India: From Little Tibet through Little Israel to Delhi

We’re now almost leaving India and in our last days in Bombai. We traveled south through the beautiful desert areas of Rajasthan and Gujarat, where we felt, after more than a month traveling in India, that we finally arrived in India. But first we had to get there through places that were imagined abroad and brought ready-made to India…

Upper Dharamshala, also known as McLeod Ganj, also known as Little Lhasa and also known as where the Dalai Lama lives…

I knew that the ride from Manali was going to be tough, up and down and round and round. And this time I took some motion-sickness pills. So I got completely stoned and slept the whole way.

Quickly after we arrived in McLeod Ganj, we found Iohi’s sister with her friend on the main street of the town.

McLeod Ganj is the paradise of bored Europeans or people from the US that want to save the Tibet. You have where the Dalai Lama lives and his  monastery,and there are many activities and volunteering related to Tibet; and of course the “Save the Tibet” and Dalai Lama memorabilia. If you check the wiki travel page of the Dharamshala, you have a whole section with excruciating details explaining how to force a meeting with the Dalai Lama, “the dream of a lifetime for many people”. I have nothing against Tibetans or Tibetan Buddhist, but it’s a bit over the top. It’s just fashionable to “Save the Tibet”, when in fact they are not having such a bad time in India. If you go to Calcutta or many places in the West Bengal and Bihar states, you’ll see poverty beyond your imagination, Indian people without food, living and dying on the streets. But I guess they are in a really tough situation and it’s nicer to volunteer with healthy people and in a place with nice view.

And it has nothing to do with Tibetan’s autonomy, it’s true, they deserve an autonomous country, and they have been oppressed by the Chinese government. But who in China hasn’t been oppressed, intellectuals, artists, Falung Gong, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, you name it, it has been oppressed. And I haven’t meet Europeans trying to save the Uighurs and give autonomy to China's Xinjiang Region, and they deserve it as much as Tibetans. Well, of course, Buddhism is still more fashionable than Islam…

Tsuglagkhang Complex, Dalai Lama's monastery

At the Dalai Lama's monastery

From McLeod Ganj we moved to a quieter and smaller town just above it, Daramkot. It’s a backpackers bubble without all the Tibetan paraphernalia, but not so different from Manali: lots of Israelis, charas and tourist food, on the brighter side it’s less crowded with shops and people, and you can see the green mountains from the whole town. 

On our last day we walked from Daramkot to McLeod Ganj through another backpacker town: Bagsu. Bagsu is pretty much Little Israel. If you take South Tel Aviv neighborhoods and you put them in a slope you’ll get Bagsu. You have signs in Hebrew, falafel, Israeli shanty-hippy style clothes, people selling and making stuff completely unrelated to India but that the Israeli shanty-hippy community loves such as Australian didgeridoos and Jamaican dreadlocks. And of course you’ll find people that got stuck there for weeks and can think that Tibet is in Goa, complain that they can’t find the traditional chai as they drank it in Israel or look at a trash bin and say “this is magical”. This is India as Israelis want India to be, just as they imagined it from home, and Indians built it for them.

If you're shocked, read what the swastika really means

And the thing is I love Tel Aviv and specially the artsy South Tel Aviv neighborhoods, I also like very much falafels and I even find didgeridoos quite cool (and I have nothing against dreadlocks). But I love South Tel Aviv inside Tel Aviv inside Israel, not its bizarre image in India (and by the way I plainly think it’s quite stupid to travel to India to learn how to make a didgeridoo, especially when you have to carry the rest of the trip an excessively large and heavy piece of wood)

While we waited to aboard the bus back to Delhi we talked with a Hindu girl from Delhi who traveled to Tushita (near Dharamshala) to do some kind of retire with a Buddhism workshop. She told us that half of the people also there were Israeli and she even told us the well-known joke about Israelis in India:

An Indian guy asks an Israeli tourist how many people are in Israel. The Israeli answers 6 millions. The Indian guy replies: “No, not how many Israelis are in India, how many in Israel!?”

