Chapter 18
Soft morning sunlight filtered in through the slatted window, but Michael’s mind was on his aching back. His bed for the night had been about as comfortable as a wood pile. On the plus side the spartan room was clean, but it wasn’t much consolation for his sore spine. He gazed across the gap to the second single bed. It was empty, indicating that Kate had already gotten up. Time to rise. Michael pulled his legs out of his sleeping bag and threw them over the side of the bed.
“Ow!” Kate moaned as he stepped on her sleeping bag shrouded form.
“What are you doing on the floor?”
“It’s more comfortable than that bed. What time is it?”
Michael glanced at the watch on his wrist to discover that he hadn’t reset it since leaving Seattle.
“I’m thinking breakfast time.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
* * *
Michael’s body was sore but his spirit was rested, and after throwing a sheet over the capsule and securing the door of the room with a padlock, they stumbled down the chipped stone steps and into the new day. A few early rising backpackers were already out and about and one thing was clear to Michaeclass="underline" he had stepped into a new world, a world he could have scarcely imagined existed if he wasn’t standing smack dab in the middle of it. What had been shadows in the dark night, had now, under the magic light of day been transformed into mountainous green hills. But they weren’t ordinary hills. They were jutting vertical towers that popped out of the landscape in all directions like a gang of angry gum drops; soaring dollops of vegetation encrusted earth that would look more at home in middle earth than modern day China. And at the end of the street, a magnificent river glistened jade green in the morning light, the same crazy hills rising from its loamy banks, fishing boats crowded around a tiny pier. It was a scene right out of Wonderland.
“Like the landscape?” Kate asked.
“Yeah, it’s so —”
“Surreal?” Kate said.
“Sugar coated. The mountains look like, I don’t know, emerald-green cotton candy.”
“They call them karsts. But, yeah, this place has that effect on people.”
Michael soon discovered that in addition to its spectacular limestone karsts, Yangshuo was known for a second attribute, its food. Or to put it more specifically: the best Western food east of Bangkok. Teahouse after teahouse advertised banana pancakes, Western omelets and grilled cheese sandwiches, all to be consumed under the mellowing influence of Bob Marley, the Eagles and a hundred other old school acts. Michael and Kate wasted no time stepping onto the veranda of a tea house named Yangshuo Bob’s and sinking into its richly padded bamboo furniture. Almost immediately a young Chinese hostess appeared with two hand drawn menus. Kate didn’t need to look at hers.
“Tell Bob I’ll go for the muesli. And a large milk coffee.” Kate looked to Michael. “The banana pancakes are famous in forty countries.”
“And a banana pancake,” Michael said. “And another coffee.”
Michael felt briefly self-conscious of the fact that he had been in China for thirty-six hours and had yet to eat a meal of actual Chinese food, but he let it go. If there was one thing Michael knew, it was that the most expeditious route between two points didn’t always involve a straight line. More often than not you had to roll with what came. The hostess smiled and returned a few moments later with two steaming mugs of coffee and Kate’s muesli. Apparently the banana pancake was going to take a few more minutes, but Michael didn’t care. His attention was focused on the street outside where vendors set up their carts selling everything from vegetables to Hollywood movies. Alongside them backpackers of every ilk, some worn from travel, others spiffy clean in their Gore-Tex caps and Northface cargo shorts, crawled out of their guest houses to life. Like a slow wave, the teahouses up and down the street filled with them, a displaced expatriate community who had found a common home, at least for the moment, in this storybook corner of China.
“You look confused,” Kate said.
“Let’s go with curious.”
“Curious then.”
“It’s nothing, it’s just that, when you said this place was on the Circuit, I didn’t expect it to be so,” Michael struggled to find the right word, “on the Circuit.”
“They come from everywhere. The year before college. The year after college. The year before grad school. In between jobs. In the UK they call it a gap year. I forget what you guys call it.”
“Slacking off?” Michael said. “And believe me, I know. Since college I’ve done two tours of duty at Starbucks with a stab at Internet entrepreneurship wedged between mystery shopper gigs. When it comes to the art of the slack, I’m a master.”
“So would you prefer people laze about locally? Contribute to their hometown angst instead of traipsing off to the far corners of the Earth?”
“No. Nothing like that. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no problem with seeing the world. I just didn’t realize the whole world was doing it.”
Michael’s banana pancake arrived, succulent pieces of fried banana poking their heads out of the lightly fried batter, a swirl of whip cream with blueberries on the top. Michael wasted no time digging in, pausing long enough between mouthfuls to say, “Damn that’s good.” What he didn’t expect was a heavily accented reply in return.
“Yes, they are very tasty.”
Michael looked up from his pancake at an attractive young Chinese woman with a friendly face, a wide-brimmed straw hat covering her head. She wore sandals and stained blue trousers, a man’s white shirt covering her torso and a devil may care glimmer in her eye.
“My name is Ester,” the woman continued. “May I be your guide today?”
Chapter 19
Ester turned out to be a college student studying in nearby Guilin who worked as a guide in her native Yangshuo on break. After some quiet back and forth, Michael had agreed with Kate that a local might just be of some help, especially if they were looking for a particular peak as the engravings on the rim of the capsule suggested. So, after finishing their breakfast, Michael and Kate returned to the hostel where they examined the inscriptions. Looking at the capsule now, Michael admired the finely cut beauty of its craftsmanship. Though it appeared to be no more than a shell, the karst-shaped engravings had obviously been etched by the hand of a master metal worker.
After carefully photographing the engravings, they then took the precaution of hiding the capsule. After a few minutes searching, a spot was found under the cowling of a disconnected metal swamp fan on the building’s roof. The metal enclosure had a rusty hasp which Kate then secured with another padlock. It wouldn’t stop anyone who actually knew where to look, but Michael thought it was about as good a hiding place as they would find under the circumstances. From there they joined Ester at a bicycle stall in the street below. She had already arranged for the rental of a pair of well-used mountain bikes and within moments they were pedaling after her up West Street and into the countryside beyond.
Green limestone karsts towered above them as they followed Ester’s squeaky bicycle down the narrow dirt berm between rice paddies. Here, in the country, men and woman practiced agriculture as generations had before them. The rice, green in flooded mud flats, was still planted seedling by seedling, and it still needed to be tended by men and woman standing up to their thighs in muddy ooze. There was the odd nod to modern contrivance here and there: one man rode what looked like a paddle wheel equipped tricycle in the mud; another wore a “Nirvana” t-shirt, Kurt Cobain’s mug peering up from the rice shoots, but all in all, this pocket of paradise offered no hint of the modernity that lay just beyond its dew drop gates. It was a timeless China, a place of such serene bucolic wonder that it almost seemed self-evident that the weight of the world had never touched it and never would. Michael silently reminded himself that every place, no matter how beautiful, had its secrets, and it was the pursuit of those secrets that had led him here.