Day 61:

These blog thingies are usally just transcritions of my paper journal with all of the personal stuff taken out. When I penned this "Day 61" entry, I wrote an illegible mess about love and attraction. Escwing my tendency to keep the personal stuff to myself, I give you the following:

"It was in the Gobi desert that I encountered C for the first time. My falling in love with her was a consequence of having read "Breakfast at Tiffany's" several times while driving to this particular location. Upon seeing C stepping in the sand before a particularly red cliffside I felt a Tourettic urge to write this in my journal: "HOLLY GOLIGHTLY IN THE DESERT." So I did that seven times.

C was wearing pants and a shirt that revealed her dark nipples and an overwrought hat that she clutched to her head, doing battle with the desert winds."

Ahem.

Day 56, 57, 58, 59, 60

Some of my Tibetan experience, now. It's the morning of the twentieth, so I'm writing about stuff that happened four days ago...

What to say?

Lhasa is nice. The streets are busy - as the city is the centre of Tibetan Buddhism, there is a constant stream of visitors and pilgrims from the countryside. The town takes on a feeling of carnival, especially when a few thousands of tourists are thrown into that mix. I spent my time in the city with my three friends from Golmud - J and K, Americans (K a student of Chinese language studying in Beijing), and E (a Frenchwoman and consummate traveller). Those three people made such wonderful company.

J is a sarcastic guy. K is his girlfriend, a gentler soul, but very accommodating of her boyfriend. J tells really hilarious stories about being "just friends" with K for a whopping THREE YEARS. He's also got an impressive collection of stories detailing a plethora of romantic failures from his high school and college freshman years. His stuff is so wonderfully self-deprecating to be funny, but I can also identify with most of it. And while I play the self deprecation card with the driest of wit (I like my sarcasm to be undetectable), this dude is truly in love, and can diminish himself with a pleasant joie-de-vie. I hope to, someday, be able to tear myself down in such a way. K, meanwhile, endures J's sense of humor quite well, though since they've only been a couple for six months, maybe this is all new to her.

Wonderful stuff.

You (you?) have no idea how happy it makes me to see that goofy, NICE guy get his girl. THAT girl, specifically.

Wonderful stuff.

E, also, makes a superior companion. She's French, though to North American ears her accent sounds like something from Manchester, while Europeans usually place her somewhere in South Africa. She's a constant traveller, having visited all over, with a collection of fine stories to tell. She maintains a flat in Paris, and has promised me a few days tour when I pass through there next.

So...

The four of us visited some of Lhasa's sights, and ate some nice food together. With E, on the second day in Lhasa, I visited the Jokala, Lhasa's primary temple and the most important temple of Tibetan Buddhism. It's an odd place place - this sort of Buddhism is very intense when compared to Seon in Korea. There, temples are small places, sparsely furnished with visual intensity found only in the main temple halls which usually contain three rather subdued statues of the Buddha. The Jokala (and other temples), though, is a labyrinthine place with many random seeming furnishings and statues, with the smell of burning Yak butter permeating the place, with candles everywhere, with money stuck to every surface, with pilgrims circling the rooms, with beggars inside and out...

The bow here is more complete, we can say, than what is done in Korea; some of the devout have callouses on their foreheads from banging against the pavement outside the temple a few times too often.

Oh... there's also a pantheon of gods and deities and reincarnated monks and oracles. I'm not sure I'd be able to get behind a religion where the leader is a reincarnated god. Not sure at all. The fun thing about Seon Buddhism is that the most respected monks are those who are most intelligent and who can communicate ideas in the best way. These guys often live deep in the mountains away from civilization. Past Dalai Lama's, meanwhile, have lived Vatican style in a 1000 room palace in the capital.

Anyhow, yeah, the Jokala is a pretty intense place. More subdued was Same monastery, a quiet place located about five kilometres north of the city center. E and I reached that place by bicycle. The scene there is quieter, as I said, and more contemplative.

Two days after visiting Same, I got back to the big show of Tibetan Buddhism... that 1000 room palace. It's called Potala, and has been home to most of the incarnations of the Dalai Lama throughout history. It was pretty neat, but the admission ticket was steep (13 USD), for a self guided tour that included access to maybe 5o of those 1000 rooms. But hey, it included a peek at the Dalai Lama's bedroom....

Day 55

Tibet! Lhasa! Shangri-la??

