There is nothing about cocktails here, so skip this post unless you are having trouble sleeping. . .

Following up on my earlier post on the Chinese protests in relation to Tibet, there have been some further developments in the whole Chinese protesters and Chinese online media saga. (more…)

Anyone who has been following the recent Tibet riots will be familiar with the story. Peaceful protests in Tibet somehow become violent riots. China closes Tibet to the foreign media and issues hard-line statements about ‘splittists’ and the ‘Dalai Lama clique’. The Chinese media report the story by dutifully repeating the government line. The foreign media report the story using the limited information and material available to them from both the Chinese and Tibetan sides. Chinese citizens are unhappy with the foreign media’s reporting of the story (or more specifically they have a gripe with the ‘western media’). A series of several cropped and incorrectly captioned photos and segments of news footage assumes enormous importance as a demonstration of western media bias. This material becomes ‘proof’ that the western media is attempting to ‘paint China black’. Chinese students around the world protest. Exciting days indeed!

Gentle readers, it was at that point that your good narrator became involved, with ironic and entertaining results. (more…)

The next day it was another 7am start for the bus to Ruoergai in Sichuan. The road dropped a little in elevation but the altitude remained quite high. Most of the journey was across a grassy and occasionally marshy plateau, dotted with villages and grazing yaks.

Once again my ten year old guidebook was less than informative. I was told to expect Ruoergai to be a small collection of ugly buildings, including one or two hotels, and inhabited mainly by a dangerous sounding dreadlocked minority called ‘Golocks’ (or something similar), who apparently liked to ride through the town on motorbikes, sporting large knives and threatening tourists. My plan was to make a dash through the gauntlet of knife wielding ‘Golocks’ and head straight to a hotel, probably remaining in my room with the door locked until morning. Of course if things went badly I would probably get surrounded by marauding ‘Golocks’ and be forced to draw my own pair of Uigur knives. I’d definitely end up having to abandon my bags as I fought the Golocks off. With luck I’d probably be able to push one of them off his bike without actually having to kill him, allowing me to steal the bike and escape. The Chinese policemen would be sympathetic about the bike theft but wonder why I was stupid enough to come to Ruoergai given the dangers of the place.

I found that whatever Ruiergai had once been, these days it was a picturesque little town recently rebuilt in a Tibetan style. There were neat rows of buildings painted with Tibetan motifs. The place was once again full of hotels. There were no obvious ‘Golocks’. It was all a bit anticlimactic and I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. There were a lot of policemen cruising the streets for a small town, so maybe the place had a rough history. It was hard to imagine looking at the scene now though.

I checked into a hotel and went for walk around town. The place was a reasonable size, bigger than either Xiahe or Langmusi, but probably smaller than Hezuo. There was nothing too special to see though. I got a haircut and as the stylist cut my hair the Sichuanese boss asked me why America couldn’t be more like China, which apparently throughout history had never attacked another country but only fought wars to defend itself. He had a point about American aggression, but didn’t seem to know much about Chinese history, and was oblivious to the irony that the U.S. had also justified its Iraq war as a necessary defensive measure in the ‘War on Terror’. He seemed genuinely surprised to hear me say that China must have attacked other countries to have become a nation with such large ethnic minorities living in its extensive border regions (i.e. Uigurs in Xinjiang, and Tibetans in Tibet and the surrounding provinces), but grudgingly conceded that I could have a point.

I spent the afternoon doing a little work in a Tibetan tea shop and restaurant. I had another opportunity to try Sampa and Momo. This time the Sampa seemed to be the genuine article and the Momo were far tastier than at the previous place in Xiahe, quite delicious in fact. The Sampa was interesting but not something I’m ever likely to find myself craving in future. Besides the hard cheese it was not bad, but the hard cheese was like leather and just too hard to chew, spoiling the dish. On the other hand the butter tea used to mix the Sampa was better than I expected. Rather than being floating with oil the tea was properly emulsified. It had a sour taste a little like the Uigur milk tea, plus a nutty flavor from cracked grains that were stewed together with the tea. Pretty good stuff.

I took another wander around town in the evening but once again found nothing much of interest. In a small store I found an interesting bottle of something called ‘Za Jiu’ (咂酒) or ‘Qingke Jiu (青稞酒), which looked to be a Tibetan beer. It was grain based but tasted was nothing like beer. It was flat, winey, and somewhere between homebrew gone wrong and a complex sour beer from Belgium. Overall it was probably closer to homebrew gone wrong than anything else, but I bought a second bottle for later anyway. Something about it was oddly like mead actually, with an almost primeval flavor. It was a surprising 11% alcohol by volume, which really didn’t come through in the taste. It was produced somewhere down the road in Songpan.

