Video: Ping Pong Ka-Pow, Episode 17

PART TWO: of our five day trip along the Szechuan-Tibet Highway, as we leave Litang for the comfort of a warm bath, only to be assaulted by a mob of hyperactive kids wielding large inflatable hammers in a shitty pizza joint in Kangding.

This was the section of the trip that I look back upon as the most difficult – the bus ride from Litang to Kangding was absolutely hellish – just dust, and pain, and pain from choking on dust – and after getting ourselves a little excited about the idea of coming down from the icy altitudes we’d been hovering at, Kangding turned out to be the coldest town of them all.

This is the last proper episode we were able to make before our camera was destroyed in a Dance! Dance! Revolution!-related accident, and subsequent episodes devolve into a bit of a grainy mess. But more on that next week.

From what I wrote at the time (not in the best of moods):

THE HIGHWAY: continued to beckon to us in Litang, where I last left off. Litang was a stunning little town, but the altitude of 4,000m was just too much – doing up our shoelaces became an Olympic sport; walking down the street a marathon of endurance; sleeping in our beds a cacophony of noise as our hearts beat furiously to keep up with the demand for oxygen. We would have adjusted within a few days, but lacking the time we decided to push on to Kangding.

The ten hour ride thereafter was the worst we have experienced on this trip. It wasn’t just that it was dangerous in places (it was) or unspeakably dull in others (it was) but that we sat up the back under the air vent half a foot above our heads, which served the twin functions of giving us something to smash our heads against going over each bump in the road (and the road was pretty much one long bump) while simultaneously spewing clouds of choking dust over us constantly, so that our hair and clothes were thick and crunchy with the stuff after an hour or so. In the morning, with the road blanketed in ice and snow, the driver swerved around clifftops and left Erin staring fixatedly out the window with exactly the same expression on her face that you see on young children when Bambi’s mother gets shot. In the afternoon, with the roads dry and dusty and the landscape flat and featureless, the driver slowed it down so that we could feel every bump, inhale every dust particle (as well as those tasty tuberculosis particles floating around from the other passengers), and get the maximum amount of enjoyment from the whole thing.

But we made it. In Kangding, a fairly large city squeezed into a deep valley, we met up with a Portuguese-American for a couple of nights of cheap Chinese liquor to defend ourselves from the cold – and oh my, it was cold. Kangding lies at an altitude of 2600m, but it was far, far colder than anywhere we’d been, higher or lower. It was so icy that even wrapped up in all our layers it was only possible to spend about twenty minutes at a stretch outside.

Strangest thing about Kangding – remember this is a large, completely modern city – is that, walking around one day, it started to snow a tiny bit. This was pretty exciting, as although we’d driven through acres of packed snow, it had never snowed on us before. So we walked around feeling pretty Christmas-y, with tiny flakes falling on our faces, when we started to feel a stickiness under our feets. We looked across the street, where, on a bridge in the middle of the city, was a small herd of goats and yaks. People were picking the ones they wanted for dinner that night. They were being slaughtered and skinned, right there on the street.

We were walking in a flowing stream of goat and yak blood, quickly congealing and freezing under our shoes.

(apparently that was China’s way of saying, “Merry fucking Christmas, foreign devils!”)

The track underneath this clip is from Beijing’s punk legends (and Rancid sound-alikes) Brain Failure, with the title track off 2007′s Coming Down to Beijing.