Being a broken individual is not remedied by any amount of travel alone; although, it does provide a scenic backdrop for healing and transformation. By visiting imperial China, where the royalty becomes reflected in the inner landscape, there is an alchemical transformation that occurs that lasts for some days.   I stare out into the long corridor of the Summer Palace and from the intricately painted mythologies on the ceiling, then I can understand something about the leisure of royalty during those times.

In 1885, one of the most controversial times in China’s imperial history, the famous Summer Palace gardens were built by the mysterious Empress Dowager Cixi, who for her 60^th birthday decided to use the Qing dynasties Navy funds to build herself a majestic playground. She was the ruler of the Manchu empire for nearly 40 years. I walk the long corridors surrounded by innumerable Chinese visitors.   I go to view her bed chambers, her paraphenalia, as well as that of her son, the young Child emperor whom she represented, and also imprisoned for over 10 years. Brick walls covering the doorways, which still stand today. I look to these reflections as if I’m looking into a mirror. In that sense I can move away from acting on a sense of wounding, but finding empowered change. The reflection of the Empress Dowager Cixi reminds me to live with more courage.

Visiting imperial bedchambers was no solace for me. I am still healing from a deep painful loss in my life, one that left me with no resiliency or inner strength. I consider myself personally devastated and weak, even after years of painful realizations and suffering. I have to honor the reality that I am simply a product of my ancestors, and that I’m beautiful no matter how tired or poor I feel I am. I’m reminded by the Chinese tourists who are so quick to rush up to me and take my photograph. One after another want to stand with me and get a photo with me.  No one does this to the foreigners who visit where I’m from in America, as it would be considered odd for me to go up to a Chinese person and ask to get their picture with them.    

Chinese history only had two female emperors. The rest of the male Emperors enjoyed the Forbidden City, the world’s largest imperial palace, all to themselves in the 9,999 rooms. Remember, 9 was the emperor’s lucky number.   Then there was his choice of empresses and concubines, whom the emperors would choose from a young age, often narrowing down the choices of applicants personally choosing the most beautiful. Even the Empress Dowager Cixi began as a 16 year old concubine to the Emperor, subsequently bearing his sons. The emperor was only male surrounded by an entire legion of Eunuch boys who readily volunteered to have their parts removed for a chance to live in the luxury of royalty as a servant.  The entire Forbidden city was a playground for debauchery, where the Emperor’s promiscuity and power went unchecked.

The Emperor was considered Heaven and Earth combined, and had a spiritual significance. Yet became out of touch with reality entirely, often never seeing the world outside of the Forbidden City at all.  Chairman Mao’s picture hangs on the outside of the gate of the Forbidden City looking over Tiananmen square. He ended that system and formed the People’s Republic of China.

I head to Chairman Mao’s mausoleum. A few Tibetan ladies rush past me, pushing ahead with braided hair and traditional clothing on. There are hoards of all ages of Chinese visitors to the location. Most foreigners feel like elbowing people and pushing the back as hard as they are pushing forwards too. It can be annoying and aggressive to be pushed by the line of people. I manage to keep from becoming aggressive, as much as I’d like to see the effigy. I’m watching the pushers get ahead faster than me. Their pushing is working.  Going through the hour long line with hundreds of other pushy rude Chinese people reminds me of the civility of waiting in line. Waiting in line simply doesn’t happen here.

