bighairylaowai.com

8 hours every other day on rickety buses skipping along unsealed roads, cramping legs stuck to ears, an old man’s dozing head slumped on my shoulder and his drool slipping precariously down his lip, cut-and-paste hostel placards shoved in my face on arrival, itchy sheets, bed bugs, underlying planks broken in 2, snoring (often my own, needs to be said)…

For these reasons, 2 hours tapping away amongst the spitting, slurping, tunelessly wailing, shouting, staring, raspingly chatting on mobiles and farting denizens of a net cafe late at night is becoming unpalatable.

Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and sing la la la la la la until I have the leisure to write it all in an unseemly batch and back date them.

Lead with your headline story they say, so in a Tarantino style fractured narrative, it is day 4 of Big Hairy Laowai’s journey through Western China, and he is being unceremoniously sheperded into the back-seat of a Police (Jincha) Car, to be taken to the station for questioning.

It was my first full day in Dali. I grabbed some breakfast baozi, picked up my mountain bike from the hire shop and rode to nearby Erhai Hu (Ear-Shaped Lake). This meant traversing the cobbled streets at half seven in the morning, dodging commuters, school kids, the open stream that runs through the town, people lugging baskets, motor vehicles and everything else a semi-pedestrianised Chinese street can throw at you. I slalomed with considerable finesse, passed through the eastern gate and rode down to the lake for an early morning view, before rejoining the main lakeside highway. Field workers were lazily pedalling their way to the day’s crop, so I rode half a foot outside the bicycle lane. Bulky tour buses blaring their horns chugged incessantly past my left shoulder.
Read the rest of this entry »