Spring Festival Travels: SW of Lanzhou Feb. 27
Hi,
For the last week I've been back in western China, in the area southwest of Lanzhou. (I'm now in Zhangye, Gansu Province having been through Xining, Qinghai Province).
The train ride west to Xi'an went quite smoothly. Soft sleeper is pretty comfortable, though I think I would have preferred the comraderie of hard sleeper. It's nice to sit and look out at the countryside, though it seemed like people were constantly walking by with bags, forcing me to stop reading, stand up and let them go by. The region from east of Xi'an west is quite dry and dusty with lots of storage and dwelling places carved into loess hillsides (wind-deposited sediment like what's found in the American midwest I understand). I arrived into Xi'an around six o'clock and was able to buy an overnight train ticket on to Lanzhou. I had a few hours so I ate dinner and sat in a pleasant park a few blocks from the train station. Another night on the train and I arrived in Lanzhou. (though Xi'an is a famous tourist site I'll be going back there with my family when we travel in China together in late July/early July so I decided to head on west quickly).
From the Lanzhou train station it was an easy couple of bus rides across the city to the south long distance bus station (public buses in cities are really easy to use in China - I just ask someone what bus to take to a place, and ask the ticket person on board to tell me when to get off - they're always really friendly and helpful). At the station the ticket woman insisted she couldn't sell me a ticket to Linxia and pointed at a man who was harrassing a couple Dutch people. Together we were, as my guidebook puts it, "press ganged" onto a bus by a guy who was actually quite nice when I talked to him later. The ensuing ride was great fun. We crawled out of the station over torn up dirt and pavement streets while the two ticket sellers jumped on and off the moving bus yelling "Linxia" and "Xiahe" and accosting people that stood by the roadside. We pulled up next to three men with piles of bloody sheepskins on the roadside. Our ticket men quoted some price, and the men indicated, no, no. Fine then, the sellers climbed on the bus and it drove down the road 20 meters or so before they jumped out again and said, I take it, a lower price. The men agreed and the bus backed up, they loaded the sheepskins and themselves onboard, and we were on our way.
The new road climbed its way up through a dusty, dry, but pretty incredible landscape with terraced hillslopes and eroded ridges. The region is home to many Chinese Muslims, and I saw them everywhere, the men with white skullcaps and the women with scarves over their heads. They've also built some quite beautiful mosques with minarets at the four corners and silver crescents on rooftop spires. The bus dropped me off on the outskirts of Linxia, and as I got off the woman from the Netherlands told me there was a New Years festival happening in Xiahe, a Tibetan town I'd intended to visit later. I stayed in Linxia to go to a bank and get a sense of the city, but then caught another bus up to Xiahe.
There was a Chinese backpacker on the bus, and when we got to Xiahe we ended up in the same guesthouse dormroom. We started talking and ended up wandering around the Labrang Monastery together taking pictures that afternoon, and then traveling together for the next few days. Her name is Liang Feng Xia and she's a pharmacist in Guangzhou. She remembers little English from her schooling, but was very patient in listening to my Chinese (especially my bad grammar - I forget all the time that time and place come first in a sentence) and very attuned to what vocabulary I'd understand and what I wouldn't. She often acted as a translator when other Chinese spoke to me. "Did you understand that?"
Xiahe (an amazing name in pronuncation, with a quick fouth tone "Xia" and a longer second tone "he" from deep in the throat) has one painfully long main street that I had to walk back and forth from the bus station to our guesthouse. It's lined with Chinese-style storefronts that were mostly all closed for the Spring Festival. West of that was the huge Labrang Monastery complex, and a Tibetan neighborhood beyond. The monastery has several Tibetan temples on the flank of a hillside overlooking a wide area of one-story dwellings and courtyards for monks. The complex is surrounded by a path for circumambulating (a word?) worshippers, with long lines of prayer wheels on the south side.
The first morning we were there we watched some sort of Tibetan ceremony taking place. Many monks were gathered around a stage of sorts where other monks with yellow hats stood near I leader of sorts, in yellow clothing. I have a lot of reading up on Tibetan religion, history and culture to do whenever I get to a place where it isn't banned or in Chinese :). It was like Yellowstone, there were so many photographers around, only these were monks and Tibetan worshippers instead of buffalo and elk. Feng Xia made me somewhat uncomfortable by asking me to "sneak" pictures of her standing next to Tibetan women. I can't complain too much about the photographers, though, because I got to know a couple of them later and they're really nice people. Anyway, thanks to my moral reservations I don't have many pictures of people to show you.
