- best-of
Before sunrise, we rode the metro through a silent Chengdu
Our stomachs wanted breakfast. Instead, we went to the railway station.
The ticket hall felt almost empty.
Six windows stood behind the counter, but only one was open. We stepped forward and handed over our reservation number.
She looked at the screen. Then the printer under her desk began to hum.
A ticket emerged.
Then another.
Then another.
She gathered the growing stack into a neat pile, waited, then gathered it again as the printer continued spitting out more.
By the time it stopped, she slid a brick of tickets across the counter.
Leshan.
Xi’an.
Huashan.
Beijing.
Shanghai.
Hangzhou.
Huangshan.
Our entire trip fit in one hand.
I reached for it, but Dani reached quicker.
Then she thumbed through the tickets once, nodded to herself, and shoved them into her wallet. The seams stretched as she forced it closed around paper it had never been designed to hold.
Without looking up, she pulled out the first ticket and handed it back to me.
Leshan.
“This one’s yours.”
The rest disappeared into her pocket.
I stared at my allowance, hand still open as if waiting for the rest.
Then I turned, and folded the ticket into my pocket.
“Are you coming?”
I looked up.
“I saw a noodle shop over there. Let’s get breakfast.”
Then she reached for my hand and put it into her coat pocket for warmth.
The streets were still dark as we walked. Above us, the first rays of sun had just begun to illuminate the office tower windows.
~
Two hours and two tickets later, we found ourselves in Leshan—riding a bus from the train station.
I glanced at my phone.
The bus ride was taking longer than our guidebook promised.
As apartment blocks gave way to trees, I wondered whether we had boarded the wrong route.
Nobody around us spoke English, and the stop names meant nothing to us.
We watched the other passengers instead. One by one, they gathered their bags.
Soon, we were the only ones left.
“Does this bus go to Leshan?” I’d asked the driver.
The driver had nodded.
Now, he pulled onto the shoulder of an unfamiliar highway. Then he turned toward us, gestured to the door, and spoke a sentence neither of us understood.
“Leshan?”
He pointed down the road.
Then he closed the doors and drove away.
We followed the direction he’d indicated until the road merged into an eight-lane highway. Traffic poured past without pause.
I unfolded our map.
The city had grown faster than our guidebook.
“Maybe there?” I said, pointing toward the only landmark we still trusted.
We tried flagging taxis.
Every one sped past, already full of rush-hour passengers.
Then one slowed.
It stopped on the far side of the highway.
The driver rolled down his window and waved us over.
There was no crosswalk.
No traffic light.
Just eight lanes of moving vehicles.
I squeezed Dani’s hand.
“Keep walking,” I said. “Don’t stop. Don’t run.”
Cars drifted around us.
Motorcycles slipped between the gaps.
The traffic looked chaotic from the curb, but once we committed, it flowed around us like water around stones in a river.
We climbed into the waiting taxi.
The driver switched on his meter without a word.
As we drove away, I watched the blue dot on my phone leave the last street shown on our map and wander through neighborhoods that simply didn’t exist.
A few minutes later, the Giant Buddha appeared—a hundred-and-fifty-feet tall, carved directly into the red cliffs where three rivers met.
From above, his face looked calm despite the crowds flowing around him.
We stopped and let the river of tourists carry us into Emeishan National Park.
A staircase zigzagged between his shoulders and knees to the narrow ledge between his feet, but the line stretched so far we decided to come back later.
Instead, we followed quieter paths into the forest.
Within minutes, the crowds disappeared.
The pavement narrowed beneath thick trees.
Birds replaced tour guides.
Bamboo leaned over the trail, and humid air settled beneath the canopy.
We wandered without much purpose, stopping at temples whenever they appeared, listening to distant drums and chanting drifting through the jungle.
Eventually the trail descended toward the river.
A high bridge arched gracefully through the trees.
That was where we found the old man.
He sat on a log beneath a tree with a long branch balanced across his shoulder.
Dozens of tiny animals hung from it, all woven from strips of dried grass.
Dragonflies.
Boats.
Fish.
Grasshoppers.
As the breeze stirred the branch, they swayed gently above his head.
He never called to us.
He simply kept weaving.
Dani crouched beside him and picked up a grasshopper.
The old man smiled.
Before either of us could ask the price, a woman hurried over.
“Wushi.”
She dug through her pocket and held up a fifty-yuan note.
“Wushi.”
The old man remained silent.
Dani looked at me, hesitantly.
The woman took another step closer.
“Wushi. Wushi.”
Then she switched languages.
“Room.”
She pointed somewhere down the trail.
“Beer.”
Another gesture.
“Bicycle.”
Then she smiled.
“Temple.”
She repeated them louder, circling us while waving the note inches from our faces.
“Room. Beer. Bicycle. Temple.”
Nearby, the old man never interrupted.
He simply folded another blade of grass between his fingers.
Dani handed the grasshopper back.
We thanked the old man as best we could and walked away.
Behind us, we could still hear the woman’s voice following us through the trees.
“Room!”
“Beer!”
“Bicycle!”
“Temple!”
Only when the forest grew quiet again did we slow our pace enough to laugh.
~
Two more tickets.
That night in our train to Xi’an, the lights dimmed, and everyone settled into bed.
Dani fell asleep almost immediately in her lower bunk. I lay awake in the upper one, waiting for the privacy I had so carefully chosen to become worthwhile.
Instead, I discovered why the top bunk had been available.
A speaker sat directly above my pillow.
It began with announcements.
The next stop.
Safety reminders.
More announcements.
All in Chinese.
I stared at the ceiling.
Outside the window, the dark outline of Sichuan countryside moved past—the occasional light of a farmhouse or a road junction, then nothing again.
Just as I thought they had finished, music drifted from the speaker, followed by the voice of a young girl solemnly narrating what sounded very much like a bedtime story.
I couldn’t understand a word.
Her voice was unhurried. It rose and fell with the rhythm of the tracks, as if she and the train had agreed on the tempo. I found myself listening for the shape of it — the pauses, the way certain words came back. Whatever she was saying, it sounded like something worth saying.
Eventually the announcements stopped. The girl’s voice disappeared.
The speaker finally fell silent.
By then Dani had been asleep for what felt like hours.
Still, I could not.
I remembered the Giant Buddha.
I remembered standing between his enormous feet and failing to fit him inside my camera’s frame.
Then I remembered the woven grasshopper.
I turned in my bunk and whispered.
“Dani?”
Nothing.
“I wish we’d bought it.”
“So do I.”