Listen to the audio version of this post (18mins), or read below.
Industrial progress is our civilisational spell. It is the spell of the modern, of comfort, of innovation-anxiety, of hyper-domestication, of estrangement and separation, of unashamed pollution. The collective name we call this spell is hypertechnocivility.
From birth we are conditioned to conform to this story. Early on daycare separates us from our most significant protectors, leaving us vulnerable and often emotionally wounded. As wounded fledglings industrial schooling grooms us to become compliant cogs in the narrative of progress. Technical colleges or universities finish the hardening process, equipping us with trades or degrees to serve industrial capital, rewarding us materially, as long as we are compliant, dutiful and stay under the spell, or in our lanes. By our mid twenties we become modern serfs in service to the Financial Industrial Complex. The key to success is to do as you are told, become upwardly mobile, and not look at what’s really going on around you.
Every industry larger than cottage is subordinate to the Financial Industrial Complex, which controls all the other global raiding parties – Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Military, Big Ag, et al. Big Finance is the apex predator of this greater mob of morally depraved elites because it controls the capital for all other industries, including government.
It was the Luddites (1811-1812) who mounted the first and only serious rebellion against the spell casters of industrial progress. This happened in the midlands and north of England, where a number of our family’s ancestors hail. Initially the resistance focussed on ‘machine breaking’, smashing the frames of early industrial textile machines that were reducing the capacity of cottage weavers and hosiers to earn a proper income through their fine crafts.
A new power class was emerging in England at this time. The early industrial manufacturers established the first chapter of mass production. They had in turn derived from a revolutionary political theology designed by Adam Smith and others who gave spark to modern predatory capitalism, and lobbied parliament to bring in draconian laws that further prevented common folk from self-provisioning. The classical political economists knew that capitalism could only work if The Common – land that could once be used for people to produce or gather food – was enclosed, and townsfolk, artisans and peasants could no longer easily create non-monetary economies of community-sufficiency.
The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman is a comprehensive resource for examining the dark and mostly untold story of Classical Political Economy.
While the enclosures began in feudal England centuries earlier, Smith and co conspired with the church and state to make sure people were economically fragile and thus exploit-ready for manufacturers and other industrialists. This in turn created unbound poverty and suffering, which would eventually force people to move into the growing manufacturing centres to look for work, kickstarting a de-ruralisation process that continues today:
Displaced populations leave the land and make their way, uselessly, to the cities; urban ghettos swell and fester; families without skills recognisable in the cities compete for the few available jobs or go on the public dole, using food stamps to buy what they once knew how to grow. –– Kirkpatrick Sale (1995)
The wretchedness caused by enclosure and through dispossession of ancestral commons led to mass poverty. This created widespread crime that in turn led to the advent of populations being policed for the first time, as well as the establishment of faraway colonial jails like Australia. Industrial progress is also the story of made-man mass suffering, exported from England to across the world.
The history of the Luddites’ powerful though short lived uprising to save their autonomous economic-technological-cultural relations is told in Kirkpatrick Sale’s detailed Rebels against the Future: Lessons for the Computer Age. Sale’s social history brings greater awareness of the mass exploitation of labour that occurred at this time, which was required to catapult industrial capitalism into existence.
Through the many stages and processes of industrial progress we have more or less become an estranged species of anthropocentric urbanites who no longer yearn to be in relationship with earth-honouring technologies, or living within processes of regeneration. We fabricate stories of progress such as efficient electric homes powered by lithium-ion batteries, without reporting on the millions of fires these batteries start each year and the horrific costs to environments and people that the mining of this one particular metal creates.
In every new technology manufactured by the story of industrial progress, harm proliferates. Look behind the curtains of any new product, any new drug, every new digital tool or means of production, and someone or something is sick or dying. Electric technologies requiring rare earth minerals or metals won’t save us, but these technologies just might:
So, given what we now know about industrial progress, is there anything we can learn from the original Luddites? Is there anything to learn from their gallant failure, which took an English army, larger than any that fought against Napoleon, to crush their resistance?
The first lesson for us from the Luddites is violence only begets more violence, and the state is designed to ultimately protect capital before workers. As we have seen for decades, governments will use excessive force against any uprising, and Big Tech is almost fully capable now of silencing any form of dissent or using dissenting subgroups to create ideological silos in a bid to continue the colonial practice of divide and rule.
Before they resorted to violence, however, the Luddite’s political strategy was to petition the political class.
