Attached like fire escape stairs to the sides of a red brick tenement, the way up the cliff-face Maiji Mountain Grottoes rose up, threatening, impossibly high for someone like me who is deathly afraid of heights. From Wikipedia, “Acrophobia (from the Greek: ἄκρον, ákron , meaning ‘peak, summit, edge’ and φόβος, phóbos, ‘fear’) is an extreme or irrational fear of heights, especially when one is not particularly high up.” For me, unfortunately, anything above the height of a one-story roof was high up.
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Mogao CavesOn any trip to Dunhuang, the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a must see. The carved out caves feature one of the largest collections of Buddhist paintings and sculptures at a site established in 332 AD that has survived not only the withering effects of time but the actual torching of the caves by nonbelievers, looting by invaders, serving as refugee housing in 1921 for Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution along with the rampant plundering by legions of foreign, allegedly well-meaning, archeologists from Britain, France, Hungary, Japan, among others and a untold years of tourist marauders.
Dunhuang, whose name means to flourish and prosper, was established as a military garrison city in 111 BC at an oasis where the two Silk Road routes traversing the Taklamakan Desert to the west, merged. It anchored the Hexi Corridor, running southeast to Lanzhou and protected the merchants, monks, imperial envoys and camel traders carrying China’s precious silk and spices eastward. Located in Gansu Province—China’s most ethnically diverse—like all of Gansu, it retains the crossroads flavor, the intermingled lineage broadcast in faces, as well as the friendliness of a longstanding oasis town. Yet, all of the friendliness—the constant smiles, hellos and helpful gestures—were about to be outdone by a considerate act so unusual and from such an unexpected source that nothing like it had ever happened to me before anywhere in the world. Ancient legends say the area containing the Mingsha or Singing Sand Dunes just south of Dunhuang used to be flat. One day a fierce battle raged there and an army was annihilated, leaving the ground littered with bodies. A Goddess scattered incense ashes over them and from the ground rose up a giant sand mountain to bury the warriors, while the tears of the dead soldiers’ loved ones pooled to form Crescent Lake. Even now, it is said, when the wind comes from a certain direction, military drums rumble, the dunes echo the sounds of battle, the sand blows out sad laments for the fallen and mournful vapors of ghosts, drift. But this day, there was no wind, no battle cries, just sunlight and temperatures in the high 50’s and Xuxiangdong (whose name I shortened to Xu) beckoning me to follow. He led me to the camel ranch and pulled out money to pay for both of us, but I stopped him and paid my own way. I have found this is typical of Chinese generosity. If you are invited, the inviter expects to pay for everything. I guess he thought he had invited me by saying, “follow me, follow me,” and that became the tagline of the day, uttered in an amusing way as one would usher along a clueless child, along with repeating, “good friend, good friend.” I suddenly realized this was the extent of his English. No matter, we were on the same wavelength, everything was making us laugh, everything was blowing us away and we communicated our wonder with double thumbs up, shrieks and whoops of surprise and delight. We were joined by another Chinese tourist straggler and lined up for the camels. Erika wrote this: “ . . . just ready to live sensations only our soul understands.” I rode the train to Beijing standing between the cars in solitude, watching the fields, the villages, and the ordinary, unassuming Chinese life sweep by, my soul alive and bursting, yet every now and then a roving Chinese passenger would pause trying to figure out what I was taking such joy in, scratching their collective heads wondering what in the hell I was looking so raptly at. The trip to the Bingling Temple Buddha Caves in Gansu Province began at the West Bus Station in Lanzhou where the woman who sold me a ticket waved me toward a ticket taker with laugh lines so deep they looked as if they were etched in with an eyebrow pencil. When you travel, what you see is who you are. What enters you depends on how much you are willing to allow in. How safe you need to be. What you are willing to part with. What you are willing to condone. Still, you are always left with more than you came with.
