Ape Rifle

Note: When I first got back to Hangzhou from my travels in the Northwest, I posted a bunch of pictures from the trip (mostly because I was too mentally exhausted to write any posts). Now that I’m finally sitting down to write out the travel journals, I’ve deleted the original picture posts and will be using the photos here.

The bus from Hotan to Kashgar took us through many hours of desert scenery and oasis farming towns. This was truly the Uygur heartland, with sun-baked villages and donkey cart traffic the whole way. It was beautiful land, its lack of development softened by the bright sunlight and cheerful colours. Again, I was amazed by how clean everything was; trips through places like Henan had conditioned me to associate rural poverty with mountains of trash and fouled rivers.

One thing that definitely could have used some work in this area was the highway. Or I guess I should say they need to build the highway- it was nothing more than a plowed path through the desert. Unmanned road-paving equipment sat idle along the way, looking utterly abandoned. A few workers were spotted, quietly napping in the shade of their hulking machinery. So several hundred kilometres of our bus journey consisted of bumping over rock, gravel and sand at about 35km/h.

Where’s China’s patented development when you need it?

Although sitting in the front of the bus seemed like a good idea when we boarded, it became less so when we realized the off-duty driver slept in the seat right in front of us. So Justin and I spent a good portion of the trip with a snoring Uygur man in our laps, his seat so far back it was a bed. We also witnessed the pinnacle of Chinese vehicle handling: drivers switched without stopping the bus. The one at the wheel would just get up and give his space to his yawning replacement as the bus barelled through some village.

Through all this, I was kept sane and nourished by some food purchased in the oasis town stops. It was called samsas if I remember correctly, a bread pocket stuffed with seasoned chunks of lamb.

Kashgar was certainly not what I expected. From the outskirts right into the bus station, it was nothing but white-tile industrial strips, wide avenues, noodle shops and Han Chinese faces. The famed Lonely Planet (a guide that seems a bit out-to-lunch on way too many occasions) says the exotic Kashgar of yore is being changed by a wave of Han migration, courtesy of the railroad connection opened in 1999. I would categorize it more as a tidal wave; this was a little piece of faceless Hebei in Central Asia. I find it amazing how the Middle Kingdom is managing to match the cultural notion of “China” to the country’s actual political boundaries (more on that in a later post).

The city centre was an entirely different matter. It was populated mostly by Uygurs in dense neighbourhoods more reminiscent of Morocco than China. Unlike the villages I had previously seen, this was a decidedly urban area full of narrow lanes, carpet vendors and two-story homes. The architecture was quite different from what I had seen even in other parts of Xinjiang. At the centre of all this was an incredibly serene mosque, with grounds so peaceful you couldn’t help but feel spiritual.

In here we had a great laugh at a sign posted by the local government. It stated proudly: “the mosque’s presence was proof that all the locals were in favour of the government’s religious policy and the government”. Beyond that rather strange logic, it also said something about the generosity of the local officials for providing funds towards the building’s reconstruction (that is, after they destroyed it thirty years ago). I’m such a sucker for good propaganda; too bad the guard didn’t want me taking any pictures.

Justin and I wandered around central Kashgar as I contemplated purchasing a signature Uygur cap from one of the numerous vendors (I never did, and I still regret it). We shared the airline booking office with some white-robed Pakistanis as we picked up our tickets to eventually get back to Hangzhou from Lanzhou. Touristy stuff involved visiting the tomb of a famous Uygur poet and getting lost trying to find the mountaineering association (given all the urban demolition, Chinese city maps become useless the day after they are printed). We often stuffed our faces on laghman.

In the end, I found Kashgar a somewhat difficult city to get a feel for. It didn’t feel Uygur (compared to a place like Hotan), and it didn’t really feel typically Han. Giant glass shopping malls were slated to replace certain downtown blocks, owing nothing to the local architectural style (and nothing to Chinese architectural style either, for that matter). The outer areas looked as dull as most Chinese cities, but lacked the populated crunch that make the latter so lively and interesting.

And yet, I found the city to be cosmopolitan, bustling and lively. It still had a certain exoticism hanging in the air, a result of the ethnic blend and the local architecture. As an interesting urban manifestation of Xinjiang, this place had Urumqi beats hands down. Like Hotan, however, I get the feeling that this might disappear over the next decade, as new industrial areas swallow all. The older section of the city could easily become a sterile relic mobbed by tour groups, if it is even left standing at all. For now it is a very lived-in historical city, but faceless development is certainly knocking at the gate.

The streets of the old city

Lots of carpets

A little mischief

I absolutely love the architecture

While in Kasghar, Justin and I decided to check out the possibility of some kind of trip into the surrounding area. We ended up at the Caravan Cafe talking to one of the American owners; he offered to arrange either a day trip into the desert, or an overnight trip up into the mountains to hike across a glacier. We opted for the mountain scenery, which in retrospect was a great choice given the face full of desert we later got in Gansu province.

So early the next morning, Justin, Wolfgang (a German guy along for the ride) and I set out for an area not far from the borders with Tajikistan and Pakistan. We had hired a beaten up old Land Cruiser to get us out there and got picked up at the ungodly hour of 6am. The drive took us through the usual Uygur towns and desert flats, but the scenery changed dramatically as we approached our destination. The desert expanse gave way to a wall of rock and, further in the distance, massive mountains (one of them being Mustagh Ata, about 7500m in height).

