Hami. Dunhuang, Anxi, Xiahe

Sunday, October 08, 2006

HAMI
What an amazing country! We have travelled around 1500 miles so far, 98% has been desert, first the Taklamakan and more recently the Gobi (wrong), 0.5% mountain and 1.5% has been oasis with comprehensive crops being grown, thanks to irrigation. In these oases China is building new towns at a rapid rate, full of 8 storey apartment blocks. The apartments have usually been divided into areas with number codes but Jiaguguan was the most extreme example yet with 100 or more new blocks each colour coded into orange, blue, yellow, red and all of them were empty. It is difficult to imagine that the there are enough people currently living here in the mid-west to fill them, so it seems pretty certain that there is a deliberate policy of encouraging people to move west with the promise of decent modern accommodation and for those who want it some land to farm. The irrigation in the area has been used to build large areas of strip farms, already ploughed but not yet producing crops, but the desert land already looks like huge allotments thanks to the water supply. Betty, Tulufan again, made the interesting statement that China had just completed a long term contract with Argentina to buy beef at above the world market price, but in return Argentina agreed to take half a million Chinese immigrants.

We had begun to feel we were running out of time with the holiday half gone and were determined to get clear of this desert with reasonable haste. Dunhuang was a must see destination but first we had to get there. Hami was a convenient one day journey by bus. Having got there and deciding it was only another modern city we decided to break our previous rule of never spending less than two nights in a place to give at least a full day for discovery. We like Rod and Ann, an English couple 15 or so years younger, decided to move on together to Dunhuang early the next morning. We stayed as recommended by the two ladies at Tulufan in the Electricity Hotel, owned by a power company, though we were completely unable to get the hotel to match the price they had paid, even though leaving before breakfast. 

That night we got the usual 10 pm call, which Joan answered as usual, ten minutes later Rod later phoned and joked he was not offering 'massages' but wanted to arrange a time to meet in the morning. Business hotels seem to sponsor prostitution, hence the normal call around all the rooms offering services. I'm tempted to answer the next one with a 'come up dearie', just to see what they are like!'

Rod and Ann base their life on travelling, working in the UK just long enough to fund the next trip before resigning their jobs once again. This time they were half way through a four month trip having started by moving the narrow boat on which they live at Macclesfield to Kidderminster for repairs whilst they are away. They crossed the channel by ferry and made their way through Western Europe to Poland, Russia and Kazakhstan, to Kashgar. They had been surprised at how interesting they had found Russia and spent far longer there than expected. But on arrival had, like us, been overwhelmed by the colour and life of Western China. 

DUNHUANG
Next day another bus completed the journey to Dunhuang. The town was notable not for the extent of new building but by the fact that it is concentrated on building new high class hotels. We found an interesting bookshop and now have good maps of the country and also a book of lino-type representation of many of the paintings in the famous Buddhist caves. There is also a large market serving food plus a fine craft section. The downside is that they ask four times as much as the correct price for everything as the majority of tourists have no idea how low real prices are in China.

By this time I was entering the second day of 'sitting' (as Joan prefers to say), liquid manure several times a day in quick succession shortly after eating. So I survived by not eating during the day and was consequently not on my best form. It did not however spoil my enjoyment of the tour of the caves the next morning. 

DUNHUANG CAVES

Everyone has to join an organised tour conducted by a guide. On entry ten of us were allocated to a Chinese guide with a good command of English. The Chinese were not so lucky as their groups numbered around forty. There are over two hundred caves but only about 15 are visited on a tour in any one day, they constantly rotate the selection of caves. Visibility is however poor with items of interest being illuminated only by the guide's powerful torch. Nevertheless the images are impressive with many dating from the Tang Dynasty (the high point of Chinese art), which started around 500AD. The mural painting was stated to be untouched but most of the statues had been restored in the nineteenth century. Exactly how the caves are going to manage with the huge increase in tourists which is planned (a new railway line will soon stream them into Dunhuang). Already they take 4000 visitors per day. 

