Beijing to Berlin

Riding the U-Bahn in Berlin, a feeling of warm familiarity overcame me. I had arrived, not only to my destination on this three-month journey across Eurasia, but to a nation that has been my second home before and now will be again.

I marveled at being able to understand, once again, the voices and signs around me (I speak a bit of German), and at the German habit of instantly breaking into English when they see me struggling. They graciously see an English speaker as an opportunity to practice a language they recognize as the most prominent international tongue. They are not shy about it, as are the few Chinese who speak English. And they are not insulted by its use, as the proud and provincial Hungarians.

It's been several months now, and there's really no good excuse for having left our blog readers in a total lurch as to our whereabouts. I think most readers have figured out we're still alive and not in some Central Asian jail cell. Actually, we've been quite enjoying a life of long weekend hikes, strolls around the ever-so-quaint pedestrian street scape in our new home of Bonn, and sampling the best Germany has to offer in meats, breads, and vegetables. Somehow, we got here and got busy setting up our life, and the more time that passed, the more embarrassing it got to finish the final post summarizing our trip.

Many apologies. Here goes.

Off the plane in Kiev, we wandered around the well-preserved baroque city avoiding any serious effort to visit tourist sites as we waited for Ben to arrive and inject new energy into the group.

When he did, we took several trains to eastern Hungary where we sampled musky, sweet wines in the famed Tokay region. Then I spent the remainder of my days in the Spis region of central Slovakia, an area where ugly, Soviet style housing blocks clash with wonderful medieval towns and some bucolic and forested landscapes before taking an overnight train to Berlin.

In Berlin I was reminded of how much the life around me had changed since Day One of the trip in Beijing and I thought about the transition points. Chopsticks, to chopsticks and spoons in Western China, to knives and forks from Kiev westward. Women covered in long robes and head scarves in Kashgar, to female frontal nudity on an advertisement for laser skin surgery on the Berlin metro. Tea, to instant coffee in Eastern Europe, to a pot of fresh brew in Germany. No dairy or bread, to Tibetan simple, sour yak milk cheeses and soda bread, to bagels in Western China, to mare and camel milk in Kazakhstan, and on to what has to be the most sophisticated and developed bread and cheese cultures in the world in Western Europe. China's disgust of body hair, to German women in summer tank tops exposing bushes from their armpits. Mobs at ticket windows in China, to a cashier's admonishment I received at a lunch counter in Slovakia when I tried to cut in front to quickly buy a chocolate bar.

Germany and China do not actually occupy different continents, despite what geography teaches. But they are, metaphorically speaking, an ocean apart in culture and language. As we found out, the stark differences between the peoples on both ends of the Eurasia continent develop incrementally over the distance as one culture blends into the next.

Central Asia serves as the most significant connection point, a veritable blend of peoples who have long been exchanging cultural practices and ideas along ancient trade routes and more recently by way of Soviet hegemony. East and West meet in the cosmopolitan city of Almaty, a miniature Europe built on the Central Asian steppes, and in the bustling Kashgar market in Western China, one of the largest and most central centers of trade in the world.

It was almost easy to miss some of the differences as we traveled these many months, so incrementally were they sometimes introduced.

A focus on differences misses the continuity we found across our journey. "The World is Smaller than You Think," a subplot of our trip, does, in fact, bear true. The Buddhist temples in China, where the devoted come to pray and leave fruit and flower offerings, are not, fundamentally, different from the Orthodox churches we saw in Kiev where the pious lit candles and dropped change in money bins.

The forces of globalization and modernization have brought many of the same products across the globe, from Magnum ice cream bars to a near universal love of television. In terms of human nature, we found kind-hearted people everywhere who graciously offered us help with nothing expected in return. We also came across liars and cheats who sought to take advantage of the ignorance of outsiders. Everywhere, in varying degrees, we found both unwelcoming stares and genuine curiosity.

We would like to invite you to our new blog, "The Pragmatic Epicurean." Once again, you can subscribe using your email (see the link on the right hand side of the page) or via an rss feed (very top on the right). The blog will chronicle our adventures in food and travel, starting, of course, with our year in Germany. Our first post "Bonn Voyage" is already there (and we promise to be punctual).

Additional photos of the Beijing to Berlin trip are up on our flickr account.

