptly.

"Ever 'met'," I correct.

"No," she said. "I have never seen a foreigner in person... on TV, yes, but never in person."

"Not even driving by in a car?" I ask.

"No."

What would it like to live in a place where everyone is exactly alike, the same race, the same socio-economic status? At home in San Francisco cultures merge and clash. Russians, Africans, Mexicans, Asians and Europeans. There is no major nationality or combination of nationalities I have not passed in the street at home in San Francisco, and many from obscure places, places I've never head of. Over half the population of my city speaks some language other than English at home. But 95 percent of the population here is Han Chinese. The government relocates Han Chinese into minority areas at such a rate that Han has almost become the majority even in former minority areas.

At five o'clock Jin Zhi's husband comes home with their three-year old son. He is a sports teacher at the college, and it is soccer season. Jin Zhi's husband wears a blue athletic suit and running shoes. He has light brown hair and eyes that slanted upward and I am surprised that he speaks no English at all.

The boy barely notices me me. He is a bit unmanageable, says Jin Zhi, because his father spoils him. Everything she tells him to do his father says he does not have to do. Already there is difficulty with discipline. One of the problems, she admits, is that she hadn't wanted children at all. Her husband had insisted.

Of course she loves her son, and now she doesn't know why she hadn't wanted children. It is good that he was a boy, she says. If they'd had a girl they would have had to have another, to get a boy.

"I would like a girl," Jin said. "But my husband must have a boy."

In China, as in many countries, boys are social security. They grow up and make money and support their parents. Girls don't make an income to share with their parents, they get married and support, and in a way, become the property of their husband's family. It seems inconceivable.

In China a woman marries as well as she can. When she becomes pregnant she can get a determination of the gender of the fetus, and if it's a girl, she can abort it and try again. In places where they don't have pre-birth gender determination, many more newborn girls than newborn boys suffer mysterious deaths.

I feel at home in Jin Zhi's messy house. We watch the news on television in her bedroom where the family's clothes are scattered about. The bed is unmade, the plaster peels. The big window looks out upon the yard of brown mud. The government-controlled television news is obsessed with blond Russian children digging through garbage cans in the streets of Moscow, gleefully repeating that their attempted move to capitalism was obviously doomed.

After dinner Jin Zhi's husband goes out to play Ma Jong. Jin Zhi says he gambled too much. She saved one hundred yuan and he lost it. He couldn't stop. If Ma Jong did not exist China would be a better place, she says.

I had seen people playing Ma Jong all over China, huddled over boxes in the shade of a roof gutter, in the corner of a restaurant, behind the counter in a store. The game is apparently mesmerizing, the rectangular pieces smooth and cool to the touch. The luck about to happen.

Jin Zhi's husband lost all of their savings—one hundred yuan (the equivalent of twelve US dollars). She was devastated. She had been hoping to save 1000 yuan to start a kindergarten, a cooperative school so that the families in this town wouldn't have to make the thirty minute bus ride to Linhe twice a day. It would be a good business. There was a market for it, and she'd done her research. The government would allow it.

The next day the CJ was finished but I wasn't ready to leave. Frank agreed to keep it in his garage, but some of my tools were missing. He yelled at the assistants and all but one piece turned up. It wasn't important. It was because they were so sloppy, not because they wanted to steal my tools.

Despite my extreme dislike of Frank, I paid what he asked him without argument. I had actually come to feel sorry for him and his lack of opportunity. He and both of his assistants were delighted to accept my gift of a mini-flashlight to each of them, the kind that comes with a holder that they could wear on their belts. I took a few photos of them next to the finished motorcycle, and wrote down Frank's address. He was pleased, and I felt we parted with some mutual respect. I hoped that in the future he would behave better toward foreigners, if he ever had the chance to come across one again. Jin Zhi thought I was being too generous. She said he was always bad.

That afternoon Jin and I caught the bus to Linhe to pick up her son from school. As we mounted, the bus driver asked her about me, and they had a funny little conversation that Jin didn't want to relate. When I insisted, she told me he had asked why I was dressed so badly. I was wearing black jeans, cowboy boots and a plain shirt. She told him that I was riding a motorcycle through China. He shrugged. All over China you see people doing physical labor in neatly pressed suit jackets. They don't understand why rich foreigners wouldn't always dress in fine clothing.

This bus took us to another part of town. From this perspective I could see both how large the city was and how rich the surrounding lands. I later discovered that the area is home to 150 different varieties of wild herbal plants, a major corn-growing area, and that Linhe is the largest cashmere production and processing base, mutton market, and distribution center for sheep-related products in all of China. Its population is estimated at around 200,000.

The kindergarten and grammar school in on this eastern edge of Linhe looked like many schools in the west. A brick wall surrounded a courtyard where there white markings were painted on the pavement for games, with a few brick buildings that stood neatly beyond. The children streamed out looking for their parents. Jin Zhi picked up her son and we walked across the street to buy ice cream.

