Welcome (back) to China!

After spending time in Kashgar and Urumqi, It is a bit of a culture shock to come back to Dunhuang and Xi'an. In the Xinjiang province, the Han Chinese are in the minority, and the Uyhgr people make up a larger portion of the population, especially in Kashgar where they are nearly 75% Consequently, there are a few things that are different!

First, language. In Kashgar, nearly every sign was in Uhygr, with little Chinese, except on official signs. In Dunhuang, we are back to all Chinese, as you can see in these restaurant signs:

Second, clothing. Head scarves are out, umbrellas are back! Women in Kashgar and Urumqi nearly all wear head scarves, and the ubiquitous Chinese hats and umbrellas to protect their skin from the sun are nearly non existent. As I waited in line yesterday to see the Terracotta Warriors, you could see that we are definitely back in China!

The Mogao Grottoes

As the third stop on the Silk Road part of my tour, I spent about 2 days in Dunhuang, a very small oasis town that was an important stop along the silk road for two precious commodities: water and protection- this was one of the first places within the protection of China, and merchants didn't have to worry so much about being attacked once they arrived there. Because this was an important stop on an international route, many different religious and cultural artifacts have been found here, including the Mogao grottoes, which are a collection of hundreds of caves carved by hand from the cliff face and decorated as shrines to Buddha. I was prepared to be underwhelmed, as I'm a skeptic, but the caves were really just as impressive as they were made out to be. Pictures were very emphatically forbidden inside the caves, so I have a few pictures from the replicas at the museum nearby, but they don't begin to describe the massive nature of the caves, the thousands of buddhas painted on the walls and ceilings of each location, or the massive nature of some statues that stood 35.5 meters tall!

And since the internet is cooperating for the moment...you get a bonus post!

I'll catch you up on my trip to the Heavenly Lake outside of Urumqi. This was my first stop on my Silk Road tour.

My trip to the Heavenly Lake may have been the strangest day of my life. Catching the bus to start on the 3 hour bus ride wasn’t so bad, but then as we got started, and just as we got out of town the bus randomly pulled over to the side of the road so the bus driver could to pee in the trees. Our tour guide on the bus was a not particularly nice individual, and she shouted at him the whole time he was gone, interrupting her ranting only to answer her phone in a super sugary sweet voice. Later on, I saw her shove the poor bus driver so hard he tripped, and then tried to snatch his phone away. This was not a kind lady.

As we got closer to the lake, it became clear that everyone else on the bus was going on a tour of some kind except for me. I found this ironic, as I was probably the only one who actually needed help figuring out where I was going. However, it turned out to be a delightful thing to not be on tour since I’d brought my lunch (the spicy peanuts were tasty; the “cake stuffed with beef floss” not so much) and had a chance to walk around the lake and picnic instead of sticking with the crowds at the south end of the lake.

To get to the lake, we all got off of tour bus #1 in order to get on to the Heavenly Lake shuttle buses that careened up the mountains at breakneck speeds, threatening to throw the entire crowd off the steep cliffs as we went up the switchbacks. The only pay back for that nail biting ride was that when we got on the bus, it was desert, with no trees to speak of , mostly flatlands, and dry and dusty. When we got off the bus at the top, we were in the middle of a lovely, if not quite tranquil, pine forest, with the typical fake tree stumps singing Chinese folk music as you walked from the parking lot to the lake.

As I started to walk around the lake, a young Chinese guy started at about the same time. We leapfrogged for awhile as each of us would stop to take pictures, and then as we walked along, he just gently reached out to take my camera, and gestured that I should get into the picture. After offering to take his picture as well, he just sort of followed me like a puppy around the lake, randomly stopping to grab my camera at places he felt I should have a picture of. He hardly spoke any English, so it was an oddly silent sort of walk. When I had to turn around to come back to meet my tour bus, he turned and followed me! His name was Li Shou, and he kept going back around the lake until we met up with someone who could take our picture together, then suddenly he said “I have to go! Bye bye!” and walked away…

When I got back to the main entrance for the lake, I stopped to get some water, and the girl there got very excited to practice her English with me. I had about 30 minutes until I had to leave, so she walked me through all of the touristy stuff in her shop, and we tried on hats and jewelry, and she’d walk around with her arm in mine, chattering away. She’s working at the tourist shop as an internship for the university. Again, it was just so unexpected to have her take me by the arm and walk me around for half an hour- she was very sweet.

