My Kingdom for a Donkey

Dunhuang, China

There's a chain of outdoor cafe/bar/travel service/expat hangouts in a few cities in NW China called "John's Cafe" which are allegedly a good place to meet fellow travelers. Thus far the only acquaintances I have made at this branch are longtime friend Tsingtao and his singaporese colleague tiger, which will have to suffice.

Earlier today I went to the Mingsha sand dunes and the crescent moon lake - it's a 200-300m high mass of dunes literally at the end of town, and the lake is Dunhuang's other attraction besides the caves, subject of this recent Times article.

I actually walked there, as the Rough Guide to China promised it was only 45 minutes, but it was more like 75 minutes in the desert. I could have taken a bus for a nominal fee, but I was aiming to recreate in microcosm the perilous desert crossings of early explorers like Sven Hedin and
Xuanzang, out of a sentiment that was equal parts masochism and misplaced romanticism. In any event, all dreams were shattered when I got to the park and saw that they were charging an outrageous 80 yuan ($10) to get in (by comparison, the forbidden city in Beijing only costs 60 yuan). It's just a bunch of sand and an underwhelming if significant pond. To make matters worse it's got all of the full scale tackiness that breaks out whenever a site becomes popular among chinese tourists. Disappointing.

Afterwards, while I dined at Charley Jong's cafe once again (which has one of the few Engrish menus in town), I decided, in keeping with the spirit I've maintained thus far, to sample the local specialties again. Last night I had the Dunhuang noodles (and to tell you the truth, after 12 days in Northern China I am beginning to reach noodle saturation point) and the other two local specialties were cold Donkey meat or lamb & vegetable hotpot. As cool as it would be to be able to write to you right now that "DUNHUANG EATS F-NG DONKEY MEAT BEYATCH YEAH!!!!!" I opted for the latter, and was re-acquainted with an old nemesis.

Now, having seen the words "lamb & vegetable hotpot", I reverted to my Occidental conception of lamb, you know, rack of lamb, shish-kebabs, gyros, that sort of thing. Well, even though I'm a central asian veteran, I forgot the first rule of eating around here, which is that 9 times out of 10, meat = boiled mutton. It's really difficult to describe the smell of mutton. It's sort of musty, and stale, and powerful yet not really a stench. It's intensely powerful up close but doesn't really carry, although it permeates but fades. It completely defies explanation. Without getting into the particulars of the Einsteinian vs. Newtonian universe, it sort of transcends curved space-time. An ominous sign as I head further west.

I Have Always Depended on the Kindness of Strangers

Dunhuang, China

So as I get further out into the wilderness as the only whitey around, I become paradoxically both the most popular person in town, where undertaking activities like walking down the street tend to elicit stares from the locals as if I just descended unto the renmin square on the back of a flying sow with a rainbow wig wearing fuschia dungarees, and simultaneously the biggest pariah in that I'm pretty much unable to communicate other than my now indigenous mixture of pointing and bad spanish, although snorting baby powder through rolled up 100 yuan notes will occassionally result in a polite smattering of applause.

However, I must say that being a stranger in a strange land has won me just enough pity to be quite helpful among those Chinese willing to test out their halting English against my rapid fire extemporization. As I wrote earlier, my Sleeper car bunk-mate Angus of the clan He was instrumental in helping me out in old Jiyaguan the other day. On the way out of the big J, I made some new friends in the person of a group of traveling university students from Chongqing on the way to Dunhuang like me. That came as a huge relief because the train was a "hard seat" only trade loaded down with peasants with their clothes in potato sacks. They were good enough to save me a seat and to alternatively ignore and be fascinated me throughout the five hour ride through the desert.

The biggest help was a guy named something I forgot, probably Li, but anyway his english name was "Horn" (which he actually chose himself, so democracy is coming small increments, although maybe it shouldn't in this particular instance) I'm going to ignore the fact that he was a design student and that his favorite english song was Bryan Adams "Everything I do I do it for you" and that his infatuation was marginally creepy on a certain level. I also must mention that his hat, said in english letters "Sprite of the Burnout" on it. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it probably intended to say "Spirit of the Burnout", not that that would have made it much better but..

Anyway, he and his classmates let me ride in their bus to the town from the station, which was actually a big deal because it's a 2 hour drive. So we sang Chinese pop songs and they were bummed that I didn't have "Who Let the Dogs Out" on my MP3 player (no kidding) but those are the breaks. Eventually they dropped me off at my hotel, which unfortunately matches the downward progression of hotel quality as I get more rural, though it is cheap. I averted what would have been an an embarrasing incident this morning when I accidentally locked the bathroom door shut from the outside last night(because there were holes near the shower that I think a rat could fit through so I initiated defense protocols). Fortunately, in a very mission impossible moment, and in a nick of time as I had to use the facilities, crisis was averted when I managed to actually pick the lock with a swiss army knife, slowly rehabbing my reputation after the duck incident of weeks past.

