The Silk Road 8/05

On a bike ride through the desert a few days ago, poor Pierre managed to sprain his nuts. A mild discomfort soon manifested in an inability to walk, and even more terrifying than the consequences of damaged genitals, was the prospect of checking into a grimy Western Chinese hospital. Luckily, with the help of some bed-rest and advice via email from my uncle who is a doctor, Pierre’s testicular trauma seems to have resolved itself. While it is heartening to see him walking around again, I’m disappointed that the leopard skin briefs I bought him for added support are no longer in his daily rotation. Sadly he seems violently opposed to any more bike rides, and is even less enthusiastic about horse and camel treks.

As Pierre lay incapacitated in Turpan, I walked in the blazing sun out to the Emin Ta, an Afghani-style mosque surrounded by vineyards and Uyghur families selling mounds of grapes on blankets. After being invited for samosas and tea with one friendly family, I was sent away with such an armload of grapes that I ended up forcefully donating half of them to some Chinese tourists at the mosque, who seemed perplexed and suspicious of my random act of kindness.

The next day after some intense bargaining (which included some yelling, flailing and me storming away and being called back three times), I hired a taxi to drive me out to the Jiaohe ruins – an ancient Han dynasty capital built on a plateau between two rivers, hat had been decimated by Ghengis Khan in the 13th century. To my delight, this site had not been afflicted by the building of a typical amusement-park style Chinese tourist trap that inevitably smothers every aspect of culture, history and authenticity in a place. The sprawling city ruins were left largely untouched, except for a few informational placards and signs forbidding climbing, drawing, spitting and defecating on the structures. As I was there during the hottest time of the day (it was 110 degrees and the sweat evaporated off my skin so fast that by the end of the day I was covered in a thin layer of salt), I had the pleasure of wandering through the ancient temples, homes and original city streets without another person in sight for nearly the entire time I was there. It was silent except for the incessant echo of a donkey braying from a vineyard nearby. In one area, in front of a giant pit, there was a placard telling of how the remains of over 200 infants had been found buried inside a government building, a discovery of which no one has ever been able to find and explanation.

Leaving Turpan we were unable to secure train tickets to our next destination, so we were diverted to the capital of Xinjiang Province, Urumqi. After being quoted ridiculous room prices at the train station hotel, we were led to a dirt-cheap flophouse by an old man. Our squalid room came replete with a large booger wall and a hot water thermos that smelled as if it had been refilled in the toilet.

The windows of the room opened onto the corridor, and as it was sweltering, we were forced to keep them open despite the parade of nosy hotel guests who stopped to gawk at us. The room next to the shared bathroom was occupied by a Western couple – the woman was about 8 months pregnant, and she and her shirtless boyfriend/husband were engaged in a slobbering heavy petting session in the hallway every time we passed by. Inside the bathroom the florescent light was on the fritz, bathing the room in an eerie green strobe. Naturally the room was also bathed in filth and there was about an inch of water on the floor in some places. During a late-night visit I heard mysterious sounds of something lurking in the toilet trough that ran under the stalls. I felt as if I’d wandered onto the set of a serial-killer movie, and I feverishly tried to finish my business and get away as fast as I could.

On the day we were to depart Urumqi we had about 10 hours to kill before our train, so we stowed our luggage at the station and walked around the city. We found ourselves in the city park, which was comprised of a pond, some benches, and several large stages on which animatronic Uyghurs on camels mechanically swayed. The Chinese government loves artificial displays of Uyghur happiness. Every major stop along the Silk Road has been marked with giant billboards of jubilant Uyghurs greeting Mao and Hu Jintao with open arms, gigantic statues of Mao in city centers, and in Hotan, a giant statue of Mao towering over a Uyghur man as they shake hands. The region of Xinjiang has been disputed for nearly 2000 years – the last 200 years have seen several attempted uprisings against the Chinese from the Uyghurs (most recently in the late 90’s), each brutally crushed. The resentment of the Han by the Uyghurs burns bright as more and more Han are transplanted to Xinjiang, and more traditional Uyghur cities are reborn in a mass of homogenized concrete and bathroom-tile. It is easy to see both the utter lack of integration between the Han and the Uyghurs, and the fact that Xinjiang is home to a culture that is utterly unique to the rest of China. Approaching the province one enters a realm where pork and beer turn to mutton and tea, Buddhism and Taoism become Islam, Mandarin becomes the Turkic-based Uyghur language, and the black hair and almond-eyes of the Han people disperses into a population of people that could pass for Irish, Italian, Turkish, Persian, Pakistani and Russian.