Many people offer white flowers to a larger than life white effigy of Chairman Mao sitting on an armchair. Some people bow with folded hands as if they had entered a Buddhist temple.  Entering the memorial space, the glowing face of Chairman Mao is readily apparent where he’s laying embalmed in his coffin, flanked by two guards behind a glass encasement. Looking in to see his face, they’ve preserved it very well. It’s interesting to see his face. His father was a landlord, and Chairman Mao became the ultimate landlord. He father was particularly loved “face,” a term that connotates one’s reputation. Apparently, the young Mao Zhedong would refuse to serve tea to his father and his fellow landlord friends, causing his father to “lose face.” His mother taught the young Mao to share rice with poor people, for which his father thought he would lose money, yet they still snuck away to give bags of rice away.   Eventually, he founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and went on to drastically change land reform in an attempt to convert the agrarian society to an industrial one, which unfortunately caused a famine of upwards of 40 million people. Many people are conflicted by his devestating policies. Several of the visitors to his mausoleum were crying, offering flowers, and bowing with real sincerity. The flowers are then obviously resold outside for continual offering. In China, white is a color for funerals, not weddings. Even so, there is a saying in China that translates to “We hope Chairman Mao survives,” or roughly, “long live Chairman Mao”. One time a student here was reminding me that on American money is the phrase, “In God we trust.”, and then when I asked if there was a similar saying, he compared with “long live Chairman Mao.” I’ve seen and heard much of this communist sloganeering, and read the Little Red Book during college. 

Chairman Mao’s mausoleum is impressive, especially considering the communist revolution that he started to end imperial Chinese rule by a system of feudal emperors.  There is another mausoleum in China that rivals that of Chairman Mao’s. The opulent tomb of the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi’an is the place where the first Emperor, Qin Shihuang (210 B.C), was buried. This was the person who first unified China from the Six Warring States. Since it was discovered in the 1970’s, there actual resting place for the emperor has not yet been opened, and most of the tombs have not been excavated yet.  The underground site is surrounded by extensive rivers of poisonous mercury, which prevents most archaeologists from desiring to work in the contaminated area. It’s a monumental task for archaeologists, who want to be as painstakingly careful to preserve the remains.

 The magic of hidden treasure is very prominent here, as there’s an entire imperial palace currently being excavated from this time period over eighteen thousand years ago. The terracotta warriors stand in flanks, fully sized, each unique with different facial features. The bronze artifacts come in all shapes and purposes from sculptures of animals to food and water pots. The exhibitions of the majestic creations inlaid with gemstones are now tinted with blues and greens from the aging process. Allowing the web of history to unravel before me as I greet these characters from China’s past. The history is not only unearthed for me to experience visually, but alchemically I am transformed learning about the luxury of times past. The royal artifacts carry forward a cultural memory that then becomes my memory.

I am walking through the hutongs in Beijing on my way to an English tutoring appointment and a man comes outside and spits. “Oh, the spitting, and they walk outside right when I walk by just to spit. Not in the kitchen sink, of course not.” Muttering to myself I shake my head and chuckle. Then, another man comes outside to spit in the sidewalk. I laugh hysterically, and it’s unbelievable so I think that I should take it personally due to either my gender or race, but I’m not sure.   I notice a fruit shop and buy one orange for one kuai. The fruit seller cuts me a deal. I didn’t think the spitting had to do with locals reacting to a foreigner until a recent paranoia.

I walk in the public restroom in the hutong. Hutongs originally had public restrooms, and the locals would have to go outside during the winter season to use the restroom, and also take showers. Many local people have chosen to sell their hutongs back to the government, and for a very high price, in exchange to move to an apartment. In the public restroom I’m repulsed by a filthy squat toilet. Waste basket full and overflowing with a mix of bloody napkins and used toilet paper. It’s a rank smell of urine that’s aged over time. At least I don’t fall over and soak my clothes. To a novice this kind of experience with squatting and toilet paper isn’t easy, with many people requiring a full shower afterwards.

Continuing on my walk the alleyways are full of local delicacies. Very famous for Beijing is the duck heads, necks and other chopped whole body parts, all sitting separated in metal bowls on the side of the roads. The smell of grilled meat fills the air with large gusts of smoke from charcoals. I have to walk by with disgust, knowing that what is commonly referred to as lamb meat is actually rat meat. What to speak of the incredible night markets selling scorpions, centipedes, and snakes to try on a stick. It’s not only insects and meat that they do terribly on a stick either. There are some nice things served on a stick too, like pineapple and cantelope. It’s nice to scope the occasional fruit cart on the street corner with pomegranate juice and fruit on a stick. It’s not all bad.