Still drinking the first bottle I wandered into a Tibetan restaurant and asked to see a menu. As the boss explained there was no menu I noticed how absolutely filthy the place and everyone in it was and used the lack of a menu as my excuse to make apologies and leave. I tried a busy little Chinese restaurant instead. There were no free tables but a couple of Tibetan monks invited me to join them. They were impressed to see me drinking the local brew, an attitude which hinted at less than complete devoutness but nevertheless made me well disposed towards them. I ordered some food and we chatted over dinner.

The monks were in their mid-20s but looked much older and had been monks since childhood. They came from a monastery near Langmusi and were passing through town for some reason or another. The younger one was quite well traveled and had been to Lhasa as well as some of the big coastal Chinese cities. He was vegetarian which and his older friend kept teasing him about this - which didn’t seem very monk like. The older one was the more talkative of the pair but said he had never been to a big city, not even to Chengdu or Lanzhou. They talked reverentially about the Delhi Lama, lowering their voices and looking anxiously around as they did so, and expressed the hope that one day he would be return to Tibet. If I knew more about Tibetan Buddhism maybe I could have asked them some interesting questions, but I didn’t get the feeling they were necessarily that spiritual themselves.

They were actually quite funny. The older one told me that his religion meant it was absolutely forbidden for them to ask me if I had one or more girlfriends in China. The younger one leaned forward listening intently. They were clearly desperately interested in this topic! I told them that my last girlfriend had been Japanese but living in Shanghai. They tut-tuted and told me that I really shouldn’t have divulged that information. I told them it was really no problem and asked if there were any more topics we shouldn’t talk about – just in case. The older one said that we probably shouldn’t talk about things like alcohol and cigarettes, but that the most important thing was not to talk about sexual stuff. For example, he definitely shouldn’t ask me if my ex-girlfriend was pretty or not. The younger one leaned across excitedly again. I told them that I thought she was pretty but of course that was just my opinion and they might think differently. They agreed about different people having differences in aesthetic opinion, and mentioned that as Tibetans they found Tibetan girls pretty but that Chinese didn’t. Of course they added that this was all hypothetical and being monks they didn’t personally have any opinions on female beauty. The younger one asked me if I had a photograph of my ex-girlfriend. The older one frowned and scolded him in Tibetan. I didn’t have a photograph to show them in any case so had to apologize. It seemed the conversation had become too risqué though so we moved onto other topics. As the restaurant began to empty I told them I’d better be heading back to my hotel and said goodbye. They gave me their phone numbers and told me to give them a call if I visited Langmusi again.

I got up at 5.30 am to make the 6 am bus to Hezuo. I took the earliest bus to try and make as much progress along the road to Chengdu in Sichuan as possible. I arrived in Hezuo around 7.30 am, too late for the only bus to Zoige, a town situated in the grasslands across the Sichuan border. That left me with the second best option of waiting for a bus to Langmusi, a Tibetan town in the mountains on the Gansu-Sichuan border.

I went into a restaurant outside the Hezuo bus station and had some noodles. With time to kill I pulled out my laptop to write up some stuff for my blog. The waitress’ reaction was alarming even to somebody used to getting odd reactions from Chinese people. She shrieked in amazement, gave a little jump on the spot, ran over to ask me several questions I couldn’t understand, and started calling the rest of the staff out of the kitchen to look. The boss’s wife, who spoke much more standard Chinese than anyone else, told her I was using a computer and that computers were the absolute cutting edge these days. She said I would be taking records of the restaurant so other foreigners would be able to find it, which seemed ridiculous when she said it but in a sense she was right since I have ended up writing about her restaurant.

