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on Wednesday, July 06, 2005 - 12:43 PM AST - 3383 Reads
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For the following weeks, you're invited to follow Jeremy through his Silk Road Journey. You can get the whole story on his blog.
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Heavenly Lake? Is Heaven Freezing Cold?
By Jeremy
October 13th - 21:00pm
Freezing in a Yurt in Heavenly Lake (Tian Chi)
I started my trip today. It turns out I was a little misinformed about the nature of my trip here in Tian Chi. I was under the impression that I would be on a 4-day horse trip, but I'll probably only be on a horse for 1 day. Basically, my time here will be spent at a base camp near the lake, and we'll (as in any necessary guide, Ma Bing, and I - see previous post - Ma Bing's the guy who picked me up at the airport) go on various excursions (on horse and foot) from there.
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I'll be staying in a little camp of somewhat permanent yurts, in a little "yurt resort" run by a couple of Kazak families. They cook for you and take care of things like bathrooms and maintenance of the boardwalks that connect the yurts. I'm not too disappointed about not being on a horse trip the *whole* time, really.
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First, this lake is quite pretty and the air is clean, and there are lots of trees. After being in Shanghai for so long, it's very, very welcome. Second, I think it will only hurt me to have lots of expectations on this trip. Best to just take things as they come. Since I know so little about all of these places, any idea I come up with about how this trip "should" be is almost guaranteed to be wrong, or at least grossly uninformed.
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I do get to hang around with the Kazaks, though, which I'm happy about. They like to ask me questions about where I'm from and how rich people are and how wonderful it is in the United States. I try to tell them that how I see it, and that there are poor people in the US, too (though the ratios are probably a little lower), but I think that, just like the folks in Shanghai, that they'd rather keep their fantasies about the US being a weird kind of Utopia with a really aggressive government.
People told me that other people would look like me here. They're geographically located between China and some Middle Eastern countries, and the former Soviet Union, so you could say that their genetics ethnic makeups are "sort of" like mine, but not TOO much. I don't think any of them would mistake me for one of them.
So today I think I hiked around 15-20 km. I didn't expect to, but that's the way it worked out. Our camp is at the west side of the north end of Tian Chi. This morning we (Ma Bing and I) hiked east along the north end, then south along the lake to a place called "Queen Mother Temple". It's a Daoist temple that is mostly a poorly disguised tourist trap to make money off of people giving donations because it's a religious place. The original was destroyed a long time ago, but they rebuilt it in 1994 and put in a LOT of donation boxes and a couple of Daoist monks who will tell your fortune for "free". Donations are encouraged afterward, and you have to buy some papers to get the fortune telling in the first place. The hike there and back is about 4 km. Then we ate lunch. I held back on the amount I ate because I didn't know how much more activity I'd have the rest of the day. I now think that was a mistake. After lunch, I chatted with the Kazaks for a while, and then watched them play cards. They played a game that's very much like Bridge, but more complicated. Then Ma Bing and I decided to hike the other direction around the lake. You can't actually hike all the way around the lake, as there's no path and too many cliffs. Queen Mother temple is as far as you can go clockwise, but counter-clockwise is a different story.
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After about 45 minutes of going generally southward, up and down steps, in and out of valleys, I started to wonder how long before this path ended. After about 10-15 more minutes, Ma Bing got tired and took a rest for a while. He said, "you go on, it's just up ahead." After another 15 minutes or so, I FINALLY reached the end.
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I realized that I had walked all the way to the south end of the lake. The lake itself is 3.5 km long from the north end to the south end, so I figured walking along the curvy edge must be around 5-6 km. So I ended up walking more today than I have in a long time.
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By the time we got back, it was almost dark, and most of the folks at the yurt resort had either left or retreated to their yurts to enjoy their coal-burning stoves, as it got REALLY cold as soon as the sun went down. I think the outside temperature is around -5 C right now. In any case, it's WELL below freezing. Puddles of water had already turned to ice as we were walking back along the lake, and there was plenty of sun at that point.
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Anyhow, they made us some dinner, which was very satisfying. We were so hungry after walking so far, that we stuffed ourselves. This, I think, was a good idea, because it's going to be cold in this yurt tonight, even wearing clothes and with 2 blankets. The extra energy hopefully will help keep me warm. And I gotta admit, this coal-burning stove really helps in a yurt, despite the fact that it's FAR from airtight. I'm sitting next to it as I write this, to soak up as much heat as I can before getting into bed, because I know those blankets are going to be cold. Well, I'm adding one more piece of coal to the stove, then going to sleep. Tomorrow's for horse riding.
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Jeremy
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Episode 4: Horses and Catching Colds
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