Lord Byron made his maiden parliamentary speech speaking up for subjugated artisans who were being rapidly turned into impoverished subjects of capital. But shortly afterwards Byron became famous for his writings, and his attention in support of the Luddites disappeared. And then no one in the political class championed the traditional textile artisans whose industry was the first to be subject to the moral depravity of early industrial capitalists. Such powerlessness, especially felt by weavers, led to greater acts of violence against textile manufacturers’ machine parts (thousands of weaving frames were smashed), then against the factories (some were burnt to the ground), then manufacturers themselves (some were murdered).
Secondly, Luddite resistance didn’t pivot towards alternative self-organising economies. Luddites wanted to maintain life as it was, where cottagers would raise their children to take on the craft or trade of the household with their future generations engaged in meaningful, self-organising labour that was rewarded by money. Luddites and their kin perhaps could not imagine alternative economic lifeways as some of us are crafting now. Rapid onset poverty has a way of destroying creativity and thus diminishing the scope to problem solve because the sole concern of destitution is sheltering and feeding oneself and family.
Today, time-poverty, including among the wealthy, similarly destroys the ability to problem solve because responding to a predicament intelligently requires a mind not over-filled with stresses and distraction. To respond to the predicaments of our time, however we are reading them and which ever ones jump out at us and call for our attention, our minds need to be connected to the universal creativity of the living of the world.
The lack of pivot of the Luddites was probably also due to the demotion of subsistence (or non-monetary) economies, again due to prior enclosure laws. While Luddite cottagers, at night, focussed on organising secret militia attacks in numbers that are astounding to consider right across the industrialising midlands and north of England, they could have alternatively spent this time covertly growing crops on marginal or hidden lands, keeping pigs and chickens in simple enclosures, poaching the game and stock of the landed gentry, and generally setting up underground food networks, which also distributed other basic needs to people. This form of covert economic resistance may have resulted in the manufacturers having much less of a population to draw on for labour, and therefore lessening their ability to exploit workers with wages that barely enabled people to survive.
Thirdly, life is not worth living when we are enslaved or owned by others and we cannot augment our own economic forms with kindred souls. Many Luddites had nothing to lose but to gather, swear oaths (a crime considered worthy of hanging or transporting to Australia), and form secret militia groups that would conspire to attack the new masters.
The political classes learned from the political violence the Luddites escalated between 1811 and 1812. After the Luddites were eventually smashed, the new rich manufacturers, the established political elites and the financial class gradually conspired to produce more subtle ways to placate and incarcerate working peoples and turn them into docile factory slaves. Industrial schooling, drugs, alcohol and mass entertainment became important tools of capital that worked on placating and making soporific the rebellious spirit the Luddites possessed. As we know, these are still some of the tools used for compliance today.
Adaptation before panic has been a message we and countless others have been singing for some time now. Collapse now and avoid the rush, as John Michael Greer famously wrote in 2012, precisely two hundred years after the last Luddite was publicly hanged.
The Luddites had no such prior story to inform them. No story of pivoting or reclaiming. Nothing before them had so utterly transformed human life and economy, as rapidly. Today, it’s hard to see anything that the three industrial revolutions haven’t already shat on, so an argument for economic alternatives, village rebuilding and reclaiming a ceremonial species approach should, you would think, have greater agency. So what are the road blocks?
Fear is central to killing off the creative agency needed to spell a new story of economy and culture making. The spell of Industrial progress is bound by fear. What will my parents think? What will my partner think? What will my peers think, if I take off the chains and leave the cave of industrial progress?
The Luddites wanted to preserve pre-industrial life where handmade tools aided cottage productions of beautiful and useful things, and contributed to a village logic that was not centred on extraction and pyramidal hierarchy, but rather was rooted in relationship with local, bioregional, land-accountable practices of life making. Yes, manorial lords stood over village folk to lesser and greater degrees, however, this powering-over was relatively benign by comparison with the misery of early factory servitude. As the spell of industrial progress spread like a plague throughout the world, the word Luddite naturally became a pejorative term employed by hypertechnocivility to shame-label critics.
Although all three of our wheelbarrows have derived from industrial mines, factories and markets – two salvaged from the local tip shop and one purchased new and given to us as a gift – they represent technology that can be replicated by materials walked for and harvested respectfully in nearby common land, which we help care for. Our wheelbarrows are low-impact transportation technologies that enable us to take large amounts of fodder to our goats and collect our winter fuel. We do not take for granted their simplicity or their meaning in recrafting ecological economies of place.
