Below Belief

A restful day it certainly is. When we rise at 11am, it is gently raining outside. Cannot believe it. It remains cloudy all day so we sit in the cafe, start with breakfast and settle in for the day. I share my toilet experience this morning with six, inch-long maggots and their long, wriggling tails. I know not what monsters they will become, only that they are making a spirited bid for freedom up the white tiled walls. This and the smell in the latrines all adds up to an experience which affects me deeply and conspires to bung up my digestive system tighter than glutinous rice knows how.
Natalie arrived here from Kunming last night and really did have the ultimate sleeper bus nightmare. She developed a terrible fever during the 14 hour trip and, like us, had no opportunity to stop and get water or even painkillers from her bag. Now the fever has passed but I pity her the experience. This morning she and a Frenchman are being taught the intricate rules of a military strategy game by an intriguing man, Steve, who has long blonde hair and bright blue eyes. He claims to have carried the game around the world twice and I do not blame him for treating it as a prized possession.
It seems a game bounded only by the imagination of a strategic mind. A traveller’s treat. Still raining. And with souvenir shopping looking unattractive we sit here and play rounds and rounds of contract whist with toast and coffee on never-ending supply. Later when the air gets fuggy with dope fumes from a bunch of enlightened Aussies nearby, Llew and I move outside for a half-hearted game of chess. Amazing, I have finally found a man who plays chess less skillfully than I.
Then sit and read outside until the sky half clears. Something about the unhurried pace of life here in Dali is very refreshing and yet strangely unnerving and dangerously habit-making. We have done nothing all day. There are many long-term travellers here – a breed which I admire, respect and sometimes envy. To stand up back home and have the guts to leave behind a life you know and people you love is a sign of either total insanity or else incredible self-confidence and independence. Or conceivably, the desire to have incredible self-confidence and independence. Perhaps it is loved ones they are trying to escape from: travelling can certainly have its own therapeutic effect. Travelling alone you answer only to yourself – in a million new places you can have a million chances to be whoever you want to be to the temporary friends you meet along the way. It gives you chance to be free of old worries and look only to the future. Even so, making that initial leap must be daunting.
After being on the road for over a month now, many of my days are concluded by thinking this would be a fine life to lead if only I could somehow sustain it financially. And yet on other frustrating or exhausting days I am more likely to be dreaming of some stable existence where challenges come at me under more controllable conditions and that, more fundamentally, my next meal and sleep are guaranteed occurrences. There is, it must be said, a definite comfort to the non-nomadic life. I guess when it comes to the crunch, I’m no real long-termer. I’ll settle for a brief holiday to escape the bounds of normal life, to see someone else’s perspective for a change, to hone with fresh challenges my powers of reaction and ingenuity and perhaps take a small part of a different culture home with me.
Back, to a life where more important challenges are to be faced, refreshed, invigorated, with new stories to tell and most importantly, a desire to, at some stage, do it all again. Deciding that some activity is definitely called for, we head out for a late meal in town and a premature return to Chinese food which I really have become quite attached to. Llew and I sit there eating some very pleasant dishes, knocking back the beers and talking until closing time comes round at 2am. How our conversation is led, or driven, I don’t know but we start with the in-depth academics of Darwinism, natural selection and Creationism and move on to role-playing and computer games until eventually, tongues loosened, we end up on one final and quite possibly boundless topic : the mysteries of women.
We ponder many questions but find no answers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 1997 at 1:58 pm and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.