White-Knuckling It to Shaxi

(Michael)

Our journey to ShaXi was a lot like the first World War; it consisted of long periods of serenity punctured intermittently with brief moments of pure terror. We left DaLi right after a Chinese buffet style breakfast in a van with a driver who both spoke no English and did not know the word ‘fear’ in any language and ended up in ShaXi within a few hours.

The trip started off simply enough with the Bears (group's name) squeezing into our driver’s van going a manageable pace on a two lane highway bordered by agricultural fields on both sides with an occasional cluster of farm houses, but when our driver encountered a slow moving-soviet era truck with an external engine and a full haul of bricks under a camouflaged cloth cover. If you think Massachusetts (I spelled it right on the first try) drivers are aggressive you had better not go to China. Our driver cut into the oncoming traffic of the left lane to pass the truck on one of the long straight away roads, leaning on the horn the whole time to signal the on coming bus that we surely would have collided with had the driver of the bus not slowed down and given us a mere 20 meters of space before we made our way back into our lane. This was by no means the first instance of, shall I say, aggressive driving maneuvers. Other tricks included straddling the center of the road (there were no lines), passing on a blind corner, and high mountain passes with no guard rail. All things considered, we felt  safe and had complete faith in our driver who was calm and collected throughout all of this with his white gloved hands gripping the wheel lackadaisically as if he had driven this route and faced these obstacles a thousand times each. Real life Frogger may have been stressful at times, but we were in the hands of a master and that was just how the road worked there.

When we were not gripping the seats in front of us with white knuckles, the ride was along some of the most beautiful scenery I have ever had the pleasure of observing. Once our bus got into the mountains I could not
allow myself to nap like some of the other members of our confederacy for fear of missing one of the many spectacular views that came along. We saw everything from towering mountains and plummeting cliffs to intricately painted Bai farm houses and their inhabitants going about their daily lives. All of it in some way glorious, but my favorite were the ornate farm houses. The houses are owned and inhabited by rural farmers who spend their days on their knees with a bent back in the field , yet the walls still had beautiful frescoes that would go for thousands had they been painted on paper or canvas in the states. Generally the people here have not let the promise of a life of hard work steal from their humanity, rather they revel in their industry and thrive on an intellectual level regardless of financial success. 

After our driving concluded in the village we made a short stop at our hotel to drop off our bags before our guide, a Tibetan named Evan, gave us a tour of the town. Before arriving at ShaXi I must admit that I had some notion that we were going to be roughing it somewhat without modern amenities. This could not be farther from the truth except the shower in the corner of the bath room had no door and flooded the bath room until the drain could catch up with the amount of water used. Evan took us up close to some of the Bai houses similar to the ones that we passed by on the trip and then to a beautiful local temple that seemed pure- its purpose of providing a place of worship and preserving a local heritage site; it was free from gift shops and other frankly tragic blatant commercialization that plagued other sites on our path. 

The day ended nicely on the second floor of a beautiful café with the Bears playing card games and knocking back banana and chocolate milkshakes for a few hours before retiring to bed early in preparation for tomorrow's day of hiking.