While we currently have access to a car, and we hold a small title of land that belongs to the great industrial legal lie terra nullius, we give no money to Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Military or any other industrial complex. We have crafted a cottager, community sufficient lifeway based on ancestral relations to local economy making, brought forward into the context of today and the Mother Country we live within. We don’t dress in period costumes or romanticise what was. Instead we find kinship with our ancestors and community in reclaiming and re-skilling, while recognising the greatest threat to life is the romanticisation of industrial progress.
Rather than violence as our response to the sickly spell of industrial progress, we choose defunding its power. This, for us, is the most rich and rewarding form of resistance, which is steeped in relationships that the Financial Industrial Complex or its challenger, Big Tech, can never have jurisdiction over. Sharing our story, linking with like minds, revillaging, and teaching our lifeways and learnings at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, is all we can do alongside the primary concern of actually crafting economy that refuses to participate in industrial progress. This scale is human and local, and soon to come back offline. Living the change. Living life outside the chains of the cave. Sharing our learnings with others. Dancing in the face of industrial progress without fear. This is our power.
Our wealth is time and relationships and knowledges and skills almost entirely found outside the vast drag net of the Financial Industrial Complex. We generate so little money that we don’t pay tax, therefore we don’t support the war machine or participate in government welfare given to corporates to promote earth- and health-wrecking technologies, such as gain-of-function synthetic medicines or drone warfare or more toxic biotech farming practices.
Yes, we are neoluddites. Yes, we are conspiracists. Yes, we are anti-vaxxers. Yes, dirty hippies. Yes, witches. Yes, op-shoppers. Yes, radical homemakers. Yes, neopeasants. Yes, some of us are quite toothless, repair things and practice self-suturing.
We left the sleepy, mahjong town of Lujing, outside Chengdu city in China early in the morning.
We had a plane to catch.
We could not find another way of getting to India overland from China due to border disputes, politics and bureaucracy, so we spent a little time among the clouds,
got forcibly fumigated by the air hostesses before landing, and arrived in Kathmandu three hours later. After going through immigration and customs, changing currencies and setting up a Nepali sim card, we hired a Tootle.
A friendly Nepali man took us to the lodge where we were to stay on our first night.
We walked some of the intense streets of Kathmandu,
and some of the gentle ones,
witnessed people gathered at the butchers,
and at the stupas and pagodas.
We came across personal struggles,
transportive skills,
and bigger challenges affecting people day to day,
Kathmandu is the first city we’ve visited on this journey, since we left Darwin, where drugs and alcohol are causing misery in peoples’ lives. Woody was grabbed by a man in the street. The man was inebriated, by substance and grief. He tried to cuddle Woody, forcibly, which set we parents off. We are all learning how our vulnerabilities as travellers conjure up fear, and reactivity, especially when just arriving in a new country. In reading J Krishnamurti again,
he reminds us how fear is often a precursor to violence, to a lack of freedom.
We parents were upset by the inebriated man. He required our compassion, our witnessing of his grief, our openness. Woody required protection and surety. Krishnamurti makes much sense to us, especially his thoughts about religion, however inside books, sense can be very clear-eyed, while on the streets such papery clarity can soon dissipate.
On another occasion on the edges of the tourist district of Thamel in Kathmandu,
Meg was pushed aggressively by a street vendor because we’d stopped in front of his stall to talk with another man who wanted to know about our travel plans. The push had the desired effect as we quickly left that unhappy place, after Meg offered back her views about his behaviour. We must have been an unwitting block for his livelihood.
The man who wanted to know of our plans, like many older street businessmen in this tourist district, wanted to yarn with us so as he could better weave our needs as travellers to his financial needs. Initially we were irritated and put off by this in Kathmandu, but later after speaking with Nepalis and understanding how business works here, we realised this perceived pushiness comes from an indigenous trait of connection through gossip and story sharing mixed with colonisation’s imported scarcity anxiety and lust for material riches. Nepal is currently in conversion from an indigenous culture into an imperialist one, guided by the west, China and India. This is the process from human-ecology interactive violence (eating, farming, hunting, gathering) to what Deborah Bird Rose calls, ‘man-made mass death’.
It’s easy for us to refuse what’s on offer in Kathmandu, in most cases. We are on a shoestring budget. But we also enjoy speaking with people and sharing story, even if we know there is financial intention behind the interest. It is part of the local/foreigner dance, here.
On our first night in this city, we went looking for and bought a khukuri from Ramesh, a former Gurkha soldier.