We cheated. No other way to say it.

Traveling overland across Eurasia in the height of summer travel season is not possible without weeks to spare.

For several days we worked to book tain tickets to Russia, but all were sold out for the foreseable future. The bus? Possible if we were to travel days on end with no stops.

Given the choice of possibly not meeting our fourth traveler, Ben, or cheating, we chose the latter.

Early tomorrow morning we have a flight to Kiev, Ukraine. We will miss spending time in Kazakhstan's small towns, but skipping a second border crossing into Russia is a bit of a relief (though at the least would make a good story).

We've learned that travel is never a sure thing in this part of the world, and an ability to wait or pick up and go in an instant is essential.

Planning ahead, however, is not always possible, particularly if you are not in the country and aren't familiar with its systems.
It's funny because after two months in China we had learned its transportation system well. How to book trains, when to book trains, how long a trip would take, the different seating classes. Same with the buses. Need to get somewhere in China? No problem.

But cross an international border and all of a sudden we faced once again the unfamiliar, which takes time and effort to figure out.

Traveling on your own without a tour group means that a good part of your time is spent figuring out logistics: exchanging money, how to use the Internet, where to sleep and eat, fundamental phrases for communication, and more.

Almaty is a slice of Europe in the Central Asian steppes.

Despite its trials, we rather enjoy diving into adaptation mode and learning to swim again, since we come to know some of the basic details of life and how it compares to other places.

We also run into more everyday characters, like the heavy-set woman at the train station this morning who runs the set of luggage lockers. Subtlety was not her forte. She screamed at us from across the room as we were loading a couple lockers with our bags, well aware we don't speak Russian. She was the sort we've seen elsewhere in Almaty. Our hotel floor attendant, for example, ran her space like a gulag. She alone had the key to the single shower on the floor and our level of cleanliness was determined by her decision to show up at night.

We call these sorts, "Graduates of the Soviet School of Service."

Creature Comforts
When you're traveling for months on end, you start to revel in creature comforts. Hotel rooms, the one space in the world at that moment where you can shut yourself away, become "home" and little things like shower soap and fresh towels are items of excitement.

An outdoor cafe and a glass of beer on a warm afternoon is the height of pleasure.

A woman sells fermented horse and camel milk at the Almaty farmer's market.

A woman sells honey at the Almaty farmer's market.

In Almaty, we discovered the baths.

Perhaps because of our restricted and unpredictable shower allowances, we were drawn to the city's bathhouse where for two hours we could lounge around naked (men and women seperated) in saunas and plunge pools or get beaten with myrtle leaves by a masseuse.

We came out of there yesterday with all the tension removed from our logistical days of hell. Knocking back a bottle of vodka finished the trick. As a matter of fact, we're headed there again before our 3 a.m. flight.

The Miracle Product

Speaking of vodka, we've come to see it as the Dr. Bronner's of Russia after the "miracle" natural soap that's touted for its many uses. Vodka here is one of the cheapest items on store shelves, cheaper even than bottled water.

So we discovered that besides a drink when needed, it can double as a cleaning agent, a disinfectant for fruits and vegetables, a gift, a mouthwash, a hand sanitizer, a degreaser, and more possibilities we are discovering every day.

As a matter of fact, we've taken to carrying around a bottle in our day pack.

Our first two days in Kazakhstan were not spent drinking in the snow-capped peaks of the Altay Mountains, or imbibing liesurely in one of Almaty's shady sidewalk bars.

No, we were in for a real shocker entering this ex-Soviet republic, though come to think of it, we should have expected trouble.

Lines filled our days. Lines requiring us to get through the border, lines requiring us to register our passports at some ministry office, and to purchase train tickets. Even a 45-minute line to buy three doner kebabs at a "fast food" stand.

These were not some pansy single-file lines, either, where your placement is so assured that you could kick back and read a book. No, these lines were filled with expert line manipulators in places where nameless bureaucrats could care less what happens on the other side of the counter so long as the proper form is before them, or perferably money.

Perhaps the most startling example was the Khorgos border crossing from China. It took about a week to place ourselves in the right position, only to find that one of Central Asia's busiest border points closed on Sunday. No matter, we woke early Monday morning and walked to the border post 90 minutes ahead of opening time. We thought we were golden.