Rising out of the desert

Kind of convenient to have a wall of mountains as a border

Our ride into the town we stayed at was right out of one of those ridiculous SUV commercials. The road had streams, mud and rubble sprinkled liberally along its length, giving the Land Cruiser a run for its money. This is one of the few times in my life I have actually seen an SUV do what it was originally designed for (besides drive to Starbucks, of course).

The town was up high, nestled in between majestic mountains at the foot of the glacier. The environment here was, put simply, absolutely stunning. It was like we had left the dusty deserts of Xinjiang for the heart of the Canadian Rockies. This was easily the most spectacular natural scene I had seen in many years.

The settlement was a small concentration of yurts, some of them operated by the local government (we were advised to avoid those and instead stay with a villager). It was perched among all the jacked peaks on a steep meadow, populated mostly with free-roaming cows and donkeys. The locals all came out for the requisite good look at the white boys who had just shown up, but I was too busy being in awe of the surroundings to notice.

Our home for the night

We met another one of the Caravan Cafe owners here as he was vacationing with his family. He was a really friendly American guy, impressively fluent in Uygur. He told us of the possible routes to take, and suggested we do a hike up and across the glacier to see some of the waterfalls. It just so happened that three local guys were heading up that way to pick flowers for tea, and they offered to guide us for free.

The hike up was definitely a workout. Lots of scrambling up steep paths full of loose earth and sliding gravel, not to mention one hard scramble down a steep descent. The local guys, called Sultan, Ahmet and Mohammed, had to hold us by the hand as we semi-slid the whole way down, kicking up dust and sending rocks rolling.

Taking a breather

These three guys were great hosts, really cheerful and trying to explain what we were seeing along the way (although the language barrier often produced confused shrugs and a lot of laughing). Their Mandarin was a bit rough, but still good enough that they could teach us some Uygur terms. They pointed out various mountains and animals, telling us the Uygur term for each (which I now completely forget). We walked by a decaying mountain goat carcass that seem fused with the mud around it: apparently, it had fallen off one of the mountains. Ouch.

Sultan and the guys took a special liking to Justin, chatting up with him up ahead as Wolfgang and I lagged behind. I consider myself to be in pretty good shape, but something about that hike put me near exhaustion; I guess the high altitude and clean air was too much for my smog-addled lungs. Our guides bombed up and down the slopes like they were nothing, disappearing up a mountain to collect their flowers while we sat on the glacier taking in the scenery (and chugging water).

The mighty glacier

That’s a pretty high mountain

It is not really possible to describe the beauty around us. It was majestic, pristine, heavenly and completely overwhelming. It looked too perfect to be real; the huge snow-capped mountain towered above us, as a wall of mountains on either side crashed down into grassy meadows, waterfalls and an immense glacier. The sky was bluer than anything I had ever seen.

Justin conquering a peak

One of the many waterfalls

Heading back to the the town

On our way back to the camp, we started to run into local villagers. A young boy walked his donkey along a ridge, an old man chopped wood with his grandchildren sitting around, and four boys hung out on one of the paths, already sporting that patented Uygur look. Crossing over the last portion of the glacier before reaching the village, we passed a man kneeling on his prayer mat as he faced Mecca.

Hats on the far left and far right are signature Xinjiang

A boy and his beast

Over the glacier

Precarious walkway leading back to the village

This hike is one of my best memories. I was in complete awe of the natural beauty, something that hadn’t happened to me very often in China. After two years living on the East Coast, this was exactly the kind of breather I was so desperate for. It is uplifting to see that some parts of China have yet to be devoured by the unbridled industrialism that is sweeping the nation.

Our story in Oytagh doesn’t quite end there, though. Equally memorable is what took place that night in the village. We returned to the settlement to promptly pass out in our yurt, allowing Wolfgang’s watermelon to get pilfered by a cow. As evening approached, we sat around watching the villagers go about their usual business. Two little girls were trying to ride a donkey with decidedly mixed results as we chatted with some of the local guys. Young women would walk by, take a quick glance, and then giggle their way down the path. Our host made us some decent laghman which we all devoured.

The donkey was in charge

That night, the village put on a dance and invited a neighbouring town to come by for the festivities. Everyone sat in a circle near a yurt, the music provided by a generator-powered synthesizer (power lines ran to the village, but apparently they never got any power regardless). As we watched, it became quite obvious that many of the men were pretty inebriated (I guess we got clued in by the guy who stood up and promptly vomited after someone passed him a 白酒 bottle). I was under the impression that Islam and alcohol weren’t often mixed. That night, I was proven completely wrong.

A very inebriated Sultan appeared and invited us to drink with him and his buddies. There was a tiny store in the village (not more than a shack, really), and this is where the alcohol was sold. The guys woke up the old lady running the place, bought some bottles of beer, and it was on.

As psychedelic-sounding Middle Eastern music drifted up from the synthesizer outside, we sat on the floor of a yurt with nothing but candlelight to make sure we weren’t spilling alcohol all over ourselves. The local guys were drinking some absolutely vile Xinjiang moonshine, which we were eventually forced to try because the village store ran out of beer (something Sultan apologized for about fifty times that night).

It was in here that I was given further proof that young men are the same the world over, be they in the mountains of Central Asia or a university bar in Canada. One very drunk individual starting grilling Justin about marriage and women. When it started to get a little creepy, the guy decided he would rather go have a rumble with his friend sleeping in the corner of the yurt. A guy we had nicknamed The Russian (blue eyes and dirty blonde hair) stumbled in the yurt, did some kind of jig, and then fell back out the door.

