Pictures!

Finally! Really, we promise. (I know. I can't believe it either.) They're not all titled or captioned or labelled yet, but they're up, and there they are. And there are lots of them.

Moscow	Siberia
Life on the trains	Mongolia
China	Kyrgyzstan

In other news—allow us a momentary boasting indiscretion. Since I know most of you who read this blog regularly do so in either an e-mail or an RSS/XML feed, you probably haven't noticed the little red icon at the bottom of the right-hand column of the site itself. We've been picked up by Travelblogs.com as one of their featured blogs. We're slightly proud. Check them out. They're a good site.

Minority in hegemony

It's our last night in China. Tomorrow, we're attempting to cross a border that's 12,000 feet above sea level—where a couple of inches of snow are expected—and that opens at noon for the first time in ten days. And all we've got is a car to the Chinese side of the border. Wish us luck...

But, what am I saying? We're not really in China any more. We haven't been for the last week. We're in this bizarre other world.

The Xinjiang province (the word in Chinese means "new frontier") has always been a crux of the Silk Road. Trade through here has been going on for at least seven millenia. It's been the seat of multiple rebellions over its long history, was briefly united with parts east under the Mongol reign in the thirteenth century, and then with parts west after Timur's occupation in the fourteenth. For the next five hundred years, it was ping-ponged between eastern and western rule, until it became a separate country (called "Turkestan") under Yaqub Beg in the nineteenth century. That lasted only a few years, before the Manchu swarmed in from the east and wrested control. It was again independent (and only part of it) as Eastern Turkestan in 1945, but then, again, only briefly. In 1949, after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, there rose up another separatist movement that refused Beijing's rule. This Muslim league's leaders, however, all suspiciously died in a plane crash; Eastern Turkestan was overrun and its leader executed in 1951.

The Uighurs, who people this province (though that's not completely true any more), are not Chinese. Their language is nothing like Chinese; it's not even in the same linguistic family, and it's represented by letters derived from the Arabic alphabet (though it's not in the Semitic language family either; the letters are just used phonetically). People greet each other with the ever-so-Muslim salaam aleykum, and, even if they've never been truly independent, they are fiercely so. There's palpable tension between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese, whom Beijing has been enticing to move west since 2000 (through its ingeniously-named "Develop the West" campaign). Restaurants are either frequented by Uighurs or by Chinese, but not by both. Each group views the other with suspicion and speaks the other's language only begrudgingly (and accentedly at that). It's no longer, as the Lonely Planet writes, about whether you dip your dumplings in soy sauce or in vinegar, but about how you like your mutton cooked.

The fierce independence even extends to time: Although all of China operates officially on Beijing time, the sun, unfortunately, does not seem willing to follow Beijing's whims. So, Xinjiang has its own, unofficial, Xinjiang time, two hours behind Beijing time. This makes for interesting discussions when booking tickets.

In short, this is a fascinating part of China to visit.

Urumqi
The capital of Xinjiang is the most Han-populated city in the province, and the only one in which there is some measure of peaceable interaction. The benefit, of course, is that there's a Carrefour and enough ramen to get us on to our next country. Stay along Urumqi's main streets, and you'll see skyscrapers, hot pot restaurants, and grocery stores. But turn off into any of the side streets and you enter a fascinating world that hasn't changed, it seems, in years—a world of outdoor markets, of men in traditional Kazakh hats bargaining over half a sheep, of mutton kebabs, of mosques on every corner, of burqas, bread cooked in open ovens, and houses in disrepair. And of people who didn't quite know what to do with us—an Arab and a Taiwanese in Muslim territory. It was a bit jarring.

Urumqi is also home to the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Museum. The museum has undergone a $13 million facelift that even includes Chinglish signs (yippee!), and is, quite honestly, one of the better museums we've seen this trip. Of its four exhibits, three are about the Xinjiang region—one on its history (and how wonderfully things have changed since the Chinese exerted their domination on the province; evidently the Silk Road couldn't have existed without the Chinese influence—ignoring the fact that, in the thirteenth century, when Marco Polo travelled the Silk Road, the influence was actually Mongolian. But, who am I to argue?), one on the different ethnic groups that call this province home, and one on the mummies found in the Taklamakan desert (more on the desert later). These are absolutely fascinating—they're mummies not through any preparation of the families that buried them. They're simply dessicated. They never rotted because they were just too dry.