When I finally got back to the bus, my very angry, and not so very nice tour guide would not let me back on the bus in spite of the fact that I had a ticket. Instead, she grabbed me by the arm, and shoved me onto another bus saying firmly “Bus. Urumqi” The new tour guide grabbed my arm and pushed me down the aisle to the back row of the bus, and would not let me sit anywhere else.

After two miserable hours in the back of bus #2 on a very bumpy road, we arrived at a tourist trap type place, and I opted to stay on the bus. The bus driver insisted that it was the end of the line, and that I had to get off. He even found a couple of girls who were on the bus who spoke English to come and tell me this. I was totally lost; we were nowhere near where I had gotten on bus #1, and no one could show me where we were on a map. I tried to catch a taxi back to my hotel, since taxis are so cheap here, and I could get anywhere I needed for $2-3. Unfortunately, it was rush hour, and after 20 minutes of trying to flag down a taxi, I walked back over to the bus, which was still parked in the parking lot. The driver did not look happy to have me back, and looked up gleefully to point to bus #1, which was now pulling into the parking lot. Tour guide #1 looked even less happy to see me, but put me back on bus #1, and took me back to the starting point. I’m still not 100% sure what happened, but it was a miserable hour trying to get things sorted out. I was lost, and confused, and tired, and I may or may not have cried.

Fortunately, dinner was enough to remind me of how much I like the Chinese people! As I walked into the restaurant, 3 waiters greeted me, excited to practice their very limited English. They all three hovered over me as I read the menu, and when I wasn’t getting to the pages they wanted fast enough, they turned the pages for me, and made recommendations. As I left the restaurant later, I could still hear one of the waitresses in the back practicing to herself, loudly, saying “Nice to meet you!” again and again. She was so proud of herself, and after a hard day, I needed a reminder that not all Chinese people are like nasty tour lady #1.

Into the desert! Installment 2 of the Great Camel Trek!

I think we left off with the miserable, hot, uncomfortable car somewhere on a rather jolty road on the way to the desert. We had to make a quick stop so Abdul could obtain some very fresh lamb for dinner, so we pulled over at the last village before the desert to pick up supplies before bumping the last few km into the most beautiful pavilion ever, covered with grape vines and blissfully cool where we waited for the camel man (Abdul’s words, not mine) to get the camels ready, and then, as the sun was just thinking about setting, we rode off into the sunset.

Not quite, but almost. The sun set very shortly after we got there, for which poor Abdul was very grateful. He had melon already sliced waiting to be consumed ravenously the second the sun dropped below the horizon. The desert was beautiful- greener than I thought it would be, with undulating waves of sand in all directions. The dunes were much higher than I’d assumed, but the camel man was good about leading my camel down the less steep parts of the hills, and I didn’t fall off. Not even once! Although Abdul says he has several times, and it doesn’t hurt when you land in the sand.

We had fruit and naan bread- a flat bread kind of like a pizza crust, and different than Indian Naan, for dinner, and once it got cooler the camel man lit a fire, and Abdul made lamb kebabs over the coals. It was a fairly idyllic evening, even though it in no way represented the foods that would have been eaten on a real camel trek through the desert. Fresh fruits and meats were probably not on the menu very often on the Silk Road.

As the sun went down, the weather was cool and breezy, and stunningly Quiet. When I camp in the mountains, all of the crepuscular creatures come out and start chirping, buzzing, humming, and who-ing, and the forest is noisy with the crunching of animal feet in the pine needles. Not so the desert. The only noise to be heard was the occasional sound from the camels shuffling off to the side and the breeze flowing through the sand.

