Invitations – Part I

Posted by Galen and Lee on 24 July 2014, 5:56 pm

Since we had arrived in this touristy Silk Road town, I had been trying to figure out how to get to the Qinlian Mountains, the white capped peaks beckoning us from a distance. The mountains were beautiful and looked wild. Only fifty miles away, no one had any idea of how to get there, not even if we wanted to hitchhike towards them. Most advised against it, saying it could be dangerous. Adding to this was the fact that, although we were in the desert, it seemed like rain was following us. With no answer on how to get anywhere near the Qinlian Mountains and all the other things going against us, I was reluctant to just take off in some direction, as we had done before.

Seeking answers, I walked up to the desk of a travel agent. “Do you know how to get to the Qinlian Mountains?” I asked.

Lily, the travel agent, was young and sort of cutish, in a stocky, Chinese way. Through her glasses, she squinted towards her computer and began trying to search for a way to get there, but after talking to me for two minutes, she completely revised what she was telling me.

“Actually, I don’t think you should really go there, unless you know someone. It’s sort of dangerous, and someone could rob you if you are just camped right there and there is no one else around. You know, you could go to my parents’ place.” Lily told me.

At first, I did not know whether to take her seriously. Why would I? We had just meet.

“No, it will be fine,” Lily assured me. “I am here and my brother is nearby here, so my parents are out there alone, and they have a room where you could stay. They would love to have a foreigner there. I am certain it would be a great honor for them.”

I went up to Galen to pitch the idea to him: a woman who I had just met and talked to for ten minutes decided that, instead of answering my question, she should invite me to her parent’s home, having not yet asked her parents, and not planning to accompany us. It seemed crazy, but I did not think we could pass up this opportunity.

Returning to her office, I told Lily we were up for it, and she called her parents to let them know, or to convince them-it was not clear.

At first, Lily’s mother resisted the idea. “Would they be able to communicate?” her mother asked.

“They both speak great Chinese.” Lily assured her, even though Galen spoke no Chinese, and Lily had not actually met Galen.

“What will they eat? We don’t have anything special, just the normal food. Noodles and stuff,” her mother worried.

“Mom, they are friends of mine, they will be fine with whatever.” Lily said.

Lily’s mother said she would talk to Lily’s father. I came back a few minutes later, and everything had been worked out. Lily gave me a sheet of paper telling me how to get to the city near where they lived, Yumen. Once we arrived, I was to call a Mr. Gao, and hitch a ride with him back to their village, called Drink Horse One Army.

Shoving the paper into my hand, Lily rushed off to a meeting. We never saw Lily again.

When I fell in love with China, living here from 2006-07, one of the things that fascinated me was how open people were. Sure, there were a lot of problems in China, but it was so much fun to be able to meet people and then suddenly have them invite you back to their homes, to really get to know people. One of the reasons many of the posts on this blog have seemed so down on China is because I have found that the Chinese seem to be increasingly closed, increasingly turning inward, motivated only by nationalism, as I described in this post.

Sometimes it is hard for me to see what I liked so much about China, until things like this happen, and then, I can remember.

Hotels and Foreigners

Posted by Galen and Lee on 23 July 2014, 5:58 pm

China has long had a law allowing foreigners to only stay in hotels approved for foreigners. Yet, despite this law being on the books, I had never been turned away from a Chinese hotel in the two years I lived in this country, from 2006 to 2007 and then from 2009 to 2010, no matter how shady the flophouse I was staying in.

However, just four years after living in China, my experience has been starkly different. On this trip, we have struggled constantly to find hotels that could accept us. In Xian, China’s second biggest tourist city, I made a reservation at a motel chain, 7-Days, but, when I showed up, they said they could not accept foreigners. I bounded across the street to a different chain, Hanting. They also could not accept foreigners. I almost exploded in anger before the manager arrived and arranged for me to stay at a different Hanting, one just down the street, which could accept foreigners.

Each city we go through, I have been forced to try to find somewhere willing to let us stay.

The craziest experience I have had was in a Hanting in Lanzhou. A day before, I had called to make a reservation, just to make sure that this Hanting was authorized to accept foreigners. Though there were a dozen Hantings in Lanzhou, only a handful accepted foreigners. The reservationist assured me that the one we had booked could accept us.

