Losing the plot in Yinchuan

OCTOBER 25, 2007: Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, home of hospitals that look like casinos, and home of Chinese Islam, is a happy facilitator of days on end of debauched pig-eating and alcohol swilling.Photos

The place has an all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink pizza/pasta/Chinese/fried chicken/beer/anything-else-you-can-name-that-is-unhealthy-and-Western restaurant. Oh how the locals love it. It's like Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat in the mid 90s, only with beer, fried chicken and chips included. We met some Indian medical students who've been studying here for a year. One of them, Asi, summarised rather aptly the situation of the Hui Muslims here in the Hui Muslim Self-Governing Region: "They're very quiet, keep to themselves," he said. Here you must imagine a thick, barely decipherable Indian accent. "In my country, Muslims are veddy dangerous, setting off bombs and things. But here, the government can . . ." cocks his hand in shape of a pistol, "shoot."

Last night was an unexpected blinder of baijiu, whisky and beer in the tiny, unclean restaurant next to our tiny, unclean hotel. Drinking from metal bowls was surely the highlight.


For anyone interested in the visual side, i have been running a bit of an experiment with the $3 op shop camera i've loved for so long. The thing has now deteriorated to such an extent that it leaks sunlight. So i've had it on the front of my bike, exposed to the sun and ready to take impromptu photos from on the bike. Some of the results have been quite interesting:



Click here if you care to see more of Ole Trusty's handiwork.

And there are NEW PRODUCTS! yes NEW PRODUCTS!! on offer right here, everything from 'Tumor Hospital' adverts to the worst logo in the history of advertising. Rush in now to grab your free belly laugh at the expense of China and its obsession with your language.

We managed to avoid morale-sapping tourism for the first four days, but yesterday we caved. I really don't like going to tourist sites, no matter how interesting or historical they might be. Seriously, seeing some great historical place whilst keeping to a path that someone else has set for you and which everyone else who goes there treads, it saps my will to live. I'm not saying tourist spots shouldn't exist - plenty of people seem to like them. But really, what can't you find out about a famous tourist site that's not on the internet? Being in almost any designated tourist spot, unless it's spectacular scenery, genuinely saps my will to live. I'll leave it at that.

The lack of appeal of tourism caused me to teeter on the brink of addiction to the English-language TV propaganda channel run by the immaculately-named 'CCTV'. It usually maintains an air of 'BBC impartiality' by limiting itself to the trivial and superficial. Their reports resemble, in Boxxy's words, those of Totally Wild or Behind the News. But the day the Dalai Lama was awarded the congressional medal, it lapsed into hilariously brazen propaganda. There was none of the usual childish, cliched camerawork and earnest explanations of the bleeding obvious. In fact, the report contained no pictures or explanations at all. Instead? A three-minute Powerpoint slideshow containing nothing but blocks of text from the Chinese government's official response condemning the Dalai Lama, narrated by an expressionless, anonymous voiceover. It must have been hard for the newsreader to keep a straight face as she introduced the follow-up – "The Tibet Autonomous Region's leader today announced strong development in all areas. . .", which concluded with the reporter stating, "Tibet has always been an inaliable part of China. Mr Chocog [or something, the 'leader'] says the Dalai Lama should . . .", just seconds after a voiceover had stated, "Tibet has been a part of China since the 13th century."

Yinchuan has also been the site of two rather hilarious comic scenes involving a wild-eyed male bicycle tourist. The first was simply a harrowing haircut.

It was supposed to be a day of complete individual freedom – open ended, perhaps involving long stints in guitar shops, reading news, taking photos. I should add here the background that a lightning strike the previous day had turned my hair a dark brown colour, a lightning strike prompted and encouraged by a certain Boxx Head sick of being stared at, slack-jawed, everywhere she went on account of walking alongside a foreign man with 'yellow' hair sprouting from his head.

So the newly crowd-colour-headed foreigner entered the hairdresser's and requested a regulation snip-snip, his first for 7 months. The hairdresser snipped ok. It looked a bit shit, mainly due to her obsession with plastering his hair across to one side in the style of a Lego man, so he asked someone to pass him his dictionary and looked up the Chinese for 'neat'. "It's okay but i don't want it so neat," he said. Vexed looks all round - from the hairdresser and her troupe of fashionista cronies occasionally assisting but mainly just watching. The foreigner repeated, "I don't like neat." Thinking his dictionary was being unreliable again, he looked up 'messy' and relayed that. The fashionistas evidently saw this as some kind of opening or invitation and began piling pressure on him to undertake a service they called 'burning' or 'scorching' or some similar meaning. He told them he didn't want any special styling services, that he wanted only to not to have neat hair. The fashionista juggernaut slipped a gear: among the dozens of explanations and pieces of advice spoken in a very pure hairdressing dialect, the foreigner only understood one: "You'll feel very good." The insecurities apparent in the fashionistas' meticulous hairstyles (the owner of the store himself gelled his hair twice while the foreigner sat there) began to infect the foreigner. For a good 20-25 minutes there was utter confusion; foreigner in the chair with freshly cut and plastered brown Lego man hair, not understanding a word as the fashionistas took turns in gabbling instructions in Hairdresserese while the hairdresser stood back with scissors in hand. The only way out, it seemed to the foreigner, was to accept this 'scorching'. Which, it turned out, involved sitting in the chair with his hair in rollers for nearly an hour and a half. Yes, rollers, and a heat halo above his berollered head. Overall, the process took the best part of three hours, the foreigner sitting in the chair in front of a mirror the entire time. This alone was enough to permanently damage his psyche, but as the rollers came out and the hairdresser spruced up his new hairstyle it became apparent to him that the result was a ridiculous cross between a Marge Simpson beehive and a fluffy Jew-fro. A broken foreigner walked from the shop.

