kun shan

I stayed two extra days in Xi'An, doing nothing but sucking in the pleasant atmosphere of the aesthetic parks, the bustling downtown, the kited ancient courtyards. When I finally left, it was on an overnight train heading east, back towards Shanghai.
I decided to make an impromptu stop in Kun Shan, which, thanks to a new high-speed train making it a mere eighteen minutes' commute from Shanghai, has now been resorbed as a hefty addition to Shanghai's tumescent metro area. Thomas Friedman called Kun Shan one of China's four or five Silicone Valleys in The World Is Flat; it's a wealthy little suburb of about a million people, boasting miles of manufacturing plants and factories, in which a significant hunk of the world's semi-conductors, computer peripheral parts, cell phones, fiberoptics and solar energy panels are being churned out by propsering Taiwanese-owned-and-operated companies looking for cheaper land and labor than available in flourishing Fomosa. The Chinese nickname for its downtown, rife with business owners' expensive-looking spawn and Taiwanese cuisine, is therefore 'Little Taipei'.
My aunt and uncle, themselves both Taiwanese, own a pair of companies that profitably make and manufacture industrial scales and computer gaskets. They moved to Kun Shan nearly a decade ago to save on operating costs, and, due to the area's rapid growth, have prospected land and labor options in rural China and Southeast Asia. I spent a couple of nights recuperating from satiated wanderlust in their gated community, quiet save for the patter of two boisterous golden retrievers.

xi'an, continued.

Xi'An's other major ticketed tourist spots are the old Bell Tower (a traffic roundabout bedecks it now), the complementary Drum Tower (across the street, behind a bumpin' Haagen Dazs), and the Big and Small Goose Pagodas. The Towers mark the axis of the downtown area, around which spiral unpretentious live music venus, neat coffee houses and bars, and, most notably, the Muslim Quarter.

I spent about two days wandering through that delightful maze, tasting (lots) of local delectables - kicky, garlicky shredded pork, sandwiched between lettuce doughy, baked starch; lumps of sweet gluten sprinkled with candied dates and sugar, skewers of glazed fruit, heavy twists of cinnamon-laced bread. Open-air butcher shops buzzed with flies and smelt of blood and hooves, tourists, hawkers, children packed the narrow streets. Further down, Muslim women swathed in linens sold apothecary curiosities, brocade, lacquered treasure boxes, incense holders, jade and ivory jewelry. Less exotic stands resembled any American Chinatown, offering faux designer scarves, handbags, sunglasses, luggage. Overhead, kites flown by children in the Tower courtyard drifted lazily through a cloudless sky.
Negotiation is an integral part of the culture of Chinese commerce. Nepotism and networking dominate a disproportionate amount of white collar business. Western taboos like bribery and insider trading are more or less standard practice, although the recent influx of wholly-owned foreign enterprises, international joint ventures, and multi-national corporations setting up shop in China have curbed these tendencies, or at least brought them into question. I have mixed feelings about these deeply unegalitarian but firmly-rooted cultural practices being slowly strained out by globalization, but after business hours, on the streets, and particularly here, in the heartland, it’s clear that the customs’ spirit is still routinely exercised. Haggling, which frugal I had swiftly adopted and polished in urbane Shanghai, is a procedure that resembles a courtship. It goes something like this:

Customer: How much is it?
Vendor names price
Customer: What’s the lowest price?
Vendor names price typically at 20% discount
Customer names price up to an additional 50% discount
Vendor laments the economy; redacts price to a 30% discount
Customer restates desired price
Vendor laments current operating costs; redacts price to a 40% discount
Customer states desired price a third time
Vendor acquiesces; transaction transpires

Three times a charm; incredibly, buyers and sellers in open-air markets are almost always able to come to an agreement. It’s a fun little dance, if you’re up for it. Unfortunate are the ignorant who don’t know the standard script; unenlightened are the meek who back down at the first sign of obstacle.
I picked up some souvenirs (and man, was the haggling fierce in touristy Xi’An – the first bad sign was that the hawkers spoke English), and then sat down for a traditional entrée – a thick, hard slab of bread grated into a savory lamb broth – for dinner before retiring.

xi'an.