But, when we arrived at the hotel, the woman at the front desk told me that they were not allowed to accept foreigners. I told her Hanting’s headquarters thought otherwise, and we argued for several minutes. She told me they had not been allowed to let a Japanese person stay until the Japanese person was able to ‘borrow’ a local Chinese friend’s I.D. Card (very illegal, by the way).

I decided to call up Hanting’s headquarters. The woman on the phone told me that yes, my reservation was for a place that accepted foreigners. I handed the phone to the receptionists, and the two of them hashed it out for a few more minutes. Headquarters straightened her out, and she handed us a room key. Victory was sweet. Check out the video of the encounter Galen put together:

The government says the law is for my safety and comfort. Hotels approved for foreigners are inspected more thoroughly to ensure they meet foreigner’s standards. In fact, that is nonsense. The nicest hotel we have stayed in so far was not approved for foreigners; it was also the cheapest hotel we have stayed at, less than $20USD. How do we stay in hotels not approved for foreigners? Many Chinese hoteliers are not even aware of it. By allowing us to stay at their insufficiently licensed hotel, many of them are committing a crime and so are we.

In fact, the law has nothing to do with safety and comfort. There are two reasons that the government insists on this law: paternalism and control. Paternalism is the need that officials have to hand-hold people, the belief that regular folks just are not smart enough to make their own decisions. Control is the fear that officials have that foreigners are always out to destroy China and the government must monitor them. Both this paternalism and this control are part of a ancient strain of Chinese xenophobia that long cut China off from the rest of the world and are part of the reason China is still not a democracy.

This post has been particularly pessimistic about China, but it is necessary to report this in full, in order to explain darker events to come.

Camping at the Great Wall – Fake Histories

Posted by Galen and Lee on 22 July 2014, 5:36 pm

History is history, facts are facts. No one can change can change history and facts.

– Xi Jinping, Head of the Chinese Communist Party, President of China, in remarks directed at Japan on the 77th anniversary of its invasion of China.

The rebuilt Wall is better than the old one. If we did not rebuild it, this section of the wall would no longer exist.

– Bricklayer along the Great Wall in Beijing, 1984

We were preparing to go camp at the Western terminus of the Great Wall. We had bought oats, cookies and dates, food that would be good for munching on in a tent. Wandering through the aisles of the supermarket, I stumbled on something I had never seen before: Fishing Islands Beer.

Fishing Island Beer

Some of yall may have heard of Fishing Islands, or in Chinese, Diaoyu Islands. They are a set of islands controlled by the Japanese but claimed by the Chinese. Recently, the Chinese military has been threatening the islands, and President Obama assured the Japanese that America would fight to defend the islands. There is a slight possibility that the Fishing Islands will be where World War III starts.

The Japanese controlled the Fishing Islands from 1895 to 1945. The Americans took them over in 1945, without any complaint from the Chinese. In 1969, an independent group claimed the islands might have oil, and since then, the Chinese have been pushing their claim on the islands, fabricating a history for the islands. This Fishing Island Beer was a part of that fabrication, an attempt to force the islands into the Chinese consciousness at every turn.

Tickled at the fake history beer, I snatched several cans and we headed off to camp at the Great Wall.

We walked along a dirt road that ran in between the two sections of the Great Wall, avoiding having to repay for what we had already seen the day before. This final section of the Great Wall was underwhelming, more of an “Alright Wall of China.”

The Alright Wall of China

Originally, the Great Wall that was built here at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, in the early 1370’s. It was constructed in order to keep most of the barbarians farther to the west out of China and control the entrance of those few who were allowed in.

Alright

But that wall had long ago disappeared and become a line of dirt cutting across the desert. This wall, the bricks that we were walking on, which may have been in approximately the same place as the original Wall, were placed there in the last decade, in good repair and smooth, with no sign of six centuries of erosion. The Wall we were climbing on was, in other words, a fake.

