on the road and not stopping

China. Chengdu, Emei, Kunming, Jinghong, Mengla. Grilled tofu, urban chaos, dyed chickens, Chinese families yanking goldfish out of a pond. Tsingtao beer with strangers.

Laos. Luang Nam Tha, Luang Prabang, Nong Khiaw, Muang Ngoi, Muang Khua. Bamboo-thatched villages, dusty children, rice paddies of luminous green. Landslides, BeerLao , Laolao whiskey with ex-pat Kiwis and all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffets.

Vietnam. Dien Bien Phu, Sapa. Potholed roads, plunging valleys, tourist-hungry touts and bed bugs.

Four weeks down, eight awaiting. No guidebook, no plan, no rules. Nowhere to be but wherever I am.

Which is not, unfortunately, conducive to regular blog updates. Spending hours in front of a computer screen is somewhat less thrilling than a jungle trek or yarning with strangers over cheap local beer.

And now: it's midday in Sapa, the fog has lifted and the valleys are calling [or the bar]. Tham biet.

finding Buddha.

The first three hours were a treat. Clean air, waterfalls, birds singing. Hey, I thought. This is gonna be a piece of cake.

Hmm.

I went to Emei to escape the heat. I escaped it alright. I got fog, rain and a wet ass. The promised breath-taking views were lost to white mist. My hair smelled like sheep dags.

Tourism has, like a lot of good stuff, reduced an otherwise sacred Buddhist mountain to yet another tick-box on your average tourist’s Must-Do list. What I thought was going to be a taste of China’s wilderness turned out to be [yet another] battle to hang onto my pennies.

My mission begins at 9am. Fork out 40 yuan for a bus to foot of said mountain. Set off. Fork out another 150 yuan for a ticket to get on mountain. Dodge hawkers proffering jade necklaces, ugly statues, dried meat and other wares one would find cumbersome to hike with.

Track is meticulously furnished with concrete steps and guard rails [crafted to vaguely resemble tree limbs]. Snack vendors are ubiquitous. Prices are extortionate; a two-yuan bottle of water has shot up to eight, a mouldy apple is five, a beer fifteen. Chocolate is out of the question.

Two hours. Meet two nervous young Chinese guys who cordially ask me to join them. Conversation is limited; their English is poor, my Chinese is worse. We plod on in amiable silence.

Seven hours stiff uphill slog and I concede to paying eight yuan for a 500ml bottle of Coke [RRP: two-fifty]. Best damn Coke of my life. Plod continues.

Debate arises as to where – and when – to stop for the night. Fog is thickening. Every rock, tree and concrete step starting to look the same. Exhaustion is claiming my two buddies, yet they turn their noses up at modest monastery accommodation in favour of supposedly superior facilities two hours further.

Plod on.

Eight hours. Have visions of boys [and myself] being carried off mountain in body bags. Mother Hen takes over; we turn back.

Wind up at family home-turned-hotel: soggy wooden shack divided into poky rooms. Damp bedding, naked wiring. Chooks. Insects. But, a roof. And, inexplicably, electric blankets and a TV.

Housewife feeds me a huge plate of oily grey eggs; divine. Boys decline; declare place to be ‘dirty’ and go to bed.

More weary travellers arrive. One nonchalantly unpacks a Bible, a laptop and Sheryl Crow. Bemoans lack of network. I go to bed.

Day two. Rooster crows at four a.m. At four-thirty. At five. At six-thirty, we leave.

Rain. Fog. Concrete steps.

Silence.

Six kilometres from summit and my company suddenly make a beeline for the cable car. Cannot fathom squeezing out another 120 yuan; stagger on alone.

Pace slows to crawl. Concrete steps are vertical. More jade necklaces, stuffed monkeys and throngs of babbling Chinese tourists [fresh from air-conditioned coaches].

Golden Summit.

Forty kilometres. Clear skies, tree tops and a bloody great gilded Buddha.

I’m buggered.

Happily pay 50 yuan for the hour-long bus ride down the mountain. Later, tend to muscular ailments with [eight yuan] beer.

And leave Emei on the next train.

bittersweet

I've barely got my chops around the chopsticks before she asks again. "How is it?"

Three pairs of eyes eagerly watching, waiting, over steaming bowls of soup, fried egg, shredded potato and tofu.

Delicious, I say. So good. Amazing. Zhenda hao chi.

