Buddha under construction in Litang

Hanging out in Litang

Excellent advice in our Kanding hostel

Ear picking at The People's Park in Chengdu

Serious gear is required for DIY Chinese BBQ, Chengdu

Letting it all out karaoke style, Chengdu

In the nighclub, Chengdu. There is no dance floor here despite the live music and disco lights. People come to be seen and not to pick up a date which made the mission of my companions much more difficult.

Popp'n bottles in Chengdu. The drink of choice in this upscale nightclub was Ballantine's 15 year, a nice scotch, mixed, nay, diluted with obscene quantities of super sweet green tea. I've never witnessed such abuse of a fine alcohol. I try to be culturally sensitive and reserve judgement, but this was was gross.

Panda taking it easy at the Chengdu Panda Center

The sacred hillside

We got a minibus with two Brits we met on our last 12 hour bus ride and headed to 2.5 mile-high Litang.   It’s a small dusty town inhabited by friendly rugged people.  I got the sense that tourists only come to Litang for two reasons, the August horse racing festival and sky burials.

The sky burial is a Tibetan funerary ceremony in which the body of the deceased is placed on a mountain, dissected, and then left for vultures to consume.  This method of burial was banned in China in the 60s and 70s but made a comeback during the 80s.  It is believed that through eating the body, the birds carry the soul to heaven.  The burial also serves a very practical purpose in providing an efficient and safe way of disposing of the dead in an area where the land is frozen much of the year and wood is scarce.

Remnants of past burials

We found a guest house that provided transportation and guides to the burials and went to the sacred hillside at 8 AM unsure of what to expect.  I was nervous and unsure I could handle it.  The walk along the hillside was littered with bone fragments and knives from past burials.  When we arrived the first burial of the day was well under way.  We sat close to the dozen or so neighbors and distant relatives of the deceased (the immediate family typically does not attend) and watched the cutter.  The folks we sat with were not at all bothered by our presence as I feared they would be.  In fact, I was surprised at how casual it was.  Many of them got up to take phone calls, smoke, and chat with us.

The cutter.

The cutter is a monk from the local monastery and the uncle of the owner of our guest house, hence the access to the burials.  He is 62 years old and has been a cutter for 30 years.  His story is unbelievable.  He entered the monastery at a young age, became a monk, and was minding his own business when one day at age 32 the big Lama tapped him to succeed the current cutter who was getting old.  He was mortified.  He cut two bodies and then ran away to Lhasa, some 1,500 km to the west in Tibet.  The big Lama sent three men to bring him back, they did, and he has been cutting ever since.

Delivering the body

While he was finishing up the first body the site for the second burial was selected by a Lama.  A tractor chugged up to the hill to the designated spot and from it the body, wrapped in rope and nylon sacks, was dumped on the ground.  The cutter unwrapped the body, flipped it so it was face down, and tied the neck to stake in the ground.   Wrapped in a clear plastic sheet up to his chest, the cutter knelt next to the body and began dissecting it.   He first  scalped the head and then cut deep crosshatching in the flesh all over the body: chest, arms, neck, legs, feet, everything.  All major tendons are severed but the body remained intact.

When he finished he stepped away and the hungry hoard of vultures, over 80 strong, that has been waiting impatiently surged upon the body.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  The birds were so densely packed together fighting for meat that some were stuck on top of others.  Flesh was ripped between beaks and it was madness.  After five minutes the cutter scared the birds away and all that was left of the body was a red picked clean skeleton.  The leash around the neck did not do its job as the body was a good 15 feet down the hill when the birds had finished.

Vultures devouring the body

The cutter dragged the body back to the stake and began the second phase of cutting the body.  Using a small axe, a big axe, and a stone “cutting board,” he chopped the skeleton into tiny fragments bone by bone.  The final bone to be cracked was the skull.  He lodged his smaller axe into the skull and used the back of the large axe to drive the smaller one through cracking it in half.  He then did a final mince to make sure the bits were small enough for the birds.  Once satisfied, he stepped away and the vultures returned to finish what was left.  While the birds were still eating the cutter and the neighbors of the dead left.  There burial was over.

It was unbelievable to have experienced this.  Prior to being on the hill that day I thought the whole thing was gross and brutal, but while watching it I didn’t feel that way at all and I don’t now.  The sky burial changed the way I think about the human body and death.  In Tibet, a dead body is an empty vessel and commands no special treatment.

Old grave markers. Since the same sites are used over and over the markers are collected after a certain period and put in a pile on top of the hill.

Kunming skyline from our hostel's roof

Dancing in the park on a Sunday afternoon.

Three pagodas in Dali

Tea tasting in Dali

The fisherman ties the neck of the bird so it cannot swallow the fish it catches. Pretty clever.

Bridge and temple in Erhai Lake, Dali

Our incredible tour guide in Dali, Michael "Big wang Wu-Tang" Yang. It's great, a tour guide named Michael Yang was featured in the 2007 Lonely Planet China and now there are Michael Yang tour guides all over the country. I met three and they all "recommended by LP."

Beginning our hike up the mountains in Dali

Breakfast at somewhere around 8,000 feet

The first thing we did when we got to Noida was post want ads online seeking apartments in South Delhi which we’ve been told is a really fun area with plenty of expats, bars, restaurants, and clubs.   So yesterday, being a Friday, we made out first venture out of Noida to explore the city of Delhi.

Defence Colony market at night

We bummed a ride from a co-worker after work and arrived in the Defence Colony neighborhood (where we want to live) at 6 P.M.  The central market, a two block square, was a happening place with swanky restaurants and bars and many young Indians.  At this time the bars were running happy hours with buy one get one deals and happy happy hours with buy one get two.  One place even had an all you can drink for 750 Rs ($15 USD).  We had no problem finding a place to sit down and have a good time.

