Lanzhou to the Tibetan Frontier
I awoke to Gansu province. The Urumqi-Lanzhou line is almost 2000 kilometres long, yet only cross two provinces. In fact, the four northwestern provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai and (ahem) Tibet represent half the geographical area of the world’s third-largest country, yet they contain less than 10% of the population. It is not hard to see why. As in Xinjiang, the landscape for much of Gansu is brown. It starts with dunes around Dunhuang, where we were shortly before sunrise, and continues through arid scrubland.
To the south, whitecapped mountains beckoned. My cabinmates described themselves as glaciologists, but their science serves a very practical purpose. They seek to harness the glacial waters to help irrigate Gansu and Xinjiang. Can you say “unsustainable”? At present, though, the dusty soil is largely useless, though you do see some small scale corn fields.
As we approached the homestretch towards Lanzhou, we came to a broad valley that had recently been rained upon. Indeed, the effects of regular liquid nourishment were clear in the wider variety of produce being grown and in the thin layer of green that coated the surrounding hillsides. Some of the flatter hills were dotted with sheep, enjoying some fine pastural views.
There is little question that this journey was one of the landmark moments of the trip. Though I’d been in China a week already, I was finally, officially, leaving Central Asia behind. Much to my cabinmates’ bemusement, I stared out the window for several hours in a row, drinking tea, reading, writing and listening to some tunes. I studied all the little villages trying to figure out what life might be like in one of them. They were very poor and I’m sure life is very hard. As the green landscape faded to grey with the coming of night, we started to pull into the Lanzhou area.
We left and my companions decided to arrange my accomodations. Of course, they took me to places that didn’t accept foreigners. I got kind of wet, but it was okay. It’s the sort of thing you just have to go along with. Naturally, I ended up at the place by the train station that I knew would take me.
Dive Inn, Mate
It is, I suppose, inevitable that on a long trip as this one must find themselves staying in the occasion dive. All of a sudden my complaints about previous establishments seemed petty as I scoped out my accomodations in Lanzhou. While the sample may not be considered statistically significant by the scientific community, I would propose that for budget accomodation in northwestern China, quality is inversely proportional to price.
Bogeda Binguan in Urumqi was the cheapest and was quite comfortable. The Seman Hotel in Kashgar, aside from those famously nasty toilets, was otherwise perfectly fine. The Lanshan Binguan in Lanzhou is at $5 a night, overpriced. The location is “convenient”, which means that my room fronted the very busy intersection in front of the train station. Loudspeakers somewhere in the immediate vicinity were blaring a very officious-sounding woman repeating the same five second message in a perpetual loop. The traffic noise outside drowns this out, but my walls sufficiently filtered the traffic so I got the message loud and clear.
The room itself is spacious, but grim. One of the lights was missing so it was dark. Stark concrete carpets the floor. The pillow would be scorned by a wandering ascetic. There is no room key, so for entering you are totally at the mercy of the floor lady. There is only one of them, so at night you’re stuck. Enjoying Lanzhou’s nightlife is not an option. Neither, apparently, is going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. For a solo traveller, leaving your room unlocked while you wander to the far end fo the hall to conduct business is a recipe for disaster. But that’s okay. You see, they’ve thought of that and have graciously provided a chamber pot. Better still, showers only work a few hours each night, so I was still gross at the time of writing, working on my third day without a shower.
The elevator is so finicky it requires an operator to use. She doesn’t work at night either. So if you desire to be at the bus station at 7am, that’s too bad because she doesn’t even wake up until then. They’ve blocked off the stairs. What if there’s a fire, you say? Well, you can get to the third floor and if you can smash through the barred door at the end of the hall it’s only two stories down to the roof of the adjacent building. Even if the stairs weren’t blocked, reception is presumably not open so leaving early will mean forfeiting the deposit you paid for the little card that you show the floor lady as evidence that you’re a guest.
Just to add a little spice to your evening here, prostitutes call your room. The front desk is involved because they attempt to address you by name (non-English speakers can’t pronounce my name at all). I disconnected my phone to eliminate this problem, and the floor attendant showed up at my door, quite distraught and insisted the phone be plugged back in. The only good thing is that there’s no sense in whores calling once the elevator stops running.