The train ride was okay. It took about fourteen hours, reaching all those high passes with great gusto, ending up at Lhasa, at an elevation of about 3800 metres. I got a little sick towards the end, but playing cards with my three new pals helped keep me in one piece (barely).

I did a bit of wandering around the city with E today, checking out Lhasa's sights (though saving actual entrances for tomorrow). Lhasa is a visually striking city with a style I've not encountered any time before. It's divided into a strongly Tibetan old town and a strongly Chinese influenced New Town. Both are very busy places. The old town is a maze of restaurants, shops, hotels and a general morass of tourist stuff that keeps it from getting gobbled up by the more commercial and boring new town. That place contains a collection of shops targeting the city's upper crust.

The people of Lhasa are really something special. In addition to the Tibetan and Han residents of the city, the streets are overflowing with visitors from the Tibetan countryside. These people, visiting mostly on pilgrimages to Buddhist holy sights are wonderfully dressed in the bright heavy tunics that are practical in the cold countryside, but merely curious in the city.

The smell of the city, too, is nice. The whole place smells of incense and yak butter which is burned as part of the religious tradition of the region. E and I saw great concrete "burners" (something like incense burners in temples) along a river in the new town. As we stopped to take pictures, many pilgrims stopped to add yak butter to the fires inside.

And the geography? Also rather nice. The city seems hemmed in by great mountains which forever seem to be "twenty minutes" away as one walks the street. And in the centre of town is a great hill, upon which sits the Potala Palace, a massive 1000 room building that was once home to all incarnations of the Dalai Lama.

Uhm... more next time. I'm awfully tired right now.

Day 52, 53, 54

It's early in the morning of the fourteenth of June. I'm on the train to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. I was hoping to take the bus over the 5500 metre high passes that this trip requires, but with this NEW train service (it started last year), the bus is going out of style, and only runs a couple times a week.

The train originates somewhere in the west. I got on in Golmud, the last stop before the train spends 17 hours crossing the Tibetan plateau. Golmud is a STRANGE place. A 1985 edition of Lonely planet says this:

"Locals will tell you that from Golmud to Hell is a local call."

Twenty years later, my current edition says something like this:

"Unless you are an engineer or an escaped convict on the run, there is little reason to visit this strange outpost in the oblivion end of China."

Eeeep.

Really, though, Golmud is odd. It's very clean, with wide streets lined by landscaped gardens and cute little pools of water, covered with stepping stones so that pedestrians can reach the sidewalks. The shops suggest some kind of wealth. The town IS reach, I suppose, because of the resources extracted from the surrounding countryside. Honestly, it's all quite pretty, despite what the Lonely Planet books say.

But God, it is really out there. I was wrong when I said that Vladivostok and Kashgar were at the ends of the earth. THIS place is the end of the earth... those places line up with borders and oceans and trade routes. But this place lines up with nothing but nothingness... mountains and desert. Those places have neighbours!

There's nothing to DO in Golmud, no reason to visit... but it still has a three star hotel. How does that happen?

Moving on:

I've been travelling these past couple days with an American couple - J and K - and E, a solo French woman. Some company made the boredom of Golmud easy to bare.

And thank God for that, because Golmud serves as a sort of bottleneck for travellers to Tibet, easily trapping the unwary for an unplanned stopover of two or three days. The trap lies in the paperwork required to enter Tibet, specifically a 120 dollar "permit" that takes at least one day to arrange. It's just a sort of moneymaker for the Chinese tourism industry, but everyone is supposed to have it.

The other trap is getting train tickets for Tibet. For the four of us, that was a real nightmare. Acting on a tip, we lined up at 6:00, two and a half hours before the ticket office opened. We waited and waited and then, at 8:30, all hell broke loose. The Chinese, you see, aren't so big on the concept of a queue, and the mob that appeared two hours after we arrived weren't so big on the prospect of not getting a ticket (limited availability, you see), so they sort of broke out into a mob with everyone pushing and kicking and shouting and swearing and really trying hard to get ahead in the line. Two hundred people fought for about 40 tickets. Myself and my three comrades had to literally shove back the masses as they tried to get ahead of us.

You ever see "Dawn of the Dead?" Where the zombies really want to get into the mall and bang away at the glass doors? It was sort of like that. But with living, breathing people. I actually grabbed some guy's wallet and told him I would throw it over my shoulder into the crowd if he didn't go back to his place in line.

In the end, we managed to purchase three tickets (the last three!) and paid an extra twenty bucks to get one on the black market and the 150 people who showed up after us went home unhappy.

