TravelStream™ news feed for member scottk on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/scottk en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:45:27 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1193514360/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1193514360/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1193514360/tpod.html Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:45:27 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Shanghai, China

Wednesday through Monday, October 10th through the 15th

What a great town. I got off the train from Beijing, and before I even had a chance to look for a taxi, I passed a sign that pointed me to the Shanghai subway, the Metro. This, I knew, would take me to within a short cab ride of the Metropole Hotel, which I'd found mentioned in the Rough Guide. It was approaching 9 pm, I'd just spent 10 hours on a train, I was hungry, and I didn't have a hotel yet, so I didn't want to work too hard at hopping the subway, but it was worth a shot. Tickets were sold by machine, so I didn't have to fight with a phrasebook while a line of Shangjainese grew restless behind me. Score. The touch-screen user interface included a button that said "English." Score. The button worked. Victory! To the Metro.

I emerged on the edge of Renmin Guangchang (People's Square), hailed a cab, and soon was standing in the lobby of the Metropole, an old art deco hotel that is close to the Bund and to other places I wanted to see. The check-in clerk talked me into a fancier room than I'd planned on by offering me the "internet price," but that close to the Bund even the cheap rooms weren't cheap. I'd only be there a few days, so I splurged and ended up in a ninth-floor suite with a good view of some of Shanghai's more interesting architecture.

After dumping my bags in the room, I walked toward the Bund in search of a snack and ran across an Italian joint that was still open. The waiter said the dessert special was a chocolate pudding, which turned out to be this delectable cupcake-looking thing that oozed a warm, thick, dark chocolate sauce with the first nick of a spoon and that was easily the best chocolate I'd had in China. Properly chocolate buzzed, I made a quick stop at the Bund, the riverside stretch of regal buildings that are Shanghai's best-known landmark, but this came to an end when they turned the lights out. I was staying two blocks away. I could come back later.

Thursday morning, I stopped by the hotel's travel office to arrange my next few flights (Huang Shan, Wulingyuan, Chengdu), then ambled over to the Shanghai Museum. I had missed the National Museum (?) in Beijing because I was under the weather and shipping glass my last few days there, so my opinion isn't exactly fully informed, but the Shanghai Museum may be the best museum in China. The exhibits of Chinese bronze, ceramics and porcelain, calligraphy, painting, furniture, chops, currency, and assorted clothing and other art from ethnic minorities were exceptional and were augmented by special exhibits of Spanish paintings from the Prado and of Swedish silver. Descriptions were in Chinese and English, and the English descriptions were detailed, well written, and particularly well translated by someone who speaks English as a first language. I spent the entire afternoon there and would have been glad to go back for a second viewing, but there was other exploring to be done.

The French Concession, which was praised in the Rough Guide, proved to be a disappointment, and Huaihai Lu, the main street through the area, is downright depressing. It's overrun with upscale, western clothing stores and infested with hawkers, who did their insufferable best to try to convince every tourist passerby (and clearly I was a tourist) to visit their shop or sidewalk table of shoes or watches or bags or clothing or tourist gewgaws. Hawkers are an omnipresent irritation anywhere that tourists congregate in Shanghai, and it doesn't take more than a few hundred encounters with them before you want to behead one from time to time as a warning to those nearby that you are not to be bothered. While I was in Shanghai, I tried a variety of tacks to get them to bugger off, beginning with "bu shi, xie xie" (no, thank you), but being that polite only seemed to encourage them. Sometimes I'd just have fun with them, pointing to my shoes or watch or backpack, explaining that I already had the best, most comfortable, most stylish whatever in the world, and asking why I would want to look at anything inferior. If they spoke little English, this would get rid of them pretty effectively; if they spoke English well enough to understand, they would grasp that I was kidding with them, laugh, and still give up. (While I was in Tunxi for my trip to Huang Shan, someone taught me "bu yao"-"nothing"-which worked very well during my brief, second stay in Shanghai.) Sometimes there were just too many of them in too short a time, and I got surly. I resisted using English as much as possible, but I did find that lowering my voice and issuing an emphatic "No!" had the desired effect. Some woman followed me for half a block asking me, in English, whether I wanted this, that, or another thing. When she finally wound down and asked me what I wanted, I told her in my sternest voice that I just wanted to be left alone and asked if she could do that. She got the point, finally, and went away looking dejected. One especially persistent hawker who caught me at the wrong time even heard the suggestion that he f off, but that just made me feel guilty. Including hotels, I'm spending more every few days than the annual income that defines the poverty level in China (less than 700 yuan, or a little more than $90). I may resent their tactics, but they're just trying to make a buck in a way that is acceptable in their culture. (At night, I also encountered quite a few pimps, but that story will have to wait for in-person discussions. I'm trying to keep this thing G rated. No, I did not take any of the slimeballs up on their skeevy offers.)

Come lunchtime Friday in the French Concession, I mildly humiliated myself in a restaurant that usually catered to folks better dressed than I was and who spoke at least some Chinese. I'd come in because a poster out front showed pictures of dumplings, but the dumpling menu was entirely in Chinese (not that a picture of a dumpling would have helped me know what was inside), and another menu was only partially illustrated with photos. Most of the staff was pleased to have a westerner in the place and catered to me far more than the manager would have liked. My waiter read several of the items on the dumpling menu to me until I heard a couple of things I liked, and others stopped at every opportunity to practice their limited English, but the manager passed only occasionally, never cracked a smile, and surely wished me gone. When I finally granted her wish, I noticed, on the elevator to the street level, that my shirt, pants, and belt were all askew. No wonder she thought me unqualified to be seated in her realm. Oh, by the way, lunch was delicious.

On the back streets of the French Concession, I found the Shanghainese who had real jobs and knew enough to stay away from Huaihai. The neighborhood wasn't unusual, just a pleasant respite from overpriced designer clothing stores. As elsewhere in Shanghai and China, I found block after block of tiny street-level shops below several-story apartment buildings. The shops had or did a little bit of everything: groceries, clothing, electronics, housewares, scooter repair, haircuts and hair styling, photo processing, printing, cigarettes and alcohol (always together, apparently in government-sanctioned stores), metal work (including welding, often on the sidewalk out front), and a multitude of other things I don't recall, all interspersed with lots of restaurants. I'd been looking shaggy, and I noticed a barber sitting with his feet up in a place with maybe a half-dozen chairs. I gave him a quizzical look to see if he wanted to bother with a westerner, and he waved me in. I like my barber in Seattle, but he's getting too close to retirement and isn't as attentive to details as he might be. This barber was absolutely meticulous and gave me the best haircut I've had in years. When he was finished, I got out my camera, mimed a request to take his picture, and, with his OK, positioned him at my shoulder. I then pointed the camera at the mirror, framed and focused, and moved my head out from behind the camera. When I'd taken the shot, I showed it around (everyone wanted a look), thanked my barber, paid, and left. Late that afternoon I found a Kodak shop to print the picture for me, and the next morning I returned to the shop and gave my barber the print. Once again, everyone wanted a look, and for a brief time I was a celebrity. They turned the picture over and offered me a pen so I could write on the back (my name, Seattle, Washington, very good haircut, thank you), and after saying goodbye, I took one more picture of the whole shop, waved, and left.