Delhi

After a smooth bus travel we woke up again in Delhi. We stayed in the same place as last time on the extremely noisy Main Bazaar street. We spent only one day there and most of it went by trying to get information about how the hell we travel to Shekhawati region in Rajasthan. Shekhawati region is at the northern part of Rajasthan state and Rajasthan is at the south of Delhi. So we supposed it should be easy to get there. However, it’s a bit out of the beaten track and most of the transportation goes to more famous spots like Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, etc.

We went to the Governmental Tourist Information, to a private travel agency and to the Rajasthan Tourism Development Corp. and they kept saying that they don’t know or gave us information that proved it wrong. After a whole day walking and riding autorickshaws from station to station we almost gave up.

We went back to the hotel and I did what I know how to do: I looked in Internet. I think that by this point I should get a degree in Internet Searching. Anyway, I found a strange combination taking reserved seats in the AC three tier coach of the train to Loharu. Then we had to wait for 40 minutes and take unreserved seats in a local smaller train to Nawalgarh. It was quite easy and a nice ride; and even locals from Shekhawati were a bit shocked that we managed to arrive from Delhi (and not from Jaipur) but that’s another story.

When we finally sorted out the transportation issue, it was already evening. We decided to at least take a quick glimpse at Old Delhi. We managed only to see the Red Fort from outside and we started to walk through the open market just before it began to close. It was a complete chaos and there was a traffic jam, a bike congestion and even a people congestion. If you’ve ever been to an open market on the closing time, you know it’s pretty busy. But this was as if on top of the closing market, some shops had decided suddenly to swap places, and then also most of the neighbors from the buildings over the market decided it was their moving-day. And to that, you can add maybe two demonstrations going into opposite directions. Ah, of course add many cows to the picture. But this wasn’t the case, it just looked as if all this was happening, and actually it was the regular closing time of the market…

Yunnan province: treks, buses, minibuses and other adventures

So I finally wrapped up our last experiences in China while we recover from an endless food poisoning that mixed with flu in India.

Lijiang

So from Lugu Hu we traveled to Lijiang in Yunnan province. Our friends Juan and Rebeca had booked accommodation in a hostel in Lijiang for the four of us and we were supposed to arrive there together. But we didn't. Their bus tickets were over-sold and even though the guy from the station managed to get them inside a tour bus that drove to Lijiang, we arrived in different parts of the city.

The cute rather small old city of Lijiang I knew from my previous trip seven years ago grew becoming a monster. More and more traditional buildings were built to accommodate growing masses of Chinese tourists. But of course, it wasn’t enough and walking through the crowded rambling streets of the old city with our backpacks was an excruciating task. Lijiang old city is divided in different areas with street names that repeat; and we got deeper and deeper on the wrong street with the correct name, tumbling people, listening to the different karaoke music and soloist voices from the pubs around overlapping. After one hour walking, around 8pm, we arrived to the right number of the wrong street and we were pretty desperate. By then we got a message from Juan and Rebeca with the hostel phone number and we entered to the first karaoke and begged to call the hostel. Eventually a guy from the hostel picked up us, and we walked for half an hour until we arrived there and finally met Juan and Rebeca for dinner.

That’s the whole extent of my second visit to Lijiang: on the following morning the four of us took actually the same bus up to Shangri-la (at 3200 m height).

Shangri-la (originally Zhongdian)

Chasing some of the tourism of the prosperous Lijiang (and Old Dali), officials declared the Tibetan city previously known as Zhongdian, the location of the fictional place Shangri-la (described in the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton).  It may be the case that the writer took inspiration from the writings of explorers who visited the Deqen prefecture (where Zhongdian is located), but several places in China, Tibet and even Bhutan also claim to be the real Shangri-la. But, anyway, here they went far enough to associate the city previously-known-as-Zhongdian with the fictional Shangri-la, an idyllic permanently happy land isolated from the outside world. The name of the city was changed.

