lhasa.

It's good to be king, before 1959.

Tibetans, we realized immediately, are much, much better looking than Han Chinese. They're also quite a bit sweeter. The children ran up to my (Dutch and German) traveling companions to practice their English. Everybody smiled; nobody hollered. It was warm, and the sky was a magnificent shade of blue. Lhasa, at first glance, seemed suspiciously perfect. Portola Palace, like a luscious, strawberry layer cake-in-the-clouds, holds an impotent, innocuous court over white picket pedestrian fences, perfectly-hemmed hedges, outdoor fruit vendors, cheerful cookie shops. Pretty, subtle Jankhor Temple, with its bastions of smiling pilgrims, sits swathed in brightly-colored prayer flags, amidst the hustle of the large, outdoor market, in which turquoise trinkets and furry hats are being gently hocked to an amalgam of Han, Tibetan and Western passersby. Pleasantly-voiced public service announcements, aired over sporadic gold megaphones affixed to bright white lamp posts, reminded us that dental care was a personal priority.

(I was glad, presently, that I hadn't emptied my pockets on outdoor apparel in Chengdu, the more loosely regulated Lhasa economy was host to plenty of handsome, knock-off North Face goods. Gortex + soft shell = 100rmb.)

We spent our first day touring the immaculate Portola Palace and strolling the manageable surrounding areas. It's a rather young, liberal American attitude, I think, to suspect religious politicos. In contemplating the China-Tibet issue, of which I really have very little information, I was trying to get a sense of why, to teach and observe a religion who preached immaterial absolution, the venerable lamas should reside in some severely bejeweled, five thousand rooms. The gigantic gold stupas, encrusted with egg-sized coral and turquoise hunks - which we would see throughout Tibetan monasteries - were being visited by Tibetans hunched with poverty. Alms were being shoved in the stupas' foundations. Paper money meant for the exiled lamas rained down from the upper levels of the Portola and rotted, untouched, in the gutters. Meanwhile, smaller alleys revealed a grittier Lhasa, where toothless men and dirty children begged anybody who didn't look Tibetan, presumably for more alms to stuff into the ostentatious altars. Hunks of hooved, raw yak meat hung from bloodied butcher counters. Flies gathered, nested. The stink of the yak butter smeared on oily prayer flags and altars clung to our clothes. And long parades of soldiers - with shields and automatic weapons and loads of cigarettes and bad teeth - trampled on withered fruit and loose alms that had presumably rained down from Portola.
Our motley band of five bilingual strangers hailing from a combined total of four countries and possessing, in addition to those passports, four additional unrelated ethnicities, afterwards dined together on spicy lamb chops, fried momos and Lhasa Beer.

the qinghai-tibet railway photolog.

Views from the top of the world-

We left Chengdu at 8:30PM, September 18

Dusty Gangsu Province by dawn. . .

. . . becomes an afternoon of reading, backed by occasional waters.

Evening ascent towards the Tanggula Pass (~5,000m high!)

We wake on the second day to. . . snow!

The bluest skies I've seen all year. . .


Ice-cream mountains roll by for listless hours. . .

. . . until finally, at 5:27, September 20-!

a little r&r

I enjoy traveling alone for all the normal reasons - I like to arrange my own itinerary, it's always easier with one, etc. Then there's a whole pastiche of personal reasons, which can largely be summed up as I'm anal-retentive. I think most folks prefer a little leisure and extravagance when on holiday. I'm agreeable, to an extent, in company, but when I have my own way, I go into what my laptop calls Better Energy Savings mode. I'll live in the same clothes for days, and take on one meal per day. I can function relatively well on relatively little sleep, and I'll put this advantage into overdrive when I'm on the road. Frugality is as much as habit in life as it is an obsession while traveling.

To top it all off, I'm impatient as hell. Timeliness and speed are important to me. I hate waiting on others. I'm judgmental of people who can't keep up physically. I'm cheap. When avoidable, I don't eat or sleep. So, I suppose the bigger reason I enjoy traveling alone is that I'm terrible to travel with. Of course company can be nice - it was good, for instance, to bounce would-you-rathers off Candace, Joyce and David during the (infinitely) long hike up Huang Shan; Stephanie's welcome presence enlivened Nanjing considerably; I wouldn't have gotten so down and dirty in Shanghai nightlife had it not been for Phil & co. But, generally speaking, there it is.