It's not enough. Grandma keeps telling Vivian to make me eat more; Grandpa keeps gesturing towards the egg and chilli. Vivian keeps ladling rice into my bowl. Grandma wants to cook me some eggs to eat on the train tomorrow. Grandpa gives me a package of 'special Chengdu food'. All three implore that I am very brave [crazy] for travelling on my own and that if I come back to Chengdu, I must eat with them again.

I've known Vivian for all of twenty-four hours. She and I were obliged to meet purely because I know David. She knows David. I was going to Chengdu. She lives in Chengdu. I am foreign. She is Chinese.

We meet at my hostel, she having bullied her non-English-speaking workmate into playing chauffeur for the evening. She takes me to dinner. To lunch. To the zoo. To a temple. To Chengdu's most-touted tourist attractions. To another temple. And, finally, to her grandparents' home for a real, hone-cooked Chinese meal.

And I can't pay a cent.

I am Chinese, she tells me. It is the Chinese way.

I have to physically restrain her when I slip away to pay for our smoothies at the cafe. The only chance I got to pay for anything.

Boy, did it piss her off.

It is our way! she protests.

Later, softened by half a Beer Lao, Vivian tells me she hates China.

She hates the people. She hates the government. She hates Mao. She hates that, at 26 [a week younger than me] she is 'too old' to be single and her family are constantly urging her to get a husband/house/baby.

I want to travelling, she sighs. I admire you. In China, no people can do this.

You are lucky, she says again and again.

I run out of excuses. Vivian - intelligent, sweet, educated - is probably right. She, like her friends and workmates and nearly every other woman in China, will live with her parents until she is bundled off to a suitable gentleman and a life of domesticity. A house to clean, a child to raise and elderly parents to care for.

I - educated, aimless - am free to do whatever the f*** I choose.

And I will.

Last night, Vivian and I parted with the usual promises to keep in touch. That, if she ever visits New Zealand, I will return her hospitality.

I'll probably never see her again.

Oh sure, I felt a bit crap. A bit guilty. A bit ashamed of the fact I'm so damn lucky and she isn't.

For, maybe, ten minutes.

ce la vie. My only luck is not being Chinese.

As far as I'm concerned, I've worked my arse off to do what I'm doing. I'm damn well gonna reap the rewards.

And I'll have a beer for Vivian.

food for thought.

Twelve days and I'll be waving goodbye to Hohhot from the seat of a plane.

Struggling now to name all the things I will - and won't - miss about this bizarre city and the six months I've spent here.

School. Lesson plans. The blistering heat. The stinging dust. My six-legged housemates. The tendency for my water to be inexplicably switched off at nine o'clock at night when I'm hot and sweaty and tired and needing a shower. Well, no.

But the kids, yes. Their squeals of "Katie-mao!!" My neighbours. The street life. Chinese diet Pepsi. The smell of barbecued meat wafting into my apartment. The men who take their pet birds for walks in their cages every morning. The stares and guffaws and shouts of 'waigouren!?' when I make my daily chug around the park. Yes, yes, yes.

And oh, the food. More than anything, the food.

wo bu chi rou [I don't eat meat] was - and still is - the single most important group of words I've managed to string together in my otherwise limited Chinese vocabulary. True, I've been laughed out of many a restaurant by drumstick-chewing, marrow-sucking Mongolians, and there has been more than one occasion when my tofu been cunningly served with slithers of mutton.

But, when they want to, Hohhotians do vegetarian like nobody else. Especially when it's from a stained two-wheeled stall on the side of the road.

Street food, I've been told, is dirty food. Poor man's food. They don't clean things. They re-use the oil. It's not safe.

Maybe. But it's damn good.

Roadside liang cai [cold vegetables] isn't just a side-dish; it's an adventure in vegetarian gastronomy. Tofu sliced, tofu marinated, tofu shredded; seaweed in black, white and purple; eggplant, seven kinds of fungus, beans, bloated peanuts; frilly mushrooms, chilli potato, cucumber, carrot, noodles; shapeless crunchy stuff that I'm yet to identify.

The man who runs my favourite stall greets me like an old friend. He parks his battered motorbike-drawn business about twenty minutes' walk from my apartment; it's worth every step. Thirty-odd stainless dishes of every kind of vegetable and seaweed and soybean derivative I've seen. Many I haven't. Oil-soaked and laced with cumin. Divine.

While other customers take their pickings away in a bag, this guy gives the waigouren a bowl and a pair of chopsticks and lets her sit on his motorbike to eat.