Furthermore, this new Wall was divided into two sections, a wide gap of several hundred yards between them. Apparently, when the new, fake Wall was being rebuilt, two companies wanted in on the action. They could not work it out, so they simply built two separate walls, two walls that do not connect. This way, each company could charge for a separate ticket and each tourist could decide which fake Wall they wanted to visit. This made the Wall pretty ineffective as a defensive barrier, since Galen and I, two Western barbarians, were walking right through it.

This fakeness did not end with the Wall itself. About thirty cheesy statues of Silk Road traders and their camels stood beside the Wall, just to add to the sense of Disney fakeness.

Fakish Silk Road Statues

We hiked beyond that area, past where workers on the Wall could see us, pitching our tent in a grove of trees where the ground was dry after the rain from the day before. From our tent, we could still see the Wall’s towers on top of the mountain peaks. It soon began to rain and there was little we could do other than eat dates inside the tent.

Red Mountains

In the valley surrounding us, the sun began to set across the deep red mountains reminiscent of Death Valley’s canyons. I opened a Fishing Island Beer, but it exploded on me, spewing across the tent. This nationalistic beer was dangerous, I made a note. We fell asleep to the sound of rain thudding against our tent and a herd of sheep enveloping us, nibbling on the grass and pooping on my shoes.

Tent at Night

Night Sky above the Great Wall

We woke up at five a.m. Leaving our tent behind, we climbed the steep ridgeline leading to the top of the Wall. The whole world was still asleep. Beams of sunlight tickled at the horizon. It would be another three hours before tourists began arriving at the ticket gates. We climbed on top of the tower and looked around at the blood red mountains behind us and the desert stretching outwards.

Sunrise over the Wall

I climbed atop one of the parapets and opened another one of the Fishing Island beers. Again, it spewed fizz on me. Drinking it, off in the distance, past the ticket office of the other rebuilt Wall, we were able to glimpse, off in the distance, the real wall, little more than a five foot tall pile of dirt, snaking through the desert.

Breakfast of Champions

Over the centuries, the Wall had fallen out of use. Poor folks had stripped the Wall of its bricks. The real Wall was not nearly as majestic as the fake, rebuilt version, but there was something beautiful in its honesty.

Less Grand, the remains of the Great Wall are still impressive

I finished off the Fishing Island Beer. Fishing Islands were specks of rock that the Chinese were reimagining as a part of a grand scheme to glorify their history. As we headed out of the tower and back to camp, I decided I preferred the honesty to the grandeur.

Of Course, the Fake Wall is Better

Hitchhiking and Job Offers

Posted by Galen and Lee on 21 July 2014, 5:43 pm

Galen was out of commission that day. He had spent all night in the bathroom, fighting with what he referred to as General Tsou’s Revenge, so I was visiting the sites solo that day. (By the way, if you find yourself in the center of the planet’s largest continent, I would recommend avoiding the all-you-can-eat seafood buffet).

Tower in Jiayuguan

First, I went to the Jiayuguan Fortress. This fortress was one of the first parts of the Great Wall built in 1372, during the early part of the Ming Dynasty, the period during which most of what is today called the Great Wall was built.

A Tower at Jiayuguan

The fortress was nice, but there was construction going on, which for me, detracts from it. The Chinese do not seem to mind it. Rebuilding historical objects from scratch does not make these objects fake. For the Chinese, it just makes them better.

Reconstructing History – Building Material at a Historical Site

The most famous part of the fort, Jiayuguan Gate, faces west towards the wilds that were not then part of China (though the Chinese now claim that western province has always been a part of China). It was once said “To walk through the Jiayuguan Gate is to walk out of China.”

At the gate, there was a couple: an older man and a younger woman, his daughter. I asked them to take my photo at the Jiayuguan Gate, and we began talking. Though we spoke in Mandarin, he told me they were Australians renting a car and driving around this part of the Silk Road during their (Australia’s) winter break. He complemented my Mandarin, and then we parted. I had lunch and moved on to the next tourist attraction, the westernly most section of the Great Wall.

The Couple

Climbing the steep hill up to the top of this section of the Great Wall an hour later, I ran into them again. I just asked them, “Are yall heading back into town after this? If so, could I ride back with yall?”

