Xinjiang Trip Day 18 (6-4-2007)
I arrived in Lanzhou around 6.30 am. Since I had heard that most of the better hotels in Lanzhou were clustered around the railway station I dragged my bags down the street looking for a place to stay. It seemed impossible to find anything decent since it seemed that virtually nowhere would accept foreigners. I found a dirty room for 150 RMB but wanted something better. I even started checking out some of the cheaper hostels, which are sometimes more relaxed than hotels about the red tape associated with foreign guests. Walking into one of these places I asked to see a room and was told to wait a minute. As I waited a Chinese couple walked out, the woman fuming that the place was too disgusting for a dog to live in. Naturally I became curious to see just how bad the room would be.
The room was pretty bad. It wasn’t quite ‘how did shit get on the ceiling?’ bad, but it was still bad. A depressed and grubby young maid met me and led me along a corridor to a room. The carpets in the corridor were black with dirt in some places and worn completely through in others. The whole floor reeked of piss from an uncleaned communal bathroom. In the room itself wallpaper hung off the wall and the carpet was covered with tangled black hairs, cigarette butts, and burn marks. All of this paled in comparison to the smell of sewerage from the ensuite bathroom though. To be honest, from a dog’s perspective the room would probably have made a good home (the heaters were on), but the dog’s owners would still have felt guilty.
Eventually I ended up staying at the Xilan Hotel which was only 160 RMB and had a swimming pool and gym.
After dropping off my stuff I took a long walk through town, vaguely heading towards the city center and the river. Just outside my hotel I passed a young shoe shine girl, a little unusual since shoe shine people in China tend to be middle aged to elderly. I had some jellified tofu for breakfast in a tofu shop. Walking around I noticed a lot of local shops whose names and logos clearly copied famous international brands. There was a local fast food chain with a logo derived from McDonalds (the real McDonalds didn’t appear to have reached Lanzhou yet), and a supermarket chain that seemed to have drawn inspiration from Carrefour.
Eventually I reached the Yellow River, which runs through the city. The water seemed quite low, and a lot of the access to the riverbank was obstructed by a cheesy waterwheel theme park, in which the waterwheels were all out of service due to the lack of water. There were some old people playing croquet in a little park down in the river bed. University students were out soaping down the seats on the riverside promenade. There was a place to take a cable car across the river to a park containing some Qing and Ming pavilions on the opposite bank but I didn’t bother with it. The weather wasn’t particularly clear so I decided the views from the opposite bank would not be worth the bother.
Instead I went to check out the Gansu Provincial museum. The museum had a good display on the Silk Road. There were scroll paintings from the Mogao Caves, Tang Dynasty ceramic figures of foreign traders, painted bricks from tombs of officials, and of course the bronze horse from Wuwei(?) in northern Gansu. Most of the staff were napping in quiet corners of galleries, but one guard who obviously had aspirations of being a tour guide was enthusiastically leading children around and introducing the objects to them. He was actually very good at it and since he was pitching his talk to children he was easier to understand than a lot of guides. I listened to him for a while before wandering off. The rest of the museum was mostly dinosaur bones which I didn’t bother with.
After having some cold noodles for lunch I went into a travel agent and tried to arrange a tour to the Thousand Buddha Caves at Binglingsi. I had no luck though since it seemed there were no tours until the start of the May Holidays. Nobody seemed to have clear information on the boat situation to get to the caves either.
I ended up walking practically from one end of Lanzhou to the other and was very tired by the end of the day. With the city being strung out along the banks of the Yellow River the distances are deceptively long. I still visited the hotel gym for a quick work out though. The gym was empty when I went in, with an awful pop song playing in an endless loop. Some children wandered in from the hotel’s revolving restaurant and followed me around asking me questions and just looking. Eventually their father wandered in and we chatted a little. His children took me in stride rather better than he did. He seemed so surprised to be talking to a foreigner that he couldn’t do much except keep bowing and welcoming me to Lanzhou. The children asked intelligent questions like what the different equipment was for. Eventually the father backed out the door, still bowing to me every couple of steps, and returned to the restaurant. His children stayed behind. It seems that in Lanzhou an exercising foreigner is a bigger draw card than a revolving restaurant. There has to be a business opportunity in there somewhere.
