We left Nong Khai in Thailand in a Grab car from The White Inn,

approached a sign reminding us where we’ve been, and directing us to where we are going,

departed the country through a relaxed Thai immigration, bought three tickets bound for Laos,

travelled in a van

across the Thai-Laos friendship bridge above the Mekong River,

were directed through Laos immigration,

exchanged some money, got on another bus to Vientiane, the capital, where we booked another Grab

to the Vientiane railway station, 20kms out of town. Phew; big morning so far!

At the station some locals kindly helped us navigate the rail system and the language,

and we stood in queue to buy tickets for the Laos-China Railway.

We tried to find something edible near the station while we waited a few hours to board, but we didn’t have much luck.

When we were allowed through into the station, we proceeded into a neofascist security zone, which we hadn’t experienced since leaving Australia.

After going through the scanners, we had our knives taken from us. We were really shocked and protested and asked, “How are we going to cut up fruit while we travel?” After much indignation at having our knives confiscated we were told we could pay to have an officer take them to our destination at Luang Prabang station. We agreed. It cost us AU$20, although we didn’t think we’d see them again.

Laos the nation and Laos the Laos-China Railway are two distinct countries. The former is chilled out and beautiful and wild, the latter authoritarian, stern and uptight. We have travelled through several countries with our knives, Patrick generally keeps both his knives on his belt while passing through immigration. In fact he did this here too and remarkably they didn’t pick them up in the body search, just Meg’s and Woody’s knives in the luggage scan. Was this a taste of what is to come in China? Woody was especially upset. For we adults it was like going back to school and having to endure nanny-state rules, a context that Woody hasn’t ever experienced.

His Leatherman was a gift from Steve, a kind Warrnambool man, who we met on our last big bicycle tour in 2021, and his Opinel knife and pouch were a gift from his Aunty Hen. After several hours of traveling through the beautiful Laos valleys,

where we saw many examples of subsistence farming.

it was time to get off at Luang Prabang. The armed police officer who had our knives alighted with us.

His briefcase contained some of our most useful tools on this journey, and in life generally. We were overjoyed to have them back,

but we had a problem. We knew we were going to come up against this situation again, especially in China. That night we booked a sweet little room with surprisingly cute folded swan towels, in the old capital. It was the cheapest room in the little city. Someone’s been to international hotel school in the 1980s, eh?

After arriving quite late in the day, we dropped our bags and set out to explore the town,

and to find some grub. We found a lively and packed night market, forgot to take photos, ate a delicious dinner of stir-fried veggies and rice, and came back to our swan-toweled room with mangoes for breakfast. In the morning we used our knives for the last time to cut them up.

Cutting up mangoes has been a morning ritual for weeks now, as mangoes are so cheap in Asia, and local, and in-season. We were now coming face to face with state-paternalism. We knew this was the influence of China, who paid for and jointly run the railway line we were now dependent on for our trajectory north. We headed out again after breakfast to see a little more of Laotian culture and living,

and to find the local post office to send our knives home.

We had to make such a carry-on yesterday to be able to pay get them back, and we knew things were only going to get worse the further north we headed. People around us yesterday had to hand over their work hammers, deodorant sprays, scissors and small useful knives such as ours. Hopefully we will see these prized tools again back in Australia.

After we sent off our package, we went looking for a bookshop to stock up on reading material. We walked for a while through beautiful streets,

stopped into a cafe run by this German woman and her dog,

discovered an incredible wasp’s nest above us on the footpath,

beheld more miraculous examples of bamboo scaffolding,

spent a moment reflecting on the magic of remnant ritual offerings,

before collecting our bags from our room, checking out and hopping into a van with just two seats left, heading for the station. We three squeezed in,

travelled for twenty or so minutes with a cohort of fellow travelers, and once again went through the intense process of getting clearance to enter the station. Passports, facial-scanning, security gates, body scanning, luggage scanning. Patrick had decided to keep his knife in his luggage to see whether it would go undetected. It didn’t, and the authorities refused to offer us the same knife escort service, so he gave it away to some Celtic travellers (sitting beside Woody in the pic above) rather than leaving it at the station. Now completely knifeless, we lined up to board the Laos-China Railway for our next leg.