As night fell completely, I dutifully got into the tent set up for me, but quickly determined that I would never fall asleep in the sweltering tent, so I pulled my blanket and sleeping bag with me onto the desert sand and slept with the breeze in my hair at least, even if the clouds covered up the stars. I woke in the early dawn to the sound of Abdul praying quietly towards Mecca, and fell back asleep until 10 am.

We had a crunchy orange melon with leftover naan bread for breakfast before heading back towards the car. Abdul apparently hates riding camels, so he opted to walk, and took pictures of me the whole way back. Except that my camel was being stubborn, and refused to go up any steep hills, so we had to go a round about way, and lost Abdul for a while. The camel man didn’t seem concerned, and Abdul showed up eventually, looking none the worse for wear, and we climbed back into the car for another long drive back to Kashgar.

The monotony was broken this time around, not by a flat tire, but by several other excursions. Abdul stopped his car at a river. “Do you want to go swimming?” He says. “No, thank you” Becky replied. “But I’m so sandy!” Abdul complained “I can’t drive 4 hours to Kashgar in a hot car when I’m sandy!” Fine, Abdul could go swimming. I opted not to for several reasons involving murky water, and not wanting to take off all of my clothes in full view of the highway. This didn’t slow Abdul. He reappeared from behind a bush wearing practically nothing (actually, for all I know, it was nothing. I didn’t see him until he was in the murky water, at which point the question of what he was or was not wearing remained blissfully unanswered), and jumped into the water.

I decided to just get my feet wet, and that felt nice, so I went to take one slimy, slippery step further and went down into the mud. Poor Abdul was mortified, because I, of course, was still wearing all of my clothes. I got out of the water much dirtier than when I went in, made Abdul (after he was dressed) fetch me some bottles of river water so I could wash my legs off, and then changed into some pants behind another bush by the car. Fortunately, the rest of me dried out quickly in the oven of a car.

After continuing on our way, we stopped at Yarkand to see some not particularly interesting tombs. They were so boring that Abdul, having made me go there, promptly disappeared as soon as I went in, only to reappear with a live pigeon in his hands 15 minutes later. Then he sent me into the mosque built by someone famous many centuries ago, and when I came, out, he was nowhere to be found. I sat again, and waited, and he reappeared with TWO pigeons! “Just a minute,” he says, “I need to put these in the car.”

So, with the pigeons safely ensconced in the trunk of the 44 degree car, we head off to have lunch before finishing the trip back. Only remember that it is Ramadan, so all of the restaurants are closed until sunset. The only one we could find was very nice, and very busy with all of the people in town not fasting eating there. Abdul consults with the waitress. “OK, there’s no menu, because they only serve three things. Which do you want: Pigeon noodles, pigeon kebab, or pigeon soup?” I opted for the noodles. Abdul felt this was the wrong choice and also ordered us kebabs. Pigeon kebabs. They were actually pretty tasty, and better than the pigeon noodles as they had a better roasted flavor than the somewhat insipid noodles.

All in all, I feel like the camel trek was a success. I did not get bitten by bugs in the desert, I was only sunburned on the one arm facing the sun out of the car window, and my camel had two humps. To close, I feel like I remember singing this biologically inaccurate song as Children. Go, Alice, Go!

Riding a camel with...

Two humps!

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I met Abdul (yes, that's really his name) the tour guide, on Saturday afternoon to make arrangements for Sunday. He was concerned that my independent trip to the Sunday livestock market and bazaar would take too long and we wouldn't make it to the desert in a timely manner, so he agreed to drive me. I learned through his expertise that one can buy a "good standard camel" for about 15,000 RMB, the same for a good standard horse or cow. A good standard Donkey was only about 1,000 RMB. It was sort of like the Denver Stock show only less clean, louder, and with yaks.

Next we went to the famed Sunday marketplace where you can buy nearly anything you'd ever want (including, apparently, random dried snakes, lizards and rats to use in traditional medicine), amidst hordes of people. This market is considered the largest in Central Asia, and is where the European and Chinese lines of the Silk road met- people would bring goods from both directions to sell in this marketplace.