Gurkhas are a Nepali fighting unit who have a reputation for fearless military prowess. The word itself derives from Go-Raksha – protector of cows. This again reveals the conversion – cowherds become militia, famously employed by the British empire to their dirty work. No, we didn’t buy the big knife or khukuri, Patrick was given that by Ramesh to bring drama to our shared photo. Rather, we bought the little one that now travels on Patrick’s belt. It cost AU$30.
Happily, we’re back in the business of sliced mangoes for breakfast. Yes, this local green variety is ripe!
Wearing a knife again brings things up for us. We’re not going to pretend it is only for mangoes. While we are big fans of Krishnamurti’s ‘freedom from fear’ invitation, and for wisdom like this,
we also think there is a right time and place for what we call appropriate, conscious, or ecological violence, such as hunting, subsistence farming and slaughtering, and self defence. We say this without fear in Nepal. It is wild and unruly here, but quite safe in most places.
The work that Krishnamurti perennially invites us to partake in is understanding our inner violence – impatience, irritation, superiority, lack of curiosity, absence of compassion, preciousness, and so forth – and he offers meditation (post-thought peace), breath work (being in a state of wholeness with the world), and a daily mental practice of recognising early when we enter states of fear or anger, which when not faced, can lead to wounding. More common is psychological wounding than knife or physical wounding. This goes a little way to understanding the high suicide rates of men in Australia. While there is much necessary media about physical violence to women, few want to see more subtle and more common forms of psychological violence in our communities, especially perpetrated against men. The societal acceptance of Clementine Ford’s extremist misandry, especially in the so-called liberal media, is testament to this.
Before we left the city we scoured the streets of Kathmandu for somewhere to buy a cricket bat for Woody, and after much searching we eventually succeeded, here.
We found Kathmandu boys are mostly into football (soccer), though cricket is more of a thing here than in any other country we’ve visited since leaving Australia. We didn’t see Nepali girls playing either sports until Pokhara. Woody has been longing for a game, and we didn’t have an opportunity until we reached Bhaktapur, about an hour east of the city by car, through thick traffic.
We arrived and were instructed to pay AU$60 to enter historic Durbar Square, where we were to stay. It was too much dosh for we neopeasants, so we declined, cancelled our booking at a cheap hotel inside the square, and booked into this little sweat box with stellar views, just outside it.
A kind Nepali fella back at the gates told as that after 7.30pm the guards go home and people can freely walk into Durbar Square.
It was beautiful inside,
and fragile. In 2015 an earthquake ruptured many of the buildings.
We enjoyed this place for its dedication to the sacred, pissing street dogs, absence of motor vehicles and night time quietude and cool, though we also felt a sadness here – an old Nepal walled off from the rest of the country, which has been superseded by global imperialism and national political corruption.
We are seeing in the culture how technological ascent and the global machine conglomerate disturbs everything immensely, everyday. In Krishnamurti (1973) we read this:
“…we see that education, science, organised religion, propaganda, politics, have failed. They have not brought about peace, though technologically man has advanced incredibly.”
Five decades later we are observing that technological advances have led to the psychological derangement of people, making life faster, more furious, more interrupted, more anxious, polluted and permanently unsettled. It is perpetually draining to behold the continuous propaganda and promises of US-style empire capitalism, while living the actual realities of it.
The following day, to oxygenate our rather sedated bodies in play, Woody and Patrick started a game of cricket on the brick pavement that framed a water feature and temple outside our hotel.
They soon noticed a young boy watching and they invited him to play. He was shy and declined, at first. But after a while he started helping to retrieve the ball from the water. Woody got carried away with the bat on one occasion, which found him stripping down to his undies and swimming out to retrieve the ball. Sushil, the young Bhaktapur boy, who joined our game while school kids and teachers looked on from above in their classrooms, soon lost his shyness, and we all took turns to bowl and bat, often fielding the ball out of the pond. Sushil is a natural sportsman and he loves both batting and bowling.
Once the shade disappeared from the pitch, we all got mightily hot and so we invited Sushil to join us for a drink. Patrick and Woody found out, with limited language, his family business is peddling fruit, or should we say, pedalling fruit?
We offered him a banana lassi but he wanted a Coke,
that slow release poison in a bottle, killing the microbiomes of Nepali everywhere courtesy of the psychological warfare conducted by US empire admen and women.
We observed again in Bhaktapur that Mother Country has a way of slowly eating up that which is not required,
and like all hubristic civilisations over the last 5000 years, the US empire will be eaten up too.
The following day, when we came back into the traffic jams of Kathmandu city, we glimpsed a goatherd and his animals travelling by foot.