One of Sultan’s friends had gone to sleep beside us after adamantly refusing to touch the 白酒 (he communicated to us that he had very bad hangovers) . I guess people kept audibly making fun of him, because at one point he jumped up out of nowhere, took his shirt off, grabbed the bottle and took a huge swig. The notion of responsible drinking was as foreign to them as we were: no glass could be less than half full, and everything had to go down in one gulp.

We talked about our lives in broken Mandarin, and found out these guys were all a lot younger than I thought (I had pegged them at 30 or so, but they were all in their early 20s). Some were already married, some were engaged. I told them about life in Hangzhou, and Sultan responded with: “Where’s Hangzhou?” I told him that it was south of Shanghai, and I think he said something like: “Oh, Shanghai? That place is big and dirty”. I wrote out the characters for Hangzhou, but Sultan couldn’t read Chinese characters. Those guys seemed thoroughly unconcerned with the land that lay east of them.

At some point, an older villager came to the entrance of the yurt and called all the young guys out. It turns out someone from the other village had danced with the wrong woman, and a classic drunken scuffle was developing down by the party yurt. We watched the men posture, shove and stumble in the dark, yelling at the other villagers and managing to get the music cut off. Sultan kept apologizing (whether it was for the lack of beer or for the fighting, I’m still not sure). When this fun subsided, we called it a night and walked up the hill to bed.

The next morning we left Oytagh under a deep blue sky. As our driver fixed the flat tire that had managed to appear overnight on the Land Cruiser, I had a last chance to walk around and soak in this picturesque and hungover Xinjiang mountain town.

The man himself: Sultan checks out the glacier

Hotan, given its location, looked surprisingly Han Chinese upon arrival. The large town was dominated by two-floor white-tile buildings and adorned with ugly billboards advertising such exotic wares as China Telecom. Noodle shops and Sichuan eateries lined the streets, and there was even one or two of the famed “wood panel tropical motif” bars spotted. It was uninspired, dusty and overwhelmingly ugly; it could have been any poor city in China (except for the huge number of Uygur residents).

Our hotel was in the western part of town, just down the street from a statue commemorating Chairman Mao shaking a Uygur elder’s hand (or something like that). This monument was at the southern end of a big public square imported directly from Eastern China, complete with gaudy lighting and an obsession with concrete. It was, however, a great place to people watch; hundreds of families were out for a walk and some ice cream, and there were even some small carnival rides for the kids. We sat around here for a few hours on two different evenings watching all the fun, including a musical performance taking place right under the watchful eye of the Great Helmsman.

Mao and friends

The most unforgettable experience from Hotan (and the whole trip, perhaps) was our visit to the Sunday Bazaar. I find it hard, now, to describe what it felt like to wander into that sea of bargaining humanity. It was like no crowd I had ever experienced in China.

With only some loose directions from a book to guide us, we set off in search of this weekly event. Finding it was much easier than anticipated; we only had to follow what seemed like half of Xinjiang’s population as it made its way, by foot and donkey cart, east towards the bazaar area. Along the sidewalks were rows of little shops, stalls and restaurants, hawking everything from delicious bread to butcher knifes.

I don’t think we ever figured out where the bazaar began or ended; every intersection was a traffic jam of bodies and commerce, continuing down every avenue in every direction. Whole blocks were devoted solely to the buying and selling of sheep, while others were the domain of donkeys, bikes and any and every trinket you could possibly desire.

What became immediately noticeable was the lack of any tourists besides Justin and I. The vendors never even looked our way; they were too engaged in heated bargaining over the price of wool.

Not one “hallo!” was heard the whole time. It was like we weren’t even there. This was pretty representative of my experiences in Xinjiang as a whole: foreigners just aren’t an oddity there, given the area’s role as a cultural crossroads of sorts. In Urumqi, one women even asked us if we were foreigners (imagine our shock!). Several people just assumed Justin was from Pakistan.

Although I felt completely out of place, I got none of the staring and mock hellos that are pretty standard back East, even in cosmopolitan cities like Hangzhou. Uygurs in general seemed much more relaxed and matter-of-fact in dealing with us, and didn’t treat us like we had arrived from outer space. Heck, I even looked like some of them.

Anyways, back to the bazaar…This place borderlined on sensory overload, pure and simple. The crowds, the wares, the hawking, the colours, the sheer life; it was almost too much to handle. Every face, every stall, every strolling family was worth a picture. With nary a Han Chinese person in sight, I felt culture shock sneaking up on me again: how had I ended up in Afghanistan? Thankfully, I got a mental grip on myself and managed to snap some pictures, knowing full well that, without them, it would be almost impossible for others to visualize what we were experiencing.

The outskirts of the bazaar

One of the few quiet streets

One of the many not-so-quiet streets

A pedestrian-only section leading into the Uygur city

The neighbourhood barbers

It was on the trip to this bazaar that I realized Hotan was, in effect, split into two different cities. We were staying in the Han part of town, with its cookie-cutter buildings and uselessly wide boulevards, good restaurant stalls and “waste-the-day-away” sidewalk beer gardens. The bazaar was at the heart of the other, Uygur city, with its mudbrick homes, great bread, narrow lanes, mosques and Muslim architecture. In this section, Beijing couldn’t have felt further away.