What really struck me about the Indian bar scene was how friendly everyone is.  Within our first few minutes at the bar we’d exchanged cards with five people and infiltrated a sizeable group of regulars.  It was a lot of fun and made me want to move out of Noida as soon as possible.

The real adventure began when it was time to head back home.  Two buddies from the bar helped us get an auto rickshaw and negotiate the price in Hindi.  We used Shipra Mall, a major landmark in Noida, as our destination and we were on our way.   However, after 40 minutes of driving it became apparent that our driver was very lost.

So here we were at 1 A.M. in the back of a rickshaw on unfamiliar roads and unable to communicate with the driver.  At night the ban on trucks in Delhi is lifted so the roads become filled with big and colorfully decorated trucks like the one below.  Our little rickshaw with one headlight and no tail lamps wove in and out of the trucks and made frantic U-turns as he tried to find his way to the mall.

An Indian truck

Once off the highway we made progress as he stopped and asked for directions from at least 10 people.  The reality of our situation really hit us when we passed a body laying in the middle of the street.  Our driver slowed down and took a good look but did not stop.  No one was attending to him.  It looked to me like he had been recently hit by a car and judging by way he was positioned on the pavement, face first, I think he had died.

We finally made it back to our apartment at 2 A.M., two hours after we boarded the rickshaw, and went straight to bed.  It was a rough end to an otherwise good night.  Hopefully we’ll find a place in the city soon so we don’t have to deal with a ride like that again.

***

Nearly everyone we met while travelling in Asia told us to beware of India where “everyone is out to scam you, beggars are really aggressive, and people are rude (especially in Delhi)” but so far we’ve been here for four days and had no problems.  The folks we’ve met so far have been kind and gone out of their way on several occasions to help us get acquainted with directions, flagging cabs, etc.  We’ve also been lucky and met some really neat people by chance like an extremely high-ranking federal police officer (I keep his get out of jail free card in my wallet just in case) and a big time Bollywood film reporter.

The first two days of work have been good, albeit a bit confusing.  The supervisors are still formulating exactly what my role will be but it’s looking definite that I will be in business development.  I was asked today if I’m up for travelling to Mumbai and other Indian cities on a regular basis (presumably for BD meetings) which got me excited.  I’ll have much more detail on what exactly I’ll be doing in the next few days.

I’m currently staying by our office in Noida, one of Delhi’s many suburbs until I can find an apartment in the hipper neighborhood of South Delhi.

Old city, day after storm

I spent the day of the storm held up in my hotel looking out as wind and rain beat down on Hoi An. In the night I awoke several times from the sounds of smashed glass and sheetmetal flapping in the wind. In the morning I saw that part of the front glass door had broken and a piece of the roof was missing. Outside in the high ground of our neighborhood, the streets had flooded to curb level and many trees were down. Inside, water was pouring down the main stairs from the roof and we had no power. The rumor mill was also churning among my fellow travelers as we passed along the latest news of the storm’s path and guessed at wind speeds and how long the bad weather would last.  When the storm slowed in the early evening I ventured onto the balcony to survey and the neighborhood and I was surprised to see how much flooding there was just beyond the next street, which again, is supposed to be the high ground.  Later I went into the old city with a few guys from our h0tel and it was like a ghost town.  The streets were empty, there was nothing left of the central market but tattered, flapping blue and orange tarps, and it was really quiet without the car and motorbike horns that define Vietnamese roads.

Hotel front door morning of storm

I went to sleep that night expecting the next day to be clear and I was encouraged by the light and blue sky outside my window.  I left my room and the first thing I saw through the double glass doors of the hotel was a boat floating down the street in a swift current.  Damn it.  I learned that flooding in Hoi An is always worse the day after the rain because of the water draining from the surrounding highland.  My relatively highHoi An hotel had 3.5′ feet of water flowing down the street.  I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

It’s amazing that this level of flooding happens at least once a year.  This flood was a bit different because it was accompanied by a typhoon, but still the intensive clean-up of the city and the first floor of every house, cafe, and shop is an annual event.  I guess that’s why the people I spoke to before the storm really weren’t too concerned.  It represented an inconvenience in Hoi An rather than an emergency like it would in America.  But to be clear it’s no minor inconvenience.  As I wrote this (in my journal last night) I witnessed, in the street just in front my hotel, people throw rocks at a passing car and then pull the driver from his seat and beat him brutally with flashlights and sticks.  Apparently he was driving too fast in the flooded street and the wake of his car spilled water into the homes people had spent all day cleaning.  My neighbors were furious.  They had also been drinking and I was told the water had splashed on their dinner, ruining it, so that might have actually been the larger contributionto their anger.

Today, the second day after the storm, there still isn’t much to do.  Much of the old city is closed and recovering, the whole region didn’t have power until 6 PM, and the beach is too washed and dirty to enjoy.  When I checked into my hotel there were about 30 other travelers here, and now there are 3.  It’s a shame I didn’t get to more of Hoi An and what it’s famous for – the old city tours, incredible restaurants, and the beach – but at the same time it has been a really interesting experience to be in this community as it prepared for the storm, suffered through it, and then recovered.  Noticing little things like the butchers who choked a once busy intersection to a standstill with their carts since the central market was still under water or the price of one of my favorite entrées increase $0.50 over what it had been before the storm because, as the waiter explained, the price of vegetables had doubled since they had to be imported from a neighboring city and meet prices had increased 30% I found really interesting.

The buses are still a mess so Brian is flying to meet me tomorrow as we continue our journey north together.