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Thursday 12 July 2012
Monday 25 June 2012
Journey from the West
As the cold winds began to grip Bishkek, I realised that I was a good two weeks behind schedule. My original plan was to hop into China over the Pamir mountains - probably by hitch-hiking - but the mountain pass was a couple of days' drive from Bishkek, with no guarantee of it being open due to the unpredictable weather. With Central Asia's interminable bumpy roads having already taken their toll, I decided to take the sensible option and fly to Urumqi, China's most westerly city.
I had left the UK without a Chinese visa, with the intention of applying on the road - an unwise move that put me at the mercy of various consulates along the route. Given that almost half of my planned trip was to incorporate China (it's only a tad smaller than Europe, after all), obtaining the visa became a pressing concern. Those in the know claimed that anything better than a 30-day tourist visa would be a miracle. In Budapest my one chance to apply was curtailed by a Chinese public holiday which had shut down the embassy. In Istanbul I had embarked on a wild goose chase around town to various embassy outlets, which ended in defeat after I was told that the one company licenced to process visa applications did not deal with foreigners. Worse, all my research about Kyrgyzstan showed that obtaining a Chinese visa in Bishkek was practically impossible thanks to the stubbornness of consulate officials.
The golden ticket
The elephant in the room was my intention to visit Xinjiang province, on the border with Kyrgyzstan. For reasons I'll address later, China doesn't want foreigners to visit the region. This had killed off my application in London and threatened to do so again. I now planned to simply lie to the consular officials and claim that I would fly direct to Beijing, and had yet to book the tickets. Tashkent was my final chance to succeed, and I queued for three hours outside the embassy gates for the privilege. As the security guard let me through, I visualized how I would lock eyes with the crumpled old official who invariably deals with visa applications, and proceed to beg. But my luck was in, as the office was in fact patrolled by a cabal of giggling schoolgirls, all of whom were delighted by my unexpected presence. As soon as I got out the processing fee ($100) they all scrabbled to see who could give me the visa first, to the point where the lucky young lady forgot to actually put it in my passport when handing it over. After a sheepish second attempt, I opened my passport to find a shiny new Chinese tourist visa, with the full requested 60-days. Once outside I jumped for joy, and for a brief moment felt happy to be in Tashkent.
Urumqi on a good day
Birmingham, anyone?
Before my narrative gets buried completely, let's return to my flight
into Urumqi. All was going well until the final stage, as I waited
beside the conveyor belt for my bag. A customs official, spotting that I
was the only Westerner on the plane, requested to see my visa once
more. He was most intrigued by the place of precessing: "Tashkent?" he
said, before walking off with my passport to consult a colleague. He
returned and asked: "Where you go in China?" "Erm..., Lanzhou, Xi'an...
Beijing... Hong Kong!" He returned my passport with the sort of frown
that only people who have spent their entire working lives in airports
can quite muster. I found a coffee shop by the exit and ordered some
tea, which came out in a large pot. I drank half of it and went up to
the counter to pay. The prim waitress tapped away at her calculator and
showed me the final number: 298. I looked in vein for a decimal point.
"Two hundred and ninety-eight Yuan?" I spluttered. She pointed to a menu
written in Chinese characters. The number was indeed correct, but I had
no way of knowing if I was being scammed for a different order. My
quick maths told me that I had just been charged around £28. "No!" I
said. "Yes," she replied. I looked around for some help, but there were
no foreigners in the airport and the place was crawling with police, who
did their best to supremely ignore my plight. I didn't want to get in
trouble on my first day in China, so I paid up and stomped off.
Man-made mist
The bus ride from the airport took in a seemingly endless urban landscape of factories, warehouses, ring-roads and workshops. The colour grey seemed to unite everything, from the motorways and buildings to the thick polluted air. The smog was so bad that you could barely see more than half a mile into the distance in any direction. Urumqi's reputation as an industrialized shithole seemed so far to be well-earned. (Believe it or not, Urumqi translates as "beautiful pasture" in the old Mongolian dialect.) I managed to pick out the odd mosque amid the sprawl, surrounded on all sides by aggressive concrete structures like a lost child caught in a stampede. Walking around, it dawned on me that this was among the most characterless places I had ever visited, and that most of the damage had been done in the past 20-30 years. The mosques had clearly been built before the surrounding monstrosities - a sort of inverted Birmingham. The place was massively over-congested, with cars parked in any available space, usually on the pavement. China's industrial revolution has seen many swap their bicycles and motorbikes for cars, yet most people have yet to grasp that a different driving style is required. Motorists do their best to flatten pedestrians as they veer across the pavement to squeeze their Toyotas into unfathomably small gaps. In China you have to constantly fight for personal space, be it on foot or behind the wheel. This may explain the Chinese's wildly optimistic and at times idiotic judgment of physical space - more of which to come.
