Armed with an outdated Lonely Planet travel guide, a compass, local maps purchased en route, a wad of the People’s Money the size of my fist, and a passing-but-still-not-quite-on-friendly-terms-with knowledge of Mandarin Chinese (that’s a technical term professional linguists often bandy about), I used this two-week period to randomly explore the unsung southwestern region of China by my solo self. Filled with an array of minority nationalities and blessed with a relatively temperate climate, the Southwest was a logical destination to choose as my focus for the wintertime practicum period.

The practicum period is set aside by the American Institute in Taiwan language training school as a time for us diplomat-students to either work in a Chinese-language environment here in Taiwan or travel on the Mainland – at our own expense for the first time this year due to drastic foreign affairs budget cuts. The goal is to deepen our practical knowledge of the Chinese language, gain experience with regional accents, and become more familiar with the lot (or the little) of the Chinese Everyman (or Everypeasant). I achieved all of the above in spades, in fact to such an extent that only now am I recovering from PTD. Post-Travel Depression is a common ailment wherein the victim often paces in his/her room and stares at maps and photographs of the places just visited as well as future destinations. After thrashing the ears of anyone in hearing range, the patient then considers the normal routine that he/she is returning to and is struck dumb for one to two weeks.

My mainland travels began with a short train trip from Hong Kong to the uninhibited chaos of Guangzhou (Canton), a polluted mess of a city that I detest more and more with each visit. The less said the better.

After passing one night in Guangzhou (otherwise known as Goat City), I took an evening flight the next day for Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province in SW China. All the flights I took within China were on Boeing 737s, a good sign that someone is making money in China. Largely gone are the scary days of domestic air travel as "Chinese roulette". Even service was fine.

Sidenote 1: China still employs a government-sponsored dual-price scheme on domestic airline tickets. Chinese pay one price, overseas Chinese a bit more, and non-Chinese foreigners almost double the base price. When I asked the official travel service to justify this (out of curiosity, not anger), they said it was because "Chinese are poor." I pointed out that there are many poor nations in the world, some far poorer than China, but that China is the only one to employ such a discriminatory system. Her reply was simply that it was a government regulation that had nothing to do with her. To China’s credit, it has recently repealed similar pricing schemes applying to trains and most hotels. However, such lingering discrepancies in the economy -- with racist overtones, no less -- do not boost China’s hopes to join the World Trade Organization anytime soon. (note: China has since abolished the dual-pricing airfare system in July 1997).

China from the air is a different beast than America. By day, the family farm plots make it appear more crazy quilt than checkerboard. By night, the land dissolves into pure blackness. No long, lit highways, no motels or gas stations dotting the roadways, no clusters of lights dotting the landscape like faint galaxies below. Its vast rural tracts dominate the cities, and at night it all disappears. The horizon fills the color spectrum – black, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red -- and then blackness again where the land is and where 1.2 billion people live.

Actually, Guizhou is not so ugly at all at first glance. Its mountains and rivers, terraced hillsides, classical wooden bridges, and water buffalo in the fields are all very pleasing and graceful to the eye. Guizhou is what Pearl Buck had in mind when she wrote "The Good Earth". However, a closer look reveals a less-than-romantic aspect of the region. Its terraced hillsides reveal an impossible agriculture, and its buffalo and peasants vary little from their ancestors hundreds of years earlier. It is a forgotten land in a Chinese era of media-darling Special Economic Zones and high-speed development along the eastern coast. Few tourists come here, other than to see the great waterfall near Anshun, and it is noted for little other than its fiery, thoroughly toxic distilled spirit Maotai. (I believe it was also the stuff that the terrorists were going to launch against San Francisco in the movie "The Rock".)

How do the peasants get along? I had lots of opportunities to talk with poor farmers during my trip, both in Guizhou and Yunnan, the province just to the west. I followed their footpaths, traced irrigation ditches through the fields, stumbled upon flat patches of cropland tediously carved out of the steep hillsides, and climbed through vertical forests to suddenly find yet more vegetable plots under cultivation. Everywhere I went in the countryside, the people were bent to the land scratching out their livelihood. They were clearing new land, watering and spraying pesticide by hand with plastic buckets slung on their backs, using the buffalo to plow (no agricultural machinery in sight in the Southwest), sowing, nurturing, and reaping whatever could be coaxed from the soil.