Military staff roamed about yawing, and staff arrived still in their street clothes as the clocked ticked past opening hour into 45 minutes later.

We started to sweat, thinking that at this pace, we might not get through in time for their two-hour lunch break. The growing crowd was getting restless, and our standing spots were quickly being usurped by late interlopers who were climbing over metal railings to plop themselves in front.

It was, quite literally, a stampede when the Chinese guards finally swung open the gate. Men and women of all ages and sizes threw the full weight of their bodies and bags forward and began running, in high heels and dress shoes, towards the next building. Meanwhile, the cargo trucks, which had lined up days in advance to procure their spots, began driving through a seperate gate and turning into the scrambling crowd.

I'm ashamed to admit that I ran too. But we were at the front of the first set of passport checks and sailed through the Kazakh side, too.

Our trials were not over, however. Apparently official stamps on a visa at the border are not enough to give a traveler legitimate status in Kazakhstan. We had to register yesterday at the "Office of Visas and Registration" in Alamaty, which involved more shapeless line battles. Think you're at the front and there's always someone who finds a way to squirrel around you, using the window ledging for leverage or ducking under you to appear in front. There's no shame involved.

A tactic we picked up in China has been particularly effective. We call it the "blockade," and it involves us forming a human barrier at ticket windows to shut out any cheats.

Of course, that definately doesn't mean that once you reach the window troubles are over. We found ourselves face to face yesterday with a pompous official who wouldn't take "tourism" as the simple answer to why we were in Kazakhstan.

"Why did you come here?" he demanded.

I thought but didn't say, "Because we want see home country of Borat, Great and Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."

He then told us that Kazakhs know more about American history than Americans do, and directed us to another line to pay an $8 registration fee. It took another hour to finally reach him again, and he then asked for further copies of the registration forms and passports.

"Is there anything else you will be needing?" Jacob said diplomatically.

We had to go back again early evening to wait in line again for our freshly officialized passports, which the office was holding despite the fact that a traveler can't even book a hotel room without it.

We wonder what kind of hell we're into entering the Russian "Motherland" in a week.

Retirees

It's a hard fall when your standard of living drops. China was so good to us, in terms of our purchasing power. But lately we've felt like a bunch of retirees on shortened pensions.

Hotel prices exceed those of Western Europe while the quality has dropped well below Super 8. Our first night in Almaty -- Kazakhstan's former capitol before its meglomaniac president moved it to a nowhere outpost on the northwestern steppes -- was downright depressing.

At $65 for 12 hours rest, we got a room with two small twin beds, a lock that didn't work, no sink, and dried blood on the floor. Now we're in a $40 rat hole that charges an extra $1 for a lone shower on a crowded hallway.

I have no idea what's going on with the hotel prices here, except that there seems to be a mysterious shortage and nothing has been upgraded since the start of the Cold War.

City of Parks

All this is to say, we don't really hate Kazakhstan. In fact, Almaty is one of the most pleasant cities we have visited (once the hotel situation is sorted out).

It's so thick with foilage and parks that it's easy to miss the circle of snowy mountains surrounding the town of 3 million.

Out of registration offices, we have enjoyed the change from China to what is, in culture, a very Russified place.

The people seem a peaceful mix of Central Asian and very Western-looking types. Tall, muscular Russian men, with blond hair and blue eyes, stroll the streets with dark, heavy-set babushkas of Central Asian origin.

And for once, we feel a sense of space and openness, which comes from a country declining in numbers and not exploding at the seams, like China.

We have not quite arrived in Europe, but we are getting there.

What's best to do on a mid-summer day on the edge of a desert so named in the local tongue, "Go in but don't come out"?

The town of Kashgar -- the last outpost on China's rail line near the bleak, waterless Taklimakan Desert -- shirks the heat with a bowl of shaved ice mixed with yoghurt.

Swirling their bowls to a heavy ethno-pop beat, women and men face the ice shaver in theater-style seating as if their happiness depends on his continued performance.

But the hot, dry air does not deter Kashgarians from living out the creed of Islam. Women wrap their heads in scarves, some draping heavy brown knit cloth over their faces. Men top their heads with kofis or even winter fur hats.