While I was waiting for my own trip to begin I watched the city empty out. Traffic unsnarled. Strange apparitions usually hidden behind the veil of commerce revealed themselves. Shops I liked to patronize retreated behind roll-down accordion metal doors. Firework stores appeared overnight and the sound of their wares exploded constantly, making it seem as if we all were under attack. Under attack by the Year of the Snake. The city buses that travel major roads during rush hour are usually so crowded they would evoke a sardine’s pity were half full. Red lanterns were strung everywhere. Relatives, returning to visit my neighbors, were unused to me, and stared and pointed—laowai.
I asked a friend what she thought of the empty city and her only comment was that there was less spit on the sidewalk. And so there was. D.H. Lawrence wrote: when we travel, cool, unlying life will rush in. Travel forces you to leave all your possessions behind, keeps you struggling for balance, forces you to trust strangers again, confront other ways of life and religious beliefs, as well as food, customs, toilets, exchange rates, and the only thing you recognize are the eternal things—the moon, the sky, the sea, breath, the flow of life, but if you roll with it, you may feel what Anatole France called “the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.” Traveling is in our blood. The earth was never flat and travelers always knew it. They also knew that to be lost is to be on the road to being found. We never remember the malls and the movies and the comforts we’ve had, we remember the lost and lonely and crowded places that called to us, called to us by name, like when we stand at the edge of the ocean, all that roaring water summoning us, speaking a language we once knew, beckoning us back into who we always were but don’t remember. Traveling reminds us. Traveling plugs us back in. Traveling reinforces connection. Traveling brings us back home.
It’s occurred to me that wandering is what I do best. Deeper into the heart of the labyrinth Dawn. No wind. Lavender-rose light spread like butter on distant peaks. Monks and mystics, the faithful and the temporarily faithless, opened like satellite dishes on a sacred hillside above the Labrang Monastery. Slow motion clouds moving to the natural music of the Tibetan Plateau. Everything is Ice Age still for a moment as the stunned earth awakens. The birds first, calling forth the slanted light, dousing sleeper’s dreams, silhouetting the breath of stirring farm animals, glinting off riffles in the Daxia River, driving off the last stubborn traces of the monochrome night, evaporating shadows and turning up color. A low wordless chanting arises from the hillside, lifts and circles like a flock of red-crowned cranes. Smoke rises from sacred spruce fires. Farmer’s motorcycle trucks wind along the road below, moving to the open markets of Xiahe. Life stirs, puts on its boots and pisses in the alley. Breakfast is yak yogurt, Tsampa—dough made with roasted barley flour and yak butter, buckwheat porridge, Momo—Tibetan dumplings, Thenthuk—Tibetan noodles and yak tongue. Boiling hot black tea—filtered and decanted into a churn, then fresh milk and sugar are added. The wind gusts, carving new lines in faces, stealing hats, billowing robes, herding dust, pock-marking buildings, scattering anything not tied down and causing pedestrians to lean into it. Moving clockwise, streams of worshippers walk the Kora, a three kilometer route around the monastery through prayer vapors left by previous pilgrims, spinning the colorful prayer wheels, muttering chants, along a route created for moving, meditative reflection, interspersed with scarlet monks, the old, the young, the tourists, and the devout who flatten themselves on the ground, stand up, then throw themselves back on the ground, and in this way move around the entire circuit. I walked the Kora three times. Each time was different, each time was special. It’s a very active and unique form of prayer. You get exercise—by walking and spinning the prayer wheels, get to mingle with the friendly fellow Kora-walkers, get to spend time in a setting meant for reflection, say anything you want out loud, as people are mumbling in all kinds of dialects, dress however you want—some worshippers dress in the most outlandish costumes, on a plateau high above the rest of the world, surrounded by mountains. Then I rented a bike, and escaped into the Sangke Grasslands, home for thousands of years to Tibetan Nomads. The bike was old and heavy and clunky, but I was not to be stopped, grunting and huffing and puffing my way up the gradual incline, coming to the distinct conclusion that cars hate bikes. Here I was, enjoying the quiet, and though traffic was sporadic, every idiot driver that passed me felt it necessary to honk their horn in warning, as if I couldn’t hear them approaching from a half-mile away. While some cut a wide