Stuck in the desert

SEPTEMBER 10, 2007: Stuck in Jiayuguan waiting for bikes to arrive. Photos

Some pictures from the surrounding desert/rebuilt wall areas:




The end of the Great Wall is brilliant. No-one pumped it up as being spectacular or anything - we were expecting a broken-up mound of dirt and a token sign. Instead, after we arrived we were directed down some stairs into the ground and suddenly we were standing on a glass-floored balcony 100m above a river looking out over this grand canyon of China. It was really the opposite of the average tourist experience, where everything you hear about a place before you see it leads to emptiness if not disappointment.




This is Jiayuguan, a massive 14th century fort - the gate into China on the Silk Road.




It's the last gate in the great wall. It's a well-known tourist specimen with an amazing story/myth. You might have heard about it (i hadn't, i'm ashamed to admit). The one where the 14th century (Ming) engineer was instructed to specify precisely the materials that would be needed to build the fort, and after it was finished there remained only one brick. The brick is on the ledge in the picture below:

The journey + Beijing

SEPTEMBER 8, 2007: OK so, having armed myself (ie ourselves) with a telescopic police baton (purchased from a Songyuan sports store), Boxxy and i have bid farewell to the city of Chinese pirates and set out on a rather epic adventure.

The mission is to ride bicycles from the start of the Great Wall to the end, or the end to the start, no-one really knows which. Since we just bid farewell to our adopted home, some final pictures from "Songyuarrrgh" (Songyuarr interesantes click here for more):





We only have five months, and the unabashedly cruel Chinese winter is going to do its best to stop us so there's a distinct possibility that we'll fail. And as and when we do or don't you, the consumer, will be the first to know about it.

But now we're here in this desert...my prejucided ideas compel me to call it a desert backwater but ironically this place is seriously the most advanced, poverty-free, prosperous, advanced Chinese city we've seen...

Incidentally, i've also updated the hilarious Chinese products section, for your enjoyment.

Alright we came via Beijing and judging by the overwhelming numbers of pink, sloppy, wobbling, rolling "waiguoren" (foreigners, ie white people), i don't really need to describe it further. Your mother and father/uncle and aunt have probably been there so ask them next time you're bored at a family get together.


Tiananmen Square was just a plain disappointment - way smaller than i imagined based on the now-blocked-again Wikipedia (i think the Chinese Government has blocked and un-blocked it at least 4 times now...i don't understand how that's going to increase the people's trust in them, but the claim that Tiananmen is the biggest square in the world must be pure shite, whichever location it comes from). The only aspect worth talking about was the congealing of above "waiguoren". Just look at them...


Flying the flag alright, that bunch.

Yes, and apart from the garden just before the exit, the Forbidden City (Emperor place) also pretty much sucks balls. That is, the part of it that we tourist hordes were allowed to see. Utterly overrun by tourists and tourist conveniences (which we, of course in our hypocritical tourist guise, took advantage of). The place is rebuilt/restored beyond what's believably authentic, yet in the process they haven't made it beautiful or comfortable. In fact, given X dozen emperors lived there, its lack of comfort is most likely quite inauthentic. That said, the garden at the back had plenty of interesting shit.




Unbelievably, that night we couldn't, despite our best efforts, find a taxi driver that knew where a nightclub was in Beijing.

Even more unbelievably, the next day our assigned, cocksure, certified, Bill-befriended Beijing-expert taxi driver dropped us off at the wrong train station. Now, i don't know if you know why we're so fucking late starting this trip...but the reason is there are NO train tickets at this time of year - to almost any place, let along one of the furthest-flung cities from Beijing. The university students basically render the whole system inoperable for almost 3 weeks. So we were waiting in Songyuan, waiting for tickets. Then Bill, our Mongolian trillionaire school boss, very kindly pulled some strings at the central government and we suddenly had two of the rarest tickets on the planet. So you could say this "added an X-factor into the mix" when i consulted the train information desk as to why our train was not listed on the departure board, and the reply came that our train was leaving from a different station on the other side of the city. The city, that is, with some of the worst traffic issues on the planet. In 25 minutes' time.

We trundled outside (trundled is, i believe, an appropriate approximation for the movement of the fat, pink, "waiguoren" described above, and, with our 40+kg of awkwardly shaped bicycle luggage, us at the fastest possible pace), and i yelled for someone to take us to the other station fast. Immediately an unscrupulous cunt tried to rope us in for 200RMB ($35) but his luck ran out as it dawned on me that we were completely fucked. As such, he got told.