And now I'm on the road to Lhasa. Just five minutes out of town, looking out the window I saw a very barren landscape. The LED display at the end of my carriage says that our current elevation is 2833 meters, while in the distance some very high peaks loom. Like I said, we will reach heights of 5500 meters before the end of this trip (as a comparison, Mount Everest is 8200 at it's peak, I think) .

Sitting a couple of seats down from me is a trio of Korean retirees who are taking a year long trip around the continent. They are a very odd bunch, with the guys sporting a pair of very long and very un-Korean beards. The beards are about as long as the one that the guy on the 1000 won note has, which is pretty damn long. They are all hippies of a sort, and when I dropped a few references of Hongdae district and the "Art Free Market" they were duly impressed. Hee.

Okay. The train is picking up speed...

Day 51:

Okay, so I visited, for a few hours, the town of Shizahuang (spelling?). That translates, literally, as "Asbestos Mine." The town contains little other than some housing, a couple of eateries, and also the biggest asbestos mining operation in the whole world. Apparently most of the miners have serious lung disease.

Who the fuck uses asbestos in this day and age?

It's a pretty grim town. The guys who work in the mine look pretty sad - and all used up. There was one guy at the "restaurant" I ate at who seemed completely apart from the world around him. Not simply zoned out, but really somewhere else... he had the saddest eyes I've ever seen. Most tragic of all, perhaps, is the fact that Shizahuang is not just a mining operation but rather a little frontier town - many of the miners are here with wives who work in small shops, and also with their children.

Getting to this desolate outpost was tricky. Working my way across the southern "silk road," Shizahuang was a necessary stop to get to a place called Golmud which acts as an entrance to Tibet. Of course, there aren't any roads to the mine, so I crammed myself into some guy's SUV (14 souls in a car meant for 8) for the generous fee of 10 bucks. We made a harrowing passage through rocky terrain and some inches of river, around the side of a mountain (high enough to reach a snow cap), and along some desert. We suffered one blown tire during the trip, and I suffered some really horrible neck pains. It took eight hours to reach the mine.

When we arrived, I stayed only long enough to get a bite to eat and find a car heading further east. A couple of engineers were en route to the next town, so we shared a cab for the remaining seventy kilometres. And then? Drinking with Asian people! Korea redux!

I don't know what it is about the continent... maybe it's the lack of a US styled protestant church, or maybe it's all the hardships of the twentieth century, but people really love to drink. And they are pretty good at it, too. Yeah, I've got a few stories to fill this space someday...

Anyways, so I arrived in the second town with two engineers who were sent 3000 kilometres (one way) from Shanghai to fix some sort of mining tool in the mountains to the north. One of the pair spoke a bit of English and later when having dinner and drinks with him, his buddy and three "customers" he asked what I would like to drink. I said that I was flexible, so he said to me "I think that foreigners like whisky, would you like some whiskey?" I told him that maybe that was a little bit strong, so he offered wine. The idea of a nice glass of wine got me excited, so he went to the store to find some. Of course, wine to this fellow is some some sort of clear liquid, with about 50 percent alcohol content. Oy....

So, I learned that the dude works for CAT, and that the device he was travelling to fix was used to mine for iron in the mountains.

Eventually, my engineer and his friends got very drunk and went whoring in the back streets of the town. I went to the supermarket for a candy bar and hit the sack. An eventful day.

It's now the NEXT day... about 3:15 in the morning. I'm at the Golmud hotel, having reached my final destination before going to Tibet. I'm in the lobby trying not to wake the counter attendant, who is asleep at his post. If I hold out until 10:00 am I can check into a room and keep it for 26 hours and avoid paying for tonight's sleep. My neck is KILLING ME... fucking SUV.

Day 50:

A traveler "Shijazhuang has three things: the asbestos mine, the dorm where all the miners sleep, and a big pile of asbestos."

Yeah, I visited the largest asbestos mine in the world. I want to write more, but today was yet another installment in the "drinking with Asian people" saga, and so I'm a little sleepy right now...

Day 49:

Continuing from last time:

I spent two nights in Kashgar, The real highlight of that city, as I said, is the labyrinthine Old Town, and it's maze of adobe walled homes. I visited with an American traveller for an hour or two. Visitors to the sector are charged 30 yuan admission (three bucks... you gotta pay for EVERYTHING in China), but it's worth the price; certain homes that are actually lived in are open for a quick peek. We were able to see, candidly, a couple of homes of varying styles, one of which had a meal of local food laid out on a table (it looks like Uighur people sit on the floor to eat, like Koreans). We also had a wonderful guide to the town who explained everything to us. That was actually a first in China - historical sights charge massive admission fees, but without any guides, English signage, or active restoration work ones is left wondering where all the money goes.