Afterwards we went to lunch, which is more problematic than it sounds- the Uyghars are Islamic, and right now they are celebrating Ramadan, which means that they fast from sun up to sun down. Which means that most restaurants in town are now closed between sun up and sun down. We finally found one, but also discovered that the desert site only 2 hours away from Kashgar was now closed to foreigners, so we had to go to a new site 4 hours away, which meant that our time frame had just been reduced. I ate my rice pilaf with a spoon, and we ran out the door to spend 4 Long Hot Hours in Abdul's black car without air conditioning. This was just as miserable as you would expect it to be until we hit something in the middle of the road.

This is a picture of our very flat tire:

This is a picture of Abdul trying to fix the flat tire:

This is a picture of the first repair place we stopped at after Abdul failed to change the tire, and drove 2 km so he could get someone else to fix it:

This is a picture of the second repair place we stopped at after the first repair place couldn't change the flat tire (notice the chickens and very small child randomly poking around):

They were closed, but let Abdul use their tools to change the tire. After a number of other mishaps resulting from not using the parking brake or blocks on the front tires along with parking on a relatively steep incline, Abdul managed to change the tire. Meanwhile, I amused myself by purchasing ice water from roadside stands. Remember that it is Ramadan, and Abdul was changing the tire for nearly an hour in 44 degree Celsius (more than 110 Fahrenheit) while fasting all day and not being allowed to drink water. He was also horribly embarrassed, so I refrained from making helpful suggestions. He's only been driving for 3 years, and I seriously doubt that he's ever changed a tire before, but I don't think that cultural norms would have let him take advantage of skills acquired doing car repair with my Dad and from a brother who worked for Discount tire. Also the fact that his lug wrench seemed to have the socket split open indicated that I would have been unable to help anyway.

Thus ends installment #1 of the Great Camel Adventure Trek! Next up, more pictures of camels. Specifically, Me on a camel. In the desert!

B for Bactrian?

I'm about to head off into the desert for an overnight camping and camel trek. The question is, will my camel be a Bactrian camel (two humps) or a dromedary camel (one hump)? Evidence suggests that Silk Road camels are Bactrian, and I'm very excited by this possibility! I've ridden dromedary camels before, but never a Bactrian!

A new friend in a new city

Today I arrived in Urumqui, the first stop on my tour around China, mostly including the silk road, which will start here, then I’ll got to Kashgar for the weekend, then to Dunhuang, and then to Xian. The city feels so much smaller than Beijing, and as I was driving around in a taxi, I kept thinking that things just felt different, and I couldn’t put my finger on it until I looked up ahead and realized that I could see rows and rows of buildings because the smog wasn’t blocking them. There’s blue sky! It’s amazing! I had forgotten what life was like without so much pollution. While Urumqui is smaller than Beijing, it is the capital of the province and has 2.3 million residents, so the same population more or less as the greater Denver area. The city seems older and more run down than Beijing is, but maybe that’s just because I can actually see the buildings here to note their state.

I had an afternoon available after checking in to my hotel, so I went to the Xinjian Autonomous Region Museum. The museum is free and houses the mummies found in parts of the desert in this region, as well as taking you on a tour of the different ethnicities found here, with examples of their homes, clothing, lifestyle, etc. It was a pretty cool museum, and my guidebook had suggested asking for the free English speaking guide available, but there didn’t seem to be anyone to ask as the museum was free and there was no ticket booth, so I just wandered, and there were a lot of dramatic, but good signs in English.

As I made my way to the second floor, I heard a voice say “Hello, do you need a guide?” I turned around, and there was Katherine. She volunteers at the museum because her aunt works there, and she is one of the aforementioned English speaking guides. She took me on a tour of the mummies rather quickly because that isn’t her specialty, and then we went back down to the regional ethnicity part, which is her specialty, so she could show me through again. It really was a funny tour, and she’s very good at walking backwards. And whenever she’d get stuck on her English, she’d just point to the sign, and say “You can read that,” which mostly made me laugh because I’d already read the signs in the ethnic regions exhibit, so I’d start prompting her when she got stuck.

