The Lost Coast

We stood at the entrance to the bone room, thinking “man oh man what is this place?” It was a Phrenologist’s dream, with bones piled from floor to ceiling. Sea lion skulls and scapulae peeped amongst the horse tails that had thrust in under the plank walls. From the rough hewn ceiling skeins of smaller bones dangled, rattling gently. In the corner a pile of bleached whale vertebrae were stacked up like a cone of nesting chairs. Several students that we had met on the beach came in with us, and they were walking gingerly through the bones; cautious, silent, respectful. This was Cape Alava, the meeting place of the currents, the lost home of the Makah.
We had walked a day to get here. Actually, you can walk the loop trail from the Ozette Ranger Station to Cape Alava, along the beach to Sand Point, and then back again to Ozette in a 9 mile loop that takes a day. But we had wanted to stray a little bit along the trail, watching for wildlife and waiting for events to come to us. So we brought along some fried chicken from Port Angeles and while along the trail we stopped to eat, chatting about history, politics and the ecology of the Washington coast.
The trail from Ozette to Sand Point is great fun. From the ranger station a boardwalk of split cedar planks rises and descends through a charming coastal rain forest. Much of the walk is through prairie, with gnarled cedar giving way to sedges and grasses. Then you hear the surf in the distance and you stroll down through hemlock and salal to the beach.
If you turned to the south and walked along the beach eventually, after fifty miles, you would reach La Push. Instead we set our sights on Wedding Rocks, a couple of miles to the north and lost in the late afternoon mists. It was a desultory trek. We walked along a rocky monochromatic beach at low tide. With the mist, everything gradually faded to grey. It became cold, and while looking for a campground we quickly pulled on long pants over our shorts.
Along this portion of the coast the high tide line comes right up to the woods. Obviously, camping on the beach wouldn’t be advisable. Eventually we discovered a small patch of grass covered in tiny white goose flowers. We apologized to the flowers and spread out our tent. Down the beach a hundred yards away a tanin stained creek flowed into the sea- our water source! While Yasha set up the tent I pumped and hauled the water; it was a ritual we had learned on many a trek across mountain passes.
After diner we descended again to the beach. We had heard that there were petroglyphs in the Wedding Rocks area, and despite the mist and general gloom we decided to search until dark. The Rocks themselves weren’t too hard to find really; we almost ran into the huge eroding pillar as the beach narrowed down into the woods. But where were the petroglyphs? We stumbled around in the near dark until Yasha literally sat down on a rock with cup and ring marks. We found stylized faces and dozens of carvings that surprisingly resembled nothing more than a group of flying clams in an old Rainier Beer commercial. After shooting some photographs we resolved to return in the morning.
The following day we inspected the Wedding Rocks under a better light. We found carvings of dogs, of people, of ghosts and of killer whales. Who were these people? Was this some sort of ceremonial site? We continued on to Cape Alava to find out.
The walk from Wedding Rocks to Cape Alava is short- a mere mile or two.
Yet along the way we paused to inspect the rafts of seaweed that had washed up on shore, ducked under numerous fallen trees, and finally with Cape Alava in sight we sat down on a wave-scoured log to discuss the life of the Washington coasts’ most famous castaway.
In 1834 Otokichi was a 14 year old cabin boy on the Japanese rice freighter Hojun Maru sailing the Inland Sea for Edo. A storm came up before they could flee and the ship, rudderless, dismasted, drifted for the next 14 months across the trackless Pacific. During that time the crew dwindled through dehydration and starvation from fourteen to two men and the cabin boy, Otokichi. Finally the hulk of the Hojun Maru drifted onto the beach of the Makah, and the Japanese were promptly enslaved. In time Otokichi became a man, was saved by a factor from the Hudson Bay Company and traveled to London. Renamed John Matthew Ottoson, Otokichi returned to the Orient as a translator. He snuck back into Japan posing as a Chinese, married well and often, and in the end, played a minor part in the opening of Japan to the West. Such was the fate of a survivor. Sighing, we proceeded the last hundred yards to the Cape.
Sadly, even as Otokichi was returning to the Orient the Makahs were coming under increasing Western control. All the children of Ozette were ordered to attend the government school in Neah Bay for a “proper” education. A grim Fate. Ozette was abandoned. Not too long afterward the federal government forbade the Makah the use of fish weirs to capture salmon. Without the salmon the Makah steadily declined.
For the past thousand years the Makah at Ozette and Neah Bay have been part of a larger linguistically related group of natives living on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Nootka. Frequently in the old days the Makahs would sail across the Straights of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island, raising havoc and capturing slaves. All of that now is gone. In the 1970’s an eroding bluff at Cape Alava revealed a series of Makah longhouses buried by a mud slide more than three hundred years before. This was a treasure trove for archeologists and the Makah themselves, for suddenly they saw themselves for what they were.
It’s easy to see why the Makah would have liked it here. Offshore, an island guards the beach from storms. The beach itself is nice, broad and flat and with plenty of room to pull up your canoe. The mist swirled around us and we could almost see the beach as it used to be. In the kelp beds a quartet of cormorants raised their heads like spears and then dived in unison. We climbed up an unused trail through the horsetails and found an abandoned cabin sitting back amongst the grasses. When I tried the rusted doorknob it fell away in my hand, so I pushed the door open. Inside, a half opened backpack lay on the floor. Dirty dishes moldered in the sink. In a back room, sleeping bags were spread out on the bunks. I started getting uneasy like I was Goldilocks furtively searching someone else‘s house. There were carved wooden masks and thimbles, halibut clubs and sea lion scapulae. The floor was littered with bones and half drunk 40’s of Steel Reserve. It was spooky. I shot some photographs and we eased out the door.
From the beach again we could see another house, a small longhouse, with a group of students clustered around the door. This was the bone house. Inside the Makah had made a bronze plaque thanking the long vanished Ozette people for teaching them how to live. Overtime the bronze plaque was capped with a giant carving of a whale, whale ribs were added, and the longhouse eventually became a shrine of bones. Again it felt spooky. Life and death, abandonment and the passage of time were all co-mingled like fog in the sky. Shaken, we returned to the beach for air.
“Lets walk back to the car!” Yasha said, “I bet the sun is out and its warmer there.” She was right. We climbed up the bluff behind Cape Alava, leaving the lost coast behind. Before too long the sun began to burn through the mist. First the raincoat came off, then the first shirt and then the second. By the time we got back to the car I was in shorts and the travails of the Makah were fading into the darkness of memory…

I




It was July 15th and in two days our Chinese visa would expire. I couldn't say I was sad about that. In a way, movement itself had become a guilty pleasure. The routine of trains and buses, of guest houses and greasy restaurants, was an intoxicant. In fact, in a Muslim culture of abstinence it was the only intoxicant we had at hand.

In Idries Shah's "Tales of the Dervishes" holy men wander across a desolate landscape. Destitute, dressed only in rags, these Sufis sought a spiritual Ecstasy with God, Allah. Sometimes their movement was circular, trying to attain Union with a centrifugal motion. Other times their motion was just straight and pure, like a dove flying singlemindedly across the desert. I don't mean to confuse their motives with ours, which are worldly and profane. We try to dance the same dance, only our steps are different.

On July 15th the road from Kashgar ran inexorably to the south, a seething metaled road laid across an incandescent desert. Above the waves of heat an illusory image of the snowy Pamirs rose into the sky, higher by far than the clouds. I wondered what the pilgrims and merchants had thought a thousand years back upon seeing this mirage: joy at leaving their home country, or trepidation, fear and regret. Fortunately for us, those thoughts were smoothed by the uneventual running of the sleek Chinese bus. Kirghiz folk songs played over and over again on the DVD player. Behind us a young Kirghiz man quietly sang along.