“Oh, actually, we’re going to the First Signal Tower.” The older man said, referring to the third tourist attraction in town, a place I had not planned on visiting. “But you can join us, if you like. And we can drop you off somewhere close to town.”

We talked for a while in their car as I helped them navigate out to the First Signal Tower. I was surprised that we mostly spoke Mandarin. He was neither a native English speaker nor someone who was still learning English. If he had been born and bred in Australia, we would have both felt more comfortable switching to English at some point. If he had still been trying to learn English, he would have thrown it out in phrases when he could. But he did neither, content with just going back and forth with me in Mandarin. He was from Xiamen, just across the water from Taiwan, so I threw a line of Taiwanese at him. “You’ve studied Taiwanese too? Very impressive!” he effused.

“What is he saying?” his daughter asked. The older man then explained to her what Taiwanese was.

After showing our tickets, we were waved through to the First Signal Tower, a twelve foot tall mound of dirt alongside the Beida River with a smaller line of dirt snaking across the desert and back towards the Jiayuguan Fort.

The First Tower

We returned to the car, and continued talking. He was a professor of Chinese and translation in Australia, he explained, and he began talking about job security in Australian academia, about the differences in the Australian education system. Just a lot of detail about college life in Australia. By the time he had dropped me off at my hotel, I realized why he had been wanting to probe my Chinese so much.

“People like you are hard to find. Really, I rarely meet native English speakers who can speak Chinese at your level. We should keep in touch. Who knows, maybe when you finish up with your Ph.D. we can work something out.”

When I proposed to hitchhike on this trip, I never thought I would come out with a job offer.

What could make this ancient Ming Dynasty site better? A mechanical bull.

General Tso’s Revenge

Posted by Galen and Lee on 20 July 2014, 11:49 pm

From Galen:

Sitting on the soothingly cold floor of the washroom, I felt fortunate that fate decided to let me go for quite some time before catching up with a vengeance. Engaged in an activity I cordially refer to as “returning my food to the wild,” this catch and release is more enthusiastic than I had experienced in a while. Leaning over the bowl once more, I began to reminisce on what brought me to this point.

Thinking back to the meals of the last day, it would seem most likely that the hotpot Lee and I had just enjoyed here in Jiayuguan taught me a valuable lesson. Advice found at the bottom of many menus in State-side restaurants: * Consuming raw or undercooked meats, poultry, seafood, shellfish, or eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness, especially if you have a medical condition. While the bevy of possible contamination sources was a mile long, I had my suspicions. If I were a bettin’ man, I’d reckon that something didn’t quite spend enough time in the (usually) boiling broth before I tossed it down my gullet.

Touristy Street Where the Restaurant Was

After enjoying many suspect meals in half a dozen countries, I had never found myself at the mercy of a compromised stomach. Colombian municipal water and fruits, Brazilian fresh vegetables and sushi, Bahamian conch fritters fresh from a road-side stand, and a melange of Chinese food failed to cause me any “distress.” Leaning against the wall now, I felt as though I was paying for my past culinary risks. Like a debtor, all my gastronomic loan sharks had come calling, each with a few lackeys in tow. I considered how lucky I was that we presently found ourselves in a clean (enough) hotel room with a convenience store within the lobby.

The Culprit

I spent the following day atoning for my hotpot sins and editing thousands of photos and hours of video while cautiously eating mild cracker-like cookies and sipping on Sprite. Taking a break to toss the aforementioned cookies in the wash room, it occurred to me, “Maybe this isn’t a result of the hotpot, at all.” I remembered back to high school when my band covered the chorus of the song, “Complicated,” as a part of a mean-spirited medley of dumb pop music. Oh no. My thoughts continued in that Canadian direction, “This is all because I offended the malignant god, Avril Lavigne, by poking fun at her hit single.” Satisfied with this other comical possibility, I grinned (as much as one can) as I vomited again.

Why you got to go and make things so complicated?

Global Atlanta!

Posted by Galen and Lee on 19 July 2014, 5:30 pm

Silk Roaders:

If you haven’t already seen it, check out the interview I did for Global Atlanta, a magazine about Atlanta’s connections with the world:

http://www.globalatlanta.com/article/27041/uga-alums-hitchhike-silk-road-to-explore-chinese-views-on-nature/

I really appreciate Trevor Williams, the editor of Global Atlanta taking the time to talk to me, and John Shiffert, for putting me in touch with Trevor.

