| I’ve now made it to Xining. I woke up at 5:30 AM, packed up
my stuff, and huffed it to the bus station with my 2 backpacks on. The
only people out at the time were people pedaling three-wheel delivery
carts, students headed off to school, and old people walking backwards
flailing their arms about in a repetitious fashion, tapping their heads,
and/or patting their stomachs.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with this,
older Chinese people like to do various repeated motions in the morning
to get their blood flowing, specifically motions that they would not otherwise
do, like walking backwards, etc…
This morning I got to further experience some of the ways in which Zhangye
is still a bit, well, “raw”. Though I’ve seen plenty
of goat carcasses and various individual goat parts on this trip, and
even buckets of cooked goat heads, today I saw something that surprised
me just a little. One of the pedal-carts that went by me had a pile of
freshly decapitated sheep heads on it. They still had their horns, ears
(with tags), eyes, and wool, and many were still oozing blood out of the
neck, onto the other sheep heads. I hadn’t seen something quite
this graphic yet. Following close behind was a cart with what appeared
to be a pile of stomachs, which seemed less graphic somehow. It did have
its own interesting aspect in that there was a child (about six or seven
years old) sitting in the car amongst the stomachs. He was sitting on
something other than stomachs, but was surrounded on three sides by the
jiggling organs. I tried to get my camera out, but the carts were going
too fast. What a pity.
When I got on the bus for Xining, I realized that I was in for a long
ride. People were freely smoking. I looked for a no-smoking sign but found
none. This surprised me, as all the buses that I had been on so far (especially
the ones originating in Xinjiang) had had no-smoking signs. People would
still take a few puffs every once in a while, but put it out when they
were told to. I would kind of have expected Xinjiang to be less progressive
when it comes to thing kind of thing, but assumptions like that are just
asking to be knocked down. Yep, Gansu (Zhangye, anyway) hasn’t reached
that point yet. The same “the floor is where refuse goes”
rule still applied, and therefore I kept my bag on the seat next to me
or on my lap (when there was no room) the whole way.
 Since
smoking was allowed on this bus, I sat near the back of the bus to avoid
as much of the smoke as I could. But after we got on the road, I realized
why everyone else was sitting as close to the front as they could. The
road we were traveling over today was by far the worst quality road yet,
mostly because it goes straight through the mountains. For hours my body
was tossed about like an unloved yarn-haired rag doll, sometimes being
launched 4-5 centimeters into the air above my seat. I would open a window
whenever someone smoked, but in the mountains, it was freezing (literally
– there was much snow around us), so sometimes I just decided to
deal with the smoke, sometimes deal with the cold – whichever felt
less uncomfortable. The view from the bus was gorgeous, though, for the
first half or so. We were in fairly remote mountainous regions, and in
some places there were wild goats, but frequently we’d go through
plains and grass-covered hills with herders grazing their yaks or herds
of goats, with hundreds of kilometers of snowy mountain scenery behind
them. I tried to take a picture or two, but when scenery is that vast,
there’s no practical way to take a good picture from a bus.
The third quarter of the trip was all in Qinghai, were the elevation
is higher, and (along this section of road, anyway), there’s LOTS
AND LOTS of wheat. It was interesting to get to see some of the various
stages of the wheat harvesting. One stage involves using a pitchfork,
repeatedly tossing the wheat into the air. It actually looks like the
farmers are playing with their crops, though I’m sure it must be
backbreaking work.
The last section of the drive is completely ugly – coal factory
after coal factory. Smoke is everywhere, and everything – roads,
people, animals – are stained black with coal dust. Highly depressing,
especially after starting out with such great scenery.
Xining is an interesting place. It’s the capitol of Qinghai province,
most of which is on the Tibetan plateau. Xining is about 2300 meters in
elevation, but it hasn’t really affected my breathing yet, even
when I’m doing something that requires exertion. There’s also
a lot of ethnic diversity here. By my eye, most people here are Hui Muslims,
but there are lots of Han (of course), a good number of Tibetans, and
some others I’m not completely sure about. Many women wear the Muslim
veils, which I really haven’t seen much of until now - even when
I was in Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs are all Muslim,. Almost all of the
veils are velvety/lacy combinations, and dark green or black. There are
also huge numbers of white skullcaps on the men. A surprising number of
the Hui are very light-skinned with amber eyes, which is very striking,
and quite handsome on men or women.
 Xining
is *almost* a big city. It has a downtown, with a few 20-story-or-so buildings,
a city center square/park, lots of neon, a KFC (which I haven’t
seen since I left Shanghai – or McDonald’s for that matter),
guys pedaling and pulling carts while ringing the “bring out your
garbage” bells, and street sweepers, the kind that roam the streets,
picking up after people who freely toss their wastes about. It also has
one of the more unfortunate signs of a metropolis - beggars. From what
I can tell, it has more beggars per capita than Shanghai, even. Just outside
the “Big City” blocks, though, it turns into your average
town in China: 2-3 story tile-covered buildings with lots of dust in the
streets. And, though I know I write about this WAY too much, the thing
I notice is that they’re clearly not used to foreigners. The staring
thing has continued here, and I think I’m going to reach some sort
of critical mass soon, where I explode or am just finally able to forget
about it. It was mildly surprising that in a place that has the *appearance*
of a big city, the hearts of the people are even behind that of people
in Hami or Turpan – towns which are many, many times smaller than
Xining. Then again, Shanghai is also very similar. Its appearance is extremely
modern, and many surface elements are completely developed, but in truth,
there’s a lot of growth to be done in the people’s minds before
it actually catches up with its outer shell.
I have a feeling this place will get used to foreigners soon enough.
It appears to be developing like mad (yet again similar to Shanghai),
which is evidenced by the amount of dust that gets blown into your face
when the wind blows, anywhere in the city.
I tried to walk to the very north end of town to go to Beishansi (North
Mountain Temple), but not thinking, I followed my lonely planet guide
map without verifying it, and ended up walking for 1.5 hours to the wrong
place, and when I took a taxi to the right place, it was closed. I’ll
just go tomorrow afternoon. In the morning, I go south of town to Taersi
Temple, a Tibetan yellow-hat sect temple that is fairly famous in the
area. I originally was going to see Qinghai Lake and its Bird Island,
but everyone says that there are no birds there right now, and it’s
a long drive to the lake, so I would en up spending 4-6 hours traveling
for maybe .5 hours at the lake. Pretty much just enough to say, “Yup,
I’ve seen it”, and that really doesn’t seem worth it.
So tomorrow, I see some stuff near town, and then leave for Xiahe the
next morning.
Jeremy
|