And the desert's preservation is mind-boggling. You can see the mummies' fingerprints, their nail polish, their facepaint. They look like living—if slightly stiff and malnourished—human beings. According to one of the docents, one mummy—the Loulan Beauty—is, at 8000 years old, the oldest mummy in existence.

Of all the cities we've visited in China, we might have liked Urumqi the best.

Urumqi to Kashgar
The train to Kashgar defies description. It's, quite literally, an assault on every sense. For twenty-eight hours. We were in the last two beds of the last car on the train, cheek by jowl with eighty-two other people. Silence is impossible, especially when the berths are open and there's quite simply not enough room for the people and their luggage. The corridor is packed. And our location also meant we were also right next to the bathroom.

God, how do you describe it? The smells—the fetid, orange smell of unwashed feet, the milky one of dirty babies, the grey, watery smell of squat toilets, the odors of raw sausage (eaten, straight out of the wrapper, with relish), peppers, cigarette smoke, sweat, musty old ladies, and decades-old carpet, all compete for primacy. And the sounds—I simply can't get over how dramatic most of the people here feel they need to be with their bodily functions. There's a veritable sonata of snot that happens constantly, with each movement more grand than the last. And I'm not just using that as cheap alliteration: there's actually an A-B-A'-coda structure to this expulsion of humors. Snort-snort-spit / Cough-hack-retch-cough-retch-spit / Snort-spit-snort-spit. One man's coda was a nice, long, relished bit of flatulence. Another guy's sonata took a full, timed six minutes. And it's not just the men who do this. The women do it too, though less often and slightly more quietly. The six-minute guy...he was back for more, half an hour later.

The terrain that the train crosses, though, is amazing. It passes the lowest and hottest point in China (Turpan, second only to the Dead Sea in depth below sea level; the highest temperature measured here was nearly 50 degrees Celsius) and, not three hours later, is up above 10,000 feet, crossing the Tian Shan mountains. It spends its entire length skirting the Taklamakan desert.

For good reason. "Taklamakan" means "He who enters never comes out." And I believe it. Supposedly it's the world's second-largest desert (though I've also heard fifteenth-largest...), and, unlike the Gobi, with its brush and vegetation and inexplicable saxault trees, this desert has nothing. Simply nothing. It's valleys of dirt between mountains of dirt around dried out river beds of dirt; sometimes the dirt is ochre or yellow or red or green, but mostly, it's just brown. The path around the desert was only discovered in the last couple of millenia. It's that massive. Our train was stuck for five hours in the middle of the desert, too, for high winds and rain (yes, rain...we've been so plagued by rain this trip that it even rained in the desert for us). But finally, twenty-eight hours later, after a range of Reeses-colored mountains and an incongruous oasis of grapes, corn, donkey carts, and poplar trees, Kashgar appears.

Kashgar
More Muslim than Chinese, more Central Asian than East, Kashgar has what's supposed to be the oldest and biggest open-air market in existence. Its location—at one of the major crossroads of the Silk Road, near Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and India—means that people come from all over to trade here. We saw Kazakhs, Russians, Uighurs, Kyrgyz, Chinese, and the ubiqitous Western tourist. You can buy anything here. Cows, camels, kitsch, TVs, DVDs, cloth, carpets, cooked food, raw food, goats. You name it, it's on sale. Whereas, because of the Develop the West campaign, Xinjiang's Uighur population has dropped from 90% to 50% overall, here, it's still up near eighty. This place is not China.

Of course, it never rains in Kashgar. It rained for the market. Anyone else not surprised? At least we got a beautifully sunny day for Lake Karakul.

But here, more than anywhere we've been so far, I wonder—what's it like to be a minority in hegemony? All of us in the west who aren't of WASP origin think we're living in some sort of hegemony, but truthfully, we're not. Not this kind of hegemony. Not codified, government-sponsored hegemony. The biggest and boldest signs, even here in Kashgar, have no Uighur script on them. They're all in Chinese. The mosques, as Peggy has already mentioned, have placards in three languages detailing the Party's glorious contributions to the preservation of minority cultures (and, jarringly, religious freedom). Even the place we're staying—the Chinibagh Hotel, a word that isn't Chinese at all—has no Uighur writing anywhere except at its entrance.