It took several minutes before everyone stopped crowding round watching and went back to work. Twenty minutes later a Tibetan couple probably in their late 30s came in and were similarly amazed. The woman was clearly desperate to look at my guidebook and map so I invited her to sit down and help herself. She sat and poured over them intently for an eternity. I was certain she didn’t understand the English guidebook, and she also may not have understood the Chinese characters on the map. While she did that her husband stood behind me watching me type and softly sang a Tibetan song. I noticed a few Tibetans had a habit of very unselfconsciously singing to themselves as they went about their business. When he finally spoke her husband turned out to speak reasonable Chinese, not exactly good but enough to communicate. He asked me where I was from, if New Zealand was in China or America, and if we had yaks there. I had to disappoint him on the yak front but volunteered sheep as a sort of consolation prize. Despite seeming so interested in the computer he never asked me a question about it. Either he thought it would have been rude, didn’t want to embarrass himself, or didn’t have the words to ask. Eventually the Tibetans’ food arrived and they went to eat.

The bus ride to Langmusi was mainly across rolling hills on a high plateau and passed lots of Tibetan settlements. There was an interesting variety of architectural styles. Some villages were of squarish mud and brick courtyard houses in a vaguely Chinese style, others comprised brick block houses wrapped in glass conservatories, and others were extraordinarily medieval looking affairs of wood and mud houses surrounded by stockades and with brightly colored prayer flags fluttering in poles near the houses or on high ground somewhere nearby.

My decade old guidebook had told me that Langmusi was completely off the beaten track and had no accommodation besides one or two guesthouses, which lacked showers and were heated by fires lit in the guest rooms. I arrived in Langmusi and found a street of English signage advertising backpacker style guesthouses and restaurants. Admittedly half of the places were closed for winter and there was not a foreigner in sight, but the place was clearly not off the beaten track. In fact most non-Chinese would have an easier time of it here than in your average Chinese city.

The thin mountain air made walking with bags tiring so I walked straight into the hotel nearest the bus station rather than scouting around to see what else was on offer. Three very pretty and clean Tibetan girls greeted me. The last of the three came running out of the back office with her trousers pulled below her waist, said hello to me, spent a moment staring into her crotch and adjusting something there, and finally pulled and buttoned her trousers up and complemented me on my Chinese. She was wearing thermal underwear under her trousers so it wasn’t as though I was going to see anything on account of her trousers being down, but it was still a strange display of complete unselfconsciousness. I was quite liking how naturally the Tibetans behaved. There never seemed to be much drama in dealing with them.

Langmusi was somehow nicer than Xiahe. It was also a monastery town, but the monasteries were much smaller and complemented the town rather than dominating it. There were more locals and fewer pilgrims, which probably contributed to the much cleaner feel of the place. I guess it is hard to stay clean when on a pilgrimage.

I took a wander towards the hills above the town, passing a school on the way. The school children asked me to teach them English so I sat down with them and chatted for a few minutes. Since they hadn’t started English classes it was a bit difficult to teach them anything, and after a minute or two of asking me English words for parts of the body they got bored and invited me to play basketball. I left them to their game and walked on up the hill towards a series of prayer flags on the edge of a forest.

In the forest there was a kind of a shrine commemorating a tiger. I’m not sure what the story behind it was. Beyond the shrine was a river valley so I began to hike up the valley. The valley appeared like an alpine wilderness in miniature, each rock or tree looming as a meaningful part of the whole scene, something like the illustrations in the Narnia books. It was very tempting to just keep walking up the valley and towards the jagged white peak that it seemed to be leading to, but the wind was picking up and clouds were gathering so I turned around round after only 30 minutes or so.

For dinner I visited a place in the town called Leishas Restaurant. Leisha was an elderly Tibetan man. He claimed to be illiterate in Tibetan, Chinese and English, but had somehow learned to cook favorites like risotto, frittatas, bruchetta, chocolate cake and apple pie, as well as a couple of stranger items like the ‘English potato sandwich’ - a chip buttie maybe? His Yak Burger, though unconventional (yak stir-fry served in a Hui Chinese flatbread), was tasty and extremely filling.

The bus to Xiahe left at 7am so I got up at 6am and checked out of the hotel. I hailed a taxi outside and headed to the bus station. Halfway through the ride I realized the seat of my jeans was wet with piss. It was too late to be of any use but out of curiosity I had to turn to ask the taxi driver whether someone had pissed in the front passenger seat earlier in his shift. “Yes” he replied disinterestedly. I wondered why he would let me sit in a piss drenched seat without warning me.

Xiahe was clearly a western tourist destination and besides me the bus had three other westerners on it, the first westerners I had seen on public transportation so far on my trip. The first part of the road to Xiahe wound through pretty mountain countryside. The area was predominantly Hui, and we passed numerous densely settled villages bursting with mosques and cherry trees. As the altitude increased the cherry trees disappeared, the villages became fewer in number and much smaller in size, the place names became Tibetan, Tibetan script appeared on the road signs, and colored prayer flags and stupas started to dot the landscape.

