But how do you get the llamas up there?

We spent so much time exploring, adventuring, and running around China-- literally running; running and flying and riding and walking and biking-- for nineteen or twenty hours at a stretch that when we finally made it to a hotel checkpoint, I immediately gravitated toward the everyday normalcy of television. It was like a tractor beam. We probably spent an average of ten hours total in any hotel room, but I spent the vast majority of that time physically wrapped around the television monitor with the remote control down the front of my shirt.

There wasn't much point. Only two channels on the whole stupid television were ever in English. One of them was HBO, which hey! Score! Except that every single time I turned it on, it was playing Funny People. Every city, every province, every hotel. Funny People. On a loop. It seemed an odd choice. Even odder, the Chinese government had edited it down to about forty-seven minutes. If you watch Funny People in China, you have no idea that Adam Sandler is sick or that Laura is married so you come away feeling strangely buoyant the first eleven or so times you watch it.

The other English-speaking channel was some sort of ongoing international news program that managed to be both hypnotizing and totally repellent. The format appeared to be simple-- four people seated behind a news desk discussing world events.

Which seems completely innocuous, right? I turned it on for background noise one morning while I was packing and I found myself concentrating harder and harder on the screen until I was sitting on the carpet, nose to nose with the lead anchor with my knees tucked up under my chin.

For starters, there was absolutely zero background distraction on this channel. No tickers, no scrolling feed, no station indicator, no weather map, no blue screen, no digitized dancing bears, no background props, no lettered signs of any type, no wall paint. It was like watching hostages debate one another in an abandoned warehouse on a hidden video feed.

Secondly, one of these people only communicated in Chinese. So when the other three people were discussing something in English? Dude Number Four would throw his two cents in there in Mandarin while everyone else sat back and listened, and then the other three would comment on what he just said in English. No translation of any of it, just moving right along. It was exactly like watching Hank Hill and Boomhauer have a conversation. Only, I suspect, more cerebral.

And I say "suspect" because (thirdly) I never had the slightest idea what these people were talking about. I think I have a fairly realistic grasp of how much I know versus how much I don't know (a little versus a lot), but over the years I've read enough about the world and attended enough college that I never expect to be utterly flabbergasted when I watch the news. I never expect to find myself perched on a hotel room floor in China with one eye squeezed shut, poking at the television screen with a shaky index finger and muttering bullshit under my cold, cold breath.

"Well, today marks the 3,529th Annual Festival of Anspi today in Bananastekistan and the parades are in full swing. From sunrise to sunset, the royal children will be gathering dragonflower vines and butternut roots to make their ceremonial capes, and the villagers have been hard at work for weeks building the ten-story llama lofts."

The other newscasters smile and nod. The Chinese guy shuffles some papers and interjects in Mandarin.

"Oh, absolutely!" someone answers, laughing. "I was in Bananastekistan two years ago for the festival and it was simply amazing. I still have my wooden pith helmet full of glitter and moss."

Then just as quickly as it started, it's over. Their smiles vanish in unison like ships lost at sea.

"The euro zone debt crisis reached a critical point yesterday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average once again fell short of wide expectations despite an overall rise in commodities trading."

But it's too late, I can't be cured by banality, I'm already curled up in a sweaty ball with my face all screwed up trying to figure out what the fuck I just heard.

Randy walked into the room then, back from his breakfast salad foraging, and he informs me that it's now 6:20am and I better get my luggage out to the bus if I have any hope of seeing it tomorrow morning in Kunming.

"Have you ever heard of Bananastekastan?" I ask him.

"What?" he answers, and I am at once smug and validated.

"Oh wait. You mean 'BananastekIStan'," he corrects, "of course I have. The llama lofts are supposed to be unbelievable."

Lijiang, Day One.

I'm rereading the China itinerary, and according to this we flew from Chengdu to Lijiang after dinner in Chengdu. That sounds about right; I remember I was asleep on the bus from the airport to the hotel, and I also remember we had to park and walk a good distance because there aren't any cars in the town of Lijiang.