What are we doing in this city? We want to behold subsistence-resilience, not traffic! We stayed one more night in this little cosy, mozzie-filled room,
laughed at the phenomena of us only tripping in the streets in China’s cities, which are flat, expensive and new, yet never in the countries that keep our street senses switched on,
once again marvelled at the mind-fuck that is the electrical experience in southeast and subcontinent Asia,
and headed out to find a Nepali restaurant mostly catering to locals.
We all loved the food at the Himalayan Yak, especially Woody,
and the family who ran this modest restaurant were a big part of the love we consumed in their fare. We also liked and noted the lack of advertising outside the restaurant, just a lovely gold and red drape that suggested some form of business.
The next morning we left Kathmandu, we walked to the bus stop in the rain.
We had just received a message from our friend, Trace, who asked us to look out for cyclists carrying all manner of things in Nepal. Trace is an inspiring children’s book writer and illustrator, and she told us she is considering doing a children’s book on the subject, after years of noting and documenting the beauty of such low-tech transportation and the everyday miracles of what can be sometimes carried on a bike.
We only published one bike of this husband and wife gleaning duo, in our previous Laos-China post. So, for Trace, and anyone else who is into appropriate technology, here are the wonderful cycling twosome we spoke with in Chengdu. The husband is carrying cardboard recycling; the wife is carrying plastic.
Our bus left Kathmandu at 7am, and there was talk on the bus about the potential of landslides because of the heavy rain overnight. We travelled with great alertness,
witnessing at one point a local bus on the other side of the road marooned in road-edge mud, seriously close to tipping over.
We followed the powerful Trishuli River for some time, and when the driver pulled over for punters to buy food and use the public toilets, we soaked up the energy of the river.
On and off over this several hour bus passage, the rain belted down,
and we saw locals or government employees out in it, trying to elevate the force of the water causing the land to slide.
There were innumerable examples of the concrete walls, attempting to arrest the pressure, failing.
At Dumre we got off the bus and hopped in a taxi for a ten minute drive up to the high country of Bandipur. Oh, how our senses relaxed as we moved towards this misty,
sane,
magical,
place.
We booked into this room for AU$20 per night,
looked out onto the town from the hotel,
went for a walk,
beheld sweetness and beauty everywhere,
and felt our nervous systems calm. In the main street of the town, no motors were permitted, and we witnessed first hand what a pre-industrial village would have felt like, and the greater peace that would have resulted. We asked if this man would be happy for us to photograph him and his craft.
Instead of delivery trucks, people carried things along the street with traditional baskets.
What we witnessed here is an easy work ethic, a green gym epistemology – a time for yarning and gossip, and a time to carry and labour.
No one seemed overly consumed by their work here, although the man sewing (above) did seem to be the exception. Every time we passed his doors he was working, and we felt a sadness in him that perhaps his continual labouring helps ease. We saw in Bandipur a beautiful village, only accessible from the rest of the country by motor transport since 1998, and that despite being part-supported by tourism, is still in tact socially, spiritually and ecologically.
Quite by chance we arrived in the low tourist season. Now is the coolest and quietest time of year. We booked one night, as we do with any new place, but immediately knew we were going to stay awhile. We just didn’t want to leave, and the goats were a big part of this.
Back home in Djaara Country, our flerd ran out of food while we’ve been away, and as a result kept getting out, causing generous neighbours and friends a lot of stress. Back in Thailand we made the painful decision to give our animals away. Being in Bandipur we witnessed peasant-sized small goats browsing on common land, as ours did, and the huge breeding-programme goats at the National Goat Research Centre, where we were welcomed in and shown the bucks, young and old,
and the does.
We tried hitchhiking back up the hill, the three kilometre hike from the research centre,
but there was little traffic. As as we walked we talked about saving our pennies when we get home to invest in some bigger animals.
Goats here in Nepal are a big part of daily life, and so too is play. Each day in the afternoon we went to Thulihill, the village park, to play cricket with anyone who wanted to join in. We fashioned stumps out of fallen sticks.
Playing both cricket and football here has helped dismantle the local/tourist, us/them barrier. When we come across others in Nepal we like to acknowledge them in the customary, local way, Nameste, which so elegantly translates as ‘the light in me sees the light in you.’ The more we stayed, played games and met people in Bandipur, the deeper our relations grew with the people of the village. Having worked in hospitality in our own tourist town of Daylesford for a number of years, we have a sensitivity to being ‘the locals’ too, and how tourists are often in extraction rather than connection mode.