The bus reached Xiahe around noon. A group of snotty nosed Tibetan children stormed the bus offering ‘taxis’ (actually pedicabs). Xiahe was a tiny one street town, with part of the main street actually running through the monastery, and so there wasn’t much need for a cab. I hopped into a real taxi van with the three other tourists though and we headed off together to look for a hotel. I chatted with the driver a little in Chinese, prompting the German guy beside me to gravely ask if I was a journalist. I said I wasn’t, and he said that hearing me speak Chinese he thought I must be “a specialist coming to report on the situation of the Tibetan people”. Germans have a way of sounding very serious. It would have been fun to pretend to be an undercover journalist sent to investigate rumors of a massacre of Tibetan nuns in the mountains outside town, but given my experience of plain clothes police in Yining it would probably have been unwise. It seems China devotes a lot of resources to monitoring what visitors do in ‘sensitive’ minority areas.

The Germans somehow disappeared after we arrived at the hotel. Maybe they went on to another hotel. I wanted to shower and change my jeans but with no hot water available there was not much point, so after dumping my stuff I wandered along the road towards the monastery.

The town was clearly a tourist center, with lots of English signage advertising guest houses, restaurants and souvenir shops. Simultaneously though the town was clearly a genuine religious center, and the handful of tourists were easily outnumbered by hundreds of pilgrims.

The pilgrims streamed around the outer perimeter of the monastery, following a circuit around specific stupas and buildings, and spinning the prayer wheels lining covered corridors. They moved clockwise, and made multiple circuits around each stupa or building en route. The pilgrims varied in dress. Some were dressed entirely in traditional Tibetan woolen cloaks and robes, the men sporting long, uncombed hair and with horn handled knives dangling from their belts, and the women with their hair plaited, lower faces covered, and wearing heavy silver and amber jewelry. Some were dressed in factory made jeans and windbreakers. Others were dressed in strange mixtures of traditional and western styles. A few prostrated themselves every couple of steps, but most just walked briskly onwards, heads bowed, keeping the prayer wheels spinning. Some mumbled or chanted as they walked. Some walked swinging miniature hand held prayer wheels. A middle aged man who moved with the enthusiasm of a child sprang out from the procession, grabbed my hand, and dragged me with him laughing. He smacked at the prayer wheels with his free hand, sending each one spinning ferociously. He was clearly retarded. I twisted my hand out of his grasp, patted him on the back and waved goodbye as he lurched along the corridor of spinning wheels, laughing as he went. Lammist Buddhism must be a wonderful religion for a retarded person. That sounds disrespectful but is not meant that way. The guy was obviously enjoying himself immensely.

I would like to say something about the spirituality on display, but somehow the most striking thing was the filth. Obviously there were exceptions, but as a whole the pilgrims were very dirty, partly from spending weeks on the road, and partly because a lot of them never washed anyway. Many had hands caked with what looked to be weeks of accumulated dust and dirt. Their cloaks were stained with mud and grease. A stench of piss hung over the monastery itself, with monks and pilgrims, male and female alike, simply using a wall or squatting over a ditch to pee.

The thing that struck me about the monastery complex itself was the use of cloth. The temples were draped with long banners and flags, and there were poles hung with brightly colored pennants. There was a feeling of movement as the banners billowed in the wind. It was very different to the more static feel of Chinese style Buddhist temples.

On the perimeter of the monastery was a knife maker beating blades out of steel with a hammer and sending sparks flying everywhere. Filth, pilgrims, colored pennants, blacksmiths: the atmosphere was medieval.

While wandering around I ran into a French guy who had been on the bus with me earlier. As we wandered we saw a group of monks rushing into one of the temples for some kind of prayer session. We wandered in and the younger monks, just boys of about 12 years old, enthusiastically gestured for us to sit down. We sat at the back and watched. The old monk leading the session chanted in the most mesmerizing fashion. The chanting was so deep, so powerful, and somehow so other worldly that it was hard to believe it could really be coming the throat of the old man sitting a few meters ahead of me. The younger monks sat with heads bowed for a few moments, made a couple of responses, and then the session slowly but surely began to deteriorate. The old man chanted on, the middle aged monks concentrated on the prayers and responded as appropriate, while the younger monks fidgeted, kicked each other, threw their yellow hats around the room, fished raisins out of the folds of their cloaks and ate them, and made faces at each other. One group across the room was inspired by our presence to imitate Christian rituals. They enthusiastically crossed themselves, clasped their hands in prayer, and competed with one another to look pious before looking across at us and collapsing into giggles. There seemed to be absolutely no discipline, but the clowning around remained good humored and nobody ended up in tears. Just as my legs were about to give out from sitting on the floor the session ended, the children and ourselves were shooed outside, and the older monks retreated into an inner room and closed the doors.