But 30m down the taxi rank, we stumbled upon another driver whom we confronted with the idea of 50RMB ($9) to try to get us across town in time. He demanded 70RMB ($11), we agreed, and suddenly two other Chinese people appeared (maybe they had been waiting) and we were hurtling down the crowded freeway. The driver demanded my train ticket. We were heartened by his explanation that he needed it to use when the police stopped him. But we knew we were still legitimately fucked.

"We've already missed the train, and now we're risking our lives, and the lives of two other people," a manditorily seatbelt-less Boxxy commented to a manditorily seatbelt-less me (in the middle-back windscreen seat) as the driver sped towards a red light at 100+km/h. I agreed.

But we just didn't count on the genius of the driver - even despite his devious appearance. Stop at a red light? No, no need in China. Just skip the queue using the bike lanes on either side of the road. Stop for bikes? No, just hold down the horn. Take a gamble at a fork in the road on whether to take the reliably-jammed station road or take the long route around the back? No, just go straight on through the light railway and decide once the situation is clear. Just 12 amphetamine minutes after we left Beijing West station, we were trundling again at top speed through the crowded foyer of Beijing (East) Station, pushing our way though the long, bemused queues, screaming the time of our train at the top of our lungs.

We spent the first 30 minutes of the train ride just sitting there, i'm not kidding, in total disbelief that we'd actually made it. The effect wasn't quite equal to the effect of certain drugs - "i think we both know what we're talking about here" - but it was much greater than the effect of some very expensive substances.


About 6 hours into the train trip we got our first glimpse of the wall.


Here's some scenery from where we are now. Ok enough. I'm armed. I'm out.

Ji'an, North Korea and Changbai Mountain tourism

AUGUST 23, 2007: Headed down to the North Korean border on the weekend, to a small town called Ji'an.Photos

The border is the Yalu, or "Green Duck" River. It's about 300-400m wide, and, while we were there at least, high, rising and moving very quickly. But aside from the current there's nothing at all to stop North Koreans from swimming across if they want to.

The view into Kim-Land was of averagely-dressed people of average weight doing average things - pulling in fishing nets, riding bikes, walking along the river. Not surprising - that would be what Kim would like the Chinese to see. However, to know more about that situation, click here to read the account of a North Korea expert on his journey up the Yalu River.

The Dear Reader can't hide the towering bare green mountains, though - click here to see a panorama. On the Chinese side, the forests were in surprisingly good shape. Chinese, or at any rate Jilin farmers just stick to the valleys. It's hard to understand given there's so damn many of them. You hear a lot about the 'cataclysmic environmental destruction' in China, but here it's nothing like East Timor or Indonesia or Malaysian Borneo.

Actually, they're already out-sourcing at least some environmental destruction: a report cited by the UN Environment Programme says that since China banned logging in 1998, it has been responsible for much of the logging of Indonesian forests, so you've got to wonder whether the bare slopes on the North Korean side are actually the reason for the presence of the forests opposite.

Driving around near the border, i couldn't escape how much the pair of us might have seemed like a western spy cell. One a whitey, bargaining stingily in an attempt to appear a budget traveller; but not interested in visiting the tourist sites - only North Korea; incessantly taking pictures, especially of North Korea and border infrastructure; and with just enough Chinese to ask for important information like, "How do you get to North Korea?". The other, clearly a member of some disenfranchised minority - but definitely Chinese - pretending she didn't understand a word, while quietly noting down every detail. The alleged spies' "high-resolution" scans of the infrastructure and location of the North Korean city of Manpo is here.




Ji'an's got ancient pyramids like the one at the top of this page and though it's a good place for scenery absorption, we only had one night there. So without even meeting any Koreans, we went back to Tonghua, the nearest city, via a truly spectacular bus ride, for which the cameras did the mountains no justice at all.

The cameras were much more at home immortalising this hilarious menu in a Tonghua coffee shop. Coffee shops here are falling over each other to appear more western than the next...this means an English-language menu is a must - if no-one at your company speaks English, at least there's Google Translate.

Witness a small selection:


Our next (and last) destination for fly-past Chinese-style tourism was Changbaishan. It's a 2600m extinct volcano with a lake called "Heaven" right on top, in the crater. It's incredibly famous and, having not even laid eyes on a hill since we arrived, it wouldn't have been right to leave Jilin Province without visiting its preeminent landmark.

Questionable judgement and an inbuilt aversion to package tours left us on hard seats on an overnight train. Yellow socks, yellow feet, protruding limbs and sleepless misery were the order of the night. At least we were heading in the right direction. I spent most of the night drunkenly talking with an artist from Liaoning who was heading out for work. We got off the train at 5.30am feeling foul.