That is one cheery building

A quiet side street

A mosque door

It was a bit sad to see that, beyond the necessary mingling at the street traffic level, the two ethnic communities were pretty segregated. Whole streets (not to mention whole parts of town) were either Han or Uygur, with a scant few being a mixture of both. Han people shopped at Han stores, and Uygurs shopped at Uygurs stores. I was absolutely amazed at seeing only a few Han faces at the great bazaar, given the great love for shopping and bargaining in China. The different ethnic groups lived side-by-side, but I never got the sense that they truly lived together in a multicultural environment. It was like they were guests in each other’s worlds, neighbours by necessity.

Hotan was an amazing introduction to Uygur Xinjiang, and also in some ways a glimpse into the future of the area. Han Hotan is likely to swallow the rest of the city in the next decade or so, with “modernity” replacing difference and bulldozing any ideas of cultural accommodation. An underground shopping mall had already turned the centre of town into a giant construction pit. The Uygur city is pushed steadily to the fringe, its colour and vibrancy under threat from the white tile. I have absolutely nothing against modernity and rising living standards, but, I suspect, these are not the driving forces behind the re-modelling of this region and its march towards the national ideal of conformity. One gets the feeling there is something slightly more sinister going on.

In the bus station, there was little to indicate we were still in China. Some young men, wearing sideways-cocked wool caps, loitered around chatting while others helped their veiled female relatives stuff parcels into the buses. After finally getting used to Mandarin, I was now once again surrounded by an utterly foreign and incomprehensible language. An Arabic-looking script adorned everything (alongside the Chinese characters, obviously), and the Turkic language sounded like it belonged several thousand miles further West. Looking only very slightly less out-of-place than us were the two young Han women also waiting for our bus, dressed in their very best faux-Japanese attire.

The production involved in leaving the station was one of the most time-consuming I encountered in China. Random men kept getting on and off with different forms, sitting in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, then getting back up to go chat with more random men outside. A month’s worth of paperwork and heated discussion seemed involved in getting this bus to pull out of its gate.

We hadn’t even moved twenty feet before the bus stopped again. The drivers/attendants/random friends (there was a whole team responsible for chatting in the front) got off and seemed occupied with yet more forms. Family members of passengers would get on the bus to give their loved ones some last minute road snacks, mostly delicious looking bread. One grandfather figure seemed to get on and off about five times, his family discussing something apparently important with one of the drivers. Three minutes into a twenty-four hour journey, and people were already getting off the bus for cigarette breaks.

We moved closer to the exit, and more officials and forms appeared. The driver(s) got off to handle it, and the grandfather’s family managed to get on the bus to settle him in (his bunk was right under mine). Everything seemed to finally be settled, with passengers being scolded back onto the bus for departure. About forty-five minutes after pulling out of the gate, our bus finally made it out of the bus station.

Of course, we stopped one hundred metres down the road so the attendant could run into a shop and buy a supply of flat bread. This apparently came in handy as, ten minutes later, we pulled over in the outskirts of the city to meet some sketchy-looking men standing around unmarked sedans. The drivers did more chatting, giving one of the men the bread and, I think, some money. After this, our journey finally began.

Never in my life had I seen the sort of nothing that surrounded Urumqi. On both sides of the highway, flat rocky terrain spread to the horizon where it abruptly turned into rocky mountains. The only sign of human presence was the highway and the occasional blue truck rumbling along in the distance. In this vast emptiness we stopped at a gas station for a quick restroom break, and the wind was so strong I had trouble opening my eyes.

Next up were some spectacular red rock formations, towering over the highway as it snaked among them. Occasionally, a mountain-sized sand dune would appear, having cascaded over the top of the rock and into the canyon. I could only thing of Tatooine from the first Star Wars ( I usually hate saying a real place reminds of some fictional movie locale, but having never been to a desert before this is about the best I can do).

After this our bus sped through an endless variety of desert scenery: rocks, sand, big rocks and more sand. As it got dark, we stopped in some town for dinner. In truth, it was less of a town than it was one street built up around the highway. This was the first time I got the feeling that I was really in the middle of nowhere. As Justin ate his 羊肉串, I nursed a Sprite and watched veils fly by on the back of the occasional motorcycle. A Han man asked the restaurant owner if he had any rice. The owner laughed and responded in broken Mandarin: “no, we don’t have any rice” (said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world).

Just as I started to feel a new culture shock, two black Santanas pulled up and saved the day. About twelve people piled out of them: two army officials and their families. The noise level was upped considerably, the men were demanding beer and the kids were running around in their usual state of Chinese toddler hyperactivity. I guess political borders still count for something. Not soon after, another sedan pulled in and a young army officer emerged in his greens, looking for a meal.

As night took over and we got back on the road, my memories get a little hazy. Portions of Broken Arrow mixed with local Turkic-language music videos on the TV screen (conveniently right in front of my bunk) as I drifted in and out of sleep. I woke up at one point to find our bus stopped in a large courtyard completely surrounded by a brick wall. I got off to use the washroom, and was instructed that anywhere on the ground would do. I watched my step in the dark, trying to avoid spots where I had made out people squatting down for business. Meanwhile, I think our bus was filling up on illegal gas.

The Taklamakan desert was nothing but a blur, as I woke up occasionally during the night to look out the window. The highway was a two-lane road with sand rising sharply on both sides, the only visibility provided by the headlights. It was strange how a vast desert could feel so claustrophobic.

In the morning we awoke to a rather different world. Now completely on the other side of the desert, we passed through several small towns that are Chinese only according to their place on the geo-political map. Old bearded men guided donkey carts (often carrying several passengers) down the road as barefoot children walked to school, some of the girls in very colourful headscarves and dresses. The boys were already sporting the “wool cap and worn suit” look so favoured by Uygur men.

