Journey to the West

Our return to China went pretty smoothly.  We woke on the train with a couple of hours of Gobi between us and the Mongolian border city of Zamyn-Üüd.

On arriving we found a big crowd of minivans, jeeps and buses waiting in front of the station.

The jeeps, minibuses and taxis wanted 50RMB per person (a bit over NZ$10) to ferry us the 3km across the border.  This was better than the 80 we paid on the way there, but there was even less excuse for it, as they were all going across empty on this direction to pick up import goods for the trip back.

So in a move that at least scraped if not cut off my nose to spite the taxi drivers, we bought tickets for a direct bus to Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, China for 135RMB (if we'd taken a 50RMB jeep across we could have got to Hohhot by train for an additional 55.)

But it did mean that we got to drive under the pair of diplodocuses south of Erlian whose necks stretch across the road so that they can kiss in the middle, high above the traffic.  And it meant that we got to Hohhot at around 17:00 instead of waiting in Erlian for the train and arriving at 21:00.

This was not at all a bad thing, as it turns out we quite liked Hohhot.

The first afternoon was just spent doing administrative tasks related to our return to China. Finding a hotel near the station, buying train tickets for the next leg of our journey, getting more Chinese cash and paying our cellphone bill (which was 5 days late, since we'd been unable to pay it in Mongolia).  It wasn't all that easy to pay it in China either, at least in part because we were trying to top up a Beijing number in Inner Mongolia.

In the end, the third China Unicom shop we tried was a charm, and we got it done thanks to a young lady who worked there and paid our bill for us at an automated kiosk using her own WePay (Chinese phone based payment system) account and let us pay her back in cash.  All of this was made very pleasant by it being a delightfully warm and sunny evening.

We also had a fabulous dinner of spicy tofu and stewed eggplant at a very friendly little restaurant where the entire Friday night crowd (and the owners and their children and their children's friends) wanted to be our buddies. We took tons of photos with people, talked as much as we could manage with my limited Chinese skills, and kept having our beer cups refilled long after our two bottles were empty.  Plus the food was amazing after the (I hate to say it) fairly uninspiring fare in Mongolia. Spicy, aromatic and full of vegetables. What a welcome back to Zhong Guo!

The next day our train didn't leave until 16:15, so we got out of the newly cold and rainy weather by visiting the Inner Mongolia Provincial Museum.  A fair bit of what it contained was similar to the Mongolian National Museum, so it was interesting to see how they treated similar subjects. Case in point: the legacy of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which once ruled Mongolia and China both.  The Mongolians seemed to hate the Manchus with a passion, and had a section in the museum on how they oppressed and tortured Mongolians, while at the Inner Mongolian museum (only about 15% of the population remains ethnically Mongolian in IM) it seemed like they generally got along fine, and that the Qing period benefitted everyone.  I suspect it swung between the two extremes depending on exactly who, where and when you're talking about, but as I say, the different perspectives were interesting.

Another cool part of the museum was the section on the Chinese space program. Launches and landings are both done in IM, so there's a local connection.  It was pretty cool learning about the early days of the program... The diorama of the Mongolians cheerfully clearing out of the 4000sq km to be taken up by the complex, the photos of the  eary launches, the fact that they used camels in the construction of some facilities...

After the museum we had just enough time before our train for a late lunch at our previous night's dinner spot (more ma la dofu, this time with garlicky mushrooms and bok choy instead of eggplant.)

While we're on the train, one further note on the wonders of technology.  While in Mongolia we'd downloaded an offline translation app for our phone.  You can speak, type in or even take photographs of what you want to translate.  Anything more than simple phrases (and sometimes even these) turns into a bit of a mess, but it certainly made it easier to explain that we wanted to pay our phone bill, and taking a photo of a menu and having some sort of translation is an improvement on our old method of pointing at what others were eating, or just picking items in the lower price bracket and assuming they'll probably be vegetabley and not too unusual to eat lots of...)