We were immediately accosted by an energetic 'helper', fishing for tourists to provide a range of tourist services to: "Taxi?" No. "Changbaishan?"
Not yet. "Eat?" No! We just want to sleep! Despite - or perhaps because of our terrible state of mind, on the way to the hotel (it was across the street) she roped the pair of us in for the trip to Changbaishan. "We'll leave at 9," she told us. Boxxy showered while i tried to sleep. Neither of these simple tasks had any chance of being completed before fists were banging on the doors (shower and bedroom respectively). "We must go. Not enough time!" demanded a pushy voice outside the bedroom. "No way," i replied. "You said 9 o'clock, i'm sleeping."

"That's too late, rain falls," the voice said. "We go now."

"We'll just go at 9, thanks anyway. I want to sleep."

"No cars at 9."

Fuck it, i thought. I probably should have just told them straight out to leave before i jammed a ballpoint pen into their eye. The contention that there would be no cars was utterly ridiculous - any taxi in the town would take us there. But i was in such a malleably sleep deprived state that merely having the image of no cars to the mountain was enough. So, in desperate need of both food and sleep, off we went.

I saw, when i came outside, why they were so anxious for us to come quickly - four other tourists were already waiting to go. Add us and they had filled the van. Dirty lying bastards. To make matters worse, the dawdling journey included a 45-minute stop to allow other passengers to go white water rafting, and another 30-minute stop at a peripheral tourist attraction we had no desire to pay any attention to.

At long last we reached the gate - having long before spied the snaking trail of tourist hordes. This mountain must seriously be one of the most heavily trodden "natural protection area"s in the world. Lucky for it it's impenetrable with snow for 5 months a year.

There were tour groups arriving in their dozens. There were hordes queueing to buy entry tickets, at 168RMB each. There were hordes at the gate to use said tickets. Less than a drop punt away there awaited further hordes, this time trying to get onto the sleek new buses shuttling people up and down the mountain, to and from the scenic spots. When i say 'hordes', i mean hordes. Queues in China are not a respected concept. Perhaps they're seen as being for the weak, i don't know. But any time you stand in what appears to be a queue, you'll find people pushing you out of the way from behind or phasing in on your flanks.

The bus ride finished at a car park and "shopping area" according to the map, below the rim of the volcano's rim. We walked out into the tourist playground (a forest/mountain walkway) - very slowly so as to allow the rest of our busload to go on ahead. Alas, after a meagre 2 minutes of relative calm, the next busload arrived and we were swamped. I believe this continues all day, about one bus every 3 minutes.

Anyway the scenery was amazing.


After a couple of boiled eggs from the hot springs, we headed for the Heaven Lake. And, lo and behold, another nose-to-tail transport snake, another fucking extortionate ticket price. Getting to the top was not even included in the 168RMB entry. (Remember, 168RMB is worth approximately the same as $168 here.) Nobody warned us, and we simply didn't have it. There's no bank for miles and i doubt you can get back in after you leave.

Changbaishan tourist playground is a pretty good analogy for China as a whole - highly organised, probably too highly organised on a grand scale, yet with chaos never far away on the ground. Weight of numbers can never be defeated.

So away we went, back to Changchun.

Zoo

AUGUST 22, 2007: Our last trip to Chanchun two weeks ago to buy bicycles was quite uneventful - apart from the arrival
(in which we were turned away from 3 successive hotels because, so one of them told us AFTER we agreed to take a room, the boss said they "cannot take foreigners" [that was the exact wording in each case], leaving us with to return to the bug-infested prostitution tower [which we only found out it was on the last day, and in whose communal showers Boxxy had been very concerned about getting naked in front of what turned out to be whores])
and the departure (in which the situation boiled down to a perilous and desperate goose-chase [goose doing the chasing], dashing and weaving through Chinese rush-hour traffic on a brand new touring bike at top speed to pick up another touring bike and transport them both to the bus station before the last bus departed, [so fast, in fact, that the bike shop owners waiting outside watched, bemused, as the goose swept right past the shop and hurtled on down the street]).


Wishing to avoid a repeat of this (mainly the staying in the flea/whorebag part), we bought our bus ticket early and chilled in the afternoon. At the Changchun Zoo.

It was always going to be horrific. I include only the above photo of a mankey who had just mankey-slapped me. If you want to be horrified - horrified in a very predictable way, you can go here.

The Cold China Urban Decay Expansion Pack

AUGUST 12, 2007: This has been a long time coming: 77 of the most rapidly decaying scenes you'll ever see, direct from the land where urban decay is the rule rather than the exception. You can download it here, probably best to unzip it then view as slide show, especially if you're a decay seeker.