People just looked,dressed and acted completely different. The architectural style, apart from the odd white-tile import, was completely different. Actually, just about everything felt completely different. The Chinese characters on certain buildings, rather than reminding me of what country I was in, just looked foreign and out of place. It was culture shock all over again.

The surroundings would have been more at home by the Mediterranean; the colour scheme was light and bright, and the mudbrick courtyards homes were surrounded by poplar trees. Despite the dust, everything was much brighter, cleaner and better-kept than the rural squalor back in the East. One of the things I found the most striking about Xinjiang was how the bright colours contrasted with the earth tones of the stark surroundings. As our bus continued onto the Southern Silk Road, huge snow-capped mountains rose from the southern horizon, presumably marking the beginnings of Tibet. The sky was a majestic blue.

A few hours later, after passing through more striking oasis town scenery (and lots of desert), our bus stopped for lunch. This consisted of people smoking and chatting for an hour or so outside the bus, pulled over on the shoulder in the middle of nowhere. No food or restaurants in sight. Some of the Han passengers got a little antsy at their precious meal schedule being so casually disregarded.

It was here, as I stood looking out at the nothing before me, that one of the passengers finally approached me and asked the standard questions (nationality, job, purpose of visit,etc.) He knew Canada produced a lot of wheat, and seemed amused that anyone would bother visiting Xinjiang (”There’s nothing here, look! Ha ha”). We somehow moved onto religion, and this is where my shaky Mandarin started to fail me.

I managed to convey that there were people of all faiths in Canada, although they seemed to be more interested in whether I was a believing Christian. After many gestures and signs of the cross, I got the point. By then, a few of the other passengers and one of the drivers had joined in on the discussion and the subject of Islam came up. Uh oh.

They asked me if I knew about Islamic scriptures and religious issues, to which I replied no (even though I did study them a few years back, but no point in trying to explain that). This produce amazement, laughter and much animated discussion. Even though the conversation quickly shifted into Uygur, I distinctly heard the names “Saddam Hussein” and “Bin Laden” mentioned. Another man then asked me if I was American. I said no. They asked me if my friend still on the bus was American (he is), but I think I told them he was Mexican.

Back on the bus, I went back through the conversation in my head to try and figure out what had caused so much amusement on their part. If I wasn’t Muslim, how was I expected to know all about the religion? Then, I realized what had happened: he hadn’t asked me if I knew about Islamic issues, he had asked me if I had ever heard of Islam, period. To which I had replied no. Oops.

On the TV screen, a rather peculiar Uygur VCD was now playing. In the movie there was a Uygur political protest scene, and another where a visibly Uygur hero punched a visibly Han police officer in the face when he tried to break up a card game. I had several doubts about whether this film was, to say the least, legal. I looked around at the passengers on the bus to gauge their reaction, but no one flinched. The Han men were busy snoring away in the bright sunlight, their pant legs rolled up for maximum comfort. Welcome to Xinjiang.

Beijing was the end of the line for my mom’s China adventure. In a bit less than a month she managed to see more of the country than most Chinese people, and she left thoroughly fascinated by the place. A memorable trip to say the least.

My trip, however, was only half done. After saying goodbye to my mom outside of the Beijing airport, Justin and I boarded a plane to Urumqi and the wilds of Xinjiang (新疆). To most people outside of China, this huge northwestern territory is completely unknown (I’ve had so much fun trying to explain it to friends back here in Canada). To most expats in China, it is the source of the famed 羊肉串 vendors and a potential glimpse of central Asian Muslim culture. To many Chinese, it is a place inhabited at once by dancing, smiling “nationalities” and knife-wielding terrorists.

I was warned more than once to be careful in Xinjiang, because it is a “very dangerous place with lots of terrorists”. I greeted these comments with a heavy dose of skepticism, seeing as they came from the same sort of people who were afraid to take a bus from Hangzhou to Ningbo (a three hour journey in one of the most developed coastal regions in the country). Michael Moore could make an interesting movie on the role fear plays in Chinese social stability.

So on June 24th, Justin and I set off for Urumqi without an itinerary nor a clue. We bought the plane tickets in Beijing, and all we knew is that we had to be back in Hangzhou around July 10th. How we were going to get back was to be decided somewhere along the way.

The four hour plus flight was smooth and uneventful, the plane fairly crowded with the usual golf shirt-wearing, leather shoes-sporting businessmen. The highlight of the trip was an article in the in-flight magazine about one of the airline’s stewardesses. Her corporate loyalty was demonstrated by her ability to withstand the horrible conditions of the company dormitories, which “sent most other applicants packing”. Apparently, exploitation has become so commonplace in Industrial Revolution China that a major airline doesn’t think twice about publicizing how badly it treats its employees. I had a great chuckle over that one.

Arriving in Urumqi was definitely strange. The place looked like a Chinese city, but did not feel like one. The buildings looked the same (drab communist blocks), the roads were just as dangerous, and there were mostly Han Chinese around; so what was so different? After a few hours walking around, it hit me: Urumqi had an overwhelming sense of open space. Compared to the out-of-control metropolises way back East, there was quite simply nobody here. It felt like a downtown core plunked in the middle of nowhere. The city seemed surrounded by barren mountains, its minimal bustle the only sign of life in an otherwise desolate landscape.

The crowds were overwhelming

Urumqi, for the most part, was grimy and ugly. Crumbling industry, grim tenements and unfinished concrete hulks made up a good part of the city. The center of town seemed almost comical; huge glass towers and shopping malls, completely out of scale and out of place. The only purpose of their presence was probably to comfort the Han population that, they too, could have a “modern” city like their cousins back East.