The street food vendors operate so that you try at your own risk. Often at dawn, I see locals with the cover off of the sewer dipping large spoons or buckets to get this gutter oil, afterwards it’s boiled and processed to look exactly like regular quality cooking oil. I avoid the street food at all costs. The gutter oil that they use is siphon from the gutters or recycled from restaurant fryers or grease traps. When walking into a normal restaurant, there are various certifications that the restaurant can be graded based on following food regulations. If they are caught with gutter oil they are given a lower certification, of course street vendors have no certifications.

Getting a bowl of noodles isn’t difficult, and then using the chop sticks to eat the noodles is trying. I manage to order mushrooms and rice noodles, but it’s impossible to pick them up with the chop sticks. I somehow manage to accidentally drop half a noodle outside of the bowl, which then by force drags the rest of the noodle out of the bowl and into my lap. I pick up the two foot noodle and simply throw it up in the air so it hits the floor. The rest of the splish splash of noodles flop out of my chopsticks and back in the bowl. The red chili sauce patterns my shirt and jacket with tiny red dots.  Luckily with noodles it’s a personal dish. Unlike the Chinese eating culture with the round table. . Aside from that, ordering chicken intestines, dried duck blood, pig brains, turtle soup, for example, are just a slice of the cornucopia of dining adventures one can have in Beijing. Frequently eating around a round table requires some vaccinations, otherwise it’s paranoia to share the saliva of 8 people all at the same table dipping their chopsticks into the food and into their mouths. The dishes are either oily, fried, or dropped into scalding water.

It’s rush hour in the morning so I decide to take the subway instead of a taxi. Traffic in the morning can be 15-20 minutes for one stoplight. Only Beijing residents are allowed on the road. The traffic regulations allow even and odd numbered license plates to operate on different days, but then Saturday and Sunday everyone can drive. Crossing the hutongs to the subway, I then squeeze on so that there’s no room left. I’m pushed and squeezed into other people until we are standing with no room in between. There is the heavy smell of breath wafting over to me, and the car is too warm overall. We stand together waiting the 6 minutes until the next stop when everyone piles out and new people pile in again. There are 18 lines in the subway, and I’m on one of the more crowded lines, the line 2. In Beijing, they destroyed the old city walls to build the second ring road, and then they built the subway underneath it. Then the build concentric circles of roads and subways within the city. Above ground, several of the towers were left from the city wall, but the rest is gone. I stand for a while on the subway until I get a seat. The girl sitting next to me is watching an T.V. show with Chinese subtitles.  There are a few guys sitting staring at me, and the look like villagers from their wrinkled sun roughened faces, huge green duffle bags, and durable worn clothing. One guy picks up the phone and starts yelling into it.

I leave the subway and again put on my hat, sunglasses, and my “techno” brand respirator mask. I look like a cross between Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter in it. No one can see my white non-Chinese face and hair as well, which is an added benefit. I even wear it indoors at times when the air pollution is really high. I check aqicn.org today and notice PM 2.5 is at 247 and the PM 10 is 124, which is high for PM 10. On the website are various numbered tick location marks for each of the air quality monitoring stations, and each is showing purple color of higher than 200, which is very unhealthy and health warnings of emergency conditions. PM 10 are particulate matter up to 10 micrometers in size. The previous year had unusually good “weather”, we say instead of saying the pollution was low. We had mostly sunny days, which seemed a combination of dry weather and low precipitation. This year things may shift again away from clear and into hazy if not misty and snowflake like. 

I walk into the Sinopec offices, which is China’s biggest oil company. They scan my badge and take my ID’s to check. I lay down a handful of environmental articles on the table. The president of the company sits down to begin reading. He reads them out loud until he gets to a word he can’t understand. His English level is advanced so tutoring this class is difficult, as I have to have a high vocabulary.  The first article was about electric vehicles. He had never watched “Who killed the electric car” so I started telling him the reason why electric cars weren’t on the roads nowadays. He’s clueless that the pollution is even bad for one’s own health, and he doesn’t have an air purifier. We look over the edge of the window down towards the white haze covering the cityscape. I walk out of the office and catch a taxi back to the dormitory where I live.

