I Can't Stop Roaming, Book 4: Worldwide Backpacker until Age 84

By Arnold Mountcastle de Wees

A four-book series about a boy's worldwide travel and adventures from age 15 to 84.
He ran away from his family's Blue Ridge Mountain farm at age 15 and lied about his age to join the Marines at age 16 and served in China from 1946 to 1949 when the communist assumed control of the country and foreigners had to leave. He commanded a Marine infantry platoon during the Korean War and was plagued with violent dreams for years after wartime experiences. During some years in New York City while working as a journalist and later as a publicist he battled himself out of a severe alcohol problem. His university sweetheart rejoined him him after he transferred to Chicago and they soon became expatriates in Europe. After he death he ridded himself of possessions and became a worldwide nomad. At age 84 he still travels mostly throughout Asia with his only possessions in a backpack and has returned to China several time to witness unbelievable changes since his teenage years in the country before the Revolution. He vows to keep traveling until his last breath.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arnold Mountcastle de Wees
• Release date: May 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990405924

Arnold Mountcastle de Wees

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I Can't Stop Roaming

Worldwide Backpacker until Age 84

_________

BOOK FOUR

Arnold Mountcastle de Wees

Copyright © 2014 by Arnold Mountcastle de Wees

Smashwords Edition

This book and all its contents are protected by U. S. and international copyright. All or no part of this book may be reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission of the author. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of its contents is illegal.

Worldwide Backpacker until Age 84 is the fourth book in a four part series. Please look for our other books at Smashwords and other fine retailers.

BOOK ONE

Born to Roam

BOOK TWO

Journey with the Love of My Life

BOOK THREE

In Pursuit of My Dreams

Dedicated to the loving memory of Jo Ann,

a glorious companion and adventurous traveler

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Book Four

My 84th Birthday on the Road

Chapter 1

Kumming bus station is a wild sight. Suitcases, backpacks, sacks and cardboard boxes with passengers’ belongings are stacked everywhere. Sprawled on many of them are passengers catching a few winks of sleep while energetic children scamper before their departure time.

Stars of the show are a tiny boy who is engaged in a solo game of pulling luggage off piles and straining to restack them and a little boy and a girl are engaged in a wrestling match and a game of chase. Eventually the mother of the girl gets fed up with the antics and gives her a few smacks on her bottom. An old man, possible the grandfather of the boy, rises from his seat and gives the boy a few whacks.

The swattings fail to deter the two little demon, and they soon resume their pummeling, tumbling, running, and rolling.

There are no close-by restaurants to my knowledge, but there is a shop in the station and I start browsing for packaged food. I select a vacuum package with a small piece of chicken inside. Beside it is another pile of vacuum packages with blood-red meat inside. Bones protruding from the meat are about the size of turkey bones but I have never seen a turkey in China. I have seen a number of cats and small dogs here, and I am debating with my conscience whether I should be adventurous and take one of the packages.

I would never intentionally eat a dog or cat except in a case of starving desperation. I did, however, inadvertently eat dog meat in Vietnam. Anyway, I am curious to taste that red piece of whatever it is and tell myself that it couldn’t be from a pet.

Whatever it is, it is so tough that I can hardly chew it. I remember the dog meat I ate in Vietnam as being tasty. This piece I now chew is not only tough but rather tasteless, which somewhat relieves my guilt feeling of the possibility of consuming part of a kitty-cat or another pooch.

I board the Lijiang-bound sleeper bus at 2100 hours (9 p. m.). There are three rows of double-decker beds—a row front to rear on each side and a middle row. I have been assigned a front and lower bed in the middle. I like side beds best with a window but traveling at night there won’t be much to see so I don’t feel too cheated.

My bed is typical of a Chinese sleeper bus. The bed is just barely long enough for me. There are guardrails and when I try to lie on my back my shoulders get wedged between the rails.

There is a prominent no-smoking sign displayed at the entrance. Chinese are the smokingist people I have known, and I have doubts that anyone will heed the notice. Sure enough after a short time on the road I smell cigarette smoke and see a heavy cloud rising from the driver’s seat. That triggers a signal for others to light up.

The bus is comfortably warm, but when we stop for roadside piss calls, the air is almost cold enough to freeze streams aimed into ditches.

Finally I am asleep but eventually awaken when the bus stops. I put on my shoes and follow the driver and passengers through an alley, which I assume is leading into public restrooms.

Instead we find ourselves in an enormous shed that is partially covered with asbestos roofing. Other portions are open to the sky. This shed serves as a restaurant, and it is as cold in here as a Siberian well-digger’s ass.

Some men take seats at a table and motion for me to join them, which I do. A waitress starts placing plates of food on the table. I still feel full of the piece of chicken, the red whatever it was and a package of sugared sunflower seeds and don’t intend to order food.

