Nomad Culture and well fed Vultures

Myself and Martijn (the Dutch fellow) had a wander around the town, and climbed a mountain at the back of the towns huge monastery. Litang is one of the highest towns in the world at 4100m and many rests were needed due to the lack of oxygen. Martijn got altitude sickness so I climbed the last 100 metres or so, on my own. I was well chuffed to have got to the top. Flying around the mountains were huge Crows and Vultures which have a good balanced diet of humans and more humans. The people in this area believe that once the body dies it is worthless and they don’t get all sentimental about their relatives corpses. The bodies get taken to the top of the mountain and a monk opens out the ribs to let the birds eat out the organs and once that is all devoured the bones get cracked to allow them to eat the marrow. Unfortunately no-one was having a funeral when I was there; it would have been fascinating to see. I like this tradition. We take so much out of the food chain during our lives; it’s good to give something back when you’re dead. Getting buried or cremated is such a waste of protein. When I die, I want to get made into pig feed and have a nice wee picture on the bag, a bit like the KFC logo but with me on it and pig feed written in bold capitals.

Two little piggies

In the evening Longlife took Mimi the Japanese girl and myself to one of Litang’s two nightclubs. Everyone stands in a big circle moving in a style very similar to line dancing to Traditional Tibetan music with techno drum beats and the occasional Indian song. The T.V plays Bollywood films in the background as do many Tibetan restaurants, The Tibetan people seem to affiliate themselves more with Indian culture than Chinese culture. Myself and Mimi got invited into a private booth where we got free drinks and I served as a translator for all the single men who wanted to tell Mimi how pretty she was. They don’t waste time in talking about marriage. Some of them were carrying big swords that were razor sharp. Longlife says it is normal for young men to protect themselves in this way. Needless to say, I wasn’t brave enough to try chatting up the locals even though the girls that weren’t wearing face masks were very attractive. I got involved in the dancing instead and managed to learn some of the easier repertoires. With the air being so thin and the light pollution being more or less non existant, the stars were unbelievably bright on the walk home. Were it not -11 degrees I would have watched them longer. 

Paranoid about the threat of snow I went with Mimi and Martijn the following day to Daocheng. That’s only 1 days travel from the Tibetan Plateau to warmer climates so the chances of getting stuck in ice and snow for months at a time was drastically reduced. Whole towns and cities in the plateau are pretty much isolated for months. Daocheng is thoroughly not very special. Were it not for the evening games of poker using sesame seeds as chips I would have been pretty bored.

There are supposed to be daily busses from Daocheng to Shangri-La in Yunnan province but a Japanese fellow named Shuzi had been waiting for two days and we were told at the bus station that we’d have to return daily to the bus station to check if a bus was coming and we’d have to wait a minimum of two days. Along with a Swiss girl and two Chinese we hired a 7-seater mini bus. It was a 10 hour very bumpy journey across unpaved mountain roads. I had diarrhoea 3 times before the minibus left and contemplated waiting a few days for the bus but thought about Aarons epic touching the void quote. I went to the toilet 9 times in total that day. I’m glad I went because I later met an English girl who was supposed to meet her friend in Shangri-La but she was stuck in the Tibetan Plateau due to snow and ice on the roads. If we had been in Daocheng one day more we’d have been stuck as well. Not many people can claim to have squatted on the side of a 4000m mountain pass in late November; I’ll be putting that on my C.V too.  

Although Shangri-La is not exactly tropical, it is much warmer than where I have come from. It has felt strange being in Shangri-La, I’m used to being alone not in a big group. It’s good to have company and sharing 5 dishes between 7 is a lot more interesting than eating alone. I got given a proxy by Martijn so I’ve bypassed Chinas stringent internet laws and updated my blog and I’ve been reading my Khaled Hosseini novel and have decided that Afghanistan has replaced Nepal or Iran as the country I most want to visit in Asia. I’ve been researching on visas, places to go and which are the safest border crossing. Maybe that should be reworded to least dangerous border crossings? I don’t think I’m a reckless person and if I get to Pakistan and conclude it isn’t safe I’ll go just go through Southern Pakistan to Iran. Maybe I’m naïve but I think the most dangerous place would be getting from the mountainous areas on the Pakistan border into Afghanistan. So long as I stay away from Helmand and Kandahar, Afghanistan should be relatively safe, certainly in comparison to the tribal zones in Pakistan. I’ll learn some Pashto before I go and grow a decent beard.

The old town of Shangri-La isn’t very appealing to me. It has 3 names, a Chinese one (Zhongdian), a Tibetan one (Diqing) and one that they created to attract tourists. They claimed Zhongdian was the paradise named Shangri-La in some book that inspired a hotel chain. I can imagine that Shangri-La is nearly as bad as Fenghuang during warmer times of year but it is relatively quiet in Late November. The locals far outnumber the tourists, not that I’m justified in complaining when there are lots of tourists. By the sounds of it, Lijiang, my next port of call is far worse than Fenghuang regarding crowds of inconsiderate tourists.

The locals dance every night in the square to the same line dancing moves that were in the nightclub in Litang. It was really nice seeing a young man with very fashionable modern clothes doing the same moves as the woman next to him who was old enough to be his granny. You just don’t get that kind of cultural connection between young and old in the western world. 

