I remember one year pulling out of the Salmon River near Riggins, Idaho feeling happy that I would finaly be able to take a real shower and wash the sticky sand off of my sunburned body. But as I started deflating my boat and wrapping up the straps, I looked out over the river, with its never ending current flowing ever onward towards the sea, and wished it would never end. I feel a little like that in Beijing right now. I'm packing up my bags and looking out over the city from my hotel room wondering where three months have gone...seeing the current of 20 million people flow down the busy streets. There is so much to tell you.
云南（Yunnan） is a beautiful place! The rivers are huge and the mountains are even bigger. I can't wait for you to see the pictures. Yunnan actually means "Cloud South," or--more accurately--the "colorful southern clouds." One of the first things you will notice about China is the red: The houses are red, the clothes are red, the signs are red, everything is red. In Yunnan, however, everything turned blue, even the roof tops. That was a nice change and a welcome site for red-sore eyes. The first night we went to a performance in 昆明 （Kunming）, the capital city. While we think of Chinese people looking a certain way, there are actually dozens of minority groups in china, many of which live in 云南。The performance was a way of looking back to honor the culture of three of these minority groups. One of these groups captured my attention: the Free and Bold "Yi" people (彝族）。 They are 6 million strong and live mostly in Yunnan province, but what is most peculiar about them is their old title: "the free and the bold." This one line has changed me...
Also in the performance were a few lines of brief clarity, some of them poorly translated, but nevertheless poignant. "If you do not sing with your mouth, life is meaningless," said one. Another ancient Bai proverb said, "The sun can rest from its work and the moon from its labor, but a woman may never rest. Without women mankind would never exist" How true.
East of Kunming we went to a cave that was cut out by a river. The river actually cut through the mountain. It was a small river, just wide enough for a paddlecat and just crazy enough for a Nickle. The pictures didn't turn out well, but the cave was pretty cool. You could pay two little Chinese guys to carry you on a litter through the cave if you felt lazy. I just walked.
I feel like there is so much to say and not really enough time to say it. I took tons of pictures--hundreds and hundreds. From Kunming we went to 大理, Salt Lake of China (my name because of the huge mountain range on the one side of the city and a lake on the other). In Dali I took some pictures of the mountain that are absolutely fabulous. It was hard to believe what I was looking at sometimes. Tiger Leaping Gorge, for instance, had the biggest rapid I have ever seen. No matter how crazy us Nickle's get, I think I'll be leave that rapid for a true nut job...Nickle nuts still choose life. From there our journey took us further north to 丽江 (Lijiang) which is a place I could see myself living in. The city is something like 8,000 foot above sea level, yet the mountains around it tower many thousands of feet higher. One peak, most often covered in the famous clouds of Yunnan, was over 16,000 feet. It was snow capped, even in August. Unfortunatly here, we all got food poisoning--at least that's what we think it was. I like to call it Mao Ze Dong's revenge. It was a horrible day. I thought I was going to die. Montezuma has nothing on Mao.
We drove further north the next day further up into the mountains. I was thoroughly amazed that after reaching a plateau, another higher mountain range would spring up. We'd climb that one to the next valley and an even higher one would appear. Finally we got to UM creek--I mean 香格里拉 （Shangri La!) Ok, so this is a funny thing. I've always wanted to live up there along the Upper Meadows Creek in Danish Meadows or the Black Flats. I could have sworn that the city and national parks around Shangri La were right there on top of Fish Lake mountain. The only difference is there are a lot of Chinese and Tibetan people who live and work there. This city is at 10,400 feet and the mountains surrounding the city are much higher. It was beautiful, and a part of my own journey that I will never forget.
In Shangri La there is a hill inside of old town that boasts the largest Buddhist prayer scroll in the world. A prayer scroll is like an upright cylinder that spins on a sort of axle. Inside the cylinder there are written prayers and every time you spin the cylinder your prayer goes up to God. In Tibet and northern Yunnan, there are thousands of these prayer scrolls everywhere you go. They are as small as your finger, or sometimes even a few feet in diameter. The prayer scroll in Shangri La is different. It is probably 3 stories tall and at least 150 feet around. We climbed the hill and grabbed onto the bar and turned it with our might. Some of the Tibetans joined in and with all of our might we turned the prayer scroll many times. It was a really interesting feeling and it got me to start thinking about prayer. This giant prayer scroll, obviously housing important prayers, could not be turned by a single person: it was far too heavy. Instead, it took a group of at least 10 and preferably 30 or more to turn the thing even for a single rotation. The minute you stop, so does the prayer scroll. How does our faith work and what is the work in faith? Don't we put names of people on the prayer rolls at the temple and even fast as families and as groups to unite our faith. I've never really thought about what that meant until I was turning that prayer scroll with those people on that hill in old town Shangri La.
We flew into Beijing last night, arriving back at the hotel at about 2am. I had the intense feeling of coming home (my China home). The air is thick with pollution and the rank smell of the city streets burned my nostrils, but I was glad to be back in Beijing. Tomorrow I am headed back to Gao Bei Dian, where this journey began. Its a long trip to the other side of the city, but I feel like I need to complete this circle, to end where I began--on the stone streets of Gao Bei Dian. I feel like I have only scratched the surface of China, yet I feel like I have seen so much. I have not changed China, but China surely has changed me. The essayist Martin Buber said that, "All journey's have destinations of which the traveler is unaware." There have been so many of these for me.
Let us also live free and bold--
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