through the looking glass

we missed the train. get there at something absurd like 2am. train’s at three. go to net bar. reason that if we buy an hour the computer will turn off in time. obviously, this was faulty reasoning. computers turn off, alex nudges me and sums it up with ‘shite!’

so much for our perfect plan of sleeping on the train and early morning bus. I couldn’t seem to stop snickering. I’m not entirely sure alex knew what he’d gotten himself into, signing on with me for this trip, but this was something of the perfect introduction. in the middle of nowhere nothing goes to plan, so it rather made sense that this started at the beginning.

taxi back to the boys’ place. only a few hours till the first bus should leave, so I let alex grab the first nap and I pop in a movie. 6:30 am, onwards to the bus station to catch the first bus to lanzhou.

don’t think the first bus ended up pulling out till 7:30, but by that time I’m pretty sure we were both sound asleep on it

I’m gonna insert too much information here, because it became something of a trip barometer for me. (that, and I just found it sweet.) for the first while alex wouldn’t sit next to me on busses. (nor, mind you, would he change his shirt while I was in the room. boy’d go to the bathroom.) so on this the first leg of the trip, my trip companion was a row behind me, occasionally poking me or otherwise attracting my attention so we could converse through the gap in the seats

arrive in lanzhou, taxi it over to the bus station across the city only to find out we’d missed the last bus directly to xiahe. now I didn’t much like xiahe the first time round, but alex had a friend who’d gotten his name on some big chalkboard there for eating a giant yak burger; alex apparently found this a worthy challenge, so xiahe it was. I’d heard there were near hourly busses there from linxia, so we took the next shuttle bus. I still believe we would have made it, it we hadn’t gotten that flat tire.

if you’ve never seen a bus tire changing in china….. very small man jumping on a very big stick. occasionally, two men jumping. I still haven’t worked out the physics, but eventually it did something and, new tire on, we’re back on the road.

only to arrive literally minutes after the last bus for xiahe had gone.

we get a tip from someone on the street that there’s a gas station near the edge of town where busses sometimes stop. along the way we realized there was a young guy asking all the same questions we were, so we started chatting and caught a taxi together for the gas station. turns out he’s from xiahe, just finishing a semester at northwest normal university and on his way home. rather desperate to get there, actually; understandable as we were all of an hour and change away. while we waited for busses we stopped every passing taxi and tried negotiating fares. sometimes it truly amazes me what some people think it’s okay to charge a white person. actually had one guy say eight hundred kuai. we conversed with the melon seller nearby to pass a little time. he chuckled rather a lot. at us, I’d say, particularly when we hid behind his cart while our new local friend ask taxis for prices. he didn’t have much better luck than we did. in the end, as no busses came, it took al of alex’s goofy charm and all my eyelash batting broke teacher sob stories kid from xiahe just trying to get home to convince a taxi to take us for the vaguely reasonable 30 kuai each.

only it’s now dark, and streetlights aren’t exactly prevalent, and this guy doesn’t so much know the roads. and we keep getting stopped by men with disturbingly large machine guns asking for papers. usually they’d let us pass as soon as they saw the white faces grinning from the back seat, but some weren’t fooling around. took a while to extract the information, but eventually we learned that one of the drug gangs linxia’s somewhat notorious for gunned down a number of cops the day before. If we hadn’t been there we never would have known.

poor taxi driver will likely never pick up anyone ever again. the new road wasn’t finished and the old road was already partly torn apart. landed in xiahe at maybe 11pm and the poor man had to turn around and go back. in an awkward moment, the driver asked the student if he could stay with his family. he said no, but in practically the next breathe asked us to stay with him. we politely declined, but said we’d like to meet him for lunch the next day. he rambled off into the back streets and though we waited we never did see him again.

xiahe sleeps early, but darjee at the cafe on the corner held her doors open, with the help of a friendly german patron, just a little longer so we could eat for the first time since potato bing at 7am. a little fried rice later we fell into the first hotel with open doors.

(traveller’s note :: watch out for the funny little inverted u shaped poles on the sidewalk. walked into one last night. it’s possible this is their only purpose.)

up early, alex chomping at the bit to shop for knives. didn’t find one, but he did buy a fedora I’ve been attempting to pilfer ever since. I started what was to become an oddly unintentional collection of allegedly bird bone pipes by inadvertantly bargaining ridiculously low prices and then rather having to finish the deal. hearing comments all the while about all the crap I usually give alex about being a girl for shopping so damned much. unfortunately, no student, no yak burgers, so after lunch we headed to the station and caught the 2pm bus to hezuo

arriving, we’re told that there are no more busses out today, but go to the other station just in case. taxis outside say no busses as well, but lo and behold, what do we find sitting there almost waiting for our arrival but a bus to luqu. perfection, we climb in.

