I Grew My Boobs in China (22 page)

“He’s a really friendly guy,” she started, knowing we were going to force everything out of her anyway.

“Where’s he from?” I asked.
Am I really asking that typical backpacker question?!

“Iran.”

“Oh, that explains his weird garb. Well, I think it’s sexy!” Bree said.

“He’s a yoga teacher,” Mom told us.

“Yoga, eh?”

“You guys! Stop it. It’s not going to happen. I’m not ready for anything like that.” We knew she couldn’t really mean it. He was too much of a hottie to escape her attention. She was just not interested in the idea of dating itself. Having only ever been intimate with one man in her life, it was not going to be easy for her to give herself to another. We knew this process would take some time, but patience was not our long suit. When she offered the excuse that she was still married, we rolled our eyes derisively.

“Dad is already living with somebody else. Surely, you’re allowed to look!” we told her, irritated.

“Oh, he’s like Costco guy,” I carried on, remembering a cashier we’d picked out for Mom before leaving home. He was a slightly younger version of George Clooney, and we’d ogled him suggestively for months, making numerous special trips to do groceries and purposely choosing his till. We never got much past asking if he liked baseball, though, and were a long way from arranging a date.

“Oh, I dunno. It is a close call,” Bree said, snagging a leaf from a tree hanging over the narrow trail. “I think this purple guy might even be cuter---”

“No! How can you say that about Costco guy? Ok, fine. Then I get him,” I said.

“Hey. That’s not what I said. You can’t have him,” Bree complained, selfishly.

“They’re both too old for either of you,” Mom mumbled as she shook her head, bemused, as we continued to bicker in her wake.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As we passed other hikers, everyone was making friends and sharing stories. I was so happy to be around familiar words and accents. I had been craving any English that was not spoken by my family, because that was as unsatisfying as listening to my own voice. I quickly learned that as much as I wanted the backpackers to be my messengers from the other side, they weren’t. They were not there to tell me the latest gossip about my friends, which movies had come out, or which fat girl slipped on a banana peel. They were only interested in one thing – travel.

“Where are you from?”   “How long have you been out?”   “Where have you been?”   “Where are you going next?”

The conversations never seemed to change. Despite this, I soon learned that travellers were really there for each other. During one of our hikes, Bree developed a nasty blister. Forced out of her stiff, new hiking boot, she started working on getting a callus under her foot, something she somehow didn’t seem to mind. Luckily for her, though, she didn’t have to trip and skip over rocks and twigs for long before a young trekker came by. She must have been in her late twenties; her hair was a thick matt of curls tied up above her visor.

“Hey, I’ve got an extra pair of flip-flops I don’t need. If you want, you can have them,” she said, noticing that Bree’s bare foot made an odd match with her clunky boot.

“Oh wow! Thank you. You are too sweet!! I totally owe you one,” Bree said.

“Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s my pleasure.” It seemed there was an unwritten travel rule about passing on help in the future, even if it’s the smallest thing. It could be anything from information to a used book, or even an old pair of flip-flops. Offering help was an unwritten code between travellers.

Just when I was getting used to having company and people to talk to, the 22 km (13.6mi) stretch of trail slowly spread everyone out. Some continued longer than others before calling it a day, and hikers stayed in different guest houses along the way. Before I knew it, we were alone again.

The trail got narrower and narrower the higher we climbed. It was rocky and bare, with little vegetation. Despite the gorge getting deeper and deeper, the white painted peaks never seemed to get any closer. I suddenly felt as miniscule as the grains of rice which I was surprisingly learning to like. I felt pretty darned tiny from a top-of-the-world perspective.

“The Yangzi River,” Ammon announced. “That right there is the longest river in China. It’s like the Amazon of Asia,” he told us, leaning over to peer down at the narrow gorge. “And it’s one of, and possibly THE, deepest gorges in the world – 3,800 metres, which is about, what? 12,000 feet? Maybe a bit more.”  I moved in behind him to lean forward to see the river, cautiously putting my weight on my front foot. There were no rails or fences of any kind. If you tripped, you were a goner.