Pudong, across the river from the Bund, was less of a disappointment Saturday than Huaihai Lu in the French Concession the day before, but only because of the view from the waterfront and from the observation deck of the Jinmao Tower. The rest of the area was office buildings and western-style shopping malls. At ground level, the air looked fairly clear, and I suppose in relative terms it was; from the observation deck I'm pretty sure I saw the Yangtze River several miles to the north. However, the horizon still disappeared in a smoggy haze long before it should have. My friend Conrad, with whom I've eaten at the Hooters in Seattle more times than either of us will admit, will be pleased to know that I had dinner at the Hooters in a shopping mall in Pudong. I was craving a good burger and a beer (Kilkenny beats any of the weak Chinese beers, I learned), and I thought it would be amusing to see how the U.S. and Shanghai versions compared. The interior design, the menu, and the skimpy costumes on the waitresses were all the same, but somehow the experience wasn't. The waitresses were trying too hard to endear themselves with casual conversation in broken English, and when I left, I got the hard sell on Hooters memorabilia. Suddenly Hooters was no different from being on the street in a tourist area of town. I couldn't imagine a good use for a Hooters Shanghai t-shirt, so I left my waitress broken hearted.

My last full day in Shanghai I learned that the old town area is really two different areas, one tarted up for tourists and the other a lower-class version of the back streets of the French Concession. The hawkers in the tarted-up area were even more irritating than hawkers elsewhere in Shanghai, so I bolted for the nearest exit and ended up in another area where regular people lived. The streets were narrow, the shops were dingy, and the restaurants looked like places I wasn't willing to trust my good health to, but no one was trying to sell me anything. One of my maps had mentioned a bird, fish, and insect market in this neighborhood, which I tracked down in an inner courtyard that was only accessible by one double door that I could easily have missed had I not been on the lookout. The place was packed with tiny booths spilling into narrow aisles, and while there were several bird and fish vendors, as well as a few dogs, cats, rabbits, and ferrets, the majority of the space was occupied by people selling bugs. This bug stuff was clearly a well-established business; most of the vendors used the same type of tailor-made container, complete with air holes, for like-sized bugs. Many vendors were selling bugs that looked like little cockroaches, but a few were selling huge beetle-like things that made a pretty good ruckus and that were pushing at the lids of their prisons trying to get out. Some containers had easily removable lids, and potential buyers were taking the lids off and poking at the bugs with lengths of grass as if to find out how angry the bugs would get. A few vendors even carried spiffy little containers that you could carry your bug in, some with an opaque sliding door that you could pull over the clear plastic lid so your bug could take a nap. I tried repeatedly to find someone who spoke enough English to tell me what this was all about. Cockroach fighting? Pets? An alternative to exterminators? Did the beetles eat cockroaches? Unfortunately, I had no luck finding anyone who both spoke English and was less in the dark than I was.

I spent much of Monday hanging out in a smokey internet gaming emporium working on this blog, nursing another short-lived cold, and waiting to go to Pudong Airport for a late-evening flight to Tunxi, the town nearest Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountains, which the Rough Guide claims the Chinese revere and hope to visit at least once in their lives.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192923480/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192923480/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192923480/tpod.html Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:42:06 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Karakel Lake and Mustag Ata, China

Tuesday through Thursday, October 2nd through the 4th

Several decades ago, when I was in the Boy Scouts, my scout master, who was my friend Jim Anderson's father, had the bright idea that we should earn our winter camping merit badge. I don't remember any of the requirements except the one that we actually go winter camping, three times, voluntarily, in what proved to be a cold winter even by Iowa standards.

Camping gear in the late 60s in Iowa included a lot of cotton. My own sleeping bag was a Sears special with flannel lining in a pheasant motif (I still have it) and was perfect for "camping out" on the living room floor on a Saturday night with a friend or two who had come over to watch the late-night creature feature and eat popcorn. It was pretty heavy and bulky for a scrawny kid to haul around in the woods, and it could probably have been generously described as a three-season bag as long as the three seasons were late spring, summer, and early fall. I was damned uncomfortable three weekends that winter, and the following summer, when we moved to another town, I made no effort to find another scout troop.

After our hike to Shipton's Arch Tuesday morning, we drove back to Kashgar, traded our two Jeeps for the minibus, and drove south to Karakel Lake, near the base of Mustag Ata, another of the mountains around Kashgar that has a connection to Eric Shipton. Dinner was at a yurt restaurant in the tiny village wedged between the highway and the lake. Our entourage came along, so we were still supported in a style that would embarrass the Boy Scouts, including a hot water bottle for each of us just before bedtime for the foot of our sleeping bags. Winter was coming early to the area, though, so the predicted overnight low was considerably lower than the 35 degrees that Snow Lion Expedition materials had suggested we come prepared for, and a hot water bottle doesn't stay hot forever. (Snow Lion covered for us by providing good sleeping bags, sleeping bag pads, and, for me, a heavier jacket than I had brought to China when I left Seattle, two weeks before the tour began.)

Come bedtime, everyone but Gary and me quickly disappeared into their tents. We marveled at all of the stars we could see, and Gary started pointing out constellations. I would gladly have stayed out there with him if only to gaze up at more stars than I'd seen at one time in several years, but I was already getting chilly, and that hot water bottle was calling me. Camping gear technology has improved since the late 60s, and you can now stay warm while winter camping even in Iowa-winter temperatures. However, you still need to go outside if you want to pee in the middle of the night. (Not strictly required, I heard from Gary, but I don't plan to go winter camping enough to learn about the alternatives.) When you come back, whatever heat your body may have imparted to your sleeping bag earlier in the evening has fled into the ether, and the hot water bottle isn't. If you're naturally underinsulated, if you're camping at 12,000 feet (which has the effect of slowing digestion and, thereby, reducing the available energy that could otherwise produce heat), and if the overnight low is 18 degrees, you might stay just cold enough not to be able to sleep for the rest of the night. I did.

Moving around Wednesday morning warmed me up, a breakfast heavy on the carbs gave me more energy, and the view of snow-covered Mustag Ata on a brilliantly clear day helped me forget that I don't much like the cold. After breakfast, we loaded back into the minibus and drove a few miles further south before leaving the road and driving toward Mustag Ata. Not too close, of course, partly because the bus wouldn't make it far and partly because we didn't want to miss too much of the gasping agony of hiking up and down increasingly steep ridges to get an up-close view of a glacier. Shipton would have rolled his eyes at such a histrionic description-he made it almost to the top of Mustag Ata, something over 25,000 feet, I think (7546 meters), and got frostbite in the process-but the 14,770 feet that we reached was about twice the elevation I'd ever hiked at, much more challenging than what I'd trained for or than Snow Lion had so much as hinted at, and a few hundred feet higher than any peak in the lower 48 United States.

Gary's encouragement and regular reminders about high-elevation hiking technique were the only reasons I made it to the ridge where we reached our greatest elevation. (Breathe deeply. Short, slow steps. If you have to stop to catch your breath, you're walking too fast.) Because we were hiking roughly across the base of the mountain, into and out of one drainage channel after another, we kept losing elevation that we'd already gained. Between the want of oxygen at that elevation and the increasing steepness of the climbs as we drew closer to the mountain, I was taking smaller and slower steps than I hope to be taking at sea level when I'm in my 90s. After three hours or more of this, I pointed at the top of the next ridge and told Gary that was it. If that wasn't the last ridge, I was giving up and heading back down. He responded by offering to carry my pack and by telling me of a time that he'd carried his own pack and those of three others on a tour he was leading, while also holding the hand of a little old lady who was having a hard time on the climb. No thanks, I'll make it on my own, I told him. (I recounted this exchange at dinner that night, and Gary confessed to shaming me into continuing. We all had a good laugh.)