Just one of the reasons Lijiang was my favorite city. The itinerary calls it the "Shangri-la" of China. I don't know if that's true or just something they put on itineraries for Americans, but it was definitely Shangri-la-ish. To me, anyway, a person who's never been to Shagri-la and doesn't really know where it is and on second thought thinks it might be a topless resort in the Bahamas, actually, so nevermind.

It wasn't anything like a topless resort in the Bahamas.

I almost can't explain it. The whole town was a labyrinth of cobblestone streets lined with shops and restaurants; there was fast-running water everywhere, streams and waterfalls and fountains built into the cobblestone framework. Absolutely incredible.

Randy and I got hardcore lost walking around. We were warned by our regional guide that this was a real possibility, so I tried to remember landmarks and I made mental notes as to whether we turned right or left. But when every single building looks exactly the same, and when you can't read or distinguish any of the street signs, and when I can only tell my right from my left like sixty percent of the time... well. We walked around in circles for maybe an hour and a half trying to figure out how to get back to the hotel. After twenty minutes I tried to crumple onto a wooden bench and just give up-- like Open Water, only on land and with better acting-- but Randy pulled me up and made a left (or a right) and we made it back.

This is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. It's 18,000 feet tall.

We actually took an aerial tram up the entire face of the mountain to the Yak Meadow. The itinerary is reminding me that Yak Meadow "commands a magnificent view of the glacier", but I don't remember a glacier; I remember oxygen tanks and the smell of fear, but no glaciers.

Eighteen thousand feet up is high. Eighteen thousand feet is so high that it doesn't really matter that you're standing on a wide, established land mass, you're still acutely aware that you're too high up in the world. Add to this awareness the restricted ability to breathe and you've essentially turned me into a land-hugging, slow-moving crab person.

 

There's a Buddhist temple on top of the mountain but I'm not sure what it's called. I almost think I asked somebody while we were there and they couldn't translate it into English, but I don't know, I might have made that up in the midst of all my fence grabbing and air gulping.

 

Randy and me. Him with his magical coat of many systems and me with my life-sustaining camera bag.

Randy dipped in for this photograph and then ran off to do what you're obviously supposed to do in Yak Meadow: pet a yak.

I don't know, man, I feel like I learned my lesson the hard way about petting random animals in foreign countries, but Randy could not be deterred.

I don't think he actually pet a yak. I think the closer he got, the bigger and smellier and dirtier the yak became, so I think Randy decided to cut his losses and downgrade his mission.

To eating a yak. Here's Randy negotiating with the yak snack salesperson while our national guide, Ming, begs him to reconsider.

"You will not like it," she grimaced. "And I don't know how the yak was cooked...". Meaning if the yak was cooked, I assume, and at what temperature, and on what day. Many, many things can go wrong with the yak snacks in China on top of an 18,000 foot mountain in a lean to.

"It's chewy," was Randy's initial assessment. Ming just covered her face with her hands. I tasted a tiny piece of the yak. It was chewy. And spicy. And disconcertingly lukewarm. I can say with some confidence that I'm not a fan. 

Sorry, yak.

Chengdu, Day One

So it's the annual Mooncake Festival in China right now, and I know that not because I was actually in China last year during the festival, and not because I spend an appropriate amount of time paying attention to news shows that aren't hosted by a short, loud lawyer in Hollywood; no, I know it's Mooncake Day because my version of Angry Birds Seasons updated last night and now when I fling birds I'm trying to smash mooncakes.

As I was attempting to crush pigs and stomp out mooncakes, I realized that I never finished detailing our unbelievable trip to China. I'm so glad I had the presence of mind to write down a few things during the trip; the staggering amount of province-to-province travel combined with the unfamiliar and gorgeous novelty of everything we were seeing-- compounded by no shit THREE WEEKS of crippling jet lag-- turned the entire trip into one big confused, stunning blur.

So I've got my notebook and a copy of our itinerary and a bunch of photos and I'm going to see what I can do.

Pandas! We'll start with pandas. We visited the Giant Panda Breeding Research Center in Chengdu.

We flew to Chengdu on a midnight flight and then took a bus another hour plus to the hotel. I was trying to fight off a cold by this point, and if you know me at all you know that when I'm fighting off a cold, I do so defensively rather than offensively; by this I mean that I curl up in a limp "c" shape someplace obvious like underneath your dinner table or in your lap, and then I whisper that I'm fine when you're inevitably forced into asking if I'm okay.