Once again, the train attendants were officious.

The land from the train was beautiful and uncontrolled. There was longing in us for such uncivil life, and we contemplated the easiness of Thailand, sans the pollution, and the autonomy we have back home, as we don’t live in a city. As we travelled, Meg and Woody listened to an audiobook about Don Bradman, while Patrick read The Forest People: The story of Laos’s unknown tribe.

This account of Mlabri (or Mrabri) people is again another example of just how uninformed Yuval Noah Harari is when he describes human history as being a singular path of narrow self-interest. His ridiculous propaganda, we later found, is also available in Chinese.

Like countless examples of indigenous lifeways, sharing food and other resources among the Mlabri is the rule, not the exception. Every wild forested area we passed held the possibility that Mlabri are still living outside the luggage-scanning, finger-printing, facial-recognising insanity of the global machine conglomerate.

When Meg lived in Laos 25 years ago, teaching English, there were no sealed roads. While the roads now are still rudimentary, Meg was surprised to see so many sealed ones from the train. We also saw many beautiful patterns of cultivation, demonstrating other earth-harmonious lifeways are possible besides nomadic forest dwelling.

We wished we could have spent more time in Laos, but this journey to India is taking much longer than we expected, and we still have a long way to go. In the afternoon we arrived in Boten station in the north of the country, where we came across this musician playing a Lusheng wind instrument.

Later we found out that Dong people, a minority group from southeastern China, traditionally play this instrument. We waited at Boten station for a few hours for another train to take us into China.

As you might imagine, things were fairly serious going through immigration into China, which occurred after just 12 minutes of being on the train. Everyone got off. We had our temperature and faces scanned, our fingers and thumbs printed, and our passports checked and scanned, and notes were written down. It was quite a procedure. We held both apprehension and excitement for entering China.

Once back on the train we had our tickets checked and passports read again.

As we travelled, we passed millions of hectares of cultivation, everything highly organised.

We couldn’t quite believe we were in China when we alighted the train at Xishuangbanna.

We didn’t think our travels were going to take us this far north, into this epic country.

But we had significant challenges ahead. We had no money we could access, and we’d booked a hotel that required a 15-minute car ride. We didn’t have a local sim card, or a way to install an e-sim, therefore we had no use of the internet. We knew most things in China require an ID banking app, and our remnant Laos Kip had no agency this far inside the country. Outside the station we were approached by a fella who could speak a little English. We showed him the name of our hotel as he shunted us towards a driver. We conveyed to him we had no money, and he said, “Driver, ATM.” We understood. They had a brief conversation and we were led away by a sweet man who drove us to several ATMs until one relented and gave up some yuan. We all cheered and got back into the car.

Then we continued on to find our hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at all, but some sort of shonky sublet business. The driver couldn’t find it because there was no hotel, there was just a picture of a hotel on the internet. Eventually he found some locals who directed him to a back door operation where we got a key card for this little apartment room.

We were grateful. We handed over our passports for about the seventh time that day. Nothing is underground here, not even shonky sublet businesses. Everything is recorded and scanned and documented. Several moments later we were also grateful for the family-run restaurant across the street who accepted us for a meal after 9pm. We sat down and we were brought tea and dry roasted soybeans.

They asked us to take selfies with them. We were quite the novelty in this city. We were going to find out that in southwestern China our ethnicity was quite exceptional. People kept staring at us. Long stares that were met with our smiles. Our meals arrived,

which we had ordered by pointing and hoping for the best as there was zero English in the restaurant and we had no internet for our translation app to work. We were so grateful for this first delicious Chinese meal and also grateful this business took cash, as across the country they are phasing it out. We noted (pardon the pun) that all the notes of money included a picture of Mao on one side.