My next hilarious humiliation came on a street corner with a Xinjiang cake seller. I'd seen them quite a few times in cities – just trying to sell off pieces from massive metre-long fruit and nut loaves. The previous day i'd walked past him and told him i wanted to try the product and would come back. I duly came back the next day, to the same street corner and had almost given up looking for him when he came out from an alleyway, pushing his cart. I greeted him and told him i'd come back to buy. I signalled for him to cut me off a conveniently protruding end piece. He looked a little taken aback and offered me half what i'd suggested but i told him the end piece would be fine. It didn't look like too much. What i didn't count on, never having consumed before, was how heavy the thing was. At the going rate of 50RMB a kilo, it turned out to be a 65RMB chunk. And i only had 36RMB in my wallet. So i asked him to cut it in half. No, he told me in terrible Chinese (he wasn't much better than me - Uighurs have their own, Turkic language and many can't speak Chinese), if he cuts it in half, no-one will buy the the other half. "Oh shit. Hmmm. What can we do? I don't have enough money." A sizeable crowd had gathered and had now enclosed us. Boxxy was so embarrassed she simply stepped back and melted into the onlookers. Rattled by the shame and annoyed by the crowd members' stupid, bovine movements and expressions, i told the seller, "Ok, solution: i'll give you sell" (that's the Chinese expression), "We'll stand here together until i sell it." I addressed the crowd: "You all want to buy, do you?" i said, picking up the chunk, and walked around the ring of befuddled imbeciles, waving the unwanted chunk in their faces yelling, "Buy buy buy! Good eat! Special price . . . good eat!" Jaws remained slack. "Why are you standing here?" i shouted. "You're here to buy! Buy buy buy, special price! 30 yuan!". At this point a police officer pushed through the crowd. I greeted him and asked him, "What are they looking at? None of them want to buy!" He looked at me incredulously, turned away and joined the crowd. Finally, i knew the only thing that would get rid of them – start taking pictures. This only partially succeeded. Eventually the seller, himself clearly embarrassed, took one chunk away, put it on the board, and said he would eat it. I paid him what i had for the bigger chunk and we made a break for it. Glory be.


We hadn't seen the Great Wall for about 2 weeks until we took a taxi out to see it yesterday. The taxi driver, though he'd been to Beijing, had never seen the wall despite its being only a 15 minute drive from his home.




It wasn't that we hadn't been trying though. Two days after leaving Zhongwei we camped in a desert that consisted solely of sand and vicious prickle bushes (which, in turn, consisted solely of extremely sharp prickles, which i only discovered when i tried to ride my bike on them and punctured both tyres in 10 places). That night was full of explosions in the not-too-distant distance – big ones. Their cause remained a mystery, but only until the morning. We continued riding towards the Wall for a few kilometres, but just as we were mounting the hill that should have given us our first glimpse, a green military 4WD sped past on a nearby track, honking wildly. The passenger got out and yelled at us to stop. I approached him and after a quick interrogation and investigation of our cameras, were were told to kindly vacate the desert because the army wanted to explode more bombs.




That afternoon we reached a restaurant – a concrete block shrouded in the smoke of multiple aluminium refineries. I stuck my head through the door. An man in his 50s sporting a sour expression stood inside. I inquired as to whether this 'restaurant' could cook us some food, and, without answering, he turned and gave me the iciest look imaginable, a "what in fuck's name are you doing here?". I said, "Fried rice, add vegetables and egg, can do?" Suddenly he burst out laughing, evidently amused by the simple fact i said "Fried rice, add vegetables and egg, can do?" He turned out to be the hippest, strangest old man we've met. He took us out the back to his storeroom to select our own dilapidated vegetables from their rat-eaten boxes, and soon insisted on us staying the night to share baijiu and aluminium fumes with him. Demanding we take photos of him, dressing up and endlessly primping his combover in the mirror in preparation for them and demanding i do the same, yet refusing any thoughts of a photo of him cooking; chuckling heartily practically every time I opened my mouth; insisting Boxxy take cold medicine despite her protestations that she had no such affliction – yes, this was a strange one.


As we continued the next morning the scenery became more and more dire. By the time we reached the Yellow River, it was exactly how i imagine 19th century Europe: small towns and villages (not big cities – small towns and villages becoming big cities) with factories clamouring for prime riverfront space with assured waste-pipe access, spewing forth yellow plumes that cloak the air; the echoey clanking of heavy iron bouncing down factory-walled streets; families living in tiny homes next door to factories; chains of putrid, green billabongs in the bottom of ditches; and the self-made millionaires exiting the factory gates in the most fashionable, ostentatious transport available.


We've ridden through endless cornfields (and were back among them before long). The choice faced by peasants in an industrial revolution is between the fields and the filth. And we know that most of them end up choosing the filth for the opportunities that it represents. But, as so often is the case, the direr the scenery got, the friendlier the people seemed to become. These guys, who live in their tiny shop next to a foul river, were the friendliest people we've met.



Still, peasants can in fact reap some benefits from the abovementioned ostentatious vehicles without leaving the land. The above is apparently done for the purpose of threshing by running over by passing cars. Someone should perhaps remind me to limit my consumption of local grain products.