Tuesday night ’round 8 o’clock I got a phone call. The next night ’round midnight I was lying on a dragon’s tongue before a neon Buddha. There are days I love China.
We were a motley bunch of obscene adventuring foreign sheep under our friend Ginger’s watchful eye and lashful tongue. (The list of names so I don’t have to do it artfully: Ginger [who is a Wanzhou native], Corey, Scott, Emily, Neil, Margaret, Melissa and me.)
The idea was to take advantage of the days off and go somewhere, you know, fun. So Wednesday was spent on a bus out to the grasslands near Wuxi (or Wuqi if you believe the roadsigns, but no one pronounced it like that).
Now, Chongqing Municipality, the non-province we were travelling through, is mountainous. Sometimes in the past I’ve made fun of calling Wanzhou’s hills mountains. This trip reinforced that scoffery. We were driving on real mountains, even though they were fully covered in trees. You know how I know this? Because of the sheer drops we were driving next to. These were not “We’ll roll a few dozen times and then die in a fireball” kind of drops but “We would have time to take pictures of our terror and then jam the cameras into our rectums for safekeeping before the first impact” kind of drops.
But we safely arrived in a town and then hired a little van to take us out to these grasslands, a place known as “China’s New Zealand” by at least the guy who forced some other guy to make a sign. The van trip was more cliffside scaling and being glad the driver was liberal with his horn around the blind corners. And ogling the scenery.
There was much arguing at the various hotels down in the valley, but Ginger eventually worked things out. We were in a little place that had horrible toilets, but whatever. The valley was beautiful. The mountains all around us were snaggled and converging in ways it was impossible to see as anything but the jaw of a dragon (or possibly a dinosaur, since Emily was along).
At dinner began the list of firsts I had on the weekend. First time drinking honey and flower liquor (which was weirdly sweet and much stronger than you’re probably thinking); first time drinking fermented deer blood. Fermented Deer Blood. Yeah. I was expecting something much more congealed and puffin-like. It wasn’t tasty but was stupidly potent. Luckily we only had one glass to share around the table (the manager provided it on the house, because it’s like 300Y/bottle).
Then us ramblers got rambling off into the night drinking and yakking (talking not vomitting) under a fingernail moon. The road forked around this hill with a bright colourful light on the top. There was much debate about what the light could be, but we took the wrong road and couldn’t easily get up to it to prove me right. Defeated, we turned back to sleep the sleep of the dead.
Or did we?