On the way back to her house we bought groceries for dinner. It was difficult for her to allow me to pay, but finally she did. We bought pork from the butcher, and vegetables from a stand, but still she picked dandelion greens in the field on the way back to her house.

Unlike Lily, Jin Zhi let me help her cook and clean. She showed me how to make noodles, just water and flour, but the right technique was crucial. I chopped vegetables and went to the front yard to get water. Again I spent an evening in family surroundings amongst people who were going about their business. Her husband came home and took their son out to play soccer in the nearby field before we ate.

"Did you notice that my husband is Mongolian?" Jin Zhi giggled, during dinner, as if it were a scandal. I hadn't, really. Some people look a little different here, with lighter hair that is fine instead of thick and straight. Jin looked a little like that too, but her eyes were dark, not golden brown like the Mongolians.

Immediately after dinner Zin Zhi and her husband had an argument, and then he left. "He's going out to play Ma Jong," Jin Zhi sighed. "I will never have a business."

The next morning I wore the only dress I packed and a pair of sandals to go with Jin Zhi to the agricultural college. The campus was a jumble of red brick buildings scattered on an expanse of green lawn. I sat at a metal desk in the faculty room and talked a little to the other teachers, all women, while Jin Zhi did some administrative work, and then we went outside under some large leafy trees to take photographs. Jin Zhi had told everyone I was coming and everyone who had one brought a camera.

A bell rung and hundreds of students came streaming out of all the different rooms. They rushed up to me so quickly that I was frightened that I'd be mobbed. Several girls grabbed me and pushed me into the middle of their group. They talked to me as well as they could, and I will never forget their young faces looking earnestly into my eyes while asking questions. I asked where their families lived and if they had brothers and sisters. What their job would be. Some were able to answer. Others giggled and said, "I'm sorry," and moved back into the crowd.

I carried on conversations in broken English in group after group, pausing to grin for the photographers. I was pushed and pulled around for a full half-hour like a celebrity. Jin Zhi tried to intervene after a while, but even she gave up and stood back with the faculty and watched. Finally she announced that the visit was over. Her favorite students—the ones who studied—followed us back toward Jin's house. They asked me to come to their dormitory after dinner. Jin said I didn't have to, but I wanted to.

The dormitories were similar to those in American colleges, only more crowded. There were six beds in one small room, with no room for a desk and I wondered where they stored even their few belongings. I was settled down on a lower bunk and the girls gathered around, taking turns shaking my hand and saying a few words in English. I asked them about being Mongolian—about half the girls were. They were proud of their culture, they told me, and especially of their songs.

"Would you mind to hear us sing a song?" one girl offered. Then the six girls gathered around and sang the sweetest Mongolian folk song in lovely high voices. After that one Han girl sang a traditional Chinese folk song.

During the song the word had gotten out that I was in the vicinity again and the door was jammed with other students, who waited for the girl to finish. Then they begged me for a song.

This is my nightmare. I absolutely can not sing in tune and I have a very narrow range. I resisted as long as I could. I don't know all of the words to a single song, but they wouldn't believe me. Suddenly I remembered that I did know the words to one song: Home on the Range. I sang it, with as much aplomb as I could muster, figuring it couldn't sound all that bad next to some of the twangy, nasal Chinese songs I'd heard blasting non-stop from every town's speaker system. So I twanged, and messed up the words unbelievably, but they would never know. My reward was that they were absolutely and sincerely delighted.

Then they asked me to autograph their school books. The stream of books seemed to never end, and I wrote variations of the same message in each one. "It has been so very nice visiting with you. I wish you success in your studies and a prosperous future..." Finally Jin Zhi came to the rescue, pretending to drag me away. Though I enjoyed the interaction with them very much I was exhausted with being a celebrity. I now know why celebrities hide out in large houses behind walls.

As Jin Zhi dragged me away, a sad looking girl, the one who had spoken the best English, passed me a folded note on thin lined notebook paper that begged for my help in getting out of China.

Always, as soon as I leave a place I'm sorry that I didn't stay and delve deeper into these lives. But I was seeing that a foreigner can be destructive as well as instructive to a culture, especially one that has such limits set upon them by the government. So when I began to sense that I was bringing Jin Zhi's buried discontent closer to the surface I knew it was time to go. We had each talked of our lives and they were galaxies apart. My middle-class life of unimaginable ease. My freedom, out of the question. She was interested in everything. She enjoyed my company and I, hers. But her frustration was intense. Her intelligence, energy, and ambition had no place to go. And the dean of the school, she had added, was uncomfortable with my presence.

I was horrified to think that I might be endangering her job, her life, but she insisted I wasn't. "No... he is an old-fashioned man, he does not know that you are helping because he is afraid of the new world.

A version of _The Chinese English Teacher_ was first published in 1998 in a series of realtime dispatches from the road during Carla's journey around Northern China. You can read more about this trip at CarlaKing.com.