A boon to his business, surely. All for five kuai [about a dollar].

And the adventure isn't just gastronomic.

Of course, I'd like to think that the owner of the foot-long black hair entwined in my seaweed had bathed recently. That they used a good shampoo. That, at least, their hands were clean.

I'd also like to believe that the fingernail-sized body I once found floating in the oil at the bottom of my styrofoam dish didn't have a face. That it was a seed, a strange kernel, a slither of tofu, perhaps.

Has it put me off?

No. I've been back. And I'll go back again.

Perhaps it's the same principle I've applied to many of my experiences over here. Be it teaching five-year-olds how to say "There are FIVE apples!", explaining adverbs to adults, showering in the dark or chowing down on unidentifiable fly-infested roadside cuisine.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

When I cross over the Chinese border in a month's time, it'll be with a steely determination that I can - and will - do whatever I want.

And guts of steel.

the wheat from the chaff.

Jerry, I fear, will always struggle with English. Consonants and dipthongs stick in his throat; words just don't make their way out of his mouth. He sits alone in class, quiet, fidgeting. Ten years old and an enigmatic loner.

I give out scraps of paper and ask the kids to draw a map of China. Most produce a lopsided kidney bean. I pass Jerry's desk and he's halfway through sketching the entire Asian continent; every contour and groove as geographically and politically accurate as if he'd traced it from an atlas. Regional place names in perfect Chinese pinyin.

Later, between my crap Chinese and his crap English, it transpires that he wants me to keep his masterpiece. I do.

Jessica lucked out in the looks department. Pug-nosed and pudgy with cauliflower earlobes and a voice ["Kay-TEEE-ah, Kay-TEE-ah. FINished-ah."] about as musical as potato peelings being sucked down a drainpipe, her saving grace is her brilliance. Her English, on good days, rivals my adult students.

When I head for the door at the end of class, it's with Jessica's stubby nine-year-old arms wrapped around my waist. And with "Kay-TEE-ah, goodbye, I miss you..." screeched at my departing back.

Wing-eared Jack, in pastel shorts are too small for his chunky buttocks, could be the son of Shrek. Smart, and smart-arsed, Jack has driven many a teacher [Chinese and foreign] to suicidal exasperation. He's locked me out of the room, scattered chairs and muttered insults I don't care to have translated.

Jack waves when he sees me now. He laughs at my jokes. He stands when I ask him to. I dunno what I did; I don't care to find out. I just know that Jack would rather be smacked over the head with a book than told to write fifty lines for homework.

Susan is fifteen. She looks [walks/talks/dresses] twenty-one. I've had to boot Ali in the groin more than once for ogling her. She's invariably bored; her mates are all out shopping or giggling over milkshakes with their first boyfriends.

I ask her if she enjoys class.

No, she says.

In the middle of a a board game last week, Susan snatches my marker. She writes, in perfect cursive, "Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you."

"Katie, have a good trip," she says. Beatific smile.

Five months down, three weeks to go. And it turns out I actually like these brats.

That I'm going to miss them. That, months and years from now, I'll be wondering what they're doing, what they've become, whether they remember their weird yellow-haired foreign teacher who came from some unpronounceable place in the outback.

Today Mike is wearing a t-shirt that says COC-BOY.

I point at his head.

"Nose!"

I point at his nose.

Sloppy grin, lolling tongue.

"Mon...key."

Well. Some of these brats.

flogging the rocking horse

I'd put up with his foot-swinging. With his kicking his shoe across the floor, with his sliding off the chair.

I'd turned my back when he'd dropped his pencil case for the ninth time and thrown the flashcards at the door instead of handing them to me.

It's when I point to the colour black - after twenty-nine minutes of drilling and chanting and games and Find-Me-A - that I nearly lose it.

"Bla-nana!" he slobbers. Triumphant grin.

We hadn't even covered fruits in this lesson.

Mike was lucky that day. Had I another five minutes, I'd have spent them washing his blood off my hands. Instead, I calmly left the room and went to my next lesson.

A few months ago, Mike's stunning display of ignorance would have been the final blow. Sent me to the window ledge of a fifteen-story building. Or the bottle. Anything to redeem my apparent utter failure to elicit a simple "It's black."

Experience [read: apathy] has mollified me.

I've since learned that for every nine kids who pick up "It's a GREY elephant!" within minutes and bounce out of class with a book full of Happy Points, there's invariably a tenth who will stare vacantly.... blink slowly.... and, eventually, painfully, produce a goldfish-like 'o'.