They are crazy about music, these Kirghiz, so crazy that Islam has adopted itself to them. That night we stayed at Karakul Lake - Black Lake in Kirghiz - and in the morning we stumbled upon a music video being shot amongst the yurts of the village. There was a Romeo in a bright red clown suit sitting on a boulder, badly lip syncing to a tape deck. Behind him was Mustagh Ata - The Father of Snows - a 7500m giant, draped in glaciers and and perpetual wind and snows. Dancing girls, looking like they had just stepped out of "I Dream of Jeannie" posed beside a snowy white yurt. The singer stopped singing and imperatively ordered the videographer to stop also. Slowly he adjusted his tall, white felt hat, stretched out his arms towards the steppe, and let out a bellow of pure song. Beautiful.

The steppe, the beating heart of Central Asia, lies all around Karakul Lake. Every direction leads to a different pass, a different thread of the Silk Road. To the west lies the Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan, Samarkand, and if you looked hard enough, ancient Rome. To the South, the riches of India and the complexity of a Buddhist world system. Eastward lay the Middle Kingdom, China. With an aging visa, our choice was simple.

To the south, greenery appeared on the mountain sides. First, it was like a mistake, as if the only color in existence was brown. But then the green was crushed velvet, and a gentle rain began to fall. Our bus labored upward through the steppe, with crags unseen in the mist above. Sadly, this ethereal solitude was marred by PSB border police manning the gates of the empire. To the very end the Han appeared rigid and distant; their government, one of control.
A lone mustached Pakistani border guard raised the barricade. He gave us a toothy smile, and with a wave, gestured us onward.

II


From Khunjerab Pass the pot holed road descends a precipitous 2,000m into the heart of a jagged wilderness. While the Pamirs were wide and open here everything was narrow and steep. Enormous dun colored peaks, dripping with ice, lorded above the isolated villages. This is the frontier between Central Asia and the lands of turmeric, cardamon and spice. Although the country is Pakistan, the feel is wholly Central Asia.

At Sust, where we checked in, the streets were crowded with Pashtun Afghans, dark Punjabis from the Sindh, and the curious, blue eyed tribesman that we had met on the roof of the world.
We booked a mini-van for Passu, 60km down the Hunza Valley, and soon we were passing through dusty villages hidden amongst apricot groves.

We had heard that in Pakistan women were sequestered, and when they were allowed to leave their homes looked like something out of a medieval fantasy. Yet here women were not only seen but evidently equal. At every turn men kissed the hands of elderly women who pulled back their shawls with a flourish and blessed them. Everyone seemed to speak English, and when Yasha asked the women sitting next to her in the van who these people might be she simply replied, "We are Wachi". Unwittingly we had stumbled into the land of the Ismaelis.

With the death of Muhammad in the late 7th century CE the Muslim world was riven by the first of a seemingly endless struggle of succession. Muhammad's cousin and son in law, Ali, claimed the right to the Prophet's cloak by right of birth. Others claimed that Muhammad himself had insisted that his successor be elected through a committee of Elders. With Ali's murder the Muslim world descended into a cycle of revenge and retribution: on one side were the Shia, the descendants of Ali, and on the other were the more orthodox Sunni. Each side considered the other to be apostate, a legal term which conferred the immediate blessing of death.

As time passed dissatisfaction with the wealth and status of the Caliphs grew within the more radical sectarian groups, and they called for a return to the purity of Muhammad. One group of Shia, however, took their extremism to new heights. Believing all of creation to be God's work, even down to every rock and tree and blade of grass, the Ismaelis retired to the mountains of Afghanistan. From there they carried out a guerrilla war against their more orthodox brethren. Known as the Assassins, they would allegedly imbibe hashish until they entered a world of unknowingness. From there they stole into the palaces of Caliphs and Wazirs where they practiced their deadly art.

Regrettably for the Ismaelis there was only one man in the world who didn't fear them. In fact that man, Genghis Khan, didn't fear anyone. When he and his horde swept down out of the Northeast in the early twelfth century there was nothing the Assassins could do to even slow his progress. He cracked their fortresses like a strong man cracks a nut. Everyone was put to sword, down to the last man, woman and child. Today, some three million Ismaelis remain scattered throughout the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, through southern Tajikistan and northern Pakistan.

Today the Ismaelis have been transformed. Lead by the Aga Khan, who rules benevolently from a penthouse in Paris, modern Ismaelis follow a liberal doctrine of gender equality, community development and love for all of Allah's creation. In truth their pactices, once considered apostasy, now demand to be considered orthodox. We were astounded.

To the South, in the North Western Frontier, suicide bombers were immolating themselves and innocent bystanders in an orgy of hatred and violence. "Stay here" we were uged by local Ismaelis, "There are no troubles here. This is Shangri La." And they are right.

We hired a local man, Zakir Hussain to guide us on a five day trek along the Batura Glacier. Supposdly there were shepherds along the way, grazing thier flocks in high altitude meadows. Unsure of our reception and relying on our guidebook's advise we thought it simply safer to be accompanied by a local.

Unfortunately, the first two days were hellish. We struggled across the glacial terminus and then along the giant lateral morraine in high 30 degree centigrade heat. There wasn't an inch of shade and even less water. For a respite from the sun we would briefly crouch behind boulders.... but to even stop in this parabolic oven of an environment was a mistake. We lagged badly. By the end of the day we looked like a pair of raisins fresh out of the drying shed.

But the view from Yashpirt was sublime. We stood amidst a brillant green meadow sprinkeled with sheep and goats. Across the glacier to the south was a massif of 7500meter giants - The Batura Wall - glistening in the late afternoon. It was almost too bright to look at. The 1st Ice Floe - an ice fall of enormous proportions - cascaded in one unbroken line from the summit of Batura I to the valley glacier below. Batura I is a killer; five climbers were lost in 1970. Since then, this side has remained unvisited. With further fragmentation of the glacier due to global warming it is unlikely that it will be climbed any time soon.

We spent several days trekking from meadow to meadow in the Yashpirt area. During that time Zakir repeatedly mentioned that a women's group would be ascending to the Yashpirt meadow. Not just any women's group, and difinately not a western women's group, this was delegation of local Ismaeli women from nearby villages who had never gone higher into the mountains then the Karakorom Highway. Returning one afternoon from the Ibex Grass Glacier we found the group picknicking beside a small stream. Instantly the made a place for us and bade us to sit. We ate cheez whiz on chapatis, raisins we had brought from Turfan and apricots from Hunza, all the while eyeing each other hungrily. They wanted to know us just eagerly as we wanted to know them. Some had headscarves, some didn't. Some were young and some were old. Remarkably, they weren't so very different from us.

We walked back to Yashpirt in a gentle rain, the icefalls white and blurry in the distance. Before long, the women and shepherds had an impromptu game of cricket going, men and women mixed. (How this violated my sterile concept of a sequestered, burka clad Pakistani female!). For sure there weren't any leg spinners amongst them, and the women's batting was, if possible, even worse than their bowling. Yet their laughter was so free and unforced it felt like we were observing the Innocents at the dawn of Man. The laughed at everything, from a dropped ball to the wicket - a five gallon plastic jug, and the end I began to feel envious. In the West we rarely laugh, and when we do it is generally at someone else's expense. But here, free from the addictions of the modern world, people can take joy in the simple joys of life.

The cricket match died in the early evening's darkness. But the games weren't over yet. A giant rope was laid out in the now muddy meadow and two women's teams squared up for a match of Tug 'o War. Yasha was dragooned into joining, and before too long she was being dragged through the mud along with the rest of the loosing team. I laughed until I thought I would cry.

Then it was my turn. Quickly, with some trepidation, I found myself gripping the giant hawser slick with moisture. I knew that due to my hernia that I couldn't, or shouldn't pull, but my companions didn't know that. After an ineffective struggle I fell, and then the rest of my teammates followed. Willy nilly we were dragged through a freezing cold mud comprised mainly of sheep shit. Finally I understood why they were laughing...