Having time to kill, however, before taking off to Tibet and reminding myself that relaxation is the catchword of the Sichuanese, I wandered down to the southern end of Chengdu, and, as if by magic, stumbled upon a gem of an English bookstore, The Bookworm.

The bar / cafe / library / bookstore, with branches in Beijing and Souzhou, lent me one of its leather couches for the afternoon. I went a little wild; I ordered chocolate cake and port, and spent several hours curled up with a few different volumes, plucked from high mahogany shelves that seemed to go on forever. It was entirely excellent.

jiu zhai go

The Valley of the Nine Villages is populated largely by Tibetan and Qiang minority families, and sits just to the north of the epicenter of May's big earthquake. It was not known until the 1970's that the Min Mountains were host to a fantastic, almost mystical series of lakes - undisturbed for so long that the water takes on a deep aqua-purple color under the right light.
It was overcast, however, when I spent the day trekking from lake to lake, realizing that, despite my predilection for creature comforts and cultural sight-seeing, that being alone, in the mountains, by the water, in the cold, can fulfill on a completely different level. The water, anyway, looked like this:



And like this, a little higher up:



And like this, when it's serving as a reflective plate for the vain vegetation surrounding Mirror Lake:

huang long.

I was starting to feel a little apprehensive, prior to landing in mountainous northern region of Sichuan Province - a slight shift north-east of the epicenter of the big earthquake - were these two days of hiking going to take the wind out of Tibet? Do I even like hiking? Were the dreamy photographs of the area's two principle reserves - Huang Long and Jiu Zhai Gou - to be believed? And, it looked bloody cold out there!

I realized in Chengdu that a lifelong aesthetic distaste for athletic wear and gear had left me woefully unprepared for three weeks in the mountains and the cold. I'd wandered idly and ignorantly into a couple of trekking apparel stores only to discover that-! This shit was expensive! And unwarranted, because the same puce-toned fleeces and body-bag backpacks that I'd shuddered at in Amherst apparently hadn't yet gone out of fashion. I had left in a huff, and instead spent 114rmb (about $16USD) instead at a Chinese supermarket on two pairs of shiny waterproof pants and two breathable "bamboo" jumpers. If I was going to look like a moron, I was going to do it on the cheap.

The sight that greeted me upon landing in Jiu Zhai Gou swept away all stresses and grumpiness. We were high up in the Minshang mountain range, where snowy peaks and stratus clouds reigned. And rained (but only a little). It was surprising and beautiful.

The Huang Long peaks - at an altitude of about 3,200km - would be a respiratory appetizer for Tibet. I began to feel a little light-headed during the ascent. I met and chatted with the only other lone hiker in sight, Yan, who, at 22, was about to enter his final year at Durham University in England. He talked a lot, and was pretty funny. He also bore the burden of a whopping SLR with a little cache of lenses, spare batteries and memory cards.

Huang Long's travertine basins are its pride and glory. And stunning they were! - all smoke-lit and luminescent, the color of swimming pools :

Lovely, right? Apparently, Yellowstone's got a famed collection of travertine terraces as well. . . which I might have known, had I ever bothered to get nature-y in the States.

Yan and I commiserated over the timing of our trip - just about two weeks too early to catch the ripening autumn colors rippling red and gold frames all around the exquisite aquamarine pools. To our disappointment, we found that another section of basins were blocked off due to earthquake-related damages. When we finished the trail, Yan took my arm and marched us into the ticket office, where he insisted on getting our reserve admission tickets refunded because of the inaccessible areas. The woman shrugged him off.

Yan then asked to use her phone, and dialed the recreation area office. He demanded a sit-down with somebody in charge. It was getting late; I was feeling a little restless and hopeless about the whole operation. To my surprise, the recreation office sent two managers out by Jeep to the ticket office. Yan went on a pursuasive and hilarious little diatribe, weaving an intricate story of crushed hopes and blown savings, in which I was cast as the confused and litigious American, and he, the poor but patriotic college student.

In the end, we didn't get our money back, but they loaded us up with a ton of crap from the gift shop. 'Not bad, Durham.' I offered him my hand. 'Nice work being my bitchy American girlfriend,' he returned, handing over the bag of DVDs, books and keychains.

hot! pot.

