A Perfect Day

As I already hinted at in the last message, I wasn't exactly in stellar condition when Saturday morning rolled around, but at the least I did manage to let the 'rents know I was still alive and managed to set some kind of Yangshou record for staying in bed most of the day. There was a brief attempt to rally late in the afternoon and even to try to stomach more than a couple of bites of solid food, but after stumbling along after Jimmy for an hour or so and a very poor attempt to hackey sack, I called it a wash and went back to the Hotel to nurse my misery.

It may be noted that it really takes a day as useless and crappy as that to truly appreciate what happened Sunday. I agree with Jason Lee's character in Vanilla Sky - you can't have the sweet without having the sour; the sour just makes the sweet sweeter.

The sour was pretty damn low end, even amongst bad hangovers. Something of a leader, that recent memory can recall.

Sunday began with the simple appreciation that I was whole again, and able to maneuver. It was immediately followed by a ravenous hunger that quickly reminded me that I hadn't really had much at all yesterday; after a quick conference with Jimmy (he was already up), we threw some things together and hit the road.

After another failed attempt to get mobile data service (the thought of being able to send the blog in from the side of a mountain somewhat appealed to me) - more on this in the future, Jimmy and I rented a couple of bikes and took off for the countryside. It's been probably 10 years since I've been on a bike, but you know what they say about "Once you know how to ride a bike..." so I figured it was time to give it a shot. Taking pictures from a cameraphone while riding on a dirt road isn't a very exact science, so I definitely lost some of the more vivid images from the journey, but the pictures that I did get (when I figure out how to get them online) will probably give you the general idea of how beautiful it is out there among the valleys and sharp rises of the small mountains. I did manage to sneak one online though - take a look here at Moon Hill.

It's something of a truism to say that a lot of people bike in China, but I wasn't really prepared for the enormity of it. That particular Sunday we raced in and out of tour groups, school kids taking an afternoon, families going for a peaceful ride, and foreigners that I was happy to notice were generally looking a lot more lost than I was. Things being what they are, I tried to remember a couple of my old mountain bike tricks and managed to jump the bike off of the shoulder on a road back to blow by one particular slow going group that'd been giving us some trouble in passing.

What I didn't expect was the middle aged father looking guy dressed in black to come blowing by me clearly looking to race. It wasn't until I saw his cute little daughter smiling in that impish sort of way and give me a wave that unambiguously stated, "haha slow poke" who was sitting in a basket chair affixed over the black rider's back wheel.

That was just not going to stand.

I brought my gearless wonder of a mountain bike to bear on the matter and engaged in the race. I blew ahead of him by surprise until he realized that I wasn't going to take the matter lying down, and soon we were both standing on peddles pushing for all we were worth. I figured his handicap of carrying along the 20 pound cute menace was more than offset by the fact that I hadn't done much physical exertion other than lifting the beer mug to my mouth in a few years, so the race seemed fair by all reasonable accounts. A couple of kilometers later he began to flag after I'd held the front position for a while, despite some of the chinese protests being emitted by his daughter.

At least until his very able bodied niece decided to do something about it.

I didn't even see her coming, but this time it was very clear exactly what she was saying in the international parlance of our time as she proceeded to smoke me and cut me off rather abruptly with a loud more mature tone of "take that!" in her native tongue. Jimmy had just managed to catch up and was explaining to me that I was a bit of a crazy rider on a bike, something I must have picked up from my past, as he smiled from the immediate understanding of whatever it was that the girl had told me in a syllable or two before the abrupt unseating of the front position. He dropped off his philosophizing and only nodded to me and smiled as he quickly saw midsentence my facial expression telling him, "I mean no disrespect to your current dialogue, but I have a terrible need to go racing after that girl and it just can't bloody wait another second". A quick wave and a "go" followed shortly after, but the gesticulation and verbalization only reflected damply off the nearby trees as I was already long gone.

I'll cut to the chase. I almost had her, but she was making me work for every inch of it. And there was no way that I could keep up the long journey back at the level of expenditure I was forced too just to keep my tire in line with hers, let alone to get ahead. I abruptly exhaled my surrender and began to fall off to a more reasonable face.

For a bit of gloating that was well below the level that I expected, she soon dropped back to a reasonable pace and began breathing just 10% less than I was going; it was some small measure of recompense for the loss. Soon the others caught up (Jimmy adding some kind consolation about her incredible skill that he was kind enough to inflate for the sake of my ego) and we rode back the last few kilometers as a group, joking around and one of the guys who was hanging on to the fast girls bike to use as a tow practicing his English with me. All in all, an excellent afternoon.

Back in town, I nearly fell off my bike when Jimmy told me that we'd done about 35 kilometers in a little over an hour, including the breaks for observation and water along the way. I weakly told him that I needed to stick to walking for a while, and we returned the bikes to the shop and began to head back to the waterfront where the hotel was located.

After a quick stop back at the hotel to grab the essentials, we went back out for some entertainment. The people of Yangshuo are very friendly, and soon enough we had a pretty decent hack circle going and some accomplices in crime for the day. The girls invited us to a social of some sort that their school was putting on that night, and we decided to take them up on it.

We met up with a couple of the people we'd run into the first day and visited a couple more of the sites around town. Later that night, we went over to the English school and spent some time doing all the sorts of things that you can imagine one can do at a college level school function that doesn't have fancy attire or anything even mildly resembling alcohol at it. After a few rounds of some odd language games, they pushed me to start playing.

I went at it for perhaps an hour, the audience providing all of the feedback I needed to know there was some sort of musical fit being found. One of the people that I met there was Lisa, a monitor of some sort (I knew from the difficulty that it took Jimmy to render the word that it wasn't the sort of thing to directly translate), who encouraged me to play a few more songs than I probably intended, and all of the students were completely ecstatic for the opportunity to try out their English with a native. I had to applaud their hard efforts, even though it served as a reminder for how little my Mandarin had progressed thus far.

Emails and SMSs swapped, the students had to turn in much not the manner of American college students to make it to class early the next morning. Our hungers for the night far from sated, Jimmy and I proceeded to hit the bar strip for a drink or two before calling it an early night ourselves. That was how we found ourselves at the Red Capitalist Club.

Obvious logical contradictions aside, the place was awash with smoke machine and laser lights that had long been banned from the US and kept to such non-US-frequented destinations such as Cancun. The place was dominated by a large dance floor with a bar cutting out a corner, with two sides forming a U filled with tables. At the corner was a small raised platform with some instruments arrayed, giving at least one backpacker hopes to fill a wild imagination.

After a couple of songs went by, a few musicians got on stage and started to play. The crowd seemed happy by the local tunes, while I tried to put away some drinks and muster some courage.

Suffice it to say, though I doubt the people understood most of what I was saying, the music communicated something or other after the waitress told me it was ok to play a song and I was fed a barrage of "one more song!" every time I tried to put the guitar down and sneak off the stage. We eventually left the club to pass out back at the hotel, taking only a few minutes to reflect on how the day had gone.

"That was it, Jimmy."

"It was what?"

"That.. was a perfect day."

"Yeah. I think... Very good day."

"Night," I muttered, knowing sleep was nowhere nearby after my brain cyclically rehashed the fun of the last 24 hours.

"Goodnight," he replied, with the tone of finality that let me know he, of all people, could actually just fall asleep.