We did a lot of walking around the monastery complex, nad a little walking into the hills. On one of these walks into the hills we ran into an Italian man who apparently travels around China for his life, and goes home to visit Italy for vacations. He shares my enthusiasm for the Tibetan areas in western Sichuan and (along with others I've talked to) highly recommends some river valley (not Tiger Leaping Gorge) in Yunnan Province right along the border with Myanmar. Anyway, he said I really ought to go to Langmusi, a town further into the mountains, so I decided to join Feng Xia in going there the next morning.
At 7 am the next morning we walked in the dark bus station and met a man I took to be a profession photographer, whom Feng Xia had spoken with briefly the afternoon before. He and another photographer we traveling on the same bus to Langmusi. While I gazed out at the landscape (stunning) Feng Xia talked and talked with the two photographers and also a Tibetan girl. I couldn't follow their conversation and so didn't join in, but when we arrived we were walking together to find a hotel without me even knowing who they all were. So we became a little travel and photography fellowship in what was one of my best experiences of this trip and my time in China.
I've already introduced Liang Feng Xia. Now, Lao "Old" Zhang a professional photographer from Nanjing - a specialist in photographing people and a smoker, he had a great sense of humor and traveled (I was amazed) with only his camera bag and one small hand bag. Then there was Lao Ding (nicknamed Hongbo, or "boss" in the local Tibetan dialect), actually not a photographer but the owner of Shenzhen software company that translates software into Chinese on contract. He was decked out with nice outdoor travel gear, a high-end Canon digital SLR like Lao Zhang's, a sweet Leica digital "point and shoot" (he's a really good photographer, though, so he deserves the gear), and a digital sound recorder. He has a great interest in documenting the Tibetan people, and played for us beautiful recordings he'd made of a woman in his Xiahe hotel singing as she mopped the floor. Lao Ding spoke some English and could convey things to me that otherwise slipped my ears in their Chinese conversations. Last, there's Cai Bao, a Tibetan native of Xiahe who studies Tibetan medicine in the nearby city Hezuo, and is currently visiting a classmate in Langmusi. She had no camera but took custody of the Leica in our subsequent adventures.
Langmusi is a mainstreet and a collection of houses in a couple intersecting stream valleys at 3500 m. Hemming the town in are a mesa that reminded me of the cliffs at Aguerro, Spain, a hillside with Tibetan temples and vegetation that looked like African scrub, and a wall of white rugged mountains to the west. The five of us got rooms together at a pleasant hotel, and ate lunch at Lesha's cafe, a place with a lot of character, a lot of signed t-shirts from international travelers on the wall, and a very tall non-Chinese waiter. We ate apple pie among other dishes and then then headed out to shoot up the place from village to ridgetop, before resting awhile in the midafternoon, and staking out on a hilltop for the sunset. That evening we all sat around talking in the guys' room (No. 203) and entertained various talkative Chinese guests that wandered in. It was really incredible for me to be there listening to these folks, and getting to know them. Without Feng Xia's ability to make friends along the road, I would probably never have gotten to know these people. Lao Ding spoke English and was willing to speak slowly in Chinese, but Lao Zhang was generally incomprehensible to me (though it was very funny to watch the others' reactions to his jokes).
We rose early the next morning for a cold but beautiful sunrise, the light touching the mountains and then the town below. We had a good time taking pictures of each other along with the scene.
We'd been invited by Cai Bao's classmate (also Tibetan) to a housewarming party his family was having. We placed our gifts on a table outside and walked up the sets, though the porch, and into a house full of Tibetans of all ages. They sat us on couches behind glass coffee tables full of food. They gave us Tibetan milk tea and dishes with rice and sugar and something unknown. I was gratified to watch my Chinese friends politely say thank you to and ignore our hosts' suggestion that they carve pieces from the huge hunk of perhaps beef lying on the table (it's an art I often practiced at dinners with Xiao Sheng's family). Lao Ding asked if anyone would sing, and a woman sitting on the floor in a corner of the room bent her head over a microphone and sang with a voice full of emotion. He recorded her and later a teenage boy that the room cajoled into singing (until his voice cracked).
