This is the fifth essay in a series about traveling across Southern China. Start with the first essay to get the whole story.

SHĒNZHÈN, Guăngdōng, China — I'm incredulous that my cell phone reads 7:45 AM and I'm still in my Hong Kong hostel in Causeway Bay. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE1? I wonder. Okay, if I leave now, I can still make it to my flight, I tell myself. But I'm in total denial. Boarding my 9:55 AM flight to Guìlín at the nearby Shēnzhèn airport is a preposterous fantasy, because the bus trip from Hong Kong requires a stop at both Hong Kong's and mainland-China's immigration checkpoints (under the same roof), a trip which, at a minimum, takes 90 minutes.

A sign in the Shenzhen Metro encourages Chinese citizens to try queuing.

A miniature, hand-crafted Temple of Heaven is on display in Splendid China, Shenzhen.

Actors perform in Splendid China's Yao Minority Village.

Actors perform a reenactment of a Genghis Khan horseback battle at Splendid China in Shenzhen.

Shenzhen apartment buildings tower over a miniature reproduction of the Great Wall of China at Splendid China in Shenzhen.

Nevertheless, the obvious obstacles don't faze me. I WILL MAKE IT, DEFINITELY! I tell myself. I'm a religious airport optimist, believing that I can make it to any flight departure on time, if I just have enough faith. I pack up as fast as I can, almost murder the hostel owner for taking ten minutes to find my deposit money, sprint to the Hong Kong subway, and slide into the bus station just in time for the 8:15 AM bus to the airport. Maybe the immigration officers are running efficiently today, I think, continuing my insane optimism.

Amazingly, they barely look at my passport — apparently, there's no one on Earth trying to sneak illegally from Hong Kong (considered the world's freest economy) into mainland China — and I speed through both immigration checkpoints in about ten minutes. Still, I don't arrive at the airport check-in desk for Air China until 10:10 AM. Even now, I continue my delusion, sure that the woman at the desk will tell me that the flight has been delayed. Instead, she tells me matter-of-factly, without any sense of apology, that the flight departed 15 minutes before my arrival. She tells me that the next flight isn't for another 12 hours.

In my American way, every possible flight and airport permutation runs through my head, and I ask her to search for flights from all airports within a four-hour bus ride to all airports within four hours of Guìlín. The fear of the inevitable destruction of my eternal airport optimism combined with the prospect of being trapped for the day in Shēnzhèn — one of China's Special Economic Zones (SEZ), in which the free market reigns, but the beautiful outdoors does not — is making me ill.

In her Chinese way, she pushes a few keys on her keyboard and reports back: "It impossible." She smiles. I frown.

I AM GOING TO VOMIT ON THIS CHINESE FAMILY, I think as I take a bite of a cheeseburger in the Shēnzhèn airport's McDonald's (apparently, Communism is dead in the SEZs). I realize that my rule about never eating non-native food in foreign countries exists for a reason; I don't know what I've put in my mouth, but it shares no DNA with American fast food (which, admittedly, is bad to begin with). The families in the McDonald's look at me like I'm crazy when I spit out my bite of "hamburger" and discard my entire inedible sandwich and inedible French fries. They should just be happy that they're not covered in vomit, I think.

I spend a couple hours moping. I wish that a band of Chinese con artists would appear and try to scam me out of $10,000, because anything would be more fun than sulking in this airport, I think. The word "anything" arrives in my brain as a realization. I check my backpack at a luggage storage desk and jump aimlessly onto the Shēnzhèn subway. (Though the US has a woefully inadequate, crumbling transportation infrastructure, China has 16 major cities with mass transit rail systems and 16 more cities' subways scheduled to be completed in the next three years.)