I so anticipated the impending trip to the States that I failed to venerate, in a timely manner, the nicest few days of my travels.
On the morning I left Tibet, I was starting to feel a little weary of the road. Two days spent retracing bumpy tire tracks from the Nepalese border back to Lhasa and the prospect of another fifty hours in a hard sleeper train were, together, draining. I decided to break the trip into two segments - a thirty-six hours detour to Xi'An in small ShaanXi Province, chased by two days of recuperation before taking a sixteen-hour train from Xi'An to Shanghai.
Xi'An, the ancient capital of terracotta-warriors-fame, can be analogized to the American Pacific Northwest, in that everybody in China loves it, but nobody (relatively) actually lives there. It's famously livable - a sleepy two million neighbors keep it cosmopolitan to a practical, but not overwhelming degree. An independent artistic stronghold, its film and music scenes are singular in a country where Taiwanese-imported hip-pop blare monotonously from every stereo, iPod, nightclub, commercial break. Easy access to the same bordering mountainous zones that made Xi'An an attractive capital for eary emperors maintain its people's modern-day reputation for being adventurous, athletic, environmentally-minded. Centuries of Muslim influence are evident in Xi'An's architecture, and, more eminently, its renowned cuisine.
I knew about all this in a vague sense from living in Shanghai, and, more explicitly, from the last few weeks of travel. Xi'An, for most backpackers, is the east-west prelude to Chengdu, which is the gateway to Tibet, XinJiang, YuNan. Still, I thought of Xi'An as just another Chinese city - a convenient rest stop, as opposed to a destination.
As it turned out, I ended up lingering for four full days in Xi'An. It was a place that, upon first viewing it from the train station situated underneath the Ming-dynasty parapets that defined Xi'An's first proper borders (the city has since bled out from under them to over twice its original geographic size), it was impossible not to like. Some of the sentiment was admittedly relief - neon lights, fruit vendors, bus stops and a panoply of drug stores reassured me that I was in China proper, again - but the rest lay in the ineffable sense of comfort I felt as I boarded a south-bound bus to my hostel. It wasn't dauntingly exotic or sophisticated. It was clean, bustling, well-lit, amiable. I thought of individuals who I had liked on impact; Xi'An was the first place to exude comparable charm and warmth.
It was Friday night when I arrived. My hostel was located near to the Big Goose Pagoda, one of Xi'An's four major tourism spots. It was only a short walk from the local bus station, but it took me nearly thirty fascinated minutes to cross through the Pagoda square and the adjacent park. Dim, tasteful paper lanterns lined elegant, well-preened walkways. Sporadic streams of water illuminated by subterranean colored bulbs shot up in grass and concrete clearings, to the delight of shrieking children. Late-night vendors sold steaming paper cups of cilantro-flavored stew, glazed candied fruits and roasted chestnuts. And music! I passed a live garage band of teenagers playing at a small crowd with no discernible age demographic. An old woman chortled falsetto Chinese opera, while a make-shift band of tired saxophonists and drummers swayed around her. I was most amazed, when, following the sound of traditional xun and flute melodies backed by thumping bass beats, I discovered, like some fairy bacchanal, a packed plaza of middle-aged Xi'Anese doing the electric slide in time to the music, which was coming from a stereo set duct-taped to a bicycle.
I was in high spirits when I checked into the Square Youth Hostel, and in even higher spirits when it became evident that the owners didn't have a strong grasp on the concept of a hostel, and had instead built a brand-new, luxurious hostel-priced apartment complex. My six-bed 'dorm', for instance (which remained unoccupied by anyone else during my stay) boasted a balcony, washing unit, and fluffy feather comforters. It was nearing midnight then; I strolled back through the park, sat down, and enjoyed the warm night air, full of fragrant scents and music.



After a restful night's sleep, I spent my first day knocking off the terracotta warrior museum, situated about an hour outside of Xi'An. Here, stoic stone figures stood guard in menacing formation in vaulted showrooms (just like in my seventh grade textbook insets!) The tomb of the megalomaniac Qin ShiHuang, China's self-declared first emperor, located about twenty kilometers from the warriors, remains unexcavated.

zhangmu: nearing nepal.

From through the broken window of the internet cafe, in this charming mountain hamlet overlooking the Nepalese border, I'm watching (smelling) a man cauterize the bloody stump of a yak head with a small flame thrower.


Nepal's a funny country, geographically (and geologically) speaking. The northern half incorporates the better part of the Himalayas, making it the most mountainous country in the world. The southern portion slopes towards India, and its eastern neighbor is the enigmatic Bhutan. To reach the border meant rappelling, by dilapidated van, down through the Tibetan Plateau. We rested in Zhangmu, a bustling (really!) border town laid out vertically along the slope of a misted mountain.

Here, Han, Tibetan and Nepalese folks sold batteries, knock-off Northface coats, Pringles chips, turquoise jewelry, Tiger Balm. It was the first city we'd seen since Lhasa, and we were ecstatic to drink beer, eat fruit, take showers, use the internet. Five or six different languages were being exchanged out in the streets; it was a relief to be able to communicate in Mandarin again, and, for my companions, in English.
At night, we clinked Lhasa beers (full, foody) to wish two of our group safe travels through Nepal and India.