On my last night in Shangri-La/Zhongdian/Diqing they played the DVD of Into the Wild. It’s a fascinating story of a young American who donated all his money to charity living a nomadic lifestyle on peanuts before going to Alaska where he died of starvation and from eating poisonous species of plants. I felt a bit embarrassed about what I had named my blog. He had called himself Supertramp and I could see a lot of similarities between the lifestyle he chose to live and the lifestyle I aspired to live and having reflected on my 4 and a half months on the road feel a bit embarrassed about how easy I’ve made it for myself. I acknowledge that sciatica played a part but it’s no longer relevant and I haven’t made many changes to my lifestyle since I’ve been unaffected by it. I’m looking forward to getting a bike in Dali and living a less planned; less predictable and less wasteful life. Even though I’ pretty good with the language considering I’ve only been in China for 3 months and have got more off the beaten track than most people I've met, I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of time and opportunities. I’m off to Lijiang then Dali. My time In Tibetan culture has been fascinating but brief. I’d love to return in warmer times but I’m glad to be heading south to lower altitudes. I am looking forward to some change.

Mountains are Holy Places and Beauty Costs a Bus Fare

I got 3 hours sleep then my alarm gave me a fright at 4:50am. I don’t like being woken suddenly; I don’t like remembering my dreams. I don’t like to be reminded about unconscious anxieties about an uncertain future that my conscious thoughts can effortlessly nullify. I read on the BBC website a few years ago that scientists discovered that people who read factual books are less likely to remember their dreams but people who read novels have much more vivid ones. I should go back to reading Richard Dawkins instead of Mark Twain and that Afghan fellow. I had piano sonata 2 (by me) in my head when I had my early morning coffee then when I arrived at the bus station I involuntarily had an acoustic version of Rocket to the Moon by Runrig floating around my cranium.  I love the reverb of music when you don’t choose to hum it in your head, it’s so much more multitimbral when it’s impulsive and sparks an indescribable emotion. I like starting sentences with I.

When in Beijing I moaned about their pathetic breeds of dogs. In Tibetan culture they have real dogs. Charlie the cyclist (Yangshuo blog entry) told me about the Tibetan Mastiffs and I assumed that because he has such a good command of the English language he was using overly powerful vocabulary to describe the inbred mutts. They are just as evil as he had said and I would have donated both of my mother’s kidneys to have seen a puny little Beijing Shitzu prancing around Kangding at 5:30am instead of those raucous beasts, no offence mum.

The 6:30 bus from Kangding to Litang left the bus station on time but then spent half an hour loading up with goods on the edge of town to be taken to the Wild West of Sichuan. Neither words nor my poor photos from the moving vehicle can describe how majestic Gongga Shan and the surrounding peaks were when we ascended across the mountain passes. My bag of chilli flavoured French fries exploded on the first 4000m + pass from the change in air pressure. I was gutted, that bag was supposed to last me the whole journey. The 10 second rule doesn’t apply for the floors of Chinese transport (at least not the whole bag).

As we started to ascend on the second high pass the bus driver stopped to buy a live chicken. The whole of the bus gathered to one side to see what price he got it for. It was only £1.60. I was tempted to buy one myself but the bus departed before I came to the conclusion that the amusement of taking a chicken to stay in hostels would in itself have been great value for money. I thought about this for quite some time (you have time to think on long bus journeys). I would have named it Sanchez and got a bicycle in Dali with a basket on the front and taken it with me until I got to the Laos border then donate it to some vegetarian expat in Jinghong. I would have given it its own Facebook profile as well.

The 10 and ½ hours felt great and passed in no time. I was randomly thinking good thoughts and smiling and chuckling away to myself more or less constantly. I love bus journeys through new and unfamiliar lands. It was only 101 miles by air but the winding passes take ages, the roads are just gravel and therefore very dusty and bumpy. After every high pass the bus is spewing out steam and needs hosed down for 5 minutes which slows the journey down further. There are small, dusty, dry stone or corrugated iron houses up in the mountains that serve as Lorry and bus hosing stations. It must be a lonely life scraping a living in a harsh and barren wasteland where the highlight of the social calendar is whilst servicing the daily bus and Lorries stopping to get cooled down with some h2o for a few minutes a day. As always in China, construction is never far away and when the tunnels are opened some time in the near future, people like me won’t be able to experience the joy of crossing the mountain passes and the roadside dwellers will be forced to leave the certainty of their small world and hopefully find somewhere that’s fulfilling.

Although the landscape was at times similar to Scottish landscapes, when we reached the third pass and were properly in the Tibetan plateau it reminded me more of the North American plains prior to the decimation of the land and culture by the white settlers. It’s filled with countless yaks dotted across the horizon, nomadic herders who live in tents not all that different from tepees in an unforgivable, cold and dry, seemingly endless land of grass and rolling mountains.

This is what the sides of all roads would look like if roads weren't paved.

Litang itself is a dirty wee town which oozes with character. The locals claim it is the highest town in the world. It isn't, but the air is very thin. The dogs roam freely as do the yaks who have taken to recycling human waste with great effect. They may be free-range but they certainly aren’t what I’d classify as being creatures that produce organic meat. One had a cardboard box hanging out its mouth when the bus approached the station. The population is predominantly Tibetan. I had read a couple of blogs about Litang and opted to stay in the highly recommended Peace Guest House. Unfortunately it’s so popular that every guest house has named itself the Peace Guest House. Copyright infringement means nothing in these necks of the woods. With a bit of luck I found the original Peace Guest House next door to one of its many replicas. I was greeted with smiley faces from the old ladies whose descendants own the place. They all had really friendly wrinkly faces and one of them spun her hand held prayer wheel while sipping on yak butter tea the whole time. I love the faces of people who live in extreme environments. To me they have faces that personify wisdom even though they are often the least educated people on the planet and therefore in some ways the most narrow minded people on the planet. It then occurred to me again the similarities of this place to the plains of North America. If Tibetan people were placed among Native Americans for a photo shoot I’d never be able to distinguish one weathered face from another. Their jewellery is in a similar style and steeped in mythology and superstition, they are deeply spiritually connected to the land, and the Tibetan ladies even wear a type of moccasin shoe when indoors. They have a similar diet and tough nomadic culture in a ruthless setting. In addition, they are both conquered people.

