Mary's working for 3 weeks
and I'm on holiday, so it's a chance to travel the silk road, or roads, which
basically connected Europe and India with the east (China in particular) from
500 BC to 1500 AD give or take. Mary and I have had a week in Xian, the ancient
capital of China and the start/finish of the road(s). This trip on my own picks
up the route from Lanzhou and goes westwards, into the desert. I'm a bit
nervous about travelling on my own, but excited as well, and I try to keep in
mind that "China is a learning experience, not an
escape; an adventure, not a getaway; a new challenge, not…a holiday" [J.D.
Brown, 50 Memorable Trips]. Most of this was written on the trip but posted
retrospectively since decent bandwith was very hard to find to upload. Enjoy!
Sunday,
8th June in Hulian Hotel, Lanzhou
And we're off. Midnight flight from Singers
and into chinese airports we go. Really good signage (this is important!) Lots
of black-clothed kids in police uniforms. We got herded into a pen at one point
for 'explosion training'. Funny being in China again. The people are more
aggressive you can see it and feel it. One woman tough as nails on the plane
fights to get her place in the queue, tells me to get out of her seat, pokes
and prods me (she was right, I was wrong). On the other hand the Chinese appear
to me to be so much more confident and assertive than Singaporeans. I'm
impressed with how the people get on with each other. There's lots of casual
conversations between strangers, lots of laughter (sometimes raucous!) and
people clearly enjoying themselves and each other. It's such a contrast and I
like it.
In Lanzhou (Larn-joe) I work my way out of the
airport and just kind of stumble into the airport bus rather than a taxi. Went
fine, although I didn't really have a clue where they dropped me off, just had
to ask and work it out (in the end, probably a 2km walk down the main drag
Tianshui Nanlu. So yes, I am in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu Province, gateway to
the Hexi ('Hersh') corridor and the silk roads of the desert. It was an amazing
landscape coming in - large hills of sand like giant tailings, dirty and dusty.
In the valleys some green but I couldn't see a river. LOTS of big
infrastructure projects - motoways, giant flyovers for two train tracks and, around
the airport where we landed 70km away, lots of incomplete towers of apartments.
Lanzhou is (I think was is more accurate) the
world's most air-polluted city on
earth. It's on the Yellow River and in between two mountain chains. Recent
Wikitravel comments call it busy, ugly, polluted & expensive with insurance
scams and foreigners prices, suggesting
you'd be a masochist to stay a few days! Well, I've got 4 nights here at
various points in this trip! You notice the typical features of
Asian - and some specific to China - cities. The constant construction, the big
tall and modern, the big tall and ugly, and then the older buildings which are
ramshackle constructions with the signage almost as tall as the space. In there
will be someone selling drinks and snacks, and there being nothing
differentiating him/her from any number of others doing the same thing. As
always, people are living their lives on the street - lots of informal fruit
sellers (berries!) and girls in restaurants looking bored dressed up in their
red dresses trying to lure the customers in.
Monday
June 9th, Hulian Hotel, Lanzhou
Planning day today - organise trip south to
eastern Tibet for a week, find some food, change some money, buy a train
ticket. How hard can that be? (Answer: yes, quite hard). First up the travel
agency in the hotel: the Gan Su Hualian Triavel Service and it's reassuring cos
their travel tenet is "the at home and affection family love
services" and the "integrity, innovation" is the management idea.
Yes. Half an hour later I'm walking out of there and I'm sure they still had no
idea what I wanted to do! Another place that spoke english made it a 5 minute
jobby
It took 3 hours to find a place to change
money. I went to the Lanzhou Bank, the Bank of China (1), The Agricultural
Bank, The Bank of Communications (1), the Construction Bank of China, the Bank
of China (2), then the Bank of Communications (2) and finally the Bank of China
(3), where I had to wait for about 30 minutes. Oh yes. Then down to the train
station to get the ticket. I had an agent write out the destination in Chinese.