EBC.

By the time we made it to Rongbuk Monastery - four bedraggled days later - we were a little dispirited - by the long, lonely roads, the tiny, impoverished villages, the lack of sustenance. (Tibet, for all its blue skies and beauty, is terribly inhospitable in nearly all other respects. Nothing grows; food is imported from China proper, and, as such, is costly and generally non-perishable. The trip's diet consisted mostly of plain chapatis and soda crackers.)But then, almost suddenly, there we were, at the world's highest monastery, looking, on an unusually clear, cloudless day, at the world's highest mountain.


We settled into one of about fifteen tents nestled in the rocky valley running perpendicularly toward Everest.


"The Yak and Yeti" was indistinguishable from its neighbors; a stove, which also served as a furnace, was wrapped around a support pole in the center of the tent. One continuous bench marked the periphery, where we'd sleep head-to-toe. Two flaps cut into the tent's slopes let in frosty sunlight.

The trek to the Base Camp - 5km from the Yak and Yeti - felt like walking across the imagined terrain of a strange moon. The roads was full of clefts and dips, framed by igneous boulders and small valleys of purple and green pebbles. The sky was very blue; it was frigid and windy and the air up here - 5,200m high - was noticeably thin. In the far-off distance, Everest loomed like castle. Progress was therefore slow; we paused more than once for water and to rub some circulation into our raw ears and noses.

Finally arriving at the Base Camp - frantic prayer flag streams and a small cluster of Chinese foot soldier tents - felt like a mighty achievement. We were lucky, we were told; the weather had been particularly forgiving, and afforded us a brilliant view of the mountain.

We returned to the Yak and Yeti, and picked at oily noodles and played cards until the sun set (Everest blushed soft pink), after which I skipped outside to stare at the brightest sky of stars yet. The next morning, we would continue on the trickiest bit of the trip - the drive to the Nepalese border.

gyanste to tingre.

Leaving delusionally pretty Nam-Tso and Lhasa behind, we forged onward to the south and to the west, where we'd eventually hit the Nepalese border. First, however, there was the matter of a few more monastaries, the most notable one being the Tashilumpo in Shigatse, a city-shrine to the scholar-politico, and lama Tibet's second-in-command, the Panchen Lama. Here, symbolic offerings of pens and pencils, alongside the usual flutter of paper money were squished into walls, taped to pillars, buried in the vats of yak butter that served as candles.
The food in Shigatse was a welcome reprieve from stale, oily yak meat noodles on account of Shigatse's being Tibet's second largest city after Lhasa, as well as a strong Han presence.
We took a night in the significantly more provincial Gyantse as well, where traffic was a function of local goat-herding timetables.

Next was Sagya, the first in a line of smaller and increasingly rural townships along the so-called Friendship Highway (where the boulders havebeen shoved aside to make room for goatcarts or suvs or our dusty, banged-up Chinese van).

The ride was peppered with dry, dismal patches of shelter where no roads or running water, or electricity visit. Squalid, which means that the occupation of every single villager living in these remote, beautiful huddles of huts is beggar. The children - all smiling, dirty, friendly - tried to sell us pebbles and gum. A pair of urchins in yak-less, dismal, garbage-infested Tingre - one, still in the crotchless onesie of pre-potty-trained Chinese kiddies, offered us cigarettes for 3RMB. His friend, no more than 5 or 6, swung a makeshift switch of broken bungee cord and rocks and sticks maliciously toward anyone who refused.

the empty road.

Most of Tibet looks just like that - beautiful and boring as hell. Turqoise lake, gaping gorge, snowy, cloud-laced mountains. . . for hundreds of miles. It gets a little grueling, particularly if one lacks even a rudimentary working knowledge of geology (by day). By night, distant galaxies become pronounced. For city-dwelling I, it was all fascinating; I stood outside for as long as I could bear the cold each night, neck craning, eyes wide.


Glacier-gazing:

A photogenic bathroom (a loose term) break near Shigatse-

Mountain villages en route to Kathmandu-

nam-tso

Nam-Tso is one of four 'holy' lakes in Tibet (still don't understand quite what that means, except 'holy shit, it's beautiful!'), and, at 4,700 meters above sea level, holds the obscure superlative of world's highest saltwater lake. 'Lake', however, seemed to me an off-putting description of a body of water beginning under a startlingly near snow-capped range and extending to distant horizons, where the light and its reflection on the emerald waters became altogether indistinguishable.