At the crest of that last ridge, we stuck around just long enough to take the obligatory pictures (including one that I took of Gary's wrist watch/altimeter showing 14,770 feet), then we pointed ourselves downhill and practically floated down to that night's camp. Even the occasional short climb on the way down couldn't detract from the buoyant feeling that came with making it to the top of that last ridge with everyone else. I stopped wondering whether I would have come on the tour had I known this day would be so hard, but any interest I once had in climbing Mt. Rainier has been extinguished.

Folks turned in right after dinner. Thanks to an extra blanket that Taher had snagged for me at the village at Karakel Lake, some extra pains I took to ensure that my feet were well insulated from the ground, and an overnight low of 24 instead of 18, I slept pretty well that night. Thursday's jaunt to the highway was flat or downhill the entire way, and after a three-hour bus ride, we were back in Kashgar in plenty of time to take a shower before dinner.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192807800/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192807800/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192807800/tpod.html Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:37:41 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Kashgar, China

Saturday and Sunday, September 29th and 30th

Kashgar is the backwater that I expected Urumqi to be. The streets are almost all paved and are crowded with cars, motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles; people wear clothing made of fabric instead of animal pelts; grocery stores are stocked with the same packaged goods available in grocery stores elsewhere in China (although the packages of silk worms in the snack aisle were unusual, I think); you can have a good dinner in any number of restaurants that serve a variety of cuisines (as long as you want Chinese or Uiger food). And yet there are those indications that you aren't in Beijing any longer, for example, the donkey carts, the occasional horse cart, and, from time to time, a donkey without a cart, plus street signs indicating which streets are off limits to donkey carts, donkeys, and/or tractors. Or the lumber yard that stocks mostly entire tree trunks, stripped of branches and bark, in assorted lengths and diameters. Or the six-lane road that has more donkey carts than cars clogging the lanes. But let me return to the story, where more examples will emerge.

While in Kashgar, we stayed in the Seman Hotel, the grounds of which are the former location of the Russian embassy. The old embassy building is now the hotel cafeteria (the term "restaurant" is too grand), and several buildings of hotel rooms have since been added. We heard that they'd recently renovated the rooms in a Uiger style, which I guess explains the walls covered in plaster-relief frames around plaster-relief flower arrangements and plaster-relief abstract decorations, all painted in bright pastels and covered in sparkles. Too bad they didn't also upgrade the plumbing to add P-traps to the drains so the place didn't constantly smell faintly of sewer gas (or more than faintly if you closed the window at night to keep out the cold), or regrout the granite-tile tub surround, or buy carpets that fit the room instead of lapping up the walls. Then again, it might be the best hotel in Kashgar; this was not the only hotel in China in which I've encountered the sewer-gas problem.

Saturday morning we took our minibus out to a small town outside Kashgar to a street market that Taher thought we'd like to see. Perhaps not every eye in the place was on us as we walked the few blocks of the market, but anyone who wasn't openly staring was merely trying to look nonchalant, I'm convinced. ;-) Almost everyone was cordial, though, and when I smiled, they usually smiled back. We didn't help matters by sticking more or less together, but being near Taher, who we quizzed a lot, helped us understand what we were looking at. Why, for example, were those men emptying large bags of freshly picked cotton onto a big blue tarp? Wouldn't the bags be easier to transport? Perhaps, but the buyer was paying by the kilogram and wanted to make sure that the seller hadn't tossed a brick or two into each bag. What is that two-foot-tall pile of grated white stuff at the food booth? Radish. Gary had already told us to be on the lookout for sheep with unusually large butts (large-tailed sheep?big-assed sheep?). Similar to camels' humps, these sheep butts contain extra energy to help the sheep survive without food for a while. People continued to arrive at the market the entire time that we were there, many on donkey carts with produce or animals to sell, some on foot or bicycle, a couple in trucks with larger numbers of animals to sell, but no one came by car, and certainly no one else came in their own minibus.

On the way to and from the market, we saw some of how rural people in western China live. The road between Kashgar and the market was lined with fields that people were working by hand, including many fields that people walked through bent over or crawled through on hands and knees picking cotton. (I have yet to see a tractor in a field anywhere in China except occasionally a small tractor being used to tow a wagon of produce, and more than once I've seen farmers plowing behind what I think were water buffalo.) We saw a few clusters of handmade greenhouses, with brick north walls and bowed branches on the south side for supporting sheet plastic. Taher said that the greenhouses were used year round; at night during the winter, farmers lean mattresses against the south side to hold the heat in. Homes are walled compounds near the road with solid metal or wood double gates wide enough for a donkey cart, and a house, a yard, and perhaps a barn inside the walls. As at the market, everyone gets around by donkey, donkey cart, or bicycle; on the edge of many fields in which we saw people working, we also saw bicycles parked or donkeys grazing.

Back in Kashgar that afternoon, we spent some time in the old part of town, wandering narrow streets and watching people make by hand things that are made by machines where I come from: copper pots, bowl, teapots, and other cooking utensils; galvanized buckets, watering cans, stove pipe, furnace duct, and all manner of other galvanized parts; lathe-turned table legs, rolling pins, and other decorative pieces for purposes I couldn't guess; knives, meat hooks, hinges, handles, and a multitude of other metal parts; hats and clothing; and other things I'm surely forgetting. The vendors mostly didn't seem to mind being watched and photographed, and some of the kids in the neighborhood had become hams at the prompting of tourists and their digital cameras. I had one group of kids follow me for a while, leap into each picture, and then motion to the camera to indicate that the wanted to see themselves. One little boy followed me longer than the others, and I realized that I could get him killed if I weren't careful when I pointed the camera at a building across the street and he dashed across the street to be in the picture.

Dinner Saturday evening was another of those only-on-a-tour experiences, but with an odd twist. The family of a good friend of Taher's had agreed to invite us to their home for dinner, where they fed us in a room even more flashily decorated in Uiger style than our hotel rooms at the Seman Hotel. (This was the guest room.) The quirk was that it was Ramadan, during which Muslims don't eat until after sunset, so the family wasn't able to eat with us. Mom even apologized (through Taher as translator) in case the spicing of dinner wasn't just right (like we'd know), but she wasn't able to taste the food she was cooking. We could have waited until after sunset to eat with them, but that would have made for a very late dinner for us. (For them, too, but they weren't going to Shipton's Arch the next morning.) All of China has but one time zone, so Kashgar time, which should be two or three hours earlier than Beijing time, is exactly the same, and sunset in late September is after 9 pm. Many of the locals have compensated by operating on "Uiger time," two hours earlier than Beijing time. Taher says this means that people who are talking time need to specify Beijing time or Uiger time.

Much of Sunday was dedicated to two markets that are more famous than they now deserve to be, though in the past they may have been more exotic. After Saturday's market, Sunday's livestock market, also a few miles outside of town, was different mainly in scale. Farmers in a huge dirt field were selling hundreds of sheep, donkeys, and cows, as well as a few horses and a father, mother, and baby camel. Outside, a few food vendors had set up, and a donkey-cart vendor had a half-dozen new carts on hand. Clearly this market was more popular with tourists; most of the locals gave us little more than a glance, and I saw several westerners other than those in our group also sporting cameras.