The following day it was time to return to Passu. The Ismaeli women, dressed in snow white Salwar Kameez and scarves, held hands in a circle and prayed. It was inspiring: the green of the meadow, the circle of Believers, and the icefall, calving with an occasional boom in the back round. We followed the women down the moraine in a fine mist. It was a perfect day for walking despite the reduced visibility. The women ahead of us started singing, first one song then the next. Finally, raising their arms above their heads they sang sing-song like beautiful birds, "We will welcome you, We will welcome you!"

In response I too raised my arms. But instead of singing I simply repeated over and over again to myself "Thank you Lord for we are blessed!"

III

Some six hundred kilometers south of Passu the Indus River finally emerges from the grip of the mountains. Brown and muddy, it carries the weight of both the Himalayas and the Karakorom. In the plains of Punjab the river is corseted again by the concrete channels of irrigation canals that lead it, eventually, to the sea. But foolishly we had left already left the Karakorom Highway in Rawalpindi for a very slow road to Lahore. Our aged bus jerked and wheezed along a roadway crowded with renegade trucks, luxury vehicles and immense oxcarts pilled high with hay. In the bus, we were trapped in seats designed for a midget. But at least we had seats. Above us a wall of sweating Pakistani men swayed towards us with each lurch of the bus. Fleas scampered up our legs in search of greener pastures. In fact, it was only their nipping that kept us awake in somnelent atmosphere of the bus.

At one stop, which lasted more than an hour, a family used the bus for a moving van. Loading all their worldly possessions onto the top of the bus - two beds, cabnets, innulmerable metal boxes of clothing, a dishwasher(!) - was accompanied the usual south asian gamot of arguments, prostrations and tears. It was impossible. At one point an older man sat next to me and inquired how I liked Pakistan. "Oh very much!" I lied, and then proceeded to bable on about the virtues of Pakistan. He regarded my silently for some time before simply saying, "Too much hot!" With that he got up and left.

In Lahore we checked into a squalid little guest house, the Regale Internet Inn, where the beds were so close together that you had to climb across your neighbor to reach your own. Yet the Regale has one thing all the more expensive hotels lack: an owner who will take anyone, for free, to the greatest show in town. Locally, its known as Sufi Night.

I had seen Sufi dancing before, but they were Turkish Sufis of the Mevlana Order. Its generally what you think about when you imagine Sufi dancing. An impeccably dressed dervish, all in white, with white leggings, and a short white skirt, topped off with a red fez, slowly revolves around himself like an independent and self contained cosmos. The Pakistanis, as I was to find out later, would have none of that. They liked their ecstasy sharp and raw, with a wiff of sweat and more than a touch of violence and pain. This was Allah with street credentials.

By evening one of the periodic brown outs that characterize Lahore had settled across the city like a noxious blanket. On the ride to the Sufi shrine we experienced a "sympathy blackout"- every one of the four rickshaws of our group drove without its head lights. At first I thought it was a war zone, but no, its typical for south Asians to drive without lights. They try to extend the life of the light by not using it! It makes sense too when you think about. Needless to say, it gives a night trip through the winding gorges of the Karakorom a whole different feeling...

We arrived at the Shrine of Baba Shah Jamal to find it packed with a throng of young Pakistani men- the only women present were westerners in our group. But already it was plain that this wasn't the place to bring your young Muslim sister. In fact, it had more of the feel of a college fraternity house than a shrine! There wasn't any alcohol- Pakistan is a dry country, Instead, almost everyone, to a man, was either rolling or smoking a hashish cigarette. The air was blue with smoke. I saw may old college friend the carburetor there - a one and a half liter plastic coke bottle, empty, with five joints protruding from its base. For a second I wanted to stand up and shout, "Yo, let me show you how a real man handles that thing!" Then mercifully, sanity returned. In retrospect, the carburetor had only brought me trouble. Plainly, it was going to bring trouble, at least amnesia, to those poor fools who were greedily sucking at its smoking mouth.

An hour quickly passed. Free food was past around, and as we ate, a beatific bearded man dressed in white, evidently a saint in train, wandered amongst the crowd. He carried on his back an industrial three gallon hand pump, the same kind that firefighters or farmers use. Instead his was full of rosewater. When the crowd grew too boisterous, or too hot, he would pump the air full of a heavenly mist.

Finally, space was cleared and two men stepped forward with several large two headed traditional drums, the dhol. The drum is worn around the neck with a strap, and played with a straight stick and a curved wand. It sounds like both a rhythm drum and a tabla taken together. Soon these two guys were just flying along, alternating leads and counters as melodies passed between them without even braking a sweat. Then from out of nowhere a crazy guy jumps up and starts playing slow sweet jazz on a soprana saxaphone. It was like Sufi Night at the Knitting Factory in NYC. The saxaphonist noodled along for an hour, playing a series of solos, while the drummers played hard and fast underneath. It was totally cool.

Eventually the horn player grew tired and left. The crowd was pushed back even further, and six dancers pogoed into the center of the crowd. They were all madly shaking their heads like they were trying to induce a fit.... at first it was a little ludicrous. Then one guy starts hopping up and down; his head was shaking so violently that the whites of his eyes showed. His greasy hair flew around his head and then he raised his hand into the air and cried "Allah!" over and over again. Heartened, one of the other dancers started to whirl. Crouching low, like a twirling bowling ball with extended and clenched fists he would spin until he crashed out of control into the other dancers. Soon they had gathered around him in a senseless brotherhood, holding their hands in the air in praise as they guided his violent meanderings. It was like on old time full contact revival, with greasy hair and white soulless eyes.

Again space was cleared and the two drummers stepped forward. They had been playing without a break for hours and sweating like pigs. So I couldn't believe it when they started twirling, first one and then the other, both keeping time and playing frantically. One of the drummers was huge, a big man; he leaned back as he twirled and his drum flew about him like a giant missile. It was most impressive!

But soon the dancing began to break up. Some people were too high too high to walk, and their stumbling would trigger a pushing and shoving match. And then it would trigger a fist fight. It was time to make a graceful exit while most people's attention was driected else where. We squeezed down the stairs and out into there night. There, below us in the darkened street, was a sea of taxis confined by endless foodstalls, all illuminated by candles. Stoned Pakistanis pushed too and fro. Somewhere amidst this mele were our rickshaws, and hopefully, a way home to our bed....

"What is history but a fable agreed upon." Napoleon


A brief disclaimer- this entry is first draft of a potential article on the wandering monk, Xuan Zang (also spelled Hsuan Tsang). Unfortunately, I don't really have the biographical material at this point to back up the article. I don't even have a copy of Xuan Zang's "Journey to the West in the Great Tang Dynasty" to use for back round information. What this article simply does is record what Yasha and I saw as we followed in his footsteps.


I


If I were to ask you what famous classical adventurer walked the farthest over the greatest period of time you would undoubtedly reply "Marco Polo, of course!" Ah, but I didn't tell you that this was a trick question. I used the word 'famous', and 1.6 billion Chinese would just have assuredly answered "Xuan Zang!" As far as famous goes, numbers win out.


Xuan Zang was a monk, a decidedly brilliant Buddhist monk, living in the 7th century CE. When he discovered inconsistencies and omissions in the available Chinese translations of Sanskrit originals he promptly decided that he would go there himself, to India, and translate the texts himself. Yet Xuan Zang was more than just brilliant, he was also remarkably dedicated and perseverant. First he learned Sanskrit, then he learned Tocharian, the lingua franca of the western regions. Then when the Tang emperor, Tang Taizong, refused him passage to the west he simply slipped away at night, fleeing from a comfortable life in the greatest city on earth to that of a wandering indigent. It would be 17 years before he returned to the Tang capital of Xi'an.


