The 101st Use for the Internet

As annoying as I find the Blue Mountain cards you get for every little occasion, I was actually charmed (at least temporarily) by the new (to me) animated cards that you get to put your face on the card and they animate. Even more so when I found out that you can put not only your face on there, but the face of your loved ones. To top it off you can pick the worst photos of your loved ones that they have ever taken and put them in there without their consent (and then post it on the internet). Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Highway Yangshuo

After driving back and forth to the different climbing areas for the past 3 weeks I have developed a pretty good understanding of the workings of the highways in rural China. I've been either taking mini-buses, riding bikes or taking motorcycle taxis up to an hour out of Yangshau.

In the states traffic has such hard a fast rules. Each driver has their own lane; bikers have their own lane; pedestrians even have a lane to call their own (sidewalk). If you veer outside of your lane there are immediate consequences: you're either going to get a ticket, hit somebody, or at the very least piss somebody off.



In China there still seems to be the three lane system (lets say six to cover an entire road- and to be entirely clear here, I mean: 1) shoulder- 2) biker lane- 3) driving lane - 4) driving lane - 5) bikers lane and 6) shoulder). However in the Chinese system any one vehicle seems to feel entitled to use up to four of these lanes on a need based basis. To explain this point, lets say you have some one walking in lane 1, motorcycle in 2, car in 3, and an oncoming motorcycle in 4- and a giant (and I mean enormous) truck behind the car decides he needs to be in front. Also let me make a point here that faster traffic always thinks it needs to be in front. There is no getting stuck, there is just pushing ahead until you more or less force the other vehicles out of the way. The standard procedure is for the truck to hold on his horn and partially swerve out into oncoming traffic. This has the effect of getting the car to push over the motorcycle who pushes over the pedestrian and forces the oncoming motorcycle to go over to the shoulder. There are no yellow lines here. Usually accidents wil happen when 5 of the lanes are already full and someone goes for a pass. Here is some hair-raising video of what it is like driving in Yangshuo.

The O.C. Disorder

If you've known me for little over 10 minutes, it's probably pretty easy to pick up that I'm about as OCD as you can get without requiring medication. Actually, maybe I do require medication, but I've never been diagnosed. I think when I decided to eat vegetable stew for 3 meals a day / 7 days a week for 3 years of my twenties, I became resigned to the idea that obsession would have more pull over my life than common sense. When I went out to set the world distance record for handbiking (non-amputee division), that theory would be solidified all the more. So it should come as no surprise that given enough free time, good weather, and lack of distractions, climbing would overtake my life. Oddly enough, I don't even come close to having enough talent to set any climbing records; in fact I feel like I'm barely grazing the edge of climbing mediocrity.

When I came to China last year with my friends Marshall and Josh, it was a much more balanced trip of climbing and discovering the culture. We visited local hot spots, went out hiking, tourist caves, meat-dog farms and the like. This year I'm pretty much climbing every day. You're supposed to climb 2 days on, 1 day off; however if you don't care how poorly you're climbing or how mangled your fingers get, you really don't have to stop. Climbing every day will decrease your performance and in turn make you an overall worse climber. And thus the constant struggle I seem to face with athletics and OCD. I guess it comes down to what your goals are; climbing well or keeping a smile on your face by just being out there. Here is a video of one of the projects I worked on while in Yangshuo.

Limmony Snickets and a Very Unfortunate Series of Events

I'm surprised I've never heard the phrase 'back-shadowing'. Back-shadowing would be a sweet sister word to forshadowing. It would mean when an event happens and you can trace the origins of that event back to 3 or 4 other obvious events that should have foreshadowed that something big was going to happen, but you didn't pay attention. That was a pretty sloppy description, so let me just get right to the story to explain.


The final product was the following situation:

1. Stranded in a Chinese Airport with a canceled flight due to the protests in Bangkok


2. Stranded by myself with no friends in sight


3. No credit cards or ATM cards


4. Less than $10 on my person (not enough for cab fare to Yangshau, 1.5 hours away)


5. No one that spoke English to help me


6. I didn't have any phone numbers to call someone for help

These are the moments in traveling where you really have to buck up, or at the very least wait it out. I guess you could cry yourself to sleep in a corner and someone would come and help you eventually. Before I get to how I got out of it though, here the the moments of back-shadowing that led up to this.

1. Stranded from protests: We have been discussing at length over the last few months the deteriorating political climate in Thailand. After rioting and coups and re-re-elections, this was bound to happen.


2. Stranded by myself: I came over travelling with 3 friends. They all wanted to go back on the 22nd. That wasn't enough climbing for me, I had to stay 4 more days til the 26th. The 26th happens to be the day that the airports in Bangkok shutdown. My friends got home just fine on the 22nd.