berth around me, others flew by like meteorites, and it felt as though they were trying to blast me senseless in the swirl of their passing. Still, the grasslands were miraculous. They swept away toward the horizon in fields of wildflowers, clouds, mountains and sky. I passed a lake so still I named it Narcissus Lake and spent some peaceful moments lakeside recovering from the climb up on my ridiculous bike. In which the birthday boy runs smack into Tibet Sometimes it takes a jet to carry you somewhere over the rainbow, or maybe a train, a boat, a fast car or a powerful wish, but in my case all it took was three and a half hours of patience and a bus filled with happy-go-lucky passengers. We climbed upward, past amazing, terraced hills, planted with produce, the sheer ability to farm the precipitous heights was astonishing, and at one point I saw a farmer pruning his crops by means of a rope attached around his waist, dropping down, then down, and down---we blasted by too fast to know how he managed to get back up. Then we leveled out and entered a biblical zone of fertile valleys with mosques everywhere. Their signature globes and towers rose above the landscape, more plentiful than church steeples in New England. But what was odd to me was that I equated mosques with desert terrain—these rose above green fields bright with a summer’s growth. I stopped counting them after I reached a hundred and one. After passing through Linxia City, which has long been called the “Little Mecca of China” featuring 1,700 mosques and an important stop along the Silk Road, we started climbing up, up, up, then leveled off in earnest, the terrain changing, growing more austere, though still summer green, with stuttering Van Gogh fields absent of crows, then angling almost imperceptivity downward and eventually arriving in Xiahe. Surrounded by a desolate, Martian-red expanse of bulging desert, a gleaming new Jiayuguan City has arisen on ancient ground that has been continually inhabited since around 1375, 120 years before Christopher Columbus bumped into the Americas on his way to India. Everything looks brand new. Civic auditoriums, government buildings, parks, stadium and sports center, statues, row after row of lofty apartment complexes, office towers, shopping districts, the broad boulevards lined with shade trees and lit at night with graceful light fixtures I’ve never seen anywhere except in urban design catalogs. Workers were everywhere, staining wood trim, laying paving tile, pouring cement for curbs and sidewalks, planting flowers and trees, all as if getting everything ready for buyers impatient to move in, but when I was there, the city looked hardly lived in yet. I’m used to scuffed up, bruised and bluesy cities; I really don’t know how to act in a brand new one. It was the old ground that I was interested in. I rode the magic green #4 bus out to the fort built at the narrowest part of the Hexi Corridor at Jiayuguan Pass (guan in Chinese means pass, so writing pass is redundant, it should be written Jiayu Guan . . . thanks Wikipedia!), bought a combo ticket (which allows you to visit the fort and some additional historic sites) for 130 RMB and walked up the hill as lazy fockers passed me riding the 10 RMB shuttle. I was glad I did, as I was able to capture the photograph below of some workers grooming the landscaped grounds. In most parts of the world, weary travelers only have to find a hotel, choose a room, agree on a price, and settle in. In China, it’s not that simple. A little known fact is that hotels often turn away foreigners, without explanation, or at least one you can understand, and in my case the shy desk clerk called someone, and a woman with a shellacked helmet of hair came barreling out, stamped her foot and said, “No stay here.” With martial stiffness, she pointed out the door, and away, and up the street. I said, “Umm, what?” She went to the door, and again, pointed up the street. “But, umm, you see—” “No stay here, no stay here.” I blinked, looked around. What could I do except bow and say, “Won’t stay here, no no no, no like-ee here,” and walked out the door and into the hot evening. Some people say hotels have to have a permit for foreigners to stay, others say it’s because they are running an illegal operation (casino, card room, etc.) and don’t want the attention a foreigner can bring, still others are convinced it’s xenophobic panic, while others claim it’s because foreigners smell bad. Me, I think I smell pretty good. I wandered around thinking I should have learned a lot more than how to order a cold beer in Chinese, when a man rushed up to me and said, “Halloo, halloo,” smiling and pointing and waving, as if to say—come along, come along. He was leading me towards the doors of a hotel. I grinned and followed and when we were in the lobby, I successfully mimed sleep, after which it all got complicated. I was quoted three different prices, which, by the