“Whoa!” I gasped when a few rocks fell loose, disturbing the dust as they tumbled down the sheer, sharp cliffs. Just when I thought the trail couldn’t get any narrower, our passage was constricted even more. We were occasionally forced to shimmy along with our backs pressed hard against the rock face. My legs started quivering visibly only halfway through the first day, and I had slipped a few times, tripping forward as my legs gave out for a microsecond. I was suddenly grateful that Rhett was safe at home rather than weighing my daypack down. As soon as we found a guest house, I would collapse anyway, with no energy reserves left to entertain my new-found “crush.”

“I swear, I’m going to go flying off this cliff,” I told no one in particular. “And how long until we get to stop?” I asked, when I noticed that once again, my complaints had no effect. To be fair, even I could see that we could not stop until we reached a place to stay, hopefully as soon as the path was wide enough to accommodate such a facility. We hadn’t passed by any houses or potential accommodations in a few hours.

Until then, our only comfort was the sight of a few scattered companions who enjoyed nibbling the tufts of dry grass growing in the cracks of rock, and even the goats generally kept to themselves, either above or below the path. The apparent ineptness of blocky hooves didn’t thwart their mobility in any way. They climbed fearlessly to the edges to reach the last bits of untouched grass and twigs. I couldn’t decide whether they were too brave or too stupid to realize or care that gravity kills, but watching them kept my mind off the walk ahead.

It also wasn’t uncommon to see horses or mules along the wider sections of the trail. Although we had plenty of water at that point, I was comforted by the sight of the occasional waterfall glistening and splashing over different parts of the path. I readily conceded that the trail’s vistas were breathtaking, but I hurt everywhere, and my forehead was sunburned and itchy beyond belief from the sweat of our exertions. All I wanted was to get this trek behind me, but I also knew that as soon as it was only a memory, I’d be wishing I was sitting on some ledge next to a daring goat, straining to hear the current of the river far below.

Luckily, it was a flat walk, compared to the one-kilometre stretch of murderously steep switchbacks. I occasionally experienced an intense adrenaline rush when I found myself at the rear end of a wild horse on my left and a sheer, final drop on my right. Their rough tails flipping the flies from their rumps close enough to hit me in the face also set my heart racing. We sometimes inched by them so tightly that I could smell the dusty, grainy odour of their dry hair. Bree didn’t seem bothered in the least, casually patting their bums as we passed. I dared not, preferring to creep past completely unnoticed whenever possible. I could picture one of us getting kicked off like a video game target. “YES! I got the tall lanky one – rack up five-hundred points for me,” I imagined hearing after one of them reared up and kicked someone over the edge. “I count two-hundred over here for that little one. Look at her fly!” Their proximity and their muscular legs and hard hooves taunted me. Barely taking a breath, I crept past them, one after the other.

Chapter 22

Get Lost!

Ammon caught our attention as his stork-like legs slowly stepped backwards and he twisted and turned the map he held in his hands.

“What’s the problem?” Bree asked when we finally caught up. He scowled, investigating the crinkled folds and lines, glancing off to the right in the direction of the gorge and then at the road ahead. He hadn’t needed the map prior. We had simply followed the high road and the solo path that squeezed between 5,000m (16,404ft) high cliffs on either side along with the rest of the tourists.

The dinky road we’d trekked had somehow and somewhere opened up into an actual street covered with tarmac. A few villages had been built up on plateaus and we passed human life more regularly. We were far from the sight of any backpackers, so in that sense we were alone, and we went back to waving our arms and hands around to be understood. The challenge now was to find our way amidst forks and T-junctions that lacked road signs of any type.

Our immediate goal was to find a ferry that would bring us to where we’d catch a three-hour bus back to Lijiang. Finishing up our banana pancakes that morning, we listened as our waitress helpfully offered advice. She had leaned over our table when she’d seen the map spread out.