## 8

# The Hitchhiker

### A trucker's view of China

I get an early start and figure I can make it to Yinchuan, a city in Ningxia province just 340 kilometers south of Linhe on the highway that follows the Yellow River. My goal is to make it there well before sunset. The sun is hot but a spring breeze cools the air and the countryside is as picturesque as a painting with peasants working the fields. The towns, however, are depressingly industrial, filled with food processing plants and robotic workers. Instead of lunching in one of these dismal places I stop at a noodle cart parked at a desolate crossroads, the Chinese version of a truck stop.

The vendor takes a white rice flour crepe from the top of a tall stack and slaps it onto a wooden chopping block built into the back of the stand. She folds the crepe into thirds and with a big flat butcher's knife rapidly slices it into noodle-sized strands before sliding it into a bowl covered in a disposable plastic wrapper. She asks me which ingredients to add. A dozen blue and white enamel bowls on shelves inside are filled with freshly chopped cilantro and green onions, mint and other herbs and spices. I point through the glass, having learned what I like by trial and error, stopping her before she adds the red-hot chili peppers, which makes her giggle. She hands the mixture over to me with a shy smile on her face. I pour some soy sauce on and eat quickly. The noodles are cool and refreshing, minty and spicy, and a substantial meal that cost literally pennies.

As I finish, a trucker rolls up. Truckers, unlike the general population, will usually greet me instead of staring and this one smiles and gives me a thumbs up as I put on my helmet to continue on my lonely way west. I am a loner by nature but the way the average Chinese just shuts down when they see me has made for a very solitary journey through a country jam-packed with people, and so even the most insignificant interactions like the friendly noodle vendor and the hello from the trucker has become important to me.

At sunset I am still 60 or 70 kilometers from Yinchuan lost in a confused jumble of a town called Shizuishan. The main highway ended in a chaotic mix of streets and alleyways, no street larger than another, no sign indicating the way to Yinchuan, only shops and markets and fat pigs with their snouts in piles of garbage.

Usually I would follow a blue truck through a town but at dinnertime the trucks re all parked in front of restaurants. So I choose roads at random, the ones that lead west toward the sunset, but they always turn away. Panicking slightly, I wonder if I should look for a hotel here. A few times I pull over to ask someone if there is a binguan or a luguan in town, but they just look shocked and shake their heads no.

My very limited Beijing Mandarin is not well-understood to western dialects, and if they were like everyone else I'd met so far they'd never seen an actual foreigner in their lives. Teresa, the US Agricultural Attaché back in Beijing, was fluent in Mandarin, and she'd told me that it often took quite a while for people to recover their equilibrium to realize she was speaking in a language they could understand.

Soon I'm lost in a maze of factory complex and apartment buildings, all brand new. There is only one person on the street, a young man, and I pull over to ask the way to Yinchuan. He understands what I want but the instructions are so complex I can't follow. Finally, he jumps on the back.

We ride around the factory straight toward a nuclear power plant and he hops off. Apparently the road to Yinchuan is on the other side of the complex. And no, he won't take a ride home. Before I can put the bike into first two young men on a scooter pull up and block me, talking in urgent voices saying Yinchuan over and over again.

I understand little except that one of these guys needs to get to Yinchuan now. Am I going that way? It is a three-hour drive and it was dark, but there is no hotel in this town. He will guide me to Yinchuan. No money. Go to Yinchuan now. Thank you.

Three hours! According to my map it should be 60 kilometers away, but it wouldn't be the first time my maps were wrong. I quickly make a decision...take the guy with me. I'm not going to sleep outdoors next to a nuclear power plant and even though I'll be riding in the dark, riding with a local is better than going alone. And besides, what am I here for? To play it safe? Okay, get on, I say.

Yes! Good! But he must to stop by his apartment to get a couple of things. He points to the factory apartment complex, all white, all six-stories tall.

I hesitate. No bad guy, he says, in English, No bang bang pow pow, and then some babble about a truck in Yinchuan.

So I drive him to his apartment complex which is just as weird and artificial looking up close as it had looked from afar. We run upstairs. He is agile and quick. I am loaded down with fatigue, my leather jacket, boots, and helmet.

He runs out of sight ahead of me on the stairs and then runs back down to encourage me on, like a dog impatient for its master to follow. He lives on the top floor, there's a pile of bricks lying on the case and my paranoid side notes it as a potential weapon. His manner becomes manic. He is in too much of a hurry.

I point to "hurry" and "trouble" in the phrasebook, and he gives me a thumbs up at "hurry" and down at "trouble" and finds "friend" and "guide" and "no money" to make me feel better. I am sure I am driving him crazy.

I'm surprised to find that the apartment is actually quite similar to a small two-bedroom apartment in the U.S. I stand in the living room as he runs around digging through drawers. He shows me his driver's card, holding it up to his face and pointing at the photo, and tells me to sit on the couch, and pushes a pair of black leather gloves into my hands, they have fur linings, he shows me, and he also throws a pair of red cotton gloves and two tins of tiger balm and some perfume on the growing pile in my lap. The perfume smells vile, like mint and turpentine, but I smile and say thank you. My paranoia disappears, becoming amusement and curiosity.