I was given yak butter tea which tastes like cheese sauce before the cheese has been added to the mix and made with slightly sour milk. There was also a Yak blood sausage which tasted a bit like beef but more like black pudding. I had to cook my share longer than the locals; I like my blood to look un-bloodlike. There was also bread which is like hard dry Naan bread with a bit of a bitter flavour. Finally there was yak cheese which is similar to goat’s cheese but bitterer.

I was later joined by two Japanese and a Dutch man and we went for another Tibetan meal of Tsampa (an indescribably bland concoction which was actually not bad) and excellent fried dumplings. We were joined by the owner of the hostel who speaks excellent English. His Tibetan name translates to Long life and that’s what we call him. I can’t help thinking about Duracell bunnies when I’m talking to him. He’s the best hostel owner I’ve met. He stayed for 7 years in India living in the town where the Dalai Lama is a refugee and as a consequence of having left the middle kingdom seems to have a better understanding of Waiguoren than other Zhongguoren. There was a power cut and we went back to the hostel and chatted in the candlelight until the power came back on and the chatter and laughter inevitably in this day and age changed to the sound of keyboard buttons, mobile texting and Skype conversations. The ever thoughtful Longlife had anticipated my lack of foresight and turned on my electric blanket for me.

I think it was one of my happiest ever days. On one occasion I had to stop myself from laughing uncontrollably when drinking my yak butter tea and munching on yak meat thinking about what it might have been like if I was having this meal with the Tibetans and Sanchez was sitting beside me. They had been very welcoming and I didn’t want them to think I was laughing at them. 

Into the Tibetan Plateau

The small city of Kangding sits on the Trans Tibetan Highway. It’s only 3 streets wide but winds its way around the mountainous valley for quite a distance. It is an old trading town on the crossroads of Han China and Tibetan ‘China’, the population reflects its location and history with an even mixture of Han and Tibetan people. The Han women wear short skirts as they always do although in this cold climate they wear tights too. The Tibetan girls dress a bit more conservatively. Despite having excellent air quality I’ve seen a lot of people, mainly women wearing face-masks, I don’t know what that is all about. I guess they are nomads who spend most of their time up in the hills and consider Kangding to be dirty, with all the vehicles and construction going on. They’d be horrified if they went to Chengdu, or any other large Chinese city for that matter. The horizon is as clear as daylight. It’s -8°c at night. During the day the sun is surprisingly hot but there is a significant change as soon as you step into the shade.

One of Kangdings uninspiring streets 

I stayed at a family home with a few bedrooms at the top. It wasn’t luxury but I got another electric blanket and Wi-Fi with 5 green bars all to myself. The 6 or 7 year old girl was really cute. She spoke very clear but basic English and behaved like she was the manager of a 5 star hotel. She was very helpful and bluntly honest in the way that only young children can be without being rude. I love it when children think they are adults and treat real adults like they are stupid whilst maintaining a polite demeanour. The place has no heating, Chairman Mao said that houses south of the Yangzi River don’t need heating and even now that all that Maoism is irrelevant, the notion of radiators hasn’t yet caught on. I can’t imagine there are too many Chinese babies born in September or October. The showers and the squat toilet are in the same place, you’ve got to watch your footing. I’ve been in a few places like that and it no longer bothers me. I’ve got used to watching my step. Other than those minor things, it’s an ok place.

Unfortunately I had my bank card frozen again. RBS insisted it wasn’t. Kangding is the last place for a few hundred miles that has Banks which accept foreign cards. The Chinese pin numbers have 6 digits and not all banks have the software installed which reads accounts with 4 digit pins. It shouldn’t be a problem providing the snows don’t make travel impossible and I have to stay in the Tibetan Plateau longer than I’d anticipated. Banking is a pain in the ass and prevented me from spending a day climbing up a mountain which has views of Gongga Shan, (the one I wanted to climb couldn’t have been done in a half day).  Gongga Shan is the third tallest mountain out with the Himalaya/Karakoram range; it’s the 41^st tallest in the world and at 7556m is taller than any mountain that isn’t in Asia.

I went to a really nice monastery instead. There are two monasteries in Kangding. One that costs 60 kuai and one that is free and is full of genuine monks who don’t want to sell you anything. I didn’t want to look like a tourist so I started pushing the big prayer wheel with the monks for about 30 minutes. It was quite relaxing hearing the bell ring after every rotation and the rhythmic muttering as they recite the lines of the Buddha’s teachings has a hypnotic flow. I can understand why people can feel a spiritual presence whilst doing this ritual. All that walking around in circles made me feel a bit light headed too. 

