Better Than Fiction 2 (23 page)

M
y family never went a-rambling. I’m not complaining, but I was always in awe of those parents who put the kids into the car on a Saturday morning and when asked,
Where are we going?
, told them,
We’ll see
. The sheer joy of the wind in our hair or where the day might take us was never the draw.

We travelled with purpose, to places that had already been researched by an advance guard, usually the esteemed Automobile Club of America. As soon as we were buckled in, these questions were answerable:
When will we get there?, What will we see?
, and
Where will we eat?
In this way we expanded our range slowly outward from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, establishing safe, knowable boundaries – to the maternal grandparents in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, to the relatives in DC, to historic Boston and Colonial Williamsburg, and so on.

We celebrated the purchase of a maroon ’75 Valiant by driving Route 95, extending our reach to Florida (and the paternal grandparents). Eventually, there was air travel, both cross-country and overseas. My father was the consummate guide for each of these adventures, plotting our trail weeks in advance, anticipating every step with an up-to-date Michelin or Fodor’s guide, a stack of relevant articles at his side, and one magically assembled AAA Triptik, which personalized our vacation one loose-leaf page at a time. AAA knew everything. When the driving was done for the afternoon, my father would drop mother, sister, and me at the pre-booked Days Inn (quiet location, ideally with a view of the pool, and a AAA discount) so we could have a swim while he would go suss out the nearby restaurants, three stars or higher.

This is how travel happened: You unfolded maps across the kitchen table, followed suggested itineraries, and incorporated advice from the cousin who’d been there three years ago. When all the phone calls were made and the schedule was firm, you packed (two days in advance), and if you were flying, you were at the airport three hours early (even domestic). When there were screw-ups – a wrong turn, a lost reservation (or this one time in Villa Vizcaya in Miami, no film in the camera for the whole day) – there were words, followed by silences, but mostly we buzzed along in bliss, confident that we had all we needed (crayons!) and knew exactly where we were going.

One Friday, almost two decades later, after I had moved to California, dutifully learned to drive, and bought a ’74 Dart, a friend suggested we break it in with a trip to the desert.

‘To where?’

‘Wherever. Does it matter? Bring a toothbrush.’

‘A toothbrush? How long are we going for?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘How can you live like that?’

‘How can you not?’

A few hours later we were alone in the hills of the Anza-Borrego Desert, which I hadn’t known existed until a few minutes before we drove through the entrance to the park. Then and there (at least according to my memory), I vowed to predetermine as little as possible. Travelling without a destination, map, or even a plan would provide its own kind of orientation, maybe even improve my sleep.

From that point on, whenever I saw the chance, I slipped out of town. I would fill a bottle of water and drive, telling myself the freeway would decide. If I could see a town or a park that had an enticing name or looked good from the road, I made the turnoff. These outings wobbled at first. More often than not, they brought me to forests that were less pastoral than they were weedy and towns with charms too subtle for my discernment. The wisdom gained was usually that it was getting dark and I was hungry. But I did learn patience with the road. If there was no place to get to, what was so bad about a wrong turn?

A few years later, I was back in New York looking for a job, no clearer ambition than
something in publishing
. After one interview, the universe obliged with an offer. I told the boss I could start in a month, then booked a ticket to Beijing, using United miles I’d been hoarding for years. Four days later, I landed in China with a backpack and no guidebook. This was a test. The airport bus dropped me at a concrete hostel, situated on a ten-lane boulevard, a few miles from the city center, where jet lag helped me appreciate the morning rush of trucks, lawn mowers, bicycles, and Mercedes.

My China itinerary was intentionally empty, except for the
Forbidden City, which I discovered the next morning was closed for the week. I decided to view this not as a setback but as a challenge. Or better yet, a choice: A, I could flagellate myself for not having done my research and hunker down for the wait, or B, I could float easily onwards, maintaining a half-smiling bubble of Zen whateverness.

I chose B. The Forbidden City wasn’t going away. Some place quieter beckoned. How about Mongolia? That sounded far.

Without even looking, the ticket agent told me there was nothing to Mongolia for two weeks. The speed with which she said this was suspicious, as if I’d failed to proffer the password to get to Ulan Bator. Should I stand my ground or move on? Again, I chose option B.

A poster of limestone mountains in the south provided enough spark. I bought a ticket for Guilin, departing the next morning. A prepared traveler, I rose early the next day and caught the bus to the airport with ample time to make my plane. Somehow the express bus seemed to lose its mission midway to the airport, however, and began getting on and off the highway in a route that seemed local, almost circular. I tried not to sweat, willing myself to focus on my fellow riders and their various planes, and to believe that if I missed mine, something good would turn up. In the end, my plane was just as delayed as the bus. China, I decided, was a fine place to be plan-less.

Even from above, the mountains near Guilin are ridiculous. Artfully scattered around twists of the Li River, they shoot straight up as if they had bloomed from the fields. They have well-cragged peaks topped with gnarled cypress trees that aren’t afraid of heights. Footpaths, made by and for centuries of tourists, circle sheer forests and lead all the way up to mountaintops that are lost to cloud cover in the morning. There
in the mist, a tiny dot of a wooden shrine may be visible, ready for prayer or a photo op with the pastoral plateau below. A first-timer could be forgiven for thinking the landscape was inspired by ancient paintings and not the other way around.

At the airport, the streams of people looking for transportation into Guilin made my choice easy. I found a nearly empty bus headed in the other direction, and took it to a town at the southern end of the mountains. Rooms were cheap and came with shared toilets and calendar-worthy views. Every other building seemed to have a stack of bicycles leaning up against the doorway, all yearning to be rented.