A plate of something is put in front of me so I decide to stuff it on top of my dinner. It is a plate of noodles and blazing-hot chilies floating in a pool of oil. As I dig my chopsticks through the pile I am relieved that there is no unrecognizable meat in it, and I won’t have to worry about the possibility that I have eaten someone’s pet dog or cat who has strayed upon the road and been killed by a truck.

It is my humble opinion that road-killed pets should be rightfully collected by the owners so they can give the unfortunate creature or creatures a ceremonious burial or roast the remains with heaps of chilies and not left for a business establishment to poach for profitable exploitation.

I fully realize that I am being a bit contradictory, but I am somewhat of a realist and am far from being wasteful and I completely deny the many insinuations of questionable sanity.

Lijiang is a tourist town. Most of the visitors are Chinese and I doubt that there are more than a half of 1 percent foreign travelers who visit here at any given time.

There are about twenty-six minority tribes residing in Yunnan Province. Naxi (pronounced nah-see) people are the predominant minority group in Lijiang. Their colorful ethnic dress varies according to family status.

Lijiang is some twenty-three hundred meters above sea level. In the near distance stands Snow Mountain and its summit at more than four thousand meters above sea level is white-capped year-around.

There are four streams, fed by cold water from Snow Mountain, that traverse through town. By a bridge near a huge active water wheel is a pool with many trout, goldfish, and several varieties of river carp.

Old Town has been carefully renovated to reflect its original Naxi architecture with swayed roof ridges and up-curled ends. The town’s main commerce are lodging houses, restaurants, cafes and gift shops.

The highlight of my return visit (my fourth) is an afternoon with three university students. Rainbow (whose Chinese name is also Rainbow. Snow is translated from the word Snow in Chinese. Xiaomei (pronounced as See-ah-o-mei) is of the Huni minority group. The three girls are from Yunnan Province. Xiaomei is from Puer, a town that is famous for its unique black tea that is pressed into solid blocks.

They call me Grandfather, and I refer to them as My Babies.

They meet me by the bridge where I watch fish feeding on bits thrown into the pool by tourists. We follow the stream in the direction of Snow Mountain and enter Black Dragon Park, which is natural landscaping that surrounds Black Dragon Lake. Within the park are graves of Chinese soldiers who died while fighting Japanese during World War Two.

The girls are studying English at the local college. In four more months, they will transfer to another college where they will study to be guides for foreign tour groups.

Most of the students in the local college are from small farms in Yunnan Province and have performed back-straining labor in rice paddies and vegetable plots. They know what hard work is and diligently devote themselves to their studies to achieve qualifications for obtaining good jobs that pay considerably more than farm work.

They like to be in the presence of English-speaking foreign visitors to practice the English language. Those girls are curious about everything and constantly ply me with questions about the United States and Spain. They are thrilled to see photos of my native state of Virginia and my home base in Spain’s Granada Province. They radiate a magnificent amount of energy and I feel good being in their presence.

Much of my time is spent relaxing by the fish pool or sitting on a bench in the Old Town’s main square. Naxi women form circles throughout the day to perform their ethnic dances to Naxi music. Most of the dancers are women with wrinkled faces, but their lively dance movements defy their ages.

The square is partially filled most of the time with Chinese tourists in fashionable western dress and capped with cowboy hats or baseball caps. Many Chinese travel in tour groups. They wear identical caps or hats provided by their tour agency. A tour guide holds aloft a pennant on a rod with the agency’s logotype while leading a group through town.

Tomorrow at just past noon, I will board a sleeper bus for a 24-hour ride to Chengdu in Sichuan Province. I shall certainly miss the lovely times being Grandfather to my lovely girls.

As I start to board the sleeper bus leaving Lijiang to Chengdu, I ask the driver to open the luggage compartment on the side of the bus. His response is a motion for me to take my backpack aboard with me.

Getting a big backpack through an isle hardly wide enough for an unloaded person is no easy task, but I make it to my assigned bottom bed in the center row. With a considerable amount of kicking and pushing I manage to wedge the pack under my bed. At that early point in the journey, I thought there is no need to worry about how I am to unloosen the pack from under the bed. That necessity won’t arise until arrival at destination in twenty-four hours.

I like bus transport but loath Asian sleeper buses. Beds are always too short even for my 5-foot-7-inch (170 cm) height. Also, beds are usually too narrow for my width, which is about average. Sleeper buses are designed this way to get a maximum number of double-decker beds in three rows.

Another trick for space conservation and torturing passengers are hollow elevated ends of beds that serve as head rests as well as feet traps for the bed behind. Then tunnels are sloped downward to such an extent that my feet constantly get wedged.

That journey is to be my third in the past three years, and I know that the road is going to have probably more sharp twists and turns than any road I have traveled. Also, I have learned that Chinese are quite prone to motion sickness and that there will be lots of vomiting. I make sure that my shoes were well under my bed in case the chap above me empties lunch over his bedside.