Or, a blanana.

Some I can't blame. It's the weekend; the kids are at school because Mama and Baba have [besides fat wallets] dreams of little Johnny becoming CEO or a bank manager or the next Bill Gates. China's job market is fiercely competitive; extra tuition is sometimes just one of many desperate attempts to help their little ray of sunshine climb to the head of the food chain. Meanwhile, Little Johnny would rather be out roller-blading or squashing ants with his [less well-off] mates in the park.

Some kids, of course, are just plain thick.

Sunday, 6.25pm. Five minutes left of my twelfth - and last - class for the weekend. I've been teaching since 8am. I'm tired. The kids are tired. The room is stifling. We're learning about the weather.

It's Harry's turn to be in the Hot Seat. The word on the board behind him is 'sunny'. The rest of the class has to mime the word. He has to guess it. It's a game we've played many times.

Kids are pointing at the sun beating down outside. Kids are drawing circles in the air. Kids are fanning themselves and gesturing at an imaginary sky.

Harry blinks slowly.

"Winter."

Rules are forgotten. Kids are leaping out of their chairs. Frantic pointing, yelling, fanning, gesturing. Hot! It's so hot! Summer! Today! Outside!

Harry opens his mouth again.

"Snowing."

I think it was a hyperventilating Tom Three who eventually screamed it in his ear. I don't know. I just know that by the time the poor kid mumbled 'sunny', my last shred of sanity had left the room and was dropping ice cubes into a tumbler.

I care. I do. But sometimes I think the parents of kids like Mike and Harry would have been better off investing their two thousand kuai in the kid's retirement fund. Or a new car.

Or another school.

[five weeks to go]

the best things come in small packages.

A teacher on the cusp of her retirement once told me, you aren’t made a teacher, you’re born one.

Her words rang true the other night as I walked out of school feeling, well, crap. Exhausted. Had struggled through severe sleep deprivation [read: hangover] to lead brattish six-year-olds in a pointless game of duck-duck-goose before teaching a lacklustre ninety-minute adult class.

Left class guiltily wondering if I’d sent my students away more confused about English than they were an hour previously.

That voice in my head at work again, bludgeoning me with the steely blade of self-doubt.

Thinking, not for the first time, f*** it. I’m not meant for this.

Appetite lacking, but limply agree to meet Ali for dinner. Food, after all, fixes all.

First restaurant shoos us away, owner making vague gestures at closing. Bemoan craving for spicy tofu and a stiff drink to mark general crappiness of evening.

Rice it is, then. Onto our local, Mary’s.

Salvation. Ever-welcoming Muslim mother scrambles to her feet. Ushers us inside, clears our usual table. Round face, bound in headscarf, eagerly awaits to be ordered in our [my] bad Chinese.

Cue eleven-year-old daughter [and restaurant namesake]. Bright-eyed, pony-tailed Mary bursts from her bedroom [a wall away] still in school uniform. Urgent babble between mother and daughter; flurry of excited hand gestures transfers attention to us. In painstakingly slow Chinese, Mary explains to us ming tian wo yao kao shi …. tomorrow I have… something. The rest is lost in translation; even Ali’s four-lessons-a-week worth of private Chinese lessons fail us.

Then a shabby exercise book is fetched. Click. Kaoshi: exam. Mary wants to read to us.

Few things get between me and my dinner. But, that night, over chopstickfuls of rice and egg and green tea and a badly-animated school book, we hear our little waitress speak slow, careful English for the first time. We hear about Zip and Zoom and what Zoom thinks of Zip’s school canteen. We guide Mary’s timid pronunciation of “is”, “they” and “it’s”. We test her grammar, her spelling.

I drop noodles and tofu all over the table in between nods of encouragement and “Yes, good!”

Forty minutes later, I sign my name and a smiley face at the bottom of her Unit One vocabulary list; she has managed to get nearly every word right. We praise her; she returns a shy “thank you” before babbling away in enthusiastic Chinese. Draws us a map of how to get to her school from the restaurant that is her home.

We leave. Mary is smiling. I’m smiling. The table is a mess.

So, maybe I’m not a teacher. Maybe I’ll never get my adult students to say “thank you” instead of “sank you”. Maybe I’ll never get those spoilt over-privileged children to stop throwing my pens around the room or pinching me on the arse when I turn around.

Whatever. I feel good again.