We've arrived in far Western China, a Muslim-dominated area bordering Central Asia's 'Stans. The Chinese make a reasonable attempt at weilding a presence here, insisting, for example, that the area give up its local time zone and follow the two-hour later Beijing time. But locals mostly work to their own time and tune, connected to their Western neighbors in nearly every way but statehood.

"You go in but you don't come out" is the local meaning of the Taklimakan Desert, in China's far West.

A seperatist movement in the area has been largely quashed as China, in post 9/11 fashion, seeks to designate the group as "terrorists."

Though China has put out a call for its eastern citizens to populate the West, those who do walk the streets of Kashgar are of the visor and camera-toting sort and stand out as foreigners as much as we do.

Faces here morph from Chinese to Turkic, Mongol and even Slavic, while the signs have three predominant scripts, none of which we can properly read: Chinese, Arabic, and Cyrillic.

"We're in trouble now," said Jacob as we arrived into Urumqi, the region's capitol last weekend.

The Uigher, the main Muslim ethnic group populating the area, have a love for the grill. Our two-thirds vegetable diet, easy to maintain in eastern China, was instantly displaced by lamb galore. We've had it on skewers, in pilaf, and wrapped in bread pockets called samsa's.

Children cool off in a fountain on Kashgar's main square.

We were surprised to see piles of bagels sold on the street. If only we had some of that Tibetan sour yak cheese ...

The main reason for landing in Kashgar was to visit the Sunday market, where half of Central Asia, it seems, descends to shop. As one of the major Silk Road stops, Kashgar is used to the attention, designating a whole stretch of the city to weekend market vending.

A donkey parking lot in back of the vendors at the busy Kashgar market.

Walking there early Sunday, we crossed a bridge where chopped donkey was being sold straight from the sidewalk with the head, hair-intact, as a piece on its own. But most of what was visible, at least to us, was pretty quotidian: vegetables and melons, cooking ware, lots of clothing and fabric, and street food.

Grilled sheep heads are a Kashgar market specialty.

Of course, people watching and not shopping was our main sport (though Tony and Jacob outfit themselves as men with new knives).

Gaggles of women, hip-heavy and toting children, wandered around in sparkly bright dresses, particularly attracted to the fabric section where the patterns were decidedly 20-years old or more. Some of them colored in the space bewteen their eyebrows, creating a unibrow effect.

The men, about half the poundage of their wives, looked rather 19th Century in ill-fitted suits and fedora hats.

Men gather around a melon seller. Melons were, perhaps, the most sold item at the Kashgar market.

A boy stands guard over his chicks at the Kashgar market.

By its sheer size and activity, the Kashgar market was worth the trip. This evening we're off to Yining, a small town on the Kazakhstan border, where we plan to sleep like the nomads we are, but in yurts. Then, onto Kazakhstan.

I was curious to read the other day in an American news story that China is licensing no new Internet cafes, "amid official concern that online material is harming young people."

Judging by what I've seen in many a Chinese wan-ba, I can't imagine anything worse than dazed eyes, limpid limbs, and perhaps a latent desire to fence one's comrades in real life.

The cavernous wan-ba's are jammed with row after row of blank-faced young men fighting dragons and other mystical creatures while the young women webcam with love interests. The keyboards are often sprinkled with cigarette ash from the last user.

Wan-ba's are already proliferous and cheap, something like 10-cents for a half-hour use, making them affordable to most anyone here so long as they can read, read pinyin, and operate computer technology.

But with the Chinese government already blocking many online news and information sites like the BBC and, up until recently Wikipedia, it takes a bit of skill to get through to anything potentially "dangerous."

You'd also be stupid to try anything funny. You have to register to get into a particular computer, often giving your identification card or passport.

Links to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests repeatedly brings up "problem loading page" messages, though curiously, references to it as a tourist site clear quite fine. Tony's been having trouble getting onto some physics sites. Oddly enough, www.phdcomics, a geeky site featuring the lifestyle of geeky stick-figure graduate students, is also blocked. Wonder who's threatened there.

Chinese censorship seems particularly acute in the news. We've had occasion to watch CCTV9, the English language news channel. It seems the best way to create societal apathy is to bore viewers stiff with inconsequentials on segments about trade or cultural expos or footage of international meetings where officials blab at microphones.

CCTV9 covered one such trade meeting with the U.S. using footage of American government officials waxing thick about China. The New York Times the next day reported that the trade talks were a disaster.