What does that feel like? What does it feel like, as a minority person, to walk into the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Museum (I just like typing its full name) and see your culture's musical instruments, traditional costume, and home furnishings displayed on mannequins, with signs next to them blathering on about how "Kazakh women like the dance," or "the Uighur man embodies the plains"? Are you proud? Proud that your culture has been well preserved, in a well-done museum, for the world to see and learn? Or does it bother you that there isn't a section for the traditional music, dress, and home furnishings of the Han Chinese, that there isn't a placard reading, "Han Chinese women used to bind their feet"?

What's it like to see a huge statue of Mao Zedong in the central square of Kashgar? How does it feel that one of the only four exhibits in a museum dedicated to your culture is actually about revolutionary Han Chinese achievements (this one, interestingly, had no English signs)? What does it feel like to realize that your image, as a minority, is on the 10-cent and 50-cent pieces and on nothing else? Do you even realize this, having grown up under this regime? Or is this, really, just the way things are? I can't tell.

Does the propaganda, the ethnic displacement, the language supremacy bother you, or are you happy that money is, truly, being poured into your region? Is this what the First Nations people of North America felt when the Europeans first started settling?

Even though I find myself getting angry when I see blatant examples of an imposition of a foreign culture on a region steeped in its own history, I recognize I'm bringing my own anti-imperial western leanings to the table. But, really, what's it like to be a minority in hegemony?

Hitting a wall...

I know. We shouldn't be complaining. We're out, in the middle of China, feasting on mutton head floating in cold intestine soup (actually, we're not; we've avoided that particular dish so far), while all of you are working. But, every once in a while, one hits a wall. This is that time.

Xi'an
Not particularly sure why, really. Xi'an was one of the most spectacular cities we've seen so far (granted, it was raining, so we weren't forced to contend with what is supposed to be an insane amount of pollution). It's a beautiful city, one of the few with its city walls still intact. You can walk around on top of them—it takes about four hours, which we didn't do given the aforementioned rain.

It has served as the capital of eleven Chinese dynasties, most importantly of the Qin dynasty, the first one that unified what we now know as China. The lone Qin emperor was also responsible for such minor advancements as the standardization of the Chinese writing system, the completion of the Great Wall, the standardization of weights and measures, and the construction of those infamous Terracotta Warriors (more on that later). Small stuff. Because of this, the town is steeped in culture.

It centers around the Bell Tower, which looks nothing like our western minds expect a bell tower to look. But, true to its name, it's fringed with bells. Just to its northwest is the Drum Tower (fringed with, well, drums). The emperor would ring the bells in the morning and beat the drums in the evening. And now, though not in use the way they used to be, the towers are dramatically lit at night and house an amazing museum of furniture and shadow puppets (yes, I just described a museum of shadow puppets as amazing. But when you think about the fact that these puppets are cut from translucent leather with an intricacy that belies the material they're made from, you'll agree. Of course, if we could show you pictures, that would be better, but certain censors persist in their dislike of Flickr).

To the north of the Drum Tower lies the city's Muslim quarter, home to the small Uighur population in Xi'an (there's a bigger one where we are now in Urumqi). Mostly a Chinese-run tourist trap at this point—myriad copies of Mao's little red book, in whatever language you want, as well fake watches, purses, "100% real cashmere" scarves, and the like—this quarter centers around a still-functioning mosque. Again, this looks nothing like you'd expect a mosque to look, but in the middle of the bustle of Xi'an, it's a haven of quiet, peace, and the occasional Russian tourist.

Despite its bustle, though, Xi'an has a very chill, laid-back vibe—at least, as chill as a city of 3.5 million people can be. (Of course, in China, that's a veritable hamlet, but no worries. The Greater Xi'an area boasts 11 million.) After the haranguing of Beijing, this was a haven.

The Terracotta Warriors, by the way, live up to their reputation, and are therefore justly thronged by people. They were also the only place where the touts—ubiquitous in Beijing—exsted in any number. Even in the bathroom: I followed a local Chinese guy into one of the public toilets. He waltzed in, made a left for the men's room, and did his business, unobstructed. I, on the other hand, was accosted with the most original pick-up line I've ever heard.

"Hallo! Sir! Money!"

That's it. No subtlety about it. The guy wanted to charge me the equivalent of $3 (US) for the privilege of using a urinal, just because of my big nose. And this wasn't even one of the three-star toilets you see around China (yes...as part of its preparations for the Beijing Olympics, China has even started giving its toilets stars.)

Not that you wanted to know about our lavatorial woes.

