A Different Path

My family is cursed.... While other children and wives spend their vacations on the beaches of Thailand and Bali, the ski hills of Switzerland and British Columbia, or in the shopping meccas of Paris and Hong Kong, my family is dragged on dilapidated buses though sinuous mountain passes accompanied by the chorus of car-sick villagers. Their curse- to cater to an obstinate wander-lust that seems to take us to increasingly uncomfortable but always stunning ethnic areas in Asia's poorest areas.

The high of getting off-the-beaten-path, of seeing areas seldom visited by urban Chinese, let alone Westerners is addictive. Sharing life stories with elderly villagers over tea and sunflower seeds, walking through flooded rice terraces alongside prehistoric-like water buffaloes, hiking into thatch-roofed homes to search for old textiles, playing tag with goats and sheep in a kaarst fairyland- this is what life (and not just what traveling) should be about. Each new experience vies to outperform the previous one but, in a China that is now covered with cement and bathroom-tile buildings and fast-food and pashmina outlets, great effort is now needed to get beyond the ubiquitous neon veneers.

Our Centre's location allows guests to have genuine snippets into a dynastic Chinese culture. We have endeavored to take our guests beyond the typical sites and focus more on the interaction with locals and the sharing of their traditions. But even we are resigned to the fact that in the future areas like Xizhou will slowly become gentrified to the point that the aforementioned experiences will be less spontaneous and more staged. Thus we continue to travel around the region's uber-rural villages to look for future expansion sites. We ourselves want to stay ahead of the commercialization of the travel experience in China. We explore because we can provide a model that may provide a buffer against the KTV and t-shirt economies that now overrun Lijiang, Yangshuo, and Suzhou.

While my family may sometimes feel burdened by my wander-lust, our sojourns are constantly replayed with pride in my family's eyes. The journeys and their occasional hardships provide them with a sense of accomplishment, a challenge tackled head-on and survived. We laugh about the precipitous cliffs, the ornery water buffaloes blocking our paths, the dark and scary unguided cave explorations. I know that my wife and boys are proud of their ability to 'chi ku' (eat bitter- survive adversity), and I admire their willingness to put up with my enthusiasm for another old village, 'bird and flower market', or New China Bookstore. These sites may not rival the beaches of Hainan Island, but they do provide us with learning experiences that will last much longer than suntans and margaritas.