He rumbles through more drawers, takes out a plastic model of a drag race car and runs it through the air inches from my face making a sound that must be the Chinese version of "vroom vroom," then opens the door to the bedroom, which glows red because of the red lace curtains on the windows, to rifle through more drawers. He then runs to the kitchen to fill my tea jar with hot water, then back into another room.

While he is busy I walk around. The apartment is very nice, top floor with a view of the factory and countryside beyond, flush toilet, neatly furnished, a wedding photo of him and his wife looking very young and sweet. He's wearing a tuxedo jacket and she a traditional Chinese red wedding dress, with lace overlaying the silk. For some reason the photo calms me.

The phone rings. He has a hasty conversation. I get up to look around, peek in a door and see a flush toilet. I don't have to pee but it's been so long since I've used an actual sit-down flush toilet I try. It is a very pleasurable experience, clean, cold porcelain, warm water for washing hands, a towel for drying hands.

I emerge. He shoves my helmet and gloves and the two other pairs of gloves and the balm and the perfume into my hands and shouts in English "LET'S GO!"

He literally runs in circles a couple of times looking for something as I stand there slightly astounded.

"LET'S GO!"

We are off, down the stairs and getting on the bike, just as his wife arrives. She is astonished and about eight months pregnant. He talks and talks and she looks from him to me and back again, unable to speak.

"SORRY!" he shouts to me. "LET'S GO!"

Another woman cycles up and stops beside his wife. They stand there gaping. I feel bad that I can't reassure her, but it comforts me that somebody has seen us go, that someone knows who I'm with and where I'm going. They definitely are not happy, but he says goodbye and jumps on the back seat and shouts again "LET'S GO!" I shrug apologetically to the two women and jam the bike into reverse with the foot lever.

The sun has set but there is still a little light. It is colder than I had thought it might get here in springtime, and I can feel the guy shaking in his thin jacket. His hand shakes when he points the way in crisp jerks in front of my face, right or left or straight ahead. And then I get it. He is a truck driver, his truck is in Yinchuan for some reason and it shouldn't be, he took it there and will be in trouble if his boss knows, had talked his friend into taking him on his scooter but then they saw me.

Truck, nervousness, shakes.... drugs? He is running around like a manic because he's a speed freak trucker.

oohWHAAAH! he yells in my ear when it looks like I may go straight instead of left.

oohWHAAAH! he yells when I get too far in the middle of the road.

oohWHAAAH!! he yells when a truck jumps on the highway ahead of us.

He reaches over my shoulder and points frantically at the ignition button, distracting me at exactly the wrong moment. A truck is passing in my lane dead ahead as I'm passing two bicyclists who are riding astride and a taxi is hot on my back bumper and beeping like crazy and this guy is jabbing at my ignition button. After about the fifth time he does this it dawns on me that he thinks it's the horn. I beep the horn, which is on the other side.

YYYYEEEESSS! He yells in glee. YYYYEEEESSS!

It is now night. Pitch black. I am freezing and I am wearing four shirts, a leather jacket, wool scarf, helmet and a rain suit. He is wearing slacks, a white shirt, dinner jacket and a wind breaker. It becomes so dark that even the drivers who drive without their lights on turn on their lights, and that's when they start their sadistic little headlight game power trip.

I have no idea why they're flashing their brights at me. I have the lows on, they flash their brights. I flash my brights and they blast me with brights. They leave the lows on and when they get ten feet away they turn on their brights to blind me. All this while I'm trying to miss potholes, pass tractors and motorcycles and bicycles, and deal with oohWHAAAH! on my back seat.

Why can't they just put their dims on when they see an oncoming vehicle? It seems a simple rule but it doesn't work here. I experiment. Dims on when I see them coming. Nope. They bright me. I bright back. They dim and bright back again. Okay. Brights on until they flash. But then if that happens they seem to get pissed off and bright me ten feet from touchdown. Too late to bright them back. Okay, so wait until we're about in irritation proximity, then dim. Seems to work best, but I still get blinded. JERKS! I yell.

WHAAAH! I'M SORRY! from the back seat. Oh yeah. He's a trucker. Getting a little taste of his own medicine, I think.

So I let them see my brights and then dim before they do, which seems to work best, though I still get blinded sometimes. I cannot figure out the rules. And then I figure out there are no rules.

Two hours later my left thumb is sore from hitting the bright-dim switch, and sometimes I turn the lights off entirely, because the switch gets momentarily stuck between. When that happens I hear a "oohWHAAAH" and then a hysterical laugh in my ear.

We ride. The cold air creeps in through gaps in all my clothes, and I wish I knew what this was all about. I didn't like the way he treated his wife, but then in China there is no public display of affection between husband and wife, none at all. I wonder how many times he has pulled stunts. I feel sorry because she's eight months pregnant and he's on drugs again and off with a foreigner and of course she's worrying.