And it worked. Besides, the Tibetan city became also a Western outpost: lots of expats, international initiatives to promote local handcrafts or to develop the area, and good Western food including real pizzas, pasta, yummy yak hamburgers, yak steaks, real salads. There is even a cheese shop! With excellent yak cheese! As much as we love Chinese food, it was a nice break. (And this last week in India we were craving those hamburgers!)

Even before we were close to Shangri-la we heard about Marco, an Italian guy that moved there and opened an Italian restaurant. We, of course, went there for our first meal and ordered some pizza and salad. As soon as Marco takes our order, he starts rambling in Italianspanish about fake Tibetan monks, tourists kidnapped by the Chinese army and how his restaurant isn’t in the Lonely Planet guide because he isn’t an evangelist. And then he starts to tell the history of his life: seven years ago, he married a Chinese Naxi woman, who now works with him, and opened the place. In the flow of the unclear Italianspanish that doesn’t stop, I hear something about him being a nurse. And then I remember!! I met him seven years ago in another Tibetan town called Xiahe. We even shared the room! By that time he was an eccentric 40 years old (single) backpacker, but as crazy as now, he was trying to teach English to the Tibetans to help them moving to India.

We stayed in Shangri-la some days, we wanted to do a trek “near” in Yubeng, but the weather wasn’t good and then Iohi caught the flu so we waited, hanging around with the couple we met before. They were volunteering in a school teaching English to the kids, and Iohi also eventually joined them.

Rebeca and Juan teaching English (Iohi was of course taking the pic)

Finally, we headed to our trek, and we even got an authentic Spanish chorizo colorado from Arturo who was leaving China. Thank you Arturo! We ate it with the parmesan yak cheese in toasted Tibetan bread during our trek!

Getting to Yubeng

So this is how you get to the “near” trek. You take a bus to Deqin, which takes from 6 hours to any uncertain amount of time depending on the conditions of the roads and on your luck. Then you take a minibus to Felai Si which takes around 1 hour. In Felai Si, there’s nothing but a nice view, so you sleep there and you take a jeep on the morning that takes another hour to Xidang. And then you can start. Piece of cake. Should I add that is a mountainous way and there are landslides and flooding all the time?

So fearing crowded minibuses we took the 7:40am bus and after 2 hours it stopped. We were three hours there until we understood that the bus was going to continue going only at 8 or 9 pm (yes pm) when the road was going to be cleared.

The first bus on our way to Yubeng

So yet again we left the bus and, with two Chinese couples, we took a minibus which was able to go on alternative narrow and muddy roads, where we got stuck every now and then.

Then at 9pm, when we were only a couple of hours from our destination, the axis of our car broke in the middle of nothing, and we had to move again, this time to jeep crammed with Tibetan monks. We arranged a price to Felai Si, but when we arrived in Deqin, the nice driver wanted to drop us unless we paid more.

So we paid more and then we arrived to the lousiest hostel belonging to the Youth Hostel association.

The following day it rained a lot, so we didn’t start the trek. It was so cloudy that we even didn’t see that we were surrounded by snowy peaks.

Yubeng trek (under the Meili Snow Mountain)

On the next morning we had an amazingly nice day and the snowy peaks were everywhere!

We arrived in Xidang on the morning and we started to walk up the muddy trail. Five hours later we got to the peak and we started to walk down to Upper Yubeng, the upper part of the town (at 3150 m).

Both Yubengs, upper and lower, are places which seemed to be taken from a painting. Surrounded by mountains, these small Tibetan villages with wooden and mud houses lack cars and seem completely unreal. 

In Upper Yubeng we had dinner twice on an open terrace from where the rainbow was present every afternoon.

We walked all day from there to a glacier over a half frozen lake. We drank there the best water we had ever tasted, straight from the ice in the mountains to a waterfall.

Then we moved to Lower Yubeng (which was slightly lower than the other Yubeng at 3050 m), as beautiful as Upper Yubeng, where we stayed in a room with view to the woods and a stream of water. We saw yaks and mules through our balcony and we used the first day to recover ourselves.