Kashgar also has a very famous Sunday Market. It's the usual Chinese market stuff - carpets, silks, food, junk electronics, hardware, surplus from the factories supplying Wal-Mart - but as in Turpan, merely the sounds and smells of the place make a visit worthwhile. I bought a wall-hanging/blanket thing from Kirghistan (or maybe a factory in the Suburbs of Shanghai).

After visiting the market, I spent a couple of hours at a Kashgar cafe planning the next few weeks. As it exists now, my plan is to get to Tibet within the next week and a half. I met a Korean guy in Kashgar who wants to do to the same thing, but getting there from Kashgar, however, is tricky.

That guy is taking the most direct route: southwards through the mountains, directly to Lhasa at an elevation of about 5000 meters. It's illegal for foreigners to take that route, but he thinks he can dodge the cops because he looks sort of Chinese. It's been recommended to me that I take the same route - bribes and fines are easy enough, I guess - but as a solo traveller, I'm not very eager to deal with the cops here.

So... here I am now on the slow road to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. I'm in a city called Ruoqiang, a dusty outpost in the middle of nowhere, on the south east fringes of the mighty Taklamakan desert (the largest sand-only desert in the world). My route to Tibet follows the "southern silk road" from the city of Hotan to the city of Golmud (along the desert) and then south through the mountains to Golmud by bus, through mountain passes at heights in excess of 5500 meters above sea level.

To that end, I took a 10:00 pm bus out of Kashgar, arriving in Hotan twelve hours later. I quickly hopped on ANOTHER twelve hour bus that got me to Qiemo. Twenty four hours on the road left me quite tired, but I tried my best to add another six hours to the tally, but was unable to get a drive onwards. So, I spent the night in an overpriced bed and caught a 10:00 ride onwards...

And here I am.

The ride here was decent enough. The book and website that I consulted suggested that it would be a long, bumpy fifteen hour marathon, but I guess the roads have been paved in the last year, so I did it in five.

This town is something else... it's all big wide streets and dusty (so dusty) sidewalks. The storefronts that line the streets have a big coat of sand blown in from the Taklamakan, as do all of the street signs. At first it all seemed so underpopulated... with just a couple of strangers shuffling around I felt like I was in some sort of bad post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick. A little more walking, though, lead me to find a rather pleasant little downtown core, some nice boutique shops, more wealth than I thought was possible in this region, and a population mostly Han Chinese rather than Uighur.

Nice, nice.

Next stop: a big ol' asbestos mine.

Day 45, 46, 47, 48

Laid up by a bit of illness lately, I've not had much enthusiasm about writing in this space. The twenty-four hour train ride from Turpan to Kashgar was rough. The usual Chinese railroad bullshit, when extended for twenty-four hours, was a bit too much for me. The constant smoking is what started it off - my bunk was beside the smoking section (just the end of the carriage), and so I had the smell of 50 cents/pack cigarettes wafting into my lungs for a whole day. That, combined with the general smelliness of the carriage, people spitting on the floor and children peeing into whatever sink or floor drain they could find make me a little queasy. Later on, a plate of fried vegetables pushed me over the edge.

You know, the only thing worse that shitting into a dirty squat toilet is vomiting into one. Yow!

That said - puking up with two hours to go was a smart move: it cleared my systems long enough for me to enjoy a day exploring Kashgar.

Kashgar is a visual and auditory treat. I spent my day wandering the streets with an American graduate student on a break from studies in Beijing. Kashgar, even more than Turpan, feels like a middle eastern city; the local Uighur people keep quite separate from the Chinese residents of the city, who are numerous. Strolling down the streets of old Kashgar one sees, immediately, such wonderful clothes - the women wear long, colorful (and sparkling) clothes of a local style. The men all look very smart in long overcoats and square hats, and most sport some very compelling facial hair. Older Uighur men look particularly sharp, abandoning none of their heavy clothes even in the heat of the summer.

The commercial life of the city is quite busy. Everywhere are carpet dealers (this place is famous for its carpets, though all are quite shitty in this age). There are also a thousand hat sellers in the city, men sharpening and selling knives (another local specialty) and men banging out shiny copper ware. And, of course, there are millions of food vendors, selling mostly lamb kabobs and flat breads. I've noticed that like in Chinese-China, there are many vendors of packaged food products, but they only sell drinks. Getting a bag of chips or a chocolate bar in China requires a bit of looking...