After lunch at a fancy Uiger restaurant (meaning lots of mutton dishes) and an ill-advised stop at the completely useless Kashgar Museum (housing a tiny collection of local artifacts in display cases on the perimeter of one small room, with few captions, none of which were in English), we spent a couple of hours at the other market, which sells everything but livestock. In a series of enormous buildings across the river from the old-town area, we wandered aisle upon aisle of goods that, with few exceptions (animal pelts, fur hats, hand-woven rugs), you could buy at any department store or hardware store in the west. Vendors selling like goods were grouped together so, for example, the 50 or 100 shoe vendors were in three or four adjacent aisles. I'm not sorry to have gone for the experience, but I won't bother going back next time I'm in Kashgar.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192820940/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192820940/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192820940/tpod.html Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:43:42 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Shipton's Arch (near Mingyol), China

Monday and Tuesday, October 1st and 2nd

Not every experience that you've been anticipating for six months lives up to your imaginings, especially when you've seen pictures ("Somehow I thought it would be bigger."), but the time we spent at and around Shipton's Arch, in the mountains northwest of Kashgar, was every bit the breathtaking, word-defying, "like, wow, man" experience I'd pictured.

This time we did not take the minibus. Taher arranged for two Jeeps with drivers to haul us and most of our bags, and arranged for two trucks to haul tents and other camping gear, food and cooking gear, a cook, and a couple of helpers to set everything up. We set off Monday morning on a road west of Kashgar that soon enough turned to dirt and then to rocky riverbed. If you squinted hard and used your imagination, you could almost see something that sometimes looked as if it might have been a road in Eric Shipton's time, back in the 1940s. Shortly after we looped around the west end of a small mountain range and continued up the riverbed to the northeast, we got our first site of the arch, from the vantage point at which Shipton himself first saw it. Yes, it looked a lot like a hole in the mountain. From that location, it didn't look that big; in the pictures I took with the equivalent of a 300 mm lens, it's still little more than a speck. (Effective lens length with my camera is 1.5 times actual lens length.) We were a few miles south and several thousand feet below the opening, though, so it was pretty easy to imagine a hole that size looking a lot bigger up close.

Riverbed turned into dirt road and back again a few times, we stopped for lunch, and we even drove on a paved highway again briefly, but most of the last 17 kilometers of the drive was on more riverbed that only looks like road if you had playmates no one else could see when you were a kid or you spotted the odd rock cairn. The road was so rough that the locked hatch on our Jeep popped open twice.

We reached the Shipton's Arch trailhead late in the afternoon, a couple of hours before dinner time; we used the free time to hike up two nearby canyons. The first dead-ended maybe a half-hour up, so we doubled back and set off up a slot so narrow that we had to squeeze through. This we expected to dead-end even sooner, but it widened out more than enough to make for a comfortable hike, and folks had fun spotting miniature arches high up the canyon wall. As usual, I was lagging behind taking pictures, so I was the last to see why everyone had stopped. We had reached the top of a ridge, and the other side looked nothing at all like the side we had just hiked up. Instead, the ridge dropped away several hundred feet or more to the canyon floor. (On that scale and with no visual clues like nearby 50-story buildings, judging distance is difficult.) As the canyon receded from us, it widened and continued on for a half-mile or more before curving away out of sight. I tried to get some pictures of it, but the light that late in the day offered little contrast, and it was too big to get into a single shot even with a 27 mm lens.

That evening's dinner, cooked at 8000 feet over a propane stove, was better than several of the meals we'd had in restaurants in China. We asked Taher to call the cook into the dining tent so we could give him a round of applause. Taher reported that this cook was highly sought by trekkers in that area. No surprise.

After a chilly night (lows in the thirties, I'd guess), we had a terrific breakfast, put on hardhats in case rocks cut loose and fell on us, and then headed up the trail toward Shipton's Arch. As with the second hike the previous day, we had some squeezes through narrow slots. We also came across a few climbs up short ladders that someone had custom made from tree branches, which squared with Diana Shipton's account of having to be pushed and pulled up in some places that were too high for her to scramble up. The top of the arch came into view well before we arrived at the ridge from which you look (roughly) through the middle of it, but you don't begin to grasp the size of the arch until you're standing on the ridge and gazing down into the abyss. The ridge drops away too gradually to be able to see the bottom of the arch, which adds to the mystery of the experience.

We wandered around the small area of the ridge for, Gary thought, about an hour an a half. I can't speak for the others, but I spent the time marveling at the contours and the size of the arch, watching how the changing position of the sun affected direct and indirect lighting of the opening, and being generally amazed at where I was. We took pictures of one another in various combinations with our own and each others' cameras and eventually grudgingly acknowledged that, with six hours of driving and another night of camping ahead of us (this time at 12,000 feet), we'd better get going. Even as we hiked down, we turned back several more times for one last look and one last picture.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192480560/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192480560/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192480560/tpod.html Thu, 25 Oct 2007 04:51:27 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Urumqi, China

Friday, September 28th

In truth, most of this day was spent either in Jiaohe, a long-abandoned city on a plateau above the intersection of two rivers near Turpan or on a small bus between Turpan and Urumqi (pronounced something like oo ROOM chee). However, I had to choose some location for the Travelpod map pin, and this was my only chance to choose Urumqi because we were on a plane for Kashgar before the end of the night.

In many respects, Taher is an excellent guide for western China. He speaks several languages (Uyger, Chinese, English, French, plus a smattering of Czech); he's enthusiastic and good humored; he knows the cities of Turpan, Urumqi, and Kashgar, and he's a strong hiker, in case you're headed into the mountains, and we were. However, a historian he's not, and a historian is what we needed to make sense of the jumble of rocks that constitute the former city of Jiaohe. As with most historical sites and museums in China, captions are few, terse, and ill-translated, and in a city that is exposed to the elements and has been abandoned for something around 600 years, it's difficult to tell the difference between a home and a room for grain storage, or the remains of a wall from an oddly shaped rock formation. Sure, that basement prison (or was it cold storage? a pool hall? ) was still in good shape, but it would have been nice to know more about how many prisoners (or barrels of beer or pool tables) they could fit into the place at one time.

Gary, tour guide and history nerd, was eager to see the mummies at the Xinjiang Uyger Autonomous Region Museum, so we had a quick lunch back in Turpan before dashing off to Urumqi in a mini-bus. If I recall correctly, Urumqi is further from an ocean than any other city on the planet. It's also in the least-populated area of China and is surrounded by desert. Dull and ugly, you might well expect; I did. Somehow, though, a couple of million people have managed to create an oasis that I wish I'd had more time to explore. Other than our brief stop at the museum and another for dinner, we only got to see Urumqi from the bus, but we caught glimpses of bustling streets, outdoor markets, parks, an attractive downtown brimming with imaginative (and, in some cases, gaudily colorful) architecture, and a snow-capped mountain serving as a backdrop for the city as Mt. Rainier does for Seattle.

We also discovered that Urumqi has an exceptional museum filled with ancient artifacts from the region and an exhibit on traditional clothing of the ethnic groups that live in the region. (An exhibit on the Chinese military must have been imposed by the government because it was ridiculously out of place.) As with the other museums we'd seen, the captions weren't great, but we didn't have much time to read anyway because the museum was closing soon, and we had to get dinner before our plane to Kashgar. No matter. The items in the collection were exceptional just as art, so much so that I almost bought the museum catalog, but my reluctance to make full, heavy bags fuller and heavier won out.