As I analyze the subway map, two stops catch my eye, mostly because their names are abnormally written in English: "Window of the World" and "Overseas China Town." Using my phone, I learn that Window of the World is a Chinese theme park boasting 130 miniature reproductions of the world's most famous tourist attractions. I'm intrigued, but, then, I read about another theme park called Splendid China Folk Village (at "Overseas China Town") which has miniaturizations of China's important historical sites and faux villages featuring clothing, architecture, and the daily life of China's 56 ethnic minorities. Though I'm a little worried about what will happen to my ego when surrounded by miniatures — already, my six-foot tall height makes me huge in China — I've been interested in learning more about China's minorities since I set foot in the mainland. I'm also excited to see The Great Wall (even in miniature), because it's not on my itinerary for this southern-China-only trip.

In the park, overwhelmed by its size, I try to consult a posted "Total Navigational Chart" — seriously, it's like all Chinese translators are trained at Getting Your Point Across in the Wackiest Way Possible University — but the Chinese characters on the map seem to negate my inherent map-reading ability. So, I wander around, without direction, past a traditional dance show and toward a street of food vendors, where I buy and eat a sweet, unidentified Chinese pastry. Soon, I start feeling like Alice in Wonderland, towering over both the miniature historical sights and the park's Chinese tourists. BEWARE OF ME: I'M A TERRIFYING, ENORMOUS GIANT FROM CALIFORNIA! I want to yell.

Yet, stomping around as some kind of off-kilter, Western ogre, seeing all of China's important historical landmarks as miniatures, in a single hour, feels hollow. It's sad to see the Leshan "Grand" Buddha Statue — the 233-foot-tall original is the tallest pre-modern statue in the world — at a height of only 40 feet, despite the park's nonsensical boasting of the reproduction's "excellent facilities like awful posture, bold lines, concordant proportion, serene expression, graceful bearing." Beijing's Forbidden City looks more like more like a Playmobil toy than something awe inspiring. But, I do get my only chance to see the Great Wall of China — in miniature, made with six million hand-laid bricks, with Shēnzhèn apartment buildings towering behind it.

I hope this guy knows that I know that this isn't the real Great Wall, I think, when I ask a miniature tourist to take a photo of me in front of it.

Next, I galumph through the park's "folk villages," which, to my Western eye, seem a lot like Chinese government propaganda exploiting the country's ethnic minorities. The People's Republic of China takes great pains to appear magnanimous toward its minorities, but international watchdogs frequently criticize the government for human rights violations and its brutal treatment of its Tibetan and Uyghur minorities (not unlike the US's historical treatment of Native Americans). Incidentally, a Splendid China theme park operated in Orlando, Florida between 1993 and 2003 frequently attracted protesters claiming that the Chinese-government-owned park was just a huge piece of Communist propaganda. I try to think of an equally-dubious, analogous U.S. propaganda piece — like a Native American theme park with a miniature village for each tribe — but only Epcot's (very different) World Showcase comes to mind. But, since I seem to be the only person in the park worried about the park's affected tone, I sit back and enjoy the shows. I watch members of China's Yao minority compete in a top spinning competition, the Miao minority harvest coconuts, and the Bai minority perform a folk dance in traditional costumes. I don't learn much, because, as usual, I can't understand anything that anyone is saying. If only it were possible to learn Mandarin in three weeks, I wish.

After the folk dance, I notice that everyone in the park seems to be heading in one direction, so, I follow them into a stadium in the center of the park. Everyone in the stands seems intensely excited. Soon enough, I'm watching a gleeful horse battle reenactment titled "Unparalleled Hero," in which Mongol-leader Genghis Khan "complete[s] the great undertaking to unite all tribes and establish Great Mongolia Empire via years' hard warfare based on his firm will and outstanding military talent." In short, it seems, the show is about Genghis Khan forcing the region's ethnic minorities to succumb to his military might.

I have no idea how to reconcile the assimilation theme of the horse battle show (a sort-of gloating reenactment of Custer's Last Stand) with the minority village shows I've just seen.

After the show ends, as I tramp out of the park — looming over the miniature Great Wall of China one last time — nonsensical Chinese propaganda messages tumble through my head. I make a mental note to delve more into China's relationship with its ethnic minorities, once I've shrunken back to my normal size.