A huge bonus is that two museums are also included in the price of the ticket and you can spend as long in these as desired. Everyone visits the Library cave as well as its museum. The Library cave was hidden by a false wall only discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century leading to hugely important finds, most of which found their way to the museums of Europe and the USA, with the British Museum as always in the van together with a little known museum in Paris, well we have never heard of Guilot (spelling?). What nobody visits is the modern museum right away from the cave compound. This contains many photographs of Buddhist finds from across the world and also excellent life size reconstructions of 10 infrequently opened caves. This to us was a highlight of the day, although lacking the excitement and atmosphere of the caves themselves, it allowed the paintings and statues to be studied in detail and at leisure.

ANXI

FRUIT on ANXI MARKET

We decided on the spur of the moment to move on the next morning so as to find the time to visit Anxi, another recommendation of the aforesaid women at Tulufan. Another brand new road, opened this year, slashed the journey time in half and we got there in 1.5 hours. The attraction was to visit the LuLin caves, considered as one of three parts of the Mogao Caves, with Dunhuang being the prime site and Western Dunhuang the third. But rather than go straight out there by taxi we decided to explore Anxi town first and especially the very friendly market. Everything being offered at reasonable price, with bargaining hardly needed.

FAST CALENDAR DRAWING at ANXI MARKET

China is home to excellent quality fast food, why they needed to invite KFC and Big Mac is a mystery to us. Now we know it is also the home of fast painting. We spent precisely 30p on a fine example having watched for five minutes whilst it was being painted. The painting was done with inch wide stiff sponge, each end was dipped in different colours and the painting done with great swirls and panache producing instant rainbows, sun, dragons and apsaras (Buddhist 'will of the wisp' flying angels).

That evening we experienced our first sandstorm, probably minor in the scale of things. Nevertheless from the comfort of our bedroom window we witnessed cyclists speeding past free wheeling in one direction and brave souls struggling to make any headway in the other. I went out briefly and was amazed at how quickly a sunny hot afternoon had changed to a bitterly cold one, and found it difficult and very unpleasant to walk against the storm, even with the considerable protection of spectacles. We ate in the hotel that evening. Our meal had no sooner been served than we were plunged into total darkness. We eventually continued our meal by candlelight, but the family who had not been served went without.

Next morning it was sunny again so we visited the caves by taxi. There was no competition between the drivers, who all congratulated the lucky man in prime position on the rank, so we paid the asking price of 180Y. The journey there through red rock mountains was alone worth the fare. The caves were situated in high cliffs on either side of a river valley. I think the total was 45 caves, only one side of the river being currently on display, we were shown 10 this time, by an English speaking guide to ourselves for 45Y. Though the standard of painting  was not so high as Dunhuang, and few caves were as old, these were still fine examples, and it was nice to be alone. The prime example was a Qing dynasty nineteenth century cave. It was said they average 100 visitors per day, but we only saw one Chinese party that morning of around 10 people.

Next morning we found the hotel restaurant was not serving breakfast but laid out for a celebration for the day following Moon cake day, (the Chinese equivalent of Thanksgiving or Christmas) when whole families re-unite in celebration. Forced to innovate we went in search of bread on the market, but the stalls were just being erected and no bread had yet arrived. We noticed that the food stalls had a steady business supplying breakfast to the stall holders. We decided to investigate and ended up with one of the best breakfasts so far. The bread, perhaps more similar to batter than dough, had been filled with green tops of spring onions, a little garlic and egg, and presumably fried like Tibetan bread, we ordered one each, but the stall-holder beckoned me into the kitchen and showed me a barrel of bean curd with the consistency of junket, it was delicious served with a sprinkling of sugar. We finished off with a just-fried jam doughnut. Unfortunately we forgot to buy more of the bread for the day's journey and so we survived the next 30 hours on a packet of biscuits and two packets of peanuts. 