Batman would feel at home in this part of town

A typical market street with delicious watermelons

A mere twenty minutes away were the first real slums I have seen in China: muddy settlements in absolutely squalid condition, populated mostly by Uygurs, crawled up the side of the hill past an expressway. A man walked his goat down from this area onto a city avenue, chatted with a moto-cab driver for a few minutes, and then proceeded to force the animal into the back of the vehicle for a ride down the street.

Off to the kebob factory

Urumqi would have been wholly unremarkable (dare I say dead boring) if it hadn’t been for the people. Despite the mostly Han presence, there was enough of an ethnic mix to hint at what was to come. The faces, the languages, even the hat styles; this was the first truly multicultural place I had experienced in China. Skull caps mixed with wool caps and Mao suits, veils and flowing dresses mingled with Chinese princess skin-tight jeans. Urumqi is given a touch of the exotic it doesn’t really deserve.

Donkey carts and cool hats

The south bus station, however, felt more like another country. It serves the Uygur heartland south of the Taklamakan desert (and many, many hours away from Urumqi), and was teeming with decidedly non-Han looking people. I’ve never been to the Middle East, but I think I got a taste. Tired Han women tried to sell bus tickets to old Uygur men who had probably never even heard of Beijing, their grandsons necessarily acting as interpreters. On the whole, I found that Uygur men had a certain confident swagger to them (at least the young ones) that I had not previously experienced anywhere else in the country. We were definitely on the cusp of a vastly different culture, yet somehow still, hopelessly, in white-tile China.

Our time in Urumqi was mostly spent figuring out where we were going next, and how we were going to get there. We decided on Hotan (和田), a town on the southern Silk Road that was a mere twenty-four hours away by sleeper bus, completely across the huge desert.

Before leaving town, though, we had a fun night at a really lively night market. We sat at our table outdoors, drinking beers and chatting with the vendors of our section. I was amazed at how easily I could understand Uygur Mandarin; perhaps it was because their mangling of tones and pronunciation resembled my own weak grasp of the language. As a woman dropped a flyer off at our table, one of the cooks told us about how the paper was code and prices for various sexual services on offer. His laughing friend made some obscene gesture and offered us cigarettes. The neighbouring vendor kept trying to sell us a whole chicken.

The night market around 9:30pm (Beijing time, hence the bright sun)

Our preferred food stall

We eventually made our way back to the hotel, picking up some delicious watermelon slices on the way out of the market. Urumqi had been a slight glimpse of something different, and I was impatient to find out what Uygur Xinjiang was all about.

Getting to China’s capital was certainly eventful. Our bus ran into a torrential downpour between Zibo and Jinan, and the latter’s bus station was quite flooded by the time we arrived. Since all the buses were still arriving and departing in about half a foot of water, the scene was absolute pandemonium. The drivers were jostling their vehicles to drop their passengers on the one dry concrete platform.

Dozens of people milled around barefoot, their pants rolled up with briefcases/parcels/rice bags held firmly above the head. Inside the massive (and newly renovated) station, the ceiling of the men’s washroom was leaking like a waterfall, making standing still long enough to relieve oneself at the urinal a very unpleasant experience.

I thought for a few seconds about capturing the bus station scene on my camera, but reason got the best of me and I proceeded to score us tickets the hell out of there.

The ride to Beijing was pretty uneventful, taking us through northern Shandong and the featureless plains of southern Hebei province. Things gradually got more congested as we approached Tianjin, and the surroundings got noticeably grimmer and more industrial. We were treated to a massive gridlock of belching industrial trucks between Tianjin and the capital, not exactly a very picturesque place. Smokestacks, motorcycles and a lot of dust.

Entering the capital area was system shock.

China suddenly dropped away and we entered what could only be described as the outskirts of a large North American city. Massive highways criss-crossed the landscape, their spaghetti junctions sending cars in every possible direction. The highways were extremely well-paved, and well lit. We ended up on some ridiculously wide ring road, the many lanes bursting with car lights in the darkness. I think Beijing must have more cars than the rest of China combined.

All around us were office parks on steroids, their glass boxes easily topping off at 40 floors.The skyscrapers glittered in the night, scattered between the many highway junctions. I realized that, unlike almost every other Chinese city, Beijing keeps the lights on at night.

My mom immediately noticed that the buildings seemed better built than in any place she had seen so far in the country, and I got the same impression. They were tall and faceless, but there was no white tile to be found. Designs were simple and, dare I say, tasteful. I guess somewhere past Tianjin we took a wrong turn and ended up in suburban Toronto.

After another cab ride that seemed to involve more endless highways, we arrived at our hotel. I worried about being cheated, given Beijing taxi drivers’ reputation and the fact that, my previous time in a Beijing cab, I had most definitely been cheated. This driver, however, was definitely above board: he had to stop for directions, so he knocked off a good 10-15 kuai from the meter.

As I sat in the room of our nice hutong courtyard hotel, with its nice furniture and CNN in the background, I got that all-too-familiar feeling: what planet had I just landed on? Could Henan really be in the same reality, let alone a few hours away?

The next day, a much more familiar world revealed itself in the daylight. As we made or way to the city centre (about twenty five minutes to the south of our hotel by foot), we navigated narrow streets shaded by trees and crowded with the usual vehicular clutter. Small family-operated businesses lined the way, and shirtless old men strolled about between naps. The scene was a little eerie, however, as a decent chunk of this old neighbourhood had been reduced to rubble. Lone restaurants left standing in a wasteland of debris.