Mr. Wang arranges my classes at Sinopec, and is a cunning business man. He is no doubt profiting hugely off of me and others like me who are willing to teach the class for 30 dollars an hour. I decide to quit because he doesn’t want to give me a raise to include the commute time. One of my co-workers described the job as a low paying escort job. Teaching English to adult men is kind of like that, so I decline from now on when Mr. Wang asks me to do it.  Teaching English is one of China’s slacker jobs. Unfortunately, it also creates huge amounts of native English speaker priviledge in Beijing.  I have similarly run all around Beijing doing modeling and acting, showing up to be the white face amongst the Chinese crowd. At times I feel like part of my student stipend is simply to pay me to be a difference race here, which ends up being alienating enough socially. Most of my friendships have been based upon helping Chinese students improve their English. People don’t approach me for friendships as much as simply wanting an English language partner. I oblidge them usually because it makes me feel useful and they are so sweet offering tea or spending time with me.

Going out at night there are plenty of bars with foreigners and locals. Most of the clubs play lousy club music. The nightscape changes and the haze makes the atmosphere seem textured, with the buildings lingering in a soup of haze. Deeper into the cities core the haze becomes darker and darker.

I’m long overdue for love, according to the Chinese, who relate to someone my age and not married as a “left over woman.” The pressure is on for women in China to marry between 25-30 years of age.  They then have a child, which is akin to social security for them. It’s a duty that they can’t avoid. For me, I was not ready for a soul mate relationship the two times I got engaged in my twenties, and both of those relationships disintegrated. I learned a lot about love during those times, especially how to love myself and get the space I need for myself, and avoid attachment and control. It’s difficult for me to fathom still being in a relationship with either of the two men I previously got engaged to, and we unfortunately didn’t have what it took to work out our problems with each other. I was joking with my old high school buddy yesterday that I thought it would be fun to get married, and have the ceremony, but without the commitment. The gravity of married life for me, is more like a moon mission of gaeity and play than something landed and serious, where I don’t want control or jealousy, I still want to be free.

The evening before the wedding of my two Chinese friends, Wang Jun and Xigua, there is a small wedding party and feast prepared for the helpers of the wedding. The wedding families are there sitting around 10 round tables casually eating a feast of Chinese dishes piled on top of one another. We made arrangements for the next day to rise at 6am to begin the ceremony.

As we walk up to the groom’s house around 7am, I notice that there’s red paper placed over gutters with a small rock on top, to cover up the underworld. The cacophony of big hand symbols and drums was blaring as we arrived by people wearing yellow and red costumes. The outside of the building was decorated with red LOVE wedding decorations. 

The groom’s aunties were there preparing offerings of cakes, fruits and candies for the table and making us noodles and tea for breakfast. The bed in the house was made over with red blankets, pillows, a bouquet, and a large portrait of the bride and groom. The groom prepared his red belt. The man of honor had a pocket full of some thin metallic rings that they would give away if we passed by a funeral or another wedding. The fire crackers start going off and continue for five minutes as they crackle down the line. The groom couldn’t leave the house to go to Xiguas until exactly 8:18, because the word 8 in Chinese sounds a lot like the word for wealth, so everything has to be 8’s. Outside the music was blaring, and we are eventually rused outside to cars. I was in my own car, and the driver starts asking me questions about the difference between eastern and western weddings, and then mentions that going from house to house was sort of inconvenient. We drive over to Xigua’s “house” at the hotel. We arrive, pull up, and get in the elevator, and the groom and man of honor begin pounding on the door asking to get in. . Then they start pleading to get in, but the door won’t open. They are pleading and begging to get in. Especially Pan Guoliang, he was yelling open the door, open the door, and sliding red envelopes full of money under the door. The bride of honor and bride were standing on the other side of the door not letting them in. Nothing worked, but finally after about 10 minutes of pleading the door finally opened.  