Two hours into it and he's still giving me directions on how to miss potholes and pass tractors. I think I've come far enough without your help, I yell through my helmet and the wind, and he says YESSSS! in delight. He weighs maybe 100 pounds, maybe 90, not much heavier than the extra cylinder I have in the sidecar. I begin to dislike him intensely, but then he starts the massage. A little chop chop on the back, a little squeeze squeeze on the shoulders. Some pieces of song that might be in English, another oohWHAAAH!

We're eighteen kilometers from Yinchuan but I have to stop and walk around for a few minutes.

He lights a cigarette and starts babbling about this and that, (boshe, fellali, new yok) smokes, shakes his head, paced, and occasionally shouts in glee, "YINCHUAN - ONE - EIGHT - YES!"

We arrive in Yinchuan at eleven o'clock and my trucker helps me find a businessman's hotel. He helps me get the motorcycle safely parked, locked, and covered. He runs ahead of me to open the door, helps me fill out the check-in form accompanied by a non-stop dialogue to a very confused reception clerk. Then he brings my bags to my room, barks at the floor girl, washes his face, makes sure I have hot water in the thermos, tells me his name, which I can't understand, leaves, returns, lets me take his photo, asks me the time, turns on the television, and then leaves again.

I stand in front of the door still wearing my layers of clothes and jacket, holding my helmet in one hand and the fleece-lined gloves he gave me in the other, waiting for him to remember one more thing and come back, but he does not return.

The room is comfortably stark, with the requisite thin red carpet, hard bed, heavy curtains, tiled bathroom, and this one actually has hot running water at all times. After a short hot shower I fall into the kind of deep, peaceful sleep that comes with having reached one's destination in safety after hours of stress.

Yinchuan is sparkling and green, its streets are clean and lined with trees, its air is fresh, its traffic is light, and drivers are polite. Modern shops are crammed with goods...hats and electronics and clothing and music. The theme song from the movie Titanic blares from every second doorway. I wonder where the trucker is. I wonder if he found his truck and I wonder if that was even the problem, and if his wife was really mad, and how he's going to explain, and if he's a drug addict and what he thinks of the whole thing last night. It's a good story for a trucker. It's a good story for me.

Under a huge covered food market more than fifty woks sizzle with tofu, vegetables, mutton, mushrooms, and many things I don't recognize. Everywhere there are small black pots bubbling over fires blazing everywhere. Glass shelves are artfully stacked with skewers of quail eggs and triangles of marinated tofu. I buy a sweet yogurt cream in a white ceramic pot covered with tissue paper held down with a rubber band. The vendor pops a straw through the paper and I find a place in the shade to people watch. It is an affluent city. The people are fashionably-dressed. I am the only foreigner, but though I am noticed, my presence is taken in stride.

The specialty here is eight-treasures tea, a chrysanthemum tea mixed with dried dates and apples, lychee, Chinese wolfberries, raisins, currants, something called dragon-eye fruit, and a lump of rock sugar. I sip it slowly from a streetside table, letting the fruits soften. The theme of the movie "Titanic" plays again, competing with the wizened Chinese bohemian sitting cross-legged in the dirt playing a single-stringed instrument the size of a banjo. It creates an amazing range of tones with just the one string. The music is beautiful, strained, a sad violin solo. I put money in his hat and he presses his hands together in a "Namaste." A Buddhist. My guidebook says there's a monastery nearby.

I catch the end of worship at the monastery by the Haibao Pagoda a few miles out of town. The Tibetan priests preach and chant to the congregation, about 20 Chinese kneeling on the concrete floor. They have a hard time holding still and the oldest priest interrupts the ceremony several times to tell them to shut up, but he might as well be talking to kindergarteners. After the sermon, the priests rip handfuls of soft white bread and throw them violently at the Chinese devotees, who scuttle on their hands and knees to grab pieces from the floor. It's perverse, but I can't suppress a giggle.

Finally the monks grab musical instruments and play a soothing melody. It's peaceful here with the music and the lengths of colorful silk cloths streaming down from the high ceilings, and the coolness of the interior of the temple. The temple is such a haven from the noise and chaos of the outside world that I wonder if religion was invented just to give people a little time to experience peace.

I tuck myself into a corner as everyone leaves, then walk to at the altar to a large golden Buddha sitting among silk scarves, fruit, bread and coins, and place some money there. One of the monks runs out and grabs a banana from the altar, shoves it into my hands, and runs out again. That was nice of him, to give me a blessed banana, "prasad."

The Haibao Pagoda next door is nine stories high. From the top I can see Mt. Helanshan looming in the west, the Yellow River to the east, and the city of Yinchuan beyond an expanse of emerald green rice fields being tended by peasants in peaked caps. To the southwest are the mountains that shelter the city of Lanzhou, my next destination. With the view stretched out before me, I am suddenly eager to get going again. I wonder if my trucker is on the road somewhere. If we might pass each other sometime. Would he beep at me? Flash his lights? It's too bad, I wouldn't notice.

