China

4 March 2008

You are in China, and it is obvious from the very border, exploding with the industrious mega-growth gripping a nation which is unfathomably big. 15-story buildings at every moment of construction. The border officials ask you if you speak Chinese with an air of expectancy. The rifle through passports as if they were in some way suspect, you suppress a cough and surreptitiously wipe snot away from your nose - you have already lied on the questionnaire about your proximity to birds in Northern Laos and whether you are suffering from these symptoms. Eventually you are stamped with the first of the extraordinary red ink and waved back on the city bus, minus the two Russians who had been the only other Western travelers on your bus from Oudomxay, Laos.

The immediate and overwhelming changes in the landscape are dominated by sweeping vistas and scale of agriculture, both enormous and impressive. The road is much better and superhighway is in the works across the way. A man will slide into the seat next to you for a very brief while, but still long enough to smoke 5 cigarettes.

Out the window young women are wearing fake Gucci hot pants and boots, rhinestones sparkling. They walk arm in arm past tractor-engine wooden carts piled high with yellow watermelons. Everything is in Chinese, except irrelevant and strange translations on advertising banners.

The landscape grows more spectacular, lush above the Mekong River. It is dark on arrival to Jinghong, which is first announced by a neon-lit bridge - lights running up and down the towers, a rainbow spectrum on the sides. Unlike the previous week spent in the isolated village of Muang Noi, the lights will not shut off at 9:00 pm with a sputtering of the generator. You are already certain the China will offer itself as the most psychedelic of countries on your trip to Asia.

Off the bus and bags dumped unceremoniously into a white hotel room you are half-starved and looking for the first real meal of the day after 7:30 am sandwiches at the bus station. Turn left on a cutty alleyway and look inside to see a a young girl being instructed in a traditional flute with a gourd as its base. To the right is a stadium with lights fully blasting and heading back to the main road when 2 loud explosions ring out. You drop and grab your lover as if in reaction to gun shots. It is a moment before realizing it is the beginning of an intense display of fireworks directly overhead. Professional pyrotechnics detonate very close to the surface of the ground and are the most awesome you've ever seen, brilliantly colored in the warm black of the night. "Because China invented that shit," you'll say at the dramatic conclusion.