When I talked to them, they often found my questions concerning time strange. "What time do most people get up here? What time should I come back for dinner?" They pretty much made up a time for me, I think. Everything depends on the sun, not a clock. Incidentally, all of China operates on Beijing time, so sunrise is actually quite late in the morning in the West. Yes, even the arrival of the sun is subject to Beijing dictates.

Guizhou is not prime farmland. According to my host in Langde, a tiny Miao minority village of 550 in a narrow valley, the Miao tribe originally dwelt in the fertile land of Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces on the east coast. Driven out by the dominant Han Chinese – which make up 95% of China’s population – they were forced to settle in distant Guizhou and make the best of what they had. His story was not unlike the story of many of the American Indian tribes in the U.S. pushed onto reservations by the advancing European settlers. I often caught myself comparing the Chinese minority tribes to the American Indian tribes, and at such times I would try to imagine a Chinese student of English wandering American Indian reservations in order to practice his English and learn about America. Or imagine a wealthy young British nobleman passing a few weeks in 1830s America amid poor Appalachian settlements or rough frontier towns in the Old West. I had to laugh at myself for deciding to wander in all these fields talking to these awestruck minority peasants, some of whom had never seen a foreigner or even travelled outside their county.

In Langde, I stayed in a room of a Miao house set aside for the occasional traveller. Not many travellers pass through, and there weren’t any others while I was there. It is located about 45 minutes away by minibus from Kaili. The latter is a dreadful, smog-filled concrete town seven hours by minibus due east of Guiyang, the drab, polluted provincial capital where my plane had arrived. Guiyang’s only saving grace was that I had just been in Guangzhou.

Sidenote 2: The Guiyang-Kaili minibus trip should have only been four hours, but I did not have good bus karma during my travels. A tire blew nearly every time. Therefore, repair time must be counted as an integral part of any bus trip’s travel time. At one point, our driver Mario Andretti, on seeing a "Careful/Slow" sign near a crowded vegetable market area, immediately laid on his horn and didn’t let up until our little bus was safely out of danger. His foot would have nothing to do with the brake pedal. Pedestrians hurtled by us at breakneck speed, but Mario got us all out of there intact. With more bus drivers like Mario, I am confident that China’s population problem will soon be under control.

My only good memory of Kaili was an enjoyable meal served to me by a friendly young woman who had just opened a teahouse with her brother, a soldier in the "there’s-no-business-that-ain’t-our-business" People’s Liberation Army. Walking through Kaili’s crowded streets later in a vain search for something interesting, I was struck by a random, somewhat subversive thought: China’s crime rate is lower than that of the U.S. not because it is a more orderly society or because wealth is more evenly distributed; no, it’s because there are just too damn many potential witnesses!

Back to little Langde. My room set me back about US$1.50 for the night. It opened onto a balcony overlooking the main square of the village. The square was paved with large flat stones, and the figures of two horses were carved into the surface at each end, a nod to the Miao’s long-gone horseriding days. Today the square is filled with children playing with a ball and Miao women preparing vegetables for the night’s dinner. As there are no restaurants, I ate my dinner with one of the families in the village. After eating my fill of rice and vegetables with a meat broth (plus Maotai!), I wildly overpaid with US$1.

The dark wooden houses of the Miao cluster along the small river ambling though the narrow flat space the Miao have hacked out of the mountains. A beautiful covered wooden bridge spans the river, and several primitive waterwheels redirect part of the flow into the field irrigation system. Two boys toss stones at a ball floating in the river, while an old man on the opposite bank applies some sort of white powdered medicine that he says will heal the animal’s skin disease. I smell fresh air, animals, grass, and manure, not necessarily in that order. Ducks, chickens, goats, and pigs are tucked into pens or independently wander the narrow lanes between the houses. Terraced vegetable plots wrap around the hills above, and tall teepee-like thatches of dried river straw stand like sentinels in each one, waiting to be gobbled up by hungry buffalo. Hammers and saws piece together a new house for a young newlywed couple up the way. The rest of the infrastructure consists entirely of two electric power lines coming in from the main road to provide a few hours of electricity each night.