The sallow cheeks and strikingly small stature of the Sichuanese do not betray the culinary peculiarity associated with the region an experience in which traveler's curiosity, coupled with ignoble hubris, led me to partake. It was by far the most unique dining experience I'd ever had.
BiXia, precisely eight years my senior (by curious coincedence we share a birthday) was seated across from me. Between us, straddling the diameter of the large hole cut into the table, was an igneous cauldron of mephestous, red oil and lard, bubbling and foaming like rapid, predatory jaws.
This was the infamous Sichuan hotpot. At the core of the metal basin rested 'the chaser', a cup of clear broth into which some sparse-looking herbs and a quarted cod carcass had been tossed for flavor. Flanking the viscious conconction wa a bowl of minced garlic and a dish of diced cilantro.
To the left of all that, we lined the three bottles of water we'd preemptively purchased across the street.
Our meal, bland and ecru-hued, soon arrived. Cabbage blooms, raw tofu, sprigs of mushrooms and bean sprouts, gluton cakes and heavy udon were ceremoniously sacrificed into the volcanic pit. Each morsel surfaced momentarily, bloodied, before going limp and falling back into the hot pot's molten depths. We waited for the food to cook, and following my companion's approval, began chop-sticking steaming, zombified food onto our plates.
Sichuanese fare is typically described as 'ma la' - 'la' being the obligatory 'spicy' and 'ma' indicating a hyperbolic (or so I thought) 'numbing'. After a few intensely spicy, but more or less manageable, bites, all oral sensations of taste and temperature had been replaced by an uncanny tingling sensation. It spread out across my lips, up through the cavity between my nose and mouth, and down into my throat, where it seemed to melt the flesh away, like carbonic acid.
Soon, eating was a solely purfunctory activity. We mechanically scooped floating bits of fibrous carrion into our mouths. We chewed, eyes, noses and brows running. We swallowed, paused to afford our ravaged pipes the courtesy of water. Rinsed; repeat.
"I don't reckon Sichuan men try to drink one another under the table," I remarked (gasped) to BiXia, an ecology professor from Fu Zhou. She pointed out that it wasn't tenacious dudes, drunk off cabbages that dined all around us that Mid-Autumn Fest eve, but families. Babies and geriatrics, I supposed, were all busily numbing out there digestive systems to simaltaneously facilitate the feeding. To my mind, it all required a certain degree of madness. By the time we settled our check, we looked as though we'd been sobbing for hours. I thought that we'd probably consummed a little less than a quarter of the veggies we'd ordered, leaving the rest to float and bloat.
I imagined my stomach to be a vat of hot oil and fire. I could feel it roar when I stood up. The lower half of my face had lost sensation altogether. BiXia cheerfully walked and steered us hostel-ward.

sichuan, baby!

Feeding time (every three hours, or so) at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Facility




"I'm so cute, I exist despite my species' staunch proclivity toward extinction."




"Is there a carbon monoxide leak in here?"

The rail station at Chengdu resembled every other rail station I've seen in China. The Chinese, I later proposed to friends newly made, haven't suffered the luxury of metropolises long enough to internalize the need to escape, to nature, to solitude. Shopping malls are still a novelty. The surrounding area, too, was generically Chinese. Dusty, dirty commercial centers, lots of cabs and cars. Only this was Sichuan, and not Shanghai - Chengdu, while a junior Chinese cosmopolitan of eleven million strong, still lagged behind its coastal counterparts in many respects. There was no subway system. Squatter toilets would be the norm.

Chengdu - and Sichuan at large - is notoriously care-free, to the point of scornable laziness, to the mind of the typically type-A, fashion-forward, money-driven Shanghainese. (Fitting that the giant panda, mind-blowingly lazy/cute spetial leech makes its home here.) It's also, I discovered, a backpackers' haven. Chengdu is the gateway to a number of attractive adventures - the last big Chinese city before the mighty Tibetan Autonomous Region to the west; exotic XinJiang to the north, and the splendid southern Yangtse River regions of Yunnan and Guangzhou.

Sichuan itself is famously beautiful. Magical, mist-shrouded mountains and mirrored lakes line the northen region. Cultural minorities and their farms and ponies and snow-capped pilgrimages can be found in pockets along the southern and western borders. I decided that Jiu Zhai Go, a picturesque reserve 330 km north of Chengdu was a must-see; the Shaolin mountains nearer to Chengdu would make good day trips; Tibet, if accessible, would be a treat.

the long grift.