Looking at people who'd been dead for three or four thousand years wasn't as gruesome as you might think. They were mostly clothed, and they'd been thoroughly dried out in the desert long before they were discovered, so the little skin that was exposed looked more like medium-brown leather than like human skin. (For more information, see http://discovermagazine.com/1994/apr/themummiesofxinj359.)
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192471740/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192471740/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192471740/tpod.html Thu, 25 Oct 2007 04:48:31 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Turpan, China

Thursday, September 27th

The train station for Turpan is some 40 kilometers northwest of Turpan, in an area that, from the window of a train, looks a lot like a lifeless wasteland. Our local guide for the remainder of the trip, a polyglot named Taher (pronounced tah HERE), met us at the station with a small bus early Thursday morning and took us to our hotel for that night, the Grand Turpan Hotel.

The day's jaunts began with a trip to the Emin minaret and the attached Su Gong Ta mosque. If there is an Allah and if he takes a dim view of violating the spirit of the law, I'm not getting my 70 virgins (or, by one translation, 70 white raisins). However, we were the only ones in the place, so I chose to strictly interpret the graphical sign indicating "no videos" to mean that still photography was all right and took at least my fair share of pictures, prompting yet another harangue from Chuck on the inferiority of digital photography.

A well-run tour can take you places that you couldn't find on your own, and that's where we went for lunch. Our bus driver has a friend whose home doubles as a vineyard and triples as a small restaurant that has no name, no menu, no hours, and no sign at the front door, meaning (I think) that it's more a neighborhood hangout than an established business. We walked through a double gate at the street and into a courtyard covered with a grape arbor, where we were seated on a low platform around one of four large tables. Our host, a handsome man in his mid or late 30s, brought us tea, several small bowls of different kinds of raisins, and a large platter filled with grapes. Mindful of the caution about eating fruit that had been washed in possibly contaminated water, several of us, feeling guilty for being ungrateful, nonetheless skipped the grapes. No matter. Before long, the platter of grapes was lost among a tableful of plates of mutton kabobs, pumpkin and mutton steamed dumplings, rice pilaf, assorted vegetable dishes, and melon for dessert. As we finished eating, our host brought out his 10- or 12-year-old daughter (he also has a younger daughter and son) and a small drum and played a tune while his daughter danced. Were she eight years older, this might have been a seductive dance but was instead a remarkable display of poise and coordination from someone so young.

From a tremendous experience in the home of a local restauranteur and grape grower, we ricocheted to the other extreme, to Turpan's low point, literally and figuratively. The Turpan Depression has the lowest elevation in China, at 154 meters below sea level, and if god has a sense of humor, surely the lowest point in the Depression is at the winery in Turpan's grape-promotion complex. This monument to capitalism includes restaurants, the usual tourist-junk vendors, Kodak moments with traditionally dressed young women who are glad to take your money for the thrill of being photographed with them, an American-West-style saloon and winery that served bad but expensive wine, and an amusement park that we were spared.

Taher redeemed this ill-considered trip with a stop to see an acquaintance of his who lived nearby. We walked down a dirt lane past grape fields and walled courtyards to the home of a man whose back yard is filled with grape vines and whose rooftop includes a brick structure for drying grapes, comparable to but much smaller than similar buildings that we'd seen all around Turpan. It's bigger than a utility shed, maybe 8' x 15', and each row of bricks is laid with a few inches of space between the bricks: brick space brick space brick. This allows air to circulate past the grapes but keeps them from being in direct sunlight, which would turn them black. He treated us to some of his grapes, and, through Taher, I asked some questions about the process of making raisins. (Moistening the grapes as they dry counterintuitively causes them to dry faster.)

Going to school in an education system that focuses on the successes and failures of the powers of the western hemisphere means you miss some astonishing achievements. We ended the day at an exhibit on the Karez irrigation system, which carries water from the mountains north of Turpan into the valley below. (Pakistan also has an irrigation system of the same name.) The Chinese consider the Karez system one of the three great achievements of Chinese engineering, along with the Great Wall and the Grand Canal, which connects the Yellow and Yangtzee rivers. I don't know enough Chinese history to know what the other contenders might be, but I was impressed with a system that once included 5000 kilometers (3000 miles) of hand-dug tunnels and 170,000 vertical wells, one every 30 meters or so (100 feet) of tunnel, to afford tunnel access. Construction began 2000 years ago, and some of the tunnels remain in use today.

Class dismissed.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192415340/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192415340/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1192415340/tpod.html Thu, 25 Oct 2007 04:22:07 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Dunhuang, China

Wednesday, September 26th

Once again my philistinian ways are revealed. The Mogao caves are unquestionably an impressive homage to Buddha. Several hundred caves are dug into a low cliff outside of Dunhuang, and many, if not all, are all tricked out with Buddha statues, some quite large, and paintings of 1000 Buddhas per cave. (To protect the caves, only about 20 at a time are open for viewing, so we saw only a tiny fraction of them.) Me, I kept wondering three things:
- How the place looked when access to the caves was via the original wooden platforms, before all of the openings were covered with steel doors and the entire fascade was covered with concrete
- How much longer the caves will continue to exist with several thousand visitors traipsing through them each day and exhaling moisture and carbon dioxide, both of which, by the admission of our tour guide, are quickly deteriorating the art in the caves.
- What the price is for admission to Buddhist heaven. The first cave here was created after someone had a vision, but our guide said that many of the subsequent caves were created at the expense of wealthy patrons. Who would do a Buddha cave, and how much would they charge? Flat fee, or time and materials? If you pay enough for your cave, do you receive a guarantee?

After a morning of disrespectful ponderings (on my part, anyway), we had some lunch and then went for a camel ride partway up the Singing Sand Dunes, which are encroaching on the outskirts of Dunhuang. (The dunes sing in a high wind. We heard nothing but the sound of camels snorting.) This wasn't the adventure it might sound like. You pay a fee at the front gate, walk a short distance to the camel parking lot, get on the camel that the camel tenders tell you to, and hold on while your camel stands up, rear legs first. The camels are initially laying on their bellies like sphinxes, so getting on is about like getting on a bar stool, only smellier.

Let no opportunity to make money be squandered. We rode maybe a mile (or rather were led by a camel tender on foot) past folks trying to sell us pictures of ourselves on camels and stopped at the base of a dune, where we had to pay again to climb to the top and pay yet again if we wanted to ride down v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y on a makeshift sled. (The coefficient of friction of sand is much higher than that of frozen water, some folks discovered.) I almost didn't bother hiking to the top-I could see sand from where I was-but I'm glad I did. I now understand why there are so many art photographs of sand dunes. You pretty much can't take a bad abstract picture of a sand dune with fluffy clouds in the background.

When we'd regrouped, we hopped back on our camels and were led past the main gate to another Buddhist temple, complete with snack bars and vendors of tourist junk. This was really a reproduction of a Buddhist temple; the original was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. After a final ride back to the main gate, we had dinner and then took the night train to Turpan.

