The cool aspect of traveling to Guiyang by hired car is that my close confidant, Mr. Cheng, offered to drive me in his fancy new Cadillac. I like to joke with him that he looks like a gangster with the oversized rims and blacked out windows.

Traveling from Ya’an, Sichuan to Guiyang, Guizhou, we covered just under 500 miles, stopping very frequently to stretch our legs and destroy our lungs. The scenery along the entire route was something out of a travel guide with steep canyons and bamboo covered forests broken up by family farm houses etched into the mountain sides. At about the halfway point, Cheng gave up the pilot’s seat to his best friend Mr. Wong. Two completely different driving styles where I am glad to have had several iTunes movies to entertain me, rather than grow impatient due to the fact that we were going 30km/h slower than everyone else. After several breaks at what is best described as full-service rest stops, we arrived into Guiyang at about 5:00 pm.

We went out for dinner before retiring back to our inexpensive, but oversized and fancy rooms. As I am playing host on this excursion, Cheng was happy that I booked him the at the same location. The following day was to be filled with meetings and laboratory discussion on our panda mercury project so I told Cheng to take the day off and to meet me the following evening for dinner as I had organized for everybody, including the mercury lab, to eat together.

With a lab meet time of 9:00 am, I looked up the location on their website and confirmed this with Bing maps before trekking out into the delightfully torrential downpour. Without knowing that the lab website listed their old location, I walked about two miles in the wrong direction before flagging down a cab. By the time I arrived at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Environmental Geochemistry- as they are properly known, I was completely soaked through to the soles of my shoes. Little did I know before arriving at the lab, but they were on the same freakin’ block as my hotel. At least I got to tour the city a little bit.

Being woefully uninformed on where I was supposed to go, I stumbled into the administration office, introduced myself by saying that I can only speak a little Chinese, and began repeating the lab managers name- Ping Li. The polite young lady immediately called him and handed me the phone. Apparently, I was in the wrong building, but very close.

Ping arrived and seemed a bit startled by my height as he looked me up and down before saying in perfect English, “Are you Nathan”? He’s only about 5’0″ tall, so it was understandable. We walked over to his office and we immediately began to catch up. Ping, or Dr. Ping Li, was the person who originally analyzed our panda samples in 2012, so we had quite a bit to talk about as this was the first time that we had met face-to-face. After exchanging goods and handing over the spreadsheet that I had made for him to record the results, we agreed on the final price and then toured his superbly-extensive lab.

Not realizing it from the name, Ping’s lab is government run and funded. Which means that it is top of the line in terms of cutting edge machinery and personnel. The fact that he can accept outside work is a step above what our government institutions would be allowed to do without a mountain of red tape. The best part about all of this is the turn-around time. I was expecting him to give me results sometime in December, but he assured me that he would have them to me by next month. By this point, I was just in awe.

We grabbed one of his colleagues and snapped a photo before agreeing to meet for dinner at 6:30. I hopped back over to my hotel to dry off and change my clothes. Back down to lobby, where Cheng and Wong were enveloped in a cloud of their own smoke, Ping showed up shortly after. We walked about two blocks to a large open-air shopping mall that was half vacant, before settling on a small restaurant that specialized in boiled fish. My last experience with this delicacy was in 2010 when I got sick, couldn’t leave my room for two weeks, and ended up losing 15lbs. before winning the bathroom battle. Needless to say, I was a little hesitant.

The food was surprisingly excellent and very, very spicy. We ordered a bottle of Baijiu to compliment our steaming fish sauna, and set about breaking down barriers the old fashion way. Ping sat between Cheng and I, and they seemed to hit it off immediately. I’m always surprised at how friendly strangers can be here. You wouldn’t be able to tell that the people eating dinner together had just met. Or, the Chinese liquor was kicking in.

We conversed over dinner for about two hours before casually strolling back to our hotel. As everyone stood in the doorway to the building, I thanked Ping for collaborating on our mercury project and for being so kind to my friends and for allowing me to visit. After confirming my airport departure time, Cheng agreed to see me off to the airport the next day before they made to long trek back to Ya’an. I’d say this was an excellent trip.

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I hope you enjoyed reading about my adventures in Guiyang. With two days of travel to get back home to Portland, and then the difficult battle of return jet-lag, I might be out of touch for a bit. To learn more about PDXWildlife or would like to get involved, click HERE. Thanks for reading!