Back on the outer perimeter of the monastery me and the French guy (Giles) tried to chat with some young Tibetan women who sat down beside us on a wall to rest from their pilgrimage. They were very curious about us. They swapped comments about us in Tibetan and giggled. A lot of what they were saying seemed to concern our appearance. Giles did much better than me in communicating with them. He spoke much slower and more basic Chinese than me, and the women could understand a lot of what he said. When I tried to talk to them in Chinese they couldn’t understand me. I tried speaking slowly and clearly but I wasn’t very good at it. Maybe I also had too much of a southern accent. Language barriers prevented the conversation from going far. They told us they were in town on a pilgrimage, and that they had come from Tibet itself. We couldn’t find out how they had traveled – i.e. whether they had walked or come by bus. Giles decided to ask them to recommend a Tibetan restaurant in town. I thought he was being a tad ambitious. First, their Chinese wasn’t up to discussing the intricacies of fine cuisine (not that Tibetan cuisine is intricate). Second, I doubted they were frequent restaurant customers. We never did get a restaurant recommendation out of them, and eventually an older woman traveling with them, maybe their mother, told them it was time to stop chatting with strange guys and continue with the pilgrimage. We waved goodbye and they disappeared among the prayer wheels and other pilgrims.

I had a very late lunch with Giles. We tried some sampa and momo in a small Tibetan restaurant that seemed to be catering mainly for tourists (with an English menu etc.). Sampa is the stable in Tibet and is a dish of milled grain, which the diner mixes into a paste by adding hard cheese, yak butter, and yak milk tea. I don’t think the sampa in this restaurant was anything like what Tibetans eat. It was a sort of sweet cookie dough, shaped into balls and dipped in sugar. Giles said it was different to what it eaten before in a Tibetan area of Yunnan. Probably it was a tourist version. Momo are steamed dumplings stuffed with yak meat. The momo in the restaurant seemed to fit that description and were reasonable enough.

After a rest I had a dinner inside the hotel. The waiter was a Chinese boy from a nearby village who had just graduated from school and was preparing to take university entrance exams in English in a few months. He was a desperate to practice his English so I chatted with him for a while. He had already been working at the hotel for a week or so but had still not managed to visit the monastery even though it was located just a hundred meters away. It was typical of how employees in low end service jobs get treated in China, with their bosses allowing them absolutely no free time, even when their job is not busy – the hotel and restaurant were practically empty.

The combination of uncertainty about the boat situation and laziness on my part meant I didn’t bother to get up early and try and visit Binglingsi. Instead I just relaxed around town. I went out for some breakfast, had my shoes shined, and bought some breakfast buns for the shoe shine girl. We chatted a little as she was shining my shoes. She was working on Dingxi Rd. and said she was from Dingxi herself. She told me that if you followed Dingxi Rd. to the very end you would get to Dingxi. Back at the hotel I checked on a map found that Dingxi Rd. ended after a few blocks. Either she was living in a very constrained little world or had been joking.

Around noon I visited the bus station to try and buy a ticket to Xiahe, the location of the largest Tibetan monastery outside of Tibet itself, and the second most important Tibetan Buddhist center in the world. Apparently the only bus left at 7am and it wasn’t possible to buy tickets in advance, so I would just have to come back early the next day.

I messed about doing some work and then spent the evening reading in a branch of the Shangdao Coffee chain. For dinner I had a Lanzhou style ‘shou zhua’ (手抓) meal. ‘Shou zhua’ literally means ‘hand grab’, and in the context of a restaurant indicates foods you eat with your hands rather than with chopsticks. ‘Shou zhua’ restaurants are all over Lanzhou and seem to be either the traditional local specialty or a recent local craze. The most popular item was chunks of lamb on the bone. The meat was tender but there was no seasoning besides five spice powder and salt. It was nothing special, but good to try I suppose.