“No, no. Much fastest old ferry. Better, better,” she explained with her few words, and as she was a friendly local, we believed her. The other advantage was the minimal dent the fare of the Old Ferry would make in Ammon’s wallet compared to the First Ferry.

But not long after breakfast, Ammon was standing perplexed in the middle of the road, obviously struggling to make a decision.

“Well?” we prompted him, asking to be brought up to date despite the fact that none of us had had any prior interest in, or responsibility for, the map.

“I dunno. I’m not sure, but I think we missed our turn,” he told us without looking up from the map. The thought that we might have walked even one step further than we absolutely had to made me groan.
All that energy wasted!

Bree jumped over and started putting her fingers all over the map, bringing it down to her eye level and examining it. “Let me see here, hmmm….”

“Get off it!” he said, not wanting to be bothered explaining it all to her. She was not by any means a map person, but her curiosity understandably got the best of her. When somebody says something like, “I can’t figure it out,” or “I can’t twist this lid off, it’s stuck,” we are sometimes tempted to respond with, “Give it to me, then.” The instinct to try even when you are pretty sure you won’t be able to help is strong. You want to make
sure
that you can’t. Curiosity combined with the urge to help seems to be an inherent, instinctual part of human nature.

“I’m serious! I don’t know where we are in reference to the road that she told us we needed to take.” The lines on the map were faded, the towns unnamed. “Geez. It’s gotta be just over there.” He pointed down at a dirt track winding off in the direction of the gorge. The paved main road we were standing on headed further inland, away from the water. “This map makes no sense. I think we missed it.” He muttered to himself for a while before giving his opinion. “That’s got to be where it is. It probably connects back to the road we missed.”

“So it’s
not
the road we missed?” Bree asked, thinking she’d missed something.

“Yah, yah, it is. It’s that one,” he said, finally making a decision. After all, somebody had to do it, or we’d be standing there until our year was up, given our family’s mutual tendency to procrastinate. I was just glad to hear that we didn’t have to backtrack and could access the right road just below us instead.

Bree then mischievously tugged the earphone out of my ear, and I skidded and scrambled down the steep gravel hill screaming behind her, “Hey!! Where do you think you’re going with that!” We stirred up clouds of dust as the four of us slid down towards what we hoped was the right road.

Catching up to a skipping, jumping Bree, I grabbed the second earpiece dangling from her right ear and promptly stuck it back in mine. She was in charge of the MP3 controls. The MP3 player which was actually mine to begin with had conveniently wound up in her pocket after hers had mysteriously broken.

“This has got to be it. It’s got to be the right one,” Ammon assured himself.

Bree and I continued on our way, linked arm in arm and loudly screeching along to a Whitney Houston tune.

“Okay, next song is yours,” Bree generously offered, continuing with another of the games we often played. Listening to randomly chosen songs, we had to consider every word and relate them to our lives. It was easy to do this now, lots easier than it had been at home. Many more songs seemed to resonate with me now. I related strongly to tales of missing loved ones and broken hearts, pain and weakness, sweat and tears. In fact, I realized as we walked that I had rarely before been all that moved by song lyrics. Music had just been the source of a pleasant beat to me, and I had somehow managed to largely miss the point of every song I ever listened to. But now, the lyrics took me through layer after layer of emotion, some of which I didn’t always want to feel.

Quickly switching off the song, Bree said, “No, no! You can’t have this one. We aren’t allowed to listen to
this
one.”

“What? Bree, you were listening to it just the other day,” I protested.

“Yah, but I decided we can’t until we’ve been gone for a hundred days.” It was 3 Doors Down’s, “Here Without You.” Despite only hearing the first few beats before she snapped it off, the lyrics played in my mind, “A hundred days have made me older, since the last time that I saw your pretty face.”

I thought of Terri. I had been counting the days in my journal. We were at day twenty. The hike I was facing seemed at least that long, but it was only three days, a thought that made me shudder. As we continued to sing away, the trail grew fainter and fainter until it eventually faded to nothing.

“Uumm, Ammon?” Mom quietly began.

“What!” he barked, displaying a bit of the tension he was feeling.