Before long Lao Zhang and Lao Ding were up and about taking pictures of the people, and Feng Xia, Cai Bao, and I went outside to join the dancing. I tried my best to mimick whoever was in front of me, whether Cai Bao, seven year old girl, or teenage boy, in various traditional dances. A favorite of mine had us trotting in a circle swishing our hands back and forth, then turning inwards to reach an arm down towards an outstretched foot, followed by a dip of the knees, with hands on hips and rear end out. After a while we retired to the porch, and the wireless microphone circulated. Somewhere in this world (on Feng Xia's camera where I hope it will never reach you) there's a video of me serenading (walking around and everything) a housefull of Tibetans to the tune of Edelweiss with made up words (about flowers not Jasper this time - there was one English speaker on the scene). Lao Zhang and I also teamed for a brief rendition of "One Night In Beijing," a current Chinese pop hit that may or may not have reached your ears. Then Feng Xia and I held one of Cai Bao's classmate's several older sister's twin babies. Lao Zhang has a great picture that I hope will make it back to me. Actually he and Lao Ding got a ton of excellent photos of these people - I'll try to pass a couple on if I can get ahold of them.
Lao Zhang, Feng Xia, and I were planning to catch a 2:30 bus back to Xiahe but first Cai Bao led us up to a cave next to where the White Dragon River (soon to be filled with trash) emerges from the mountains. We arrived back at the center of town on time, but found we had (perhaps partly intentionally ... I at least was torn about whether to go or not) missed the bus. So we stayed another night. I took a walk back up to the White Dragon gorge, and into the rocky limestone ridges beyond, where it was beautifully silent and I got to watch wild turkey-like birds hop and flutter up cliffs opposite.
We ate dinner again at Lesha's and returned to the Tibetans' home. Walking up the dirt lane to their house felt like entering an off-campus party at college (not that I went to any). People were milling around inside, and entering first, I was captured and led to a couch where a drunk Tibetan explained to me in slurred Chinese that he is male, I am male, and beer is a man's drink ... another man kindly gave me an overflowing cup of orange soda. Feng Xia rescued me with word that there was dancing. On the way out someone grabbed me and placed a long, white, silk-like scarf around my neck.
We danced in a large cicle in the dark yard, stumbling over rough ground and pile of dirt. People started setting off fireworks, including some duds that brave souls ran in to relight. After a time the music changed to something more modern (if a techno beat is modern) that I don't quite know how to describe, and I who had been fumbling through the group dances became a star (whether as an American or an impressive dancer I don't know). There was a kid of maybe eight or ten running around in army pants and a leather jacket, with the front of his head shaved and a huge lock of hair coming off the back (whatever that's called). He was going crazy throwing himself around in the crowd of dancers, and we had a good time doing a little dance off with him.
Around 9 or so we decided to bow out and return to our hotel. We said thank you to the family elders and wound up dancing and twirling our whites scarves down the main street of town, to the amusement of the folks in Lesha's. We rounded off the evening sitting on our beds eating some kind of seed or nut as we (mostly they) talked. That night Lao Ding decided to stay on and record enough material for an album of their singing, but Feng Xia, Lao Zhang, and I got on a bus early the next morning, and transfered in Hezuo to another on to Lanzhou.
In Lanzhou Feng Xia and I parted ways with Lao Zhang at the train station. I found that train tickets east to Shanghai (I was looking for one for a few days later) were sold out, but we both managed to buy train tickets to Xining, to the west in Qinghai Province. The train ride was uneventful except for the crush of people getting on and a really nice couple and their seven-year-old daughter sitting across the table from us. The girl was really cute and was entertained for quite a while by a game where she covered a pile of pumpkin seeds with her hands and Feng Xia guessed whether it was an odd or even number. I again experienced how relaxing it is to sit and eat seeds with people as time passes by. Feng Xia managed to buy a ticket from Xining to Shanghai for me (for tomorrow evening) and her friend back in Guangzhou websearched us a hostel (a curious but comfortable place down a dark alley with no sign, and a dog that barked ferociously as we walked outside to and from the bathroom). We ate in a great night market and the next morning we parted ways as she headed off to a Tibetan temple, and I bought a ticket to Zhangye.