COMING SOON: Trekking Tiger Leaping Gorge!

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YÁNGSHUÒ, Guăngxī, China — If you've been worrying about Canadian pop-punk star Avril Lavigne's declining career, don't. China's 1.3 billion people love her. They also love American pop-country star Taylor Swift. The first time I rode the Shanghai subway, I found myself absent-mindedly humming along to a muzak version of Taylor's "Speak Now" — "I'm not the kind of girl/Who should be rudely barging in/On a white veil occasion/But you are not the kind of boy/Who should be marrying the wrong girl" — which, to my utter confusion, was being piped into the train.

Climbers stand below The Egg, a karst in Yángshuò, Guăngxī, China. (view all Yangshuo, Guangxi, China photos)

Karsts serve as backdrops to the streets of Yángshuò.

Bamboo rafts wait for tourists on the Yulong River in Yángshuò, Guăngxī, China.

A bicycle sits in front of the otherworldy karsts of Yángshuò, Guăngxī, China.

Orange light makes Moon Hill glow at sunset near Yángshuò, Guăngxī, China.

The Luanle Cafe & Bar serves up local singers nightly in Yángshuò, Guăngxī, China.

Chinese vendors play cards while waiting for customers in Yángshuò.

Climbers walking toward The Egg in Yángshuò, Guangxi, China.

A woman climbs The Egg in Yángshuò, Guăngxī, China.

The small town of Xīngpíng sits near the Lí River in Guăngxī, China.

Plastic covers protect crops from cold weather in front of karsts near Yángshuò, Guăngxī, China.

Despite my Shanghai subway experience, China's fascination with these particular Western pop stars is still a mystery to me as I cycle toward Dragon Bridge (Yùlóng Qiao), a 400-year-old bridge about 10 kilometers northwest of Guăngxī province's Yángshuò, one of China's most popular climbing and cycling destinations. Earlier in the morning, I rented a bicycle from Bike Asia owner Scott, who helped me map out a route alternating between rocky, dirt paths weaving among marshy rice terraces and newly paved concrete roads winding through small Chinese villages along the shore of the Yùlóng River. As I ride, I watch boatmen ferry Chinese tourists down the River on rickety bamboo rafts. Mist-enshrouded limestone karsts, which look like bent cowboy hats, painted green and turned upside down, are sprinkled throughout the landscape. Farmers, tending to lush orange trees in fields, dot the countryside. I stop for a lunch of Yùlóng River beer fish at a restaurant in a family's home near the ancient bridge and then take an alternate route back to Yángshuò, biking through a maze of rural farmland to Moon Hill, a hikeable mountain with a rising-moon-shaped arch at its top. From the arch, I watch the sun set behind the alien karsts. Darkness falls, ending another grueling day for the farmers.

I cycle back to Yángshuò in the dark and, after returning my bike, find myself walking by the Luanle Café and Bar. From inside, I hear a young woman singing soulfully and playing an acoustic guitar. The lyrics are in Mandarin. I can't understand the words, but I can tell easily that it's the kind of tune that you might turn on when you're home alone, crying on your couch, gorging on caramel chocolate cheesecake ice cream, after the love of your life has just announced his or her engagement to someone else.

Beckoned by the live music, I walk inside the café, sit at the bar, and order a banana milkshake and a Coca-Cola (my signature, sugar-filled beverage orders when I'm exhausted by traveling) from the waitress. While I'm sipping my milkshake, the musician — a young woman in her early 20s with long, black hair, an attractive, round face, and dimples — continues to croon, performing song after song as though she's the most forlorn young woman in China. I order dinner by pointing at some Chinese characters on the menu. There's something yin and yang about the fact that, in China, I almost never know what I'm ordering for dinner, but, when the food appears, it almost always tastes great. When my dinner arrives — a traditional Yángshuò dish of crispy Lí River shrimp — the singer takes a break, and another musician, a man ten years older, takes the stage. He, too, begins singing a song that makes me think that the love of his life just announced her engagement to someone else. Meanwhile, the first vocalist sits next to me at the bar.