We love the casual drying of corn between rain showers in the streets,
the Sishnu (nettle) and Bandipur (fermented vegetable) soups, served with local Tumba (millet) wine, which is clear in colour and tastes more like a spirit,
and we love Nepali money, which celebrates six indigenous Nepalese animals. The largest note, 1000 npr, is worth just over AU$10.
In the evenings we played cricket until the light faded,
and the local boys said to us, you need to get home because the tiger might be out. We were thrilled more than fearful, however, we took their advice and didn’t dawdle in the dark, more forested parts of the village.
On our third day, after writing a bunch of postcards,
we jumped on the cable car from the top of Bandipur,
and descended through the clouds to Dumre to send them. The Dumre post office, which we found online, didn’t actually exist in physical reality, despite the internet stating it did – the map is not the territory, just as data modelling is not our complex immune biomes. So, instead of sending slow mail to love ones we stopped in at the Dumre markets, brought some bananas and mangoes,
the latter of which we couldn’t get in Bandipur, and headed back up the hill, praising the craft of Baya Weavers (or, Tope Chara, in Nepali),
yellow-breasted sparrows Indigenous to Nepal and other parts of Asia.
Bandipur is just over a 1000m above sea level. On our fourth day the clouds revealed to us the Himalayas. While difficult to see in this photo, this first sighting of the majesty of these mountains enchanted us. Hint: Not all the white above the tree line is cloud.
There is an undeniable power in this country, and beautiful people. Dilap, who pointed out the mountains to us when we descended the staircase at his family hotel on that morning, is one of them.
We moved hotels to his, after the black mould became too overwhelming in our room in the first.
On the journey down from Bandipur to Dumre to catch the bus, we asked Dilap how his family survived Covid without tourism: “We didn’t have much money then, but Nepali all know how to grow food. We are an agricultural country. We help our friends when they struggle, and the food we grow at home is fresh and is healthier than from the store.”
In Bandipur we witnessed widespread home-grown food production and herbal medicine plants we use at home,
We helped heal Woody’s knee injury with our own peoples’ medicine kit – soaking this typical boyhood scuff of the knee injury in eucalyptus oil and warm water to clean it,
and later applying narrow-leaf plantain salve. He limped around for a day or two,
but soon forgot about it when it was cricket time. Woody’s immune system, of course, did most of the healing particularly with good food in his belly. We ate healthy Nepali food in this lovely town, much of it grown close by, (rice, lentil dahl, buffalo curd, veg curry and a weed saag),
and we sat and yarned in the clouds.
Bandipur bore many gifts, including the community of village cricket and a dreamy peaceful respite from the intensity of travel. We left with tremendous gratitude.
We caught another bus on to Pokhara, which was slow going (can you see the goat on the van’s roof?),
mostly because of the monsoonal rains causing landslides that narrowed the road,
but also other challenges.
It took five hours to travel 80 kms. It is currently wet in this region, and the next season’s rice crops have been planted.
We saw from the bus endless examples of subsistence agriculture. We love the fenceless nature of farming here, where cows and goats graze right up to rice paddies, and where the ‘fences’ are the human herders who stay with the animals to prevent them from eating the crops.
This being with the herd, being with the land, instead of constructing fences suits a less manic, less alienated culture. For the cow- or goatherd to observe their animal’s intelligent senses in what they graze and when and where, gives the farmer knowledges about deep and diverse nutrition. These knowledges slowly accrue in the being with, and often cannot be measured. In Nepal, we’ve witnessed how animals are often stabled for part of the day with rice straw or freshly cut weed fodder, after bouts of free-ranging.
This allows people to do other things throughout the day.
When we arrived in Pokhara, and went down to the lake, we found cows free-ranging among the tourists and locals.
The Pokhara farmer whose cows they were was on always on hand.
The very first image (thanks to Jordan and Happen Films) we published in the very first blog post of this journey, was of us moving our animals across town.
We miss our flerd and find comfort in the ways people are with their animals here, and also the way they are with each other. Like in the two-cows-by-the-lake image above, we witness daily the unashamed public affection Nepali friends have for each other here.
On the way to Pokhara we passed gravel mines on the fertile flood plains. This gravel is being used to make concrete to build roads,
and modern Nepali buildings.
We stayed in one of these buildings in Pokhara.
It was an oven inside because of the concrete acting as a heat bank.