In China, the press release is the news story.

The extent to which the government is forced to address an issue, such as a major algae outbreak in some lakes that recently shut down drinking water, the news is always presented in a proactive "here's-how-we're- going-to-fix-it" attitude.

Sometimes it seems less is better. "Flooding in Western China," a story of legitimate interest to any traveler, failed to mention where, exactly, the floods were. After some further research, we discovered it was in eastern Sichuan, though perhaps elsewhere too. A bridge collapse in Guangdong province was easily explained the same day as the sole fault of a passing boat, apparently no investigation necessary.

Then there's the story about a slave operation in central China where hundreds of people were stuck working in brick kilns without pay or ability to escape. My first question was, which local party officials were part of this racket? The new story in the China Daily the next day pointed out that several officials were part of the 168 arrested. No names, no accountability.

My favorite example, however, is the recent food poisoning scares. The only news I've read about anti-freeze in toothpaste and cough syrup for export, and babies dying with enlarged heads because of tainted formula is in Western sources.

The Chinese news sources report, without context, that the government, too, has found problems with Western imports: ants in some pistachio nuts.

I can't help but wonder why the Chinese people put up with such shoddy information and government heavy-handedness, even when their lives could be at risk. Information about the SARS outbreak, after all, was first distributed by text messaging, not by the government.

But judging by the screens at Internet cafes and the wispy-thin major newspapers, I'd say the Chinese people seem conditioned to tune out the news. Thirty years after this county swallowed the bitter pill of the Cultural Revolution, it accepted de-politicization as a way to move on.

Besides, who'd want to sit through segment after segment of Chinese expo news. A good game of mahjong is certainly more interesting, and group tai chi in a nearby park more invigorating.

Posted by ahawkes.

Here are some of our recent photos, which did not make it onto the last blog because of upload limits.

Our pot of chicken stew comes to life.

Yaks walk down the center of the street at a town in western Sichuan.

The Tibetan men of Litang, a town in far western Sichuan, are a tough bunch with a love for cowboy hats and motorcycle riding.

[i]Western Sichuan and Yunnan are the supposed home of the first flowering plants. Many natives are garden varieties in the West.

Tony turns down this man's generous offer to pick his ears on the street.[/i]

A streetside noodle fryer in Xi'an demonstrates "breath of the wok."

Wandering around the Zhongdian bus station one early morning we saw a well-adapted, if not modern Tibetan monk.

He was wearing traditional red robes overlaid with a bright yellow Columbia outdoor jacket and a cowboy hat.

Lama-boy? Or was he a Cow-ma?

His attire spoke to the spirit of eastern Tibet, the area of western Yunnan and Sichuan that's not officially part of China's most mountainous provence, but is in spirit and culture.

It's a hardscrabble life in the Himalaya foothills, where summer temperatures dip below 50-degrees and the altitude is higher than America's Sierras.

The Tibetans out there have a tough edge with their long hair and beards, practical garb and mannerisms, and free-spirited attitude. I know who I'd place my bets on in a wrestling match with a Han Chinese.

Yaks drag wooden beams, that will be used for construction, up a hillside in Zhongdian pastureland.

In one town, Litang, the town scene was motorcycling. Men with their babe Tibetan women riding the back raced up and down Main Street with colorful mud guards covering their back wheels.

Other characters roamed Litang: ruffian children with snot dripping from their noses, monks begging at restaurant tables, old women turning prayer wheels, and businessmen turning a profit selling dead caterpillars for eating.

The Tibetan frontier towns are mostly a collection of low-slung shops selling needed wares, while hamlets nestled in valleys or alongside cliffs eek out a living off yak herds and wheat.

The food is basic. Soda bread, yak meat, sour-tasting cheese, and to drink, salty yak-butter tea. We drank it happily in a shack in yak pastureland where, on a hike one day, our Tibetan guide had taken us to eat and meet his family.

For the record, though, yak-butter tastes a lot better when spiked with hard-grain alcohol.

We had trouble keeping the pace set by our chain-smoking Tibetan guide on a hike through Zhongdain pastureland.

We also encountered for the first time in China an awareness of the environment amoung certain people, though suspect that much of the American outdoor gear is worn out of necessity and comfort, when affordable.