So the morning of the pandas-- the morning after the flight-- we had a wakeup call at like 6:00. By this point in the trip Randy had developed this truly hilarious breakfast routine where he'd scour the always extensive and impressively global buffet and create some kind of green salad for his meal. Our lunches and dinners were always very traditional Chinese fare (read: no salad) and Randy's a salad guy. The Chinese recognize that Americans enjoy salad, but they don't seem to have figured out exactly what it is or when we eat it; having said that, there was always something vaguely and endearingly "saladish" available on the breakfast buffet, and Randy turned it into a kind of game. Every morning you could count on him to swipe all the green garnishes and some kind of poached pork being served alongside kumquats, and there was always a sweet pink dip or two that was Thousand Islandish, so there.  

This particular morning I remember Randy being tickled because there was cheese being offered in some form. I was, if memory serves, doing my best to buck up and not bring down the team. Which totally means I was just this side of tears and probably asking random people to feel my forehead while I took obnoxiously tiny sips of juice.

Randy kept asking me jovially over his plate of kale and cheddar cubes if I was going to hold a baby panda. Because that's the deal: you go to the panda reserve and then you get suckered into paying like $250 to hold a baby panda. It's totally optional, obviously, but it's a moderately hard suggestive sell (we'd been hearing about it for like four days at this point). Randy was all for it, he thought I should definitely hold a baby panda.

"When are you going to get this chance again?" he asked, scooping up some pink dip with a cantaloupe leaf.

"I don't know," I sniffed, "I wouldn't want to get the panda sick."

"Yeah," he agreed, spearing something with his chopstick that looked like a grape, only with more legs. "You wouldn't want the panda to catch your inability to travel." 

In response I took the smallest sip of juice I've ever taken as an adult.

The panda reserve was wonderful. Incredible, truly, a once in a lifetime experience for sure. There was a light rain the day we were there, so we got to walk through this perfect, misty, insulated forest with all of these crazy majestic roly-poly creatures crashing innocently through the greenery around us.  The pandas are left to their own black and white devices in an exceptionally authentic environment, and they roll and play and fall out of trees completely oblivious to their audience of shutter-clicking humans. The reserve showcases the baby panda nursery behind big panes of one-way glass, and you're welcome to walk by and coo at the teeny tiny little babies with their teeny tiny little panda hands and you can just see them dreaming about all the trees they're going to fall out of one day.

Speaking of, it turns out that when you hold the baby panda (which isn't a baby so much as a teenager), you do it in a hospital gown and hat and slippers in a completely sterile room, so it falls somewhat short of your dream of cuddling with a panda on your daybed. Someone does snap a commemorative photo of you and your panda, but how cool can that be? You're still wearing a bunch of protective biohazard shit designed to keep you from rubbing off on the panda. It's like paying a hooker who then demands you wear eleven condoms. Insulting, is where I'm going.

Only not really because pandas aren't hookers and I got a little off track there and maybe a little offensive and I apologize. 

I didn't hold a baby panda. I couldn't justify the cash. Plus once I found out it was pretty much Level Five of the Andromeda Strain quarantine in there, I did genuinely worry I might inadvertently kill a baby panda with my dread disease of overtired plus premenstrual.

Yeah, nobody really wants one.

The dermatologist called- both moles were dysplastic, not melanoma.

"Dysplastic and irritated but nothing to worry more about."

I like the irritated part; I imagine the moles floating in their little plastic lab jars, arms tightly crossed, all huffy and annoyed.

Randy and I are celebrating our second wedding anniversary in Telluride, thanks to a stockpile of frequent flier miles and ridiculously reasonable tail-end-of-the-season lodging.

"What do you call a cocktail made with snow?" I asked Randy, grabbing a glass and slipping out onto the patio.

"Dirt," he answered. It wasn't really a guess.



"A snocktail," I corrected.

"You want one?"

Randy did want a snocktail, but he wanted it with ice cubes instead of snow and he wanted to make it himself and for me to go wash my hands.