Trains
On the other hand, riding trains in China is, no question, an experience. We timed this portion of our trip to China poorly. October 1 is a national holiday, and the two weeks surrounding it see the heaviest travel of the year. This is China's Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving (the one in November, for you Canadians).

On any given, regular day, 1% of China's population is found on trains. This doesn't sound like much, until you think about the fact that that amounts to ten million people. And this number is likely doubled or tripled around the October 1 holiday. We found out.

I apologize for the stereotyping that's about to happen, but we can only write from experience, and this is what we've found: In one-on-one interactions, many of the people we've met (outside of the tourist industry) have been some of the most kind, hospitable, and helpful people we've met so far. But get these people into a group, pushing for entry through one small gate, onto a train with limited luggage space, and things change. Sharpen your elbows, because you're going nowhere otherwise (well, that's not exactly true. Boarding the 34-hour train from Xi'an to Urumqi, you didn't have to walk. You could have lifted your feet off the ground and been carried onto the train by the mass of humanity with one unified goal: make sure I get the prime spot in the train).

This is because, this time, it was we who were priced out of anything but worst-class. Open, cattle-car type trains, three bunks to a side, with only a small luggage rack with space for two backpacks and little else. It was an uncomfortable ride, but we were, quite likely, the only English speakers on the entire train, and definitely the only ones in our class.

And the attention we got! It was crazy. The train's provodnitsas (sorry...we're in China...fuwuyuanmen) would think nothing of sitting outside our berths and staring at us, blatantly. Our foreignness did, though, make for some great conversations. We met people willing to discuss Taiwan's politics at great length (and, simultaneously, attempt to pick Peggy up—he failed). We met students who wanted to teach us Uighur. We met Wang Yi and his girlfriend Mong Yen, two law students from Xi'an. Wang Yi has picked "Nick" as his English name because, he told us, "All the handsome actors in America are named Nick." And with his rock-star good looks, he chose wisely. Mong Yen—and her anime good looks—wanted us to pick her a name. We failed.

And we met the train's announcer. Every announcement on the train (and there were many; most of them smacked of propaganda—how to coexist on a train in harmony, what sort of food is appropriate to bring on a train, how to use the bathroom...that one needed instruction. Using a squat toilet on a train hurtling at 120 km/h takes some dexterity) was made in Chinese, English, and Uighur. The announcer must have heard that there were English speakers on the train, because, our second night, she came up to us and asked us to pronounce the announcements for her in English. She spent a good twenty minutes practicing (and, to her credit, improved amazingly).

Kindness, genuine interest, and a culture that thinks nothing of pushing old ladies aside to get a better spot on a train...it's contrast at its best.

Next stop
So, we're in Urumqi now, having arrived this morning. We'll be here, sampling Uighur food, until tomorrow, when we board yet another train for the thirty-six hour journey to Almaty. Currently we have no place to stay there. Evidently, some major exhibition has coincided with our Kazakh experience. Every hotel is booked. Wish us luck!

And maybe those are the walls. Maybe it's the trains and the lack of accommodation. Or maybe it's just that we've been on the road for a month. Oh, for a platter of sushi...

PS...once out of China, we'll post all the pictures.

Out of the steppes

Alright...I give up. I delayed publishing this post because I sorely wanted it to be accompanied by pictures. But, the fact is, not only have we taken—between us—about 1200 pictures (I'm not making that up. Don't worry...we won't subject you to all of them. Unless you're our parents. Then, prepare yourselves...), but we've spent many a frustrating hour with internet connectivity in China. Certain websites are suspiciously always "temporarily unavailable." The BBC is one of them; Wikipedia suffers the same fate. Unfortunately, Flickr, where our pictures are hosted, seems to be subject to these vagaries and is therefore causing us myriad problems.

Of course, it could also be the slow computers and twitchy internet access we have in our backwater hostel in one of Beijing's hutongs. Literally outside our window, currently, is one of those drunken parties that flirts with (but so far hasn't descended into) violence.

But enough grousing. We made it out of the steppes in one piece, and, as I said, thoroughly, madly, unabashedly in love with a new country.