Anyone familiar with lefty communities in America would feel at home here, too. Patterns and symbols on tablecloths, wall hangings, and doors are vintage Berkeley cafe, while the prevalence of wood is reminiscent of an aging hippy's backwoods cabin.

The Tibetans might not know it, but they have a bond with the American left in style and spirit. If you can imagine, think hippy-Texan.

Old Tibetan women picnic on a hillside underneath a tangle of prayer flags.

We traveled the backroads in rickety buses for days, bumping along dirt roads over mountain passes that exceeded 15,000-feet (the highest mountain in the continental U.S. is Mt. Whitney at 14,000-feet).

It takes two full days to travel 100-miles. The views were spectacular with knife-sharp peaks covered in snow, hillsides dotted with yaks, and boxy Tibetan homes with roof shingles held down by rocks.

As the scenery changed, so did the housing construction and design. First wood, then plaster walls, then rocks. Each kind had a different highly-stylized window.

Sitting for days on end, I thought I would get bedsores and I was aching to walk the landscape. It was then I pronounced that I would bike those "foothills" one day, before gasping for air at the combined impact of high altitude and cigarette smoke clouding the bus. Guess something was going to my head.

The Village Connivers

If our heads were in the clouds from Tibet-philia, here was a grounding moment.

Mid-afternoon one day we reached Xiangcheng, a small town halfway between nowhere and nowhere.

The most ambitous people in town had banded together in a scam to strip Western tourists of their cash and travel plans. It involved the bus ticket office clerk, the nearby gold-toothed guest house operator, and possibly a taxi driver in a white minibus.

The ticket office clerk refused to sell us bus tickets to the next town, or even to say exactly when the bus departed. Meanwhile, the guest house operator was haggling us to take a room. And the taxi driver kept coming around offering to drive us to the next town for $60, no negotiating.

The confusion went round and round for an entire evening and into the next morning, when after being refused bus tickets yet again we finally took the taxi driver up on his offer with three fellow Westerners.

It was sobering to realize that the only way between nowhere, and the nowhere further down the road were paper tickets in the hands of village connivers.

The Spirit of China

The spirit of China is beginning to seep in me in subtle ways.

I noticed this the other day when it suddenly dawned on me how much it made sense to get rice at the end of a meal. I had been confused and somewhat annoyed by this practice for some time, and attributed it to China's perpetually bad service culture.

But here's the deal. When eating out, you want to consume the good stuff first and top off with rice. Rice is the tummy-filler in China, not a palate accompanyment.

Also, I now prefer the squat toilets, especially in public places. I will never, ever warm to the stench, or the abhorrent plumbing systems here, or doing my business in front of others, as is common at pit toilets in the countryside.

But I see now that squatting has its advantages in dirty, public places. "Western" toilets be gone!

Here's the kicker. Today at lunch, I spat my chicken bones on the table. Just like that. There was no personal plate, as we eat out of the same bowls in the middle of the table.

So I did what the Chinese do, no second thoughts about it. I dropped my head, and dropped my bones.

I woke up the other morning in a half-dreamy state and turned my head towards the train window to see what I'd behold.

The countryside was lush and tropical, broken up by steeply terraced farm fields running up the edges of hills. In valleys peasants plowed using water buffalo. The scenery was visible only as glimpses through heavy mists. As the train barreled insistently into mountain tunnels, I would close my eyes momentarily and let sleep begin to overwhelm me again before I would reawaken at the other end.

This was Yunnan, China's farthest Southwest provence, a place known for its tremendous human, biological and geographical diversity. I didn't want to miss a second of it.

Yunnan, so remote that the long ago Chinese dynasties barely maintained control, feels more connected, in some ways, to Southeast Asia and Tibet.

Bordering Tibet, Burma, Laos, and Vietnam, the region has tropical rainforests, extinct volcanoes, an active fault line (there was a 7.0 earthquake two days before we arrived), and high altitude plateaus rising to the Himalayas.

Many common Western garden plants are native to this area, including camilla, rhododendron, azaleas, vibernum, hibiscus, and others.

We decided to take a bit of time to explore the Western half of the province after a few days in the capital of Kunming, a modern, relaxed city at an altitude of 6,000-feet (higher than Denver) with few tourist sites (super!) and consistently excellent cuisine.