Our view

The next day we walked to waterfalls where we drank exquisite cold water again (yes, water can be exquisite) and on the following day we left.

I'm the blue dot

The way back from Yubeng

We took another path with two Israeli girls. It was a shorter path and without going up. For a couple of hours we walked following a river between small villages. Then we walked in a single line on a narrow trail which had a stream of water on the left near a rock wall and a very high cliff on the right. We even had to put the feet in the water when the trail was narrower and muddy or grab from the wall! The view was amazing and was scaring as hell! 

This was before it gets scary (and then we didn't take pics!)

After walking another couple of hours we reached the point where we should have easily found minibuses to Felai Si. But there weren’t.

We ended up in a construction site where we called everyone working in all the hostels around using the phone of one of the workers. It seemed that there were problems with the road again and we waited halves of hour for five hours for the minibus that didn’t arrive.

Then we caught a minibus that was going down to our direction and we cancelled the last minibus we called. But we didn’t realize until late that he was supposed to pick up a group of six Chinese that were below us. They weren’t happy to be crammed and travel with us but the driver was (he really robbed us with the price). So we contemplated again an endless Chinese quarrel until we begged the only English speaker to let us go with them to Felai Si.

We arrived to the same lousy hostel, but this time even lousier, the electricity was cut. Anyway, it was worth while; I guess that all the effort that implies arriving there makes Yubeng a rather clean, quiet and beautiful place. And we stayed there four nights, because we had already plane tickets from Kunming, but we could easily have stayed much more time, just sitting there on the nature.

We went back on the following morning to Shangri-la anyway, and we met again our friends. From Shangrila to Kunming, we suffered again with the transportation.

We thought the problem was the unreliable minibuses, but official buses were also uncomfortable and got stuck. We thought the problem was also being far from the big cities but the sleeper bus we took to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province wasn’t a joy either. It was roughly like sleeping with thirty more smelly guys in the same moving bed. Twelve hours later we arrived in Kunming.

Kunming

In Kunming we enjoyed our last days in China, a rather big but quite city with the perfect weather: it’s at an almost-tropical latitude but with a 2000 m altitude. We mainly got ready for our next destination, India, and of course we acted in a movie.

All the pictures are in Iohi's picasa.

Traveling illegally in a closed Tibetan area in west Sichuan and our last day in China

We are on our last day in China, actually I’m writing from the Kunming airport at 2 am in the beginning of my 30s birthday waiting the two hours delay to fly the Hump. We are about to do an emblematic flight from the World War II where many planes crashed (but I can already tell that we survive when we finally arrive to India from where I’ll post this).

And today we were transported even further back to the past, when we played as extras in a movie about Yunnan’s bank  Fudian in 1930s. We and a bunch of foreigners, which were offered to work as extras too, were the bad guys, French guys who evilly clapped their hands after a speech that was supposed to celebrate the exploitation of Chinese workers. And the bank somehow saved the workers. But I couldn’t find more information on the internet and I couldn’t get the name of the director. So Chinese friends (or maybe Cheng) can find out more.

But before all that, as I was telling in the last post, on July 11 we were traveling from Qinghai province in China to Serxu in Sichuan province in a brand new 4x4 with a young guy and the lama of the girl we met in Yushu.…

Serxu (or Sershu or Sershul or Dzachuka or Shiqu)

The ride took around 4 hours. During the first hour and a half the lama and the young guy tried to disconnect the alarm that was driving us crazy (until Iohi told them to just press the damn button from the keychain). The rest of the time the lama drank Redbull cans and threw them from the window, well maybe it were only two cans, but we were pretty shocked because we thought that at least Tibetan monks, and even more Tibetan lamas were a little more educated. And of course besides drinking his Redbull we made futile attempts to communicate (in Chinese).