Dunhuang itself is the home of the spectacular
Mogao Caves aka the 1000 buddha caves. The mother of all buddhist caves, this is really incredible shit, it's like Bingling Si on steroids. Lots and lots of caves dating back to the first introduction of Buddhism in China from the early early AD era culminating in the Tang dynasty style around 700, and you can literally see the progression from cave to cave from Indian to Chinese art styles. Great stuff. There's also two incredible 100 foot tall, 1000 year old Buddha statues carved inside two caves. The only really big drawback is that you can't take photographs of them which is a huge pity - the other thing is that a huge library of manuscripts from inside is somewhere in a basement in the British Museum after the work of Sir Aurel Stein early last century, and many other relics from Dunhuang are spread about Paris, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Japan and even the US. The Chinese who work the caves referto them as thieves & robbers & villains, which they were to some degree. To be fair though, had they not stolen the stuff it's likely that either white Russian Refugees (who trashed a bunch of the caves in the 20's) or native tomb robbers would have likely wrecked them anyway, so there's two sides.

I've got yet another night train, this time to Urumqui tomorrow night, and then another one on the Kashgar after that which is my ultimate goal. I've been stressing all week about timing and covering ground and trying to make it to Kashgar for its legendary Sunday bazaar, but then last night I sort of caught myself and said "Fuck it, you're on vacation for 5.75 more months, stop worrying". While the bazaar is a major attraction, why exactly do I need to be there that bad, to buy sheep? No, screw that. If I miss it and I really have to see it I'll just stay another week and go to the next one; It's not as if I don't have the time.

All Along the Watchtower

Jiayuguan, China

So the Night Train to Jiayuguan was fairly uneventful. Somewhat more interesting was dinner earlier at the Botoh Coffee Shop, which is apparently THE place to be in Lanzhou. Coffee shops are the latest western rage to hit China. So if you take wicker furniture, red checkered table cloths, an extensive whiskey collection, crystal chandeliers, candlelight, waitstaff wearing hotel maid uniforms, 40's USO WWII black and white photographs, eel pizza (tasted like chicken) and of course a grand piano & pianist, and you have the Botoh Coffee Shop. Starbucks has it's work cut out for it when it gets here, which it will of course, as there's already one INSIDE the Forbidden City.

I met another chinese friend in the badly misnomered "soft sleeper" car on the train, a Mr. He something or other, whose english name happened to be....Angus. Naturally, after meeting my good buddy Raphael a few days ago, I was wondering how the hell he got the name Angus. And alas, in China, contrary to what I thought, but par for the course for the PRC, one doesn't get to choose one's own English name, your English teacher chooses it for you. So the poor guy is stuck with Angus. Nice guy though, he helped me out on the train when the severe car attendant demanded my passport for no apparent reason, and paid for my cab fare to the hotel. I promised to send him some fine tartan for his kilt.

Jiayuguan itself is a kind of squat little industrial city that traditionally marked the far Northern and Western border of the Chinese empire in Medieval times. It's situated in a mountain pass where all Silk Road traffic had to pass through on its way either into China or out into central Asia, and it's where the Great Wall quite literally ends. The main attractions are the Wall (which has been well restored here, and has more snakes and scorpions than fat tourists and hawkers) and a huge fortress that's also well preserved and restored. In China, Jiayuagan is almost a metaphor in an of itself as the end of the civilized universe with inhospitable barbarians in the West (turks & muslims) and North (Gobi & Huns & Mongols). The only real problem with Jiayuguan is that I was able to see all of the sights in about 3 hours and now have to kill the rest of the day, so it looks like I'm taking the early train to Dunhuang tomorrow.


Picture of the fort below (again, not mine unfortunately):

http://www.coxandkings.co.uk/img/fareast/tours/sre_jiayuguan.jpg

nopuedoverlo

Oh yeah, one more thing I can't read this page or access it, though obviously I can post to it, since big brother blocks access to it here. Cool.

For that reason I can't respond individually to comments (even though they get sent to my e-mail), though trust me I really want to.

Bingling...Si

Lanzhou, China

So now I'm in North central China sort of at the edge of the Chinese part of China near the top of the Yellow River. Mercifully the temparture has dropped considerably, with it topping out around 30 C.

