When travelling, you get to meet lots of new people and have lots of conversations with strangers. After a while you start realize that many conversations are very similar to each other… for some reason, this is especially true for conversations with Chinese guys (girls tend to be a bit more creative).

A typical conversation would invariably begin with a “ha-lo!“, which might be thought of an attempt in English. Once in a while a brave Chinese, vaguely recalling his highschool English studies, follows up with an English “where are you from?”. At this point they get really stuck, because Chinese pronounce country names differently than the way we pronounce them in the west so there is no way in hell they can understand my answer of “Israel”, and we must switch to Chinese. The next part of the conversation is also quite easy to anticipate, and all of it can be summed up by this “Top 10 Conversation Topics List”:

1. Ha-lo!
2. Where are you from?
3. Ah, Israel! Israelis are Muslim right?
4. Oh, Jews! Jews are so clever!
5. The prime minister of Israel is “Shalong”.
6. Israel is currently fighting a war.
7. Let me tell you everything I think about the political situation in the middle east.
8. Do you have a wife/girlfriend?
9. What do you think of Chinese girls?
10. Great! Then I’ll hook you up with a Chinese girl. Here, [randomly pointing at some passing girl], how about this waitress over here?

Regarding #7, you might be interested to hear (especially Gilad Feldman who writes about this sort of stuff in his blog) that although the formal Chinese stand in the Israeli-Palestine dispute is supporting Palestine, it seems that the general population tends to take Israel’s side. One of the opinions voiced to me was that all the problems in the Middle East would be solved if only everyone would simply follow Confucius’s teachings….

At first I thought I was hallucinating. As we were driving through the Sichuan mountains (refer to my trip to the Sichuan mountains) a kid, standing at the side of the road, raised his hand in a salute. I quickly discarded the “salute” idea and decided that he’s simply shielding his face from the sun in order to get a better look at us, until I suddenly realized that the sun was at his back.
After this happened for two or three more times, and I was pretty sure they were saluting us, I mentioned it to my companions. They seemed to be well-acquainted with the phenomenon, but could not really reach an agreement as to its reasons. Several theories were raised:
1. Once in a while some “esteemed guests” (read as: “donors”) arrive to the schools, and the children are trained to “show respect” by saluting. These “guests” arrive in SUVs (Israelis should read this word as “jeeps”). Our vehicle looked like a SUV (to my dismay it didn’t have the offroad capabilities of one) and they saluted to us out of habit.
2. Similar to the “esteemed guests” theory with the slight change that the important component is seeing me (a foreigner) in the car. It did seem that more children were saluting when I was in sight in the front seat, but perhaps it’s just because I had a better field of vision and managed to notice more of them.
3. The saluting is some advanced form of begging, in which the children believe that the people in the car would stop and give them something (candy? toys?).

For me, this remains an open question to this day.

During the trip to the Sichuan mountains we had visited many areas with largely-tibetian population and has some chances to acquaint ourselves with small bits of the Tibetean culture. One interesting Tibetean custom is called “Sky Burial” (天葬), and we happened to pass by a temple in which this ceremony takes place.

Sky Burial is basically a burial ceremony in which the dead person, instead of being given to the earth (i.e. buried in it), is given to the sky. (Un)fortunately, on the day we had passed through the temple nobody had died, so we had to content ourselves with seeing the altar and hearing a verbal description of the process. On the plus side the monk had consented, after some persuasion, to let us take a a picture of the altar (normally they don’t let people photo the altar, especially while the ceremony takes place) so I can show you what it looks like:

the altar on which the sky burial takes place

The dead person is placed upon this altar and a knife is used to cut open his body. At this point eagles, the greatest benefitors from this ceremony, arrive from miles around and start feasting on the body. After the body is picked clean by the eagles, and just the skeleton is left, a hammer is used to smash the bones (you can see the hammer clearly if you click to enlarge the picture) so that the eagles have easy access to the bone marrow. Finally, nothing remains but a small pile of clean, broken bones, and the ceremony reaches its conclusion.

The place itself is very pastoral and a bit at odds with the “mood” that some of us might associate with burial ceremonies, in particular ones involving the corpse being torn to bits by wild animals. This picture was taken standing right next to the altar:

view from the sky burial altar

After arriving to China and settling down a bit, I gave Mao Xinyu a phone call. Mao Xinyu and his wife Xu Ting are two Chinese friends from Hangzhou who I had met two years ago while travelling in China, and since then we had kept in touch through the Internet. “I am planning a two-week trip to Sichuan and Yunnan with some friends”, he said, “would you like to join us?” and naturally I did.

The plan was to start the trip from Chengdu (capital of Sichuan province), where we would rent a vehicle along with a driver (if you are surprised about the driver bit, you should re-read this post). We’d then work our way through some places in the mountain areas of Sichuan, visit a few places in Yunnan province and finally end our trip at Kunming (capital of Yunnan province) where they’d head off home.

The first bit went more or less as planned, but after getting to Yunnan we had gradually split up. As it had turned out, I did not go all the way to Kunming but am currently mid-way back towards Chengdu; Nonetheless the trip was quite fun.

These were my brave companions during this mini-trip:

From left to right: Ben Ben Niu, Xu Ting, Xing Hai Wan, Mao Xinyu.

All the Sichuan bit of the trip was in relatively high altitude (all of it higher than 3000m), with the “core” of the trip being Yading, a mountain nature reserve, ranging over 4500m. My experiences during the trip deserve several separate posts, so in this post I’ll mostly stick to posting a few pictures to try and give you the “feel” of the places I’ve been to:

Plus a panoramic sweep I did of one of these places, because only a 360-degree picture can do it justice:

And finally, to keep this post from being boring, an anecdote:
As you may have noted we had been six people (five of us plus the driver), comprised of four boys and two girls. Since much of the time we had stayed in lodges offering twin-bed rooms, the best arrangement was putting the two girls together in one room and split the four boys between two more rooms. Mao Xinyu and Xu Ting, a married couple, did not seem to mind this arrangement. After a while, at Yading park, we had slept (along with a few other travellers) in a ramshack cabin up in the mountains: On each side of the cabin was a long bed on which five travellers could lay side by side in sleeping bags. Next to me lay Mao Xinyu and Xuting, who had conveniently interlocked the zippers of their two identical sleeping bags into one big queen-sized sleeping bag. This was the first time in more than a week that they had slept in the same room and, as it seems, they had missed each other’s company very very much. They were relatively quiet; The bed, however, being basically one long and thin plank of wood, was an excellent conductor of vibrations. I did not get much sleep that night.