Noe that the map pin for Dunhuang is not correct. The actual location is 82 kilometers west-southwest of the marked location (Anxi), but Travelpod's mapping mechanism doesn't allow me to get any closer.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191881160/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191881160/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191881160/tpod.html Thu, 25 Oct 2007 04:03:42 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Beijing, China

Thursday through Sunday, September 20th through the 23rd

As I've mentioned, I first got interested in traveling to China when I saw an article on a tour to Shipton's Arch, in far western China, in National Geographic's Adventure magazine. While considering the tour, I assumed that going alone to remote areas in western China would be more difficult than going to large cities in the east because fewer people would speak English in the west. This is probably true, but it's not a huge issue; I've found few fluent English speakers in most of the places I've gone in Hohhot and Beijing and have done fine overall. I also assumed that going alone to the many places along the Silk Road that the tour went (Xi'an, Dunhuang, Turpan, Urumqi, and Kashgar, plus Shipton's Arch outside Kashgar) in two weeks would be much more difficult. This is absolutely true. Public transit is available to most of the places we went, but would have been considerably slower than our dedicated tour buses. Cabs are also available, but I have yet to meet a cabbie in China who will admit to speaking a word of English, and without the address of your destination written in Chinese or a map to point to, you might as well not bother hailing a cab. Some of what we did would not have been open to me as a solo traveller, including dinner in two private homes (which I didn't know when I signed up), and though I could conceivably have gotten to Shipton's Arch on my own, it's an undertaking that requires the help of a local adventure travel company, not a scheduled bus route with stops to pick up hikers at every hotel in Kashgar. In short, the tour was the best way to see everything that we saw, but it was sometimes a trial, and I'm decidedly not a convert to travelling by group.

The Shipton's Arch tour group assembled for the first time at dinner on Thursday evening. Gary, the tour guide from Snow Lion Expeditions, who would be with us for the entire trip, had already been here for a day, and I met him briefly when I checked into the China People's Palace Hotel in midday. He was on his way to pick up the others on the tour, who were all arriving on the same flight from San Francisco: Humphrey and Kevin, two friends who both live in the Bay Area and who have taken at least one other vacation together (to Peru), and Chuck and Kathy, a couple from Shoreline, Washington who live, we calculated, something less than 10 miles from me. When they arrived at the hotel, they were all thoroughly jetlagged, so dinner was at a restaurant a short walk away. Another advantage of travelling with a group (at least in China, where people share dishes) came at mealtime: because we shared seven or eight dishes at every meal, we all got to try more different dishes in one meal than any of us could try in a week's worth of dinners eating alone. I benefitted from this even more than the others because I got to try dishes that I wouldn't have ordered for myself, including anything vegetarian and anything with the word "tofu" in the name.

Friday morning, the group plus our Beijing tour guide, Peter, took a long bus ride northeast from Beijing to Simatai, one of the places where tourists can get onto the Great Wall. Gary passed out the sandwiches that we'd eat for lunch and some extra bottles of water, we put on plenty of sunscreen and our funny hats, and we set off for a 10-kilometer hike to the next access point, at Jingshanling. I'd read several articles about the Great Wall, so I knew that it was sometimes steep and not always in the best condition, but words cannot convey. I'll try anyway. Several years ago, I did a 12- or 14-mile hike with my friend Linda to Mystic Lake, on the north side of Mt. Rainier. This hike along the Great Wall, at not quite half the distance, was at least in the ballpark in difficulty. The terrain is just like what you see in pictures: steep hillsides with the wall running along the crest of the ridge on a route that makes you wonder how they built it. I'd guess that we were climbing or descending steps a quarter or more of the distance that we travelled, and the rest of the route wasn't flat. The steps are uneven sizes, often rough, and sometimes crumbling. The angle of the climb changed with the terrain and occasionally approached 60 degrees (the steps we're accustomed to are closer to 30 degrees), with steps just deep enough to fit a shoe on if you turn your foot sideways. The hike was a challenge, the only shade was in the towers, which are a few hundred yards apart, and the temperature was in the 80s, and yet I had an exceptional time. Every step of the way (except when I was looking at my feet in an effort not to fall to a certain death ;-), the view was the sort of view that people go on vacation to see. I constantly lagged at the back of the group taking pictures and, in the process, triggered a running (and soon tiresome) debate with Chuck over the differences between film and digital photography. Gary was often right there taking pictures with me, though, so I didn't feel that I was delaying the others much. Heavy traffic slowed our return to Beijing, so after we finally got back and took a shower, we had time for nothing more than a late dinner.

Saturday was Tiananmen Square (where I'd already spent some time on my own, mostly staving off sellers of Mao watches, Little Red Books, and other tourist junk), Mao's mausoleum, the Forbidden City, Prospect Hill in Jingshan Park, the official Beijing silk shop, and a Chinese-acrobats show. As you might guess, Tiananmen Square does not include any plaques or monuments related to the student protests there in the 90s, and any tank-tread marks have long since been paved over, so it's just a big, open space with several monumental buildings on the periphery, including Mao's mausoleum.

Visiting the body of a long-dead politician whose legacy I don't much respect is not high on my list of favored activities, but Peter offered to stay with our bags, which were not allowed inside, so I joined the long but fast-moving line with everyone else on the theory that it would be a cultural experience. In a plaza outside the mausoleum, a few people (one in 10 or 20) jumped out of line long enough to spend a yuan or two on a white rose and, inside the entrance, left their flowers in an impressively large, neatly arranged pile in front of a statue of Mao. (I'm convinced that the flowers are resold until they start looking wilted.) Soon we were in the room that contains Mao's body (unless it's a wax replica, as some have suggested), and we all had the same initial response: his face was lit in a way that caused his head to appear to glow from within. Then we were out the door and on to the Forbidden City.

After a look at the Forbidden City, the best response, I think, is, "No wonder people overthrow their royalty." Even from the outside, the place is the very picture of excess. The perimeter wall, inside the moat, is roughly 1/2 mile by 6/10ths of a mile. My Beijing travel guide says that the Forbidden City is said to contain 9,999 rooms, and having spent part of an afternoon meandering from one end to the other, I think it's possible. (If it were nothing but rooms, each room would be over 800 square feet. There are a lot of outdoor spaces, including plazas and walkways, but there are also a lot of small rooms for, for example, concubine quarters.) I don't mean to be a Philistine, but the architectural style is consistent throughout and, as a result, one area quickly started to look a lot like the last. There were plenty of interesting details-sculptures, large pieces of unusual rock, plaza entrances graced with expanses of decorative tile, paintings on the beams above covered walkways, rooms that you could peer into to see how people lived-but I was ready to go when we walked out the north gate and up Prospect Hill, from which we had a hazy view of the Forbidden City and the rest of central Beijing. After a late lunch, we made a quick stop at the official Beijing silk store, at which the only advantage over other fabric and clothing stores was an interesting display on how small cocoons are turned into thread and large cocoons (from a different breed of silk worm) are turned into filling for quilts. Amazingly to me, a single large cocoon can stretch to the size of a quilt. (A week or so later, in a grocery store in Kashgar, we saw packages of silk worms in the snack-food section.)

I saw one troupe or another of Chinese acrobats on Ed Sullivan plenty of times when I was a kid, but it was still fun to see them in person that evening. Some of what they did was weird (doing mouth stands, which are much like hand stands, only you support your weight with your mouth), and some was more strength than agility (going down and back up a short flight of stairs while in a one-handed hand stand), but I still loved it, especially the bicycle tricks.

Sunday we went out to the Summer Palace, on the northwest side of Beijing, where royalty hung out during the summer because it was cooler there. This was another full day, so we did a quick pass and then popped back into the city for a slow bike ride (without helmets, like everyone else in Beijing) through the neighborhoods around Qianhai Lake. While we were out, we stopped for a while at the home of Wu Xue Jun, who is (I was told by Peter, our Beijing tour guide) a well-known artist in an arcane field: he paints on the inside of bottles. His work was beautiful, he was personable, and I vowed to return to buy some of his work after the tour. (I'm writing this from Beijing on Monday, October 8th, a day after I bought rather a lot of glass. Now I just need to figure out how to get it home before I leave for Shanghai on Wednesday.)