Closing the book on Xi'an, at breakfast the other morning I noticed that I was surrounded by lots of tables of Germans each bearing what was apparently one of Xi'an's major souvenirs, chinese babies. Nothing to say other than that it was a weird spectacle.

On a self-centered note, all the guidebooks warn male travellers to be wary of frequent attempted hook-ings. Well I haven't really been solicited at all aside from the standard Beijing street pimps, so I'm not sure whether to be insulted or flattered - I must have an un-hook-able look about me, which is either gay, poor, or too attractive to be hooked. I'm going with the latter for now.

Regarding Lanzhou city (another one of those 3.5m person cities that nobody in the US has ever heard of)not that nice but not that bad either. Beer drinking was all the rage here among locals, which suits me fine. There's an outdoor bar in the parking lot next to the hotel which is not half bad at night, if you don't mind the bartenders who shortchange westerners (for meager amounts), the smell of motor oil, and the fact that you shouldn't sit at one of the back tables, as they are frequently hit by buses backing out of the parking lot, no kidding. Still at the equivalent of 37 cents a beer, I'll take it and then some. My crap chinese has incorporated the word for beer "pijiu" -- although when I say it, it comes out as "pee-jew", which causes confusion as it is also the chinese word for Eric Lipman in a bar after 10 minutes.

The main highlight here, which I didn't know about until a few days ago, are the caves at Bingling Si (photo below, found off the web, not taken by me) http://www.martinsbta.co.uk/images/photos/china/big/bingling.jpg


I'm not sure if it's possible for a Buddhist cave to be f-ing awesome, but these caves were f-ing awesome. Briefly speaking, it's a series of thousand year old Buddhist caves, frescoes, & statues carved into the side of a canyon off the Yellow River. Really truly awesome. To get there, you have to take motorboat (that frequently runs aground as the river is huge but shallow & silty, also you tend to run aground more if your boat, like mine, is overloaded with rotund Marseilleise) through these huge canyons for about an hour. The highlight is the 70 foot or so tall Buddha carved into the side of the cliff around AD 700, very cool.

The only problem is that it costs an arm and a leg to get out there and they hit you with fee after fee once you get there, including a ridiculous 300 Y to see the "special caves" at the very end, which I declined. The Japanese visit in droves and they fork over anything, so they drive the price way, way up.

My company for the trek was a local guide I totally forgot his name halfway through so I started calling him "Li", since pretty much everybody's name out here is Li, which proved correct. He was in fact Mr. "Raphael" Li, apparently Michelangelo and Leonardo were taken, though I give him props for not choosing john, george, david, like most. Despite his latin name, he was quite confused about the name "Miguel", as are most Chinese, who tend to pronounce it "My-gull" or "Mee-gull"

Later on today I'm taking the night train to Jiyaguan, which has to be a metaphor for something, or at least will be before tomorrow AM.

Kenny Rogers Roaster

Xi'an, China

Postscript on Beijing, which I left today for Xi'an:

Last night I decided to sample what passes for nightlife in Beijing. Getting out there was a chore, the cab drivers in Beijing, as in many parts of Asia that I've visited, either don't know where a damn thing is or try to scam you if you're Western, which makes for a nasty combination. The guy who drove me to the bar district, which I colorfully described to him in Spanish ("Bar! Cerveza! Borracho!"), since he wasn't going to understand anyway, inexplicably dropped me off several blocks away, which is odd considering that the bar district is denoted with a 20 foot tall beer mug on the street corner. Technically, he did drop me off close to one bar, the aptly named "Music Bar Sport Restaurant", which promised "Nordic Style Cuisine Eating" - which gave me a mental image of some Asiatic Thor figure smashing up dim sum with a war hammer - regardless I passed on that.

The acutal bar district is a joke. It's just a row of cookie cutter pseudo-American style places, all with awful chinese bands, expensive (for China) budweiser & food, and acres of empty tables. The establishement that I patronized was particularly happy to have an actual american as they proudly positioned me in the window seat, and they were crestfallen when I declined their offer of American style popcorn (served in the microwaveable bag).

The exterior of the street is even worse, as pimp like figures offer you "pretty girl bar massage 100 yuan" Obviously, that sounds like hot concubine action on offer, but with the lengths to which people will go to scam you, I'm guessing that even that offer is a scam of sorts. The thing was sort of like a bad Chinese knock-off of Bangkok - I mean how much open street hooker-ing can there be in a quasi-totalitarian police state? Not much I bet. But anyway I didn't stick around to find out. The whole thing was only the second most ridiculous thing I saw that day however, with the first being the Chinese Miltary Museum (FYI, Mao won WWII, in case you didn't know)

So now I'm in Xi'an, aside from a Kafka-esque experience of being ferried around town (in omnipresent 40c weather) in search of mythical train tickets to Lanzhou -- where I actually don't even want to go, it's just on the way west -- I settled for the less mythical and slightly pricier option of flying - which was had its own Kafka-esque sequences (I had to sit in three different chairs - the ticket booking chair, the hotel booking chair, and the change -getting chair - mind you, this is a small 10x10 foot office with three desks and three chairs).