Strolling in a field above the village, I met a peasant smoking a cigarette as he inspected the leaves of a cabbage plant. He explained that all of the land is sectioned off to various families and then subsectioned by crop. The Miao grow corn, sweet potato, cabbage, mushrooms, onions, and other vegetables. After selling a small portion to the government at a mandated price, farmers are free to dispose of the rest of their crops as they wish. In more prosperous agricultural areas, that would mean bringing your excess produce to market and making as much of a profit as you can as you fill the needs of the cities. However, in tiny Langde, the entire harvest is eaten locally in a hoe-to-mouth fashion.

The farmer said the harvests have been good of late and that everyone has had enough to eat. However, when floods or droughts strike, the villagers are forced to go to the market themselves and buy what they need to survive. Much of what he said echoed the lessons I’ve learned from China experts and China-related readings I’ve taken in during the last few years. However, listening to a poor farmer in the field talk to you directly about the effects of flood and drought on Chinese rural life really drives home the point in a way that no expert can.

Where do they get the money to buy food, clothing, and other supplies? He said much of it comes from villagers who leave the village and become migrant workers for part of the year. They help harvest crops coming in elsewhere or they move to a city to find work at a construction site or factory. My friend in the field had himself worked for two years in a factory in distant Wuhan. He currently works off and on in a factory in nearby Leishan that processes fruit for shipment to the special economic zones of Zhuhai and Shenzhen. Having visited both zones, I know that much of the produce and other food products eventually make their way into Hong Kong and Macau markets.

According to my Langde host, a measure of self-autonomy is granted the Miao. Village leaders are elected by all residents of at least 16 years of age. Such leaders are called upon to settle disputes, preside over celebrations, and act as village representatives to the county government.

Langde has its own grade school, but students must board in the town of Leishan during high school. A Han Chinese teacher I met teaches Mandarin grammar to Miao students in the high school. He maintains that their level of educational achievement is the same as that of Han children. He never attended college, but he studied for his teacher’s certification on his own. He said that employers often prefer self-taught students in China because they have demonstrated motivation and commitment to their goals.

In general, rural villagers struck me as being more independent and comfortable with being alone than most urban Chinese I’ve encountered. Long days in the fields tending the soil breed a different personality than that found in the cities, one that is accustomed to passing time with only a grazing buffalo for company or perhaps a child too young to attend school yet.

This urban-rural character difference is even noticeable in the face. The facial expression of choice for urban Chinese is the smile. It expresses pleasure, embarrassment, annoyance, impatience, even anger. It’s the most suitable facial expression to wear in a desperately crowded society bent on maintaining harmony and avoiding confrontation. However, the smile doesn’t leap as easily to the face of many rural farmers. When it does appear, it beams and is more likely to genuinely indicate pleasure. Rather than the smile, the default facial expression of many peasants is that of an unhurried person intent on the familiar task at hand and nothing else.

Sidenote 3: If you want to know how an individual sees himself, ask him or her to pose for a photo. Most people anywhere instantly revert to an image in their own mind of what sort of person they are or of how they would like others to perceive them. A photo is a permanent image of themselves that many people could potentially see; it should not be taken lightly! Americans might smile or ham it up to show their friendliness. Mainland Chinese – both Han and minorities -- almost invariably become as stiff as a soldier on parade and let loose only the shyest of Mona Lisa smiles.

After boarding the hard-seat, "spit as you please" train in Kaili to head west, I quickly became disenchanted with the book I brought to read on the train -- "The Fall" by Albert Camus. This pompous existentialist story of Modern Man’s struggle with his selfish nature could not be more inappropriate to my current setting.

Fortunately, I lucked out with my hard-seat partner this time. He is a finance student at a university in Guiyang. A Miao from Leishan, he hopes to work in a bank in Guiyang or Kaili after graduation. However, ideally he would like to leave "backward" Guizhou. He says he believes the coasts are far more developed because of the preferential treatment they receive from the government, and he is very curious and envious of Taiwan’s prosperity. Most mainlanders I met were well aware of how well Taiwan is doing economically. My student friend proudly mentioned how a neighborhood in the northern coastal city of Tianjin is "the most developed place in the world." Apparently it earned this title from the Chinese official newspapers because each household there had its own car. If that is the official measure of prosperity, China still has a long way to go to catch up to auto-happy America (woops, showing my Detroit colors again).