Fun story, I have been going back and forth with Trevor for the past few weeks, but, I have been busy with this trip and with writing, and Trevor has been busy traveling. So, he interviewed me, we corresponded back and forth over several weeks. He put the article up and then emailed me, but before I was able to check my email, another friend, Josh Summers, who is living in Urumqi, Xinjiang, had already sent me something telling me the interview was published on Global Atlanta’s website.

So, before I knew about it, a friend on the opposite side of the globe was aware of the interview and told me about it. Small world, I suppose.

Thanks again Trevor, John and Josh.

Halfway Hitching Success

Posted by Galen and Lee on 18 July 2014, 5:40 pm

I had looked over the maps and found the highway that looked like it cut closely to where we wanted to go, the Mati Temple. We took a bus to the edge of town, a dusty strip of car repair shops and dirt parking lots, and began to try to hitch a ride.

We stood on the road for about fifteen minutes, when a man on a motorbike puttered alongside us, grinning. He was in a jumpsuit and a bag full of soupy noodles hung precariously in his left hand. We talked for a few minutes, nothing particular, then we told him where we were going. He grinned, clearly excited to have met us.

“Oh, this is not the right road. There’s a road down there that you want to take,” he said, pointing.

“Are you sure?” I tried to reason with him. “The map indicated…”

But he cut me off. “Nope. You have to go back that way.” He paused for a minute. “I’m working at this gas station up here. I’ll see if I can get the company car and get you going in the right direction. If not, you want to go to this intersection and then turn left and go until you start to see the signs.” He instructed us, shaking our hands and smiling more before disappearing into traffic.

We walked up to the intersection he had suggested, and, as we made the left he had told us to make, he swung out of nowhere, hollering at us from his truck.

As we threw our bags into his truck, he told us he was a local Hui Muslim. When he had been in Qingdao, one of China’s large coastal cities, he had lost his wallet and his I.D. card and a foreigner had given him some money so that he could return home.

He drove us a few miles to a spot where we could pick up a ride, a sign pointing to the Mati Temple forty miles away. He did not take us more than a few miles, but it was the gesture that meant something. He smiled, turned his truck around and then, again disappeared.

We never made it to the Mati Temple. It began pouring before we got there. And our hitching experience was half-failure, since the gas station attendant only took us a few miles. Yet still, this is why we had wanted to hitchhike, so that we could meet good folks in China. In that way, this hitch was a success.

The Big Buddha of Zhangye

Posted by Galen and Lee on 17 July 2014, 5:39 pm

Fat Buddha outside Big Buddha Temple

In Zhangye, we were back on the traditional Silk Road, with no more excursions into Tibetan lands. Zhangye is a midsized town located in the center of the Gansu Corridor, the spit of land running between the Qinlian Mountains and the Gobi desert that formed a passageway from inner China to the Taklamakan Desert. We were now three hundred or so miles northwest of Huazangsi, the Tibetan town where we went on our hike up to Maya Snow Mountain.

Flocks outside Big Buddha Temple

Zhangye has China’s largest reclining Buddha statue, in the aptly named Big Buddha Temple. We wandered around the temple, examining the hundred foot long Buddha lying inside the main hall. His head laying on a pillow, his eyes barely cracked, suggesting that if he were any more content, he would be asleep.

The Big Buddha

The Buddha was built in 1098 by the Tangut Empire. The Tanguts were more Mongolian, though their ethnic background is still not entirely clear. They ruled over the eastern stretch of the Silk Road for almost two hundred years, until they were destroyed by Genghis Khan as he expanded his own Mongolian Empire.

Sleeping

Like I said, the ethnic background of the Tanguts is still up for debate, but we saw some signs of the Silk Road’s transiting of people and ideas in the faces of the statues. The Buddha and some of the statues of Arhats around him show physiological characteristics fairly typical of Chinese people, but other statues showed more Mongolian features, wide eyes, stout brows and very jowly faces. These faces showed no signs of delicacy that we usually find in artistic representations of Chinese faces.