Prayer flags in Tibet are everywhere. At Nam-Tso, they formed rippling, rainbow hypotenuses from high, craggy rock cliffs down to the water's foaming edge. I read that the colors symbolize the ancient elements, which was a particularly fitting correlation here, where white light cast by a crimson sun illuminated the skies, the seas and the earth.



After sundown, we watched the stars - of the entire, shimmering Milky Way and beyond. From this (numerically insignificant but visually soul-changing) vantage point, we counted about a hundred shooting stars, before bundling up and falling asleep to the persistent howl of mastiff mongrels.

the bends.

"The symptoms of altitude sickness," wrote my worried father, "are brought on entirely because of the elevation and thin oxygen content in the air. As a result, the brain tells the body to hyperventilate (unconsciously) to bring in more oxygen. Don't push yourself. If you don't feel well, find the quickest way to descend."
Tibet lies somewhere in the ballpark of 4,000m above sea level. I had virtually no context for regarding altitude prior to this trip, only a mounting sense of paranoia towards a condition I assumed (like just about everything else) could be shrugged off with a hot shower and a long nap. The fear was chiefly brought on by the assiduous preparations being taken by a couple members of my young, fit, globe-trotting group. They ate, beginning three days prior to arrival, exclusively fruit and bread. They took their daily Diamox; they drank water perfunctorily and obsessively. And, perhaps as a result of too much preemptive mental stress, which can increase the heart rate, which at high altitudes can induce additional oxygen depletion, they got sick.
The rest of us escaped with mild headaches, which evaporated after the third day.

lhasa.

It's good to be king, before 1959.

Tibetans, we realized immediately, are much, much better looking than Han Chinese. They're also quite a bit sweeter. The children ran up to my (Dutch and German) traveling companions to practice their English. Everybody smiled; nobody hollered. It was warm, and the sky was a magnificent shade of blue. Lhasa, at first glance, seemed suspiciously perfect. Portola Palace, like a luscious, strawberry layer cake-in-the-clouds, holds an impotent, innocuous court over white picket pedestrian fences, perfectly-hemmed hedges, outdoor fruit vendors, cheerful cookie shops. Pretty, subtle Jankhor Temple, with its bastions of smiling pilgrims, sits swathed in brightly-colored prayer flags, amidst the hustle of the large, outdoor market, in which turquoise trinkets and furry hats are being gently hocked to an amalgam of Han, Tibetan and Western passersby. Pleasantly-voiced public service announcements, aired over sporadic gold megaphones affixed to bright white lamp posts, reminded us that dental care was a personal priority.

(I was glad, presently, that I hadn't emptied my pockets on outdoor apparel in Chengdu, the more loosely regulated Lhasa economy was host to plenty of handsome, knock-off North Face goods. Gortex + soft shell = 100rmb.)

We spent our first day touring the immaculate Portola Palace and strolling the manageable surrounding areas. It's a rather young, liberal American attitude, I think, to suspect religious politicos. In contemplating the China-Tibet issue, of which I really have very little information, I was trying to get a sense of why, to teach and observe a religion who preached immaterial absolution, the venerable lamas should reside in some severely bejeweled, five thousand rooms. The gigantic gold stupas, encrusted with egg-sized coral and turquoise hunks - which we would see throughout Tibetan monasteries - were being visited by Tibetans hunched with poverty. Alms were being shoved in the stupas' foundations. Paper money meant for the exiled lamas rained down from the upper levels of the Portola and rotted, untouched, in the gutters. Meanwhile, smaller alleys revealed a grittier Lhasa, where toothless men and dirty children begged anybody who didn't look Tibetan, presumably for more alms to stuff into the ostentatious altars. Hunks of hooved, raw yak meat hung from bloodied butcher counters. Flies gathered, nested. The stink of the yak butter smeared on oily prayer flags and altars clung to our clothes. And long parades of soldiers - with shields and automatic weapons and loads of cigarettes and bad teeth - trampled on withered fruit and loose alms that had presumably rained down from Portola.
Our motley band of five bilingual strangers hailing from a combined total of four countries and possessing, in addition to those passports, four additional unrelated ethnicities, afterwards dined together on spicy lamb chops, fried momos and Lhasa Beer.

the qinghai-tibet railway photolog.

Views from the top of the world-

We left Chengdu at 8:30PM, September 18

Dusty Gangsu Province by dawn. . .

. . . becomes an afternoon of reading, backed by occasional waters.

Evening ascent towards the Tanggula Pass (~5,000m high!)

We wake on the second day to. . . snow!

The bluest skies I've seen all year. . .


Ice-cream mountains roll by for listless hours. . .

. . . until finally, at 5:27, September 20-!