Then, the bride was still nowhere to be seen, and we had to wait in a separate room while she finished preparations. After a while, the door opened and he was able to go inside to find her in the dark, sitting on the bed wearing a majestic white dress, holding a bouquet of red flowers. Then, they had to find her shoes, which had been hidden by the bride of honor and the bridesmaids throughout the room. They looked for a long time and had a really difficult time finding them amidst everyone’s luggage and the furniture in the room.  They tore the room apart looking for the shoes, and discovered one was under a small sofa. The other one was under the bed such that several men had to grab each corner and pick up the bed with the bride still sitting on it to get the shoe from underneath her. After that, the groom put on her shoes so that she could walk out. 

They greeted the bride’s parents. They did a ceremony bowing to them three times and saying some things to them. Then the bride’s brother gave the groom a cup of tea and they pinned flowers on the bride. After we finished taking photos the groom carried the bride all the way through the elevator, downstairs and into the vehicle. I asked the groom later if he had worked out to prepare, and he said no more than usual. He even commented that she was ‘t heavy, although he frequently makes jokes about how fat she is to everyone, which is a term of endearment here in China. 

The vehicle sped away to the grooms house, where we arrived with the full band of traditional Chinese music, and a range of fireworks for about 5 minutes. The clanging of the cymbals and drums was quite intense. Then, the bride jumped on the grooms back and he carried her up the stairs and put her on the bed in his room. The bride then changed into a red gown and her hair was completely redone. I noticed the grooms mother also getting made up. After, they did a similar ceremony with the grooms parents and we took a few photos. The ceremony was rather brief and we all hurried downstairs to go to the hotel for the lunch banquet. 

We got to the hotel, and were greeted there by the bride and groom, the bride was still wearing the red dress from before. There was a large stage and aisle setup in the banquet hall. People went to make their money offerings in the general amount of 200+ yuan.

The ceremony was about to begin and everyone settled down. The bride and groom arrived at the end of the aisle together. The bride was wearing a completely gorgeous white dress and white tierra. She had changed clothes for a 3^rd time while everyone was settling down and offering money. She looked phenomenal. They walked to the end of the aisle and exchanged rings. Bubbles blew over them magically, and the projector screen in the background had kind of a Catholic bible scene with a cross while they exchanged their rings and vows. The groom had actually rehearsed traditional western wedding vows “to have and to hold” and knew the entire thing by heart in English and Chinese. He recited it from memory without the help of a priest!

The bride and grooms father and mother all joined them on the stage where they bowed together and said a few kind words. Also, our professor, Dr. Shi got up and gave a speech, as well as Joelene, one of the postgraduate researchers from Oxford. After that, the ceremony quickly ended and we all had lunch together. It was a huge banquet, and they placed many dishes on the spinning tables for us to enjoy together.  The bride and groom came around together to drink with everyone, as did their parents. The bride was wearing a traditional Chinese qipao wedding dress to toast everyone. That was it. The ceremony was over after that, the staff at the hotel started tearing down the stage, as we were leaving around 1:30 or 2pm in the af/ternoon. 

The Wa minority are the major ethnic group of the Cangyuan area. Their culture is defined by colorful hand weaved clothes, dance and traditional storytelling. They don't have a written language unique to the area like Burmese, but they use English letters to form words. There were American missionaries that arrived over 100 years ago and then left, and there are Catholic churches here in the city. From what I'm told, Wa culture primarily resides in Myanmar with a population of over 600,000, and in China the numbers are much smaller with around 400,000 people. They get kind of a bad rap because their culture was previously cannibalistic and they are still involved heavily in the opium/heroin trade in that area. Cangyuan is the biggest city in the county.

