Chapter 178

Distance covered: 68 km (total 1143 km)

Up at 7, I went to the car and got myself a protein shake to supplement the breakfast mostly consisting of steamed buns, bean sprouts and hard-boiled eggs. Again, the routine, after some painful stretching I went to practice the routine with the teacher, adding new moves until we completed it all by the end of the morning session. We made a few videos of us doing it in unison, of course we’d need to drill it quite a bit if we’d want to be perfectly synchronized but it was pretty damn good if I dare say so myself.

We ate noodles for lunch and then went to the tai chi museum. The shurgwaydinging attempts at keeping the dog out failed miserably, it’s good to be a gangsta. We walked around the gardens, checked out the halls, drank tea and took pictures of us doing poses at the various gates or on the giant yin and yang sign in the middle of the large plaza. It was an interesting visit but it was 39 degrees Celsius, at any time I felt like I was going to melt.

We packed the car and got ready to leave as the masters and students were heading to afternoon class. They bade us farewell and said we’re welcome anytime. Very nice people. I dropped the Chilean at the neighboring town so he could go to a bank, went to the ATM myself, and then drove the Venezuelan to Gongyi South station for his Nanjing-bound train. Might as well be called “middle of nowhere station” as it’s way out of the city like most if not all new bullet train lines, back in my day it didn’t exist. We’ll see each other in Beijing at the end of the week.

Then I drove to the area near my old college, and blindly followed a dirt track going up a mountain. Soon after I stumbled upon some empty caves right by the road, with a kickass view over mountains and valleys, which would be the absolute perfect spot to camp. Well, I say empty, of course they are full of garbage, but mostly old discarded burlap bags and rubber, nothing that reeks. I looked at the cracks in the walls and ceiling of the clay caves and wondered about the chances of it collapsing, now that would suck, wouldn’t it?! I imagine it’s tiny, people have been dwelling in such caves for a long time.

The thing is of course I’d be a bit conspicuous, with the car right there. There was one old woman sitting nearby with a whip and a large bottle of water, watching her herd of goats. She didn’t seem very dangerous but who knows if she has brothers whom she could tell there’s a dumb laowai with a car and a bunch of expensive shit that they’d never afford on the money they make selling goat milk. I waited for her to go before setting up the tent.

I was all set and ready to eat dinner, but didn’t have cold beer on hand. The ice packs in my cooler had long melted, and now it was like a sauna in there. I got in the car and thought about going down the hill to buy some, considered it, but refrained. Baidu Maps told me the nearest supermarket is 3 km away, and by the time I’d come back it might be too dark to go safely on that bumpy dirt path. Plus, there’s always the chance they don’t have cold beer and I’d hate myself for going all the way there for fuckall. So I went beerless, though I had a few sips of gin. I heated some leftover roasted eggplant and flatbread from last night’s barbecue, wolfed it down, and read a chapter from Andy Ngo’s book. The dog was completely passed out in the dirt, the heat took a toll on him. I washed his paws and belly with a wet towel and then we got in the tent at 9 PM and crashed hard.