The train ride from Shanghai to Chengdu, the centrally-situated capital of Sichuan Province, takes thirty-six hours. I'd harbored some real, rose-colored projections regarding this transport - sunrises searing a changing landscape; lamp lit nights tucked into a soft sleep bunk with a book while the host locomotive jetted west-ward through the night; refreshment trolleys loaded with Hogwartsian sweets. In my fantasy, foreign love and paternal porters lay just beyond the next cabin.

The dream, alas, was speckled with fallacy. Hard sleepers were economical, not to mention the only available way to travel. Hard sleepers, from what I understood, resembled concentration camp bunk beds. There were no walls; just head-to-toe layers of thinly-mattressed cots. 'Locomotive', also, was a romantic mental euphemism for a rusted train with paint-splattered walls, dirty linoleum, and two squatter toilets per car. I decided almost immediately to volunteer myself for thirty-six hours of unconsciousness, which I achieved, more or less, successfully. I polished off a light and appetizing novel and one apple, and commenced with coma. I was roused periodically by porters vending instant noodles or gruelly rice porridge ladled from a wooden cauldron on a cart, but rather successfully staved off nutritional, excremental and conversational activities until we neared Chengdu, one-and-one-half days after boarding the train.

The woman occupying the adjacent bunk immediately offered me bread and fruit upon my awakening, perhaps thinking that I was gravely ill for not having eaten or stirred much since Shanghai. We conversed in the way I parlay with everybody I meet in China: I let them do most of the talking, and lie in the convenient direction when asked about myself or nod in agreement. I surmised immediately that she was a working class lass - most likely somebody's hired help. She was returning home to Chengdu for the first time in three years. The thought of a three-year absence from anywhere - the States or New England or New York or home-home in California still makes me nervous, although time began to pass more anonymously and smoothly somewhere around the eight-month mark. In July, loneliness crested; desperation reared. Today, however, newly arrived in Chengdu, I felt good.

interrupting. . .

. . . regularly-scheduled nothingness to pen pensives re: the following itinerary:

9/13 - Chengdu
9/16 - Jiu Zhai Go
9/18 - Tibet
9/30 - Kathmandu OR Chengdu
10/3 - Xi'an

小 資 .

There are lots of ways to blow dough in shanghai. There are German cars and Italian leathers that line big, glassy boulevards. You could book the private bower at the Cupola, and have dinner and champagne for two in the ballpark of $2,000. You could have a *really* wild night on the Bund; you could buy art (if this is your fancy, you should call me). yYou could spend a wad of cash to get out of shanghai - to Hainan, to Yunnan, Xinjiang if you're a culturally adventurous, Japan if you're a baller, Singapore if you're corporate.

Pretty much everybody, though, who spends any significant time here, has chosen at one time or another flash cash at the Pacific Digital Mall at Xujiahui. Xujiahui, be noted, is a fantastically futuristic nexis of consumerism. The subway stop has sixteen distinct exits, each pumping queues of Chinese people into separate shopping havens. On one end, resembling a silver layer-cake, is Grand Gateway Plaza, a high-end mall so glamorous it has its own cab line. On the other, the giant chrome globe of Metro City lords over the steroidal intersection of three major avenues. Dwarfed by this sensation is the demure, but never forgotten PacDigital Mall.

I'm not a big techie, but it's hard not to get excited at the sight of the entrance (itself an extension of Exit 10) - the first of eleven floors of electronic fantasies, each one with possessing the inviting, solicitous gleam of the floor-sized cosmetics counters of any major department store.

The first two floors alone are devoted to cameras and photography accessories, which is where I first jetted, to haggle for a new telephoto lens in anticipation of this week's trip to Sichuan and Tibet. (For the record, I'm now the happy owner of the 55-200mm Nikon VR.) The third floor is digital storage. Memory cards, external hard drives, thumb drives the size of thumbnails fill display cases like silicon candy. I took the escalator up past floors of palm-sized laptops, wall-sized flat screen televisions, technicolored MP3 players, and stopped at the fourth floor to pick up a cell phone, as my old one had unceremoniously bit the dust a week before. After a bit of window shopping and a good deal of haggling, I settled on the clean and tasteful Nokia 2680.

I skipped out with my packages, and crossed over to Grand Gateway. Costa Coffee pours out onto a terrace over looking Xujiahui, and it was a seasonably perfect afternoon to people watch from that quiet height, between reading and sipping designer coffee.