The Travails of our Travel

Today everything went wrong.

Guilin’s curse on us began as soon as we stepped out of the airport. On the way to the hotel, the taxi driver passed my dad his cell phone and said, “It’s for you.” Jerry was on the line.

Jerry is the Chinese version of Don King, only  slight and sort of dorky-looking (how he got my dad on the phone is a mystery we’ll never solve). Jerry wanted to organize a boat trip for us down the Li river. We were into it, because boat trips down the Li river are the reason you come to Guilin. Jerry proposed a private boat ride, just for the four of us, whereby we could avoid the booze-cruise-type riverboats that bomb down the river filled with Hawaiian shirts and tour guides with umbrellas, boats my mom calls trimbale-couillons, which, roughly translated, means “tool transporters.”

We’re down, so we meet Jerry at the docks to wait for our vessel. On the river we see people fishing on bamboo rafts, the distinctive mountain range, which in that area looks like little shredded hillocks shrouded in mist, women washing clothes on rocks riverside. Well, it’s certainly not a trimbale-couillon. This boat is made out of corrugated tin and duct tape. Pushing off the dock, we rear up and vroom out, engines screaming. I’m sure we swamped all rafts within a km radius.

The trip takes three hours, and this boat’s noise is akin to sitting on the wing of a 747, the fumes like sitting on the tail. There’s a piercing rattle coming from the flap cover behind us, but it quells if held down, so Caroline and I take turns with our arm over it the whole trip. The vibrations are so extreme that after twenty minutes our arms have lost feeling and the muscles need to be kneaded back into form.

Our driver’s pretty nonchalant about it. He drives with his feet, using his  revoltingly long thumbnail to flick ash from his “Double Happiness” cigarettes (dumping the butts into the river) and bellowing into his Nokia over the noise of the motor. When we pass the big trimbale-couillons going in the other direction he aims for their gigantic wakes so that we’re guaranteed good air on the jumps. Whenever this happens, Caroline and my mom, who are on either side of me, lock their arms around my thighs to brace themselves against the inevitable crushing crash when we hit the water again. I was sure the boat was about to shatter into scrap metal and rust molecules.

Finally, three amphetamine-like hours later, we made it to land. I’ve been to rock concerts, I’ve been to raves, and I’ve never felt as deaf as I did for the next half hour. We were all totally dazed. Things only got better. Just as we were saying we were glad we’d skipped the bike ride we’d planned, our taxi broke down, and we had to get out and push it while my dad got it started, which, thank God, he did (all of this in 95-degree weather), as half a dozen little old women relentlessly tried to sell us postcards.

My shower that afternoon was amazing. Then I bust out Care’s Epilady so I could clear my legs of the hairy jungle that’s been growing on them since graduation. Unfortunately, twenty seconds into the much-needed procedure the plug started emitting smoke, and the damn machine stopped working altogether. Ye gads!

That night we all went to the hotel’s restaurant, ordered Western food, and got cocked. The End.