I thought my frightening incidents with animals in China were over when I got off that mule. Then I was attacked by a monkey.

We hiked down from Jizu Shan and went to Dali, the center of the Bai people. It’s a touristy village on a lake, and also attracts a few westerners. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see much of Dali because I was too busy voting for Obama. The day we left Kunming my absentee ballot still hadn’t come, and I was heartbroken at the thought of sitting out my first presidential election until Alison suggested we just print out the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot, which ended up taking the entire afternoon. If I had to miss cormorant fishing on Lake Erhai with a bunch of Chinese tourists, at least it was so the world would be in better hands.

A small temple in some misty mountains was our next stop, and we hiked up there to spend the night. It’s also where there are lots of wild monkeys, and my professor brought a bag of peanuts hoping to attract them. I offered to carry the peanuts, and was minding my own business when we heard the stampede of about thirty monkeys coming our way through the woods. I can still hear the monkeys’ footsteps. One ran straight for me, leapt around my waist, and grabbed my bag of peanuts as I shrieked my head off. They all swarmed around the peanuts on the ground as I was ushered to safety by my friends.

The temple was so beautiful, though. There were grottoes and waterfalls, and we all slept in one room of this old inn. The next day we got to the next temple, one of the most important in Yunnan, that a local governor had saved during the Cultural Revolution. It was rainy and cold, and the mist turned into thick, impenetrable fog which we hiked through to get down to the Bai village of Shaxi. It was a surreal experience. We hiked silently in a line, wearing brightly-colored rain jackets and pushing past pine trees along a ridge high above the valley. Parts of the trail were collapsed by landslides, and we were all soaking by the time we got to the bottom.

In Shaxi we met the group of families with whom we are going to live for the next five days. My host mother snatched my bag as soon as we met and led me down an old cobblestone path past low-slung houses and muddy trenches until we got to her home on the edge of the village. It’s different in every way from my homestay in Kunming. In Shaxi, everyone is a poor farmer. My bed is next to the chicken coop, a plank cushioned with straw and an animal hide. The whole thing isn’t so much a house as a series of rooms accessible from a muddy courtyard, with bales of hay piled everywhere and ears of Yunnan corn drying on string from the eaves.

I’m still not sure who exactly is in my family. There wasn’t a formal introduction like in Kunming. I ate alone with my host mother, except for when the nainai, or paternal grandmother, shuffled in and wheezingly served herself some soup. The only other person I have seen is the didi, or mother’s younger brother, who is a farmer like she is.

There’s a constant sound of trickling rain and everything is damp and dark. My host mother is nice, she tells me to wear more clothing and eat and drink more. It’s hard to understand her. Everyone else in her house speaks Bai, and she’s the only one who knows a little Mandarin, but speaks in a heavy local accent. My shoes are wet from the rain, and I have no others to wear while they dry out. I huddle around my computer for warmth.