I needed to venture beyond the safe confines of the Gringo trail. I had spent Christmas in Utila with an incongruous group of travelers and I was getting frustrated that the trip was turning more bar hop than adventure hop. A flamenco dancer from Amsterdam and a group of university students from Cork were my group then and we gathered nightly in the one or other of the two bars which had ‘Pirate’ in the name.
I'm hurrying down Gerrard Street, hunched shoulders, first stop, the Loon Fung supermarket. It’s to pick up the South China Morning Post, like I do on a weekly basis. The sounds and smells are the same as Hong Kong, the scent of street market, five spice and cinnamon. Only the air is cooler, not humid, nor is the air thick with sidewalk steam, nor is it 30 degrees, nor real feel 40.
I wandered out into the cool night air and headed away from the quiet end of Roma Norte towards the bars along the Avenida Álvaro Obregón. Then I stopped to look at a bulletin on the door of a jazz café when suddenly a man pulled me by the arm and shoved me inside.
When the woman I was making love to turned into a pig I knew that I had become too cynical. I watched her face fill out, her cheeks lose their definition and her nose turn up at me to form a perfectly cylindrical snout. Her skin became rough. It became pockmarked and covered in fine grey hairs and then her mouth widened and opened up to reveal a coarse and unclean set of teeth.
It would be a long bus journey from Lijiang to get there and it was not clear where I would stay once I was there. The guide books did not show anything. And it was not certain why it was off limits. Perhaps it was a route, albeit circuitous to Tibet. Perhaps it was because the society who lived there was matriarchal.
All around the walls hung heavy sequined tapestries. Scenes of death, love, of the battle; of evil and good; of the demons and the heroes of the Ramakien, all portrayed in relief. Rich gold embossed details on coarse brown fabric. A Burmese man sat at a table tuning a receiver to the World Service.
Dressed in faded denims, he wandered past bottles wrapped in shining glittered paper for the connoisseurs of fine liquors. His shirt was stained and punctured with wear. Jeans stretched, they hung loosely around his buttocks and were frayed at the ankles. Sweat gathered in black shavings where the plastic straps of his thongs rubbed his toes. And he shuffled around the aisles, parted the hair away from his eyes and stared along the display for the right whisky.
A Thai soldier adjusts his steel-rimmed sunglasses. He stands legs astride, feels the tension in his thighs, holds the gun from the hip. He raises a bottle of whisky to his lips, eats glass he does and watches old American war movies. Likes to sprinkle bullets in the air when he's alone, and when he's not he fucks with boots on. She can see her face in the shine.
To the left, the broken dam had caused the valley flood… The water chased the road around each curve, disappeared behind cleared out mounds of mud then came back to swamp them in a pall of grey mist. Black trees stuck out leafless and drowning, isolated stick creatures stretched out as frozen cracks on the surface. Wooden huts sat like fat shining slugs on gnarled logs in the water, some huddled close, linked with rotting planks, while others were pushed away from the pack, as if they had quietly lost their mooring and had absent-mindedly floated away.
Karin skipped through the barriers and past a security guard. She took one final look back at me, over her shoulder and her eyes were green as the misty slopes of her Cambrian childhood, glistening despite the cold neon lights.