The construction in Cangyuan is part of the national development for the entire country, so the new airport and corresponding shopping malls and hotel complexes all concerted together are radically transforming this off the map town into a modern city. We drive past rows and rows of shops, some selling fancy clothes, household items, and other wares, English pubs or café's, and of course Chinese food restaurants. I notice wooden housing on stilts simply thrown together amidst the major construction, with narrow brick streets leading into the suburbs with gated houses. It's common to see the Wa or Dai minority villagers here amidst the crowds sitting on the side of the street with their produce or otherwise handmade goods which they brought from the rural areas. In the morning, I eat a normal Chinese breakfast of mushroom baozi, which are bread rolls with a savory mushroom filling, and rice porridge. Then I take a walk around and check out the shops. Some of the traditional clothing shops have black, red, and deep purple colored clothing weaved into skirts and shirts, which is the Wa style. Their clothing has their cultural symbol of the bull embroidered on the front.  This symbol is also found throughout the city in sculptures of bulls together or bulls heads, adorning the outside of the county buildings, and overall ingrained in the cultural heritage of the area. 

The vendors outside are mostly ladies, some are Wa minority people, and some are Dai minority people. At first, I couldn't tell their was a difference, but after a few days of exploring the area it became obvious which minority they were from from their clothing. Wa people usually wear a colored head wrap, often have a long pipe, and embroidered or woven brightly colored often neon bright clothes.  Dai people often wear white, grey or pink colored head wrap. They often have Buddhist clothes, and often wear lighter colors. The shops with Dai clothing have pastel dresses which are etheric and outerwordly. The vegetables they weigh with a rudimentary, tarnished, often broken scale and weights. Most of the younger women don't like to get their picture taken, but luckily the older women don't mind. Since they speak Chinese I can have a conversation if they ask me questions, and once I was invited to a wedding by a complete stranger!

I go meet up with the director of one part of the nature reserve who likes to begin work after lunch around 12:30 giving me my entire morning free. It makes me laugh that this is how to fieldwork done. I'm used to waking up at 7am at least to go into the field on any field job in America, and this is a field crews dream. Apparently, they're paid about 50 kuai a day (roughly 7 USD), which is considered a half day of work for them. 

We travel in a big team of over 5 people including myself, all of whom speak Chinese (Not to brag or anything), and everyone except me can also speak a local dialect called Wa. I found it totally unnecessary to have such a large team, but they insisted it was to keep me safe! There was one trained tracker/hunter, the director, one guy to come along for the experience?, myself,  and my assistant Xiaobao, who came along to simply interpret everything from my simple Chinese into more fluent and advanced Chinese the team can understand. Although at first Xiaobao was coming along because she spoke English, she never speaks any English at all to me, but none the less she is helping me with my Chinese. Teams of 5 people is how they like to organize, and so I would ask them to carry a few things, and hang up the camera traps. Having a 5 person crew is kind of disruptive to the environment and dangerous, because someone could get hurt and it's also a lot less stealthy meaning that the trail could easily be followed by another tracker. 

I'm also worried about the security of the cameras as they are easy to find, and also once stolen we never get them back. People live adjacent to and also within the nature reserve. I often see rice fields in the nature reserve, and an occasional hunters lookout platform.  In one of the previous camera traps studies done in this county, over 20 out of 40 of the camera traps were stolen.  Camera traps are somewhat expensive ($100-200) and anyone who wants to steal them will and can resell them!  What I did as my only precaution was to carve a phone number in the side and cover them with tape. I also put the phone number and name of our Beijing Forestry University Wildlife Institute on the bottom, so everyone would be clear who they were stealing from if they took it. It's my biggest fear actually that my project will be canceled because of theft! If we need to figure out some extra security precautions I'm sure we can. 

My challenge is setting the cameras in a suitable area to find animals and also avoid theft. I have to trust the field staff to know the area enough to put them in a good area for finding leopard and clouded leopard. Not only that, but the clouded leopard is partially arboreal, and almost completely nocturnal.  