I had three days, and apparently there wasn't a whole lot to see in this season around Xining, so I decided to go up to Zhangye, on the Silk Road in Gansu Province. It was a long bus ride away, but bus rides have been one of my favorite parts of travel in China. This one didn't disappoint. I knew that the Silk Road in this region followed a narrow corridor between mountains, but was expecting most of the drive to be across a dusty monotonous landscape. Instead we wound our way up through barren rocky hills, on a rather precarious road (under reconstruction) around a reservoir, and through a tunnel into a huge, normal-fault bounded valley on the scale (though not the vertical relief) of Death Valley. The valley was beautiful, a cross between the Basin and Range and Montana, plus dusty Chinese villages and herders' homesteads. We drove up this valley to the northwest, and over no less than two 11,000 foot plus passes (modest compared to the 14,000 foot passes I went over on the way to and from Litang ... everything is high here), before dropping (quite rapidly on the downward, curving road) onto the flat Great Plains of the Silk Road valley.
Zhangye is, true to Lonely Planet's word, a relaxing, pleasant city (of apparently over 400,000 people, though it is noticeable smaller than Dinghai) with nearly all its streets lined by willow trees. My aim here has been to relax, and I spent my morning today walking around the streets taking pictures. It's nice to spend two nights in one place and not have a whole lot in particular to see. Tomorrow morning I'll get on a bus back over that great road to Xining and spend the late afternoon in that city before boarding a train to Shanghai around 9 pm. It'll be two nights and a whole day to Shanghai. I bought the last ticket on the train evidently, a soft sleeper, so it should be comfortable. I was torn for a while by the alternative of taking a bunch of long distance buses east from here to Xi'an, then Wuhan, then Shanghai, but it's good to know for sure I have a way back on time to start teaching on March 5. I arrive in Shanghai at 6 am on March 2 and should get home early afternoon that day. That'll give me 2 1/2 days to get settled in Dinghai before I start teaching again on March 5. I'll be busy with pictures, and getting back in touch with you all (eventually!) through e-mail, phone, or video conference.
I hope you've enjoyed these e-mails - gosh this is long.
Best wishes to you all,
Tyler
For the last week I've been back in western China, in the area southwest of Lanzhou. (I'm now in Zhangye, Gansu Province having been through Xining, Qinghai Province).
The train ride west to Xi'an went quite smoothly. Soft sleeper is pretty comfortable, though I think I would have preferred the comraderie of hard sleeper. It's nice to sit and look out at the countryside, though it seemed like people were constantly walking by with bags, forcing me to stop reading, stand up and let them go by. The region from east of Xi'an west is quite dry and dusty with lots of storage and dwelling places carved into loess hillsides (wind-deposited sediment like what's found in the American midwest I understand). I arrived into Xi'an around six o'clock and was able to buy an overnight train ticket on to Lanzhou. I had a few hours so I ate dinner and sat in a pleasant park a few blocks from the train station. Another night on the train and I arrived in Lanzhou. (though Xi'an is a famous tourist site I'll be going back there with my family when we travel in China together in late July/early July so I decided to head on west quickly).
From the Lanzhou train station it was an easy couple of bus rides across the city to the south long distance bus station (public buses in cities are really easy to use in China - I just ask someone what bus to take to a place, and ask the ticket person on board to tell me when to get off - they're always really friendly and helpful). At the station the ticket woman insisted she couldn't sell me a ticket to Linxia and pointed at a man who was harrassing a couple Dutch people. Together we were, as my guidebook puts it, "press ganged" onto a bus by a guy who was actually quite nice when I talked to him later. The ensuing ride was great fun. We crawled out of the station over torn up dirt and pavement streets while the two ticket sellers jumped on and off the moving bus yelling "Linxia" and "Xiahe" and accosting people that stood by the roadside. We pulled up next to three men with piles of bloody sheepskins on the roadside. Our ticket men quoted some price, and the men indicated, no, no. Fine then, the sellers climbed on the bus and it drove down the road 20 meters or so before they jumped out again and said, I take it, a lower price. The men agreed and the bus backed up, they loaded the sheepskins and themselves onboard, and we were on our way.
