Running without air

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An attempt to catch up a bit from the summer travels.  Thanks to the Great Chinese Firewall, I hadn’t been able to post the whole time I was traveling there.

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Aching body, no yoga for days, and a wake-up to a hazy Guilin morning means that I am due for a run.  Grudgingly pulling on my old Asics, my soon-to-be non-existent Asics (trashed after China), I stopped at the hostel front desk on my way out to ask about the best route to take.  I just needed about a 30 minute jog, preferably not through the main thoroughfare of Guilin, China.

A and I have been in Guilin for two days now and e don’t seem to be getting stared at any less than when we first arrived.  Dodging cars across the main thoroughfare of Zhongshan Lou made me no less conspicuous, if only because I was running, rather than walk-weaving, as the locals do.  If not for my running shorts and tops, I might look like a panic-stricken tourist, so unsure of how to cross the streets in a country where no one follows a consistent traffic pattern, that I was sprinting for my life across the 6 lane road.

Safely across, having successfully navigated tuk-tuks, bicycles, scooters, trucks, buses and ancient cars, I set out.  Zipping past couples out for a stroll, grandparents with children hanging off arms, a few lone tai chi-practicing souls, I forced myself to stare straight ahead.  Not the most enjoyable way to run, it was, however, the only way to not take in every single stare from most every person I passed.  Guilin is not overrun with white people.  The few that do come for the Li River tours are certainly not running down the street.  I was a spectacle.

I was also short of breath.  The haze hung heavy in the sky and I visualized my lungs taking in black air and still trying to function.  A rather unpleasant mental image, it is likely a rather accurate one.  The past few days have found A and I blowing our noses more than usual, cleaning out the evidence of pollution.  Blackened buggars.  Dry noses.  Even drier eyes.  I have never experienced such pollution.  And this is with weeks to go before Beijing.

The cruise yesterday was breathtaking.  A level, calm river punctuated by spikes of conical-shaped mountains right at the water’s edge, each one with a story behind it.  Legends of dragons, of elephants, of mourning lovers break up the otherwise flat landscape in rising peaks of fantasy and sorrow.  I stood on the top deck of our boat, working to memorize the way the mountains feel.  Clicking away on my camera like a good tourist, the action felt somehow hollow as I realized the futility of capturing what this felt like.  Even video which could relate the sounds of the breeze would also unwittingly announce the harsh Canadian voices of the frat boys on the boat with us.

I wanted to remember the Li River the way it felt up there as I blocked out the background noise.  Memory, in all its unreliability, is all I have for that.  It is a poor substitute for the moment, but that is true of most any experience.  The beauty of travel is its ability to make you live in the very moment.  When you travel, you expect a new experience at every turn and are usually rewarded with one.

Life is no different from travel, but our expectations make it so.  Every day offers a new spread of experiences if we were only to look at it that way.  Travel is about the novel, the obscure, the different.  We can have those experiences at every turn if we were willing to change our mindset a little.  It is much more difficult to do this regularly if you do live in the same place for a long time.  As adaptable as humans are, we are also tied to habits and comfortability is the true enemy of new experiences.

A and I have arrived at the Guilin airport for our flight to Kunming, the far western area of China near Tibet.  An hour’s ride from the city over some pretty rough roads, the airport itself is surprisingly organized and western.  A is munching on some Chinese version of Cup-O-Noodle while I write.

Grating Chinese attacks me from every direction, but I better get used to it already.  It’s not going anywhere soon.

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