In case you didn't know, the buildings here are so bad that even the seediest South London council estate block transplanted into the middle of oil-rich Songyuan would look like a palace.

What i find most fascinating about urban decay is the way it shows what'll happen to the world's cities after the collapse of civilisation. China's buildings decay almost fast enough for falling chips of concrete cladding and tile to be a(nother) pedestrian hazard. And with a day to spare in the Songyuan spring, you could, if you wanted to, witness the weeds on a ten-storey roof emerge over the parapet and into public view. Someone wrote in New Scientist last year about "how quickly Earth will forget us". I'm surprised they didn't mention China's buildings. It's like watching a videotape of the post-apocalyptic world in fast-forward.

Some of these photos are ok, some of them are not really. Most of them are quite old. The reason for this is, unbelievable as this may seem to those who know me, China has so saturated my senses with urban decay that it actually now seems quite mundane.

I came to China thinking i'd be in urban decay heaven and for a time, i was. I even wrote a passionate description of a visit to a friend's house in a place that in the West would be a most terrifying ghetto. I somehow lost it and didn't have the motivation to re-write it.

Because you realise after a time here that this, although it captures the man-vs-nature battle i mentioned above, it's not really urban decay. For a start, most of the buildings in these pictures are less than 10 years old. And, more importantly, rich and successful people live in these kinds of places. In rich countries, urban decay's a massive, vivid, visual rendering of the society's imperfections. In China no-one gives a shit about how the buildings look when there's money to be made or a better life to be had.

Anyway, decay afficionados and future-watchers should enjoy this.

The not so general hospital

AUGUST 16, 2007: Boxxy's rather nasty coughing illness led to our first infiltration of what Wiki-Travel calls "China's hyper-capitalist health care system".

Bill predictably directed us to the best, most advanced, well serviced hospital in Songyuan, "Oilfield Hospital".

Oilfield Hospital, like the equally well-appointed Oilfield High School, is a private enterprise offering a base-level social service, owned by a government-owned company. Get it? Basically, a government-owned private hospital. The 'Communist' government has this preoccupation with appearing as capitalist as possible, both at home and abroad. (One day i hope to fill a book cataloguing this often tragic and still more often amusing irony.)

The lobby resembled a medium sized train station (admittedly at an unusually quiet time - it was full of people as opposed to teetering on the brink of implosion with people), complete with ragged cleaners trailing filthy mops around and indoor smoking. Its main purpose was to facilitate queuing at the endless rows of ticket windows. At Oilfield Hospital, all patients must queue up and pay each time before any treatment or consultation (except for oilfield employees, they instead queue up and flash a card before receiving treatment).

The consulting rooms, too, were a stereotypically Chinese affair. First of all, the familiar stench of toilets emanating from 10m down the corridor. And there is no waiting before you get to see the doctor in China. By that i don't mean there's no waiting before your consultation - rather, you join the queue inside the doctor's room and watch on while the doctor consults, listening to people in front of you describe their symptoms, history, medications, family tragedies etc. and holding your breath for the diagnosis. This is particularly interesting, i imagine, when you're a local in a city with 7 foreigners and one of them (who appears to you Chinese) is being consulted via an translator, while another (who appears decidedly less Chinese) stands by and chips in with earnest, mangled Chinese sentences.


The doctor ordered blood tests and x-rays, so of course we went straight back to the ticket counters to queue up and pay.

At the blood testing area there was again no waiting. And it wasn't hard to see why: no kind-hearted, reassuring nurses, no hydraulic pain-reducing tourniquet, no pomp and ceremony, just a row of 6 train station ticket windows, a strip of rubber tubing and a very industrious blood-taker who didn't even say hello.

The X-ray zone was also, by Western standards, nothing short of recklessly efficient. Again, no waiting. Just a doctor in one room, an X-ray machine next door. No lectures, no dressing gowns, removing of clothes containing metal, or emptying of pockets. No printouts were required, the doctor simply looked inside Boxxy's chest and slapped a big red 'normal' stamp on her test form. The reinforced steel door to the room containing the X-ray machine had on it an imposingly large radiation sign and a warning in Chinese. Still, no-one saw fit to waste any time closing it, even while the machine was firing its carcinogenic impulses.

Two hours later we returned to get the blood test results. We arrived during lunch hour and found the hospital deserted. There weren't even any doctors, except (so we were told) in emergency. In keeping with the consulting rooms' level of privacy, all the patients' blood test results were spread out across a counter to be picked up at the patients' leisure. I'd be surprised if HIV+ results got treated any differently.

"It just didn't seem sterilised," was Boxxy's take on it, though this description shouldn't be taken as a complaint because the medicine prescribed does seem to have cleared up her cough.