Today, Xuan Zang's story has been told and retold in China a hundred different times. The Ming era classic, "A Journey to the West", immortalized Xuan Zang as the monk Triptika. Aided by magical creatures, his story continues today in Anime cartoons and poorly costumed Chinese TV productions. And yet, 1300 years after his death one still wonders, who was he?, what did he feel, what did he see? With a month left on our Chinese visa Yasha and I decided to find out. We would go where Xuan Zang went, within reason that is, and try to see, if not what he saw, but what is there to see now.


They say that every journey begins with a single footstep; but for us, retracing Xuan Zang's trail began by following our nose. Behind the pleasant tree lined courtyards of the Great Mosque in Xi'an lies a narrow alley entirely given over to the pleasures of the flesh. Meat is everywhere, unrefrigerated, hanging on hooks, on tables, or sometimes simply spread on a bloody sheet of canvas, on the ground. The smell, needless to say, is indescribable. Noodle and kebab houses are a dime a dozen, yet it is the more arcane practices of animal rendering that attract the nose.


In a little decrepit courtyard full of broken bicycle parts you can see a man standing in a sea of frothy lung, doggedly chopping away. Along Beiguang Jie there is a whole string of liver stands (turn your face away!) with reeking tables groaning under the weight of baked liver, swollen like bowling balls, slowly cooking a second time in the sun. And then just when you feel like you need to rinse your nose out with salt water a new smell insinuates itself, something you've smelled before, something you love. There, virtually hidden by a crowd of pushing customers, is a take out sandwich stand. All they sell is beef brisket, corned beef, and for less than a dollar you can have a piece of Muslim flat bread, so hot that you can barely hold it, filled with a spicy and fragrant meat so soft that it falls apart in your mouth. Why do they even wrap it? In the best tradition of American fast food we merely moved several meters away from the crowd before gorging ourselves on a simple, but guilty pleasure.


Ironically, as you move away from the Muslim quarter Xi'an feels less like a village, something Xuan Zang would understand, and more like the modern Chinese city that it is. Xi'an is locally famous as the place to score a cheap mobile phone. Along the repetitious main streets and under the futuristic office towers it seems as if little else is sold. The immense city walls, 16km square, look as if they were built yesterday- and they probably were! Festooned with a million red lanterns the walls attract wealthy tourists like a moth to the flame. We got burned ourselves, paying 40 yuan apiece to climb to the top to view what is essentially an artificial set piece. That is the China of today, you pay more, but get less.


This, plainly, isn't what Xuan Zang was all about. I began roaming farther and farther afield, searching for a place where the mind of the great Tang philosopher might still reside. On my tourist map of Xi'an I found two spots that looked promising, two spots of green far from the city center. Tang pleasure gardens perhaps? One long day I ventured forth- only to find a wilderness of plastic recycling yards, coal depots, and grandiose construction projects. I wandered down increasingly more narrow lanes bordered by seemingly endless industrial brick walls. In the haze of early summer skeletal apartment blocks, apparently abandoned, ringed the horizon. Eventually the path turned to dirt, and I realized that I was lost. A battered three wheel cart bumped past me and I was pressed back against the brick wall. Then, from behind me, I heard a bird sing, and my heart filled with an unexpected joy. For a second, just a second, I felt close to the world of Xuan Zang.



II



To the west of Xi'an the landscape begins to change. Rain fall decreases, and the mountain ranges that rise from the desert are black, devoid of vegetation and ominous. This is the land of the Hexi Corridor, a narrow 1,000 km strip of irrigated land hemmed in north and south by the mountains. For China, the Hexi Corridor has always been its window on the West. Pilgrims, caravans, bandits, the wealth of Asia and the Occident traveled back and forth along its storied length. Xuan Zang walked here, and saw some of the things that we saw. Above all else the Hexi Corridor is an agricultural place, in the rhythms of socially conservative farm life one can see a bit of the past. In fact, nothing is more primeval Chinese than the image of a man, or a women for that matter, with a hoe. The metal head rises at the end of its five foot wooden shaft, pauses teasingly at the top of its arc, and then descends again and again into the earth.


We stopped in Lanzhou to look at the farming and religious life of the Hexi Corridor. Xuan Zang would have seen similar fields of wheat and yellow rape seed. He would have seen men harvesting the wheat by hand, with a small sickle, and then stacking it before the south facing entrance to the family compound. He would have seen the horse and donkey carts that are still used and he would have smelled the shit running behind the walls of the village. This much hasn't changed.


We traveled to Xiahe, a Tibetan community four hours by bus south of Lanzhou. In 630CE, when Xuan Zang passed by here, there were no Tibetan monks or Tibetan monasteries. The grass lands immediately to the south of the Hexi Corridor were then home to brigands and nomads, barbarians by Chinese standards, while Buddhism was unknown here. But today Xiahe contains Labrang, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries outside of the TAR. With monastic life largely absent from China since the Cultural Revolution it is at Labrang where one can see something like what Xuan Zang saw. Labrang lies at the base of a cliff, with four or five large prayer halls dedicated to various deities and literally hundreds and hundreds of monks' dwellings. A three km outer wall, studded with thousands of large prayer wheels, surrounds the monastery and is focus of pilgrimage for Tibetans from far and wide.


Tibetan Buddhism varies in many ways from the mainstream Mahayana of the Tang era and it is easy to emphasize the differences, not the similarities. Yet in his day Xuan Zang himself was a proponent of the Yogacarya or Mind Only School. Today this school has been absorbed into Tibetan Buddhism and forms much of the basis for advanced philosophical debate. But perhaps it is not so much the details of the philosophy that Xuan Zang would have recognized but the everyday facts of life of a large monastery; the hi jinks of the novice monks at early morning prayers or the solemn demeanor of the ordained monks squatting in a line in a back alley, peeing into the dust. Mostly Xuan Zang would have recognized the predawn coolness at early morning prayers and the seemingly timeless chant, "I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, and I take refuge in the Sangha!"


One afternoon we slipped away from the monastery. A narrow valley led between the arid hills, leading to the west. We tried to ford the creek, failed, and then scrambled up a ridge, gaining 500m through flowering wild rose. From the summit we could see that the hills diminished into flat grazing grounds. To the west there was a sea of grass, undulating gently, bisected by a little road that wound itself into extinction. We ate a lunch of nectarines and Muslim flat bread, gazing far into the distance, where grasslands, mountains and sky all met in a cerulean haze. Undoubtedly Xuan Zang would have identified this view... well not this exactly... but the view of distance, and how that translated into time and effort. He would have looked into the distance and understood the transience of it all, and how out of this transience, or impermanence, all the infinity of forms arise.






III





The days that followed passed in a blur of movement and heat, of train stations, bus stations, and cheap Chinese food. Lanzhou, Zangye, Jiayuguan; now they are just names of cities along the Hexi Corridor. From the window of our bus a bucolic landscape scrolled by; fields of cabbage and beans bordered by copses of cottonwoods. Packed earth greenhouses marched across the valley floor. Once I saw a man with a hoe over his shoulder leading a white horse by its bridle; five minutes later I saw a pig and a cow standing nose to nose in deep meditation. Then the cow jumped back, evidently surprised by the extent of their unspoken inter species communication.



But what I remember most of all was the heat. How could Xuan Zang stand it? And him in heavy monk robes! Did he continue wearing the brown and grey of everyday monk's attire, as illustrations from the time show him? Or did he shuck down instead into an orange loincloth, and find shelter under a broad brimmed straw hat?