Accountability - Chinese style
At 3.1 million people, Urumqi is one of 72 Chinese cities with a larger population than Manchester (yes, seventy-two.) My Dad was born in Coventry which, as he used to tell me, is the furthest city in the UK from the seaside, requiring a three or four-hour drive to the Welsh coast. Well, Urumqi is the furthest city in the world from the seaside, a good 1,400 miles from the freezing waters of northern Russia. So no more complaints about Spaghetti Junction, please. Urumqi, although large enough to be the capital city of most countries, feels like an isolated outpost. To the north and west is the Gobi desert; to the south and east the Taklamakan desert, two of the largest in the world. Despite this arid landscape, the biggest draw near Urumqi is in fact a mountain lake, Tian Chi. I headed up one day with some Chinese travellers in my dorm, and the change of atmosphere was extraordinary. I was breathing oxygen again!
Tian Chi was the first designated tourist spot I had visited in China. Being new to the country, I still laboured under the misapprehension that the lake would be free to visit. After all, it was just a natural lake surrounded by some mountains, not a theme park. But about ten miles short of our destination we were marched off the bus and into a cavernous tourist centre, replete with turnstiles and security guards. There we had to buy entrance tickets at ¥120 a pop (12 quid), and another ticket for a separate minibus to the lake. This, in a nutshell, is the basic tourist experience in China. As we climbed up and up the haze began to clear, and for the first time China revealed itself to have blue skies just like everywhere else.
I hadn't the time nor inclination to hang around Urumqi, and knew that it was time to face the wilderness of China's west. I folded out my map of north-west China and tried to take in the sheer emptiness of the place. Covered with deserts and mountains, Xinjiang covers an area almost three times the size of France. There's only one road and one train line connecting Urumqi to the rest of China, following the old northern Silk Road through the Gobi desert. I had been told that every single train seat for the next five days was booked, so I had to face the grim prospect of taking bus all the way to Lanzhou - 1,000 miles to the east. I would have to stagger my journey over a week, stopping off at old Silk Road towns like Turpan, Hami and Dunhuang, each day requiring six to seven hours of driving. It was to be a long old slog ahead.
Fag break
The first leg of my Xinjiang odyssey was Turpan, a classic Silk Road town three hours east of Urumqi and famous for its grapes. The drive was typical of what was to come in China - hours of being stared at by fellow passengers, who were sent into a flurry of nervous excitement by any of my movements, be it reaching up to the luggage rack, putting on my headphones or simply scratching my head. The TV screen at the front was tuned to a bizarre Chinese variety show, with random people dancing and telling jokes to the delight of the studio audience, whom the camera would cut to every ten seconds for a wild burst of applause and a sea of toothy grins. The driver beeped his horn when overtaking every single vehicle, which fast became infuriating. Eventually I realised why he was doing it - some drivers will casually change lanes without indicating or even looking in their mirrors. We almost ploughed into the back of a truck due to such carelessness. One can only assume that driving tests in China are less strenuous than those in the UK. By far the most infuriating part of the journey, though, was the hour spent crawling along at 15mph looking for passengers to pick up, despite there being only one free seat and a 150 mile drive ahead. All of these annoyances are standard in Chinese bus journeys.
Jiaohe
Turpan is an unremarkable town with one point of
interest - it sits in the third lowest geographical depression on earth, and is
the hottest and driest place in China. A few miles outside is the ruined city
of Jiaohe, one of the best preserved in the world. I had the place to myself, aside
from a smattering of Chinese tour groups, who all diligently stuck to the
designated walkways. As always, the real interest was in heading off the path
and into the heart of the ruins. The city was built between 3,000-4,000 years ago in a
natural fortress surrounded by two sharp cliffs. The place must have been
pretty much impenetrable to invaders, and the plateau was indeed settled for
over a millenium. The mud remains are impressive and suggest a population of
thousands at its peak. The four hours spent walking around it was like an extended out-of-body
experience, so strange and beautiful was the arena. The one disappointment was the amount of litter, which has been an all-too-common sight in historical places since Turkey.
