The Qinlian Mountains, just past Subei

Make sure to check out this earlier post explaining why many hotels do not allow foriegners to stay.

As I mentioned before, we had been trying to get into the wilds of the Qinlian Mountains that ran along the southern end of the Gansu Corridor, marking the northern-most extent of the Tibetan world. From Google Maps, the wilds of the Qinlian Mountains looked vast and unpeopled. I had hoped we might be able to get to what looked to be China’s largest lake with no paved road leading to it.

We were in Dunhuang, on the western end of the Qinlian mountains. Google Maps suggested that, just thirty miles to the south, going around the sand dunes that surrounded Dunhuang, the town of Subei had access to the most westernly extent of the Qinlian Mountains and the wild spaces beyond that. So we went to Subei.

Unlike every other town that we had been in, Subei had few places to stay. I found a small motel that charged 120 r.m.b, or $20 USD, but they had no internet. The fanciest hotel had bad internet, but it was 360 r.m.b., or $60 USD. I was not willing to pay that much for a hotel that could not even give us internet.

Walking further, I found a small, mud baked house with a hotel sign hanging out of it. It was a family run place with several rooms along two of the walls in the interior courtyard. The facilities were basic. The room had two beds, a furnace and a desk, an old television on top of it. The hotel did not have a bathroom, only an outhouse just outside the back gate in a dirt lane that divided the city from green fields and, beyond that, mountains. For a shower, they had wash basins in the room which could be filled with warm water. Still, they did have internet access, and the room was only 50 r.m.b., less than $10 USD.

The family that ran our flophouse

By the primitiveness of the facilities, I knew this flop-house was probably not authorized by the Chinese government to accept foreigners. However, the family’s two high school daughters, who functioned as the hotel’s reception, had never met a foreigner, and were excited at the prospect of our stay.

I filled out the registration form, though some questions were difficult to answer. “What ethnic group are you?” I wrote the Chinese character for America.

“This should be okay, right?” one sister whispered to the other.

Dumplingess

It was already in the afternoon, and Galen and I had not yet eaten lunch, so we dumped our things in the room and skipped back into the main part of town. At an intersection that seemed to mark the center of Subei, we stopped in a small dumpling place. The restaurateur was tickled to have us, serving us a hot plate of twenty something veggie-filled dumplings. At first, she surreptitiously took photos of us with her phone. Before long, we waved her over and posed with her, taking some photos of our own. Immediately, she sent the photos to her friends. Her friends were floored to see foreigners in her place. Foreigners never came to Subei, she told us.

Strolling around town, we ran into some college-aged students. We stopped to talk with them and have some shishkabob. As we pulled meat off the skewers, they took photos with us and sent them to all their friends. We told them that we were planning on hitching into the mountains the next day. They told us, “It will be hard to get into the mountains. Very few people go there. Worse, you may not be able to get a ride back.”

“We will try it,” I assured them. “We are not afraid of failure.”

They laughed and, sending more photos of us to their friends, said, “Foreigners never come to Subei.”

We ate dinner with the family who we were staying with. The meal was simple, a noodle dish with veggies mixed in. As I mentioned before, noodles are all they eat in this part of China, with hardly any rice. They peppered us with the questions we normally get, where are you from, how long does it take to fly to the United States, why had you come all the way out to Subei.

“We came because we wanted to go and hike in those mountains.” I explained to them.

They laughed at the absurdness of it all. “It is very cold in the mountains.” Then, looking us over, one of the high schoolers said the same thing everyone told us. “Foreigners almost never come to Subei.”

The people of Subei all welcomed us warmly. None of them had ever meet a foreigner. No foreigners ever come here, they told us. But they hungered for a taste of the outside world, somewhere far away from their tiny town.