Mongolian Features on the left

A clutch of old ladies passed us. Pointing at the Buddha’s face, I ask one of them about Buddha’s Indian heritage. “He wasn’t Indian. I mean, he was born Indian, but once he was enlightened and became a Buddha, he wasn’t Indian. They don’t know what he was once he was enlightened. They don’t even know where he was enlightened,” she insisted.

The power behind the idea of the Silk Road is that all these different peoples, groups who we think of as far away and having little to do with each other, melted together to form a single beast that stretched from China to India to Europe. Each nation that participated contributed, and, by contributing, became part of something much larger.

But this woman was trying to dial that melting pot back a little. To her, Buddha was not Indian (he very much was), but something unknown. As far as I could read her, she wanted to think of Buddha as Chinese, or, at least, retain the possibility to think of him as not Indian, not from some distant land connected to China by the Silk Road. Instead, Buddha, for her, was Chinese, an attempt to read modern Chinese nationalism back onto an older, more cosmopolitan story.

Silk Road Pagoda nearby

At Grandpa’s

Posted by Galen and Lee on 16 July 2014, 5:12 pm

I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited,
but I couldn’t stay away, couldn’t fight it…
Adele, Someone Like you

We were camping out at Grandpa’s place in a valley that led to Qinghai Lake, China’s largest lake.

If you haven’t read the two previous posts, make sure to check those out here and here before reading this one.

Galen, the two cops and Grandpa

We got out of the white SUV and the driver, the pudgier one, introduced us to his grandfather, a hardened-looking, cut, seventy-year-old man with a faded yellow cowboy hat and a hearty laugh. Grandpa lived in a small, metal building with a glass-enclosed porch that was half store, half home for him and his wife. The glass case in the store was lined with simple foods, instant noodles and bottles of Coke. On top of the glass were almost fifty cups of yogurt.

Yogurts and Cokes

“Do you want your yogurt warm or chilled?” our driver asked, handing us cups. After he sprinkled each cup with over a tablespoon of sugar, we sipped at the stuff. In contrast to what other bloggers have reported about Tibetan yogurt, it was the tastiest, freshest yogurt I have ever eaten. The yogurt was not uniform, but had thick, solid bits floating in a liquidy base. Having been made from yaks milked a mile away, we expected it to still have hints of yak smell, but there was nothing. It was delicious.

Three brown, urn-like vessels sat atop small stools pressed against one of the walls of the building. Each of the urns contained a local moonshine, which the police gladly poured us a cup of. I sipped it, but it was like fire water going down my throat. I could not finish half of the cup, giving my remainder to Galen, who drank it and then did another two ounce shot with grandpa, who was happy to see that at least one American could handle his liquor like a real Tibetan man.

Liquor

At this point, our police escort left, carrying some yogurt and telling us that we could sleep in a tent beside Grandpa’s building. The tent was a twelve by twelve square, with carpeted wooden pallets laid out on either side, to keep occupants from sleeping on the cold pasture ground. We should have realized it then, but it was going to get cold that night. We laid our sleeping bags out on the pallets and then left to hike.

Police Escort to our Tent

We were in a mountain valley that led down into Qinghai Lake, China’s largest lake, though we could not quite see the lake. We crossed over the highway and onto a rutted dirt road that led towards brown mountains. The valley around us was green with a thin layer of grass, dappled with small clusters of yaks and sheep, with a handful of horses. Otherwise, the landscape was desolate and moon-like, without a single tree. Across the valley, some of the mountains were iced with a white layer of snow.

Yaks in the Valley

We hiked for an hour without seeing anything new. The land is so raw and open that you can walk for miles and feel like you have not moved at all. The landscape never changes. We were passed by several herders on motorcycles, off to tend their flocks or lug yogurt back to their stores. We talked to them briefly before they headed out to tend to their farms and flocks.

Herder

Herding Family

Wisps of rain clouds breezed over us. Galen and I decided to head back in, since his camera gear was exposed. By the time we returned to the tent, the sun was setting and the temperature was dropping quickly. After saying good night to Grandpa, watching tv with his wife on the small bed inside his metal building, we crawled into our sleeping bags on the wooden pallets inside the tent.