It didn’t seem very communist to have just the one character on every note, especially a character that had caused so much suffering in the twentieth century. We wandered around the city after dinner. It was Friday night and everywhere we turned young women were being styled and groomed in some sort of costume that looked part wedding dress, part traditional costume.

There were dozens of businesses working on hundreds of young women. The street life was vibrant and had a carnival feel about it. We went looking for a sim card and were told we had to go the the business park in the morning at 9am and apply for one. So we woke early, took some bananas for breakfast as we could peel them without our beloved knives, made a cup of tea and sat outside on the balcony taking in the new day,

until quite suddenly we were forced inside with a toxic smell permeating our olfactories. We packed up and left the building gagging, alongside others who also ran outside. It smelt like turps mixed with something stronger. We handed in our key and were helped by a kind local woman to hail a driver.

We were taken to the wrong place by the driver. You just can’t go into any phone place and get a sim card here; we discovered you have to go to the right phone place, and apply for one. We hailed another car, and he took us across the city to the right phone place, even though the previous places were all the same company, the government-run China Mobile. We were noticing most of the traffic consisted of new electric vehicles and we saw only a remnant of an older kind of mobility, although it too was electric. We also noticed how well organised everything is, including the streets and the roadside gardens.

It took about an hour to apply for and receive a sim card, by which point we’d missed the train we’d hoped to catch. Before we headed to the station for a later train we walked around looking for food. We came across many police cars, cameras and prohibition signs, such as this one, prohibiting long distance riding.

Our bicycle touring sensibilities were shocked. Over the past decade, we have spent nearly two years on the road riding long distances.

Since arriving in China we are finding the authoritarianism a frightening sign of what is to come in Australia, if people don’t pay attention to the incremental rise of surveillance, digital ID metrics, biometrics, censorship, and everything else Australian federal and state governments are doing to screw up our freedoms (such as steer us into another bogus pandemic, this time bird flu). While China has learnt predator capitalism from the west to grow its economy and incentivise ‘progress’, the west (particularly the Anglophone Five-Eyes countries) appears to be learning from China how to control populations and eradicate dissent. This is how the global machine conglomerate works. Any self-respecting anarchist does not want to live in a police state that has a prohibition against long-distance bicycle or motor bike riding. Patrick has also been reading Howard Zinn’s, The People Speak,

which details the horrendous struggles working men, women, indigenous, black and minority Americans have had over the centuries, since the Spanish first arrived. Be it industrial fascists, industrial communists, or a more contemporary, insidious merger of the two into an industrial state-corporate nexus, we people will need to fight against the next wave of totalitarianism. Being in China is making us realise just what is at stake, and reading Zinn reminds us that freedom doesn’t just happen, it has to be worked for and reworked for. One of the books Meg picked up in Laos is Elie Wiesel’s Night, another timely reminder of what happens when a country gives in to authoritarianism.

And it’s not just the Five Eyes countries. The way in which the German and Israeli governments are currently conducting themselves today, they would do well to turn back to books like these.

For lunch we found a restaurant and once again navigated the menu without a clue for the language.

We thought we’d conveyed, “Chinese vegetables and rice for three” quite well, and we received a beautiful leek and pork dish and some rice. OK, fair enough. We were grateful. Then another dish arrived. Egg and tomato – delicious, but too much. And then another, Chinese vegetables, and then another, which we couldn’t recognise. We protested, but the staff had no idea what we were saying.

It was all bloody delicious although enough for six people. After we had eaten all we could, we cleared out our ‘tea chest’ container and piled in the leftovers, which we had on the train, later in the day.

We travelled north, having no idea how we were going to get to India from China, but just pushing forward in the general direction, avoiding Myanmar. We’ve heard of the rapid industrialisation of China over the past three decades, and now we were experiencing it. The scale of development here is mind blowing. So far we have seen high intensity cities and agricultural zones, with only little glimpses of wilder spaces when the fast trains have come up from the extensive tunnels, briefly for air.