As I was leaving, a monk said hello to me and invited me into his quarters for some Yak butter tea. He asked me where I’d come from and wanted to know if I was going to Lhasa.  I tried to explain that getting a Tibet permit is complicated, police, protests, no independent travelling allowed, blah blah blah. I think he understood me but I often say I understand just so that the person who’s talking to me doesn’t keep on repeating the same thing over and over again. Nodding your head and saying ‘Mingbai’ is often more convenient. Maybe he was doing the same. There was a huge poster of the Dalai Lama in his dwelling and I was curious to know if that was a potential flare but the monk said that they weren’t a problem. I think it’s an arrestable offence to have posters of the Dalai Lama. I’d read that there had been problems in the past in Kangding regarding Tibetan independence. There is a large volume of police that patrol the streets and there had been riots a few years back when people campaigned for the return of the Dalai Lama. There’s even a hotel in the town specifically for policemen. A drunken man came along and insisted on staying in the monk’s quarters to bow at his feet, refusing to leave when the embarrassed man in robes shooed him away. He was absolutely legless and quite aggressive; it took about 3 monks to kick him out. The monk showed me around the Temple then to spark up conversation I looked up the word monk in the dictionary and asked him how many years he had been a monk. He corrected me by saying he was a Lama and didn’t answer my question. A minute later he shook my hand and told me he had to go and do something or another but invited me round tomorrow. I thought about why he had been so friendly and then so abrupt when I left. It later occurred to me what a stupid question I’d asked. As far as he’s concerned he’s been a Lama for about 15 generations!

The following day I climbed the mountain I had intended to climb the day before. It is 3900m which is 200m taller than the highest place I’d been prior to this (Mount Tidi in Tenerife). I started off at 2500m so I feel quite chuffed that I climbed higher than from the sea to the top of Scotland’s highest hill Ben Nevis and with significantly less oxygen in the air too.  On the other hand I look around to see what other mountains people climb in the area. There are several over 6000m and one over 7000m. In comparison, my walk was a pitiful token gesture of outdoor adventure. Some people have told me I could be a travel writer but you have to do things more dangerous to grab people’s attention in the first place and get notice from publishers. I’m quite content to do my wee climbs then spend the evening all cosily tucked up in my electric blanket. I was taking breaks soon after I started ascending and used a Tibetan Yak herder as a pacemaker until I could no longer keep up with him. I had planned my climb on Google Earth but turned right too soon. I ended up causing mini landslides and clambering through thick bushes for about an hour before finally getting onto something that resembled a path. Other than having to dodge the multitudes of Yak shit it was plain sailing from there on. The 14mg tar Chinese cigarettes have really taken a toll on my stamina. I was stopping every 20m or so towards the end, panting for breath. I’d struggle to do more than 2000m climbing in high altitude a day and my knee would be screwed for the following day and to think that something big, like Mount Everest would have just a fraction of the oxygen I was breathing. The mental anguish and physical torture was worth it though (that was a shameless attempt to make my climb seem epic). The views of the towering peaks were gorgeous. I think that nothing is prettier than seeing the smooth snow glisten in the sun on the tops of craggy mountains. From the summit I managed to see the route I was supposed to have taken and got down in no time, it’s not easy memorising Google earth imagery. I had a cigarette with the yak herder during my descent and was quite amused watching him slinging stones at his livestock to keep them in line. 

 A look up to where I'm heading.

The views from near the top, similar to the view from the top but with a wee house as well.

Me and Mr Yak having a cigarette.

My knee wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated and I had my first proper meal of the day when I got down at 5pm. All I had with me was 4 little bits of dry bread the size of Swiss rolls that got devoured in no time. For some reason, dry bread on its own is really popular here. The Chinese say that Western food is flavourless then take the blandest of western foods and make it so dry it’s hard to swallow. It’s difficult to fathom. Apart from having every hair stand on end when Tibetan Mastiffs growl at me, it was a good day. Getting all the twigs and berries out my fro in the evening was no easy feat.

Chengdu

The mountain range came suddenly to a halt not too far from where the world famous Wolong Panda Sanctuary once stood (it got closed down after the quake, some pandas were crushed in their cages and the rest were moved to a different sanctuary) and onto the flat plain leading to Chengdu. You could tell the bus was getting closer to a city by the smog. Chengdu was only 80 kilometres from the epicentre but largely left intact. 


I met up with Arron and Susan and had a hotpot (which wasn’t all that spicy) and the hostel staff allowed me to swap my Genghis Khan book and Tom Sawyer book for A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It’s about the recent history of Afghanistan. It was available to buy for 50 kuai and I bought the two books I swapped for a total of 27. I’m chuffed. I’ve decided I’m going to go up the Tibetan plateau even if it is freezing and the roads are dangerous. I’ll most likely have no internet, so The Three Kingdoms and the Afghan book will keep me entertained.

I don’t have much to write about the city itself. Chengdu’s quite nice. If it was the first Chinese city I’d been to I’d probably have loads to write about but when you’ve been in the same culture for any great length of time you don’t take much notice of things such as toddlers peeing on busy streets and whatever other things occurred that were different to how things happen in a culture I've grown up in. The traffic is relatively tranquil for a city this size (I like my traffic congestion chat don’t I)? They have traffic lights and 4 traffic guides at every major junction.  I had some nice Chrysanthemum tea and had a really interesting wander through the cities main park. As usual there was a cacophony of sounds from the various dance groups and opera bands that congregate there. It’s certainly not a place to go for peace and quiet. Dancing groups are common in any large open space in China but I’ve never saw a fake catwalk in a park where mainly middle aged women would stroll up a tatty red carpet, strike a pose and then walk back. They’d wait a couple of minutes then do it again, in the same clothes that they did it in before which aren’t that nice in the first place. They’d take it so seriously, their pouts were unforgettable. Crowds of people gather to watch them looking as miffed about the whole phenomenon as me. I just don’t know what motivates them to go to a park to pretend to be a supermodel in front of a bewildered public. I was still chuckling uncontrollably in the evening whenever I thought about them.