After dinner that evening, we got on the night train to Xi'an, our first stop on the Silk Road.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191766200/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191766200/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191766200/tpod.html Thu, 25 Oct 2007 04:03:08 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Beijing, China

Saturday through Wednesday, September 15th to the 19th

Many people like traveling with tour groups, and there are benefits that solo travelers don't enjoy: someone else sorts through train and bus schedules to figure out how to see the greatest number of places in the shortest amount of time, hires private transportation when public transit won't work, makes adjustments based on experience, hires tour guides who (ideally) can tell you something about what you are looking at, gets you into places that you wouldn't otherwise know about, and handles problems as they arise. A group also swings more weight than a solo traveler when something goes wrong.

Me, I prefer going alone or with one other person (or with my friends Gregg and Lori, who might as well be one person ;-). This allows me (with some negotiating when I'm not alone) to spend a little extra time anywhere I want, do nothing at all if that suits me, turn left if left looks more interesting than right or straight, change my mind about what I'm doing this afternoon if the weather isn't conducive to a traipse through the grounds of the Summer Palace, eat in a cafe that doesn't have enough seats for a tour group, stand in a long line without being left behind to get a bag of fresh-baked cream puffs the scent of which is turning the head of every passerby, skip the fourth mosque in three days, catch a concert that was written up in the morning paper, decide that winter camping just isn't that much fun and bag after the first night of freezing temperatures, or spend an extra day in this town before moving on to the next one.

Do I see less than a tour group? That depends on how you define "less." I don't get to as many of the sites that are listed in the travel guide in a given day as a group does, but I get to watch a couple of guys on a back street that a tour would never traverse play a board game I've never seen while a half dozen of their friends kibbitz, watch a couple of girls strike silly poses and take pictures of one another in front of a fountain that isn't grand enough for a tour to stop at, walk three or four times around a sculpture that is several blocks from the nearest tourist attraction in search of interesting views for a photograph or two or ten, watch four friends play a game of two-on-two basketball and then watch them ham it up when they realize I have my camera out, and generally watch local people do what local people do instead of racing from monument to museum to palace to mosque to pagoda and seeing real life only from inside a bus, which prevents you from getting more than a glimpse.

The first five days that I was in Beijing, I did it my way, which means that I wandered back streets a lot, took most of a rainy day off to update this blog, ate at restaurants that I found by walking by, spent little more than an hour on Wangfujing Dajie (the major tourist shopping street), and skipped most of the travel-guide stuff because I knew the tour I was soon to join would catch me up on all of that.

I had to at least pass through Wangfujing Dajie because I'd heard it mentioned so many times. It's about what you'd expect of the Beijing equivalent of Fifth Avenue: lots of internationally known brand names; the usual assortment of junk food, American and otherwise; several indoor malls so business doesn't fall off too much in bad weather; and prices higher than anywhere else in town to cover the expensive rent. A side street that an Aussie couple pointed out was much more fun. They'd laughingly suggested that the food vendors there sold anything that moved, and the seahorse and scorpion kabobs were a good start toward making their case.

The weekend edition of China Daily, the English-language voice of the Chinese government, mentioned a ruan concert Sunday evening at Beijing Concert Hall. I'd never heard of the ruan, which seemed like as good an excuse as any to go, especially when I tired of exploring about an hour before the concert and a short walk to the hall. I learned from the program that the ruan was invented in China, had fallen out of popularity and maybe had even gone extinct (my memory is fuzzy on the details) but was resurrected sometime in the 20th century and now has a small following that is led by the soloist for the evening's performance. The ruan looks a lot like a lute and sounds sort of like a cross between a banjo and a mandolin, if you can imagine that. I enjoyed it well enough, but by halftime I'd had plenty of ruan solos and ruan ensembles, so I skipped out.

George and Kay, my friend Chris's folks, are good friends with Nina Jablonski, the head of the anthropology department at Penn State. Nina, who has spent a lot of time in China doing research, was briefly in Seattle just before I left and graciously took the time to talk with me over breakfast about places in China that she thought were worth going. One of these places was the Sackler Museum on the Beijing University campus, where the collection gives a good overview of Chinese history. Her enthusiasm alone would have sent me there, and my China travel guide agreed with her, so I set out on Wednesday to find Beijing University. With only a few "where do I go now?" moments, I got onto the campus, found a helpful student named Xiong who could have given me directions to the museum but instead gave me a guided tour, and arrived at the door of the museum only to discover that it was being renovated and that the entire collection was in boxes. Not a problem. I'd already had a good adventure, and it was barely lunchtime.

Xiong and I were walking back toward the main gate when I noticed an old watertower that I wanted a picture of. I was taking a second shot, which included Xiong, when an old guy (older than me, anyway) stopped and asked me to take a picture of him, too, and then asked, through Xiong, if I'd print and send him a copy in Chongqing, where he lived. (He has no email address.) Um, sure, I can do that. He wrote down his address in Chinese, Xiong translated it into Pinyon for me (so my package would make it out of the US), and we were off. Not just Xiong and me, but Xiong, me, and the old guy, Hang Yu, who had attached himself to me with the idea that I would accompany him to the nearby Qinghua University campus, take more pictures of him there (apparently as inspiration for his children), and print and mail the whole lot to him. My initial response was surprise at the effrontery of such a proposition mixed with a touch of sympathy, a dash of "what else do I have to do today?," and a squirt of "how long can this take?" Well, as it turns out, it can take the rest of the afternoon, and did. The nearest entrance to the Qinghua University campus wasn't all that near, and Hang Yu had never been there and didn't know for certain what he wanted photos of, so he stopped about every third person to ask questions that I didn't understand but that often left the questionees looking bemused or confused. Without any clear idea what we were after, we wandered and, in the end, it turned out to be exactly my kind of day. I saw a good piece of two beautiful college campuses, took some pretty good pictures, talked a little with Hang Yu, who I discovered spoke a skosh of self-taught English, did a good deed (or will have when I print and send him the pictures-I already cautioned him that I don't get home until late November), and had an odd experience that made for a pretty good story.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191704580/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191704580/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/scottk/china-2007/1191704580/tpod.html Thu, 25 Oct 2007 04:01:55 -0400 China: Eleven weeks alone in a country of a billion people whose language I can't speak, whose written language I can't read, and whose vegetables I can't eat (doctor's orders ;-)

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Hohhot, China

Tuesday evening, Wednesday, and Thursday, September 11th through the 13th

I was talking with someone just before I left for China about all of the reading and other preparation I'd done for this trip, and he reminded me of the quotation "Chance favors the prepared mind." Neither of us could remember who said it, and I pretty much forgot about it until my first "what have I gotten myself into?" experience in China.

Pardon me for a moment while I digress to explain how I tried to learn at least some Chinese before I left Seattle. One class that I signed up for was cancelled for want of enrollment. Another dwindled from 22 students to nine by the fourth session, after which I stopped going because the instructor was having us recite in unison, so we were getting no individual feedback on our pronunciation of a language rife with sounds that have no direct correlation in English. The last class I signed up for seemed ideal at first: the instructor was from China, the course materials were quite good, and she had us read aloud individually in class. However, as soon as I'd learned a bit about correct pronunciation from the audio CDs that accompanied the textbook, I realized that many of my cohorts' pronunciation was even worse than mine, yet the instructor greeted every recitation with applause and a "Good job!" I gave up on her class after seven sessions and figured I'd get more out of studying on my own, and I probably would have if I'd been able to find the time. ;-) End of digression.