Scared of heights?
Such were the vast distances involved in my travels, I had to stop overnight in a small town called Hami, which has absolutely nothing of any tourist value to it whatsoever. I arrived at the bus station on the edge of town and took a taxi to the train station, where one can usually find a choice of hotels. The most attractive was the "Hami Business Hotel", which had a plush marble foyer with a shiny grand piano in the corner. I managed to negotiate a discount despite the staff speaking no English whatsoever (not even "hotel" or "passport.") The room was windowless but otherwise plush, with a glass-encased bathroom that I could dance around naked in. After five minutes the phone rang - the inevitable call which every lone male guest receives in China offering a prostitute, in cahoots with the front desk. Instead I opened up a can of rancid Chinese stout and watched a Meryl Streep film about cooking, the only selection that wasn't overdubbed into Mandarin. The evening was considerably more enjoyable than my first night in Tashkent.
Moderate luxury for 15 quid
The Gobi desert - and you thought it was interesting
But did you know about the snowstorms?
Well, you could start by asking the indigenous population of Xinjiang (official title - Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.) The Uyghur people have lived here for hundreds of years, and were until recently the largest ethnic group in the region. They have a separate religion (Islam), language (Uyghur) and ethnicity (descended from the nomadic peoples of Central Asia) to that of the Chinese. They live 1,500 miles and two time zones away from the capital that claims sovereignty over them. By rights they should be an independent nation, like Kazakhstan or Mongolia. Of all the proximate countries with a valid cultural and political claim to the region, China is pretty low on the list. (By my reckoning there are ten capital cities closer to Urumqi, Xinjiang's largest city, than Beijing. Of course, this is not a completely fair method of allocating sovereignty, but it shows how far China's tentacles have spread.) Since 1949 it has been Chinese policy to encourage migration to the region in the hope that Uyghurs, along with smaller ethnic groups, would eventually become outnumbered. At the time of writing, the balance is about half-and-half. Essentially this is an attempt to strangle an entire culture through sheer weight of numbers. (A similar tactic is of course being deployed in Tibet, which currently receives far more attention.) As luck would have it, Xinjiang also provides China's largest share of oil and natural gas reserves. In Urumqi, I had sat next to a Uyghur family in traditional dress waiting for a bus connection to Hotan, one of the last indigenous strongholds in the region. It struck me just how utterly out of place they looked amidst all this Chinese-ified modernity. Sadly, they have become a voiceless minority in their own homeland.
Back
in London, when I applied for my Chinese visa at the consulate in
Chancery Lane, my application to visit Xinjiang was far from warmly
received. I was told that I must provide a complete itinerary of plane
tickets and hotel reservations for the entire duration of my stay, and
even then my application might be turned down anyway. "The security
situation in Xinjiang is difficult," the man behind the glass window
informed me. "Two years ago some people... died." I was a little taken
aback by this news, not least because I had just sat through a 30-minute
documentary about Xinjiang on one of the televisions in reception.
Nothing in the programme had touched upon deaths or violence at all.
Instead, a succession of Uyghur peasants had been plonked in front of
the camera, with the following results:
Interviewer: Aren't you glad the government are building houses for you and your family?
Peasant: Yes. I am very happy. Long live the People's Republic of China.
When
I got home I did some research. In 2009 a Uyghur protest in Urumqi
escalated into a full-scale riot, the main targets being ethnic Chinese
migrants. Soon the army were sent in to "put an end" to the
disturbances. After the chaos, 200 people had been killed with a further 50 "disappeared," not including the 37 Uyghurs sentenced to execution. The
Chinese government blamed the trouble on "Islamic militants" operating
out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which one can't necessarily disprove, in the same way one can't disprove that there's a teapot orbiting
Neptune. The parallels with Tibet are again obvious - China is willing
to kill its own citizens in the name of preserving "national unity." All
in all, quite an intriguing place to visit.