The catwalk brigade

The catwalk area is also the only part of the park (and the only place I’ve been to in China) where people dance freestyle. Some of them are amazing dancers and some of them just look ridiculous. One of the dancing girls gave me a bunch of plastic flowers and had me up dancing. I was drawing more attention to myself by turning down her offer than by giving it welly for a minute or two so reluctantly, I strutted my stuff with the bunch of plastic flowers in my hand, to the Vengaboys if I remember correctly. It wasn’t my finest moment.

I was going to go to see a Giant Buddha with 7 metre long ears and toe nails the size of a human the following day but I was drawn back to the park. I just don’t get why people would go there to seek relaxation. I told myself I’d try my hardest to find tranquillity there. I spent the majority of the day in the various tea houses reading ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad and sitting contemplating in the gardens. I was free to ponder my thoughts for hours alternating between Jasmine, Wulong and Green. Only the occasional offer of an ear clean for 20 kuai from men with little feather dusters disturbed my peace. I got recommended Heart of Darkness by Charlie Walker the cyclist back in Yangshuo and found it highly interesting. It is an account of an expedition up the River Congo during colonial times. The tales of cannibal tribes and bloodthirsty murder for profit from the Ivory trade probably isn’t the best book in the world to read whilst seeking tranquillity.

There was one area of the park where they do calligraphy writing on the pavement using water. I liked to imagine they were writing subversive messages that could evaporate should the authorities come but it was most likely trivial poetry.

 In the square the same people were there doing the exactly the same thing as the day before. There are about ten different groups dancing, nine of which are choreographed so that everyone is doing the same moves. I sat for an hour in an area where I was getting the noise equally from 3 different speakers and watched the world go by. I obviously didn’t find tranquillity but I did get a sense of why the lack of individuality appeals to them. In the west having a sense of individuality gives people a sense of significance but in a country as populous as China feeling like an individual amongst the hordes of people does the opposite. I can see why being part of a group of strangers that has unity in its movement gives the person a sense of belonging and stability, which I suppose leads to a feeling of tranquillity. The loud beats from the other groups just metres away just needs to be put to the back of the mind and voila, serenity is all yours.

I find the people who move how they want possibly the most interesting bunch I’ve come across in my travels. The day before I thought they had completely lost the plot. This may be true but they are also possibly the most liberated Chinese people I’ve met. They don’t seem to care what others think of them, they are just interested in fun and if that means strolling up a fake catwalk or dancing like an idiot then so be it. The dancing was equally hilarious second time round. I joined in at the end and when it was getting dark quite a crowd gathered as I chatted with them. One spoke reasonably fluent English and the older toothless man who walked about with chalk all day drawing maps on the pavement could write a bit of English. He told me that 20,000 Jews fled Germany for Shanghai during World War II. I then drew him a map of my route to Chengdu on the pavement. I got a bit nervous when chalk man started talking about politics and how America is better than China because China is a one party state. I didn’t know who was in the crowd and don’t want to be held accountable for spreading political dissent and was glad to change subject. I got told to look for work in Chengdu and have a shave then Chalk man would find me a Chinese girlfriend. One of the older women (who is an excellent salsa dancer and rather attractive for her age) told me I could marry her 22 year old daughter (but only once I’ve shaved). I explained to them that I intended to go to Kangding in two days and needed my beard to keep warm, I don’t know whether they liked my justification for looking like a savage or not. Anyway, I think I’d prefer to check her daughter out first before I’d plunge into the deep end and if that were to happen it would be after I’d been up the Tibetan Plateau.

I did very little sightseeing in Xi’an and nothing in Chengdu and quite frankly I don’t care. I'll put up videos of the park once I get a stable internet connection. I’ve been considering returning to China to find work after going to Laos. Who knows?

The Road to Chengdu

This was quite possibly the most fascinating bus journey I’ve ever been on. The bus snaked along the mountain road, passing small Tibetan villages with their tattered prayer flags flapping in the wind, swastika adorned houses and monasteries and temples in the hills above. In many villages almost every house had a Chinese flag. That surprised me. It’s not a common site. I don’t know if these people feel more Tibetan than Chinese and are putting the flags up either due to external pressure to be patriotic or if they genuinely have patriotic sentiments towards the middle kingdom.

One of the villages (Songpan, I think) was clearly geared for tourists with every shop having a Tibetan, Chinese and English translation. Usually the signs in English are only for shops selling things relevant to travellers. In this village there was even a translation for the cement shop and scrap metal shop. I wonder how often a western tourist walks in and asks how much a kilo of cement costs…

Out of the villages yak and semi wild horses grazed on the parched grass, rickety looking rope bridges crossed silver streams flowing fast enough to drown even the strongest of swimmers, glacial lakes reflected the autumn colours and the towering white peaks glistened in the sun. In many ways it reminded me of Scotland, the mountains are often treeless, the white Tibetan houses look like crofts from a distance and even the yaks are similar to highland cattle.

I got ripped off at one of the toilet stops buying tangerines (8 kuai for 1 jin compared to 3 in rural Guizhou) and sat on the kerb munching on my overpriced fruit. A young Chinese couple were having a spitting contest with their apple seeds which I found hilarious. I decided to join in and only got 1/3 the distance of the girls 6 metres winning entry. It’s not a game I would phone up my friends to try and organise but when done spontaneously it is great fun. 

