Chapter 213

Distance covered: 421 km (total 10 703 km)

Up at 7:20, we had breakfast at the same muslim restaurant across the street and went to retrieve the covid tests. I waited in the car while the girlfriend went in, and she forgot my passport inside. That could have been a huge pain in the ass if I didn’t notice just as we were about to get on the road.

We all have been reading the news, the pandemic is in full swing again, first there were a few cases among workers at the Nanjing airport, but then it spread like wildfire, which makes sense, as it’s summer time and a lot of people are traveling. Now my friends in Nanjing are in a world of suckitude, and everyday more cities report confirmed and asymptomatic cases. So far it hasn’t really reached the remote west, but we have to be extra careful regarding where we go and how we go there. We’re on our last leg anyway, preparing to do the long drive home.

We entered Sichuan province through a quick and easy police checkpoint, after mama-in-law had done her research and confirmed that the cases in the province are limited to the densely populated east and that the far western Tibetan counties don’t have any restrictions or anything that would affect negatively our health QR code.

The scenery was of verdant valleys, with sometimes a village built on the hillside, and of course thousands and thousands of grazing animals. It was absolutely magnificient, words wouldn’t do it justice. I don’t think at any moment through the day did I look at something not incredibly picturesque, even the towns we crossed were cute as hell, with squat square buildings and Tibetans walking around with their wide rimmed hats or red robes.

Consequently, the government officials in charge of tourism are in a bit of a pickle: since the attraction of the region is its natural beauty, how can they set up tourist sites to extract as much money as possible from obedient domestic visitors? You can’t really build Ming Dynasty structures or tacky theme parks. Sure, there are those low-key spots where people can go horseriding and camp in a yurt, but they only attract a certain demographic and you don’t want too much money going into the Tibetans’ pockets, do you? Fencing off the whole province or implanting a chip in people’s brains to charge by the minute every time they look at a beautiful mountain or grassland valley isn’t feasible (though I’m sure it’s been brought up in brainstorming sessions), so then what they did was quite smart, they found a place with particularly dramatic rocky peaks, turned it into some kind of national park (not with preservation in mind; quite the opposite, instead they just overbuilt a site around it), slapped a ridiculous price on it, and got a hype machine rolling.

“Hey look! Lianbaoyezi is that way, down this side road, only a 36 km detour!”

“Well, 72 km if we have to come back to this road. What is Lianbaoyezi?”

“It’s a famous site”

“Why is it famous? What’s there?”

“It’s famous! There are mountains, a river valley, and a Tibetan village”

“Like... what we’ve been driving through for the past hour?” It’s hard not to be snarky and cynical sometimes.

We went, decided it was too damn expensive, and did a U-turn. It wasn’t a waste of time though, the road along the river was beautiful and fun to drive. Some of the lightly sloped green plains reminded me of the Beauce region of Quebec (the golden buddhist temples not withstanding) and the valley with thick coniferous tree cover also reminded me of my homeland. We stopped by the river for lunch, mama-in-law bought a piece of beef from the muslim restaurant and cooked it in the electric pressure cooker they had been lugging along, the meat was very good but tough, it should have been braised for much longer. After we ate, I chopped the leftover beef in tiny chunks, mixed it with leftover rice and beans, that I’ll use tomorrow to make burritos. We chilled there for a bit longer, my driving duties were completed for the time being, so I had a beer and a nice glass of apple pie Bailey’s, something the Venezuelan had in his fridge in Nanjing, and that I fell in love with.

After a whole afternoon driving on those remote, but excellent quality country roads, we got to Langmusi. Unlike the backwater dusty towns of Jiuzhi and Dulan, Langmusi is a full-on tourist city, with guesthouse after guesthouse after knickknack shop. Some even had English signs, hoping to cater to a foreign backpacker crowd who’ll likely never come, backpackers are notoriously lame and tend to stick on a very beaten path, especially those who come to China.

We had a meal at a Sichuan restaurant, all the classics, and then got back to the hotel. I had a Skype convo with my dad, my brother and his two kids, the connection was a bit spotty at times but I’m still grateful we’d been able to use the internet at all, in this faraway corner of the mountains. Also the dog peed on the bed, something he hadn’t done in a long long time. I punished him and he bared his teeth at me like an insolent teenager, which looked more silly than threatening, with his underbite that separates his front teeth by a good centimeter.