Confessions of a Drifter

On the road…traveling towards towns with foreign names, soaking in whatever I can from this inimitable Chinese expedition.

I will be journeying for 3 weeks around the country, mostly carrying a backpack with clothes and a notebook to record things. This will be my journal, a completely unaltered account of my experiences. I will not edit this in any way, just try to express myself and record what happens.

Let the wandering and writing unravel…let the Chinese adventure begin.

Day 1—January 26, 2011

We left the dorm in Hangzhou at 10am this morning—10 GEPers, 7 dudes and 3 girls. Most of us are wearing those big hiking backpacks bulging full of shit, with a sleeping bag on top… I look like some of those scraggly-haired hippies that I see wandering around Bolivia sometimes. We scream foreign.

As usual in Hangzhou, getting cabs was difficult. We split up, strategically placing ourselves on different street corners like raggedy-ass commandos. After a while we were all on our way—bus station-bound.

As we are being led on this expedition by a German with a healthy appetite, we arrived with plenty of time to kill and went to have an early lunch. Dumplings with beef noodles in a steamy, crowded restaurant. Mmm, mmm… better than the canteen at Zhejiang University. We walked around the marketplace, stocked up on cookies and water, and then headed for the station.

Over 77 million travelers road the rails over the new year

In the bus station. Bathroom break before the 6 hour bus ride… now, how can I describe this aptly? …It was like an army of incontinent sailors, navigating a ship without toilets past every babbling brook and gently trickling stream in the sea, setting foot on dry land for the first time after 8 months of gritting their teeth and squeezing together their thighs tightly… or like that ill-fated day when ‘Dutch Hooker Day Off’ happens to coincide with Valentine’s Day, and all of the desperate, lonely men of Amsterdam are prowling the canals of the Red Light District, shoving and jostling each other for the next available hole… I guess that’s what I felt like, shoved up against a wall, shoulder to shoulder and chest to back with 100 Chinese men in a cramped bathroom. Shuffling our feet slowly, getting pushed from behind and jabbed in the ribs, catching the occasional waft of dozens of men pissing and shitting together (with nowhere to run)… An all-around traumatic experience.

Anyways, we finally made it onto the bus and are now on our way. We’re about 3½ hours in, and the landscape of Hangzhou has drastically changed…concrete melted into snow patches and mountainous bamboo forests…into small towns beside tea plantations with hovels beside muddy roads…into newly built cities with cranes on top of each building, near huge houses that looked like identical suburban palaces…into dying woods with no leaves in the winter wind, to rivers near slopes of red grassy dirt...

Jiuhua Shan, here we come.

I’m pumped to climb that Holy Mountain… 

-Seb