leaving the dusty developed areas behind, we pass a stunning monestary and the gorgeous open fields filled with wildflowers that drew me to this area last year. mountains in the distance, rolling hills with streams cutting through, alex begins to understand why I’m taking him to a town no one’s ever heard of. at the height of fascination out the window the bus turns off the main road, pulls into a tiny little town and stops at the curb. we exit to a single main street. a taxi passes, a horse passes, a taxi passes. a horse passes. we smile, refreshed, and start looking for lodgings.

so great is our desire to explore that we take lodgings sight unseen. well, alex might have seen the dorms, but after he kept forgetting to make sure they had things like toilets with doors in ningxia I didn’t so much trust his judgement as yet, and as the ensuite rooms were 20 kuai more we decided to splurge. only to find one dividing wall almost entirely made of glass. this lead to amusing moments of politely tossing each other out the room, or pretending we had something to attend to when we figured the other might want a shower.

linear time pauses here. I’ve a memory of walking around the town alone, of being in a net bar with alex, of finding crazy back alleys that led along a river of garbage that I’m honestly not sure was manmade or natural, of walking towards the river proper to see the sun set, of sitting in the square and being approached by a pair of tibetan women; we shared no common language but managed to communicate all sorts of secrets and, smiling ear to ear for no apparent reason, held hands. of meeting english students who wanted to know everything but couldn’t find a single question, of having dinner with alex in a mildly posh place where we met a group of students from shanghai in town to ‘help the people’ in some confusingly unspecified manner… I’m honestly not sure in which order these events occurred.

the next morning however was unforgettable. we headed out of town, following the river, passing yurts with friendly occupants and those without, bulldozer sites, field upon field of wildflowers, laying lazily by the rushing cold stream, watching a pair of hui people fishing with a bowl and string, watching the world go by, watching as their families joined in and served lunch, walking some more, unable to comprehend the vastness of the landscape surrounding us. we saw a stunning woman herd a veritable plethora of yak down to the river for a cool off, then out and up the road for a snack. all of which involved a lot of yelling and the occasional throwing of rocks. baby yaks chased their parents and swatted flies with astonishingly long black tails. spotted yurts with land rovers parked in front, or the occasional piece of heavy machinery. we crossed a hill only to find our outdoorsy selves mired in something of a swampland, searching for spots of light green grass indicating solid ground so we could cross. we climbed a hill that looked tiny in the grandeur but took quite a while to mount. and from the top, a little nameless village behind us, we breathlessly surveyed this mini tibet from amidst a massive cornfield.

I’m making a valient effort to write up the summer circle. I really am. apartment hunting’s getting in the way, and needless to say it’s difficult for a chain smoking writer to get down to business when she’s sleeping on a non smoker’s couch. none the less, while the words and practical information might take a while the pictures are processed and finally up for perousal.

right, so that’s obviously a bit over the top. dramatic, like. but my visit back to the states opened my eyes, not only about my own personal changes but on the bizarre juxtipositions of the meanings of freedom.

one moment, one case. this is how I see america today :

my mother wanted to go to epcot center. tix were free, she has her own version of international shopping, so off we went. got lucky on the parking, free and close. enter.

at the gates, time to open those bags. burly men with flashlights paw through the stuff people’re toting. my guy bangs a very expensive camera lens with a flashlight, I tell him to be bloody careful, he panics a bit and makes me remove it from the bag and unwrap it from its bandana enclosure. and all I can think is, if this is a bomb what good is making me unwrap it here going to be, and isn’t having me be the one to do it perhaps not the best idea, really.

search done, I follow the ‘rents to the gate. card into slot, no problem. uum, thumb on scanner? what? uum, WHAT???

not a soul blinks. hundreds upon hundreds of people blithly insert their fingers for encoding without a second thought as I stand there, dumbfounded.

I can’t do it. my father and I have a very terse moment as I try to explain why it’s completely out of the question for me to say that this sort of thing is ok, which is what I’d be doing if I went along with it. you can’t exactly take a moral stand from ‘inside’ the park. meanwhile the monitor guy is watching, breaking into our conversation only to mention that the info is encoded onto the card so people can’t share tickets. after fifteen minutes back and forth my father finally thinks to ask this guy whether there is an option two. he says “of course. show me id and sign the card and you’re all set.”

so. not only are people willingly giving up something, they’re doing it when they don’t have to.

at disney world.

of course, I’ll now defeat the point of my own narrative by mentioning that I joked around the rest of the afternoon about being shadowed by the disney police. only it was one of those jokes that was funny cause you rather thought it might be true.