A version of _The Hitchhiker_ was first published in 1998 in a series of realtime dispatches from the road during Carla's journey around Northern China. It was also included in the book _In Search of Adventure: A Wild Travel Anthology_.

## 9

# From Somewhere to Nowhere

### Confluence in Kanyakumari, India

I walk into the water at the pointy tip of India to let the Trinity flow around my ankles. Here is the confluence of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bengal Sea. Here are the pilgrims, dabbling in the water and settling on the sand to contemplate and to pray to this great trinity--the creator, the protector, the destroyer. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. The father, the son, the holy ghost.

I chose to ride an obscure little back road from Madurai to Kannykumari, the end of India. It was a mistake. It is often a mistake to choose a back road in a country where even the main roads are back roads. It began well enough, lush and tropical, but changed abruptly to scrub and desolation. Sometime recently asphalt had been poured thinly onto the dry golden earth, resulting in a winding black ribbon, already crumbling at the edges into dust. The motorcycle chugged along undisturbed, but for me it was a lonely road, like the road to Big Bend through a dry Texas valley toward the Rio Grande, like the road through the Gobi Desert with its windswept snakes of sand wending south to the Yellow River. It's along these roads that you start wondering if, by some fluke, you are the last living person in the world, and then suddenly someone appears walking from somewhere to nowhere. Where was she going, that woman in a bright green sari carrying the huge bundle of twigs on her head? And those two men with newly carved wooden pitchforks slung over their shoulders. Where might they use them, less than a day's walk away?

Another hour goes by and I'm still wondering where these people came from, where they were going. In four hours I stopped three times for other vehicles--two buses and a truck that kindly didn't force me off into the ditch. I stopped once for a herd of cows and once for a black spotted goat that trotted back and forth on the asphalt when he saw me. I might have dreamt my last forced halt to let fifty miniature burros pass by. They swarmed around the motorcycle, their long ears brushing my mirrors as they trotted toward an oasis with one tiny pond and a few spindly coconut trees. The scent of hot fur and manure lingered a moment, and then there was only dry heat in a landscape of sand and aloe and acacia and twisted little trees with flat tops, with a few withered leaves clinging to dry branches.

Still no village, still no petrol station--the source of a helpless underlying worry that remains with me. I follow the sun, setting its glare in my right eye, and continue down this southwest back road, as if I had any choice. I am twenty kilometers into the reserve tank, and my worry grows, but just when the engine begins to stutter from starvation, civilization appears.

I coast to the pump and welcome the shimmering rise of petrol fumes as the attendant splashes the first precious drops into the tank. It is hellaciously hot as I stand waiting for the tank to fill, and touts swarm me with promises of cheap hotels.

I ride toward the sea to join the pilgrims. I sit on the beach and watch the horizon from this spot at the end of the world, the end of their world. The women are draped in all colors of silks and cottons, with scarves over their heads and gold discs in their nostrils, bangles on their wrists and barefoot, barefoot for all of their lives. A man in white and orange is having his photo taken to commemorate the moment, the highlight of his pilgrimage. He adjusts his white turban and strikes a severe pose, ankle deep in the sea. Beyond him a few people splash in the water, protected by the smooth brown rocks that break the waves. A sun-blackened hippie wrapped in gauzy Indian cotton perches on a larger rock, picking out a tune on an exotic small guitar. He smiles at me, then picks up the rhythm as two women wade into the water up to their thighs, their saris floating in the gently heaving tide like yellow and lavender seaweed. I press my bare feet into the sand and walk in after them, the brown cotton of my pants darkening with water.

The sea is warm and the salt stings my wounds. The sun is falling. The faces around me are quiet and smooth in meditation. Many, sitting in groups on the sand, close their eyes. The bald heads of those who gave their hair at Tirupati are smeared with yellow ash. Nearly every forehead is dotted with red kumkum powder, swiped on by the priest during today's darshan blessing at the temple. They know why they are here, these pilgrims. They come in ragtag groups and huddle together around the buses in which they arrive. They make a tiny space for living, cooking and sleeping. They defecate onto the rocks at the sea wall at dawn and dusk. They go to the temple, worship, and they gather again, kneading dough for chapati, flattening them into discs, tossing them into a fire. Someone stirs a huge pot of watery yellow dahl. They are experiencing hardship, as is appropriate on a pilgrimage. The word "sacred" has its roots in the word "sacrifice," and they know the meaning of both. The road here is difficult, and they are poor, but they, at least, know what they are looking for. They, at least, know that they have found it, that they are fulfilling an agreement made from the beginnings of their many lives. And they know that this life is only one of many more to come.