The best "sight" in Kashgar is it's wonderful "Old Town," a sprawling, labyrinthine collection of adobe homes and cobblestone streets. My American comrade and I explored that place at length, peeking into some homes (and being given tours of others) all along winding streets that took some hours to explore. The homes are very old, running the gamut from dumpy to luxurious.

And one more thing: the city is FULL of little dentist shops, all possessing only one or two chairs , and looking like little barber shops. They are as common as, say, corner convenience stores in Suncheon. I asked my guide to the old town about this - she said that it's because of the local diet; Uighur people love sugary sweets and tooth staining dates and prunes. And, I guess, they like to look good, too...

Day 44:

I went to the post office and they didn't have any packing material. But I knew this ahead of time, since they didn't have any packing material in Beijing, either. So I brought a big bag of newspaper to stuff the box with. But the lady told me that it is illegal to mail Chinese newspapers to Canada.

What?

Day 43:

I'm in Lanzhou now, which a few years ago was named the most polluted city in the world. What fun!

The hotel I'm staying at here is a real treat. It very much encapsulates what is great about hotels in this country... that they have something for every budget. This place has nice single rooms starting at 10 bucks, doubles for 15, and a number of deluxe rooms starting at twenty (as well as a 150 dollar "Presidential Suite.") But it also has a number of five dollar "common" rooms that are very clean but lack a private bathroom. Unlike many places, the staff here were happy to give me a common room, though I am sure they are confused about why ninety percent of the rich western travellers who show up in Lanzhou ask for the cheapest bed in the joint.

Lanzhou is a decent enough town, and other than some haze across the afternoon skyline, I can't really see any signs that this place is the epicentre of modern pollution. I strolled around a bit in the afternoon, first to Dongfanghong Square, which is a very modern, very green public square with lots of trees and large and immaculately tended lawns. I was struck here, as in other towns, by the LACK of a Mao statue. Lenin is everywhere in Russia, even after the USSR fell apart, while even with communism going strong here, Mao is nowhere. Odd.

Later on, I went to Wuquan Park on the edge of town, near one of the mountain ranges that hem in Lanzhou's urban jungle, but with the zoo and the bumper cars and the "magic cave" the place was TOO MUCH and I wandered back to the hotel for a nap.

And here I am! Tired, because last night was spent in the hard seat carriage of the train leaving Xi'an.

Day 42

I've eaten Korean food in three different cities since leaving that country. Polishing off a bowl of bibmbap at this very moment. Old habits, right?

Busy day today in Xi'an. I got up early and went to the Muslim quarter to find a souvenir. I've purchased hand-made blanket (blanket type things, anyhow) in a number of places I've visited over the last few years, so finding something like that was my mission for the day. But I had to give up on that mission early when the first seller I approached opened negotiations for a used blanket at $1200 usd. Yeah... twelve hundred bucks for something at a stall in an alleyway in Xi'an. The guy was full of shit, so I got the hell away from the markets, giving my shopping money to a a beggar child hanging out at the exit.

I taxied down to Xi'an Shaanxi History museum for a few hours of peeking at cultural relics covering the whole of China's pre-civil war period. The exhibits were very impressive, thought after awhile the whole pottery theme that most Asian museum have going is sort of tiresome.

After a lunchtime snack I walked down to the Big Goose Pagoda. Not sure about the origins of the name, but the ol' Big Goose stands a very impressive 64 metres tall, and is filled with lots of neat Buddhist relics. Tourists can climb up and get a nice view of the city (charge: four bucks).

Later on, skipping a visit to Little Goose Pagoda, I taxied over to the Forest of Steles Museum in the centre of town. That place exhibits a library of texts engraved on massive stone tablets created during the Han dynasty. The museum is a curious place, being simply room after room filled with these big stone tablets... and nothing else. I suppose it's mainly for big stone tablet enthusiasts, though the sureallness of such a place makes it worth a visit for the non-enthusiast traveller.

Xi'an, they say, is the beginning (or end) of the old silk road, a series of trade routes connecting Europe and China, used for the transport of silk products and other commodities. There were many paths traders used, some going through Pakistan, India, or even by sea, but they all passed through Xi'an. I'll be exploring some silk road sights in the coming weeks, starting with an overnight trip to Lanzhou, which will begin in a few hours.