3. No credit cards/ATM cards: So a week before I came to China I had my wallet stolen in Thailand. Right out of the glove compartment of my friends car while we were climbing. They got all my cards, driver's liscense, video rental card, subway punch card, etc.



4. No money: So after my credit cards and ATMs were stolen, I figured I would just travel with cash. Except for the exchange rate between Thai Baht and Chinese Yuan buys and sells at about a 28% loss to me. So I decided to just have my friend that I was traveling with use his ATM and then I would repay him when I got back to Thailand. The $10 I had left when i got to the airport would have been perfect had I not been stranded


5. No way to communicate: I clearly remember standing in a book store in Yangshuo that morning and picking up a Mandarin phrase book and thinking, "I'm not going to need this now, maybe next time."


6. No phone numbers- I should know better by now. Always have atleast 1 business card of a hotel or a business or something. I had all the contact info for the place I was staying on my mobile phone. Unfortunately, that got stolen with my wallet.

So I'm sitting outside of the airport trying to figure out what I'm possible going to do. The airport in Guillin is about the size of the Jackson airport and probably just about as far from town. Then a couple of Chinese people walked past me and for I could understand what they were saying, because it turns out that they were speaking (and were) Thai. Turns out that they were on the same canceled flight. Neither of them spoke English, but they could speak fluent Chinese. So we went back inside, talked to the ticket counter, they pulled up the website for China Climb (my friends in Yangshao), got their phone number, called them, China Climb sent out a taxi, and the rest is history. They helped me with all the money stuff until I could get some money wired from Thailand.

I'm stuck in China now until I can fly back, but there are much worse places to be stuck in the world. I had a feeling I was tempting fate with the Limmony Snickets haircut; it was really only a matter of time.

Visiting Old Friends

Food is often one of the defining factors of a great vacation. I remember 5 years ago I got this mini-sized hamburger in Washington Square Park at the Shake Shack in N.Y.C. It was soooo good, that to this day, that stands as my number one reason to get back to to N.Y.- to eat another one of those burgers. (My good friends Chris and Josh come in at a close second.) I had a similar love affair with some noodles and Seschwan beef last year in Yangshuo, China. So when I found out that one of my compadres at the climbing shop was going to be interning in Yangshao (at chinaclimb), I couldn't think of a better opportunity to reunite with an old friend (the noodles). So I'm here for a few weeks climbing, eating noodles, and blogging. Pui had to stay behind because she is saving her vacation time to come back to the states next summer. However Pui's boss, Josh Morris and girlfriend, Kat and Kat's brother, Dtaw are all here with me. One of my goals for this trip is to get some sweet climbing photos with the hair, so stay posted!

Revisiting My Least Favorite Holiday

I feel like every year I write something new about how much I hate the giant Thai Festival, Loy Gratong. This year was an exercise in facing this holiday head on. Putting all my fears about losing fingers, eyes and sanity to this fireworks infested holiday into a gratong and sailing it down the river. I stood at the banks of the river that drove me to madness last year for up to half an hour. Bottle rockets soared over my head, M-80s exploded everywhere. Police were arresting people left and right for setting off fireworks that were considered big enough to actually kill people. We had one of these go off 30 feet in front of us and you could literally feel a giant shockwave push you back. If you give it about 10 minutes, you actually stop panicing and start relaxing. I mean it's all way too much to worry about. Then I finally saw what maybe I was missing after all these years, all the activity, all the movement, the shouting, the life and excitment going on in every direction as far as the eye could see and no one was worrying about what might happen, they were just living in the now. (**this includes all the people that just lost their pinky finger to an M-80).

Oh... And I also went to the lantern lighting festival that I went to the first year. Here is another fantastic video.

Look at the Cute Little Puppies!

Wait a second? How did a dog crawl into the kitchen cupboard where all of my beloved Cliff Bars are stored, rip them open, and then have a litter of puppies in there? Wait a second! Those aren't puppies! Those are baby rats!! Some fat, slutty, pregnant rat was squatting over my Cliff Bars and pushing out these little pieces of disgustingness. These are the same Cliff Bars that I bring over from the states every year (50 lbs. in a suitcase of their own). The same Cliff Bars that Pui once quoted me as saying that 'I think I might love Cliff Bars more than her'. The only thing that might be worse is if those baby rats were conceived in my Cliff Bar drawer.

Anyways, after puking my guts out at the sight of these things, Pui and I went through and cleaned off every single one. We found 7 of the creatures in total. One of the most satisfying things I have ever witnessed was tossing them into the canal behind my house and watching an enormous fish coming up and eating one of them whole! Let that be a lesson to all would be rat mothers that plan on desecrating my Cliff Bars with their fetid offspring.