I say that I am not a seeker, yet here I am in a country where seeking and finding is a natural part of life. Road signs warn, "Be Careful, Only One Life," but to Hindus, karma is a factor that tempers the fear of the end of this life, and if you die because you are driving like a maniac, well, it's out of your hands. It's your karma. But no matter, previous lives lived well promise reward in the next. You can speed up the process toward enlightenment by walking around mountains and deities and performing countless other rituals. Such rituals! They are lovely and frightful. I studied some; I copied the movements, the outward signs of worship, but always felt somewhat removed. I followed carefully in the bare footsteps of those walking through darkened hallways, down the stairs to the inner sanctum. I performed the puja ceremony to the temple gods along with the others, and received my darshan from the priest. Now I stand in the sea, my forehead swiped with red kumkum powder, too. A non-believer can pay respects, no? Even if she doesn't completely understand?

I am a child-person here, a foreigner, and they forgive me. Religion is not a game or entertainment for tourists, and I am a tourist, an unwilling spiritual tourist in this land of temples and sacred mountains. I have always made a little bit of fun of seekers, but India does something to you that creates a wondering. Within a week I found myself at Aurobindo ashram, and the next day I was meditating with the largest crystal in the world. There I found an energy that removed me from my physical self for just a little less than an hour. I floated for days on that energy, and I know that whatever shaped that clear pure stone is a spiritual force to be taken seriously, as serious as the velocity at which I hit the ground seven days ago.

I killed a dog. Does that shave some time from my process of enlightenment? I rub the seawater into my wounds and the salt stings good. The thick scabs that have formed on the tops of my wrists, my knees and my left shoulder are softening and beginning to bleed again. I remember the speedometer reading forty miles per hour but I have no memory of the impact, the tumbling. Only the sound of my helmet bouncing in my ears, and then blessed landing, unconsciousness, then water in my face. The dog was still screaming as they took my keys and put me in the van. They were Christian missionaries, Indians in fluttering white saris. They put me in the back, and I looked out the window. The dog lay still at the side of the road. It was a gray-black dog, an adult, healthy and vibrant, with short, shiny fur. There was no blood, but it lay panting heavily, its eyes open wide. I know I hit it square on, right in the middle. The moment before I hit it is frozen in my memory.

"Is the dog dead?" I asked the woman in the green sari who was performing Hindu blessings over my bloody knee.

"No," she said. "It is not yet dead." One of the missionaries started the motorcycle. Miraculously, it was undamaged.

"It will be dead soon?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "It will soon be dead." She said one last prayer, and left me to the missionaries. No one paid attention to the dog.

I hated it for crossing the road like that, without looking. I thought it deserved to die, the stupid, hateful creature. And then I was sorry. So sorry. Weeks later I still fluctuate between the hate and the sorrow, and I remember, along with this confusion, the feeling of the blood, so warm at my knee, and then colder as it ran down my leg, soaking the white fabric of the fine cotton sari folded under me. At the time I didn't even wonder at the fate of my knee, or of the rest of my trip. I was enfolded and unraveled, leaving my fate in hands other than my own. In India you look around and realize that since you've arrived there is no moment, not even one, that you can escape knowing where you are.

The sun sinks into the sea and I become a pilgrim. I am in India, with all its dirt and beauty. Each is balanced by the other; there is nothing that might be labeled bland. There is the boy with the twisted legs and the wide black eyes skittering on his hands along the sidewalk, silently begging. The woman, piebald with leprosy, glaring hate and spirit. The old crone with her hand sticking from a ragged silk sari, her toothless mouth croaking "maw, maw."

There is the glossy white cow that chews through banana peels and pomegranate husks. The girl child who supports her baby sister on a tiny, jutted hip. A line of sadhus in orange robes, sitting with their beards and their hollowed-out gourds along the swept-clean gates of an ashram. A stoned hippie argues with a rickshaw driver over a nickel's worth of taxi fare. Goats toss their heads as they rip through plastic bags at garbage piles, their yellow eyes glittering under the streetlight. An aluminum vat of green chili peppers pops and sizzles. Discarded banana leaves slimy with yellow curry lie in a pile by the curb.

It is difficult to look sometimes, but if you do, you begin to see past the dirt.

_From Somewhere to Nowhere_ was first published in _Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel_. The story is based on realtime dispatches from the road during Carla's motorcycle journey in Southern India.

Liked this story? Get more free adventure stories, travel tips, and gear reviews by signing up at www.CarlaKing.com

## 10

# Tips for Traveling Solo

### Don't be scared. Be aware.

You want to take that solo trip but everyone says that you'll be a magnet for all the unsavory characters in a hundred-mile radius. Not so! I have traveled by bicycle, motorcycle, train, car, and bus around the globe for over thirty years. Here are my best tips for staying safe.

### Foreign women are well treated...

In general people are very supportive and give me the thumbs up when they figure out what I'm doing. I've left a trail of people who think that all American women can fix engines and tromp around the world all by themselves without a second thought. In rural places, getting held-up or raped or murdered doesn't cross my mind. (I let my intuition help with that, see below) Getting stuck on a desert road with the camels and an overheated motorcycle engine does. But there's always some kind soul who will stop. Usually that's my stop for the night or a day or two, and I get to see what life's really like.