The new road climbed its way up through a dusty, dry, but pretty incredible landscape with terraced hillslopes and eroded ridges. The region is home to many Chinese Muslims, and I saw them everywhere, the men with white skullcaps and the women with scarves over their heads. They've also built some quite beautiful mosques with minarets at the four corners and silver crescents on rooftop spires. The bus dropped me off on the outskirts of Linxia, and as I got off the woman from the Netherlands told me there was a New Years festival happening in Xiahe, a Tibetan town I'd intended to visit later. I stayed in Linxia to go to a bank and get a sense of the city, but then caught another bus up to Xiahe.
There was a Chinese backpacker on the bus, and when we got to Xiahe we ended up in the same guesthouse dormroom. We started talking and ended up wandering around the Labrang Monastery together taking pictures that afternoon, and then traveling together for the next few days. Her name is Liang Feng Xia and she's a pharmacist in Guangzhou. She remembers little English from her schooling, but was very patient in listening to my Chinese (especially my bad grammar - I forget all the time that time and place come first in a sentence) and very attuned to what vocabulary I'd understand and what I wouldn't. She often acted as a translator when other Chinese spoke to me. "Did you understand that?"
Xiahe (an amazing name in pronuncation, with a quick fouth tone "Xia" and a longer second tone "he" from deep in the throat) has one painfully long main street that I had to walk back and forth from the bus station to our guesthouse. It's lined with Chinese-style storefronts that were mostly all closed for the Spring Festival. West of that was the huge Labrang Monastery complex, and a Tibetan neighborhood beyond. The monastery has several Tibetan temples on the flank of a hillside overlooking a wide area of one-story dwellings and courtyards for monks. The complex is surrounded by a path for circumambulating (a word?) worshippers, with long lines of prayer wheels on the south side.
The first morning we were there we watched some sort of Tibetan ceremony taking place. Many monks were gathered around a stage of sorts where other monks with yellow hats stood near I leader of sorts, in yellow clothing. I have a lot of reading up on Tibetan religion, history and culture to do whenever I get to a place where it isn't banned or in Chinese :). It was like Yellowstone, there were so many photographers around, only these were monks and Tibetan worshippers instead of buffalo and elk. Feng Xia made me somewhat uncomfortable by asking me to "sneak" pictures of her standing next to Tibetan women. I can't complain too much about the photographers, though, because I got to know a couple of them later and they're really nice people. Anyway, thanks to my moral reservations I don't have many pictures of people to show you.
We did a lot of walking around the monastery complex, nad a little walking into the hills. On one of these walks into the hills we ran into an Italian man who apparently travels around China for his life, and goes home to visit Italy for vacations. He shares my enthusiasm for the Tibetan areas in western Sichuan and (along with others I've talked to) highly recommends some river valley (not Tiger Leaping Gorge) in Yunnan Province right along the border with Myanmar. Anyway, he said I really ought to go to Langmusi, a town further into the mountains, so I decided to join Feng Xia in going there the next morning.
At 7 am the next morning we walked in the dark bus station and met a man I took to be a profession photographer, whom Feng Xia had spoken with briefly the afternoon before. He and another photographer we traveling on the same bus to Langmusi. While I gazed out at the landscape (stunning) Feng Xia talked and talked with the two photographers and also a Tibetan girl. I couldn't follow their conversation and so didn't join in, but when we arrived we were walking together to find a hotel without me even knowing who they all were. So we became a little travel and photography fellowship in what was one of my best experiences of this trip and my time in China.
I've already introduced Liang Feng Xia. Now, Lao "Old" Zhang a professional photographer from Nanjing - a specialist in photographing people and a smoker, he had a great sense of humor and traveled (I was amazed) with only his camera bag and one small hand bag. Then there was Lao Ding (nicknamed Hongbo, or "boss" in the local Tibetan dialect), actually not a photographer but the owner of Shenzhen software company that translates software into Chinese on contract. He was decked out with nice outdoor travel gear, a high-end Canon digital SLR like Lao Zhang's, a sweet Leica digital "point and shoot" (he's a really good photographer, though, so he deserves the gear), and a digital sound recorder. He has a great interest in documenting the Tibetan people, and played for us beautiful recordings he'd made of a woman in his Xiahe hotel singing as she mopped the floor. Lao Ding spoke some English and could convey things to me that otherwise slipped my ears in their Chinese conversations. Last, there's Cai Bao, a Tibetan native of Xiahe who studies Tibetan medicine in the nearby city Hezuo, and is currently visiting a classmate in Langmusi. She had no camera but took custody of the Leica in our subsequent adventures.