Duck No. 1.15 098564

Beijing, China

First, let me say I'm not sure whether I'm writing this to myself or for an audience or both, so I'm going to switch on and off the pretense randomly, so that is part fo the ride.

On Beijing generally, after the first full day (now two) the most noticeable thing after seeing the standard tourist sights (Tienanmen, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, etc.) is the love affair with euphemism in place names("Hall of Heavenly Peace, Eternal Joy, Ultimate Wisdom etc etc etc". During the Qing dynasty when most of this stuff was built & restored, there was anything but joy, wisdom, peace, tranquility both within and without. That sort of thing doesn't seem to vary with politics here, since even the more modern stuff bears the same hallmarks (e.g., the "Great Hall of the People" isn't really that great, nor do the people have much input). I'm sure I'm not the first to make this observation in a cynical Western way, but at least we're honest about that sort of thing when naming stuff back in the US; take the White House for example, its inhabited by and largely run for the benefit of rich white guys. It's easier that way.

On to the less weighty stuff - the real reason I came to Beijing was to try out to become a eunuch. Since the application was Chinese, my second real reason for being here was to eat a duck. So last night I rolled up to the signature location of the massive Quanjude roast duck empire, a seven story avian graveyard. After cruising through the requisite gleaming lobby (btw, Chinese architectural schools must have like, a whole freaking year of courses on how to cram in as much marble and chrome as you can per square meter; I knew that coming in, but still, man...) I was directed up to the 5th floor and the end of a long hallway.

So I grabbed a seat in a smoky roomful of Chinese duck eaters who mercifully paid no heed to the weird foreigner eating alone. Afer a few minutes I hailed the waitstaff and stalked my prey - one roast duck and 24 oz's of Yanjing beer. The language barrier presented little problem, by now, I've resorted to talking loudly and ridiculously in English to all Chinese, hoping that body language can get the meaning through, which it usually does. Plus it allows me to laugh at my own jokes. They don't mind, I don't think, because they talk really loud too naturally so at least we've got one thing in common, and they already think I'm weird anyway.

What made them thik I was weirder was that I ordered a whole roast duck. As you might know, Peking Duck comfortably serves 2-4. But I knew this and wanted the damned duck anyway, so I sort of played off the gluttonous American role and boasted to the waitstaff that I was going to finish the whole duck since I was from Texas. For additional effect, I drained the rest of my Yanjing and ordered another. I think this went over pretty well or not at all.

When the duck finally arrived, I reiterated this pledge to the duck carving chef and started pointing to my stomach, and said "I'm taking this duck down", which generated much levity, or mockery, not sure which. The train started to go off the tracks almost immediately. Here one is expected to roll up your own duck into little pancakes, while stateside the duck chef usually does it for us gringos. My first duck roll was a disaster. To make things worse, the waitstaff was watching, and my chopstick control was badly affected by nerves - it was like Uma Thurman trying to eat rice in Kill Bill vol. 2. By the second roll, the waiter stepped in and rolled it up for me. This was doubly insulting as I've eaten enough things in tortillas in my life to feel really bad about this.

I started to improve my rolling a bit after that, but that was when the scale of the task before me began to sink in. I had two plates of duck meat in front of me stacked up like the Petronas Towers and a whole lot of boasting to back up. 4-6 rolls later I had chopped down the first tower, but I was in a bad way and had the second plate, plus the split duck head to go. 2-3 rolls into plate 2 I hit the Great Wall. By the last roll, not only did my rolling form revert to shit, but I had to take super small bites and chew it up into paste since my esophogus was pretty much 95% duck. Slightly after this, and to avoid further loss of face by hurling in the Quanjude Duck house, I hung up my chopsticks and was presented with a certificate by the waitstaff indicating that I had consumed Duck No. 1.15 098564 - which at that point was being packed into a doggy bag that I had no intention of eating but asked for anyway for appearances' sake.

As I sat sipping my Yanjing, watching as the duck head was lovingly packed for me to consume today, I thought about a lot of things about east & west, but mostly, I thought "son of a bitch, that was a shitload of duck."

3 bags, 6 months

DSC00021
Originally uploaded by mv.

Fascinating, right? This is why I haven't been updating this thing much.