In our last episode, I was still on the train from Ulaan Baator to Hohhot, which is known to the locals as Huhehaote (pronounced something like hoo-huh-how-tuh); the mismatch caused me a brief heart attack while I was trying to confirm with the conductor that the train was arriving at my stop. I gathered my too-heavy bags, struggled out the door of the station, and was confronted with a large plaza filled with Asian faces and surrounded by buildings ablaze in neon, every last electron of which glowed in Chinese. Not Pinyin, so I could at least pronounce the words and look them up in the phrasebook that was buried somewhere in my bags. No, this was real Chinese.

Hohhot got four pages in my Rough Guide to China, and I'd made mental notes about places to stay. One was supposed to be directly across from the station, but I couldn't pick it out for certain, so I walked up to a place that seemed a likely contender. A hotel employee standing on the front steps spoke no English but somehow identified someone in the crowd who did. After consulting with her, my translator reported that I couldn't stay there. He then tried to guide me to a place he said he'd stayed and liked and that cost only 30 yuan, about $4 US, but the dark alley that he headed for put me off, so I suggested a closer place that was much more well lit. (I've since decided that he was probably an employee of the hotel that he was trying to lead me to. Or a mugger.) After a lengthy discussion with the receptionist in Chinese, my translator reported that they couldn't take foreigners. I'd heard about this quirk in Chinese law, but I didn't expect to encounter it. I figured hotels would only be restricted in places that the Chinese didn't want foreigners at all, like near nuclear power plants or military bases, and maybe in remote locations where foreigners weren't likely to go and the hotels didn't want to bother with the paperwork to be approved. This place was next door to the train station in a city of, I think, about three million people.

My translator had to catch a train, he said, but he enlisted someone in the lobby, who spoke no English, to help me find another hotel. This second "volunteer" slung one of my bags over his shoulder and, with me at his side with the other bag, crossed the plaza and turned right onto a busy street, also dark and none too promising. A block later, with no hotel in sight, a cabbie pulled up next to us and called out the window. I may not speak Chinese, but I speak cabbie just fine. I took the bag from the shoulder of the chap who was helping me and tried to convey to him, through the tone of my voice, both my appreciation for his help and my desire to find a damned hotel already. I then dumped my bags into the cab, crawled in after them, and immediately discovered that the cabbie didn't know from "Railway Hotel," another of the places I'd read about in the Rough Guide. I held up a finger, the (I hoped) universal sign for "wait a second," dug out the guide, turned to the page that listed Hohhot hotels, and circled the Chinese characters for the place I wanted to go. (Boundless praise and gratitude go to the editor who thought to include Chinese characters for places mentioned in the guide.)

I had another brief heart attack when the cabbie, unlike any cabbie I'd ridden with in my life, did not U-turn and head in what I knew to be the correct direction but instead kept going the way we were facing. And going. Until the next intersection, at the end of a very long block, where he turned left, left again, and then right, and pulled up in front of a place that said "Railway Hotel," in English, over the front door. I grinned. He grinned. I gave him the pittance he asked for and a ridiculous tip in a country that doesn't tip, dragged my bags out of the back seat and up the steps, and checked into the Railway Hotel. Chance favors the prepared mind, indeed. If only I'd prepared better, I wouldn't have had to rely so much on chance.

Hohhot is not, as near as I can tell, one of the major vacation destinations in China. It has a few museums to which the Rough Guide gave luke-warm reviews, a Muslim community in an older area of the city, a mosque that is famous to folks who follow that sort of thing, and a whole lot of big, modern buildings. Were it not for the signs in Chinese and the sheer quantity of neon, which is not nearly as prevalent in America (outside of Times Square), you'd be hard pressed to tell the part of Hohhot around the Railway Hotel from any city center in the world. I spent almost all of my Wednesday exploring (read: wandering), mostly in the older neighborhood, and being amused by assorted discoveries, including a long pedestrian alley of nothing but drapery shops, another alley of nothing but tropical-fish shops, and a guy who was renting out a couple of pool tables that he'd rolled out into a small plaza/parking lot/walkway.

I had lunch in the Muslim neighborhood at a small restaurant where I saw someone on the sidewalk dropping long strands of fresh noodles into a vat over a propane burner. Even from the outside, it looked like a little neighborhood joint that fed mostly folks who'd come from the next block, and I was hesitant to walk in and disrupt the place by my very presence, but this clearly qualified as the sort of adventure I'm looking for, so disrupt I did. It was mid-afternoon, and they weren't busy; the staff was eating at one table while a handful of regulars ate at the next table. I was relieved to see that they'd posted a picture menu on the wall, and, after some comical miming, experiments with our small shared vocabulary (they knew "noodles"), and the participation of the regulars, I ordered something that looked, in the fuzzy picture, like some kind of meat and some vegetables over noodles. What arrived at my table could have been the "don't eat this" picture in a brochure for the University of Washington Travel Medicine Clinic: cooked but cold meat and several kinds of raw vegetables over noodles. (The noodles should be fine.) After the welcoming reception I'd received and the effort they'd already gone to on my behalf, though, I couldn't not eat it or even eat it but without obvious pleasure. I still had plenty of antibiotics, so I dug in. Delicious, vegetables notwithstanding. (Didn't make me sick, either.) I paid and joined the staff (the regulars were now gone) in a round of good byes, and went outside to take a picture, then went back inside when I realized I should have a picture of the staff, too. More miming, more laughing, and a picture, then I headed out the door with the email address of one of the staff members, so I could send him a graphic file. Later in the afternoon, I stopped into a shop that could print the picture for me and took it back to them, much to their glee.

I spent Wednesday evening catching up on some writing before taking the train to Beijing the next day. Or so I thought. Thursday morning I took a cab to the train station with plenty of time to spare, figured out which waiting room I belonged in, and took my place next to the sign that listed my train number. A seat opened near me, and the young lady sitting in the adjacent seat looked at me and motioned toward that seat. I declined at first, but my train didn't leave for a while, so I soon joined her. She almost immediately struck up a conversation in English that would benefit from some practice with a native speaker and in a waiting room that was much too loud for a conversation between two people who only barely have a common tongue. Between having to concentrate to understand her and having fun talking with someone from Hohhot, I lost track of time and missed my train. (I also foolishly assumed that, because the row of seats I was sitting in lined up with the gate I was going through, there'd be some extra action around me when my time came. Wrong.) The remaining trains to Beijing that day were already sold out, so I had to get a ticket for the next day's train, pay for the hotel in Beijing where I had a reservation beginning that night, and pay the princely sum of 68 yuan (about $9 US) for another night at the Railway Hotel. (You get what you pay for. I got the same room for a third night, for which the nearest running water and the toilet were down the hall and the shower was down one flight.)

I'd seen what little I wanted to in Hohhot the day before, so I spent Thursday in two different internet cafes (mostly filled with internet gamers) writing the Ulaan Baator blog entry, had an exceptional dinner of barbecued chicken, and called it a night so I could try again to make it to Beijing the next day.

By the way, out of curiosity, I returned to that dark alley in broad daylight. It turned out to be a dead-end courtyard surrounded by apartments and one place that might have been a hotel, but not one I'd have wanted to stay in.
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