Wandering Goat

Travel stuff by Miguel A. Villarreal

My Photo
Name:
Location: New York, NY

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

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.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey maybe these Chinese students could have solved that burning question: WHO DID let the dogs out?

9:29 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home