So we arrived at a monastery in Serxu Dzong at 9pm and it was rainy and cold (well, we were still high on the mountains around 4500 m)

The place was amazingly clean and nit (and cheap) and was run by two women who seemed to be in charge of every aspect of the monastery. Everything there was refurbished or it was plainly new. We were so happy to see a clean place after all the dirty holes where we spent the previous week in Qinghai…

On the next morning we understood from a very well-spoken and worldly-wise Chinese young woman that they were preparing the place for huge celebrations in a couple of days and Buddhists from all around the world were expected.  So everything was also fully booked for the next days and even though the place was beautiful we decided just to move on and travel to Ganzi.

Ganzi (or Garze)

We took a minivan with room for seven very small passengers with already six not so small grown-ups and a monk kid, so that we started the drive as eight people. We were crammed like sardines and the fact that most of the passengers (except of the monk kid) smoked, ate chicken feet (yes, chicken feet) and drank alcohol all the way, made it also smell like the inside of a can of sardines.

One hour later, we went through a kind of border control were a police peeked in the van without seeing us. After we passed the control, some people in the van said “something laowai (which were us) something” and then they laughed. We suspected that we weren’t allowed there, but nothing happened, and then we stopped to eat 50 meters from the control (and we were completely paranoid but nothing happened again).

So we continued what it should have been a 7 or maybe an 8 hours ride. However, the dirt road was a big pool of mud because of the non-stopping rain and there was a gigantic truck stuck creating a big traffic jam over a cliff.

This is the situation every time a vehicle is stuck in these parts of China:

MOUNTAIN

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Many many cars à CAR à TRUCK ßMany many cars

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Many many cars àCAR à ß CAR ß Many many cars

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CLIFF

And then Chinese drivers get outside their cars and start shouting and discussing who should pass… for hours.

When this happened, we were stuck several hours, and we had time to recruit a new member for our van who was carrying a huge car battery. Instead of 7 or 8 hours, the drive was 12 hours jumping, feeling like a sardine milkshake. We arrived at the city at 9:00 pm and our first choice for a hotel was full.  So we were led to another place where we got an OK room with bathroom.  And then we understood how come the hotel was filled with mud and pools of water on the floor… there was no running water in all the building! People were carrying water on very shallow bowls from a huge barrel!

Then tired and hungry, we went to eat to a Tibetan restaurant which seemed the only normal place and while eating tasteless momos we saw a nice black rat fleeing from the kitchen… (OK, I know I said in the last post that our luck began to change and this doesn’t seem like that, but just wait).

Anyway, we tried to remain optimistic despite the situation and made a full detailed plan for the next day. The thing is that from the beginning we wanted to stay in a monastery close to Ganzi but it was too late to go when we arrived. So next day Iohi traveled to the monastery (which was 1 hour from the town) to check if there was room for us there, because if it was full I was going to buy bus tickets to leave the town.

And while I was buying some food in the market, the streets got suddenly extremely crowded. Then a sea of policemen and soldiers flooded the same street. There were police and military cars everywhere, and I realized that the town was also filled with a sort of portable police tin houses. Nothing happened, no clash, no shouts, no demonstrations, just lots and lots of people outside.

Police and soldiers were seeing me all time but they didn’t seem to be interested in me, until a very polite policeman dressed as civil approached me. He told me that the place wasn’t safe for me and asked me to leave the town as soon as possible, preferably the same day. I told him I was leaving the next day to Kanding and I went to buy the bus tickets… 5 minutes later, Iohi sent me a text message asking me to join her in the monastery Darjey Gompa. There were other laowais there, and they said it was ok and safe. So after a frenetic text message swap, I returned the tickets and got completely ripped off by the only Tibetan guy who agreed to drive me to Darjey Gompa.

There I met Iohi in a heavenly guesthouse between mountains and rivers and snowy peaks everywhere over the horizon. The foreigners were a bunch (actually half a bunch) of Buddhist Germans who got there following their lama and were doing everything to get the other half of their group to pass the foreigner-proof border. They were thrilled and a bit jealous that we managed to get to this closed sector, without even being sure that we were doing that. In the meanwhile, half of their group was bouncing in the other side of the closed area between Kanding and Ganzi.