The train journey was a long one, 17 hours in total, to Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province.  During the daylight hours there were views of the dry brown mountains that the tracks ran along the base of, but come sunset it was really just time for bed.  It's a relatively small sample size of journeys, but I think that over the past six years, smartphones have made train travel in China less sociable and talkative as most passengers seem to spend much of the journey engrossed in their phones.  Fortunately there's still room for snacking... I was finally ready to eat bags of sunflower seeds after overdoing it on our 2012 trip to China, and Sarah had some spicy peanuts.  And of course we both had lots of hot drinks using the water boilers at the end of each car.

We arrived in Lanzhou at around 09:00.  It took a while to find a place to stay, as most of the less expensive hotels within walking distance of the train station wouldn't accept foreigners (foreigners staying at Chinese hotels all have to be registered with the police by hotel management, and many places don't know how to/can't be bothered with the process). But by 10:30 we were all set in a pleasant and clean youth hostel that was reached by walking down an alley, up three flights of stairs, through a courtyard, then up six more stories in an elevator).

After that it was time for a late breakfast of the local speciality: Niu Rou Mian. This translates literally as "beef noodles" but in Lanzhou it means delicate hand pulled noodles in spicy, savoury beef broth with spring onions, a few chunks of somewhat fatty beef, big slices of radish and (if you like) more sliced rare beef or hard boiled egg.  Plus a variety of inexpensive (vegetarian! Yay, says Sarah) side dishes.

The last time we were in Lanzhou we didn't even have time for this, having taken it's reputation as dusty, boring and polluted to heart, and getting in and out as quickly as possible.  This time we were going to give the city a bit more of a chance.

And we turned out to be rather charmed by the place.  There was little sign of obvious pollution, just beautiful late spring days. The Gansu Provincial Museum (featuring the galloping horse stepping on a swallow, which is justifiably one of China's great artistic treasures) was fun and well done.  The riverside parks (including one featuring water wheels and other antique irrigation technologies where I dropped my sunglasses in a pond and had to wade in to fish them out) were cool and pleasant.  The first bridge across the Huang He (Yellow River) was a fun spot to visit.  The mountains rising quickly out of the Yellow River valley on either side of the city were impressive. The views from the hillside temples to the river's north were great. There were lots of fun street markets of the kind I really like. And sitting on the upper deck of a permanently docked tea/beer garden boat as the (very high) Yellow River flowed past beneath was just great. And of course there were plenty more hand pulled noodles to eat.

In short, while there weren't a lot of hugely exciting things to do in Lanzhou, I quite liked the place, and even felt a bit disappointed as we boarded our train for Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai province, a mere 3.5 hours up the tracks.

Xining was a pretty pleasant place too. Our hostel was on the ground floor of a new housing development, and took a bit of work to find.  But it was quite nice when we did.  The buildings were 10-15 floors instead of the 20-30 floor ones common in other Chinese cities. They had lots of street level retail on the ground floors facing the main streets, and pleasant parklike gardens in between the buildings.

After getting settled in we went out to have a look around town.

Xining has one of the largest populations of Hui (Han Chinese Muslims) of any city, and this was very evident strolling around. It looked as though almost half of the people out on the streets wore headscarves or white prayer caps.  And there were lots of mosques around, including the Donghuan grand mosque, which we visited and can hold almost 50,000 worshippers.  Sarah had specifically dressed for the visit, but as it turned out, visitors seemed free to wear whatever they liked in the public areas and weren't permitted at all in the non-public ones.  While there we sat and had a nice chat and shared some photos of NZ with a couple of older Hui men sitting just outside the main prayer hall.

Another distinguishing feature of Xining is its position on the edge of the Tibetan plateau.  As a result it has lots of yak products for sale in its bustling market streets. Sarah snacked on some delicious yak yogurt after our visit to the mosque, while I had some very oily bread that was favoured with waaaay too much sage, a rare Chinese food fail.