When China meets Islam
Fast food - Chinese style
Buddhist grottoes
On my fourth day of bus-travel hell I arrived in Dunhuang, a small Oasis town that has been renovated very much with tourism in mind. The biggest draw is the Mogao caves, a treasure trove of Buddhist carvings inside a mountain. Naturally I was the only foreigner there, and my arrival caused quite a kerfuffle in the front office as they desperately searched for their English-speaking tour guide, who understandably had packed up for the day. After an initial offer of a French-language guide (clearly they thought it was worth a punt), the original guide turned up, and I was given a private tour of the caves. I was prohibited from taking photos, so I'll instead sum up the main attraction in a few words - it's a ruddy great big Buddha inside a cave.
Chinese people are by and large fascinated by the appearance of foreigners. Just walking down the street will turn hundreds of heads, all of them utterly perplexed by your presence. It's a little bit creepy, but not threatening in the slightest - it's just that you're probably the first non-Chinese person they've seen all year. Sometimes people cross the street just to look at you, covertly. For the most part I didn't mind it, as the Chinese rarely come up and bug you like elsewhere. I've been told horror stories about India, for example, where people will literally follow you back to your hotel in a bid to sell you stuff. The Chinese are in fact a bit like the English - reserved at first, but very generous once trust is established. My friend offered to buy me a bottle of juice, to which I declined. He pulled a face of impatience, so I instead accepted his gift. Never refuse the generosity of a Chinese person, unless your intention is to insult him or her. We talked about the differences between the Chinese and English language, and I managed to pick up a few key words, such as "gonggonqiche," which means bus. I tried to explain that "gong" was quite a silly sound in English, but he didn't really get it. (Although, as I've found out with my Chinese students in Hong Kong, the English phrase "pretty pink" is riotously funny.)
Another night, another hotel room
As luck would have it, my Chinese friend was taking the same bus as me to Jiayuguan, a historic town on the fringe of the Gobi desert, famous for it's Ming-era fort. Built in the 14th century, it was so meticulously designed that only one spare brick was left over after completion. My guidebook describes it as "China's final outpost, the last point of civilization." Indeed, this is the place where undesirables were banished from the Middle Kingdom forever, marched out through the western gate which guards the mouth of the desert. On the walls of the gate you can still make out the final scribbled messages of the condemned, before being expelled to no man's land. I spent all morning walking around the ramparts, battered by the incessant wind. The place has a tangible last-frontier feel, and I was glad that my journey was heading away from the great deserts of Central Asia and towards more hospitable climates.
Jiayuguan pass
Murals
After the fort I had a few more hours of daylight to explore the most westerly segment of the Great Wall. To my disappointment, much of it was simply a drab restoration, but walking along it was nonetheless thrilling. From up here I could fully appreciate the incredible flatness of the Gobi desert, contrasting violently with the jagged mountains to the east and south. I spotted the fortress a few miles back along the wall, and could just about make out its three wind-battered towers. I took another path away from the wall and dropped down to the flat desert valley, the most lifeless place I have ever been. A line of telegraph poles stretched endlessly out across the vast flats, presumably towards another town 30 or 40 miles away. What a dreadful existence it must have been for anyone unlucky enough to be banished here in days of yore.
On my last night in Jiayuguan I went out for some food, and found a quiet little restaurant where I could eat in peace. But I was mistaken, because a large group of diners had spotted me and very cheerfully invited me over to their table. It was the usual Chinese fare - plates of bean sprouts, shredded beef and chicken feet on a rotating platform, with everybody sharing and tucking in. Communicating with them was hopeless, as they couldn't understand any of my poorly-pronounced Mandarin, but they didn't seem to mind. I was inducted into the byzantine drinking rules of Chinese diners, where you cannot take a sip of anything without locking eyes with someone across the table and offering a toast. It all seemed unnecessary, as the men must have toasted each other 20 times over the course of the dinner, but I played along. Of course, they insisted that I try everything on the table, and I just about managed to get through a chicken foot without gagging. It doesn't really taste of anything, comprised as it is of skin and bone. I managed to explain that I was English, and was traveling to Beijing by myself, which produced many "waaaahhh" sounds from my captivated audience. At the end of the dinner, as I excused myself, one of the female diners said her goodbyes in perfect English, and asked if I would be able to drop by again tomorrow. Why she had remained silent through three hours of my linguistic flailing I don't know, but it was still a minor relief to hear my native tongue spoken in this far flung corner of China. I thanked her and headed off to the train station, which turned out to be a nightmare... but I'll tell you next time.
Beijing - 1,300 miles
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