Those buses don’t have toilets aboard, and roadside piss ‘n’ puke stops are made every couple of hours. It is hoped that all aboard can hold down their lunch until the stops but not all do. A favorite place to discharge shaken-up cargo while the bus is in motion is on the steps at the exit door.

At the first stop, I am afforded an opportunity to learn why my backpack couldn’t be stashed in the luggage compartment on the lower side of the bus. The driver opens the side hatch to reveal that a water tank has been fitted into the luggage space. He promptly connects a hose and sprays the steps to flush away vomit while passengers heartily piss ‘n’ puke in roadside ditches.

Well, some 24 hours later we arrive in Chungdu. First of all I have a painful ordeal of extracting my cramped and crimped legs and feet from that foot tunnel com elevated headrest. Then I work up a sweat while removing my rucksack that is tightly wedged under my bed.

Fleets of tuk-tuks wait outside the bus station, and I toss my backpack into one. The one I select just happens to be a bad choice. Not only does it just barely move but it obviously has no suspension so that the laboriously long ride inflicts millions of painful jolts and jerks to my muscles and bones that have suffered badly in a torture chamber some twenty-four hours over a bumpy serpentine road.

I am more than ready to crash in a decent bed after the ailing tuk has limped through massive traffic jams and deposited me in front of Mix Hostel.

Yunnan Province is at high altitude with agriculture predominating over manufacturing, which is a more conducive situation for a healthier environment than the neighboring Sichuan Province with hoards of smoke-belching factories.

Traffic leaving mountainous Yunnan descends over serpentine roads through valleys stifled with heavy coal smoke. Trees with blighted leaves appear to be struggling desperately to survive in the highly acidic atmosphere.

Sichuan Province is coal-mining country. Most of the houses are of traditional construction—walls from bricks made with a mixture of clay and rice straw, and swayed gray-tiled roof with ridges that have up-tilted ends.

Above roads are coalmine entrances. Dump trucks queue under tipples to load their cargo destined for factories strewn through the smoke-clouded valleys.

This is my third year to travel these roads. My first trip to Chengdu was three years ago soon after a nearby earthquake claimed many thousands of lives. I was disappointed where I spent my first night in a busy part of the provincial capital. Next day I discovered a hostel some distance away that was near a canal with peaceful walkways alongside.

Though other parts of the city were showing signs of pollution, the canal area had not yet done so. I returned to the same hostel last year and was astounded that a gray blanket of pollution obscured the sky.

Even greater disappointment is in store for me upon my return this year. It is no longer pleasant to walk on the canal-side paths. Acidic fallout has poisoned the waterway to such an extent that it smells awful.

What a crying pity.

Por fortuna, the 105 hectare (a bit more than 250 acres) panda park and breeding sanctuary a few kilometers outside of town is still as beautiful as it was the first two times I visited it.

For my first time, I visit the municipal bamboo park. It doesn’t yet seem to have suffered much from acid rain. However, I was rather disappointed that the park does not have the diversity of species that I expected and have seen in other bamboo parks and forests.

If pollution levels in the Chengdu areas aren’t curtailed, I desperately fear that the decent existing spots such as the panda sanctuary will be destined for doom like the canal has become.

While in the enormous waiting room of the Chengdu train station, I crane my neck over the waiting passengers and conclude that mine is the only non-Asian countenance among thousands of people packed in there. This is only one of many occasions where I happen to be the odd person within a maze of people not of my race or national origin. Invariably in such situations I have stopped a moment to ponder whether I am a man of the world or a man without a country.

My overall appraisal seems rather to favor the latter because I have become fully convinced that I am the world’s worst traveler. No one rightfully claiming to be a person of the world could come near my record of losing as much stuff as I have in these past three years—a notebook computer, two cameras, my passport and inoculations record booklet, and 500 euros, 200 US dollars (not counting all I have been swindled out of). Nor has there ever been a person of worldly worth who has been lost as I have in many of the larger cities on the map, plus scores of little whistle stops not big enough to be mapped.

Anyway, I decide to take a reprieve from sleeper buses after a recent miserable twenty-four hours in one from Lijiang to Chengdu. I normally favor a bus ride because they go slow enough to take digital shots through windows and stop for mysterious meals in some intriguing places. This time I decide to have a change of pace and get some decent sleep on a train during my twenty-eight-hour journey from Chengdu to Beijing.

The thing I had dislike most of all about Chinese trains are their filthy toilets. If I describe those scenes you will accuse me of having a scatological mentality. I have a friend who traveled by train in China a few years ago and said she avoided consumption of any liquid before and during train journeys to decrease her chances of having to visit the toilet.

Well, I must say that since last year on that same Chengdu-to-Beijing run, the plumbing situation has been so rectified that I hardly gagged while watering the tracks.

