I’ve gone to China too many times.

In high school and college, I was on the rowing team. Rowing is a sport that can happen wherever there is a river long and wide enough to fit a few boats side-by-side for a good distance. Despite that pretty general criteria and the abundance of water on the earth (or maybe because of it), teams find themselves traveling all over the place to practice and race. Through my time in school, we traveled across the US for training trips and races in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee, to name a few.

This continued after college as well with alumni rowing, but with a twist. Instead of many short trips across the country, we with were invited to fewer races, but they were farther flung across the world. The first of these for me was to China.

As I was still folding up my cap and gown, I received a message from my older brother Jack, who had recently finished up grad school in the UK. His Cambridge team had been invited to send a boat of rowers to China for a week and half to race in three different cities, and they asked him if he wanted to go. He declined as he was busy working at the time, but he let them know that I was still fit (having just finished the national championships) and had absolutely nothing going on (which was a great burn on the fact that I didn’t graduate with a job lined up). So they agreed and I was invited along to race!

I got my passport ready and went to the Chinese consulate to get my visa sorted. Then I boarded a plane to go spend 10 days on the other side of the world with a bunch of people I had never met.

Most rowing trips in high school and college followed the same format: cramped flights or buses, two to a bed in a Days Inn or HoJo, bag lunches, lots of downtime, and straightforward racing. In high school, we also had to pay for most of the trip. All that is mostly what I was expecting on this first trip to China. We’d go to each city (Chengdu, Wuhan, and Linfen), do our racing, and have lots of pal-around time at the hotel in between some serious bouts of rowing. But this would be all-expenses paid—I just had to get my passport and visa, and they’d cover everything else. I was also told there would also be a banquet at the end of the racing, which was new to me but didn’t seem too out of the ordinary.

After a long, cramped flight on China Air, I arrived in Chengdu. That’s when I first linked up with Dave (my brother’s friend and the organizer for the Cambridge team) and met the rest of the crew. We were met at the airport by some of the organizers and some of our “handlers”. Having handlers seemed weird to me, but I supposed we needed translators. I later figured out that they were basically chaperones who were there to make sure we stayed out of trouble and were where we needed to be at the right time. They were all local students who were studying English, and they all seemed pretty fluent.

When we arrived to the hotel, I got my first sign that this wouldn’t be a normal rowing trip. The hotel was enormous, gilded everything, with huge rooms and no need to share beds. I shared a room with the other American on the trip, but we both had our own space.

I was worried: would I miss sharing a tiny bed with another giant dude? (Luckily, I got used to it.)

That night we all crashed early, exhausted by the long flights. But first thing in the morning we were up, traveling to the race course to take a look at our equipment and get it sorted for practice. On the way, we properly introduced ourselves in the light and figured out the lineup for the boat. Everyone on the team seemed great and I was settling in nicely. This would be a great trip, and nothing could go wrong!

We got to the course and that’s when the wheels started falling off. For most rowing trips, you bring your own equipment — boats, oars, cox-box, etc. And the boats are already wired up with speakers and have shoes and seats screwed in. These boats were completely empty, and in two pieces (the front and back were separated). There was a pile of shoes and seats off to one side, and a pile of oars off to another, for all the various competing teams to sort through. The Cambridge team seemed to know to expect this and they had brought their own speakers, wiring, and cox-box, and told a few of us to quickly go through the oars, shoes, and seats to ensure we had matching sets that fit the boat.

Why would the regatta organizers fly everyone over only to have equipment that didn’t match, or that was slightly broken, or in any way wasn’t good? I don’t know, and I never figured it out. This free-for-all was simply part of the competition, every time. Could you get enough workable equipment to get your boat in the water and take some strokes? If so, you were better off than most.

While half the boat went to scavenge from the piles, the other half went to work assembling the boat itself. After finding the right bolts and putting them together, we were met with an interesting hiccup.

It was over 100ºF, and these boats had been sitting in the sun for a few days. When we tried to tighten the boat together, we found that the heat had actually warped the fiberglass, and the two halves of the boat wouldn’t fit smoothly together. That means water would leak in through the seam, which just so happened to be at the six-man’s seat—my seat. So we did the only thing we could. We complained until we realized the organizers didn’t care, then we bought Vaseline and shoved it into the cracks, and kept some sponges in the bottom of the boat to bail it out when needed.

Finally, it was all put together, we had serviceable oars, and were ready to launch. The water was a nice neon green, like the ooze that made the ninja turtles, and the heat was oppressive. We asked our handlers if we could have water, and they said it would be ready for us when we finished practice. We tried to explain that in the heat, it’d be dangerous to work out without water, but they didn’t seem to get it.

So we launched and practiced, trying not to splash any of the water into the boat, and frequently stopping to bail out the leaks. But against the odds, the rhythm was nice, and the squad had some power. After a while we swung it into the dock and put it away. We looked for our handlers and the water, and finally saw them running over with a few boxes. We opened them to discover dozens of cans of Red Bull. As it turns out, Red Bull was sponsoring the regatta, and so cans of Red Bull were the only drinks provided to the athletes. We talked to them again about the need for actual water, and they assured us it would be provided the next day for the race. Which is a little true, they did provide bottles of warm, sweetened, flavored seltzer water. Better than nothing!

We headed back to the hotel to cool off and have lunch. Unlike the bagged meals for US rowing trips, all our meals were provided for. We usually ate at the hotel, which is what we did that day. Meals typically consisted of noodles, rice, and French fries, although Dave (who had gone on some of these trips before) was more adventurous with some of his snacks.