After transferring in Guiyang to the overnight train for Kunming, capital of neighboring Yunnan Province, I find myself among a different class of people. I am in a "hard sleeper" berth, which is actually too harsh a name. I have a comfortable, cushioned bunk with five others in the same compartment, and the service is excellent.

Sidenote 4: As lousy as transportation and lodging can be in China at times, I love the hot water thermoses and tea leaves provided everywhere. Somehow, even a tiny hotel room with no hot running water, a squat-floor toilet, and a broken window becomes more civilized when I spot the hot water and tea cup left by the maid. It’s amazing how long the water remains hot in the thermos. I think the Chinese keep all the water they can find in a permanently boiled state because you just never know what goodies you could happen upon that need only be dropped into some boiled water and gobbled up with soy sauce and vinegar.

As sleeper tickets are more expensive, the coach is full of Chinese Malaysian tourists, travelling Chinese businessmen, a few government types, and myself. As the lone non-Chinese, I became the instant Foreign Expert on every subject under the sun. Something about being from a faraway place makes you appear worldlywise and knowledgable. People want to get your opinion on international issues, hear what you have to say about their homeland, and learn about why all American schoolchildren carry guns to school. I held court for about an hour in the narrow aisles, adjuticating all sorts of disputes and treating several people’s personality disorders, prescribing drugs, and correcting their misunderstandings about geography ("No, I can assure you. Canada became the 52^nd U.S. state in 1993, right after Cuba.")

One businessman from famously prosperous Tianjin visits Yunnan once a month to buy its quality lumber. He then transports it back across the country to Tianjin to make furniture for export. I liked him because he seemed to know at least one completely useless sentence in every known language.

But a Malaysian businessman with two kids at the University of Nebaska chided him for sending the lumber all the way to Tianjin for processing. "Why not make the furniture here and ship it from the south through Hong Kong?" No answer was offered, but it is a tangible example of why the interior regions are beginning to resent the faster economic development of the east coast. Yunnan, to the businessman with access to preferential treatment in Tianjin, is nothing but a lumber yard.

The Malaysian businessman, whose mother tongue is Chinese, also gave me some heart as far as Chinese language ability goes. He said he has a very difficult time understanding different accents on the Mainland, even among the Han, much less the minorities. In Guizhou he always sent his daughter into stores to buy things in order to avoid looking silly. I often ran into difficulty, too, but I blamed it on my Chinese ability, which truly still has a long way to go.

Like America, China is a huge country full of regional accents. Most Americans, however, speak English as their first language. In large parts of China, Mandarin is the second language, maybe third. As a result, I was often told that my Chinese was more "standard" than that of the minorities or of ill-educated Chinese in the south. That is, my pronunciation is closer to the dictionary than theirs is. Of course, I still have an American accent, but apparently an American accent is not as "thick" to Chinese ears as that of a Miao from Guizhou or a Han peasant from Sichuan, for example. Indeed, I met four young Han originally from Beijing and who now live in Detroit, of all places, working in auto-related industries. They were vacationing in China as well. Because Mandarin basically is the Beijing dialect, their spoken Mandarin was crystal clear to me, and they had little difficulty understanding my accent. In the south and even in Taiwan, it is still difficult at times. It’s like learning standard TV English and then going to rural Mississippi to practice.

Yunnan lived up to its name, even in midwinter. This most southwesterly of China’s provinces is renowned for its mild climate. Instead of having four distinct seasons, one Chinese told me that Yunnan prefers to have "all four seasons in one day." True to his word, I found myself biking in just a T-shirt by day and shivering under three blankets by night.

Bordered by Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos to the west and south, along with Tibet and Sichuan to the north, over 20 minority groups live there. Why is it that minority groups are always so "colorful", like precious flowers so valued for their rarity? Yunnan’s ethnic mix give the region a flavor all its own, and it is definitely a place I will revisit. Like Guizhou, it features towering mountain ranges and long rivers, jungles as well as vast stretches of what looked from the plane like red clay. The province boasts various cuisines, and most are spicy like that of neighboring Sichuan. A couple of my favorites were "Across-the-Bridge Noodles" and some sort of hot, tomato-based salsa prepared by the Dai tribe. They dip wild plants that resemble parsley in it.