On our way home from the mosque, we heard music and chanted prayers coming from up a public driveway off a main street. We walked up to investigate and saw a very new looking temple and figured that this was a dedication ceremony or something similar.  On our way back down we passed the gathering again and were invited to sit down and join them for some food and, more significantly, drink.  We drank glass after glass of the Chinese spirit called baiju with a wide variety of members of the gathering.  Fortunately the glasses were smallish (the size of a large thimble) and the baiju was much more pleasant than some we'd had in the past (didn't make you screw your face up in discomfort with each sip).

It was after 15 or 20 minutes of this that a young man who spoke a bit of English showed up and it finally became clear that this wasn't a temple dedication but was in fact his grandmother's funeral.  He departed as quickly as he appeared, but we felt compelled to stick around a bit longer. It felt a bit awkward, but presumably if the family didn't want us there they certainly wouldn't have sat us down at the table and kept refilling the plates and glasses!

The next day we had a bit of an adventure planned. We hoped to head out to Youning, a monastery about 50km from the city. A bunch of research, and looking at maps the best plan we could come up with was:
Take a bus to Ping'an. Hope there's a bus to Wushi. Take a taxi or some other form of transport from Wushi to Youning.  Despite the fuzziness of all this it went almost flawlessly. Bus to Ping'an, no prob. We'd mentioned to the driver that we wanted to go to Wushi and he told us where to get off to change buses. Bus to Wushi no prob. It even went a bit past the centre of town to the turnoff to Youning. Where we found an (English!) sign pointing to the monastery and minibuses charging 5RMB/person for the final 5km. Not sure if this was a test of our ability to navigate in rural China or of our luck, but either way we passed with flying colours.

Apparently Youning was originally constructed in the 17th century, but almost completely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.  It had started reconstruction in the '80s and was really going full speed ahead with it now.  The courtyard in front of the largest building in the complex had been turned into a lumberyard with half a dozen people cutting and shaping timber and another three doing detailed carvings.

The temples and shrines rose up the hillside.  By the time we'd visited the first two, we were in step with a local family of three women (mom, daughter and sister I think?) and two men (husband and ~9 month old son). They were all Tu, a local ethnic group that practices Tibetan Buddhism, but speak Chinese and are descended from Mongols.  The ladies were all decked out in their traditional costumes, and we followed them as they completed their circuit of the shrines, praying and making offerings at each.  A couple of times caretakers pressed us to buy (expensive) butter lamps, which I really wasn't interested in doing, though we did leave a donation at one of the temples (it's always nice to do this at places that admit tourists and don't charge admission fees).

At the end of our circuit, we took a few photos with our new friends.  They were keen to take off their traditional dress, as it was getting hot under the fierce sun, but were more than happy to dress Sarah up in it!
When it's purely a tourist attraction, paying for a photo opportunity, I really don't like this kind of thing, but when it's a shared experience that everyone is enjoying it can be great.

On our way home we popped in to a small village festival a couple of km from Wushi where we watched some singing, bought some apricots and were sat down by a couple of young melon salesmen to eat some incredibly juicy and sweet honeydew like fruit and some very tasty local lamb ribs.  Unusually, this only took about 15 or 20 minutes (these things often end up being drawn out, if often entertaining experiences) and we caught the second of the four buses on our return trip without much hassle.

Back in Xining we struggled to find a small craft brewery.  This turned out to be only slightly because it's location was tricky and mostly because it had gone out of business.

This failed endeavour left us near one of the most highly rated spots for mian pian, a Qinghai speciality consisting of squares of noodle dough in a thick, stew-like broth, usually made with tomato and capsicum.  True, it's a great big bowlful of starch, but it's also a very filling meal, especially after a long and adventurous day on your feet.

The next morning was time for the first of many bus rides. We were heading south from Xining into country that's still beyond the reach of China's rail network.  First stop was the small city of Tongren (a Chinese city [just] less populous than Wellington!)  The bus trip there was impressive both for the rugged mountains towering above the river valley the road was in, and for the engineering of the road itself, which had many kilometres-long viaducts and lots of tunnels, two of which were over 3km long.