So we had an amazing time there in a simple room that felt for us 5-star with a view to the garden and having two Tibetan nuns who cooked for us (and told us off every time for not finishing our meals). Strangely enough, the food they made was Chinese and Chinese breakfast is usually not our cup of tea (by the way, they don’t drink tea on the breakfast either). Most of the breakfast stuff is not sweet or salty or spicy or anything, it’s just plain. A typical example is rice in hot water with no salt or sugar or anything at all. So eventually we got sick of that, we tried to ask for scrambled eggs which we end up doing by ourselves. They were pretty happy with the arrangement until I burnt the wok because I didn’t use enough oil! They did like the scrambled eggs, though….

Our room!

We passed some days either seeing the rain from the window of the nicest room ever or walking around. We also had a natural hot spring close were Tibetans girls washed their cloth and then bath naked! That was when Tibetan guys weren’t washing their motorbikes! The only issue was that the hot spring was across an old wooden bridge which seemed a little too fragile on a fast and furious river, but that didn’t stop us.

The hot spring

And this is the way to the hot spring

We walked a lot across fields waving back hello hello to the locals and we entered to the basic house complexes that were spread around some kilometers from the guesthouse. On one occasion, first we were invited by some monks for tea and sweets; 2 km from there, we were invited again, this time by nuns. They showed us see their plants and insisted that we stayed to have more tea and some bread!

After some days we decided to go back to the town, Ganzi, to take a bus to Kanding. We made our minds to take bus no matter what, swearing that we would never take a minivan in our lives. And of course the buses were full and we took a minivan. And of course the 8 hours drive lasted 13 hours bumping on the mud.

We drove down and down and down between the mountains inside the fog and we finally arrived in Kanding exhausted with migraine and at night…as always. But this time we traveled with a family and no smokers and they even invited us to eat with them during the lunch stop (and didn’t let us pay anything).

Kanding

Kanding is a small city nested in a valley surrounded by impressively huge mountains. It’s funny when you see the city from above that it has no place to grow but up. It’s the middle point between Tibetan and Chinese-Sichuanese culture, with the spirituality of the Tibetan Buddhism and the spiciness of Sichuan. We had there our first experience with Sichuan peppercorn , that mixed with red chili is called málà: "numbing and spicy". It has a very special and nice taste but until we got more or less used we had the strange feeling of not being able to feel our mouths and feel fire in them at the same time.

Kanding

Kanding's spicy food

  And even though we thought the city was open to foreigners it was filled with police, army and blinded trucks with massive guns. It was a little scary but we weren’t kicked out from there this time but in Chengdu we learnt that we could have been. The whole Ganzi prefecture, which includes Kanding, was closed at that time and police kicked out foreigners every time an English speaker policeman was available. As I was telling in previous posts, the police was afraid that the Tibetan demonstrations that started in Aba would spread to the whole prefecture. We had the chance and the luck to travel through that beautiful area only because we arrived from a less usual place, our damn Qinghai.

So we walked around far from the downtown and the army until we met Chris, the American owner of the hostel Zhulim. His hostel seemed really great and we heard later that people go to Kanding only to stay at his place. But it was completely empty, obviously because he’s a main attraction for foreigners but not so much for Chinese people that were the only tourists around. We had a bad coffee but got a lot of good advices like how to get to Yunnan (since almost every short way was closed to foreigners) and advices regarding traveling to Chengdu via Moxi since the main road was being repaired.

And the following day we actually left the forbidden area and we headed to Moxi with a really nice excursion.

Qinghai province II - how we got the hell out of there

Amnye Machen

Last time I was telling how we got stuck on the flanks of Amnye Machen Mountain between two dusty Tibetan towns for 6 hours. The Amnye Machen is a sacred Tibetan mountain and walking around it is supposed to be one of the holiest pilgrimage for Tibetan Buddhists. How they decide that a mountain is sacred, I've got no idea. I asked English-speaker Buddhists but their answers were completely vague and we kept finding holy Tibetan places where Buddhists walk clock-wise in many areas. Anyway, pilgrims make the 200 km circumambulation of the mountain while prostrating every other step and groups of tourists suppose to ride horses around half of the mountain to get to the other side. We couldn't find a guide and horses anywhere and we decided to just move on, get to Xiedawu on the other side of the mountain by jeep and try to do a short excursion with horses there.