Due to the monsoonal rains there are great numbers of mozzies so we needed the fan in the room all night to both repel the mozzies and try to distribute the radiating heat from the room so we could sleep. Here is the rooftop room we spent the first two nights in in Pokhara. When thermal mass is not a good thing, and not just because of the ruined fertile flood plains…
We spent the afternoon walking the streets of Pokhara to seek out various things. We looked for a shoe repairer to fix the holes in the soles of Patrick’s shoes. A skilled man in his street workshop stopped them from leaking,
and also brushed the mud off and polished them, all for the equivalent of AU$10. Locals told us he over charged us, but it’s all relative.
We also sought out more postcards, and a secondhand bookshop. There are several in Pokhara, with books in many languages. Patrick found Bikas-Binas (Development-Destruction): The change in life and environment of the Himalaya, a radical text from the mid 1980s featuring both Nepali and foreigner contributions, discussing through a development-critical lens what was happening to this beautiful region at that time. When Patrick opened this book it fell to this page,
In one of the book’s essays, Deadly Development, the author, Claude Alvares, reads the development of this region as a con-game:
“…for it seems now that the idea of economic development has been used by the ruling classes to induce people to accept not only enormous sacrifices, but the destruction or mutilation of older cultural patterns and physical and moral environments, and debilitating forms of dependence.”
There is a romantic, pre-development painting of a Pokhara village scene hung in the office of the hot hotel we were staying in. It depicts traditional stone, slate, clay brick and thatch buildings, which are only one or two storeys high and presumably cooler and ventilated. Villagers are engaged in ecologically-embedded labours,
That was a scene of Pokhara, according to the artist. This is a scene of Pokhara now, according to Artist as Family.
The irony of being dependent on some of the patterns of colonialism is not lost on us, though we baulk at most things on offer here.
Radical texts like Bikas-Binas don’t appear to exist anymore, or they are labelled conspiracy texts, and disappeared from view in the search engines. When you do a Google search for something today, it is always filtered according to the empire’s narrative. This is why
On our first evening in Pokhara we stopped to ask a man where we might eat where the locals go. John, a jovial Irishman, led us to such a place and joined us for dinner.
John, who is currently living in Pokhara, is a great source of local knowledge. We told him of our plans to bus from Pokhara to Sonauli on the Indian-Nepali border and go through immigration there. He told us that with our Indian e-visas – the most over-complicated and annoying piece of bureaucracy we’ve ever had to endure, and which Meg spent several hours filling in back in Kathmandu – we won’t be able to cross at Sonauli, and worse, John told us, “you’ll need to return to Kathmandu and fly to Delhi; there is no other way.”
We were gutted.
What we are witnessing on this journey is the more a country ‘develops’ the more ridiculous the rules become, and the less freedoms people hold. Development isn’t only about eliminating old cultural patterns and customs and transforming ecologies into construction sites,
it is also about controlling people, and herding them into sad little, hard spaces as workers or consumers, and both.
And this control stems from a desperate economic system based on a the fabrication of scarcity. Capitalists and Marxists alike perpetuate this system, which is always city-centric and debasing to people and life forces.
We are on this journey, having not gone overseas for twenty years for social, economic and ecological reasons, to give Blackwood a glimpse of other cultures and lifeways before health-fascism – biometrics linked to Digital IDs passports – become the norm, and people like us won’t be able to travel at all.
As those of you who have been following this journey from the beginning know, Woody’s love of cricket and our meeting ‘cultural others’ through a shared love of the game, combined with our more adult focus on subsistence-resilience are the main intentions for this travel. We know we need to be ever mindful of the restrictives, negatives and our expectations, acknowledge them and let them go through to the keeper.
The feralty of street dog life in Pokhara helps with this. The way they dance through the streets with their souls in tact gives us courage and guidance.
We walked for a while with these two,
up to the park, where cows graze on soccer fields and players kick around them and cricketers play until dark.
That magnificent steer (in the photo above) certainly had his eyes on the ball. How genius for a large park that enables festivals,
track running, football, volleyball, badminton, cricket and many other social gatherings, for the cows and buffalos to be the ecological lawn mowers of it,
eating down the grass while returning manure to feed the park, and being part of the social life of this beautiful commons.
Having cow pats scattered around the park certainly adds another level of coordination and awareness as a player, when chasing down the ball.
On our fourth and final afternoon of cricket in Pokhara, a two meter long, grey-brownish snake revealed itself, just near where this fella fielded a ball.
A few stones were thrown to encourage it away from the game. It was very respectful. We are impressed with so much in Nepal, especially the interspecies connections and reverence for life.