As the road led south and downhill there were many signs saying 5/12 followed by some text in Chinese characters. On the 12^th day of the 5^th month in 2008 the 21^st deadliest earthquake of all-time hit this region. The bus route goes through Wenchuan County, the region that was at the epicentre. The quake measured 8.0 on the Richter scale killing over 69,000 people and an estimated 4.8 million were left homeless.  On the 6^th November of 2008 the Chinese government announced they’d be spending 3 trillion Yuan in the next 3 years rebuilding the damaged areas. I visited on the 13^th November, just over 3 years on and there was still extensive damage.

There is a new highway getting built parallel to the old one that ran through the valley. There are still fragments of the old highway dotted around with huge concrete and steel 4 lane roads suspended over the river having been tossed about and thrown onto the valley below. There are bridges that just stop half way across the river with the steel rebar still sticking out from the edges of the concrete. There were numerous trails of rock running down the mountains from the landslides. One village had a handful of semi collapsed housing next to a huge pile of rock that had fell from above assumedly destroying the rest of the village.

The landslides blocked the river resulting in lakes being formed which flooded the buildings that had survived the initial quakes. There were many boats used for dredging dotted around the valley.  

This village appeared to have been buried and was only just being dug up.

3 trillion Yuan goes further in China than it would in Europe or North America, and I’ll bet this area is almost unrecognisable now to what it was like immediately after the quake. What I saw was only a tiny proportion of the carnage that was unleashed; I can’t begin to imagine the level of destruction that the quake produced. Office buildings in Shanghai, 1000 miles away swayed and towers in both Shanghai and Hong Kong were evacuated as a result of the tremor. 

Jiuzhaiguo

Myself, Aaron and Susan caught the train to Guangyuan with the intention of going to Jiuzhaiguo the following the day. Like me, they chose their route because they didn’t want to back track the same route from Chengdu even though that route is more convenient. They had booked their transport via the hostel. I didn’t want to pay the hostel a commission fee when I was passing the train station anyway when coming back from the terracotta warriors. The seats were all booked by the time I got to the ticket office so ended up paying more money for a sleeper than if I had just paid the commission. Never mind.

I tried to sort out my camera situation before leaving but didn’t get time. Once I arrived at the station I didn’t have time to call in by the police station and drop off a box of chocolates to thank the ones who did find the time to help me. I spent the majority of the train journey in the aisles between the carriages because you can move from side to side depending on what side has the most interesting view and you can smoke. I spent a lot of the time chatting to a man who was both deaf and dumb using the dictionary at the back of my phrasebook. The arrangement of words in alphabetical order means nothing to him but he flicked through the dictionary for half an hour and must have picked up on Chinese characters that he thought would come in handy later and memorised their location to speed things up. He was very quick at finding the words he wanted and unlike the majority of Chinese people I met, managed to read between the lines when I was trying to explain things that required words that weren’t in the dictionary. I was surprised by the amount of things that were communicated. I still would have preferred to have stared out the window all day. Never mind.

Me and the deaf and dumb dude

He insisted on giving me my 2^nd free meal in 3 days. The Chinese are a strange bunch of creatures. When they aren’t trying their utmost to rip off foreigners they are insisting on giving outsiders freebies. It’s one of the many shield/spear situations in this country. The staff in the restaurant carriage continued to talk to the man even though he clearly used hand gestures to tell them he was deaf and dumb before he proceeded to make his order using his finger. I’m totally confused about the reasons so many people here find it so difficult to employ lateral thinking. They got his order wrong. He had been pointing at a Chinese character and pulling a facial expression of disgust and seemed annoyed that he had to spend quite a lot of time fishing out the chillies and bits of meat that he didn’t want. He went to bed shortly after sunset and I read my Genghis Khan book for the remainder of the journey. He must have a frustrating life (the deaf man, not Genghis Khan). I’ve been invited to his house when I’m in Chengdu (likewise… the deaf man, not Genghis Khan). I turned down invitations to stay over with people in Hangzhou and Guangzhou because I thought the people were boring (and very gay) but I might take up on the deaf man’s offer.

The three scots left Guangyuan Train Station and got into one of the cheap, dirty hotels that are always clustered near bus stations. The rule against foreigners must not apply to areas where foreigners rarely venture. Aaron had been sick all day, was sick once we got to the hotel and also when we got up at 5:15am to catch the only bus of the day. Aaron decided to get on the bus despite the advice of Susan and myself to take a chill day. “If the guy from Touching the Void was in my situation, he’d get on the bus”! Classic line, I’d use it myself someday if I was the sort of person who’d get on that bus having been vomiting for 24 hours.

Immediately after leaving Guangyuan the bus entered the edge of the Tibetan Plateau and veered across mountain roads with deep lakes below before coming into Gansu province, following a fast flowing river all the way up to Jiuzhaiguo. Tibetan housing was evident much of the way. The houses are smaller than the normal rural countryside houses and have less elaborate carvings around the doors, windows and roofs but have elaborate paintings on the faces of a lot of walls. The toilets that the bus would stop at every couple of hours were up there with the worst I’ve seen. They were all joined onto the pig sheds. At least the other communal squats I’ve seen have had doors leading into the toilets so that the whole world can’t look in. I’ve seen one other pig shed/toilet in someone’s house in Guangkeng but at least that wasn’t communal.  These aren’t places to be if you’ve been ill…

Although there is little to differentiate Chinese cities I’ve noticed a number of regional differences in agricultural techniques. In Jiangxi they like to separate the rice husks from the straw immediately after it’s been cut and put the straw in big circular piles and dry the husks on the roofs of their houses and on the sides of the road. In Guizhou they’ve constructed large wooden structures where they hang both the husks and the straw out to dry. In Southern Gansu they tie their straw in big bundles and then hang them onto the trunks of trees. I’m not sure if there are differences in climate or terrain which makes one technique unsuitable for certain regions or if they are just approaching the same problems with different but equally effective solutions.