Into my iPhone's Google Translate app, I type: "You have a very pretty voice," and show the translated Chinese characters to her.

"Thank you," she says to me in English and blushes. "But he is much better?" she asks, pointing to the man on stage.

"I like your voice better," I say. She smiles and asks my name and where I'm from. I tell her, and she tells me that her name is Ping and that she grew up in Guăngxī Province (where we're sitting). I've spent the last few days reading Red Dust — Chinese dissident Ma Jian's seminal work about traveling across China — and I chuckle to myself because every woman with whom Ma Jian falls in love in the book is named Ping. This Ping tells me that she's studying statistics at a college in Guìlín, the province's largest city. She travels about 90 minutes away by bus at night to earn extra spending money by singing in the bar.

"What will you do when you graduate?" I ask, annoyed at myself for asking the question universally hated by college students around the world.

"I'm not sure," she says, sheepishly. "I want to play music, but it is hard to make money." I get the feeling that China's high-pressure college placement tests didn't put her on a track that she's particularly pleased about. Unlike in previous decades, now that the country is moving toward Capitalism, Chinese college graduates are no longer guaranteed a job. Our conversation is interrupted when she's called to return to the stage. I listen to her sing for another hour.

The next morning, I drop by Insight Adventures (formerly ChinaClimb) to ask climbing guides Wade and Nick if they'll help me climb to the top of one of the many limestone karsts I passed during my cycling trip the day before.

"Sure, we were about to take him too," Wade says, pointing to a scruffy, 30-year-old guy with a ponytail and long, thick sideburns.

"I'm Amit from Boston," the guy says in a thick Boston accent. I introduce myself and ask him how he ended up in Yángshuò.

"Well, it's a little complicated: I auditioned for an Israeli-backed, touring musical version of Zorro in Boston and got the part of the bad guy," Amit explains. "We rehearsed for three months in Israel and then planned to tour across China, but the show ran out of money. So, I've spent the last four months just hanging out in China. The rest of the cast went home. I don't understand why, since we had a free flight here." It's easily the strangest story I've heard of how someone ended up on a backpacking trip across China.

The four of us take a minibus to The Egg, a large, limestone mound that looks particularly like an upside down cowboy hat covered with tufts of green underbrush. I put on a harness and climbing shoes while guide Wade zips to the top of the karst to anchor two top ropes above two routes rated 5.9. The bad guy from Zorro and I start climbing simultaneously. For me, it's not an easy climb. The jagged limestone cuts into my hands as I search desperately for adequate handholds, and I spend a lot of time resting on the rope, exhausted. Halfway to the top, the muscles in my arms already feel totally worn out. (Tired arms are a dead giveaway of an inexperienced climber using poor technique; good climbers use their legs almost exclusively to reach the top of a route.) I look about as elegant as a sumo wrestler in a ballet, but I manage to beat Amit to the top (though only using brute strength as a substitute for good technique). From the karst's peak, I admire the green and brown rows of rice terraces and the rolling horizon created by a range of bulbous karsts. I watch a grey, fat water buffalo with curved, razor-sharp horns saunter by. Then, I rappel back to the ground, embarrassed by my poor performance.

"For someone who doesn't climb regularly, you did great," says Wade. He's spent four years in China — two years teaching English and two years guiding outdoor-adventure trips for kids from private schools in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Korea. "You should see the Korean kids: most of them refuse to climb because they have never participated in an outdoor activity in their lives. They think that their favorite extra 'extracurricular' activity is studying, because that's all their parents let them do. The worst, though, is the expat teachers from Shanghai who think they're superior to everyone in China because they're paid so well. They don't realize that they're just puppets that the Chinese schools use to have a Western face and please Chinese parents. Back in America, they'd just be badly-paid teachers. I know. I was one of them."

"Perspectives become warped easily, I guess," I say. "One day you think you understand the world, and the next day, you hear a muzak version of Taylor Swift being piped into the Shanghai subway. I thought Taylor Swift was as American as it gets."