SLEEPER BUS CHINESE STYLE

We booked our tickets (2 x 200Y) for the following day deciding to go for it and travel the whole 1300 km to Lanzhou in one hop on a sleeper bus. We had over calculated the likely improvement in travel times and eventually arrived at 4am when we parked in a seemingly deserted side street with a host of other buses. It turned out that we arrived at Lanzhou bus station but that it would not open until 6am. Every one was still asleep. 

JIAYUGUAN FORT, (GREAT WALL of CHINA finishes nearbye

As soon as the bus station opened we decided to move straight on to our next destination of Xiahe, but when I attempted to buy tickets the reply was mei you (don't have) and that we needed to go to the South bus station. For once I understood an important reply and instructed a young taxi driver to take us to the Qiche nan zhan, thanking my lucky stars one of the first additional bits of vocabulary I had learned on this trip were the compass directions, south in this case. 

When we arrived at the station we were the cause of a fight, with one man pulling me to a waiting bus and another pulling me to the station hall. We left them to it and made our way to the ticket desk where I bought a ticket for the 7.30am bus. My guess is that the first man had parked the 6.30 bus, which had officially left, outside the station whilst he tried to increase his load and pocket the fares. The other had a vested interest in the pay load of the later bus, the only one for which tickets were still available.

But I am getting ahead. We boarded our first sleeper bus (to Lanzhou) not knowing what to expect. There were 24 bunk beds in the main section with several more over the engine compartment at the rear. We were shown to two adjacent lower bunks and proceeded to install ourselves. Thus commenced a 17 hour journey of which the daylight part was spent observing the desert, as we clipped along at 90 km/h propped up in our chaise-long. It may seem that hurtling along a dead straight road through a level desert would be boring, but both I and Joan were enthralled. We would not hesitate to take another sleeper bus.

FLYOVER but NO NORTH SOUTH ROAD

My first fascination was with the Civil Engineering. Almost the whole journey was accomplished on new roads. The 600km road from Hami to Jiayuguan was done on a road, 2 lanes each way, still under construction to motorway standards. Both carriageways were already tarmac but only one lane was in use as they were building the flyover bridges over the other. That's the beauty of virgin desert you can build a west-east road and forget about north-south traffic, for it doesn't yet exist. They are opening up the west at a staggering rate. Our bus occasionally switched from one lane to the other to suit the ongoing construction and sometimes we reverted to the old road to bypass a river bridge at a vital stage of construction. Of course there was no water in the river, but obviously at other times there's an over-abundance. We had already noticed on other single track roads that they were incorporating large culverts and each was protected by a fully engineered bridge, clearly they had had enough of roads being washed away as per the route to Karakul.

The roads are being built in such a way as to follow a slow incline either up or down, and to accomplish this the road is sometimes on embankments 5 metres above the surrounding ground and at other times go through cuttings. They are obviously setting the gradual levels to suit water flow in nearby irrigation channels. It will be very interesting to repeat the trip in a few years time, it will be no surprise if the desert adjacent to the roads is producing crops. The railway lines are also being renewed, but I guess the real change will be in the introduction of basic industry. Even to construct such roads in the wilderness they have first to produce factories for grading material, cement manufacture, concrete and concrete tile manufacture. At each bridge they have constructed a large deep concrete pit to hold water for the manufacture of concrete. Stones have to be imported, probably from river beds for the desert is largely sand. 

I thought in the fifties I had seen plenty of the taming of wilderness in Canada for mining or hydro, but this is on an altogether different scale. The conditions under which they had to work were illustrated vividly on a toilet stop in the desert, the cold wind was blowing so fiercely that even the women learnt what men have always known that it is not advisable to pee into the wind. As Joan continually observed women worked alongside men on all these hard manual jobs.