A street near our hotel

My mom and I did all the usual tourist things. Tian An Men square was a bit overwhelming at first: massive, imposing and hopelessly communist. The Forbidden City was simply amazing. The Summer Palace was nice, although smothered in a horrible haze. The Peking duck was delicious, accompanied by good conversation and cheap local beer. The bars and cafes around Houhai were fun and bustling on a warm summer night, and they gave us (by this time we had met up with Justin, another teacher from Hangzhou) a chance to people watch and enjoy free cigarettes that some “promotional girls” kept throwing our way. An afternoon and evening wasted on a patio on Sanlitun were also an afternoon and evening well spent. In many ways, Beijing was like my vacation from vacation.

The famed City

The famed Square

Seen at the Summer Palace

Onwards, Capitalist roaders!

On a more somber note, we had the surreal experience of witnessing someone set themselves on fire/blow something up in the middle of traffic right across from Mao’s smiling face at Tian An Men (also letting us see how many “tourists” were actually government security agents). The man was whisked away in seconds.

The incident from a distance

Our trip to the Great Wall was also quite interesting. Due in large part to organizational fatigue on my part, we left it to the last minute and had to settle for a quick trip to Badaling on a local bus (and by local I mean the rattling, smoke-belching kind).

After passing through some eerie abandoned amusement parks and getting stuck in a country road traffic jam (blue trucks once again being the culprits), we arrived at a sparsely crowded Badaling, not at all the carnival I was expecting it to be. For such a touristy portion of the wall, the climb is still pretty steep; being as intelligent as I am, I wore sandals and soon had to take them off and go up barefoot. I ended up in more than a few Chinese tourists’ pictures, grinning like an idiot.

The wall was impressive, but the view was severely limited by the heavy haze that engulfed the mountains. Unfortunately, this is all too common in China: scenic spots lose out to heavy, unregulated industry. We walked to the end of the restored section, my mom got in a picture with some random Chinese tourists, and we made our way back down to catch the bus back into town.

It was at this point that something very strange happened: the pollution cleared up completely to reveal blue sky and puffy clouds. As this happened, a group of dignitaries were arriving at the site in a column of limos and wailing police cars. I could not believe the drastic change in air quality; I ran back up the wall to get some shots of the now much more picturesque surroundings. I also caught a glimpse of the visiting dignitaries, and they were definitely of the foreign variety (later we figured they might be relatives of the Syrian president, who was in town at the time).

Returning to Beijing through an hour or so of sprawl and gridlock traffic, the heavy haze soon returned to settle on the area. My mom and I spent that time playing conspiracy theorists: had the government just engineered a “beautiful” Great Wall scene for visiting foreign dignitaries? Did they know exactly what factories smother Badaling in smoke and shut them off for an hour? It was a little weird.

The wall smothered in haze

What the dignitaries saw, about half an hour later

During my time in the city I experienced two Beijings. The first, which is the most noticeable, is a projection of power on an inhuman scale. The impossibly large boulevards, the mammoth government ministries, the skyscrapers, the ring roads; everything is too wide and too big. Faceless avenues sprawl through endless clusters of bland highrises, their dull colours helping them to fade away into the heavy smog. It is a perfect manifestation of modern urban China: capitalist money funding questionable socialist planning. This is the ugly grid Beijing, the one most visitors probably complain about.

Wide enough for ya?

Beijing, the biggest office park in the world

What Beijing looks like outside of the center

The second Beijing I saw was much more down-to-earth and approachable. It’s a city with a certain funky edge to it, its hipness not nearly as in-your-face as Shanghai’s. It has quiet neighbourhood streets, relaxing patios and old men playing cards on the curb. Its cosmopolitan elite don’t seem as concerned with flaunting money in your face as they are trying to appear cool and cultured. Young people with money sit around cafes, trying hard to look completely disinterested in the political power games that fuel their city.

Just a few blocks south of Tian An Men square, a middle-aged man wearing nothing but boxers walks home from the bustling night market, supper in hand. In fact, half of Beijing seems to take off its clothes in the blistering summer heat. Local restaurants are packed with red-faced patrons arguing over the bill. Friends sit out in the lane, gossiping and smoking the day away. This Beijing is much more of a real city, and very Chinese one at that.

Bustling in the night

A quiet afternoon in a quiet neighbourhood

In the interminable Beijing vs. Shanghai debate, I would have to back up the nation’s capital. Sure it is artificial, over-planned and “not a realistic window on China”, but many capitals the world over are not realistic windows on their respective nations. It is a government’s duty to make sure tax dollars are spent on sprucing up the capital to fool tourists into thinking the whole country is civilized.

In many ways I think Shanghai is worse in this department. It wants to come across as a free-wheeling Asian New York, but instead is a government showcase over-planned to look like a “free-wheeling” Asian New York. Pudong was no accident. If you want to get into the Beijing vs. Shanghai “which is more artificial?” fight, I’d put my money on the so-called financial capital taking the prize.

But back to the matter at hand: I really enjoyed Beijing. When you get tired of the forced grandeur and smiling Maos, there is still a great northern Chinese city to explore.

Zibo is not so much of a city as it is a decent swath of central Shandong. The “city” encompasses a huge area and the “districts” are not neighbourhoods but rather distant, separate urban entities joined only by municipal amalgamation. The central district, Zhangdian, is considered by most to be Zibo. The outlying satellite districts are kept at bay by miles of farmland and industrial belts.