An Italian friend in Hong Kong who grows porcini mushrooms in Yunnan for export to Europe maintains an apartment in Kunming near the airport. Through his generosity, I had access to a modern apartment full of Western luxuries – the laundry facilities and Italian wine were key – for my entire stay in Yunnan. I used it as a base for exploration of outlying areas.

Kunming itself is a pleasurable city of broad, leafy boulevards. I dislike most large Chinese cities because they tend to be bland, crowded, and polluted. With a billion people to house, Chinese city planners and civil engineers tend to be functional rather than sentimental. They value speed and low cost, damn the aesthetics and to hell with construction standards. It’s good enough, move them in! Kunming and Shanghai, however, contain comfortable oases within them that are exceptions to this rule. Kunming’s pollution was not as bad as that of other cities either. As a result, I thoroughly enjoyed renting a bike for a couple days (US1.25/day) and flowing to the two-wheel rhythm of urban Chinese life.

Sidenote 5: The key to biking in Chinese cities is to go slow, don’t follow too closely, carry a lot of small bills to pay the blue-coated bikelot guards when you park, and to pick a bike with a good set of brakes. A horn is a must, too, if only to warn the person you are about to pass that they should not turn and spit to the left until you are safely by. Biking is the only way to see a Chinese city. You can quickly get a sense of size and overall pace of life from the seat of a bike.

Kunming is far more prosperous than Guiyang, and it has a self-assured spirit to it that other Chinese cities seem to lack. Throughout Yunnan, I met a variety of people who had moved there from elsewhere in China, demonstrating a growing mobility among some classes of people. Kunming has all sorts of upscale boutique shops of the sort you find in Hong Kong. I found a trendy outdoor café area for cellular phone-packing yuppies and a raft of shoeshiners just outside. Young women smoking, too, not a common sight in China. I saw fancy hotels and office buildings as well as shops filled to the rafters with goods both imported and domestic. Street massagers offered comfort at their fingertips, but I was having too much fun on my bike to stop. Minorities from outlying areas come into town to sell native crafts, open restaurants, or just seek work like everyone else.

As for tourist sights, I bypassed the more famous Stone Forest outside of Kunming in favor of a visit to the misnamed Bamboo Temple, which is not made of bamboo at all. Perhaps the original structure was. However, what it does feature is what the Lonely Planet describes as the "incredible surfing buddhas". I can’t improve upon that description. A famous sculptor about 100 years decided to carve life-size images of various people who had attained Nirvana and become buddhas. Each one is incredibly lifelike and their faces portray every expression imaginable, from serenity to despair, from anger to boredom. Each was perched atop a sculpted crest of blue wave crashing in on either side of the temple’s interior. Quentin Tarantino could make a lovely film based on this bizarre setting.

I spent New Year’s Eve in Kunming. After finding little of interest to do at the big Holiday Inn (how long can you listen to a Filipino band and watch Chinese prostitutes chat up the Western guests?) , I headed back to my apartment to drink some Chianti and pass my first quiet New Year’s in a long time.

It was not to be.

Instead I entered a Western-style pub that I was passing by and joined a group of European backpackers and local Chinese in a wild, beer-filled dancefest until 2:00 am or so. At midnight, we exploded the ballon decorations with lit cigarettes and toasted each other’s countries several times. It was an unexpected bit of fun that I enjoyed. However, it then took a strange turn.

After the Euro-packers left, I chatted and drank with two of the Chinese men for a while longer. I had told them earlier that I was a language student in Taiwan, which is entirely true. Getting into details about my job with USIA often leads to requests for help with a visa or maybe even suspicion that I am a spy. However, they suddenly began speaking in slow, but near-perfect English and asked me all kinds of questions about the U.S., my opinion about Taiwan independence, CIA efforts to combat drug trafficking in Yunnan, etc.

At first, I felt it was another Foreign Expert conversation, but as the questions got more pointed, I began to remember suspicious things I had noticed earlier about them. At one point while we were all dancing crazily, I had snapped a picture of the scene. One of them began waving his hands in disapproval, which had struck me as silly. Another time, a bartender was telling me how little he made per month at the bar. The two men harassed him in a friendly way to change the subject. Remembering this, I waited for an appropriate moment to ask about their jobs. One said he worked for Yunnan Airlines and gave me his card. What is someone who was trained so well in English doing working in southwest China for the airlines? I certainly met no one else at the airports who could speak English, but perhaps that’s exactly why he was sent there. The other guy just smiled and said that he couldn’t tell me where he worked. "It would be too difficult."