Though I complain that I'm too tired, Wade sends me up two more routes on The Egg. My arms are jelly, but he won't let me give up. He's a good climbing guide.

In the evening, the four of us join the company's other guides and clients at their climbing gym for a hot pot, a kind-of Chinese stew. Three young, Chinese women spend a half-hour teaching me how to make pork-filled dumplings, though mostly they spend the time laughing at my lack of inherent dumpling-making ability. Afterward, a big group of us surrounds the simmering pot, and we throw vegetables, tofu, the dumplings, and whatever else we can find into it. We're all ravenous and, by my estimation, we eat about 400 dumplings in 20 minutes. On the table, there are more empty beer bottles than I can count. (In China, empties are always left out as a kind-of badge of honor.)

"The best thing about China is that you can sit on the toilet, take a shower, drink a beer, and smoke a cigarette all at once," Derrick, another climbing guide, explains to me. (Usually, Chinese bathrooms are one room shared by the toilet and shower nozzle, and smoking is permitted pretty much everywhere.) Derrick tells me that he traveled to China ten years ago to help expand a family business. He never left.

Afterward, I'm so tired that I'm ready to return to my hotel, but I remember that one of the great pleasures of traveling at your own pace is the luxury of spending many days in one spot, establishing habitual haunts and getting to know the people whose paths you cross daily. So, back at a table at the Luanle Café, I again order a banana milkshake, a Coca-Cola, and a random, unidentified dinner from the menu. Ping is performing her never-ending catalog of love ballads.

When Ping takes a break and shares my table with me, I tell her that I'm on a pilgrimage to the west to hike China's famous Tiger Leaping Gorge. I'm surprised when she tells me that she's never been there — it's purportedly one of the most beautiful places in the whole country.

"I've never left Guăngxī Province," she explains. When she's called back onto the stage, I spend the rest of the night in this café in rural China, writing about my trip and responding to e-mail. Again, I think of Ma Jian's Red Dust: "It is nice to spend a day writing letters. It feels like traveling through space… I want to think on my feet, live on the run. Never again can I endure to spend my life in one room." All the while, I'm listening to Ping's melancholy ballads.

On my last morning in Yángshuò, I rent another mountain bike and decide to tackle a more adventurous cycling trip toward nearby town Xīngpíng on a rolling mountain road above the Lí River. I cycle for about five hours, powering up steep hills and flying recklessly down mountain valleys, stopping frequently to admire the views of bubbly karsts and endless ribbons of orange fields covered by plastic to protect crops from the cold. The route is confusing, and I keep running into intersections not shown on my map. At one, a few young, curious Chinese boys, come to investigate me and my bike, and they point me in the direction Xīngpíng. But, after continuing to cycle through the mountains for a long time, I realize, now, that the road has been veering away from the town, and I've missed a turn, probably many miles and many steep hills ago.

In a small village in the mountains, I stand on the road, too weary to pedal another minute, hoping that a fluent-English speaker will magically appear to help me. Instead, a line of about 20 middle-aged men walks by, and I use Google Translate to explain my predicament to them. But, they don't understand how to use my phone to respond to me with translated messages. Instead, they manage to explain that they're headed to an all-village dinner, and they continue onto a path into an adjacent forest, leaving me alone. I get the feeling that I'm going to be sleeping here, on the side of the road, in the mountains of Guăngxī province.

But, about ten minutes later, a younger man appears from the forest path. He pulls keys out of his pocket and motions to a nearby pickup truck. I imagine that the conversation, at the village-wide dinner, about what to do about the exhausted Westerner standing cluelessly in the middle of the village road, must have been a good one. For Y100/US $16, the young man agrees to drive me to a nearby town. There, he directs me to a bus that takes me back to Yángshuò.

Drained from my cycling adventure, I again stumble into the Luanle Café and order a banana milkshake and a Coca-Cola. I imagine that I look like I've just been beaten up by China, but Ping, who's singing on stage, smiles at me anyway when I sit down.