We would discover the city hours later when we arrived. But we enjoyed the journey from Guilin every bit as much.

Trains are the common way for common folk to get around China, since roads are often impassible because of traffic and connections between towns are poor.

Tickets are nearly impossible to get at last minute, though the train stations are full of people sleeping amidst their bags in the hopes they might be able to procure a spot.

Gaining entry, however, is worth the wait and trouble. Long-distance sleeper trains are clean, safe, and if not always speedy at 16-plus hours, reliably on time. Far better, in fact, than Amtrak.

Passengers line up well ahead of boarding time and when the gate opens surge forward, nearly climbing on top of one another in the typical Chinese fashion to get ahead. The rush perplexed me at first, since everyone has assigned bunks, but I later realized the value of obtaining space on the overhead luggage racks.

Once comfortably situated, passengers settle down in their cabins, usually using the bottom bunks as communal sitting areas. The bottom bunk is the most prized spot on trains, the first to sell out and the most expensive because of convenience and access to a small table.

But we found we like the middle and upper bunks, which are more private even as they require a bit of scrambling up narrow ladders.

The middle bunk is situated for perfect bedside window gazing, and it is there that I've spent many an hour watching the countryside roll on by.

With full days spent on foot exporing new towns, the trains are a chance for us to relax and interact with the Chinese who sometimes need to be around us a bit before they are comfortable enough to attempt conversation. The young men seem particularly interested in us and most able to communicate a bit in English.

The trains serve full meals, but most Chinese delve into personal stashes of raman noodles. A constant supply of hot water provides for soup and tea.

To while away the hours, people play cards, chat, doze, and stare out the window. But sometimes they are ready for anything. As I went to get beer from food car one early evening, Jacob pulled out his portable Chinese chess board to ready our game. I came back and my seat had been taken by a man who couldn't resist the temptation to play.

After beating Jacob, he was followed by a 9-year-old boy, who eagerly pressed forward with quick moves. Jacob was nearly beaten again except for the boy's few fatal errors. He was anxious to try again, and we realized he'd probably be happily at it all night. We had to kick him out so I would get a chance to play the next game.

On one ride, the indifferent stares of the older women in the next cabin changed to smiles when I pulled out my little sewing kit and began replacing the broken buttons on Tony's shirt. Needle and thread in hand, this independent Western woman had transformed, in their eyes, into a properly trained wife.

There are a few downsides. The toilets are indescribably disgusting and, to boot, get locked up for long periods of time when the train is stopped. The trains could travel a lot faster if not for unexpected stopping, sometimes not even at stations, for 30 minutes or longer. When that happens, the air conditioning shuts off, the cars heat up and the top bunk becomes a sweat lodge.

There's also little ability to plan one's own sleeping schedule. The lights go out at 9:30 p.m. and flick on at 6:30 a.m., along with music and the screech of the food cart vendors.

But we consider these rather small imperfections, easily offset by glimpses we get of Chinese life both inside and outside the train.

On the road

We've taken the bus, too. Let's just say the road to Shangri-la risks life and limb.

I was mesmerized, unable to take my eyes off the bus driver who adroitly maneuvers past slower vehicles on twisty mountain roads by using the oncoming lane with seconds to spare.

It's like watching a video game only the thrill is heightened by the fact that my life is on the line. Will the driver, unlit cigarette in mouth, be able to beat the odds, passing three vehicles around a blind corner and come out the other side unscathed?

How will he manage to zip past a herd of goats, a swarm of schoolkids on bicycles, clouds of burning trash, and a pile of hay raked purposefully into the middle of the road by peasants hoping to use the passing vehicles for crushing power?

This was the ride we faced on a seven-hour bus trip along the old Tibet highway to Zhongdian, a town in Northwest Yunnan that's remaking itself as the supposed site of Shangri-la.

Nevermind that Shangri-la is a fictional place from James Hilton's Lost Horizon. So much for everlasting life. The old people seem to be getting older this town and there's plenty of ugliness to the modern buildings near the bus station.

I'm reminded of the Third World's olfactory trifecta: human/animal waste, burning trash, and vehicle exhaust.

We'll be spending a few days in this Tibet town, drinking yak butter tea, and then are headed north into Western Sichuan for more of the frontier life.