The sober, somewhat tense turn in the conversation seemed surreal after just whooping it up for a couple hours earlier. After all, what sort of undercover security personnel would announce, "I can’t tell you where I work"? Either a lousy one or somebody who is just trying to be funny with a foreign language student. No matter, with nothing to hide, I had nothing to worry about. However, they did ruin my New Year’s buzz. I wished them Happy New Year again and wandered home.

After New Year’s I flew to a tropical region away down yonder on the Burmese-Thai border called Xishuangbanna, home of the Dai minority. Closely related to the Thai people, the Dai are a darker skinned, very attractive people. Taking advantage of the pleasant climate and scenery, they have learned to turn the tourist dollar by staging nightly performances of traditional Dai dances at myriad tourist hotels in the county capital of Jinghong.

I crossed a bridge over the Mekong River, one of only two on the entire river apparently. The Mekong flows from Sichuan Province in the north all the way down to Vietnam. On the opposite bank, I passed through a small modern, commercial area and then a traditional settlement of raised Dai bamboo houses in the forest. The Dai houses are on stilts in order to avoid mosquitoes hovering close to the ground (I took malaria prevention pills for the Yunnan trip). The entire living quarters are upstairs, while the pigs and chickens live on the open dirt floor underneath the raised structure.

On the riverbank I saw several boys with homemade kites and a young Dai woman who appeared to be exercising. She told me her name was Su Ying, and when I asked her what she was doing, she replied that she was practicing Dai dances for performance. She was originally from Sichuan but moved to Jinghong for dance training. Later Su Ying hopes to perform in a Chinese cultural theme park near Shenzhen. The training for the ten main dances lasts a total of six months. She offered to take me to a performance that night, and I gratefully accepted.

We met later at Peacock Lake Park in the center of town and then biked to a street of rustic dance-dinner restaurants. The dances were festive and interesting, and I even joined onstage in the Unity Dance with a boatload of Japanese tourists. However, after watching the dances I have to wonder why six months of training are required. On the whole, they are more difficult than the Macarena, but easier than the hokey-pokey. The food was fantastic, however, featuring simple shredded, barbecued meats and vegetables. And I’m tellin’ ya, they should bottle that Dai "salsa" and sell it in the States.

I passed the following night in the village of Ganlanba, about an hour distant from Jinghong. The popular hostel with backpackers there is a family-run Dai Bamboo House, built in the classic, raised, bamboo style. It was quite large, full of charm, and very cheap. I shared a room with simple floor bedding with some Japanese backpackers for about US$1 each. The interior common areas were quite large and comfortable, a nice place to read or write travel notes and postcards. Some of the other backpackers, both Asian and Western, studied Chinese grammar books or planned their onward journeys to Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, or other points in China. The backpacker spirit of camaraderie prevailed in the Dai Bamboo House, with English as the common language.

But first a word about Chinese strolling. A long-time American resident of Taipei explained to my classmates and I why the Chinese enjoy ambling en masse along city sidewalks and aimlessly window-shopping, a habit often liable to drive goal-oriented Westerners on the sidewalks to madness. For a Westerner, he explains, the sidewalk is a mere conduit, a path to get you from Point A to Point B, which could be a store, a restaurant, a friend’s house, whatever. The sidewalk is merely the passageway to get to your destination. If we had our druthers, we’d probably choose to "beamed" to our destination like Capt. Kirk and the gang.

For many Chinese, however, the sidewalk often is the destination itself. As most Chinese homes are tiny, cramped spaces, the sidewalk offers an opportunity to get out and move around. Strolling along is entertainment, and going in and out of stores or visiting various street vendors is akin to channel-surfing on the TV. However, the busy sidewalk itself often is the main destination, and each stop to shop or snack is just an added bonus.