Like Xuan Zang, we faced the difficulties of petty Chinese bureaucrats and the weaknesses of our own bodies. In Zangye, after paying to see a thousand year old reclining Buddha - the largest in China - we discovered the entire statue wrapped in scaffolding, the Buddha barely visible in the dark, hiding the heads of the disciples surrounding him. When we complained and demanded our money back the gatekeepers merely laughed. How funny we must appear to them! The Chinese themselves are too afraid to complain. To stand up, to expose yourself, is not a Chinese quality. In Jiayuguan my body failed me. I woke, blew my nose, and gave myself a hernia! Despairing, I consoled myself with thoughts of all the other pilgrims that have walked this path. Many were killed by wild beasts, others encountered bandits that stripped them and left them alone to die in the desert. Supposedly Xuan Zang himself traveled at night, both to avoid the heat as well as the ever present eyes of the dacoits.



From Jiayuguan we turned south, leaving the Hexi Corridor behind. The mountains that had funneled us along the Corridor, the Black Mountains and the Quinlin Shan, faded to nothing. In their place was a seemingly endless stony desert. On occasion we passed a remnant of a silk road fort, it's sun baked clay bricks now eroded like a child's sandcastle after the tide has come in then gone away again. The bleakness of it all was heartbreaking.



One the southern edge of the Gobi Desert are a series of small ravines, nothing dramatic, where an seasonal stream cut it's way below the desert floor. Cottonwoods and poplar lie close to the ravines edge, while around the brackish pools of the drying watercourse thick rushes hide both raptors and songbirds alike. 2,000 years ago Buddhist monks and craftsmen came to these ravines, carving three separate cave complexes within a 150km radius. The greatest of these is are the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang.



Xuan Zang had passed through this area on his return trip from India. In the intervening years the desert has advanced, Chinese dynasties rose and fell, the caves were looted by westerners,

and finally, used as a stable by fleeing White Russian Cavalry. Today the caves see some 5,000 visitors a day, all carefully managed by multilingual docents with instructions to show each group a mere 10 out of the 492 caves. If you want to see more you pay more; this is China, after all.



I was unprepared, however, for the scope and grandeur of the Mogao Caves. There are two giant Buddha Maitreya statues, one 35m and the other 31m in separate caves, with enormous faces moulded delicately in the high Tang style. In another cave is a Reclining Buddha of equal length and sensitivity surrounded by grieving Arhats. And then there are cave after cave of exquisite frescoes guarded by giant clay gatekeepers, their smiles still as ferocious as yesterday.

It's difficult to critique a place such as this; it's a tour de force, truely world class.



Yet the beauty invites a question: Who was there to see it? These caves are virtually inaccessible, even today. In the classical era one would need to cross hundreds of miles of desert just to reach the next oasis, and then what? Where the Mogao Caves the ancient Chinese version of "build it and they will come"? Or is there more to it than that? Xuan Zang, in fact, wasn't advancing into a vacuum. The silk road was populated with settlements of Persians and Greeks, Turkmen and red-haired, green-eyed Russians. There were soldiers, mercenaries, camp followers and thieves, nuns, whores, holy men and fools. Great fortunes were made and lost in the transportation of goods. Along with the goods, inevitably, came ideas. The Great Mosque in Xi'an, for example, was founded in 741- a mere 100 years after the death of Mohammad. There may not have been a mobile phone net work in the 7th century, yet information still traveled surprisingly fast.



IV



We traveled onward. In two weeks time we traveled as far as Xuan Zang did in a year. Then he had slowed in Turphan, and so did we.


At 154m below sea level Turphan must be one of the most unlikely places for a settlement in the world, yet it has prospered for nearly 2,000 years. We alighted in Tulufan, Turphan's distant railway station, after an unpleasant night's journey on a hard seat. Instantly we were staggered.

Not only by the heat, but by the terrain. Turphan lay 50km away and 1,500m below us, a tiny green oasis at the bottom of what looked like a crater on Mars. The distances were vast, the heat inescapable. So it was with some trepidation that we continued onward, roaring down the hill towards Turphan in a cheap cab, the windows wide open, the 45C heat pinning our ears back and making our eyes water.


Turphan is alien in many respects. Despite the presence of only one time zone for all of China you can still feel Turphan, and all of Xinjiang Province, for that matter, starting to drift away. Where does allegence lie? To the center, the East, or towards the Turkic Muslims groups of the West. This question has been asked often before.

Xuan Zang spent several unwilling years in Turphan. Forced to teach Buddhism by royal decree he was a most reluctant tutor. One long hot afternoon we traveled to the old royal palace site at Gaochang, 35km to the east. We paralleled the Flaming Mountains before dropping down into the oasis surrounding the old city of Gaochang.
Like Turphan, Gaochang is primarily a Uighur town. Old men in white shirts and pill box hats, their whispy white beard lying stiffly on their chest, sat on the kerb, watching the world as they knew it pass by. The women, in open toed high heels, glittering Russian style dress, and dark head scarves reminded, strangely, of a picture I had seen of the old Persian Shah's wife. Beautiful, cosmopolitan, distant. And then one saw the palace site...

Attacked by Kublai Khan in the 14th century the city was burned and the population, as they say, put to the sword. Those who were left promptly converted to Islam. Today, passing through the immense city walls, is like entering a grave site. At first there is a sense of disappointment; is this all there is? But then, in looking closer you can see that the city is nothing more than a slag heap that has melted and while dripping pooled on the ground. In places, a dark hole opens into a cellar where you dare not descend. Jutting from the ruin of the royal palace are two tall spears of bricks, unknowable cyphers of what had once been. These were the remains of the Lecture Pagoda, the location were Xuan Zang spent his years of enforced tutelage. Everything else is gone - burned, blown away, now dust cycling the globe. I sat down in the shade of a melted wall and drank what little water I had left. The fear and suffering here must have been intense, as hot as the fire. Perhaps the souls of all those who perished here, like dust motes dancing in the sky, still remain here. Now that was a disquieting thought. I rose and left before the setting sun could paint the ruins red.

V

Xuan Zang's travels were never easy. On the road from Turphan to Kashgar he hid from robbers. Unseen, he considered himself lucky to have escaped death. I suffered an almost similar fate in Kashgar. While changing the film of my camera at a vegetable market I neglected my tripod. Behind my back the tripod was snatched, and just like that, it was gone. Some people saw him run, some people didn't, but no one, not even the police, spoke English or could alter the fact that the tripod just wasn't coming back. But I was lucky. I wasn't killed by wild beasts, or sold into slavery, or any number of less desirable fates. In the end we will lose everything, even our bodies. A tripod, regardless of price, is really a most inconsequential thing - or at least so I told myself.

Nor did it dim my appreciation of Kashgar. Surrounded by mountain ranges whose names are legend - the Tien Shan and the Pamirs - Kashgar is a polyglot mixture of every Central Asian race. I loved it. You could sit in a second story tea and dumpling shop in the old city and just watch faces all day. Who were they? How did they get here? History was writ large in every face.

Along the poplar lined streets leading into the city donkey carts still make haste in the early morning hours. But by late afternoon people move at a more languid pace. Smoke from the kebab stands rises into an air like incense for the Gods, calling the men from their evening prayers to the more convivial life on the streets. And there, unfortunately, we must leave them. From Kashagar Xuan Zang struck out to the west, across the Bedal Pass. Regretably, international protocol forbids us from following him. Instead we will follow the path of least resistance but, perhaps, of greater danger. Tomorrow we will leave for Kunjerab Pass and the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan.

Just as Xuan Zang confronted danger by praying not only for his own well-being but for the well-being of all creatures so do we. Just as compassion was his armor may it be our's also. Hopefully his spirit and our's will walk together where ever we may go, whether it is to Pakistan, or to India, or into (gasp!) the deepest heart of America.

Peace.

The Caterpillar Fungus





At the eastern end of the Tibetan plateau is a mountain once considered taller than Mt. Everest.
Solitary, draped in perpetual ice and snow, Minyak Gankar rears 1500m above its 6000m companions. To Tibetans, Minyak Gankar was the home of the wrathful Dharma protector Dorje Lutru. The mountain itself, wreathed in clouds, rarely seen, was his shining crystalline abode.