Apart from telling you where the ticket office was, there is no signage at all
in english, so you have no idea which counter to go to and I would have had no
chance of getting this ticket without it written down. The woman at the counter
is dismissive, says no to my passport, snatches my money then asks for the
passport which she grabs from me as well. Did I do something wrong?
Tuesday
June 10th, Overseas Tibetan Hotel, Xiahe
So, onwards and southwards. I'm on a local
tour to Binglinsi after which I will leave them and carry on to Linxia and
then, hopefully, Xiahe. Lanzhou is built around the Yellow River (Huang Ho) and
it's big, dirty and swollen. I'm shown the 100 year old bridge the Germans
built (apparently a corrupt government raided the treasury to pay for it). My
companions are university students ('management' but not business) at Lanzhou
University. They have been married 5 years. She calls me 'Professor' after my
attempts to explain what I did. The guide (Pingling Soeur) is a trick, a lovely woman, yells at the top of her voice
and just enjoys life.
We drive along the Huang Ho for a while, past
some big energy installations, giant chimneys belching smoke into the air, a
recurring image of this city. So we get to the reservoir, actually a huge lake
with a hydro dam and wait for our boat. About an hour and 20 mins! We have to
wait for a certain number of people to arrive to make up the complement for our
speedboat rather than taking the ferry.
Binglinsi, a bastardised Chinese word to do
with a thousand buddhas, was spectacular. More than expected. The boat trip on
the lake was pretty nothing until we gradually got into some spectacular
sandstone formations, heavily eroded. These were the canyons (Dasi Gou, Big
Temple Gully) within which the Buddhist community built niches, monks quarters
and a giant buddha. The landsape itself was pretty amazing. I loved it, all the
better when unexpected.
There are around 180 caves, and although the
first ones were here built around 500AD, they had their heyday in the Tang
Dynasty, most from 960AD. The caves have a range of clay figures and paintings.
The big statue of Maitreya, the future buddha, is cool, but so are some of the
other statues. Because of the local materials being so soft, the statues were
constructed of mud and straw over inner wooden frames.The landscape just adds
to it all.
The reservoir is just outside Liujiaxia and
they drop me off there to catch a bus to Linxia. So far so good. The threatened
highway from Liujiaxia to Linxia has now been built and instead of a 3 hour
journey it is less than an hour. It goes over several impressive bridges
(visible from the lake - arch and suspension), and skirts the lake before
cutting into a valley. Anyway, I get the idea in my head that I could actually
get to Xiahe which is only another 2 hours. This is achieved via a really long
story that involves complete misunderstanding and a totally gratuitous act of
kindness from some locals! I am really struggling with the language - the tonal
range is incredible, the pronounciations far from the sounds that I am used to
hearing, and (it seems to me) to be a language very limited with its range of
consonants. Lesson learned: make sure you write down the name and, if possible,
show the characters from the guide as well. Shame there isn't a map with
english/chinese names.
Linxia was once known as "Little
Mecca" and had 20 mosques (many destroyed in the Cultural Revolution). LP
reckons Linxia is where Han China finally runs out of steam!. Certainly feels
that way and once, finally, I am on the bus to Xiahe and we slowly climb up the
large valleys, it's pretty clear we are crossing cultural boundaries and
getting more Moslem and Tibetan and less Chinese
Anyways, from Linxia to Xiahe was one giant
causeway through a valley surrounded by huge mountains, like going from Opotiki
to Gisborne but the valleys are twice as wide and the mountains are twice (four
times?) as tall. The motorway is basically built over the river, with big
supporting pillars. Very impressive, as are the tunnels that just plough
through the mountains. This is completely separate to the road that we are on,
which also has its own bridges and tunnels! I liked the sheep and goats on the
roads, blocking all the beeping traffic! Also lots of mosques and different
architectural styles, with Tibetan and Arabic script (and sometimes English)
popping up in the signage.