Dark Clouds in the Valley

In the car, the two police officers had told us that we had gotten to Qinghai a little before the tourist season really began. I thought that was great news, but they corrected me. “No. It’s going to get real cold tonight. It would have been a lot nicer in maybe twenty days.”

Our Tent

It did get cold. That late June night, the temperature fell into the high twenties. Galen had a thin sleeping bag and only a single extra layer of clothes. He took one of my shirts and wrapped himself in the tent’s rain fly, but still, he was only able to get two hours of sleep that frigid night. A Tibetan Mastiff, unable or unwilling to go to sleep, barked all night as if trying to remind Galen that he could not sleep in this cold.

Serpentine Hills at Sunset

Tibetan Sunset

The next morning, everything was covered in frost. A car appeared outside our tent and Grandpa signaled to Galen that I needed to wake up because this car was taking us into town. We squeezed into the back of a beat-up jalopy and bumped a few miles down a dirt road into town. In the town, they delivered some of Grandpa’s yogurt to a store and left us on the sidewalk, trying to figure out how to get back into town as several Tibetans on motorcycles passed by us, dead sheep slung across their laps.

A Final Thought – Baby Yaks!

Tibetan Hitchhiking

Posted by Galen and Lee on 15 July 2014, 5:23 pm

Make sure you read the previous post here before you start this post.

Along the Road

We hopped into the back of the two Tibetans’ white SUV. The one in the passenger seat turned to us and asked, “Do you smoke?” holding out two cigarettes. They were both well-dressed, and, driving this kind of car, well-paid.

“No. Thanks.” The man handed one of the cigarettes to the driver and began smoking anyways. We cruised out of Huangyuan, the gas stations and auto-repair shops giving way to brown mountains and green pastures of the Tibetan countryside. Their radio played a typical mix of oversugared Chinese love songs and a handful of pop songs in English. “Someone Like You,” a song by British singer Adele.

“We just like the beat, the rhythm,” the driver said. “We never have any idea of what they are saying. All these foreign language songs are that way. We just like listening to them, they don’t mean anything to us.”

The song is about a woman turning up at an ex’s place after he has had all his dreams come true and she has to find her way past him, I tried to explain to them.

They nodded and changed the subject. “You know, we are cops,” one of them said. I was stunned.

“Oh.” I breathed, waiting to see how they would play it.

“We are glad to have foreigners here.” The passenger told me.

“Are there a lot of foreigners in this area?” I asked, trying to creep around the police subject.

“Oh yea. Lots. One has opened a restaurant down there,” the passenger pointed vaguely in some direction.

“There are also lots of foreigners here studying Tibetan,” the driver added. “It is so easy to learn. You’ll be able to speak it in three months if you stay here. There are not any tones like they have in Chinese. Do you have a Tibetan name?” the driver asked me.

“No.”

“Would you like one?” the other guy asked.

“Yeah,” I said. My Chinese name is Li Mo, which is pronounced almost exactly like my English name, Lee Moore. So, they gave me a similar sounding Tibetan name, Nyi ma, which means sun.

Thirty minutes into the ride, we began talking about Tibetans. “The Tibetans are very hospitable,” the driver said. “You know, if you walked into any one of these tents,” he said, pointing out to the handful of white tents sprinkling the green plains carpeting the feet of the more distant brown mountains, “if you walked into any one of these tents, you could ask them for anything and they would give it to you and not ask you for money.”

I thought for a minute as more white tents passed by our windows. “Do you think that people like that would mind if we pitched a tent out there? We had been heading to Qinghai Lake to try to find a place where we could camp for a little while. We did not care where we were going, so long as we could camp in a natural setting near Qinghai Lake.”I told him.

“No. They would not mind. If you ask them,” the driver said. “Is that all you want to do?”

“Yea. If you know of a spot where we could do that?” I said.

“How about my grandfather’s place?” He offered.

“Great.” I said. Scuttling down a half torn-up highway, we descended into another valley whose center was green but whose rim was brown as mountains swung around the outside. We pulled off the road and stopped on a one and a half lane dirt road. We had arrived at his grandfather’s.