For centuries the merit making Buddhists of the eastern Tibetan plateau would come on pilgrimage to Minyak Gankar, circumambulating entire mountain massive in a torturous month-long kora. Today its infrequently accomplished. Roads, clear cutting and farming have obliterated most of the old trails, while the heart of the pilgrimage, Gankar Monastery, was razed by the Red Guards in the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution. Rebuilt in the 1980's, the gompa is still trying to reclaim itself.



We had also come to the Minyak Gankar region to walk on the pilgrim trail but we were pilgrims of a different sort. Tired of the crass commercialism of Lijiang or "Shangri-La" we yearned to see a slice of Tibetan life like in the old days. Unfortunately, after the the ravages of the twentieth century, it's hard to conceive what that traditional life may have been like. China, like the rest of the industrialized nations, has abandoned the world of Faith and Belief for a more material future. Those not on board are forever left behind. In truth we are not pilgrims but witnesses: witness to the dying of the sacred.



A half an hour's drive south of Kangding the road ends, petering out in a cart track running high above the river. There, along the trail, you can find the usual detritus of Chinese civilization: plastic Pepsi bottles, delaminated sneakers and garbage bags, not so much discarded as released from the hand when their usefulness had ended. Above us, the mountains loomed.



We passed a gravel pit and a half completed dam. Then, a turquoise colored kingfisher, dead, crumpled beside the trail. Its orange awl-like bill was as long as my finger. The air was filled with sadness, but I suppose really it must have been just me. When we came across a group of yaks bestride the trail they fled, their bells tinkling through the dense forest.



The air grew chill and the shadows longer as we ascended the valley through the late afternoon. Finally we paused to wait for our Chinese companions in a beautiful but rubbish strewn meadow. To the east, the enormous wedge of Chiburongi soared a thousand meters above diminutive herder's tents. To the west lay the Gyazi-La, a long day's climb away. We were in caterpillar country, and from the mountains above resounded the occasional cry of success when the Tibetan hunter captured his prey - the caterpillar fungus.



Sometime ago, while reading Sir Christopher Bonnington's "Tibet's Lost Mountain", I came across a delightful chapter where Bonnington's friend, Dr. Charles Wilson, described the life cycle of the caterpillar fungus. In this case, truth is stranger than fiction.



A caterpillar - whether of a moth or a butterfly I ca'nt say - crawls through decomposing leaves under the harsh Tibetan sun. Turning this way and that, finally it scents under the ground the mycelium of a fungus, and then it begins to burrow. (To most human mushroom eaters, the mushroom, ah! the mushroom! is all that matters. But in all reality the mycelium, the thin, strand like fungus living below the ground is the real creature. In some cases it stretches for hundreds of yards as a single entity below a grove of aspen trees. At other times it is the white webbing in a rotten log. But know this, the mushroom is only the fruit; the mycelium is the plant.) It is the mycelium the caterpillar craves, and once engorged it dies, poisoned. Wrapped in the embrace of the fungus the consumer becomes the consumed. Soon miraculously, a tiny brown tendril rises from the subterranean tomb of the caterpillar and pierces the ground; the mushroom!



It is this tiny centimeter high fruiting body the caterpillar hunter spies, and with a special tool he, or she, or in many cases children unearth the caterpillar from its tiny dirt encrusted sarcophagus.

Everywhere in eastern Tibet you can find men loitering on street corners, who when given the chance, furtively offering you a much folded baggie of caterpillars. For a nomad living outside the cash economy this is one of few sources of income.



I don't know what the scope of this whole operation is. How many caterpillars are harvested; does anyone know? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? We were quoted fifteen yuan for a single caterpillar fungus - about two dollars. Some people get rich off of it. To the Chinese it's an elixir for the lungs and kidneys. To me, it's the craziest thing I've ever heard of.



The questions it brings to mind are many, but paramount among them is how can a species of butterfly (or moth) survive when its intermediary stage gorges itself till death in such numbers that it supports a bizarre health industry? When I first read Dr. Wilson's account Yasha cried out "What was God thinking?" As usual, I didn't have an answer.



As we climbed higher, day by day, to the Gyazi- La, our Chinese companions lagged farther and farther behind. They pursued the Caterpillar fungus as eagerly as the caterpillar pursued the fungus itself, and the Tibetans in turn pursued them. They came down from the hills when we were camped at night, or in the morning, or when we were struggling towards the pass. The Chinese (and we all know their reputation!) haggled, dickered, accepting one caterpillar and rejecting the next. I couldn't tell if it was a game or in earnest. At one point we saw a Chinese women, usually the friendliest of companions, throw a five yuan note back into the face of an astonished herder. Hard bargaining I guess.



Impatient, we crossed the pass and watched mist roll into the giant granitic amphitheater below Mt Grosvenor. To the south, the bulk of Minyak Gankar remained hidden; only the summit, the spire of Dorje Lutru's crystal mansion, sailed serenely above the clouds.



We walked for another day, far ahead of the Chinese, through a valley devoid of trees. Only yaks, yaks everywhere. Then we came to Yulong-xi, the village where we would stay for the night.



To our Han Chinese companions Tibet must have seemed like a rude border country, and it's people, the Tibetans, ignorant peasants, counterrevolutionaries... or worse. Certainly there may be an objective basis for their judgements. Taking my turn being last, I straggled up the hill to an imposing Tibetan house. Looking more like a fort than a house it was two stories of wood and packed mud. Small gaily painted windows were the only bit of color or ornamentation in it's impassive dun colored face. In the muddy courtyard a Tibetan mastiff strained at it's chain - I gave it a wide berth. Then there was a frantic shout and two of the Chinese women burst from the house, their hands covering their mouths. Like most Tibetan dwellings the ground floor was the stable, and reeking pools of horse and yak pee congealed in the dimly lit interior. Coupled with the odor from the "dry toilet", the outhouse hanging from the second floor of the house that discharged directly onto the ground outside, the smell could only be called appalling.



Upstairs was our host family, huddled around an iron stove. Slowly they kneaded by hand tsampa in a bowl of butter tea. The Chinese, taking no mind, swiftly set up their propane stove. They chopped and diced vegetables and pork, steamed a massive amount of rice in their new pressure cooker, unwrapped their pickle relish, opened a couple of bottles of beer, and over an excellent meal proceeded to examine their now considerable bags of caterpillar fungus. It was an impressive performance of cultural superiority.

But cultural superiority is a tricky thing. It doesn't revolve around wet toilets or dry toilets, or whether you wipe with water, paper or dirt. The Tibetans, feeding yak dung into their stove, gave us a little lesson of this later that night.

The Chinese were in their sleeping bags, napping on the floor. I was sitting, my sleeping bag around my waist, when our host walked up to me, squatted down, and closely examined the medallion around my neck. It was a picture of my teacher, a Tibetan lama. When I explained who he was, and that I was a Buddhist just like him (a claim I really couldn't substantiate), he silently unlocked an elaborate cabinet and removed a well worn picture album. There were faded pictures of him with various monks, pictures of Tibetan deities, a picture of the young Karmapa. Then he showed me his prize possession: a dog eared photo of the Dalai Lama.
"Oh yes!" I said, "We've seen the Dalai Lama many time and have volunteered at his teachings! He even touched me on the top of my head!"

Yasha explained through sigh language that she had some Mani pills - Tibetan herbal medicine that had been blessed by His Holiness himself - that she kept in a silk purse. Suddenly we were surrounded by a ring of unwashed faces blazing with yearning and devotion. There wasn't a word spoken. They held out their hands, imploring, and Yasha quietly placed three pills in each hand. But even then they wouldn't leave. They stood in a group, three or four women, several men and children, and they stared at us simply because we had seen the Dalai Lama and they hadn't. I felt very small and unworthy. I looked at myself and saw the expensive sleeping bag, the Patagonia shirts and Mountain Hardware tent and saw that we had everything that they lacked. And yet they had the one thing we didn't have, the one thing that we've been looking for and couldn't find, and that's Faith.