Langmusi is a mainstreet and a collection of houses in a couple intersecting stream valleys at 3500 m. Hemming the town in are a mesa that reminded me of the cliffs at Aguerro, Spain, a hillside with Tibetan temples and vegetation that looked like African scrub, and a wall of white rugged mountains to the west. The five of us got rooms together at a pleasant hotel, and ate lunch at Lesha's cafe, a place with a lot of character, a lot of signed t-shirts from international travelers on the wall, and a very tall non-Chinese waiter. We ate apple pie among other dishes and then then headed out to shoot up the place from village to ridgetop, before resting awhile in the midafternoon, and staking out on a hilltop for the sunset. That evening we all sat around talking in the guys' room (No. 203) and entertained various talkative Chinese guests that wandered in. It was really incredible for me to be there listening to these folks, and getting to know them. Without Feng Xia's ability to make friends along the road, I would probably never have gotten to know these people. Lao Ding spoke English and was willing to speak slowly in Chinese, but Lao Zhang was generally incomprehensible to me (though it was very funny to watch the others' reactions to his jokes).
We rose early the next morning for a cold but beautiful sunrise, the light touching the mountains and then the town below. We had a good time taking pictures of each other along with the scene.
We'd been invited by Cai Bao's classmate (also Tibetan) to a housewarming party his family was having. We placed our gifts on a table outside and walked up the sets, though the porch, and into a house full of Tibetans of all ages. They sat us on couches behind glass coffee tables full of food. They gave us Tibetan milk tea and dishes with rice and sugar and something unknown. I was gratified to watch my Chinese friends politely say thank you to and ignore our hosts' suggestion that they carve pieces from the huge hunk of perhaps beef lying on the table (it's an art I often practiced at dinners with Xiao Sheng's family). Lao Ding asked if anyone would sing, and a woman sitting on the floor in a corner of the room bent her head over a microphone and sang with a voice full of emotion. He recorded her and later a teenage boy that the room cajoled into singing (until his voice cracked).
Before long Lao Zhang and Lao Ding were up and about taking pictures of the people, and Feng Xia, Cai Bao, and I went outside to join the dancing. I tried my best to mimick whoever was in front of me, whether Cai Bao, seven year old girl, or teenage boy, in various traditional dances. A favorite of mine had us trotting in a circle swishing our hands back and forth, then turning inwards to reach an arm down towards an outstretched foot, followed by a dip of the knees, with hands on hips and rear end out. After a while we retired to the porch, and the wireless microphone circulated. Somewhere in this world (on Feng Xia's camera where I hope it will never reach you) there's a video of me serenading (walking around and everything) a housefull of Tibetans to the tune of Edelweiss with made up words (about flowers not Jasper this time - there was one English speaker on the scene). Lao Zhang and I also teamed for a brief rendition of "One Night In Beijing," a current Chinese pop hit that may or may not have reached your ears. Then Feng Xia and I held one of Cai Bao's classmate's several older sister's twin babies. Lao Zhang has a great picture that I hope will make it back to me. Actually he and Lao Ding got a ton of excellent photos of these people - I'll try to pass a couple on if I can get ahold of them.
Lao Zhang, Feng Xia, and I were planning to catch a 2:30 bus back to Xiahe but first Cai Bao led us up to a cave next to where the White Dragon River (soon to be filled with trash) emerges from the mountains. We arrived back at the center of town on time, but found we had (perhaps partly intentionally ... I at least was torn about whether to go or not) missed the bus. So we stayed another night. I took a walk back up to the White Dragon gorge, and into the rocky limestone ridges beyond, where it was beautifully silent and I got to watch wild turkey-like birds hop and flutter up cliffs opposite.
We ate dinner again at Lesha's and returned to the Tibetans' home. Walking up the dirt lane to their house felt like entering an off-campus party at college (not that I went to any). People were milling around inside, and entering first, I was captured and led to a couch where a drunk Tibetan explained to me in slurred Chinese that he is male, I am male, and beer is a man's drink ... another man kindly gave me an overflowing cup of orange soda. Feng Xia rescued me with word that there was dancing. On the way out someone grabbed me and placed a long, white, silk-like scarf around my neck.
