Chapter 93

I wanted to sleep in a bit, but the dog didn’t agree with that plan. He heard his “grandparents” in the next room and started eing (a slang word the girlfriend and I use to describe when he whines, with little high-pitched “E! E! E!” sounds) so eventually I didn’t have a choice but to get out of bed.

Yesterday when we got here it was pitch black, now we could see the surroundings a bit, the farmhouses, the green hills, a yard with a few chickens pecking around. It’s nice to get out of the city. There was drizzle in the air and it had been raining throughout the night, which is nice on one hand because it accentuated the green colors around us, but also turned the sky grey and foggy and like we were about to find out, turned surfaces slippery. Also the dog was already half mud after just a few minutes running around outside, chasing chickens and eating grass.

I normally don’t eat until noon but today I had a muffin and a small bowl of noodles with scrambled eggs and tomatoes before we headed out. The bottom floor of the farmhouse is where the meals are served, and the walls are covered with dozens of banners of various hiking groups from different cities.

We drove for half an hour or so on an increasingly narrow winding road until we reached the trailhead that will lead us, after a short but somewhat difficult hike, to a waterfall. The girlfriend had trouble negotiating the times when we had to pass a car or a truck on those essentially one-way roads, and also found it hard to resume driving after stopping on an incline, she either pressed the gas pedal too much or not enough and same with the clutch. They suggested I take the wheel, sure, the chance of running into police or a checkpoint here is less than zero, but the risk of having an accident is non-negligible and we’d all be in a world of shit if I clip a car and they find out I don’t have a license. Baba-in-law drove instead.

As I said before, the hike wasn’t very easy, due to slippery stones, numerous stream crossings, muddy landslides, and steep climbs that required some effort on the way up and to be very careful on the way down. It was beautiful though, especially the part where we crossed a bamboo grove. The dog loved it, going back and forth between us and sometimes getting sidetracked. He’s goofy-looking, weighing about twelve pounds, and could be mistaken for a wimpy little city dog, but underneath his thick white fur he’s got serious muscle and the fact that he thrives so much when running around in nature shows that he is indeed, like I always try to convince the girlfriend, a predator. She denies that wild nature and doesn’t want to feed him morsels of raw meat or other things like that under the pretense that he’s a civilized dog. To hell with that, I was thinking, watching him jump from rock to rock to cross the stream. At times he’d get a bit scared, but I’d grab his leash for safety or even carry him across, and on one crossing, FLUSH, I slipped and one of my legs went in the water all the way to the hip.

Back at the parking lot (where there was only one car beside ours, a park ranger’s) I took my shoe off and squeezed the slimy water from my wool sock. The dog was shivering, we wrapped him in his filthy towel and drove off.

We stopped at a small town and had lunch: duck meat in gravy, some kind of root vegetables, and rice. It was fantastic. I knew cold beer would be impossible to find but it was chilly enough that room temp beer was more than drinkable.

We kept driving, until we reached some kind of village where we strolled around for a bit. In the car we talked about travel plans, the in-laws are semi-retired now and travel quite a bit, and want to buy an RV. The girlfriend and I dream of a pretty elaborate multi-year sabbatical, and we discussed how there could possibly be overlaps. But this also means that they can’t commit to keep the dog while we’re away, so we’ll have to find another caretaker. There’s no way I’m leaving my hairy triangle-faced companion unless it’s to a loving home, preferably one that would hand him back when we come back to China.

I fell asleep on the way back, and woke up as we pulled over by our farmhouse. My neck was a bit jacked from sleeping in a seated position, I stretched it a bit and took a cold shower and soon after we met downstairs for dinner. Again, some delicious homemade central Chinese food was on the menu: bamboo shoots and fatty pork, stir-fried greens, a fish head and pig feet soup (much much better than it sounds) and rice. The in-laws know my aversion to piss-warm beer and ensured the boss put bottles of Snow in the fridge, I had one, and a cup of the fruit-infused baijiu that they brought.

After dinner we played majiang. It was only the second time I played this über-popular Chinese game, the first time was last October when we also traveled together the four of us. It’s fairly simple to get the basic gist of the game, but there’s a lot of strategy and regional rules involved, a lot of cities having their own slight variations. The table was high-tech shit, you press a button and a hole opens in the middle, you push the tiles in, it shuffles everything for you and then the neatly lined-up tiles come out. We played for an hour or so before retreating to our rooms.