Katherine is 16, and is out of school for the summer. Her English is really excellent, and she was good company, if a less than perfectly polished tour guide. She shared some interesting things about the museum with me, and when she discovered that this was my first time in Urumqi, she wanted to know if I’d had any Xinjiang food yet. I hadn’t, and she felt the need to rectify that, so we left the museum on a hunt for regional food. I asked her several times if her parents or aunt needed to know where she was, or if they were OK with her doing this, and she kept insisting that it was fine, and she provided some great food suggestions as we stopped at a few stands. She tried to make the traditional bread guy make me a hot traditional bread, but he didn’t want to. It took about 5 minutes before he convinced her to take the regular one, because she really, really wanted me to like it, and said it was better hot.

Then we made our way down the street, past a bakery, where she wouldn’t let me stop even though it looked delicious because it was not traditional, and into a hole in the wall restaurant, that turned out to be beautiful inside. “Do you want a snack or a meal?” She asked. When I replied that I was ready for dinner she ordered for me. We started with Uyghur yoghurt (tart and delicious, with a sprinkling of sugar on top), then a plate of mutton cooked with rice and carrots (my favorite thing I’ve eaten so far in China- and the Uyghur use silverware, not chopsticks), and a cucumber salad. I felt like this was plenty of food, and Katherine only had a bite or two since she’d had a late lunch. But then my roast mutton kebab with a spicy rub came out with a gigantic plate of chopped noodles in a mildly spicy sauce. You can eat the skewered meat plain, or twist it off into the noodles (a much better choice as it toned down the spiciness). It was amazing, and I probably would have not known to order it if she hadn’t been there with me.

Katherine was a fount of information not so much about the history of the region, but about daily life in China. Her English is so good, but she’s worried that she won’t get a high enough score on the Gao Kao, the college entrance exam, so she’s thinking about going to college in the US. Turpan, where she’s from has a sister city in Hunan province, and since there are not very many good schools in the poorer Turpan, the city in Hunan hosts students from Turpan to go to the better schools there. Her mom appears to be a construction worker- Katherine says she’s always sunburned from working so many hours outside, and her Dad seems to rotate between similar types of jobs. From Katherine’s perspective, this means that they are working very hard to support her in her education, and she’s very grateful to them.

So it ended up being a wonderfully unexpected afternoon, and I had a great time on my first day in a new city, talking with a new friend.

Yuanmingyuan park and the Forbidden City!

Some of the other excursions we’ve been on include the Old Summer Palace and the Forbidden City. The old summer palace is relatively close to where we live, and we had quite the adventure getting there. Google maps does a remarkably good job with bus routes in Beijing, so we looked up online how to get there, and it turns out that bus 628 left from the gate of the university and went right to the Old Summer Palace! We went to the bus stop indicated, and there was no bus 628 there. We walked down to the next stop on the line where there was also a second bus that went to the Old Summer Palace, but we didn’t really remember the number, and 628 wasn’t there either! We guessed as to the number of the alternate bus, and fortunately got it right, but when we got to our final destination, there was no bus 628 listed on the final bus stop! We just had a phantom bus experience, and fortunately it turned out well, but was so strange to not have the bus exist at all…

The Old Summer Palace is mostly a large park, which was lovely, but much more crowded than other parks we’ve been to, and the ruins were relatively unimpressive, so it was sort of a letdown, but at least it made for a quick afternoon trip, as it takes so long to get places here.

We also made an afternoon trip to the Forbidden City. It is on one side of Tianamen square, and you have to get to it by going in a tunnel under the street. All bags have to go through the scanner, and they patted down everyone that went in. Except, apparently, for foreigners. Very notably, they just waved us through, and every single other person in line (who were all Chinese) got patted down.