In 2002-2003, I called the outskirts of Zhangdian my home. I worked at Shandong University of Technology, and the experience was so great that it brought me back to China for a second year (although the horrible pollution sent me fleeing to greener pastures in the South). Hangzhou was a bustling town and all, but there was something about this grimy northern city that I missed.

View of Zhangdian from SDUT campus

So when my mom decided she wanted to see where I spent my first year in China, I readily agreed to make a quick detour on our way to Beijing (Henan had scared us off, and we had a few days to spare). It was an opportunity to say goodbye to some good friends before my “for-the-time-being permanent” return to the West.

We only stayed a few days, but that was thankfully enough to see some old friends and students. My old boss arranged room for us in the campus hotel; brand new, comfortable and dirt cheap (that last one due to my, umm, ex-employee status). He then proceeded to take us out for a great meal, in which my mom was introduced to the wonders of 白酒. Seeing that we had been driven to the restaurant in a black Santana, it was the perfect Shandong experience (yes, the snails and garlic were present). Sometimes it is damned hard to beat Chinese hospitality.

My mom helped give me a different perspective on my former “home”. She found Zibo really pleasant and spacious place, something you’d never have heard from my mouth a year ago. But she’s right: after life in Hangzhou, there was just something relaxing about this town. The city had much less clutter, really wide roads and the sidewalks were calm rather than crazy. Everything was moving in slow motion. The foreigners always complained (and still do) about the frighteningly heavy pollution, but since then I have come to the realization that Zibo hardly has a monopoly on that. After the energy of Hangzhou I could never move back, but after Henan it was a welcome breather.

A pleasant street

Could be anywhere in China

Downtown intersection

My return there also provided yet more examples of China’s mind-boggling modernization drive. The great restaurant behind the school? Bulldozed along with all the internet cafes, leaving nothing but a dirt lot as a quiet memorial. The great Evergreen Tree bar/restaurant downtown? Bulldozed, along with its whole block (which must have been about half a kilometre long). Its memorial? Plans for a giant shopping mall (the third in two blocks) that looks like it crash landed from Shanghai. The farmland around the school? Growing cranes and generic apartment blocks.

The most popular crop in the country

I got that weird nostalgic feeling you should get visiting your old university town thirty years on: “Gee, I remember when that used to be a…”. Except all this change had taken place since Christmas 2003, the last time I was in town.

Zibo is an average Chinese city in many ways: it is neither dirt poor nor conspicuously rich. It is growing quickly, but the development is surprisingly understated; you won’t find any faux-Roman pillar, Vatican-style condo towers here. In fact, it still looks like an overwhelmingly Communist place, with new faceless concrete apartment blocks rising up to replace the older ones. Factor in the concentration of heavy industry, and you have an urban area that, aesthetically, leaves a lot to be desired.

Urban communism in all its glory

This drab environment, however, is what helps the hospitality of the people shine through so much. I’ve heard all the stereotypes about Shandong being the friendliest province in China, and they are not far off (the stereotype about Shandongren being the heaviest drinkers isn’t far off either).

As our bus pulled onto the highway heading back to Jinan, I took one last look back at the memories I was leaving behind. This wholly unremarkable place had provided me with many of my best (and craziest) times of China. If you want to be comfortable, go to a big city. If you want to have a truly memorable time, go to a mid-sized town. In many ways, Hangzhou drove me out of China. But visiting friends in Zibo reminded me of why I will, someday, come back.

As we left Zhengzhou, the bus made its way onto a tree-lined country road, on which we were to remain for a decent portion of the journey. This seems pretty typical in terms of Chinese transportation: local roads become major inter-city thoroughfares as people try to avoid highway tolls or, simply, because there is no direct highway.

Passing through a town centre

So it was that this road was crowded with industrial trucks, coaches and cars. The traffic often slowed to an inch as we passed through the numerous villages, with thousands of people milling about and blocking passage. At one point, I could barely believe the scene: it seemed a town had set up its market on the road. Whole extended families made their way to it on the back of carts loaded with produce, oblivious to the incessant honking coming from our coach. Children would run out into the road every seconds. A dog decided it wanted to sleep in the middle of the road. An old man decided he wanted to take his daily walk down the middle of the road.

No Audis here

This portion of the ride felt claustrophobic: we stayed on the same road, and the trees and crowds limited visibility of the surroundings to about 100 metres.

We also passed through some quite particular villages; several of them had thousands of old door and window frames on display. And I mean thousands of them. The road was lined on both sides with massive stacks of the ornate old wooden pieces, likely salvaged from the urban area demolitions. That was pretty surreal.

When we got into Shandong, however, the scenery changed drastically. Gone were the cramped spaces and the crowds. The road became a smooth, well-paved highway (Shandong’s road system is apparently among the best in the country, and I can certainly believe it) and the landscape opened upon to reveal well-tended farmland and rocky hills. After Henan, things seemed infinitely more serene.

Where is everybody?

The rain was chasing us, coming down intermittently. The whole area had a mist hanging over it and my mom said it reminded her of Northern Scotland. Having previously lived in Shandong for a year, I couldn’t get over how green the countryside now was (I later found out that it had rained more than usual that spring). My memories were of a brown, parched land.

For a province with over 90 million people, this region appeared sparsely populated and remote. It was calming introduction to my old “home” in China, a nice welcome back. Of course, from the outskirts of Jinan on in it was all traffic gridlock, road construction projects and miles of dense, dusty human settlement.

But, hey, that’s just China.