Last cricket season in Hepburn, we watched a Muckleford player bash to death a two metre long tiger snake with a cricket bat. It just wanted to cross the field to get to the creek. We players could have waited five minutes for the snake to pass. Almost everyone on the field cheered when it was dead and hurled across the boundary fence. There is deep trauma in a culture that thinks this is OK.
We moved from the top floor of the hot box hotel after two nights to another multi-levelled hotel closer to the park. The trees in the garden of the Trekkers Lodge significantly help keep the building cooler, despite it too using much concrete.
It also helped we were on the first floor. Outside our window to the south was another hot-box-for-empire building going up, but much more interestingly, corn and millet were planted together where in Australia people plant lawn seed. This backyard also housed stooked rice straw for the buffalo stabled nearby, with taro and bitter gourd on the edges of the patch for human consumption.
The sweet family who ran the lodge had other family members growing this food, and collecting fodder in the park across the road for the buffalo.
The owner of the hotel told us the buffalo lives in this shed, near were we are sleeping,
and sometimes free-ranges in the park. All of this is done in small suburban, often shared areas, and it is giving us so many ideas about the scale of a farm, especially if daily human ‘green gym’ practices of foraging fodder are incorporated. Buffalo, at least on menus in Nepal, is called buff. Instead of beef, buff sits beside chicken, pork and goat dishes. While we spent three nights at this lodge we kept checking from where we could, waiting for the buff to come out of her shed to get a goodly photo. But she liked her little cow cave, and all we got is a glimpse of her lovely rump.
Coming to Nepal is like doing a RetroSuburban masterclass. Not just in the growing of food, but in the way people transport things,
wrap things,
and feed themselves in a way that doesn’t require many resources and is accessible to most. We loved eating masala omelettes and drinking mint tea for lunch. The cost was around AU$2, not just because we are in Nepal, but because such a meal can be hobbled together without a middleman, without a supermarket.
Cafe owners share, borrow or buy ingredients from one another, so no food is wasted. Often, when we’ve ordered something we’ll see the cook go across the road to another cafe get an ingredient or two. This is another example of working together – another indigenous trait that hasn’t been destroyed here.
On our first day in Pokhara we spotted these lovely boats on Lake Fewa.
On our fourth day in Nepal’s second largest city, we hired one.
and rowed across to the other side of the lake to trek up to the stupa. On the way we beheld more rural food production and preparations, such as future crop patches mulched and left to go fallow,
and in other patches, manure brought from the stables and animal sheds to return to the soil, akin to any organic food production that doesn’t require the mining of phosphate rock.
More intelligent indigenous-peasant lifeways we witnessed on our walk, and which we have seen all over Nepal, are the ecological air conditioning systems that invite rest, yarning and cooling. They are often about 3 degrees C cooler underneath them.
Here, the technics required to build this air conditioning/recuperation/social system incorporates local materials. Large mossy benches made from brick or stone are built around (often pre-existing) giant ficus trees, and they operate as temples of relief and shrines to the long history of people and ecologies being in union here. We walked on, up the many steps,
past the ‘tree elbow’ love tree,
leaving lying dogs to sleep,
passing fading proverbs adorned with wild flower,
until we reached the stupa.
We looked out across the lake to Pokhara, at a city of 600,000,
and rested and meditated on the shady side of Shanti Stupa,
which was built by Japanese buddhists belonging to the Nipponzan-Myōhōji order, and local Nepali devotees and artisans.
Our response to Pokhara at first was a repulsion for the tourism and imperialism that’s so clearly fucking over the culture here. But having meet with the locals on boats, such as Santos who grew up on the streets,
and over breakfast with Surentra who worked in Australia for five years as a chef,
and each evening playing cricket with a bunch of generous young men,
who generously included us in their afternoon games, we felt ourselves shift from sadness into relationship.
We witnessed sophisticated subsistence-resilience here, showing the way forward for the rich countries that are speedily coming down the affluence bell curve,
and we beheld the growth and learnings within ourselves.
so, after two weeks, we leave this spirited country full of possibility and with much post-hope positivity.
On our last morning in Pokhara, we woke to unseasonably clear skies, and thus to the majestic Annapurna Ranges of the Himalayas.
This rare glimpse (at this time of year) of the power and magic of this Mother Country somehow changed us. Perhaps it changed us in how we relate as humans, now knowing this grand scale of range is possible. Or is it that Annapurna is a mythological site, and we were briefly drawn into her mythos as we silently stared. We held no expectations to behold her because this is ‘off’ season and the Himalayas are usually covered by clouds, but behold her we did.
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.