In Urumqi we were happy to find, for the first time in many weeks, an underground mini-mall selling thousands of dvd’s. I also picked up a pirated copy of the new Harry Potter book for $2.50, which except for occasional spelling mistakes and typos, is the real deal (unlike “Harry Potter and the Auspicious Dragon,” a popular knockoff that can be found in various Chinese bookstores).

As we waited in the station for our train from Urumqi to Kuche, the railroad attendants locked the gates to each seating section with chains, a scene reminiscent of a livestock market. It was a strange yet comforting sight, knowing that we would be able to safely enter our train car without being pushed and trampled. In China you are almost always assigned a seat, whether it’s on the train, bus, or even in a movie theater. Sadly this system does little to quell the mass hysteria that ensues when a clump of people all try to accomplish the task of getting to their seats simultaneously. Pierre and I have been forced to adapt to this system, and we have found that we are not above violently swinging our backpacks to knock the competition over when trying to navigate a crowd. I have also developed a new method for dealing with line-cutters. Quite often people will try to edge you out of the way when you are buying a train or bus ticket at the window, and finding that verbal protests are rarely of use, I’ve resorted to grabbing the line-cutter squarely by the chest and shoving them out of the way with both hands. The momentary look of shock on the culprit’s face is priceless, as they stagger backwards momentarily, only to turn around and try to cut in front of the person at the next window.

In Kuche, which is on the Northern pass of the silk road, we checked into a hotel near the bus station. Upon entering the room, it was only a matter of minutes before an audacious cockroach ran up the front of Pierre’s tee-shirt. This was ominous indeed, as we soon discovered that the entire room was crawling, not to mention the hallway, in which a frazzled hotel attendant tried to quickly stomp on the roaches and then quietly sweep up the carcasses before the patrons noticed. It was a futile task to say the least, and after being moved to a new room in which the roaches streamed steadily out from under a diseased looking carpet, we packed our bags and marched down to the front desk for a refund. In an act of unprecedented (at least in China) concern for the customer, the hotel manager showed us to a spotless newly-renovated room on he second floor, that she insisted had no roaches. To our surprise she was right. Sadly we were soon afflicted by vermin of a different kind, in the form of a fellow American teacher named Joel. Joel seemed delighted by our company, and as we are always happy to make new friends on the road, we invited him to share a taxi out to see some ruins the next day. This outing, unbeknown to us at the time, set a dangerous precedent of Joel attempting to be in our company every moment of every day, constantly changing his plans to get on the same trains as us, go to the same hotels, share the same dorm rooms, eat at the same restaurants and visit the same sites. His constant presence was underscored by his tendency for non-sequitur descriptions of his sex-life with his ex-girlfriend that were so repulsively illustrative that Pierre and I both wanted to gouge our eardrums out with chopsticks. Joel was an angry, sexually frustrated white man, who was trying to reinvent himself on the road, claiming expertise in professional photography (but he didn’t know what an f-stop was) and lecturing at length on everything from geology to break dancing and all things Chinese and related to Chinese travel. The harder we tried to get away from Joel, the more desperately he clung – he was impervious to hints and we were quickly approaching having to resort to the “get the hell away from us” talk. After he tried to ingratiate himself with some Muslim men by saying he and Pierre were off to the livestock market to sell me to camel traders, and then later calling a fellow traveler’s Chinese girlfriend a money-hungry prostitute, we decided to take action – waiting until he was committed to going on a horse-trek with a local so he couldn’t follow us, and then jumping in a truck full of old Kyrgyz men to double back to the previous town. Four days later, as we ate breakfast on a bench in a town hundreds of kilometers away, we heard a nauseatingly familiar voice behind us and turned to see Joel and an older European woman, to which he had undoubtedly attached his soul-sucking tentacles. Did I see a slightly desperate look in her eye? Regardless, we were off the hook and he was now headed in the opposite direction as us.