way, were reasonable, but then completely stumped them all by trying to explain that I wanted to see a room first. They called in more people. Pretty soon, it appeared to me as if every member of the family was present in the lobby, along with all the workers of the adjoining business, who, each in turn would boldly advance on me saying, “Sleep” and I nodded, but when I repeated my request to see a room, their face froze and they looked from one to another, till the next brave soul tried, failed, retreated. After each one, I would again pick up my bag and head for the door, only to be stopped in my tracks by a vigorous chorus of “NO-NO-NO-NO.” This went on for some time. Then another desert angel appeared. He said, “Hello, what can I do for you?” And I swear, it felt as if everyone in the lobby wanted to burst into a clapping cheer like they do at the end of all the Hollywood movies made in the last three decades, but, being Chinese, they refrained. His name was Martin and he solved all my immediate problems. Arranged to show me the rooms, got me a price that was lower than what I was quoted, told me he would guide me to a great place for dinner, all the while advising me about local prices. He had gone to college in Arizona and his English was very, very good. After I cleaned the road dust off me, I met him outside the hotel and he introduced me to his brother and his friend and we made a short walk to a long plaza lined with restaurants, both indoors and outside, sheltered by bright green sun umbrellas. These three were a merry band and we sat outside as the sun went down and the moon came up, eating the most amazing food, drinking beer, swapping mostly true tales and measuring the distance separating our two cultures. Martin’s brother, whose English was limited, kept saying the things that mattered most, like, “beautiful food, beautiful life,” while encouraging me to try new things like barbecued sheep stomach and lamb kidneys, which I happily did. At one point, I snapped a photo of the trio, and before I put the camera away, I turned, framed and snapped one of my favorite photos. I can speak volumes about this pic but I will suppress the urge. After dinner, they took me on a walk by a manmade lake fringed with a green eco zone and a monolithic dolphin statue, lit up in vibrating, changing, colored lights, and we talked and laughed and ate ice cream, all with the ease of long time friends. I live for moments like this. And China is full of them. Tennessee Williams penned the classic line, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” and though he meant it in an entirely different context, it certainly applies to travel in China. Not only do you need the kindness of strangers, but their sympathy, their cooperation, and quite possibly their pity as well. I was only eighteen when I went to Europe alone and managed to wander about for 2 months. Back in the States, I used my thumb to crisscross the continent numerous times. You could pick me up and drop me in any city, and I would always find my way. I had a built in compass, a fairly flawless sense of direction, an almost total recall of places I’d been to before, similar to a nomad’s ability to consistently revisit watering holes in the formless desert. Later, I wandered all over the state of Alaska and survived. I also lived in and navigated my way around Central America for almost a decade, as well as numerous other places too tedious to recall. But absolutely nothing prepared me for China; traveling in this country is in an entirely new category all by itself. First of all, no one that you want to speak English, does. And even if they do, they are not going to readily admit it. This includes ticket sellers, taxi drivers, hotel clerks, hustlers, hospital workers, restaurant employees, food sellers, bus drivers, prostitutes, policemen, pharmacists, pirates, poets, pawns and a few kings. You are all on your own and no one has a clue as to what the f*** you are talking about. Next, once you get out of the airport or train station, there is barely any written English anywhere. Sure, there might be some road signs that you can decipher, but everything else is incomprehensible. Seriously incomprehensible. It looks like this: 認真難以理解認真難以理解認真難以理解. Over and over again. If you can’t point to a picture or mime what you want, you’re lost. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. With the above in mind, I arrived in desert city of Jiayuguan, expecting it to be a small place I could easily find my way around, unaided. But when I got away from the train station, I could see gleaming tall buildings off in the distance like the Emerald City. It was too far to walk and I didn’t know where the hell I was going anyway. I had done some research, and knew I could take the #4 bus to get to the fort, (ah numbers, you can always read numbers) but according to the signs, it didn’t stop on this street. After pausing briefly at a hotel and confusing everyone, then trying to hire a taxi driver who didn’t understand where I was trying to go, I made a tactical retreat and headed back to the train station. I accosted a ticket checker and pointed to the poster for the famous fort at Jiayuguan Pass, handed her my notebook, and she scribbled something, then pointed. Encouraged, I saw the number 4 and wandered in the direction she had pointed. Hallelujah brothers and sisters, there, idling patiently, was the magical #4 bus, waiting to whisk me away and into Jiayuguan City. I paid the 1 RMB fare (approx. sixteen cents) and the bus took me on a long looping tour of the city, then to the outskirts, eventually ejecting me at the last stop on the route, the famous fort at the Jiayuguan Pass. I was pretty wowed that I had pulled this off, and with new determination haggled with a woman selling straw hats, gaining laughter and respect from the man in the adjoining booth, and the curses of the woman who had started out at 50 RMB, but settled for 10 RMB. This pattern would repeat itself all throughout this trip. Haggling is an art in China. The grounds of the fort are beautiful with landscaped parks, statues and sweeping vistas. At the visitors center, I was handed a map and an info page printed in English, then motioned to have a seat and wait. Soon, a young woman came toward me and greeted me in English. She sat and patiently answered all my questions about the fort and surrounding places of interest. This was a bright stroke of luck and afterward I went to back outside, ordered a beer and sat at a table under a sheltering Tsingtao umbrella. It was late afternoon and there was no need to rush to see everything, so I decided to go back into town and get a hotel. Waiting for the magical mystery green #4 bus, I met another in a series of desert angels who would help me when I needed it most. She came right up to me, looked deeply into my face and said, “Hi. I used to live in New Jersey.” Blinking in surprise, I said hello, and smiled as she assaulted me with her knowledge about New York, New Jersey, Atlantic City, and regrettably, Donald Trump, all in rapid-fire, well-accented English, and before I could respond, the bus pulled up. I paid her fare, and we sat together in the back. I wanted to ask her so many questions, but she was rabid to talk, so I sat back and mainly listened. She was, of course, Chinese, fit, maybe thirty-five or upward, attractive. I thought she was trying to pick me up (vanity, I know thy name) until she mentioned her husband. All along the route she pointed out so many things that later on would come in handy as I wandered about that she amounted to a living map, welcoming committee, Jiayuguan brochure, gossip columnist, tour guide, monologist, history buff, and so on, all pouring forth in a snap-crackle and pop surge of English word power. Clearly, she was another light twin. Abruptly, she signaled the bus driver, then told me that I had to get off at the next stop and walk 2 blocks north to a great hotel. And though I wanted to protest, to keep listening to her very good English, to remain in the bubble of known, shared things, the bus lurched to a stop and I fumbled my way through the standing passengers, stepped down into the street, and stood, slowly waving goodbye as she put her hand to her lips, then touched the window, moving off into the land of never seen again. God, I love China. So I walked north, and as promised, there was a hotel. Jiayuguan: Beyond Lay the Barbarian Lands, Part 3 I drained the last of the bad KFC coffee boarding the 7:40 a.m. train and scoped out the seats laid out two across, then aisle, then two more, realizing I had a 50/50 chance of scoring a window seat. I was going to Jiayuguan, 7 hours and 770 km away, and had paid 160 RMB (approx. $25) for a first class seat but it didn’t come with the guarantee of a window. Everyone knows ADHD redheads need windows, especially when they are traveling. Car 17, seat 57 . . . c’mon, c’mon . . . oh . . . aisle. I hesitated for a moment and sat at the window anyway. Then, “excuse me”—clear as day. I turned and a woman was showing me her ticket, pointing to the window. I must have sighed—I’m sure I sighed, then moved to a vacant window seat. Less than 10 minutes later, the train stopped in West Lanzhou and the car filled up. I went back and sat in my aisle seat before I was rousted, humiliated, revealed as a shameful laowai seat shifter. Shortly thereafter, a man was standing beside me, motioning me to take the now vacant window seat. In my surprise, I blurted out, “you sure,” as if he could understand me, but he just smiled and kept motioning with his hands toward the window. As I got up to move, I saw the woman now sitting behind me with her husband? Brother? Secret lover? Then it hit me—while I was gone they had gotten together and moved their seats around so that I could have a window seat. These kinds of