### Foreign women become honorary men...

As a Western women in developing countries I have been privy to the mens' world (as in Africa, sort of the "honorary man"). So while the women cook and clean, you're invited to drink beer and play cards...or you can go help cook which is always fun. It's up to you. The women think it's a gas when you "ooh and ahh" over the cooking process that is so mundane to them but exotic for us. And they love to laugh at my clumsy attempts to learn.

### Respect your intuition and instincts...

Don't talk yourself into ignoring feelings you can't explain when you travel. Respect those feelings and if you ever experience the hackles actually rising up on the back of your neck, just get the heck out of there.

### Decide that embarrassment is sometimes a trivial necessity...

If you think you might be being followed or in the least bit of danger, simply go tell someone that you're worried and why. Here in the USA, take advantage of that 911 number and call it at the same time. Even use your cell phone to take a photo of the person or vehicle in question. Nobody will mind if it turns out to be a mistake. In fact, they'll think you're smart.

### Slow down!

When you're in a hurry you're distracted, you're not paying attention to your surroundings, and your intuition and instincts don't have time to kick in. You're also likely to get careless, leaving things behind or misplacing items. You may be tempted to speed, ride after dark, or make unwise snap decisions based on your schedule. It's safer to change your plans to accommodate a sensible pace.

### Carefully scope out your camping spot...

You've logged a lot of miles and you're tired, but don't take first site you see and don't camp away from the crowd. Take a couple or three spins around the campground and choose a site between families and retired people in tents, not between RVs and not next to the guys on a hunting trip cleaning their guns and drinking beer.

### Buy a cable lock with a motion sensor...

It will secure lose belongings that might be easy for a thief to grab, and use it while you take even the shortest dash to the gas station restroom. You can also hang it on your RV or hotel room door, attach it to the zipper on your tent, or carry it in your pocket to activate in case you feel the need for a personal alarm. I recommend the Targus DEFCON cable alarm. Sleep easy!

### Ask. People love helping others...

They just don't have enough opportunity to do it. The campers next to you, the locals at the breakfast joint... people love it when you're interested in the places they know, and you'll probably get tips on the best roads or even a personal tour of a special spot. Of course, you'll be using your instincts and intuition to decide whether to accept or not, right?

Most of all, remember that a positive, open attitude can go a long way in collecting a lifetime of fabulous solo travel experiences. Let these tips help you to avoid dangers or to resolve situations in the very unlikely case they cross your path.

# About the Author

In 1995, Carla King combined her passions for travel, writing and technology by pioneering the art of the realtime internet travelogue, now called blogs. Her groundbreaking _American Borders_ dispatches chronicled her breakdowns in small towns all around the USA on a Russian motorcycle, and is now a book with the same title. Following that journey came similar adventures on unreliable indigenous motorcycles in China, India, Europe, and Africa. Her next book is _The China Road Motorcycle Diaries_.

Other travel publications include the 1995 guidebook, _Cycling the French Riviera: Day trips between the Sea and the Alps._ In 2001 her writing group self-published _Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel,_ which was picked up by a traditional publishing house. E-books and magazines she has produced include _Motorcycling for Beginners, Ireland: The Sacred and the Profane, Taking Flight: An Offering for First-Time Travelers, and Writing: Your Passport to Life._

Carla's reviews of motorcycles, travel gear, and gadgets appear in many magazines and websites. She runs an educational program of books, workshops, and online courses for authors who want to self-publish at SelfPubBootCamp.com. Her Author Friendly Podcast is an interview program with the people behind the products, tools, and services authors use to write and publish. Her MissAdventuring podcast interviews people who successfully combine life, work, and travel.

Carla splits her time between the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Mulege in Baja, California, where she is working on an Adventure Guide to Baja.

No matter where she is you can find her at CarlaKing.com.

_You can follow Carla on social media (see links below) and by signing up for her newsletter, where you'll get occasional stories from the road by email._

  Facebook

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  Goodreads

  BookBub

# Also by Carla King

Find these books and more at

www.CarlaKing.com

* * *

**AMERICAN BORDERS**

Breakdowns in Small Towns All Around the USA

* * *

**SELF-PUB BOOT CAMP**

Carla has self-published since 1995 and since 2005 she's been helping other authors self-publish, too. Find her books, workshops, and courses at:

www.selfpubbootcamp.com

www.selfpubbootcampcourses.com

* * *

**MOTORCYCLING FOR WOMEN**

Great starter bikes in 6 categories

* * *

**SELF-PUB BOOT CAMP GUIDE FOR AUTHORS**

4th Edition: Your roadmap to creating, publishing, marketing, and selling your books

* * *

**WILD WRITING WOMEN**

Stories of World Travel

* * *

**CYCLING THE FRENCH RIVIERA**

Day trips between the Sea and the Alps