After practicing some of our newly learned Chinese profanity on some cheating cab drivers at the Kuche train station, we punched and kicked our way through the crowds to get on the early morning train to Kashgar – a famous trading outpost on the silk road, near the borders of Tajikistan and Afghanistan. En route we shared a compartment with two young Chinese university students who were on their way to work on a mining project in the desert. They spoke some English and seemed a little uptight, so just for fun we asked them what they thought of the Falun Gong (we have a friend here in China who is a practitioner and her life has been destroyed and some of her friends have been “disappeared). It was quite interesting to watch them randomly access the propaganda they’d been fed and spit it out verbatim- apparently the F.G. had attacked China’s equivalent to the White House (one said “how would you feel if someone attacked your white house?”), and China is not interested in religion and belief, only economy. When we pressed them for what they actually meant by “attacked,” and found out that the F.G. had sat outside and stopped traffic and held signs. When I told them that I had done the same thing in front of America’s white house many times, they looked uncomfortable and replied “This is China.” We could tell we had moved into dangerous territory. We steered the conversation toward a subject we knew would titillate and delight them, the 2008 Beijing Olympics. According to them, at present, the U.S.A. is #1 in all things in the world, but with the advent of the Olympics, China will be #1 and the whole country must pull together to strive for this top spot! Also, the country who controls Central Asia, controls the world (and apparently China was well on it’s way to doing just that). It’s understandable for people to be guarded and say the “safe” thing in a society such as this, but for the first time we felt as if we were talking to people who actually believed it (unlike the bored, robotic mantra of “we love our Chairman Mao” that I used to hear from my students.)

Kashgar is a 2000 year old city that has managed to retain it’s flavor despite the harsh concrete makeover that has afflicted all but a tiny part of the city. The Sunday market draws thousands of people – Uyghurs, Tajiks, Pakistanis, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz – all buying and selling everything you can imagine – from spices and fabric and silk to house wares, donkeys and fruit. Many of the women donned their best clothes, beautiful sequined hand-sewn dresses and colorful head scarves. The streets were frantic with honking motos, donkey cart traffic jams and even the occasional camel cart pulling an impossible load of goods.

Unlike many places where the people scream at you for taking photos, the people here seemed to demand it, following us around, curious to look through our lenses and see themselves on our digital cameras. We hopped on the back of a moto-cart and went to the livestock market – thousands of sheep and lambs – some being sheered for wool, others being squeezed and prodded and haggled over (one peed all over Pierre’s foot), and still others being beheaded and made into stew. Hundreds of bulls and cows were also lined up against the stables, while people anxiously traded wads of cash and then maneuvered the bulls onto flatbed trucks.

In Kashgar we ran into an Argentinean guy, Nicholas, who we had made friends with weeks before in the Tibetan region. Nicholas’ hot Latin temper had flared many times during his travels in China – he had been pushed so far by rude treatment that he had resorted to mooning a ticket agent at the bus station in one town, pouring water through the ticket window in another, and finally in Gansu Province, getting so angry with a ticket agent who was trying to cheat him that he savagely ripped the bars off the window. The police were called and they ended up siding with Nicholas, ordering the agent to refund his money. Although these episodes might seem symptomatic of a rude tourist with a rage disorder, Pierre and I completely understood his actions – our own experiences as tourists in this country have pushed us to the brink of violence on many occasions. As I’ve said before, personal interactions with people tend to be very positive in China, but as a tourist constantly undertaking the impersonal dealings of eating in restaurants, buying bus tickets, riding in taxis, checking into hotels etc., you are continually cheated, mocked, dismissed and ignored. As the two young students on the train told us, “In China we look at your personality and then we decide a price.”

After a few days in Kashgar, and a failed attempt to renew our visas, we got on a bus headed for Pakistan – sadly we were unable to make it all the way there because of complicated visa issues. The Sino-Pakistan Friendship highway winds through the Parmir mountains – a beautiful range that spans from arid cliffs to enormous snow-capped peaks. We got off the bus near Lake Karakul, a glacial lake beneath a 7500m mountain. Around the lake were several Kyrgyz yurts – we ended up staying with a family in their cozy circular abode – in which the husband had actually been born. These people were not allowed to return to Kyrghyzistan, because they ended up on the wrong side of the line when the borders were drawn. We spent the afternoon drinking tea and talking to the wife, Nusaroot, before setting out for a walk around the lake.