Xiahe comes up much more suddenly than I was
expecting and it's a lot different. I somehow thought it was a one-street town
on a ridge with run-down, funky cafes like Pammukkale. How wrong, how wrong.
For a long time, I think I'm in the wrong town! No names to say Xiahe, no hotel
names in English. Hmmm... Then I see some other western travellers, looking as
lost as I am, and pretty soon after I see the place I'm looking for. It's much
more modern, cleaner and bigger than I was expecting but looking good I think.
Lots of modern blocks of shops in the bottom and restaurants or hotels above.
I'm really pleased to be here. It felt like today was the first real day of
discovery and exploration - like places I actually want to go to rather than
places I have to go to get there - and it's been a real buzz.
Wednesday
June 11, Tibetan Overseas Hotel, Xiahe
So I am now, as I am repeatedly told, in
eastern Tibet, not Gansu province. The woman manager at the hotel is a trick.
Not bad english, singing away to herself, and very efficient and sorted.
Interesting watching monks in traditional
costume riding around in audis! The place is booming with 'construction'
everywhere. There's clearly been a pretty recent make-over Chinese style, with
rows and rows of shops all in uniform buildings and signage. Saw this is Linxia
as well. Guess the developers have moved in. Walk away from the main drag and
we are back to pretty traditional, scummy low rise that's probably been here
for hundreds of years (or variations thereof). I am definitely out of my own
world here. The people are dressed in a mixture of local and semi-western
attire, many of them have all kinds of face masks on (not just the women, but
mostly) There are black-dresses, black shawls and many other different kinds of
traditional dress that I guess denotes all kinds of things if you are from these
parts but which just adds up to colourful if you're not.
I'm enjoying the cold (we're 2920m up)!
Beanie, t-shirt, collar shirt, long-sleeved shirt and jacket all on at once and
I am not warm! The warmest part of this town is my bedroom - none of the cafes
or restaurants are heated (1 exception: Nirvana, aptly named!)
This place exists mostly because of the
Labrang monastery, a huge complex of buildings established in 1709. The Tibetans regard this area as part of
Tibet, although outside the 'Autonomous region of Tibet' (apparently 60% of
Tibetans live outside this area). Labrang is said to be the pre-eminent place
for study of Tibetan Buddhism, more so than in Tibet, where there was
considerably more damage done during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.
The kora is a 3km devotional walk around the
monastery with rows of prayer wheels and worship spots. From a cafe I see a
group of women doing the kora. They come
to a spot and do around 20 of these: stand, arms raised fully above head with
hands together in prayer, hands together against chest, on knees, forward, head
down, fully prostrate, then back up again. I walk the kora. You get drawn into
it - turning the wheels, finding the ones that have stopped and getting them
going again, pushing even harder the ones that are turning fast. At the starts
and finishes of the long halls there are small chapels with large wheels and
bells and they are great as well. I want to just hear the bell sound clear and
quiet, but this is often interrupted by the stream of pilgrims coming through,
ready or not.
I climb to the thangka display terrace on a
hill across the river from the town where I sit and contemplate the meaning of
life. This place is the scene of the unfurling of a giant 20m x 30m thangka
during the Monlam (Great Prayer) Festival. I'm really short of breath and only
slowly realise that it might be altitude.
Thursday
June 12, Tibetan Overseas Hotel, Xiahe
That's what happens when you have time, isn't
it? You replay the tapes - the family stuff, the music, the 'what am I doing in
this place' and so on and so on. The mind just never stops. How to calm it
down, how do you do that?
So the main job of the day is to visit the
monastery and take the tour to look at the
different temples and halls. They were amazing, impressive. Giant statues
(apparently the vast majority made in the 1980s because the originals had all
been destroyed), giant shelves stretching to the roof full of scriptures (over
65,000 volumes in sutra boxes), thankas on the walls, bells and
throat-chanting, carpets - it's sensory overload! The place is full of monks
(around 2000) and pilgrims - even the Chinese tour groups are conspicuous and
me, well I'm the only round-eye around in thousands! This is religion for real,
not for show. As one guide put it, these are "the lived realities of
Tibetan Buddhism - books and so on do not cut it; Go see a real place with real
people." Our guide said that if I wanted, I could spend a couple of years
here learning and being a monk
When the tour has finished I find a deserted
temple to sit and write, and a dude in his 20s comes and sits right next to me.