Sichuan Province’s industrial areas and much in-between are what I expected after previous trips throughout the province. Pollution is worse than last year when I rode those rails to China’s capital city. The sky has become a smuttier gray and visibility through the smudged haze has decreased considerably.

Relief eventually emerges from the wretched veiling of the landscape when the train passes between two mountain ranges. I have viewed mountains on some different continents, and I must say that those mountains radiate unsurpassable beauty where ridges and pyramids are interlaced with spectacular gorges and ravines, steep slopes and plunging precipices.

Yellow-flowered fields of rape intermingle with terraced terrain giving precious root space to other crops heralding various shades of green. What a panorama of beauty forsaken by a train that moves so fast that most of my digital frames are not much more than blurred montages.

That’s one of my grudges against trains.

The beautiful mountain scenery is eventually swallowed into darkness. Next morning I awaken with stinging eyes. Mountains have been left behind. We are to a level countryside. Farms have given way to factories powered by coal-fired furnaces with high smokestacks that lick red tongues of flames and belch smutty smoke that hovers as a thickened gray mist.

That’s one of my grudges against a ruthless approach to industrialization.

I plan to renew my Chinese visa on its expiration day today and then apply for a Russian visa so I can go on the Trans-Siberian Railway through Mongolia and Russia back to Europe in May. Today at the visa office I am told that I need to deposit $3,000 in a Chinese bank account, which is a problem I never encountered before in my three years of getting Chinese visa extensions. I have adequate funds in Spanish bank accounts but know that it would take ages or maybe never to negotiate that much money into a foreign bank account.

I think at first that it might be a Chinese version of an April Fools’ joke but the stern uniformed woman behind the desk doesn’t look much like the joking type.

So the only thing I can do is book a flight to Ulaan Baator, Mongolia, and hope to get a Russian visa at their consulate there and book a rail ticket to Moscow and from there make my way through Eastern Europe and back into Spain. Actually, I am not planning too far ahead but will take a step at a time and try to hurdle any roadblocks ahead. That’s about the only way to play the game on the road because there can be surprises around every bend.

A month in Mongolia should be interesting, though it will probably be colder there now than in May. But a shiver in Mongolia may be a worthwhile experience.

Anyway, I had a wonderful eightieth birthday celebration last night with two lovely Chinese girls. They are from Sichuan Province, and we had a hotpot dinner at a swanky Sichuan Restaurant. Waiters brought beef, duck-blood pudding, and some kind of animal skin, soy bean curd, and various vegetables, which we cooked at our table. There were enough hot chilies mixed into the lot to intensify a dragon’s flame.

The girls told a waitress that it was my birthday and Happy Birthday, Dear Arnold was sung over the loudspeaker. The meal was topped off with a cake brought by the girls.

All of that was a great contrast to my two previous birthdays. Year before last I celebrated my seventy-eight alone in Luang Prebang, Laos, eating water buffalo. Last year in Burma I was planning to find something interesting for my seventy-ninth. I made the mistake of having fish soup for breakfast from a street-side pushcart, from which I got food poisoning and couldn’t eat for another week. It was an interesting experience because it was my first time to be poisoned on my birthday.

Win a few and lose a few, as the saying goes.

Now I must have a shower and shave so I can meet a fine Chinese lady for my farewell dinner.

Chapter 2

The flight from Beijing to the Mongolian capital, Ulaan Baator, is a short one and I soon get a good idea of weather conditions. Snow covers desert flatlands and mountains.

Patches of snow and ice and a chilling breeze greet me as I step out of the Ulaan Baator Airport and follow a driver to his taxi. The ride is rather long. The fare is about double of what I could have paid if I had known that where I was booked in a hostel there is a pickup service.

It doesn’t take long to get pumped full of reasons to approach the Mongolian mentality with paranoia. Guidebooks, hostel staff, and travelers warn new travelers to Mongolia that the place is teeming with pickpockets, bag snatchers, and bag-and-pocket-slashing thieves, and that one could encounter violent crime in isolated areas and that one should never venture out alone at night. It doesn’t take long for me to learn from my own observation and experiences that the place is also teeming with liars and cheats and that people are reluctant to help one with anything without pay.

The hostel has a self-catering kitchen. It is past lunchtime and I don’t want to waste time looking for a restaurant so I go nearby to the State Department Store and buy a sausage roll and a loaf of heavy dark bread. One of the girls in the hostel reads the sausage label and says that is camel meat. I had eaten camel in Morocco many years ago and remember it as being okay. I ask the girl what kind of meat is available in Mongolia and she says that the people eat mostly camel, mutton, goat, horse, wolf, cow, and marmot.

The Soviet Union claimed Mongolia until the Berlin Wall fell. A hostel worker said traditional Mongolian writing was changed to resemble Russian script about fifty years ago. In fact, I thought all of