The next morning we left the Chinese behind and proceeded on our own, up towards a mountain pass. Eventually we would reach the monastery at the foot of the icefall, and then we would bow at Dorje Lutru's crystal feet.

THE SISTER MEAL FESTIVAL
Taijiang and Shidong, China

I

We were all dancing around to the left in an enormous circle, the Miao women shuffling along under a mountain of silver, their tall buffalo horns swaying. The Miao men were dressed in black and were dancing faster, leading the circle, swinging their ten foot pan pipes in unison.
In the center of the group there was trouble- two five gallon plastic containers full of whiskey- and around them a group of old Miao women, laughing riotously.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark shadow, a wraith really, rushing towards me. I shrank, but without much difficulty the toothless crone grabbed me by the back of the neck and poured a glass of molten firewater down my gagging gullet. I choked, the raw alcohol dribbling down my chin. There was a strange buzzing in my head and I knew without a doubt that I would have to flee before it was too late.

But where was my wife? I had last seen her in the company of two black clad women, dancing and drinking.

"Well," I thought, "She's a big girl, she will have to take care of herself. Its every man for himself!" And putting my head down, I eased myself out of the circle

The origins of the Sister Meal Festival are still shrouded in mystery. Traditionally, the Miao of the Taijiang District would gather on the 15th day of the third lunar month for a marriage festival. Before the festival would begin the young girls of marriageable age would ascend into the rice terraces and harvest several wicker baskets of sticky rice. It was then steamed and dyed the colors of the rainbow. When a suitor would present himself at the dance she would offer him a packet of rice with either a negative answer-a pair of chopsticks-or a positive answer-a piece of satin-secreted inside.

Today, of course, none of this charming ritual persists. Few young men remain in the village; most have fled for the comparatively easy life of the city. The mock weddings and sticky rice presention, for example, are now held strickly for the tourists. But still, the Miao love a good party. The Sister Meal Festival is their opportunity to dress up in family heirlooms and show off their wealth. It is time to sing and dance, to express their pride in being a small minority people in southern China. And most importantly, it is a time to drink!

We had come to Taijiang directly from Kunming at perhaps the worst of times. It was China's "golden week", a May Day holiday when the entire country has the week off. Literally hundreds of millions of people were on the road, the sort of organized chaos that China seems to revel in.
Every hotel was booked out, every bus and train packed. We had stepped off the bus in Taijaing, discovered the hotels to be full, and without even removing our backpacks began dancing. It was insane.

Sitting under the giant, grim statue of general Zangb Xongt Mii in the Taijiang square I still couldn't catch sight of Yasha. There were dancing wheels everywhere, a riot of sound and color, with Miao and spectators revolving around the drummers. I shot a few photographs of the dancers, details of silver work while they whirled past, yet it was difficult not to get alcohol splashed on my camera.

Finally I returned to the dance circle I had fled some time earlier. Inside the circle of shuffling Miao women I could see a hard cluster of spectators, and around them a predatory group of photographers. I pushed my way through the dancers, and then the photographers... to find Yasha and the old women, arm in arm, dead drunk. Their cloths were soaked from spilled whiskey and they raised their heads in a fearsome laughing croak. At their feet were the two jugs of firewater; one empty and the other half full. It didn't look good.

"Yasha," I cried, "What the hell are you doing?" I pulled here out of the dance circle. It was plain we had to leave, to go somewhere, but she could hardly walk. We staggered down the main street of Taijiang,our backpacks still on our backs, the laughing stock of the locals. I would have felt humiliated except that I have been known to pull similar bone headed stunts myself. So I kept my mouth shut and looked for a hotel. Unfortunately, we could neither read, write nor speak Chinese.

Before long Yasha collapsed on the steps of a nondescript building and refused to rise. It seemed like our journey was over. I didn't know what to do. "Hotel, Hotel", I shouted at the mob of astounded men standing at the top of the steps. In my phrase book they showed me the word for 'hospital.' "No!" I said, "Sleep, she just needs to sleep!" And I made the universal gesture for sleeping, my head on my hands. They smiled. Yes, miraculously, they had a room, probably the last one in town. We graped her like a sack of rice and dragged her upstairs.

Perhaps now it is best to draw the curtain on this pathetic scene to best protect the reputation
of those involved. Suffice to say, what goes up most come down; or in this case, what goes down must come up. My father used to say that "a word to the wise is sufficient." Let's hope so. Rice whiskey is a powerful drug and shouldn't be drunk without extreme caution. But most of all watch out for those old ladies!

II

The ramshackle bus slowly climbed along a pock marked dirt road, crested a ridge, and descended again. We were on our way to Shidong, a small village several hours north of Taijiang, for the third day of the Sister Meal Festival. I rubbed at the condensation on the bus window but it didn't really improve the view. Like an old Chinese painting I could see pine trees rising into a misty nothingness. Along the road red azaleas and wild honeysuckle bordered rice terraces; it was beautiful. Jet Li was starring in 'Fong Sai Luk II' on the video, and when it turned out there wasn't a second CD we got to watch the first half over and over again. Yet it made me feel as if we had gone back in time to a simpler China, a place where the tiny hamlets of wooden post and beam Miao houses were devoid of the ubiquitous satellite dish.

Two thousand years ago the predecessors of today's Miao had begun a migration from the upper Mekong region in Tibet. Driven by population pressures and warfare they descended the Mekong River, displacing some groups, avoiding others. The Miao always traveled the ridge tops; perhaps it was easier walking, perhaps it was easier to find game, or perhaps it was simply to avoid already established groups in the valleys.

Today the Miao extend across all of Southeast Asia. During the first Indochine war the Vietnamese called them Montegards. In Laos and northern Thailand they are called the Hmong.

After the fall of Laos and Vietnam in 1975 tens of thousands of Hmong fled their homeland... they had sided with the losers. In China however they are still a viable minority group with a culture that is still relatively intact.

Our bus again crawled up to a ridge top; the mist cleared, and mountains and rivers seemed to stretch forever around us. Then again we descended towards a village only to be stopped by a line of cars blocking the road. The drivers were gone, towards the village ahead. It was Shidong, and the day's festival had begun.

Unfortunately it really wasn't what we had been expecting. We navigated our way through all the abandoned cars to find a mock rice presentation in progress. Chinese photographers were everywhere; I had never seen so many photographers in one place. All of them had either a brand new Nikon or Canon SLR, all of them had photographer's vests and hats that said NIKON or CANON, and all of them had a brand new tripod to rest their expensive equipment on. It was as if in the privacy of their own home in Beijing they had consulted some sort of guide on 'how to be a photographer', bought all this expensive stuff, and then gone on vacation.

Milling around the rice presentation were a dozen Miao, dressed in more silver chains and necklaces than the Mayor of London on the Queen's birthday. Their elaborate headdresses- tall silver buffalo horns, silver birds and flowers, towered above the crowd. It was merely a photo-op, but of the most obnoxious sort. The Chinese photographers would rudely demand them to stand here, or stand there, and when the girls were slow in compiling they would grab them by the arm to move them to a new spot. I was shocked and a bit uneasy. Yet the Miao women seemed to take it all in stride. No money was exchanged, this was all gratis, a way for the Miao to show their visitors a good time. It was simultaneously impressive and saddening.