We got off the train in Kunming,

went through a series of security checks and scans to leave the station,

and popped out into a city of 8 million people.

As we travel north it is gradually getting cooler. Meg managed to set up a Chinese pay app and so we could order DiDi cars by copying in the addresses of where we are and where we need to go. While we waited for one to collect us, we bought some fruit from a lovely lady at a street stall outside the station. In this photo, Meg is saying no to a plastic bag, something we find ourselves saying many times a day.

We became aware of an intense police presence outside the station. The lady with the fruit stall and other stall holders were moved on by police screaming orders at them through a megaphone. Guards in mobile towers patrolled the station with machine guns,

and everywhere we turned there were CCTV cameras watching and recording. We travelled through the extremely lit CBD of Kunming,

across the city to the cheapest accommodation we could find online. It was hot inside.

We remembered the images of Chinese people during Covid, screaming from the balconies of their apartments to be let out, and we sensed what these inhumane lockdowns must have been like for people here. We were grateful we could come and go as we pleased, although having arrived and walked up 14 flights of stairs we weren’t going anywhere, we were well past ready for bed. We’d eaten the lunch leftovers in the late afternoon, and we still had some steamed sweet potato we’d bought earlier in the day. So we ate those, put on a load of washing,

took a shower, and went to bed in a sauna of an apartment with wet towels covering us. It was coolish outside, but these apartment buildings are heat banks. The motorway the apartment towers were built beside finally quietened late in the night, and we awoke to rain, coolness in the streets, and a Chinese tea set.

Just near to the apartment we found a friendly little restaurant. We ordered just two bowls this time,

and shared them between us as we are learning the portions here are often very generous. This delicious noodle soup breakfast cost just AU$4, and we were invited to keep refilling our bowls at no extra expense. It was at this meal we quite suddenly fell in love with China. Despite the unpleasant surveillance state and the attempt of Maoists in the twentieth century to eradicate the past, China still holds its deep cultural roots dear. Its soul is still intact, as are the souls of many of the people we are meeting.

Every meal we’ve eaten in this country has been outstanding. This lovely fella approached us after breakfast and asked whether we needed anything.

Steve has been learning English for several years and we shared some lovely moments together outside the restaurant. Our endorphins were tripping after our warm, albeit brief exchange. We DiDi’d back across the city to Kunming Station, noticing the old and new of China intersecting in many places.

Mobile phone towers proliferated the motorways,

and millions of rusting solar hot water systems sat upon apartment rooftops alongside their associated stainless steel header tanks.

We bought some more fruit at the station and went through several thresholds again to check in,

having to line up and scan our passports (the locals had their Digital Identity cards scanned) twice in the space of seven minutes. We witnessed one man being sent back because of a problem with his ID card. He was distraught.

The volume and scale of everything in China is incredible. The train we booked to Xichang was 16 carriages long. We were in carriage 15, which took about a half kilometre fast walk down the platform to board on time. Many had to work hard to get to carriage 16 before the train left.

Once again we settled in with our various books, audiobooks and writing projects, and travelled under ground for much of the trip. Each time the train resurfaced we were met with intense cultivation,

even on the drier, rocky hilltops perennial tree crops were growing.

These fast trains travel at around 165km/hr. We arrived at Xichang Station in the afternoon,

and DiDi’d into town.

We were dropped off in this leafy street,

where we had booked this comfortable room, the cheapest we could find in the city at AU$60 a night.

We dropped our bags and went exploring, finding we were in a neighbourhood full of sleepy fruit merchants.

Woody was thrilled. Many people work hard in China, and they take sleep whenever they can get it.

The family run hotel we were staying in was again a friendly place, and in the evening the team helped us to navigate our way to get to the opening of the Torch Festival, which was occurring in the city.

