Chapter 176

Distance covered: 190 km (total 1075 km)

I eventually drifted into shallow sleep, and had a few unsettling dreams. In one of them, I was walking with the dog, he chased a duck and got eaten by a crocodile. The most fucked up part is how even in the dream I was trying to convince myself that it was just a dream, so it felt much more real. But I eventually drifted back to reality, and reached across the tent for the little fur ball, and was thankful he is alive.

Midway through the night it started raining gently, which had a calming effect and also brought the temperature down. I slept well, and emerged in the early morning among the sounds of insects and birds, with only the occasional truck on the neighboring road. I made tea, ate raisins and packed before walking to the parking lot.

It was a tourist site of some sort, and now the gates were open so I walked in. I thought someone would tell me to buy a ticket or shurgwayding my dog out of there, but the three employees sitting around on low benches just welcomed me with a HALOU. In front of me was an estuary of the Yellow River, with parked boats and vehicles to go around the area. That early on a Friday morning there were almost nobody, I walked to the embankment and looked at the mighty river, very wide and fast flowing. It draws its name not from the color of the skin of the people who dwell on its shores, but because it is very sandy, and now that it had been raining, the dog was covered in mud from all his happy strolling. I went back to the parking lot, took a nasty shit in a filthy public bathroom, and washed his paws in a sink before carrying him back to the car.

Then I drove to Gongyi, and the closer I got, the more excited I was becoming. This was a pilgrimage of sorts, Gongyi being the first Chinese city I lived in, back in 2008! I left in 2009, came back in 2010 for a short visit, and more than a decade has passed since. There were a lot more high-rises, and the central train station had been renovated, but a lot of downtown looked the same, with the KFC still at the bottom floor of Star And Moon Plaza, the only non-Chinese food option in those days and probably still. Speaking of food, I knew I was close enough to Wuhan’s sphere of influence to get proper sesame noodles, and my search for reganmian in Baidu Maps yielded a dozen results. I went to the closest eatery and it was delicious.

I then went to the Song Dynasty Mausoleum, a huge plaza surrounded by ancient buildings, one of my favorite places from back in the day. Gongyi is now an insignificant backwater dead in the center of China’s most struggling province, but for a short period of time a fuckton of centuries ago, it was actually the capital seat of Xia Dynasty. The tomb itself, a mound of dirt and grass, is not accessible, but you can see it through the crack of the perpetually locked gate. The nice thing there is just to wander around the gardens or the plaza, and it’s cool to think that if such a place was in Beijing, it would be surrounded by a fence, slapped with a 200-yuan price tag, and infested with large tour groups and guides gangraping your ears with their microphones, but now it’s completely free and as low-key as you can get.

Last step was a visit to the campus of the college that was employing me twelve years ago. I took the road east that I rode hundreds of times on my scooter, parked the car and walked to the gate. It was a bit less hellishly hot than on prior days so I left the dog in the car, and the shurgwaydinger at the entrance just let me waltz in. The campus was the same as when I left it, and it was a good walk down memory lane. I took a bunch of pictures and sent them to my old students (now in their thirties) and coworkers from those days.

I was now only about forty kilometers from my final destination, the village of Chenjiagou, birthplace of tai chi (well, one of the places with this claim) where the Chilean from Nanjing is now training. It was a leisurely drive, windows down, Hank Williams III blaring, looking at the scenery. We went through hills peppered with large holes, this part of Henan is full of cave houses, I went to several when I lived here, I even attended a wedding in one. They look very unassuming but some are really nice, with hard wood floors and huge TVs and all the modern amenities, just that they are built in a hole dug from the clay of the mountain. Then we crossed the wide expanse of the Yellow River, and eventually I got to the pinned location my friend sent me. It was dead in the middle of a dried up field, I sent him a message asking what’s up with that, and it was an error, I’m supposed to go to the main road a few hundred meters away. I still stayed there for a while, drying up the tent in the now scorching sun, sitting on my camping chair in the shade with a bottle of water and my computer to write this diary.

At 18:30 I went to the tai chi school, just when class finished. Dozens of people in loose clothing were walking down, I told one of them that I was coming to visit my friend and he said “Ah, I know who it is”. Among all the Chinese faces was a white dude with long hair, after our bro hug he said we are the first two foreigners to come here since the outbreak of covid. I got my room and then we walked on the village’s main street to a restaurant, where we had a nice meal with cold beers before taking a long walk home. It was really picturesque and quiet, the kind of China that people fantasize about, and nearly every building was a tai chi school or a tai chi store. We had one more beer in the room and then retreated to have a rest and get ready for tomorrow’s practice.