So Iohi and Maya got inside a house that had a jeep parked outside, and persuaded the woman of the house to wake up his husband from his nap and make him take us to the other side for a normal price. (We discovered that bargaining was out of the question with Tibetans and we could be considered lucky if they don’t raise the price after it is settled).

So we jumped into his brand new jeep and when we started to go we saw a guy coming with row of saddled horses, but… fuck it! We were already leaving!

The driver happened to be a pretty cool guy and agreed to stop every other time to see the magnificent landscape. So we had 5 hours of amazing views driving on the mountain, seeing snowed peaks through the zillions of prayer flags and even a glacier!

We finally arrived to Xiedawu, a town which was even dustier and uglier and smaller than the previous ones. It even seemed poorer and there was no hotel or guesthouse around. Maya and Tomer, the Israeli couple, had a phone with a local sim card, but the cherry of the cake was the lack of phone signal! We managed to persuade some local guy to call the woman from a travel agency who had assured us that there is a hotel (and horses! And of course there were no horses there).

So she said that yes, there should be, but she’s not sure, she hasn’t been there, she doesn’t know, yada yada yada. We understood from some guy that we can sleep at the local school, which was falling apart as everything there. So we begged our driver to continue to the next town, which at least was on the main road that goes from Xining, capital of the province to the south, to Yushu. He called and asked permission from his wife and some more money from us and we continued to Huashixia.

At 10pm, exhausted, we arrived in the rainy, muddy and cold town of Huashixia and we settled in the first place we saw. After trying to swallow the Qinghai specialty, either some noodles in a kind of greasy soup or very greasy noodles fried with beef; we joined all the beds in the room to bear the cold weather.

On the morning, a little miracle happened, the dirt and the mud were gone and instead there was a magnificent layer of snow! Besides, we saw for the first time the snowed mountains that surrounded the town. I guess it’s not a miracle to see snow in summer above 4000 meters high and the mountains were all the time there (even during the night), but it was surprising for us, and the town seemed at least prettier.

So we booked by phone some beds in a guesthouse in Yushu, and we were said that there’s an afternoon bus to there and that we would arrive around 9pm. After hiking on the mountains during the morning, we tried to precise the concept of “afternoon bus to Yushu”.

I walked all the town (like 1 km) with Amori, who speaks Chinese, and we asked virtually everyone we saw at what time the bus from Xining to Yushu was supposed to stop in the town. So we heard between 2 and 3, between 4 and 5, between 7 and 8, between 8 and 9, there’s no bus, and today there’s no bus. And then we just moved all our stuff and bags to the street and waited from 2 till 8:30 pm, when the “4-5 hour” bus finally arrived. 

Waiting the bus - taken by Amori

We called the guy from the guesthouse, and asked him to pick us up at 12 am instead. At 12 am we were still on the bus, 2 hours more, they said, and so we called again to postpone the pick up. Around 4 am we arrived in Yushu.

Muddy and rainy Yushu

I should say that China is huge and it spans across five different time zones, from +5:00 in the west to +9:00 in the east. However, as many things in China, time is centralized. There’s a unified time zone +8 for all its territories which of course was set according to Beijing longitude.

Being Yushu 2000 km west from Beijing, 4:00 am was more like 1 or 2 am and it was pitch black, muddy and raining.

