4 years on the Road Anniversary

I've been on the road for exactly 4 years today. Can you believe it? I've lived in China, Japan, Korea, Spain, UK, and next will be France. I've taken trips to Singapore, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Oxford, Osaka, Kyoto, Shanghai, Da Tong, Guilin, Yangshuo, Long Ji, Yangtze River, Chong Qing, Chengdu, Cheongju, Gyeongju, Daegu, the DMZ, Yunnan, Li Jiang, Nagano, Mt. Fuji, Hakone, Nagoya, Mie, Kamakura, Hong Kong, Macau, Tianjin, Wuhan, and more.  It's been a long and short and good 4 years. Lets hope there are no more earthquakes, getting hit by cars, riots, etc...  Thanks to all my readers for following me through all the ups and downs and across all the boarders.  I hope it's been mostly ups for you, because it has for me.  As always i recommend traveling, i insist.  It has changed me in so many ways every year.  Even the difference between me a year ago and now is significant.  One year on the road will change you, 4 years will really change you.  Stick with me and you'll get to see some changes in the coming year in France.  Ciao!

Day 5 - Lugu Hu Boatride/Return to Kunming

leaving the hostel in the morning

breakfast with the HK crew. rice porrige and hard boiled eggs. we looked over at the other table and saw our driver eating yummy noodles instead of bland rice porridge!

i was too tired to do anything crazy, except spanking people

the mountain we were on the day before

this island was the home to Joseph Rock who was an american and lived there for 27 years studying the minority peoples language i think. someone said he coined the name Shangri-La

wat a life. just laying in the sun all morning on this island. i wanted to punch his face off

i'm loving the chinese deer representations. I think i want to do an illustration with these guys somehow.


first time i've seen a pheonix/bird on the corners

i liked how i got this single bird flying over the 11 am sun

a view from halfway up the mountain. the sky is so blue and so is the lake. you could mistake these shots as the sky but look! it's the lake! my camera sucks and didn't capture the intense blue very well but you get the idea right? pretty amazing.

back in Lijiang. we stayed another night at another hostel. we tried to find the most local place we could instead of a tourist trap. This one seemed pretty good. we ate this chicken hot pot type thing that is a big Naxi dish. it was expensive

and look what we pulled out! a chicken head and chicken foot. yummy. just kidding

we rode this double decker back to Kunming to get our plane back to Beijing. 8 hrs. we sat in the very back, that is where our seat was assigned. i was excited about our good seats until lily pointed out that the seats where concave and were forcing us into hunchback shapes. for the next 8 hrs i was not excited about our seats.
In Kunming people were just walking down these tracks like it was a street.

One very funny thing that i didn't get to take a picture of was about 7 hrs into the 8 hr return home in the chinese van a sound started coming from the front right wheel. the driver said that there was so much dust and dirt from the road that the brakes didn't work now. we all thought he was exaggerating or kidding a little. but after all that uphill climbing we now had to go downhill and he had to go really slow and use the emergency brake! His solution was get back in the van and turn the music volume up louder so we didn't have to hear the sound of the brakes destroying themselves. That poor guy. his van is destroyed. renting the whole van for those 2 days, including his semi tourguide services, 8 hrs to 8hr back, including gas and all the damage to his van was 750 rmb total ($109). that means $16 each person.

Day 4 - Mosuo Dinner and Party

Around Lugu Hu is the stomping grounds for the Mosuo people, another minority group in china. They have a unique matriarchal society where the women have the power and are the bosses. They hold the family names and the property and the businesses. The have this "Walking marraige" where the men have to climb in the window of their "partner" by night and walk home in the morning. the women can change their partner as much as they like but most are lifelong and not as promiscuous as it seems to be.

little village. they say they are the only family left there because the others have moved on to other places. a very big extended family though, maybe 30 people. and look they have a concrete full basketball court. very authentic. we asked and they say they just dry the corn to store it and then just eat it like this, all hard and stuff. you can see corn hanging from lots of houses to dry. inside their log cabin. there were some beds almost on the floor, it was freezing down by the floor. their cross eyed mao statue on this alter like thing. 10 generals from cultural revolution time i think they said. and then what the heck, the dali lama on the other wall. i asked, aren't mao and the dali lama not down with each other? how can they be into both? they said that the mao statue was just for admiration not for worshipping. can you guess what these are? they are dried out pigs of course! these have been here for 10 years, they say you can keep them up to 20 years. below you can see where they sliced off some for eating. which we ate, and it tasted 1o years old. i can say that this was gross. these pigs were as hard as wood. there was no meat as far as i could tell, it was just the fat. maybe they somehow sucked all the meat out and just let the skin and fat dry into these piggy pancakes. if you look closely you can see the tail on the top one poking out. they were pretty large pigs. they are just sitting on the floor collecting dust. mosuo liquor. it was made from a fungus. tasted like about 20 percent alchohol. not bad stuff. there was this bean curd stuff that tasted like cheese. strong rich cheese. good stuff. their concrete slab bathroom was 100 billion times better. only a few piles of feces, not a mountain. after dinner we drove to this mosuo party. its around a fire. dancing singing and such. folksy stuff. they say if you get a little finger rubbing on your palm when you're dancing around then that means the person wants to go to bed with you and have a walk-in marraige type thing. all of the girls in our group said they got it, all the guys said they didn't get it. I don't feel so bad now. of course we joined in on the dancing hand in hand around the fire and it was fun. i am dumb and it was the simplest little diddy they were doing around the fire but even after 10 minutes of a cycle that lasts 20 seconds i still couldn't get it. they took a break halfway and let everyone take pics. this is the one that everyone in the place was saying was the prettiest and wanted to take pictures with. she was pretty good. there were a couple others that were pretty good. makes me wonder if they were just han chinese imports and not real mosuo girls. hey you never know lots of the people in Lijiang are not Naxi people, they are han chinese. look at the one i got to take a pic with! sizzle! hostel around the lake. it was $5.75 night. it also had no heat, the electric blankets weren't working. the hot water went out after 3 mintues. but still for $5.75 a night that is more than good.