On that first day, we immediately got lost for 3 hours trying to find the first grid cell, and while I thought it was wise to trust the local staff knew where they were going, I eventually realized that I had the compass and the GPS and should have been more vigilant in using them both. I thought they knew where they were going and they kept getting us lost 3 or 4 times after I showed them the map. I eventually whipped out the compass and every 100 m tell them if we were going in the right direction. I haven't done fieldwork in a while, although I have over 6 + years of fieldwork experience, so it was obviously my fault for not being diligent. We saw places with animal activity, but I felt the places I chose to put the camera traps were mediocre. I was really disappointed with the second spot and even told them later on in the evening that I thought that it should be moved to a new place. Being flexible is a great way to get things done properly! I realize now that had I been more flexible I would have had a better camera trap setup that first day. Rigidity, in this case, spells defeat!

On the second day,  our new field guide in this new area attempted to get us lost again, and right off the bat he got us lost, so I had to be a little more strict with them this time. Telling them in Chinese "Come on guys we were lost for three hours yesterday how could we possibly repeat that mistake again." So he started listening to me on which direction I thought we should go. Although in his defense, he was taking us to place that had previously found and camera trapped a leopard, but it was outside of the nature reserve and outside of the project area.  

 After we're finished setting the first 6 camera traps, I move to another location. I woke up in another field station, where the local resident and his family live. I stay with them in their one room bedroom. I had the feeling they gave me their bed! The scrawny 52 year old man doesn't like to eat, but he likes to drink hard liquor and drink cigarettes. His wife has a hardened strong body, and a rough crass voice.  Their daughter is there, as well as two grandchildren that are both under 7.  Unfortunately, he chain smokes night and day inside of the house we're all at. They are all sitting around the TV dozing off right now at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. They wake up at 8am and he starts smoking in the house. By 10am he is drinking hard liquor, and this is their life where drinking is considered an important custom. I ask him why he doesn't eat. He tells me he doesn't want to. A 23 year old boy came to the house today and he immediately start drinking shots of baijiu together. I hang out and drink tea and try to hold a conversation. They show me some of their handmade tables and chairs, which are weaved out of some kind of rattan. I can barely understand half of what is said to me. We chat about the local customs here, and I ask about things like Wa minority arts and culture. I'm curious about Wa people arts and stories, and want to come back for their festival at the end of April. They tell me they have a storytelling culture, and I'm interested in what kind of stories they tell. It's interesting to be on the border of Myanmar, as the Wa share the border area. 

The next day, the two different completely new field guides weren't listening to me. I feel like they do it on purpose to show me the most interesting lookouts or waterfalls. It's frustrating to be hiking so hard all day lost and not on track. It was my third day in a row hiking, so the frustration builds when the team wastes time. They assured me there was a nice trail that went to exactly where we wanted to go, and that same trail took us so far off track we barely had enough time to set one camera trap and make it back.  I was so frustrated that I found porcupine quills on the ground. It's funny how animal energy will be attracted to us because of our energy.  We took a nice long trail around through the reserve, and went into the elephant areas of the nature reserve, which the director of the nature reserve told me was too dangerous for me to enter. It was so entirely different from the other parts of the forest. It was real jungle. I can imagine the tiny fragment of actual jungle is less than 40km2, which is unfortunately the plight of the world's rainforests to be so fragmented. It was wet, lots of jungle plants, lush, green, water everywhere. We saw a lot of elephant tracks. I started to feel the energy and my limbs became heavier, I started walking with heavy legs. Partly because I was frustrated after several days of hiking to be lost for half a day. I can imagine the size of the Asian elephant was about 7 or 8 feet tall, not huge. After being lost all day we finally placed one camera in a really good area with 3 different animal trails. Hopefully we'll get some data from the cameras. Halfway through the day I had a breakthrough and was no longer as frustrated. I started to feel a lot better.  I try my best to communicate with the staff, but I know that I'm not doing a very good job. My Chinese is terrible, although people are telling me it sounds okay, I struggle with having the right words or sounding too simple. I can hold a conversation, and it's good that I don't have a lot to communicate anyway.