Our first weeks here, Elizabeth and I wanted to see everything in China, every square inch. We went to the panda research center and it was a stone bore. Ten red pandas that are not impressive at all; they look like raccoons. There are about ten giant pandas and a bunch of guys with thick glasses in white coats with clipboards. And you can’t just go anywhere, as half the place is restricted from tourists. For years you hear pandas are sacred and lovable but then you stand there and watch them and they won’t do a single interesting thing. A brain no bigger than a BB. I got rapid-fire mosquito bites one after another. The whole ordeal was a total bust.

Next we took a trip to the mountains and were warned by guides not to get fooled by the cute act of the monkeys along the trail, that they most definitely would harass us and bite. I came back from that journey with mosquito welts the size of quarters and a festering monkey bite in the web between my forefinger and thumb. I think Chinese mosquitoes have antifreeze inside them. The only effective bug repellent is pure DEET and five tablespoons of DDT taken orally four times a day.

In Tibet I saw an Alley Oop–looking dude eating a raw shank of yak meat and washing it down with tea and a splash of yak milk. The fat content of yak milk is 16 percent. I am a lacto vegetarian but I draw the line at yak milk. Instead I put soymilk on my cornflakes. It tastes awful but like anything, you get used to it.

Once on a forty-hour train trip to Beijing I saw a bucket of dead eels by the train toilet. That night cooked eel was served in the first-class dining car. Newly vegetarian, I couldn’t face cooked eel and ate a chocolate bar for dinner. Chinese chocolate is bitter like a combination of cooking chocolate and Dial soap. It was good for another Daddy report. He wrote back asking for “every detail.”

You get a sleeper coach with a first-class train ticket. It had always been a dream of mine to sleep in a plush Pullman sleeper. Click clack, click clack as the steel wheels rock along iron rails, the most comforting sound in the world. In China the train beds are narrower than a balance beam and about as hard. Cigarette smoke like gas warfare. Every Chinese male over the age of eight smokes at least two packs a day. Boy, my hopes were dashed on that one. Top it off, I got the gastro and spent the whole ride balancing over the squat toilet, conveniently located at the hinge between train cars. Nothing like a little polluted air blast to the ass when you’re good and sick.