The Torch Festival is an annual traditional festival of the Yi minority. Fire is the symbol of the Yi people’s pursuit of light, and is believed to have the ability to drive away insects and pests, and protect the growth of crops.

Whatever went on there, we’d missed it by the time we arrived, but nonetheless soaked up the afterglow.

There was such a buzz about the place,

and many people asked us to take pictures with them. We obliged and had a lot of fun taking pictures with strangers. We woke the next day to this rather prosaic but nonetheless interesting view from our room window.

By mid morning we farewelled our happy hosts,

walked back to the street stall holders to stock up on fruit that didn’t require a knife,

admired the chickens and the wonderful characters selling produce on the street,

and spoke English with the brothers (the one-child policy ended in 2016),

while we waited for our fast ride,

with a Didi driver wanting to be a F1 driver, back to Xichang Station.

Agricultural crops are grown right up to and throughout the cities, and even right up to the train tracks at Xichang Station. We are continually amazed by the intensity of production.

There is something very special about this country – the people, the food, the buzz on the streets. And one of the things that enamours us most is the clean air. While we’re not green tech enthusiasts and we know e-cars are just another industrial revolution that will continue to mine, deplete and poison the world, the lack of motor exhaust pollution makes being in this heavily populated country an absolute pleasure.

After another four hours on a fast train we arrived at the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province, the gateway to Tibet.

Our first hotel in this city, again the cheapest we could find at AU$60 a night, was the filthiest we’ve stayed in for our entire trip. It was situated beside a large teaching hospital,

and in the morning we woke to a street-wide blackout that went on until after we’d left for some damn-delicious dumplings for breakfast.

Meg did some more research and found us another hotel room. It is the fanciest we’ve stayed in on our trip so far, but for the same price as the previous night. We’ve been spoilt outside Australia, being able to get goodly rooms for between $15-$40 a night throughout southeast Asia. We know back in Australia the same rooms would all be over $120, which is why we travelled the Australian leg with a tent and sleeping bags.

While few people speak English in China, every second person wears a t-shirt with English words written on them, or printed on walls are philosophical phrases or advice in English, sometimes making sense, but often lost in translation.

We’ve also noticed the absence of street dogs in these modern cities, which is very different by comparison with the rest of Asia, though people’s pet dogs do hang out on the street, occasionally.

We did, however, in the last days of our time in China when we stayed in a more remote village, come across street dogs, this one suffering terribly from mange.

We love the bike culture in the cities. People don’t as much own them but hire them, and it is interesting that even though the state is obviously very controlling here in certain ways, it is not stupidly paternalistic like Australia when it comes to things like helmet wearing. Personal accountability and personal choice, when it comes to safety, is obviously left for grown adults to decide. We’re impressed by this.

In Chengdu, Woody hired a bike and for the two kilometres or so he rode it, cost a mere AU 20 cents. We’re also impressed by this.

While we have found the excessive camera surveillance here disconcerting,

we have also found people largely ignore the militaristic over-shadowing of their lives. People break rules here, for example they smoke in non-smoking areas. While we personally don’t like having to smoke passively, we do like the spirit of the rule breaking.

Meg hasn’t been able to work at all in China as they ban Zuckerberg and Google products. They also ban Substack. We can understand the Chinese government banning the US spy corporations Facebook and Google, as these bastard companies are censorship dogs that collude with the US government, eroding democratic diversity and political dissident reach, and censored thousands of vaccine injured people trying to tell their stories. So, we’re glad these companies are being punished by China. But Substack? Really? This important independent publishing platform is where all the independent academics, artists, thinkers and journalists who still have their integrity in tact gather their writings, and it enables readers to transition away from the court journalism of legacy media and the predators at Facebook and Google.

A former student of the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Sunshine Yang, who we recorded a podcast with earlier in the year, told us back then, “People do whatever they like in China, they just don’t criticise the government.” We’re publishing this post before we have left the country. We hope the feedback here is taken in the right spirit.

