Jun 2007

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.

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.

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.

I've already mentioned the Chinese propensity to nickel and dime a visitor at every possible tourist site. But the practice reached new lows in and around Guilin, the major departure point for visitors to view one of China's most revered tourist desitnations: the oddly pointy limestone mountains, called karsts, along the Li River.

In the center of town, the city has taken steps to obstruct the view of one such formation called Elephant Hill so that interested viewers instead pay a $7 entrance fee. All for the priviledge of walking past the obscuring vegetation to a lower walkway, and then being harassed by souvenir vendors. No thanks.

Later we shelled out $32 per ticket for a four-hour boat ride down the Li River, jam packed with Chinese tourists competing for viewing and photography angles while a loudspeaker blasted nonstop commentary, ads, and music. The morning started with us being delivered to a kind of holding pen for 45-minutes, where we stood amidst a room full of souvenir sellers.

It ended in Yangshou, probably once a peaceful small town nestled amongst the karst and now a backpackers "paradise" with more Internet bars, tourist kitsch stands and travel agencies than seems possible.

Ah, this is modern day tourism. Amidst the eye-popping beauty and wonder of these magical places a whole Disneyworld like experience has been constructed to squeeze out every last yuan from one's pockets.

Hardly ever does a traveler truely get away from the crowds; hardly ever does she feel a sense of discovery or serenity. In China, there is always some soundtrack playing. Even climbing a mountain path in Putuoshan, hidden speakers play traditional Chinese music.

The mythical world treasures that I've fantasized about seeing since childhood are actually more a mixed bag of awe and annoyances. Fighting the crowds for a good view, patiently ignorning dogged touts, shelling out money constantly: these are the realities of the modern travel experience.

I ran into a similar situation years ago in Kenya, where a safari tour involved vans racing across the Sarengeti in a competition to see the animals before they were scared off.

We ran into a couple of grimy young backpackers off the night train in Taishan, Americans from Florida, who were heading later to Chengdu in the hopes of holding baby pandas. Apparently they had seen some photo of it being done by a tourist.

Tony later remarked, "You see, any idiot nowadays can get on a plane and arrive almost anywhere in the world."

The affects of tourism are most disturbing when it comes to interacting with locals. The relationships are often reduced to buying and selling, even as there are so many opportunities for greater cross-cultural understanding. For sure, a greater mastery of the local language would surely help. Jacob, for example, has many more non-commercial encounters with the Chinese than Tony and I do. Yesterday in Yangshou, for example, he found a quiet set of steps and ate a pomelo as a number of locals chatted with him. That has not happened to me.

We have had a number of genuine encounters -- the woman in the Beijing hutong who served us a dumpling lunch, the nuns in the Putuoshan temple who gave us apples. For those we are grateful.
But I am longing to be in a place long enough where relationships can develop naturally.

Sometimes this gets started merely by showing up to the same place multiple times for dinner.

We saw that scenario happening in Qingdao where we visited the same outdoor meat griller twice for dinner. The second time he gave us a beaming smile and emptied someone else's remainders from a beer pitcher into our glasses. He appreciated the fact that we had liked his food and came back.

It's also happened on 16-hour train rides when we've been practically breathing down the necks of our fellow passengers day and night.
In a way, it's remarkable how easy and natural relationships with other people form when given the chance to blossom.

The good and bad of traveling have raised some questions in me.

How do I appreciate the major tourist sites, which are indeed some of the most remarkable places on Earth, for what they are and not just for what they have become?

How do I minimize my own negative impact as a tourist while enhancing the value that I might bring?

And how do I get the most out of the pedestrian, daily observances and encounters with Chinese society?

As we were leaving Yangshou by bus to return to Guilin, the driver insisted we pay 14 yuan even as we countered that we'd been told the ticket price was supposedly 10. We acquiesced but later noticed all the locals indeed paying 10 yuan.

It was probably good that I didn't speak Chinese then. Or should I consider it an extra "tax" of being a tourist?

It was 8:30 in the morning when Tony sat straight up in bed and proclaimed, "Is it too late for breakfast?"

We'd been planning our trip to Guangzhou pretty seriously. Or as seriously as one can get when the major decisions of a travel day are the "When are we going to eat lunch?" variety.

We'd come to Guangzhou for two days with one major purpose: to eat. Specifically, to eat dim sum, the eclectic smorgesbord of individually-ordered small dishes that is popular to China's southern coast.

Guangzhou is also our furthest point from our end destination -- Berlin. From here we start heading west, then north around the Himalayas and west again into Kazakhstan.

Guangzhou, known in English as "Canton," is a densely-populated and industrialized port city just inland from Hong Kong. The site of numerous Western trade ventures and the Opium Wars in the mid 19th Century, Guangzhou is now where Westerners come to adopt Chinese babies.

We stumbled upon the baby market at Shamian Island, the same spot where Western powers formerly set up shop and what is now a pleasant park boulevard of clustered shabby colonial buildings.

At the White Swan Hotel, newly created families sit sipping cocktails. Past a line of baby clothing stores, a Thai restaurant offers baby food on the menu served with baby spoons to boot.

The rest of downtown makes for relaxed wandering with a number of peaceful parks and busy local shops, even with temperatures in the sweltering 90's. One nice touch are the banyan trees, which canopy a number of the streets. Spindly roots hang from the branches and grow glued to the tree trunk like varicose veins.

Inspired by Tony's call for breakfast, we bounded out of bed Saturday morning to make it to prime dim sum hour at a cavernous joint with great views of the Pearl River.

The restaurant had three floors dedicated to artful eating. We chose Floor 5, where a full elevator of the hungry spilled out.

Once there, we stared blank-faced at a single sheet paper menu with more than 100 dishes whose names were written in Chinese characters.

Now we've had this problem before. Many restaurants have English translations (though we suspect that the menus are often not equivalent to the Chinese as they are catered to Western tastes -- whatever they think that is). But many other menus are in Chinese only, which has led to numerous point and eat sessions, a risky endeavor that has brought both pleasant and unpleasant suprises (like the time we ended up with a bowl of chicken feet soup).

This menu was particularly troubling.

Jacob, using his palm pilot with its Chinese-English dictionary, began stumbling over some translations, including a category he read labeled "Very Bad Dim Sum."

The next step was to turn to the chain-smoker beside him, who offered us his stewed pork dish and, once cajoled, eventually pointed us to some truly wonderful shrimp dumplings and egg rolls.

Alas, he left and we were on own again. How about some "Time-honored horse pulled pudding," Jacob translated. Or is it "Time-honored horse seduced pudding?" Or "horse rip-off pudding?"

Between all the metaphors inherent in the Chinese language and all the homonyms, you never know what you're going to eat.

The "horse pudding" ended up being a spongy cake, which we greatly enjoyed and in the words of Jacob "hardly tastes like horse at all."

"It's a nice cake," he continued. "It needs a little more horse, though."