We descended to the river where the dancing was to be held. It was like any small town Chinese fair, with booths selling sour bean curd and rice noodles, watermelon slices and ears of cooked corn. Boys shot at balloons on a backboard with an imitation AK-47 pellet gun. Young lovers held hands. Closer to the river several men paraded around their champion waterbuffalos- the winners of a bull fight held previously. The buffalos posed for photographs also, gazing mournfully up at the sky as waterbuffalos do, with a big pink ribbon pasted on their forehead and a pair of live ducks hanging from their horns.

The symbolism, needless to say, was obscure.

Finally, at three, the dancing began.. First one drummer started drumming and a circle formed.

Then another drummer appeared, and another and another. In the end there were more circles than I could count. But they couldn't really dance. There were so many spectators surrounding around them, so many photographers, that there wasn't even enough room to move. Even then photographers would stop a dancer and pull her out of line so that they could get a shot. It was astounding and inexplicable. Surely it seemed like the Miao's patience was being tried. Yet without speaking Chinese we couldn't ascertain the real state of affairs. And perhaps we never will.

Eventually we tired of the spectacle. We climbed back up to the road and found our bus, trapped in a sea of cars. So that is were we sat for the next several hours as the police tried to unsnarl the mess and to send the photographers home.

I

At the back of an unfriendly little restaurant in Sam Neua, Laos, lies a gadget rarely seen in the West, or in any other part of the world for that matter. It sits in a faded faux wood cabinet with an aging 17 inch screen and an outdated console carpeted with the mildew and dust of a dozen monsoons. But when the proper CD is inserted - as an old man did the night we were there - this old karaoke machine becomes something special: The Political Karaoke Machine!

Once it came on I couldn't keep my eyes off of it.

The music, oddly enough, sounded strangely like a poppy love song. The video however was something else. Grainy black and white images from the last Indochinese war scrolled madly across the screen. There were scenes of howitzers firing, anti-aircraft guns firing, soldiers running frantically through trenches, hot shell casings spilling out of machine guns, and all the other paraphernalia of war. There was even a shot of one idiotic - or brave - soldier getting up on the lip of his trench and wildly firing some kind of antiquated rifle into the sky.

Then, like the boogie man being let out of the closet, the object of all this animosity appeared: down out of the sky a silhouette fell through smoke and fire. Black, malignant, it was unquestionably the workhorse of the American air war in Indochina, the F-4b Phantom.

I felt a shock of dismay. Somehow,in just in a split second, I could see that this jet represented not only all that was wrong with this world but something we must all fight against. At least that is what the video seemed to say.

Still, I was hungry, so I picked up my chopsticks and resumed eating. Yet I couldn't stop watching the video. The old man played it over and over again, the same scenes of explosions and men running, the jet descending... I wanted to stand up and shout "Yes its me... I'm the killer!" Finally I thought I was going to be sick.

A Dutch man eating dinner with us turned to me and said, "What's wrong? Does seeing this video make you want to defend your country?" I shook my head no. Yet it was plain that I simultaneously felt both offended by the video and guilty of my country's conduct in war. I remembered the old bumper sticker from the Vietnam War: "My Country - Right or Wrong!" But what does that even mean in these circumstances?

I tried to explain that I had protested against the war as a college student, had rioted and run from the police with a bandanna over my face and tear gas in the air. Then I fell silent.

"It seems as if the war isn't really over for you, is it?" Yasha asked. "Maybe our trip to Vieng Xai tomorrow can help you clarify you thoughts..."

Vieng Xai was the famed Hidden City of the Pathet Lao, a warren of caves riddling the cliffs and valleys not more than a dozen miles from the Vietnamese border. At the height of the war 23,000 peasants, soldiers and commissars hid underground as the Americans rained down death from the sky.

"Yes," I thought, "Maybe going to Vieng Xai really will clarify my thoughts." But I certainly wasn't looking forward to it.

II

The mountains to the east of Sam Neua rise in a gradual arpeggio of misty ridges and passes to the highlands of Vietnam. It seems as if summer will never come there. What is a sweltering day in the lowland provinces is a chill and rainy day in Houphang Province. It is no wonder that the people of northern Laos and north Vietnam, Hanoi especially, are considered cool, taciturn and reserved.

The next morning our bus - the covered back of a truck - slowly climbed through the gentle rain. Hmong tribes people stood idly beside the road, the children entirely naked, the adults dressed in rags. It is ironic that Houphang Province is known as both the birthplace of the Lao Revolution and as the poorest region in the country. A staggering 40% of the population earns less than $1 per day. "Is that gross or net" I mused, watching the rain. At that rate I suppose it doesn't matter. The clouds parted, drawing back like the curtains in an old time movie theatre. Below us, in a lush green valley framed by limestone cliffs, was Vieng Xai.

Unfortunately, our first impression of the Home of the Revolutionary Heroes was not a particularly positive one. The bus terminal was an open space, a sea of mud, bordered by a few poorly populated market buildings. The mist thickened again and rain swept across what little we could see of the valley. Ducking our heads, we set off in search of a guest house.

We quickly found a two dollar a night cheapie, and after settling ourselves we decided to take a look around. By then it was the early afternoon and we had missed the guided tour of the caves. So armed with a hand drawn map we set off in search of the revolution.

Inextricably, it wasn't what we expected at all.

In the interregnum between the end of the American bombing in 1973 and the establishment of the Lao People's Republic in 1975 the army escaped from the caves. In front of each cave housing a Central Committee member, and there were five of them, a lavish dacha had been built for their own personal use. Unfortunately, since then, time and tide have changed.

We ambled down a muddy road flanked on one side by pretty vegetable gardens and on the other by imposing cliffs. The rain abated and we found ourselves before a rusted ornamental gate. It didn't seem to be locked, so we put our shoulders against the dripping metal and slowly pushed it open. The sign, in streaked letters on a decaying cement wall said, "Mr. Souphanouvong's Memorial." Hand in hand we walked up the path.

At the base of the cliff was a beautiful dacha, clearly in a soviet style but modulated by the sensibilities of the French. The horizontals and verticals of the pink and blue building were offset by the sensuous curves of Champa Lao (frangipani) trees in the garden. It was a stunning ensemble.

The house was deserted and the cave turned out to be locked. Yet while walking up a brick path behind the house we came across a stupa dedicated to Mr. Souphanouvang's son, the so- called Red Prince. He had been set upon in 1969 by South Vietnamese commandos who had slipped across the border and brutally beaten to death. His death was just one more small death in a horrible war, but the picture of this young man's face on the memorial was strangely affecting. Amazingly the sun came out, and the stupa, and the flowering Champa Lao trees, were bathed in a radiance of grace.

The following day we took the tour, something I had been dreading. However, when I said that I was an American our guide merely smiled, the same smile he gave Yasha when she said that she was a German. Quickly he led us on the tour. The five caves, the underground theatre and hospital, the meeting room of the Central Committee, all passed rapidly. It turned out that he was in a hurry to attend his English lessons. We shook hands and parted.

So for the rest of the day we wandered around Vieng Xai. We watched Yao tribeswomen in blue and white checkered kulaks and elaborate vests fringed with red pom-poms striding resolutely in bare feet through the mud of the bus terminal. We watched farmers planting slash and burn style, with a digging stick and a seed, dropped on at a time, into the hole. We watched Hmong tribes people digging tubers, and when we stopped to say hello everyone smiled the slow easy smile of country folks. No one cared who we were, or what our politics were. They were there in this valley before the Communist Party came and they would still there after the Party left. They are survivors, and the rituals of planting and harvesting are far more interesting and necessary than the diversions of ideology.

I suppose there must be a lesson here somewhere. Big countries all over the world push around small countries, and I just happen to be born in one of the big countries. To carry the guilt for something I never did would, in the words of Mr Spock, be illogical. But I guess that is the way it is. Hopefully some day I can attain to the equanimity of the Hmong and the Yao and simply live, joying in the rising of the sun and coming of the rains. Until then I will bow down and consider them, as all people are, my teachers.