Yushu is a fairly populated place relative to Qinghai province: 300.000 inhabitants. What was once a big and pretty city (or it was supposed to be), it’s now ruins with most of their population living in temporary blue tents over the mud and many without any kind of toilets. On April 2010, the city was completely destroyed by an earthquake and today, more than year later,  the reconstruction is still a work in progress. We were in the rainy season and the city was a complete mess. We knew that it would be like this but the main road ended there and we hoped to sleep and then move south to Nangchen. However, the guy from the guesthouse didn’t come and didn’t answer the phone when we arrived in Yushu and we had no idea where his place was. So we were wet and freezing on the mud with the only light coming from the bus that was going to return to somewhere and with no idea what to do, when a Chinese couple told us to come over (When I say Chinese, I mean Han Chinese or I don’t know the ethnic group, but at least Tibetans and Hui Chineses are easily distinguished from Han Chineses). They were a very well educated electric engineer and his wife and had stopped a minivan-taxi and asked us in English if we wanted to go to Nangchen now. It was a 5 hours drive and we would arrive there on the morning (and we had the address of a hotel there.)

One day in Nangchen (was enough)

The driver of the minivan-taxi was a 21 year old guy who was completely asleep and drove us in a zombie state nodding every fifteen minutes in the complete darkness. He refused to stop and take a nap and instead he played loud dance music in the stereo which included hits from the ’90 like Salta sin parar (salta y salta y salta salta salta salta salta sin pararrrr) and Lambada. He kept nodding his head and around 7 am at dawn, fearing for our lives we told him to stop in some place to get us hot water and we forced him to drink a super strong black coffee.

Our driver drinking a super strong coffee

And again after driving through an amazing landscape, we arrived in a dusty and muddy and ugly one street Tibetan town. The “lonely planet hotel”, San Jiang Yuan Binguan,  had a thin layer of dust everywhere and it stank, literary. On the top of that, it was expensive. I think that our daily budget was at least 3 higher in Qinghai province than anywhere else in China including Beijing. Anyway, Amori and I went to check for others places while the others bargained the price, fearing that if this was the only hotel that accepts foreigners the owner will even increase the price if we go and return. We checked some dirtier options which included a place with dog shit in the hallway where I almost throw up from the smell. On our way we understood from a local guy that our San Jiang Yuan was the poshest hotel in town.

We bore only one day there; the amazing surroundings didn’t make up for the ugly and expensive place, the bad food and the hostile people. We had some pleasant surprises like a guy who knew English and took us to see a nearby monastery but mostly we wanted to get the hell out of the province.

Nice surroundings, ugly city

Yushu again

Next morning we traveled back to Yushu, where the group split. The Israeli couple couldn’t take it any more and decided to go back to the capital in order to take a flight to more tourist and normal places. Amori traveled back to see the Qinghai lake and  Iohi and I went to find another bus because we still wanted to get to Chengdu through Sichuan province’s Tibetan Highway on the flanks of the Tibet.

We drove in a taxi for 15 minutes across tents and scattered buildings until we get to some kind of bank neighborhood and then to the appropriate bus station. (There were many). This bus station was closed until 3 pm, but some guy there offered to help us and asked the stallkeeper from the kiosk of the station about buses to somewhere in Sichuan province. Our translator, as many Chinese people, studied English but had a hard time understanding and speaking the language and after some seconds of frustration he wrote in a piece “no tickets to foreigners”.

By that time, we had already heard so many times different things from different people that we didn’t believe anything so we just waited until the place opened.

Then I asked for buses to Ganzi in Sichuan – meyou (there isn’t) for tomorrow, meyou for the day after tomorrow. There was only for July 16^th, 4 days later. I asked for buses to Serxu, which was nearest town in Sichuan, but meyou, meyou, meyou…

So we either had to go north back to Xining by a 15 hours bus and then try to book a train or several trains south to Sichuan, or find a minibus there to Sichuan. (To wait four days there was out of the question.) Many times, minibuses are the only possible option when either there are no buses or they are full or they cannot go through a road because of landslides. Armed with a phrasebook and our 20 words vocabulary, we started to ask people around.

Then after several failed attempts, a 20-something-years old girl who spoke a bit of English explained us that her lama (kind of her Buddhist guru) happened to go to Sichuan and could drop us in Serxu…

And our luck began to change.

To see all the pics of Qinghai, you should check, as usual, Iohi's picasa.