You guys want a snocktail? I've still got my gloves on, I can hook you up.

**** I'm pretty sure it's John Mayer.

Several weeks ago, Randy and I cashed in a bunch of frequent flier points for round-trip tickets and a week's worth of hotel in Ambergris Caye, Belize. Ambergris Caye is a paradise, the kind of place I forget exists in real life. Where you can kick your feet through soft white sand, arm-in-arm with someone special, maybe you find yourselves deep into a light conversation, maybe strolling to the end of a pier to get even closer to the impossibly blue water, maybe there's a palapa hidden at the end of that pier so you stop and have a cocktail with an entire pineapple in it and you drink your pineapple and a fish jumps and you laugh, and maybe your tongue starts to swell up because you just drank a whole pineapple like twenty minutes ago at that other palapa and it's possible that five pineapples today was not the best decision you've ever made for your teeth, but maybe you're in paradise and hey, you have dental insurance and it's not like you're doing methamphetamine, you're just eating entire bushel barrels of fruit, how bad can that be, and then maybe in the middle of mentally calculating the rate of your enamel erosion a wiggly puppy squirms up next to you, fresh off the beach, this gangly lab-mix looking thing, goofy feet too big for his happy body, and maybe he licks you on the leg, just a little drive-by lick, so maybe you, five pineapples deep, make the spontaneous decision to reach down and give the little stray guy a rub, caught up as you are in the sand and the sea and the vibe and all the goddamned fruit, right, and maybe that dog takes your rub and raises you a giant bite in the ass-- which bleeds, as your someone special points out like fifty times just in case you don't know what blood looks like-- so maybe you get to contact the health department when you get home and admit yourself to the hospital so you can undergo the entire rabies inoculation protocol.

So it's a paradise, that's established.

This most recent trip, Randy was on the lookout for an adventure. I personally felt like I'd maxed out my adventure threshold on the last trip, what with the enamel loss and the rabies and all, and I'd sort of planned to spend this trip facedown in a hammock somewhere, preferably next to a crate of pineapples and a Coke can full of pennies.

"The ATM cave sounds amazing," he told me. The Actun Tunichil Muknal is a cave on the Belize mainland. A thousand years ago (literally) the Maya society used the cave as a sacred space to pray and offer human sacrifices. Some of the artifacts have been removed and placed in museums, but the vast majority is still exactly where they found it-- including intact human skeletons; because of this it's number one on National Geographic's "Ten Sacred Caves" list. Apparently you have to hike, climb, and swim through almost a mile of pitch-black cave to reach the main chamber. We had never heard of it on our previous visits and this made me nervous.

"It's because everybody dies," I speculated.

"It's because they just opened it up to visitors," Randy corrected.

"It's because you have to swim through these huge underground tunnels and you almost run out of air and you get lost and drop your flashlight. Like Touristas."

"Oh, Erin," Randy scoffed, "They're not going to give you your own flashlight."

And then he booked the trip.

Tourista jokes aside, I was legitimately nervous about this. The last cave Randy talked me into was the Lava River Tube up in Flagstaff. He got the whole family jazzed about this awesome cave we'd never heard of; he didn't know anything about it, really, he just made up a bunch of shit about lava flows and icicles and diamonds and got us to follow him into this black crack in the Earth.

That's the mouth of the cave. It's as close to an entrance to Hades' underworld as I've ever seen. Who climbs IN that?

We did, as a matter of fact. Scrambling over giant, razor-sharp boulders that were covered in ice because the year-round temperature down there is 34 degrees.

We stumbled through I don't know how many hundreds of miles of freezing cold blackness, twisting our ankles and praying our flashlight batteries didn't die. Here's a shot of the interior near the entrance:

That's ice on the ceiling, there. And it gets lower and lower and blacker and blacker the farther back you go... I'm not kidding, I expected to find Persephone lounging on a rock somewhere, rolling her eyes and painting her nails.

My point is that I've seen Randy's idea of a "cave adventure" and I have been left with valid concerns.

The ATM cave is on the mainland in the Tapir Mountain Nature Preserve. In order to reach it, we flew from San Pedro to Belmopan. Belmopan is the capitol of Belize. This is the airport in Belmopan.