We danced in a large cicle in the dark yard, stumbling over rough ground and pile of dirt. People started setting off fireworks, including some duds that brave souls ran in to relight. After a time the music changed to something more modern (if a techno beat is modern) that I don't quite know how to describe, and I who had been fumbling through the group dances became a star (whether as an American or an impressive dancer I don't know). There was a kid of maybe eight or ten running around in army pants and a leather jacket, with the front of his head shaved and a huge lock of hair coming off the back (whatever that's called). He was going crazy throwing himself around in the crowd of dancers, and we had a good time doing a little dance off with him.
Around 9 or so we decided to bow out and return to our hotel. We said thank you to the family elders and wound up dancing and twirling our whites scarves down the main street of town, to the amusement of the folks in Lesha's. We rounded off the evening sitting on our beds eating some kind of seed or nut as we (mostly they) talked. That night Lao Ding decided to stay on and record enough material for an album of their singing, but Feng Xia, Lao Zhang, and I got on a bus early the next morning, and transfered in Hezuo to another on to Lanzhou.
In Lanzhou Feng Xia and I parted ways with Lao Zhang at the train station. I found that train tickets east to Shanghai (I was looking for one for a few days later) were sold out, but we both managed to buy train tickets to Xining, to the west in Qinghai Province. The train ride was uneventful except for the crush of people getting on and a really nice couple and their seven-year-old daughter sitting across the table from us. The girl was really cute and was entertained for quite a while by a game where she covered a pile of pumpkin seeds with her hands and Feng Xia guessed whether it was an odd or even number. I again experienced how relaxing it is to sit and eat seeds with people as time passes by. Feng Xia managed to buy a ticket from Xining to Shanghai for me (for tomorrow evening) and her friend back in Guangzhou websearched us a hostel (a curious but comfortable place down a dark alley with no sign, and a dog that barked ferociously as we walked outside to and from the bathroom). We ate in a great night market and the next morning we parted ways as she headed off to a Tibetan temple, and I bought a ticket to Zhangye.
I had three days, and apparently there wasn't a whole lot to see in this season around Xining, so I decided to go up to Zhangye, on the Silk Road in Gansu Province. It was a long bus ride away, but bus rides have been one of my favorite parts of travel in China. This one didn't disappoint. I knew that the Silk Road in this region followed a narrow corridor between mountains, but was expecting most of the drive to be across a dusty monotonous landscape. Instead we wound our way up through barren rocky hills, on a rather precarious road (under reconstruction) around a reservoir, and through a tunnel into a huge, normal-fault bounded valley on the scale (though not the vertical relief) of Death Valley. The valley was beautiful, a cross between the Basin and Range and Montana, plus dusty Chinese villages and herders' homesteads. We drove up this valley to the northwest, and over no less than two 11,000 foot plus passes (modest compared to the 14,000 foot passes I went over on the way to and from Litang ... everything is high here), before dropping (quite rapidly on the downward, curving road) onto the flat Great Plains of the Silk Road valley.
Zhangye is, true to Lonely Planet's word, a relaxing, pleasant city (of apparently over 400,000 people, though it is noticeable smaller than Dinghai) with nearly all its streets lined by willow trees. My aim here has been to relax, and I spent my morning today walking around the streets taking pictures. It's nice to spend two nights in one place and not have a whole lot in particular to see. Tomorrow morning I'll get on a bus back over that great road to Xining and spend the late afternoon in that city before boarding a train to Shanghai around 9 pm. It'll be two nights and a whole day to Shanghai. I bought the last ticket on the train evidently, a soft sleeper, so it should be comfortable. I was torn for a while by the alternative of taking a bunch of long distance buses east from here to Xi'an, then Wuhan, then Shanghai, but it's good to know for sure I have a way back on time to start teaching on March 5. I arrive in Shanghai at 6 am on March 2 and should get home early afternoon that day. That'll give me 2 1/2 days to get settled in Dinghai before I start teaching again on March 5. I'll be busy with pictures, and getting back in touch with you all (eventually!) through e-mail, phone, or video conference.
I hope you've enjoyed these e-mails - gosh this is long.
Best wishes to you all,
Tyler
posted by Tyler C-R at 8:09 PM
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