Once we arrived in Jiuzhaigou I waved goodbye to Aaron and Susan who had booked a place 12km from Jiuzhaigou. The decision about whether to camp or get a cheap place to stay took all of 10 seconds. If I had a warm sleeping bag and there was a bit of flat ground it maybe would have took me 20. I got a dorm with a kettle, a warm shower, and an electric blanket! I hadn’t had one of those in years. I got all tucked in, read the last chapter of my Genghis Khan book then started reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It’s the first novel I’ve read since leaving school. The bookshop had a serious lack of non-fiction books available and the novels consisted largely of Jane Austin. I’ve read a couple of interesting Mark Twain quotes on cryptograms.org and bought his book over A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens solely based on those quotes. I’d definitely recommend my first novel in over a decade. I was laughing out loud on several occasions. I’ve decided I’m going to write my own book. I don’t know what it will be about yet but judging by my writing skills, I’m assuming that every 2^nd or 3^rd paragraph will end with the words ‘never mind’. Never mind, at least it will be good fun writing it. I think it will have a similar theme to the poems in ‘Knots’ by R.D Laing. I got recommended that book when I was about 16 by a teacher who obviously thought that I was obsessed with over-analysing the more complex rhythms in life.

The National Park at Jiuzhaigou is hard to believe until you see it. The mountains surrounding the valley are up to 4600m high. It’s mid-November and they are all snow-capped. I was hoping to get to Yunnan via Western Sichuan across the Tibetan Plateau where the average height is in the late 3000’s. I imagine the roads there would be terrible even without snow. On top of that, all Chinese bus drivers seem reckless and I reckon the ones in western Sichuan would be devout Tibetan Buddhists who don’t really care if the bus falls off a Himalayan cliff face. I don’t believe in all that reincarnation but even if I did, I’d still want to go to Yunnan and Laos before heading off for a cup of Yak butter tea in the land of nirvana. I’ll ask for advice on what to do once I’m in Chengdu. If it’s not advisable to go to Western Sichuan I’ll take the boring road to Yunnan and probably leave China before my visa has expired. I heard from a fellow traveller that visas in nirvana are renewable at no extra cost.

Anyway, The Mountains in Jiuzhaigou deposit large volumes of calcium carbonate into the water which results in the azure hues that give off astounding reflections. I think the calcium also prevents the trees that have fallen into the water from rotting. There are huge trees which have taken the place of the ones that are still perfectly preserved in the lake below. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them will have been lying in the lakes for 20 years or more. Anyone who needs to Photoshop their pictures must be absolutely useless with a camera. You can just point and snap and you’ve got a masterpiece.

Mountains may be holy places but beauty is far from free. The park is not cheap. Over a million people visit it a year. I was the first person to buy a ticket when it opened at 7am and first into the park where I got the bus to the top of the valley. Only 365 people a year can claim this accolade. I’ll be putting that in my C.V. I walked the whole way down (22 miles I think) and my right knee was in bits by the time I got to the bottom. Apart from China, the countries I most want to visit in Asia are Nepal and Iran. It will be a waste of time going to Nepal if I can’t do more than a day’s walking at a time before being reduced to a cripple. With me going on about a sore leg and what I’m probably not going to be doing in the future you would be justified in assuming I walked through the valley feeling sorry myself. On several occasions I thought about what might have happened if I had followed the medical advice they gave sciatica sufferers 10 years ago and still have been lying in my bed 23 hours a day or if I had made a handful of different decisions over the years and ended up living a comfortable but rather mundane life in Scotland and felt extremely lucky to be there. I feel jacking it all in is the best decision I’ve ever made and felt truly blessed to be one of the lucky people who get to visit such a place. The delusive feeling of absolute freedom is phenomenal.

Xi'an

On Chinese trains you hand your ticket over when you board and they give you a card which they then swap once you are approaching your station. I don’t know what the point is, I guess at worse it keeps employment levels high and means that it is difficult to miss your stop. After I had my ticket returned to me shortly before arriving in Xian, I smoked a cigarette by the door of the train, wondering why the door wasn’t opening and nobody else was getting off. After about 10 minutes I went back into the carriage and realised people were boarding from the opposite end of the carriage. I rushed up to my bunk and grabbed my stuff. I felt something was not quite right as I walked off the train but wasn’t quite sure what it was. Xi’an was noticeably chilly in comparison to my last ports of call. I was still wearing shorts and was asked several times “ni leng bu leng”? Are you cold or not cold? I proudly replied ‘Bu leng’ but if I am to be 100% honest with myself, I was maybe a wee bit. I had a noodle soup then wandered through the old city walls to find somewhere to stay. During the ¾ of an hour or so in between getting off the train and having my soup I continued to feel something was wrong. Anyway Xi’an’s streets are very similar to Beijing. It has similar wide avenues, with wide pedestrian streets running on a north-south axis. The architecture also feels very Beijingish: modern but not particularly tall with no landmarks on the skyline, a lot of 1980’s communist buildings with limited success in their attempts to make them befit their Imperial historical location and most importantly of all, smog, lots of smog. I passed a group of Hui people (a Muslim minority spread across much of China). They were chatting amongst each other with lots of sheep around them on the pavement outside a mosque. I then reached a square. On one side was a huge government building that looked bland, authoritative and imposing. Around the square were lots of hastily erected glass buildings with many advertisements for consumer goods. There was one very old building tucked away in a corner, deteriorating and almost un-noticeable with a construction crane behind it. In the centre of the square was a park where there were several dancing groups and tai-chi practitioners all moving to music that seemed in conflict with one another surrounded by busy loud, traffic. The smog gave the whole area an aura of uncertainty about what lay beyond the horizon and I thought to myself, this scene symbolises my impressions of modern china perfectly. It was then that I realised what was not right. I’m back to losing a camera a month although the rate at which I’m losing glasses continues to decline.