The same psyche pervades among long-term trekkers travelling the world’s low-budget backpacker routes. After being on the road for awhile, the road itself becomes the destination. Tourist guides and maps are obsessed over and memorized. Each tourist site, each grand city or simple village visited, is mere punctuation to a Faulkner-esque sentence stretching from Indianapolis to the Acropolis to Angkor Wat. Visas, tickets, immigration stamps and different currencies paper the paths travelled, permitting access to yet more roads and more rest stops along the way. Temples, castles, caves, hostels with hot running water, and entertaining nightlife all become mere bonuses to the rigors, pleasures and disappointments of the Road.

After all, it is the Road above all.

I grabbed the last bike available at the Dai Bamboo House, a pink bike for girls with a banana seat, broken bell and virtually no brakes. Arriving at the river, I dragged my heels to a stop and crossed by ferry. I was tired of speaking so much Chinese, and my goal for the day was to get lost in one of the pretty forests. It wasn’t hard. After taking numerous dirt paths through fields and forests and passing many isolated Dai houses, I was thoroughly disoriented. I knew my trusty compass would easily get me back to the river though.

Harvested like any other crop, the forests are arranged in orderly, numbered rings that spiral down the region’s circular hills. Leaving my bike in a bush, I followed a series of dirt paths and steps ascending to the circular summit of one of the hill forests. The day was virtually silent, and the sun was only partially successful in skirting the trees’ leafy blockade. It was a lost green cathedral like a hundred others within just a few square miles. I thought I had arrived at Point B. Looking downward through a window in the foliage, I could spot one buffalo in the field below. A woman worked nearby. I wish I could tell you that something extraordinary happened in this place, but there is nothing to tell beyond the serenity of the quiet shade.

Back on my bike, I found a small village near the river with a wooden, open-air Buddhist temple and stupa. Four boys aged 10-16 greeted me there. With religious tolerance enjoying a partial comeback in this remote part of China, three of them were studying to be Buddhist monks and wore the yellow and red robes of a Buddhist student. They showed me around the temple and shyly told me a bit about their lives in the village. They said Buddhism requires 15 years of study to become a monk. They had never left Xishuangbanna and thought the flight from America to China would take about seven days.

I left Xishuangbanna and headed to Dali, a small village of the Bai tribe to the west of Kunming. Formerly the capital of the Nanzhao kingdom until it was conquered by the Mongolian hordes in the 13th century, a small section of ancient stone streets and city walls still exists. Lately, it has adopted a funky, laidback character catering to foreign backpackers in need of a comfortable rest stop on their way on their way in or out of Tibet or neighboring Southeast Asian countries. Like the village of Yangshuo I wrote about a year ago (if you happened to receive that travelogue), it boasts lots of cafes with clever names, good music, tasty Western and Asian dishes, used book exchange services and a comfortable atmosphere for travellers to soak in before heading back to crowded trains and dismissive hotel service staff elsewhere.

Dali is near a very pretty lake referred to as "the sea" by the locals. It is backdropped by the Cangshan (Deep Green Mountains), where marble is mined ("Dali" means marble). Periodic explosions echoing over the valley mark the labors of the miners. In addition to mining, Dali boasts fishing, agriculture, cattle-raising and tourism industries. The picturesque Three Pagodas tower over the village and are worth a visit for the nearby marble market, where I decided to be a vicious, Chinese-style bargainer one day (maybe the inescapable wail of karaoke wafting from a booth right on the main pagoda’s platform turned my heart savage for a moment). It is cold here, and the winter afternoon whips up a dusty wind that stings the eyes of everyone on the street.

As Dali is far less remote than Xishuangbanna, the Bai are more assimilated than the Dai. Even so, they are still often regarded as backward or "barbarian" by the dominant Han. A mixed Bai-Han teacher I met said that such attitudes exist because many minorities are still undereducated and cling to old traditions. Some resist modern clothing or modern housing. Some never master Mandarin, the official language of all Chinese. Teacher Li said education is poor in minority areas because good teachers are often reluctant to move to minority areas to teach. I told him America has the same educational quality problem in the rundown inner cities, where blacks, Hispanics and other poor minorities congregate.

The most interesting person I met on this entire China trip runs a small place called the "Cultural Exchange Cafe" in Dali. He Liyi is an elderly Bai gentleman with a fascinating life story. Born to a farming family in rural Yunnan, he distinguished himself in school and subsequently earned an opportunity in 1950 to attend college, which is extremely rare for any Chinese let alone a minority. Having been exposed to American soldiers stationed in Yunnan during WWII, he decided to study English in college in order to make himself useful to the new communist People’s Republic of China.