Since our last post, we've spent 144 hours on trains and buses, covering 7,972 kilometers. We've met people crazier than us (eg: Bish and John, bicycling around the world in two years, and documenting their beard growth as they do it), made friends with a veterinarian who splits her time between Irkutsk and Ulaan Baatar, where she works as a quality control coordinator for a rendering plant, assuring that the kolbasa imported into Russia is of good Russian quality, learned a plethora of new games (including one that's played with the remnant ankle bones of a slaughtered goat...more on that later), eaten fathomless amounts of Nutella, sausage, and ramen (but not all together...usually), and sampled more than a few Russian vodkas (thanks, mostly, to Andrew and Kim, another set of hard-core backpackers from the UK).

The Trans-Siberian has changed significantly in the last nine years. In 1998, there were four tourists on the entire train. In 2007, there were four whole carriages of tourists. Sadly, many of the Russians, Mongolians, and Chinese traders who formed the backbone of the rail line's customer base have been priced out of anything but worst-class. This leaves the train and its dour provodnitsas at the mercy of drunken Westerners. No wonder they try to charge for hot water.

The railway itself is a massive feat of Soviet (and now Russian) engineering. As proof, there is a marker every hundred meters. Along its entire length. As of 2002, the whole of the Russian portion of the line (Moscow to Vladivostok) has been electrified, making for faster and more energy-efficient trains. The rails in China have also been changed to concrete, minimizing the railway's deforesting impact. And Mongolia...well, they have a bit to go.

But! Mongolia is an ineffably amazing country. Really, drop your plans for Tofino and head out to Mongolia next chance you get. I can't speak highly enough about that country, its people, or the experiences we had in our seven days there. It's impossible to describe Mongolia without descending into cliche, so here goes.

Some highlights of the last couple of weeks:

1. Horseback riding on the Mongolian steppes. (Behold! Cliches!) There is absolutely nothing like riding on the back of a powerful, galloping animal across wide-open, wind-swept steppes with nothing but mountain, grass, and the occasional ger anywhere in your sight. This wasn't your typical tourist-rides-a-horse thing (where the horses walk, bored, nose to derriere). No...these horses gallop. And fast. Fast enough that the grasshoppers accidentally divebomb your face in an attempt to get out of the way.
The thing about Mongolia is that, by dint of the fact that life in the desert and steppes isn't easy, everything is communal. As we approached our camp at the end of our day of riding, a flock of someone else's sheep had found its way there too. So, atop these galloping horses, we herded them back to where they were supposed to be. It wasn't like a movie. It may as well have been one.

2. Gers. Yes, it was seven degrees below zero at night in the desert. And yes, we were sleeping in circular, felt-lined tents, getting up every two hours to try (unsuccessfully) to keep the fire going. But, honestly, the gers are much more comfortable than most hostels we've stayed in. And provided you don't move, you stay pretty warm. Until 3:00 am. Then it's just a fight till the sun comes up. And this, they kept reminding us, was just the start of fall.

3. Mongolian. The language. What a strange one that one is. Masculine and feminine vowels? (really...who gives their vowels genders? And consonants change the way they're pronounced depending on the gender of the vowel before which they sit; but, to confuse you more, the vowels themselves don't necessarily always sound different).
Or, an aspirated L? (every L sounds like it's preceded by a very soft T, with air escaping out of the sides of your tongue. So, it's Utlaan Baatar).
And then there are the four vowels that span the spectrum between O an U. I still couldn't hear the difference, despite pestering many a Mongolian.

4. Food. This includes fermented mare's milk, and more mutton than you can imagine, but it's amazingly good. We happened to be at the ger of a nomad family when it came time for them to milk their mares (not hard to time that one; they do it every two hours) and kill a goat. That was a gruesome sight—two blows with a hammer through its skull stunned it, after which the guy killing it stuck his hand into its chest and, somehow, did the deed. It took two hours, start to finish, to kill, skin, disembowel, wash, and cook the goat. I'd show pictures, but...

5. Hospitality. There wasn't a single time we walked into a ger that we weren't offered something to eat or drink. This did mean medium-rare goat liver wrapped in omentum and grilled on the open fire after its owner was slaughtered, but nothing that we needed ever went unmet. This also meant playing the ankle-bone game with someone you'd never met before, sharing only a few words in common, and bonding over a bar of dark Russian chocolate.

6. Lake Baikal. Yes, it's not in Mongolia, but in the world's largest fresh-water lake, the water is drinkable without adverse side-effects (at least, none so far). And it's bitingly cold. That doesn't stop the Siberians—or us two crazy Americans—from jumping in it.

I could go on, but with that, I've probably already rambled too much. We're off to Xi'an in three hours. We'll post the pictures as soon as we can get them up.