courtesies happen to me all the time in China. I stood up to bow, hands clasped in front of me, and I could see them smiling, knowing I had indeed figured it out, then they looked away quickly as if to forget the whole thing. Now, we were on our way through a long green valley, up into adobe-green hills cut with lots of tunnels. It was---------tunnel, Jonah dark, light--free-free-free, JonahJonahJonah, free, JonahJonah, free for a second, then more Jonah, a smear of crusty cut banks, a hallucination of a manmade lake with dam, then a long Jonah, and free at last, rolling now through flat farmland of sectioned cornfields bordered by swaths of sunflowers, and every now and then bent over workers gathering cut hay into golden mats they could roll up and carry by hand. Eventually the landscape dried out, and I recognized it, familiar yet foreign. Where have I seen those same broad, flat plains, the occasional tree lined windbreaks, distant dry hills, hovering snowcapped peaks, the brief green patch of irrigated field, then the return to brown dirt, when the synaptic oracle lit up and suddenly spoke; it said: Praise be and welcome to . . . Utah! Yes indeed, I was unstuck in time and Balling the Jack through the Beehive State. As I was sitting back and noting the similarities, I saw a very un-Utah-like thing: a herd of wild camels. Then some more. And even more. I got out my camera and stood up, poised to get a wild camel pic. I waited and waited but all I got was a blurry, boulder-stained rubble of a photograph with absolutely no camels present. They were there, I swear. Really. All that camel hunting made me hungry, so I got up and staggered through the train cars looking for a dining car. A helpful passenger said something in English that was either, “Straighten up and fly right,” or maybe, “This damn train has no fried rice.” There was no way I could be certain. I returned to my seat and when the snack cart came by, I scrutinized its offerings. Mostly plastic containers of tea and brightly colored bottles of sugary drinks, with an assortment of vacuum-packed unidentifiable things I’d seen people eat and live to tell about it. I chose a too red package containing what appeared to be a chicken leg that looked like those imitation crab legs made in Korea by robots. I held it in my hand for a long time gathering the courage to open it. Hunger won. Although a little bit slimy from being encased in its vacuum package, it smelled real, and tasted real, but it will always be one of those things I will forever wonder about. Like: from an evolutionary standpoint, why is a panda colored black and white? It is certainly not for camouflage, they stick out like a sore thumb in bamboo groves. Maybe—is it to let you know they are there, so you can avoid them? . . . And why do pigeons, out of all the diverse creatures on this planet, have the greatest ability to detect colors? Is that what drove them to cities? Just then, something flashed by and it wasn’t a camel, and this time I managed to snap off a photo. I had scrutinized enough photographs of the remnants of the Great Wall in Gansu to recognize this bit of crumbling adobe brick. Without warning, more sections appeared, (Gansu Great Wall) and I wanted to shout out, “Stop the train, I want to get off,” but of course I didn’t know how to say that in Chinese, and even so, it wouldn’t have happened. Instead, I stood up and steadied my camera against the window, snapping off photo after photo, saying, “Oh my god, look at that, right there, the Great Wall!” The other passengers, alerted by my manic frenzy looked out, saw nothing, and shook their heads as if to say ‘there is just no understanding foreigners.’ But there it was, crumbling, eroding, and I wanted it to be fenced off, preserved somehow, protected, I wanted to shout out, “Take a look at one of the greatest engineering projects ever undertaken on this planet, or at least acknowledge its magnificence, ‘ooh’ and ‘aaah’ at its proximity just outside the window, or at least note its decay as a symbol of China’s opening, but just don’t sit there and not see anything.” For the rest of the trip, my face was glued to the window, and I saw the Great Wall in every aberration of the landscape, every knoll, rise, bump or arroyo, though mostly they were false alarms. Still, the train was following the ancient Silk Road route through the Hexi Corridor and I was absorbing the vibrations of countless travelers. When I gathered my things to get off the train, a woman spoke to me in English, telling me there was one more stop to go, and everyone around nodded their head in reassurance. And while there may not be any understanding of foreigners, they at least wouldn’t let one get off at the wrong stop. I smiled in my innocent idiocy and rode the train to the last stop on the line: Jiayuguan City. Jiayuguan: Beyond Lay the Barbarian Lands, Part 2 |
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