The Forbidden City was VAST! There were a lot of the main buildings that you think of, but then there are also alleys and houses off to all sides, along with enormous plazas, old fountains, canals, and one park. We thought a lot about the concubines that were there with their bound feet, and how they would have had to be carried around the whole thing- everything is so spread out, that they couldn’t walk that far, and if they wanted to go anywhere, even within the city, they would have to have someone take them, making them essentially prisoners in their own homes.

As we first got to the Forbidden City, it was very crowded and we were dodging tour groups, but fortunately we circled back around as we left, and found the front areas practically empty. It was nice to get to see it without so many people and to be able to imagine a bit more of the tranquility that the emperor and family were able to enjoy.

Now I see!

When we first got here, we were told that you could get prescription glasses for practically nothing in China, and that the place you could do that was right next to what is called the dirt market, where you can get antiques, authentic and otherwise, of all kinds. Accordingly, we planned an afternoon to make the excursion.

Our first stop was the glasses mall,
where it turned out that I could actually get glasses for practically nothing. I bought a pair of prescription sunglasses, and a pair of regular glasses for 350 Yuan, or about $55. The cute Chinese girls in the store, and Lori my co worker helped me to pick out some fun frames to try out. I always feel like I need to be conservative when spending hundreds of dollars on glasses at home, because it is an expensive risk if I don’t end up liking something. But for $20, I wanted something a bit more fun, so my new regular glasses are tortoise shell and lime green, and much larger than usual! It has been fun to try them out! It took them 2 hours to make the glasses, so we went over and spent the afternoon at the dirt market.

It was a shopping mecca with all kinds of different things, from artwork, to jewelry, to ceramics and fabrics, and most of it was cheap, and so fun to browse. The layout had a main building filled with real antiques, furniture and expensive artwork. Then there are small shops built into the walls that hold the next tier down in terms of quality and price. Then you get the stalls under the covered area, the blankets on the ground in the covered area, and the blankets on the ground in the “bring your own umbrella or swelter in the sun” area. Prices and quality dropped at each level, so depending on what we were looking for, the further we got from the main building, the less we paid for what we were buying. Mostly we just picked up a few trinkets, but had fun wandering and seeing what people were selling, and watching the other people shopping.

Hot, hot, hot and windy!

The summer palace is another place I visited and enjoyed, but never got around to posting about because I feel like I need to treat you to a lengthy essay on the history of the place, but although I foolishly purchased an audio guide, it was next to worthless, as it was supposed to tell from GPS where I was, and it didn’t. It also kept turning off, and when it did talk, it invariably repeated the same thing I heard at the very beginning and got deep into Buddhist philosophy in a poor English translation, and I got nothing out of it, even when it repeated itself. So, here’s the history of the summer palace: The emperor and family used to live there in the summer. The end. You can probably find a nice Wikipedia article on it to fill in the gaps. Maybe I should find that Wikipedia article so I know what I saw…

Here’s what I thought- it was a lovely setting, and lots of climbing: stairs, clambering up rocks, climbing hills, etc. The palace was beautiful and fun to see where people lived. There was one building where the empress lived that was furnished in the way she had it when she lived there, and it was amazing, but we didn’t actually get to go in, but could look at it through very dusty windows.

The interesting part of the excursion was that the summer palace was supposed to close at 6. At about 5:00, the clouds rolled in, and there was a lovely breeze coming from across the lake. At about 5:15, that nice breeze turned into a brisk and lively wind. At that point, they closed the doors to everything that didn’t lead out, closed all the little shops, including the place where I had to return my audio guide to get my deposit back (!) and shut down everything abruptly 40 minutes early. I wanted my 100 yuan deposit back, and really didn’t want my useless audio guide, but couldn’t find anyone to help me turn it in, since the kiosk had closed. I finally found a Chinese lady who was trying to do the same thing, and just followed her. By bullying any number of people, she found a kiosk that was closed, but still had a person in it, and made them take it back, so all was well, and it turned out to be a lovely adventure, if a bit quickly terminated.

I also took advantage of the bad weather to ride in this little bike rickshaw back to the subway station!