The size of the airport was directly proportional to the size of our airplane, a craft that seated four people and was exactly like flying through the sky in a Volkswagen Beetle.

The tour guide picked us up here and drove us about forty-five minutes deeper into the jungle. From there we hiked roughly a mile through said jungle to the mouth of the cave, including three river crossings.

There are a lot of shots like this, these "Erin, turn around," shots. Randy smartly had the camera the majority of the time because he's pretty good at taking pictures and I'm pretty good at banging the camera on rocks and forgetting to take any pictures and letting the camera float away and stuff.

Beautiful, right? That's the mouth of the cave. And we're all oohing and ahhing as the guide passes out the headlamps, marveling from the rocks how clear the water is and making Indiana Jones jokes, when our guide hops off the rock ledge and into a body of water so deep he's treading.

"Okay, jump," he orders. "Your headlamps are not waterproof.

We all just stood there, nervously patting our precious headlamps while our guide paddled deeper into the cave. Watching him swim away, I started to have a vaguely Touristas premonition wherein the guide gets too far away and we all just flail around in the dark, crying and thrashing and shorting out our headlamps.

I was nearest to the water so I jumped first and started maneuvering my body toward the dim light swimming in front of me. I assume I looked like a weird turtle.

When we weren't outright swimming, we were walking in some quantity of water. Some areas were chest-deep, some areas were knee-deep, but there was very little walking on dry land. And what walking there was wasn't so much walking as it was climbing. We had been explicitly told beforehand to wear sneakers and socks for this expedition, and I of course had packed neither sneakers nor socks. Sneakers and socks are two things I decidedly don't need to lie prone upside-down in a hammock all day so they, along with my ski parka and my wedding gown, stayed home.

Meaning the day before the tour I was forced to purchase the only thing resembling sneakers I could find on the island: neon blue Converse All Stars.

Which is how this happened:

The good news is that if my headlamp went out, I could just follow the glow emitted from my footwear. The bad news is everything else.

Oftentimes when Randy yelled, "Erin, turn around," I yelled things back and did not turn around.

Almost a mile into the cave we came into the ceremonial chamber. All of the artifacts are strewn about the floor so watching where you step is an integral part of not crushing a thousand-year-old skull with your foot.

Dr. Jaime Awe, the archaeologist who began and directed the ATM excavation, was actually IN THE CHAMBER when we were there, which was an unbelievable opportunity to learn about the history of the cave and its artifacts from the absolute leading authority. I told him I liked his helmet. He said thanks.

Our own guide was quite informative in his own right. He pointed to a nearly perfect urn that had survived close to twelve hundred years.

"That creature," he said, indicating a carving on the side of the urn, "they say it is a howler monkey. But howler monkeys have five fingers and four toes. This creature," he pointed again, "has four fingers and four toes. I think this creature is not a monkey. I think this creature is a duella."

Duella is my best approximation of what he said; it's a Kriol word and I couldn't get it exactly.

"The duella is a terrible monster," he went on, crouching down. "He hides in closets, he steals shiny things, he can make the mind of a man dark and mad, he woos women, he plays the guitar.****"

He stood up again. "I should ask Dr. Jaime about this."

Oh my god, YES PLEASE, PLEASE go ask the leading archaeologist in Central America if maybe he fucked this up and said "monkey" when he really meant "mythical thieving woman stealer". While you're over there, see if he'll trade me helmets.

There are several intact and viewable human skeletons in this room, but the most poignant is one of a teenaged girl who was sacrificed more than a thousand years ago.

She's called "The Crystal Princess"; generations of crystal calcification cause her body to sparkle in the light. She has not been moved or physically examined, but at least two of her vertebrae are crushed and that's thought to have contributed to her death.

All in all it was overwhelmingly breathtaking, and we were a solemn and reflective group as we backtracked to the mouth of the cave.

Until I got my head stuck in a rock. Then shit got loud.

I was just happy I didn't slice myself open; I mean I've had a tetanus shot and everything, but I'm guessing it's hard to give a blood transfusion to someone whose blood type is half AB-positive and half Del Monte.