An interesting cultural moment. He hardly acknowledges me, but there he is,
right there (he had been doing a circuit of the building). I make some attempts
to say hello, but he hardly acknowledges anything (just a grunt!). I show him
my diary so he can see what I'm writing, I write my name down and ask him to do
the same, I say hello, all the things. His eyes are interested, but the voice
just grunts! From the bottom up, he's got basketball-themed sneakers, blue
jeans and a black shirt, with a large grey shawl that comes over his shoulders
and down to his knees. There's a bright pink sash keeping it all intact at the
waist, a cricket-style grey hat with a floppy brim and some prayer beads. He
sits next to me but look straight ahead. I guess he's there for 5 minutes and
then he's off, no acknowledgement or farewell, just off to continue walking
around the temple. He's got a friend who's arrived (maybe he was just waiting?)
who walks round with him shouting into his phone for at least 2 laps. I count
the laps and I'm getting to 17 (about 1.15 minutes to do one!). Very
intriguing.
All the while there's been another devotee
(not a monk), and this is unusual, doing the full prostration thingy that I
described yesterday. He goes through this many times (I'm guessing for 30
minutes that I have been here), then quietly washes his hands, packs his things
up into a little bag, and walks off. There's also some snotty-nosed kids who
want to say hello and touch my things. I smile sweetly but like all kids they
have no sense of when enough is enough. I try and make myself as boring as
possible and it works most of the time.
I go back to the huge prayer hall (it would seat
1000 monks for chanting etc) and sit on the stairs outside, get out my little
red book (how appropriate in China!) and start writing. Before long, there is a
little gathering of monks who have just come out of a chanting session at about
mid-day. They can't help themselves - who am I, where am I from, what is my
name and so on. It's a mix of kids and older monks who are there with a
watchful eye I think. The dude I connect with is Awang Jianzan, who was able to
write his name for me. We pose for a photo together. It's a nice moment. He's
got a friend as well who's name is (sounds like) See-rup (he writes it in
characters). There's a cute kid, who's 12 years old, who's name is (sounds
like) 'Jeromytasi'. They're all kind of playfully jostling with each other.
It's a nice moment. The monks are interested in the camera - at least one of
them knows exactly how to work it.
I then walk up and around the hall a few
times, mostly to catch the throat-chanting going on inside. Previously we had
been shooed out of a temple where they were going to do this, so it was a bit
of a treat, even if it was from outside. There's a drum going as well.
Previously we overheard some young monks yelling their heads off chanting!
Friday
June 13, Tibetan Overseas Hotel, Xiahe
So it's my last day in Xiahe. Driver picks me
up and off to the Sangke grasslands, which really were pretty underwhelming,
although I guess in an economic sense this is what makes life in an extreme
environment possible - grass in summer for herds of yaks. But no yaks here,
only horses. Tibetan culture has been - monasteries notwithstanding - nomadic,
given the extreme cold and unhospitable terrain. I'm the only tourist in the
whole place, bar none. This is around 10am.
Not a lot of sophistication with the tourism
here. The yurts (round tents) have been replaced by permanent structures with
very little attractive about them but I guess the dear Chinese tourists won't
get too cold or smoked out. Nothing authentic going on really. The 'yurts' are
in complexes with the odd animal and a big gateway structure at the entrance.
None are occupied and there must be over a hundred. Very very tacky! Best
moment by far was coming back past a group of locals playing a board game that
looked really interesting! I'd seen them on the way up, but this time I cross
the road and then just hang and smile. I get invited to join the game (and
throw my money away?!) and there's lots of friendly smiles.
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