"Which Chinese movie and pop stars do you know?" she asks me when she finishes at the end of the night and joins me at my table. This isn't the first time I've been asked this question in China, and my answer is always a letdown.

"The only Chinese celebrity I know is Zhang Ziyi from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," I reply. "We almost never get Chinese movies or music in America."

"Well, Zhang Ziyi is very beautiful," she says, but she seems disappointed that I don't know any Chinese pop stars. "I like American music."

"Oh, really? What do you like?" I'm secretly hoping that I'll get to hear her ethereal voice sing Don McLean's "American Pie," Oasis's "Wonderwall," or REM's "Nightswimming."

"I like Avril Lavigne, and I love Taylor Swift," she says. I ask her if she has heard of Don McLean, Oasis, or REM, but she looks at me blankly. I'm disappointed.

"Oh, well," I say. "Will you play one more song for me, in English?" She nods and then giggles and blushes. She returns to the stage, says something to the café's Chinese crowd, and starts singing, directly to me, in English. At first, the song sounds like yet another from her endless Chinese love song repertoire, until I realize that she's singing Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" — the same song I heard in the Shanghai subway:

I am not the kind of girl
Who should be rudely barging in
On a white veil occasion
But you are not the kind of boy
Who should be marrying the wrong girl…

Don't wait or say a single vow
You need to hear me out
And they said, "Speak now!"

The song sounds a bit jumbled because Ping's weak English requires her to sing phonetically, but I barely notice because of her emotional performance and sweet voice. As she sings, I see the Chinese tourists in the café mouthing the words. They all know the song. Suddenly, the mystery of teenage American pop stars in China reveals itself to me. Avril and Taylor's unrequited love ballads go perfectly with couch crying and caramel chocolate cheesecake ice cream. They sound almost identical to the Chinese pop music I've been hearing for the past three days.

After the song ends, the entire audience applauds. Ping and I walk out of the Luanle Café together. It's night, but I can make out the outline of an otherworldly-looking karst, towering above us at the end of the road. As we walk through the streets of Yángshuò, passing café after café, the saddest songs that I have ever heard waft over us, in the dark.

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The bridge across Hongcun's South Lake was featured in the opening scene of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

MÙKĒNG BAMBOO FOREST, Ānhuī, China — Having parted ways with my friends (and indispensable Mandarin translators) Meggie and Ricky, I'm sitting next to the xiaojie (young woman) at my hotel's front desk, typing furiously into Google Translate. We're trying to have a conversation via translation robot about visiting Hóngcūn and Xīdì, two ancient villages and UNESCO World Heritage Sites which boast an elegant architectural style dating back to the Qing dynasty (1736-1796). It's not easy.

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Chinese tour groups hike up stairs on China's Huangshan (Yellow Mountain).

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Actors perform during a Beijing opera at the Yifu Theatre in Shanghai, China.

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A kayaker paddles in front of Yukon Island in Homer, Alaska.

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Bright orange hoodoos abound in Bryce Canyon's otherworldly landscape.

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Manga characters overlook a busy street in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan.

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Shinto worshippers throw coins and pray at Meiji Jingu shrine.

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Hikers look out from John Muir Trail onto Garnet Lake in the Ansel Adams Wilderness in Northern California.

ANSEL ADAMS WILDERNESS, California — I haven't managed to find a way to set aside enough time to hike the entire 211-mile John Muir Trail yet (it takes about three weeks), so, until then, I try to hike small segments of it when I get a chance. One fall weekend, my friends Wendy, Rich, Kristi, decide to walk to Thousand Island Lake and Garnet Lake, which lie on of the most spectacular portions of the Trail in the Ansel Adams Wilderness.

We find ourselves hiking through miserable weather: at the start of the High Trail, a lightning and rain storm takes us by surprise. On top of that, Wendy has been breaking in new hiking boots and ends up with painful blisters. When we reach a watery, gray view of Thousand Island Lake, reflecting snow on the mountain peaks behind it, the storm has chilled us to the point of misery. We can only... (more)