Lanzhou Food
There are many street stalls in Lanzhou selling just about anything you can name – meat, fish, birds (head and all), eggs, tofu, mushrooms, veggies, breads and meatballs. These are blanched in boiling oil, then coated with the same spicy mix as in Urumqi, then barbequed. The latter was a new development in the procedure, and the variety of skewers in Lanzhou is huge. A feast of these costs about 3 Yuan. Fearing meat that’s been sitting in the open, I stuck with the mushrooms, broccoli, tofu and green beans. Very tasty. The locals got, much as they have my entire stay in China thus far, quite a chuckle from my chopstick technique. It is rather unorthodox, true, but the traditional method is utterly imcompatible with my hands. My method works just fine, and I can pick up just about anything. All the same, laughter usually accompanies my meals, or barring that a steady stream of merciful waitstaff bearing forks and spoons.
Maybe the best place on Earth for street food, better even than Moscow.
What to Do in Lanzhou
Lanzhou is a relatively small city by Chinese standards, but at 3 million is certainly one of the largest in the Western part of the country. It is wedged along the banks of the Huang He (Yellow River) between two mountain ranges. The east side of the river is so narro as to only encompass a couple of blocks. Thus wedged, the city is long and narrow, stretching a great many kilometres. Having spent most of the past week in bed due to illness or on transport, I walked the 9 km to the bus station to arrange onward transport. In Gansu province, you cannot ride buses without purchasing insurance. Effectively, you are paying for the Chinese government to be insured against your death. Thus, if the bus crashes, your beneficiary gets a token payout of about $4000 and cannot sue the government for more. You cannot buy a ticket without this!
After that, I visited White Pagoda Hill. This is a park on the east side of the river, at the top of the first row of mountains. You access it by cable car from the west side of the Huang He, which you cross (it’s not very big here) and then proceed to go up the hill. You pass through a gorge with terraced hillsides. At the top you get an example of Chinese tourism – an arcade and a karaoke bar. You can, however, hit up some roads and paths to various lookout points, though none offer anything you can’t see from the cable car. The park is well-developed. It may be much quieter there than in the city below, but it’s not exactly a place to go and commune with nature. I was starving and the only thing to eat up there were seeds from the smokey teahouse packed with mahjong players.
So I headed back down and checked out some more street food. The have something called roujiabing, which is almost a pupusa – meat, onion and chile sauce inside a pocket of dough, fried on a flat grill. This is consumed with hot soy milk and sugar. I also grabbed a moon cake. These cakes are simply a very eggy, sugary dough with a sweet, almost date-like filling. I loved them at first, but overdid it and now cannot even imagine eating one.
Leaving Lanzhou
I was armed with a note from the bus operator explaining my situation regarding my need for special consideration from the hotel, on account of my early departure. They relented and left the stairs open so I could make an early escape, but conveniently left the reception closed so they could pocket my deposit.
At the bus station, there were no less than seven other backpackers also headed to Xiahe. That’s more than I had encountered on public transport in total during my stay in Central Asia. While waiting for the bus to board, we witnessed three seperate fights. We piled onto a clapped-out rattler of a minibus. WIth pockmarked roads, a driver madly in love with the sound of his horn and dusty flyblown towns of adobe houses and aimlessly wandering livestock, it was a very Central Asian experience.
Then we rounded a bend. The hills, cloaked in green, jutted sharply at the sky. A chorten, some ragged prayer flags and a lone monk at the side of the road marked my entrance into the Tibetan world. Soon Tibetan was the dominant language on the signs. This remote region is home mainly to minorities. While the Chinese appear to have a very deliberate policy of Sinofying the largest and most significant of ethnic cities, many town and villages have been left alone. Much of the preceding territory was Hui, as this white-capped group with their mosques were everywhere. Another group, an Altaic race called Dongxiang, live in the area but I failed to notice any outward signs of them.
The verdant highlands of western Gansu are largely Tibetan. My destination, Xiahe, has a Han quarter, a Hui quarter, and a Tibetan quarter. The other quarter is the massive Labrang Monastery, one of the most important in Tibetan Buddhism.
Tags: China, Travel, Xiahe
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