So by the end of June we traveled from Beijing to Pingyao.
Pingyao old city
The old city of Pingyao is one of the few places in China that still keeps their historical look as it was during the Ming and Qing dinasties. The city is pretty nice but it was also pretty crowded with groups of tourists following girls or guys with flags and speakers. The city has plenty of ancient government offices, residences, temples, banks, but in all of them you have a turnstile and someone to check tickets. So if you want to have a glimpse of “ancient life” in China you have to go and buy an overpriced ticket that allows you to enter to all those places in town. It’s not uncommon to pay to see any small thing in China, sometimes you pay at the gate of a place and then you pay again if you want to see something inside that place, and most of the time you pay to see pretty dull stuff. And most of the time, we found the interesting places just wandering around.
Anyway, our dilemma of paying or not paying the ticket to see local sights (except the tower that wasn’t including and the temples outside the old city) was partially solved when I got a used ticket. That meant that the ticket was good only for the sites that weren’t visited (which I had no clue). I had met an English guy who paid the ticket and had enough after entering to a third of the sites and after talking a while he gave me his old ticket.
So we decided to peek at one of the sites using the old ticket and then make our minds regarding buying maybe one or two new tickets. Of course it wasn’t worthwhile to pay the overpriced fee, but we were curious as if some of the sites were good. So we entered one by one and passed the tickets behind the guards’ backs just to see what the sites were and since the tickets were meant to be used only once, we entered to different places.
Most of them were more or less the same, a desk, chairs, sometimes beds… explanations in Chinese and very bad translations (computer translations, probably).In just 2 days, we walked every inch of the city, including biking to Shuanglin temple in the countryside. But our train tickets to Yinchuan, Ningxia were hard to get and we stayed there three more days.
Among the limited variety of shops in Pingyao, which repeated themselves to the infinite, there were shoe shops that included a shoemaker making the shoes. We didn’t know to which extent this was really craft, or it was just a performance and the shoes were made in an industry. Anyway, Iohi was interested in learning about the shoes, so we asked Robert1 , the guy from the hostel, if he knew someone who could teach her. He knew a shoemaker that worked in a close village and Robert volunteered to give us bikes (for free!) and come with us and translate. The shoemaker was a really funny guy who knew a couple of words of every language, he took picture with us and all his family and took our postal addresses to send us ehh, well, I don’t have any idea what he wants to send us. Anyway, he explained the whole process, and we saw the only four workers he had and the shoes were really handmade! However, he said that Iohi wouldn’t be able to learn the skills of shoo making so quickly, that’ll take at least 10 days. But she had the chance to know about materials and techniques and get acquainted with their art of shoemaking. And the whole tour ended with me buying a pair of very nice shoes (but very uncomfortable that I threw a week later) and inviting Robert for lunch to his favorite place: Dico’s, a kind of Chinese KFC.
Some days later, we finally got our tickets, but we had to travel to the province capital, Taiyuan, where we spent the afternoon with a bunch of girls who were thrilled to have the chance to speak English…
The Shapotou fiasco
Our idea was to get to Qinghai province, a mountainous area on the north of Tibet, and to travel south getting to the west of Sichuan province, on the east of Tibet. Already in Pingyao, we started to read about the west of Sichuan being closed for foreigners because of demonstrations and Tibetan unrest.
Tibetan populations extend outside the Tibet (Tibetan Autonomous Region), where you need a special permit to enter and some kind of tour, but in fact there are more Tibetans in Qinghai and in Sichuan provinces than in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. According to what I know, a monk in Aba, Sichuan set himself on fire and a series of demonstrations started there and spread to other areas of Sichuan. We decided to head to Qinghai anyway, and to give it a try. Since we wanted to cut the travel, we traveled first to Yinchuan in Ningxia province and wanted to do the only thing that seems to be interesting there, going to Shapotou, some sort of park on the fringes of the Tengger Desert.
The travel to Ningxia was very impressive and we saw from the train an incredible landscape of red desert mixed with very green areas. However, Ningxia’s capital, Yinchuan was very unimpressive, and since one day before the train trip we discovered that the only hostel in Yinchuan didn’t accept foreigners anymore (hotels and hostels in China need a special permit to accept foreigners), we decided to skip the city and travel directly to Shapotou.
It took us around one hour just to find the bus station, and then we took the 3 hours bus to Zhongwei, the nearest city to Shapotou. We arrived around midday, and then we waited other hour until the bus to Shapotou was filled.
We had the fantastic idea to sleep there, (a fantastic idea inspired by the lonely planet guide). We arrived after one hour drive, and we found ourselves in some kind of Dessert Disneyland. It was like the idea of a water park, but with the attractions of the sand dunes. So, who can think of sleeping in a water park? It was the same there, we arrived at the only guesthouse, and they looked at us like we were Martians. I guess the place was booked for groups or something like that, and I think we were the only human beings who thought about going to sleep there by themselves. We were stuck there, we had already paid the expensive ticket to enter to the place and we begged for a place to sleep.
They convinced us to go to the north gate, in the upper part across a gigantic dune, where they claimed there was a hotel. A worker at the place persuaded us to pay for some kind of transport that with his broken English was impossible to understand. Then he guided us to a place were our camels were waiting! We rode the camels with all our bag and we got to the top. There was nothing there, no hotel, no hostel, no guesthouse, nada. We asked everyone around but there was no accommodation there, we couldn’t believe it.
We sat in a kiosk completely shocked, it was around 4 and we didn’t have lunch, but there wasn’t even a restaurant there. And we even missed the last bus to get the hell out of there and continue our journey to Qinghai.
I guess the lady from the kiosk was clever enough to understand the situation (and our faces) even without understanding a word in English. She gave us fruits and candies and didn’t let me buy her water; she filled our bottles with boiled water instead. Finally, she found us a ride with an employees minibus and took us to the train station.
However, we were stuck again, the train was full.
We stayed one night in one cheap hotel without windows (that hotels in Qinghai towns will have made it look as 5 stars later) and we walked through the town answering the repetitive hellouu hellouu. But most of the day we just sat in a café until midnight, when we caught our train to Xining, Qinghai.
1. Robert is the English name of the guy, but he was Chinese. Many Chinese people that deal with westerners just pick an English name (or word, I met some woman who called herself Happy)
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