Riding the Iron Rooster

"What sort of forbidden things?"

"I only know their Chinese names—sorry."

"What are we talking about?" I asked. "Snakes?"

"Dried snakes. Snake soup. They are not forbidden. I mean an animal that eats ants with its nose."

"Scaly anteater. Pangolin. I don't want to eat that. Too many people are eating them," I said. "It's an endangered species."

"Would you like to eat forbidden things?"

"I would like to eat interesting things," I said, equivocating. "How about sparrows? Pigeons? Snakes? What about turtles?"

"Those are easy. I can arrange it."

Mr. Jiang was young. He was new to the job. He was a little too breezy. He had the jokey and insincere manner of someone who has been dealing with elderly foreigners who enjoy being joshed as they are being deferred to. I felt his obsequiousness was a deliberate ploy to undermine me.

I had told him I didn't want to go sight-seeing, and yet within an hour of our meeting he took me to the caves outside Guilin, where there were hundreds of shuffling Chinese tourists.

"What are we doing here?" I asked.

"I am so sorry," he said. "We will leave immediately. I thought you might want to see our famous Reed Flute Cave."

What was the point of looking at these humdrum and hackneyed marvels? And having just come through hundreds of miles of Guizhou and Guangxi I had seen enough rock formations to last me a lifetime. I had liked them because I had felt I'd discovered them for myself—I hadn't been led there by someone burbling, "Look!"

"Let's look at them," I said.

Like so much in China on the tourist route—like the terra-cotta warriors and the Ming tombs, the Reed Flute Cave was discovered by a man digging a well. This fellow's shovel opened the way to a vast limestone cave, with chambers and corridors and grottoes. That was in 1959. Lights, signposts, balconies and stairways were installed, and then it became domesticated and acceptable to the Chinese.

It looked grotesque and Disneyish, a piece of natural vulgarity—a tasteless act of God. It could have been made out of polyester or papier-machi. It dripped. It glugged. Chunks of slimy limestone dropped from the ceiling. It was the spelunker's version of Sunset Strip or the Shanghai Bund. People crowded through it, skidding on the greasy floor, listening to a guide explaining its variety of crazy shapes.

"We call this the lotus rock. This is the conch shell. This is the elephant's foot—can you see why? This is the carp..."

I ditched Mr. Jiang—and Mr. Fang, who was still with me—and went down to the river Li to look at the boats. Some of the houseboats were for hire, so I took one that was owned by two old women. We floated downstream, past some lumpy and lovely stone hills and temples. After some time they said they couldn't go any farther or else they wouldn't be able to pole the boat back. But the river winds south, to other rivers, the Gui Jiang and Xi Jiang, and then to Canton. I asked them whether they had been that far.

"Yes, but not in a boat like this." They had the gargling and quacking Cantonese accent, and their Mandarin was nearly as bad as mine. "We went in a big boat."

"Why not this one?"

"You would never get back in this one." She meant you couldn't pole upstream from Canton to Guilin. Well, that was reasonable.

But I became possessed by the idea of taking a small boat—say, a collapsible kayak—to China, and setting it up in a place like Guilin and paddling from river to river, and sleeping under trees. It would be a way of seeing the country from an entirely different angle, and of avoiding people like Fang and Jiang. And when I got sick of it I would simply go gurgling into the estuary of one of these muddy rivers, and then into the South China Sea.

Taking a break from the arduous poling the old women moored our boat to the south bank of the Li, near a fishing village. In the shallows were simple raftlike boats made of six or seven big curved bamboos lashed together, and also sampans and houseboats. There were cormorants on many of the boats. The women called the birds wang and also yu-ying.

The first Western traveler after Marco Polo described these birds. This man was the missionary Friar Odoric, from Friuli in Italy. He left his Franciscan convent in Udine in the year 1321 to travel in the East for three years. He went barefoot. He was very tough, very pious, and severe with himself. He wore a hair shirt the whole time.

After traveling thirty-six days from the coastal town of Fuzhou, he stayed with a man who said to him, "Sir, if you would see any fish being caught, go with me."

That was over 660 years ago, but the Chinese haven't changed their methods of using cormorants for fishing; and so Friar Odoric's description still stands.