However, the political atmosphere had changed much by the time he graduated in 1953. The Soviet Union was China’s great model and ally; the U.S. and the West were bitter enemies. China had little use for those with English language skills at the time, and Mr. He was sent to work in a government office with responsibilities wholly unrelated to his English skills. When the Anti-Rightist Movement raged in the late 1950s, Mr. He was a prime target. He was sent to a "reeducation through labor" camp to rid him of his faulty thinking and Western affectations. One of the brightest minds in Yunnan tended buffalo and made bricks for three years, and his story is not unique.

He suffered the attacks of the Red Guards again during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s but finally was vindicated by the late 1970s with the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping’s "opening and reform" policy. He has since reacquired his English and written an autobiography, published in 1993 by a small Colorado publisher. It is called "Mr. China’s Son", after his personal term for the Chinese central government.

The amazing thing to me is that he chose to write the book entirely in English. With the help of a British ex-pat teacher in Kunming, he spilled his whole struggle out into English, the very cause of all his troubles. Using English to write the book represents a great personal victory of perseverance over all the misguided movements and campaigns that harassed him. When I asked him if there would be a Chinese version of the book, he smiled and said there was no need for such a book, as Chinese are already too well aware of the pains and losses resulting from the Mao-sponsored turmoil.

Mr. He opened the cafe with help from foreign admirers in 1995. He maintains an extensive correspondence with contacts around the globe and zealously gathers up any "culture food" -- books, newspapers, magazines, videotapes, etc. -- that he can obtain in order to have it available for Chinese and travellers who visit his cafe. I bought his book from him, but I told him I’ll be expecting the movie version any day now.

Overall, however, I was not as impressed with Dali as I was with Yangshuo. It is certainly worth a stop if you are in this part of China, but it is not worth a special trip. I spent one night in Dali and one night in Xizhou, a far less touristy lake village about 20 minutes to the north. Xizhou had little to recommend it except its close proximity to the lake. Sitting next to the lake under a clear sky, I missed my Michigan home for a bit. But then I thought about Michigan in January and reconsidered.

Walking back through a vegetable field to my hotel in Xizhou, I came upon a kind, 73-year-old Bai peasant working with a six-year-old boy. We talked for a bit, and when he found out I was American, he flashed a toothless smile and proudly said that he listens to Voice of America everyday. When I asked him if others in the village listened as well, he waved his hand contemptuously at the village and said, "Ah! They’re all a bunch of illiterates. They have no culture!"

I began the return journey out of China from Xizhou. After a minibus ride to Dali, an overnight sleeper bus -- with comfortable bunkbeds, no less! -- from Dali to Kunming, and a flight back to Guangzhou, I was poised for the final 2 1/2-hour bus ride to the Hong Kong border via the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone’s new expressway. Hooking up with two women also headed to Shenzhen, we negotiated a rate with a private driver who was stealthily soliciting business near the taxis and buses. However, what we didn’t expect was that the car was the official vehicle of his government work unit in Shenzhen and that he was taking on passengers for his return trip just to make some cash on the side.

So we were whisked away in the luxury of an official, black, tinted-window Mercedes with two red Chinese flags on the dash. We flew down the expressway and flashed past Public Security patrol vehicles without a second’s hesitation. One of my companions was an aggressive, tough Hong Kong businesswoman originally from Shanghai. The other was a pretty, 20-year-old woman from frozen Harbin way up in the Northeast. She said she worked in an "office" in Shenzhen, but I suspect her desk there was the horizontal type. When the car reached the security checkpoint of the Special Economic Zone -- Shenzhen is part of China, but Chinese citizens have to obtain a special permit to enter or work in the zone -- officials there determined her permit card to be fake. She was not allowed to enter the zone, and we had to leave her at the checkpoint.

The rest of the ride was uneventful. I was dropped off about 20 minutes later and then walked over the border into Hong Kong. A 45-minute train ride later, I was back in the heart of a unique city contemplating its last moments as the colonial jewel of the British Crown.

Happy Trails!