Examples of beautiful acts of anarchy amongst all the 2030 smart city correctness being grown here in China, are the many marvellous gleaners that, like the street stall folk, bring a poetic to otherwise homogenised and boring modern streets.

The regular traffic too has a beauty in its anarchy and wildness of flow. Cyclists and scooters dart every which way and even against the traffic, bringing a feralty to the streets. Jay-walking too! We’re glad we’re not driving in Chinese cities, being a pedestrian is a wild ride enough. While there are obvious strictures on peoples’ lives here, in all the cities we have visited we haven’t seen anyone homeless, drug or alcohol affected, and people are able to raise money in novel, autonomous ways in public. This family (below) is attempting to raise money for an expensive treatment for their sick child. We don’t know enough about the healthcare system here to adequately comment, but obviously not everything is covered by a universal healthcare system, which you’d think by being in a communist country would exist. Cuba is an excellent example of medicine-for-the-people, but perhaps China has followed the toxic US model of medicine-for-Pharma-profits. We don’t know. The reason we know a little of these people’s sad story is we downloaded an app that converts photographs of Chinese text into English.

Sunshine, from afar (she is travelling in West Africa currently), and a group of lovely Tibetan women we met on the street,

all gave us goodly information about how we might travel to Tibet and enter India from there. We have read that foreigners need to apply for a special visa, which takes about 20 days and we need to go with a registered tour company. The problem we are having is we only have a two week visa for China, and we also don’t want to return to Chengdu after Tibet. The stipulation is we must be accompanied the whole time by the tour guide company. But we need to travel on from Tibet to India. While we are enjoying Chengdu city, and admiring the traces of ecological culture within this now very high-tech country,

and laughing at the hubris of the greenwash,

and playing music together,

and eating consistently wonderful meals on the streets,

and coming face to face with some confronting things –

this little one, with a AU$2000 price tag, was scratching on the glass, desperately trying to get out, if only they were able to play together –

we are at the same time cobbling together plans for the next leg of our journey.

Sunshine found for us the name of a Tibet tour guide called Harry. She has been going out of her way to help us. She told us Harry could get a visa in five working days. We contacted him, excitedly, and shared our travel wishes and our time frame, and he got back to us confirming he indeed could get us visas to travel on the world’s highest altitude and highly affordable railway for 35 hours to Lhasa in Tibet, and from there he would escort us to the Nepalese border. Yay! We were so excited when we heard the news. The train ticket was only around $100 each for all that way. The Ghan railway in Australia, by comparison, is thousands of dollars. Half an hour later, however, Harry contacted us saying that the most significant festival in the year is taking place now in Lhasa, called the Shoton (or yoghurt banquet) Festival, and there is no way the officials will be able to supply a visa in such a short time. Oh no! We are so disappointed. How are we going to get to India from here?

We have come so close to getting through to India overland or by boat, sans a short flight from Darwin to Timor-Leste. All the other borders where India meets Chinese territory are not open, and they are contested, heavily militarised zones. The two countries have longstanding disputes with each other, although relations may be warming as they are both in the original BRICS currency challenge to the dominance of the US dollar and western financial institutions.

We are looking into flying from Chengdu to Kathmandu, but the flooding and land slides covering roads to the south of Kathmandu towards the Indian border is making that option look dubious, too. So we are spending a few more days in China, in a village outside Chengdu, called Lujing, which is a little wilder,

where the locals brew booze from their rice,

and dry their own corn,

and enjoy their street life,

while we gather our thoughts, do more research, and see how else we might get to India. We are so close, yet still so far away.

Thank you for following our journeys, Dear Reader. When we leave China in the next few days we will be two months into our four month journey. We have travelled such a long way from our beloved home and community in Djaara Mother Country, thank you for coming along with us. Signing off for now, hoping you are well, eating nourishing food and breathing clean air, whatever part of the world you call home.