After lunch, we headed out of the hotel to go find some water bottles and granola bars to have for the next day. The handlers did not like that, they wanted us nice and cozy in the hotel, not outside in the world where anything could happen to us. Like what? I don’t know, nothing happened. But we frequently had to find strong excuses to leave the hotel, or simply sneak out.

Again, an early night, and we woke up the next day to race. Typical races are started fairly, with an agreed-upon starting sequence (naming each of the crews competing, then saying “Attention…Go”) and an umpire making sure the boats are aligned evenly. In China, it didn’t really happen that way. They started off with the names, but no aligner to make sure everyone was even. Then they said something very loudly, which may have been “Go” or may have been anything else. Whatever the case, we sped off the line and raced. We got 3rd place.

After the race, there was a short ceremony where they announced the top three finishers for the mens’ and women’s races, and then they set loose a bunch of ducks into the race course and a ton of locals jumped in to grab them. One of the French women’s team’s competitors jumped in to catch one, and she came climbing out with a duck in her arms. However, she must have gotten some of that neon green water in her mouth because she got very sick and ended up in the hospital. I don’t know enough about Chinese hospitals, but she was later airlifted home to France. We heard she ended up recovering.

After the race, we had our first banquet. We dressed in our blazers and had to perform a short skit for the organizers and the other competitors. We chose to do a dance routine to “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting,” which went over very well with the organizers. When all else fails, just pretend to do karate in front of the Chinese officials and you’ll be golden.

We ate dinner, which was pretty good, but the chefs must have put the names of the dishes through a translator because they came out somewhere between humorous and terrifying. A few examples are: “This is good yo” (no idea what it was), “Baba rice” (lamb over rice), and my favorite, “Fragrant smell of urine” (not too far off, but I didn’t try it).

We were also introduced to Chinese drinking culture. The organizers would keep coming up to our table to cheers us with a “ganbei,” and then have us all finish our drinks. By the end of it, the organizers were obviously toasted (the rest of us too). I’ve never been to a race where the hardest part was keeping up with the drinking of the organizers. I kind of liked it.

Afterwards, we headed out to some clubs, where it felt like if you were tall and white, locals would invite you over to their table and give you free drinks. I don’t think I spent money on anything in China (which was just as well, considering my aforementioned lack of a job at that point).

The next stop was Wuhan, which has become internationally renowned lately. When we checked into our hotel (which was attached to a water park), I found that the hotel had learned it was my birthday, and they had sent up a birthday cake to my room. Great service! I was already warming up to this new city — I guess you could say I had Wuhan fever.

Aside from the racing (where we got third and were given a giant dish-sized bronze medal), we also took part in a dragon boat race, which we won (the other boat actually sank). Then we toured the mountain next to Donghu (West Lake) where we rowed, which had a temple at the top. And against the wishes of our handlers, a few of us took some roller-luges down the mountain to avoid the steps and make it down faster. Maybe they had god reason to not like us leaving the hotel. But it was too hot to walk!

Wuhan is known as one of the four “stoves” of China, since it sits in a valley that can get incredibly hot, especially in mid-July. Before leaving for Linfen, we cooled off in the water park attached to the hotel. Upon entering, we were greeted with the sight of a man running across the entryway screaming as he held is son in his arms, blood running off the boy’s head. The water park employees shuffled him into a side room, but the park went on business-as-usual, and we went on some rides. I think this is where I picked up my parasite, which caused me to loose around 20 pounds after I returned to the US. It was fun though, and I got better.

The last city of this trip was Linfen, famously one of the most polluted cities on the planet. We heard through the grapevine that in preparation for the regatta, they had actually had the factories in town shut down for a few days before we arrived, just to clear the air a bit. It was still tough to breathe, let alone row. Much like the other cities, it was racing, tourism, and banquet, and then we finally went home.

But! Not before I spoke to some of the organizers and suggested they invite Princeton along to some future races. And the next year, I got a message—would Princeton like to send a boat to race in Wuhan and Changsha that summer? So I organized a boat, coordinated travel schedules, ensured everyone had all their documentation ready, and we went off for another trip, this time with the Princeton alumni. And another year we were invited along to a race in Xi’an, home of the famous terracotta warriors. And another we were invited to Shangyu. We kept being invited to go on these amazing, all-expenses-paid experiences through China, and coming home with medals, engraved plates, scrolls, trophies, and the occasional stomach issue. One time, they even gave a cash prize to the winners and we came home with hundreds of dollars each!

Each trip had its own special moments: two of the guys waking up to find a third had slept, and pooped, on their floor; one guy voluntarily doing shoe-ies over and over; another drinking beer out of a teammate’s unmentionables; watching someone pour an entire bottle of baijiu in their face and not even wince; watching someone take a sip of baijiu and immediately vomit; dancing to the Harlem Shake; dancing to the Macarena; racing in a number of suspect boats; showing up to a regatta we were told was going to be 2,000 meters long to find they hadn’t finished building the lake yet so it would only be 800 meters long; learning the story of the Yellow Crane Tower; having schoolchildren line up for our autographs and pictures; being interviewed on TV for the Shangyu News; bonding with the GCBs; and simply getting to travel with friends to completely new cultures and compete.

I’m very happy I did each of these trips. They are tough on the body, between the travel, the racing, and the drinking, but they are worth it, and entirely new experiences to standard rowing events. After coming home from each one, my body sore, my mind tired, my stomach sick for weeks, I always say that I would never go back. But then the next invite comes along and I’m excited again.

I’ve had these one-in-a-lifetime experiences four times now. Maybe I’ve gone to China too many times, and I should give someone else a chance. But also maybe not.