Beijing 2018 | Rain and Other Things

Rain fell on the morning of our last day in central China.

Our tour group was scheduled to ride a gondola to the top of Tiananmen Mountain, a main attraction in Hunan Province that has been a site of worship for 1,500 years.

Glossy travel brochures show off a breathtaking Tianmen Mountain National Park and its massive slabs of granite peaks that stab upwards through the clouds, into flawless blue skies.

Below, a road built by ancient laborers meanders through a primitive forest with rare trees and medicinal herbs. With its countless looping switchbacks, it resembles a dragon ascending to the top.

Rock climbers clamor here as well as space-age-looking wing suiters, who launch from the highest peak toward the city a mile below. The mountain is known as the “Soul of Zhangjiajie”

Such grandeur, however, would be lost on us. We’d almost missed the tour, rushing at the last minute to buy rain parkas and, on the ride up, the gondola windows were blurred by droplets of falling rain.

My wife and her friend, Yan, passed the time trading travel stories with four men from southern China. I peered into the gloom, knowing that the white-out fog and clouds were blanketing some of the planet’s most spectacular scenery.

It was like arriving in Florence to find Michelangelo’s David under construction, covered by a fluffy sheet. You know you’re in the presence of something truly monumental; you just can’t see it.

But that’s how travel is. The weather, train-plane-and-bus schedules, and even people’s moods, can be capricious, so you can’t regret the things you miss.

“Mei ban fa,” the Chinese say. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

For us, the sun had been decidedly fickle; out one day and lost amid the clouds on the next. At the top of Tianmen, scenic lookouts and a walkway carved into the mountainside were so obscured by fog that I spent the day salvaging what I could; taking black-and-white photographs of gnarled tree branches backdropped in milky whiteness.

A glass-floored walkway promising dramatic. drop-dead views of the valley floor far below were so obscured that my wife, normally white-knuckle panicked by heights, only gave out the occasional yelp of abject fear.

For me, the arduous climbs and wooded hikes were thrilling enough without the trophy scenery photographs. You get your travel memories where you can get them.

And sometimes they come when you least expect them.

One afternoon, I bided my time, sitting on a bench inside a salesroom offering silver jewelry, as my wife hungrily wandered about seeking bargains. Before me was a display case with various rings. A young couple wandered past and the woman, no more than 20, moved in to gaze at the glistening silver.

As she did, she instinctively reached for her boyfriend’s hand and guided him in. He looked down woodenly for a few moments but as soon as a salesman approached, he waved him away and pulled his girl away from her reverie.

He reminded me of myself at his age. I guess young couples’ views of rings — whether they represent a loving bond or a yolk of commitment — are the same everywhere.

A few moments later, I stood at the tea-serving table, next to a young Chinese man in his 20s, when he suddenly asked in flawless English, “So, how did you like the tea?”

The juxtaposition stopped me. For weeks, I had only heard Mandarin from the Chinese strangers all around me. And suddenly, here was someone speaking my language with all the casualness of a guy at a bar asking me the football score.

His name was Shaun and he was from Xinjiang province in China’s far western reaches. He’d studied psychology in Brisbane, Australia and was soon heading back to begin work on his Master’s Degree.

For days afterward, I ran into Shaun and his mother at various tourist sights and we stopped to talk. He was smart and full of insights into western culture. He had even written a class paper on the psychology Donald Trump used to win the 2016 presidential election.

Sigh, I’d traveled halfway around the world and could still not escape the dreaded Orange Man.

Traveling is being open to making fast, fleeting friendships.

One day, on a tour bus ride, I sat next to a 60-something woman from rural China who was traveling with friends. I always used the long rides between sights to edit my photographs and felt her gaze over my shoulder as I played with the color and lighting of some shots.

She pointed at my pictures and sung her approval. Then she produced her camera and asked me how to make her photographs sparkle like mine. When I showed her, she giggled girlishly and her friends cooed at me like I was Ansel Adams, or some photographic Houdini.

For two days, we’d compare our camera-eye perspectives on the same view at various stops. When we finally went our separate ways, I missed her.

But any trip presents the good, the bad and the ugly.

At most hotels, I slept fitfully on the concrete-hard beds and blanched at daily servings of egg soup, rice and noodles for breakfast. I loathed the 5:45 a.m. wakeup calls that came many mornings, hating the fact that I was being shoved along with my fellow herd of Chinese cattle.

I’d stand in the predawn darkness and look on stone-faced at the old woman trying to sell me a bouquet of flowers, telling her in English that her timing was so far off to be laughable.

I was not a happy traveler.

I made blunders, confusing the relationships of my fellow tourists. I wrongly assumed that one father-daughter duo was actually a romantic couple. When I asked to see one photo that he and just taken of her, I told him that she was very beautiful and that he was a lucky man.

I don’t know which planet he assumed I was from, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from this solar system.

On Tianmen Mountain, I spotted what I thought to be a couple with their pre-teen daughter. At one break, I asked the daughter in halting Mandarin if she was traveling with her parents.

No, she responded curtly, as though talking with a mumbling homeless man. No. They were her friends.

End of discussion.

Is it a felony cultural faux pas to suggest to a young Chinese woman that she looks like a 12-year-old? I don’t know the answer to that one.

After so many long lines, to this site or that, this bus or that train, I quickly wearied of the bureaucracy of Chinese travel. After paying for a day-long pass, you’d be given separate tickets along the way for, say, a walk on a bridge or passage through a tunnel. No ticket, no tunnel, even though the route was one-way with no option to go back.

If you could not come up with your ticket, you were pulled aside by another unsmiling worker.

At one point, at the end of the tour, with the waiting gondola in sight to take us back down the mountain, I was stopped at a turn-style by a woman who demanded a ticket.

I gave her my day-pass.

Nope. That’s not the one she wanted. She barked for another that was somehow linked to my passport, one I don’t even remember being given under the flurry of other paper tickets.

I saw the gondola began to pull a way and decided that I’d just make a run for it. But the turn-style was locked and I slammed into the bar with my upper leg, howling in pain.

The woman just stared at me. Without a ticket, I was apparently not getting off that mountain.

Suddenly, my wife came running up with the required stubs and, just like that, we were free to go. Parole is a wonderful thing.

On the ride down the mountain, Shaun explained that the tickets were a security precaution to monitor how many people were on the mountain, so no one would be left behind at night.

He was right, of course.

I felt like a fool. The ugly American.

But I rebounded. I got my travel mojo back.

On one morning, our group paused in the square of an ancient village. As our guide did a head count, numerous other tour groups filed past, their leaders touting high-flying flags.

I wandered over to a stone staircase, on top of which a group of Taoist monks was conducting a praying mantra, backed by strings and the steady beat of gongs and drums.

The rhythm was hypnotic, mesmerizing. As I stood at the foot of the stairs, I was alone in the world; the music had transported me somewhere far, far away.

By the time it ended, I realized that this was precisely the reason I travel; for this very moment, in this very place.

Then I turned around and rejoined my tour group.