It was probably the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever seen – an ocean of snow caps with a crystal blue lake. Occasionally we passed grazing camels on the hills. As dusk fell, an unbelievable swarm of mosquitoes descended on us – hundreds of them, biting any flesh they could find, our cheeks, eyelids, fingers, even crawling up under my hat to bite my scalp. We frantically ran through the fields, swinging our arms until we finally made it up onto a road and out of the tall grass.

That night Nusaroot tucked us in, tickling Pierre’s feet and making bawdy comments about the hanky-panky that might ensue from everyone sleeping on the floor together. As we were back in high altitude (3600m), it was hard getting to sleep. Late at night everyone awoke to Pierre yelling and moaning – I tried to wake him up but he wouldn’t snap out of it. Finally he sat straight up in bed and awoke – he was having a horrific dream that a child’s hand had clamped onto his throat and wouldn’t let go. In the morning we were awoken again, this time by a shaggy goat with huge horns who had snuck into the yurt and was nosing around in the dishes. The goat soon realized it had been discovered and slinked out of the tent.

We had to double back to Kashgar to continue along the silk road, and after a day or two of rest, continued on to the small southern silk road of Yarkand. When we arrived, we were turned away by the bus station hotel, then another hotel, and another. Apparently only one hotel in town was allowed to take foreigners, and when we finally got there they were quoting ridiculous prices. Evidently some official had decided to make some money with one of the local hotels, barring foreigners from all but one establishment, and thus eliminating the competition. The snarky woman at the hotel desk refused to bargain, thinking we didn’t have much choice – Pierre and I made the split decision just to leave town, but not before Pierre said loudly to theclerk “Yarkand” and then grabbed his crotch. There were no buses out of Yarkand until the next day, so we haggled with a taxi for a while, walking away and pretending to start hitchhiking before finally settling on a price.

Now we are in Hotan, site of the most fascinating and lively market we’ve seen yet. If it’s possible, the livestock market is even more chaotic than the one in Kashgar – ill-tempered cows trying to kick people as they run away screaming, and donkey carts plowing through the crowd at warp speed. Sadly, the famous museum in Hotan has been closed down, the mysterious and ancient red-haired mummies that were found near here have now been sent away to Beijing (In fact, every museum of antiquity in Xinjiang that we’ve tried to visit has been closed down.)

Yesterday we embarked on the frustrating task of trying to get our visas renewed. When we were turned down in Kashgar, we were told that we definitely could get them renewed in Hotan. The official who told us this would not back this claim up officially, but we managed to copy her name and phone number down for future reference. When we showed up at the PSB yesterday, we were told to go away and come back at 4pm. When we returned, some people made some phone calls and said to come back tomorrow at 9 am. This morning at 9 am we were told to wait outside a locked office. Eventually a woman showed up and looked at our passports and filled out some forms. She then sent us to another PSB office – a dank, smelly concrete mass with wet drippy walls and no sunlight – when we found the right room, the official said that we still had five days left on our visa and had to wait to renew it. When we told her what was said in Kashgar and gave her the name of the official, she changed her mind and said “no, the computer’s broken – it’s been broken for seven days, come back in two days when it’s fixed.” We argued and told her we were headed off to a very remote part of Qinghai province where we couldn’t get it done. She chatted with her coworkers for a while, made some phone calls, sorted through some files and then left the room. About 20 minutes later, two Pakistani guys came in the room and told us to come back at 3pm. At 3pm we returned, only to find that the office was still closed for lunch and wouldn’t open for another hour and fifteen minutes. After sitting in the drippy, moldy lobby for a while, an official brought us to a new office where we explained our predicament once more to a new person, and were then directed by the new official to go wait in the first office we’d waited in. A while later, a woman approached us saying that we would have to prove we had enough money to travel in China, and wanted to see a bank statement. We pretended not to understand her at all, which was successful in frustrating her to the point of giving up. We then were sent to go and redo all the paperwork and Xeroxing we’d done before going to the first PSB office, and then waited a while longer while 3 PSB officers had an involved discussion about different stamps and visas in our passports. Late in the afternoon we were unceremoniously handed our visas!

okay, if you’re still reading this, Pierre and I will now backtrack along the silk road and then across Eastern China to Beijing, where hopefully we will be able to get on a plane and fly home!