Look at this Photograph

Blog Entry #8: Look at this Photograph

Choose one of your favorite pictures of yourself and post it to your blog. Your assignment is to tell the story behind the photograph. In doing so, try to emulate some of the techniques used by the author of the Iraq piece - namely, his use of imagery and ethos to allow his audience to relate to this experience. Min. length - 500 words.
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The Motorcycle Diaries is an underrated film. It's a classic buddy pic road movie in which two friends - Ernesto, a 23-year-old medical student and Alberto, a biochemist, tour South America on a single motorcycle, camping out or finding lodging wherever they can. The hook is that medical student, Ernesto (played brilliantly by Gael Garcia Bernal) will one day grow up to be Che Guevara. The film implies that some of the poverty and injustice he sees on his journey will at some point motivate his transformation into the notorious revolutionary figure we know he will ultimately become, but the film's politics remain in the background. The main point is the adventure, the exhilaration and sometimes the danger of the central trip through a beautifully shot South American countryside.

When I saw this movie in the late summer of 2004, I was just out of college and a year younger than Ernesto. And having just graduated, I was living with my parents. The contrast between his life and my life wasn't lost on me, and I watched the movie with a seething sense of jealousy and longing. I should be motoring cross-country with a buddy, not watching someone else do it. I was young, adventurous enough, and unemployed, which meant that at least I was flexible. If not at that moment, then when? I spent the two hours in the theater, planning the logistics of my own road trip. The more I thought about it, the better it sounded, and the more eminently possible it seemed.

It should come as no surprise that I never took the trip. In about a month, I would find an interim teaching job, and then I would get into grad school, and basically that was that. Part of me has always regretted not just throwing caution to the wind and taking to the open road, and I know that a repeat viewing of The Motorcycle Diaries would only serve to exacerbate this feeling. I have a friend named Marc - incidentally, the friend in the picture below - who  decided one summer that he wanted to learn Chinese, and promptly bought a plane ticket for the southwestern city of Kunming so as to immerse himself in the language. He chose this particular city, despite not knowing a soul there, because it was known for its moderate climate and relatively laid-back vibe. I admired him quite a bit for having the guts it takes to do something like this. He's an agent for the State Department now, so his international adventures have continued. We aren't in regular touch, but every two or three years, he will return to the States after an appointment in some exotic place (China, Thailand, Turkey), and we'll catch up over a beer. Meanwhile, I haven't been outside the country in over a year and a half - and that was a trip to Canada, which arguably doesn't count.

But I haven't been sitting on my couch for the past fifteen years either. Adventurousness is relative, and though I've never pointed blindly to a globe and made the on-the-spot decision to go wherever my finger landed, I have to admit I've taken some pretty cool trips. In 2007, the summer after my first full year of teaching and the same summer Marc was in Kunming, I volunteered with a colleague to teach English at a school in China. The teaching portion of my trip turned out to be somewhat disastrous (For details, read the series of blog entries I wrote last summer), but the disaster turned out to be a blessing in disguise. If the volunteer teaching program hadn't been exploitative and generally awful, I never would have run away from it, I never would have met up with Marc, and this picture (easily one of my top ten favorite pictures of myself) would never have been taken.

Once the teaching program went south, I considered trying to get an earlier flight back home. But a more intriguing option was to ditch the program and meet up with Marc in his adopted city - even though it was on the other side of the country from the city of Nanjing, where I was holed up in a cheap hotel behind a KFC on the outskirts of town. I e-mailed Marc to suggest the idea, and in typically spontaneous fashion, he urged me to catch the earliest flight I could.

It turned out that Marc's experience in China had been as fortunate as mine had been catastrophic. (Certainly his success was not a coincidence: he was a much more savvy traveler, with a much firmer grasp of Chinese language and culture.) Within two weeks of arriving in Kunming and setting up temporary residence in a hostel, he was more or less adopted as a live-in English tutor by a local family with a disposable income. For the past month or so, he had been enjoying a positively cushy lifestyle, which included free meals and trips to various scenic areas of Yunnan Province.

I was told not to worry: its mouth was Scotch-taped shut.

When I arrived, Marc told that I was in luck: his new family was about to take him on another vacation - this time to a beautiful region called Xishaungbanna, on the Mekong River, just north of China's borders with Burma and Laos - and I was invited to come along. In fact, they had already bought me a plane ticket (it was about an hour flight from Kunming, in a tiny aircraft) and a hotel room for the week.

There was something so surreal about being whisked away by strangers to a magical land whose name I could barely pronounce. I had never even heard of Xishaungbanna prior to my trip to China, and what little I learned about it, I read in my Lonely Planet, between bouts of turbulence on the tiny aircraft.

Of everywhere I've ever traveled, this was both geographically and culturally the farthest I've ever been from home, and the farthest I'm ever likely to go. It was in Xishaungbanna that I:

• Ate a meal consisting entirely of three whole fish on skewers.
• Had my picture taken with a giant python around my neck.
• Sang karaoke to "My Humps," in front of a room full of people. (Don't judge. It was one of, like, three English language songs to choose from.)
• Judged a beauty contest at the Dai Minority Village, which is by the way, one of the most ridiculous places I've visited. Picture a touristy "authentic Native American village" in the U.S., only cringier.
• Hunted for the best price on jade nick-nacks.
• Received an excellent blind massage. (What is a blind massage, you ask? It's a massage from a blind person. Obvs.)

On our final day in Xishaungbanna, Marc and I rented bicycles and ventured into the countryside. The scenery was out of Apocalypse Now, minus the Napalm. Big sky, mist rising from unbelievably green hills, and a sea of rice paddies. This was the Chinese countryside of my American imagination. I had been in China long enough to realize that almost no one wore those stereotypical wide-brimmed hats, like they did in the children's books - but here, they were everywhere.

My Motorcycle Diaries moment.

I have plenty of photos from my time in China, but only one from this stretch of the trip: this one of Marc and me, standing in a field with our bicycles. greenery and forbidding clouds as far as the eye can see. Forget the fact that we would both sleep comfortably in our hotel beds that evening. And forget the fact that within twenty-four hours, we would be back on a plane to the city. At that moment, we were Ernesto and Alberto, and these ten-speed bikes were our motorcycles.