I thought I’d discovered Shangri-La. Flipping through a Lonely Planet on the hostel bookshelf told me a decade of backpackers had beaten me to it. Immediately, the comfort of the place was suspect, which is to say that although I appreciated the muesli, yogurt, and honey that came with the low-key breakfast buffet on the wooden porch at the back of the hostel, I wanted more.

Yes, I had knocked together a holiday on short notice – radical, given my influences, but no huge feat for a first-world tourist with a functioning credit card. There had to be a greater risk/reward out there. I envisioned a true walkabout, consisting of equal parts epic beauty and epic danger. My fantasy had one more ingredient – assured survival, ideally by my own wits. To be clear, there are degrees of lost – being mapless in the Louvre and mapless in the Amazon Delta are different things. I was willing to accept slightly less danger for tidier closure. A true explorer would embrace the possibly suicidal nature of the mission: Truly getting lost may mean staying lost. For me, anything that didn’t end up involving the American Embassy would suffice. And no injuries or illnesses, please.

The next morning I set out to find it (what?), this time for real. I paid for my room a week in advance so I wouldn’t be missed if I didn’t make it back that night. (Surely Amelia Earhart never threw such caution to such wind.) To further hide my tracks, I walked to the far side of town before renting a bicycle and heading north. I took random lefts and rights as fast I could, always veering away from the main road to Guilin, and into the foothills of the thickest cluster of mountains. The further I pedalled, the more I left the majestic for the rustic. Persimmons and tomatoes were laid out on sheets in the sun, meaty smoke poured from the chimney of an old brick house. Women and men rode past me on bicycles that had seen far less maintenance than mine, with side baskets carrying grass, eggplants, and swaddled pigs. No one bothered to even acknowledge the
gwai lo
in their midst. All the better.

In high valleys, a few steeply planted farms provided perfect disorientation. I turned onto an overgrown dirt trail, seeking true oblivion. At first, it complied, serpentining and steepening downward, leaving me to pump the useless brakes and swerve around dips in the road to keep from wiping out. When it finally levelled, civilization returned, with the overgrowth pulling back from the road to reveal that I was coasting right into a village on a bend of the Li River, easily identified by the large tourist boats drifting by. Foiled, but not stopped.

A single low wooden boat, painted with a distinctly non-standard pink Nike swoosh, bobbed at the shore. People were boarding it from the water’s edge, carrying their vegetables, already limp from the sun, and chickens, trussed into passivity. I parked my bike, then negotiated a seat on a splintering bench in the back, next to an apparently unaccompanied chicken. Once the boat was moving, I used my pitiful sign language to ask if
one of the humans could write down the name of the town. A middle-aged woman, wearing a baby in front and a toddler on her back, complied. I thanked her as best I could, folded the writing I couldn’t read, and zippered it into my backpack. (Yes, it was one breadcrumb, but I wasn’t enlightened enough to consider abandoning someone else’s bicycle.)

The boat drifted from one village to another. Another bend in the river, another market closing up for the day. I disembarked at the fifth stop. Neither Dad nor AAA nor even Lonely Planet had prospected this town before. One of the stalls there was selling a pancake+vegetable+dark sauce item that looked appetizing. It was taken apart, reheated in a wok, reassembled with extra sauce and grandly presented to me, piping hot and practically gift-wrapped in rapidly melting toilet paper. That would be my lunch, and maybe dinner and breakfast too. Who knew?

I ambled straight up into the hills, mixing my rights with my lefts, mindfully stopping every now and then to
just sit
. After a few hours, my meditative spirit was interrupted by the question of where I was going to sleep. I considered: The nights were mild, I had a change of underwear and socks in my pack – all was good. And besides: What did it matter? Negotiating a truce between camping out and tramping out, I meandered toward a settlement in the distance. There were hills in the way and, after a while, what seemed close did not get any closer, spurring more intrusive worry. A moment of thirst devolved to early symptoms of dehydration and a lonely, parched death. I attempted to replace this thought process with the memory of the red plaid thermos we used to take on car trips, usually filled with Minute Maid lemonade – if we were lucky, the pink one.

A moment later, a child, a barefoot boy of about five in homemade green overalls, stepped out from some bushes,
carrying two glistening plastic bottles of water, recently refilled. He saw me look at them and immediately held one out in offering. I accepted and, after thanking him in the wrong dialect, went even more clueless, and attempted to give him some change. This didn’t register a response. Instead, he crouched to examine the stitching of my hiking boots while I happily drank the water. When he figured out that I wasn’t giving up my boots, he stood up and continued on in the direction I’d come from. After a minute, he had disappeared back into the woods.

Eventually, as night came on, moonless and still, I arrived at the town I’d been aiming for. It was the one where the boat had let me off. Except for a trio of blasé cats, no one was around. I accepted the circle of this part of my trek as a kind of randomness – maybe all roads are loops – and walked through an untended field of thistle to sit down by the water. There was an old tarp on the ground, ideal for stretching out. I could sleep right there until the sun came up. I could do this.

‘Mister Steven! Mister Steven!’ A man punted a rowboat onto the nearby sand. He waved me over, smiling but urgent. I half-hoped that, like my young water bearer, I’d conjured this boatman to bring me to the next stage of my journey. When I saw the bicycle I’d rented that morning laid flat in the back of the boat, I knew that this wasn’t quite the case.

Even more humiliating than having to pay for the bicycle and boat return after dark, was reckoning with the fact that stupidly trampling around, inconveniencing the locals, then throwing extra dollars down for their trouble, only reconfirmed that I had transcended nothing. I was another tourist, just less prepared. The only difference between this and the travel of my youth was that I’d probably gone right past all the five-star views in the area.