Between Jiayuguan and Zhange we went along 600km of the same motorway but this section had been completed (and the nearby railway track had been electrified). Steel crash barriers in the centre would prevent head on collisions and at the side prevented vehicles plunging down the embankments. Concrete posts every 1.5 metres were strung with 10 parallel barbed wires to fence-off motorway from the desert, which will one day be owned. The Green motorway signs were in Chinese characters and English with such instructions as 'Buckle Up - Don't Drive Tired', 'Don't Drive Drunk', ' Keep 200 Metres Spacing' with frequent examples of 50, 100 and 200 metres distances to drive the point home.

The Taklamakan desert is sandy like everyone's picture of a desert with exceedingly attractive dunes. The Gobi (wrong name) on the other hand is like a moonscape, alternately being dirty sandy coloured, dirty red, and just plain dirty grey. In fact most of the time it resembles the colour of the #1 Sub-Base, that I and other builders use for foundations. Where the desert was cultivated the principal crop had turned from cotton to maize, glowing vivid orange on the roofs and even on dedicated fields where it was laid out to dry. Neither desert soil contains enough stone to be really suitable for the building job so the rubble of whole carriageways is contained within retaining walls, cleverly (economically) built with as little large rock stone facing as possible.

XAIHE
It was clear from the start of the bus journey from Lanzhou that we had entered a quite different country, one of mountains and greenery, where villages were still being built in the traditional style of a walled courtyard in front of each single storey house. The villages competed as if in Pretty Britain competitions by lining the hedgerows with flowers. It was as if we had been suddenly transferred to the Alps. The corn drying on the flat roof tops was golden, the trees and shrubs were beginning to take vivid autumn shades of yellow with a glimpse here and there of the red which will surely follow. The mosques interestingly had pagodas instead of minarets. 

BED DIVIDING COFEE TABLE

By the time we reached Xaihe we had climbed to 3000 metres. We checked into The Overseas Tibetan Hotel and found our room, walls ceiling and furniture were painted in colourful Tibetan designs. Our beds on a platform across the room were separated by a long Tibetan painted coffee table.

We have taken more photographs here than anywhere since Kashgar market, that really says it all. The town which we entered from the south starts with a new Han Chinese area, then changes to Hui Muslim where the people wear plain white hats, and finishes up with its real attraction a Labrang Tibetan sector with one of the most important Buddhist monasteries (yellow hat) outside Tibet. 

The monastery is surrounded by 3 to 4 km of prayer wheels and there is a constant stream of Tibetan people young to old and infirm completing the arduous hour and a half circuit, swinging the heavy prayer wheels as they go. Inside are many temples, dedicated to Philosophy, Medicine, Buddhist Teaching etc. 

REBUILT TEMPLE at XIAHE

There used to be 4000 monks but although there are now only 800 the number is growing again. Considerable damage was done during the Cultural Revolution, but it is good to see temples being restored and some have already been completely reconstructed. 

PUPIL MONKS CEREMONY

The first evening we observed a 'discussion meeting' where the monks in full robes and yellow hats sat together on the floor in groups outside the principal temple, clapping politely and cheering as each new group appeared, and clapping fiercely as a member of the group pressed home a point of learning in discussion. This we assumed was an end of year certificate ceremony. 

The next day we hired a motor bike with trailer to take us 15 km further up the mountains to Sangke. It was bitterly cold in the cool of the morning but the view was exhilarating. We eventually arrived at the grasslands where Yak, long horned sheep and horses were grazing. This was obviously a festival site for there were many pavilions with glass windows and signs indicating Cossack style horse riding competitions. Unfortunately all was quiet. 

TIBETAN TEA and TSAMPA

A Tibetan (self styled nomad) came to meet us with his horse hoping to sell us a ride. We settled instead for an invitation to his home to drink Tibetan Tea and to eat Tsampa. Both are made with Yak butter, we found it surprisingly pleasant, the secret is to treat it as soup rather than tea. The Tsampa he prepared for us by adding Yak butter to boiling milk and mixing in barley flour and hard cheese bits and moulding it into a solid paste. That too was easy to eat.

In the afternoon we went on a guided tour of the monastery, led by an English speaking monk with a party of around 15, largely French. More later