Tongren has a similar ethnic mix to Xining, but leans more towards the Tibetan side.  It didn't take too long to finsd ourselves a room in a Tibetan run hotel. 60RMB for a spacious clean room with free wi-fi (although with a shared toilet and no shower.) And none of this "we can't accept foreigners" silliness (I'd observed, and had read of others noticing that you only run into this problem at sort of mid-range establishments.  Places that are <100RMB and those that are >600RMB are likely to be fine [not that I've really ever stayed in the latter category]).

Anyhow, Tongren was great.  We had a nice lunch of bread and pickled chillis (Han Chinese typically aren't much on  savoury baked breads, but the Hui and Tibetans are, so good bakeries abound in Qinghai.) This was taken sitting outside in the large square in front of Longwu monastery, the county's largest.  However just as we were finishing up, it started to turn cool, windy and rainy (just like back in Wellington!) so we popped back inside to do some reading, writing, and even napping for the afternoon.

The skies cleared for a bit, and I went up for a walk in the hills behind the city, through the new tree planting/drainage project.  The views of the valley Tongren sits in were nice, as was the city itself.

We liked it because the traffic was quieter than in big cities. There were plenty of random "Hello!"s from children and adults alike, just as in major cities.  And while in large centres they seemed pleasant enough, but in Tongren they somehow seemed like they were motivated even more by a desire to simply give a friendly greeting to an obvious stranger.

The next day we set out for the village of Wutong, which was really our primary sightseeing focus in the area. Tongren, and more particularly the villages around it are renowned for producing the finest Thangkas (traditional religious scroll paintings) in the Tibetan Buddhist world.  And Wutong's two monasteries and independent galleries and studios are the best known of the lot.

The whole experience was a little weird, but still great.  It started with the trip out. The shared minivans to northern villages had moved, and when we found them there were just no other passengers headed to Wutong. We waited and waited and no one showed up. Eventually the driver asked us if we'd be willing to just pay for 5 out of the 7 seats in the van and go straight away, which we did.

On arriving we went for a walk around the lower Wutong monastery, but didn't go inside (the two Wutong monasteries have separate entrance tickets and only one was in our budget.) If was very pretty, if a bit quiet.

The upper monastery, some 500m back towards Tongren was even quieter.  We went in for a look around the main complex, but saw no sign of a ticket office anywhere. The buildings were all closed and locked, and the few monks we ran into gave us a smile and carried on with their business or just ignored us entirely. 

Back out in the village, things were almost as sleepy.  There were a couple of hotels under construction, pointing to a planned future in tourism, but most of the Thangka studios were dark and locked up.  We did find a couple that were active though, and got to see lots of finished works (the detail on them is spectacular, with some parts using single-hair brushes, and even small [less than A4 size] pieces taking over a month to complete).  We also saw several painters at work, including one making his paint by grinding red coral with resin in a small mortar.  We didn't take any photos of the art or painters at work, but I'm sure you'll see how impressive they are if you search for Tongren thangkas.

We walked across the valley to the Gomar Gompa monastery, which was slightly busier than the others, but still seemed a little otherworldly, in part because of the maze of blank whitewashed adobe walls and blank doors that form a labyrinth leading to the main halls at its centre.

At Gomar Gompa we at last managed to find someone selling tickets, albeit only after we left.  Paying for one did, however allow Sarah to climb the large chorten (stupa) in front of the monastery, while I sat at the base and took photos of her from below.

Back in Tongren, I went out for one final walk, hoping for a quick visit to the Mountain God temple, but I'd left it too late.  On my way there through the narrow streets of the old town I met with a group of kids who typified our experience in Tongren.  They tried every bit of English they had on me, showed me the way up to the entrance of the temple, took photos with me, and even ran back home to where some sort of celebration was happening so they could bring me bananas, melon and even a rich, sticky Tibetan cake that contained dried yak yogurt and tasted kind of like cream cheese icing.

I bid them farewell and headed back to Sarah.

In Tongren, Things close down early (although those that don't seem to make a point of being noisy...) So once I arrived home, we had a good dinner of noodles and the last of the watermelon we'd purchased in Wutong and  of course the last of the Tibetan cake.  And then tucked ourselves in to get ready for our early morning bus over the mountains the following day.