I got to a hostel and had a coffee with a lively and very friendly Scottish couple (Aaron and Susan) then on the advice of the staff, headed back to the train station to try and get help. The sheep were getting skinned on the pavement as I walked back. Blood was flowing into the gutters in amongst the passers-by (who didn’t seem at all perplexed) and the clearly disturbed sheep that hadn’t yet been slaughtered who were just metres away from their deceased comrades. The policeman outside the station wanted nothing to do with me, he walked away from me on several occasions and even though I couldn’t understand him I got what he meant - not my problem, stop pestering me  as I take my daily stroll with my chest out. It felt good to swear at a policeman and not get arrested. I used my old ticket to get back into the station and found the police in the station far more helpful. Smoking in a police station and stubbing it out on the floor without getting arrested feels almost as good as calling a muscular but lazy policeman a fat lazy c$%t. Brilliant. The helpful policemen located where the train was going to – a 40 hour journey to Lhasa in Tibet. I had managed to explain my situation to the policeman reasonably clearly in Chinese but struggled to understand what he was saying much of the time. I showed them my ticket with the carriage and seat number. They checked on the train and found nothing on the seat I’d been on. He continued to speak in Chinese for a considerable amount of time before eventually speaking in broken but easily understandable English. All this time he had wanted to know if I was sure my camera had definitely been left on the train and not been stolen. The Chinese are so embarrassed about making mistakes and therefore losing face that they are prepared to waste hours of their time avoiding using grammatically imperfect English rather than do what is practical when I blatantly didn’t understand what he was saying in Chinese. This absolute fear of failure seems ingrained deeply in their cultural psyche and seems to be a cause for their unwillingness to think outside the box. As its economy is mainly based on manufacturing goods it is not a huge problem at the moment but China is building all these grand central business districts with the assumption that they are soon going to be leaders of the global economy. The most dynamic companies in the world such as Google, IBM and Apple thrive on people shamelessly contributing ideas no matter how ridiculous they may be and eventually picking up on a good one. I feel China will struggle to advance from a manufacturing economy to a global economic leader unless its people are educated in a way that promotes creativity in a way in which being wrong is seen as part of the process in attaining an outcome that is original and logistically feasible.

Despite having lost another camera I left the police station quite satisfied that I had ignored the advice of the first policeman who advised me to forget about it, got passed the security of the people who were supposed to only let in people with valid outbound tickets and confirmed one way or another whether my camera was lost or not. I left them the phone number of the hostel I was staying in just in case it magically reappeared.

The sheep had all gone but the pavement was still covered in blood as I made my way back. I bought the same model of camera as my last two and got a 200 kuai discount without even trying to bargain and went for a wander around the city. My one in Beijing was 400kuai more expensive. I ended up doing no sight-seeing. I’m bored of drum towers, city walls, bell towers and pagodas and quite happily sat on a bench trying to get lucky with the young ladies who wanted their photo taken with a wild and hairy foreigner. There were a group of 3 guys sitting next to me who got really excited when they overheard me tell a particularly hot one that I was from ‘Sugelan’, the land of Alex Ferguson and were eager for conversation. I had the most in depth conversation I’ve had with Chinese people since I arrived in August. We chatted about the potential problems facing India in the future with their uncontrolled spiralling birth rates, the geography of China and my impressions of the places I’ve been to and a lot of football chat. I’ve discovered that regardless of the culture, Cristiano Ronaldo is universally considered a vain, self-absorbed, poncy git. I’ve also discovered that in Chinese, the snooker player John Higgins is known as Shee Gee Nuz (or something like that) and Brazilian women who can dance the samba are globally considered as being ultra-sexy. We chatted for well over an hour. The three guys insisted on taking me for a meal and we washed down a bottle of rice wine (56% alcohol). After this I had a 5 minute stroll through the Muslim quarter and other than that saw nothing. I still felt it was a good productive day and it was much more fun having banter than seeing the sights that the city has to offer. I returned to the hostel feeling all jolly (the rice wine had nothing to do with it) and discovered that my camera had been found, exactly in the location where I said it would be. Never mind.

My buddies in Xi'an

The following day I found a bookshop that had an English section and bought a biography of Genghis Khan, The adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and a Chinese classic, The Three Kingdoms. I then went to see Bing Ma Yong (The Army of Terracotta Warriors). I wasn’t disappointed with the Terracotta warriors primarily because I knew it wouldn’t be overly awe inspiring. The museum putting the artefacts into their historical context was more interesting than the actual army. There are approximately 2000 of the 7000 soldiers on display. Every soldier is unique and after an extensive search I can conclude that not one of them has a better afro than me. That was enough to make my day. My preconceived ideas about Xi’an were 100% correct. I knew that its illustrious history was only visible in miniscule quantities. It’s an ok place to visit if you’ve got time on your hands. I can understand why people feel disappointed in Xi’an. That’s what they get for feeling obliged to put it on their essential to do in China lists. You’ll get a much better sense of Chinas past by going into the rural lands than seeing a bunch of stone men standing in a row, especially, if you’ve travelled for two days or so just to see them.