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

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Many many cars à CAR à TRUCK ßMany many cars

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Many many cars àCAR à ß CAR ß Many many cars

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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.

Qinghai province I -stuck on the edge of the Amnye Machen mountain

So after a night trip on the train we arrived to Xining, Qinghai province capital. Qinghai is located on the north east of the Tibet (Tibetan Autonomous Region), and has more Tibetan population than the Tibet. Besides Tibetan people, there are also a lot of Hui and Salar people (Muslim Chinese), Mongols, and of course Han (what we would call just “Chinese” and they constitute the majority in China). We traveled the east and the south of the province which is on the Tibetan plateau, filled with grassy plateaus and elevations from 2500 to 5000m high!

Xining 

Xining is on the edge of the plateau and it's an unremarkable city, not too pretty, not too ugly, but has the only normal hostel in the province. Our plan was to travel south until we got to the province of Sichuan and take a route called the Tibet Highway that passes through Tibetan towns (in Sichuan) and leads to Chengdu (capital of the province). However, from the time we arrived to Xining, we kept hearing contradictory information regarding an area that was closed to foreigners because of demonstrations against the goverment. So we made our minds regarding an itinerary that leads to Yushu, the border with Sichuan, but could be circular if we find out that Sichuan border is closed. So in the worst case we would go back to Xining and take a train to Chengdu.

Xining à Tongren à some towns à Machen à Xueshan à Amnye Machen mountain à Xiedawu à Yushu àNangchen à Yushu à Sershu (Sichuan)

Qinghai Itinerary

A couple of Israelis, Maya and Tomer, had more a less the same idea and joined our itinerary and then we met a French guy and Chinese speaker, Amori, who was interested in joining us for the Qinghai part.

Tongren (Repkong)

Our first destination was Tongren (called Repkong in Tibetan), a Tibetan area famous for its Thangka paintings. It was a 5 hour bus drive from the capital, and we actually stayed the first night in a small village called Wuton, a few kilometers from the city. Already in Xining, we had contacted a Tibetan monk who painted Thangkas and, in Wuton, we stayed at his brother house. Actually I think we stayed in the son's room. That day we met the monk who showed us his studio and some of the paintings, and then we saw the lower monastery of the village.

The monk explaining about the thangkas

A thangka

On the next morning after seeing the upper monastery, we felt there was nothing else to do there and we moved to the city. It was a pretty ugly and big city with a nice big monastery (that I didn't see because I had a cold).

Originally, we decided to pass through a series of towns until we get to Machen, a big town next to a mountain sacred to Tibetans, Amnye Machen. But then, we got the chance to take a minibus straight to Machen, and we decided to skip the smaller towns.

A stop on the way to Machen

Machen (or Maqin or Dawu or Tawo)

So after a rough 7 hours drive we arrived at Machen also called Maqin, and Dawu or Tawo in Tibetan depending on who you asked. Here the confusion of multiple names starts, one in Mandarin (the official dialect of Chinese), the others in different romanizations of different dialects of Chinese or of Tibetan.

We were pretty high already, 3760 meters, with a harsh mountain climate: either cold or a strong sun. The town was plainly ugly, one long main street with buildings of concrete without nothing picturesque about them, but the landscape surroundings the town was beautiful, mountains all around and tons of prayer flags on them forming spider-web shapes.

Outside Machen

Machen taken by Amori

We arrived to a hotel recommended by our hostel in Xining and it was quite expensive by China's standards. No one spoke English (of course), and Amori tried to bargain without success. Then he tried to persuade the lady in charge to let us stay three in a twin bed room but she didn’t agree.

 So we left Maya in the hotel to look after our bags and we started to look for other hotels around. The other hotels were either more expensive or were awful or both. So we went back to the first hotel, and we found policeman there waiting for us. It seemed that the woman tipped the police about us and since her place was the only one with a permit to accept foreigners, we were obliged to stay there!

We tried to gather information about the Amnye Machen mountain that we wanted to cross with horses and reach the main route that leads to Yushu on the south. But there was no travel agency there, the lady of the hotel didn't know anything (of course), and even though we heard and read that it was possible to ride horses through mountain, nobody knew anything. We start calling travel agencies of the capital Xining, but this didn't help us much either, they only told us that we either go back to Xining and travel with them or we can try our luck in Xueshan at the edge of the mountain. We should be able to find horses and a guide there, they said, (according to them their company just goes there and ask around).

So we hired a mini van for the next morning and we bumped our 5 hours way to Xueshan

Xueshan, on the edge of Amnye Machen

 So we got to Xueshan, a shitty and dusty Tibetan town with maybe 20 houses. And we started to ask around for a guide with horses -meyou (there isn't in Chinese), for a guide -meyou, for horses -meyou, for someone who may know someone with horses -meyou, for some place where we might find a guy who may know something about horses -meyou. Eventually we got to someone who told us that in the town 3 km away that’s right at the beginning of the mountain, there might be horses. So we asked for a ride to the town, but the guy said that he didn’t have time, even when we offered to pay. There were a couple of jeeps and some guys there, and no one seemed to be doing anything at all, just hanging around, doing circles with the motorbikes. But they really didn't want to help us.

Xueshan taken by Maya/Tomer

One of the guys with a jeep who was obviously doing nothing, after insisting for a while, said OK, but later. We waited for a while but it was getting late, and then we just got near with all the bags, and asked for a price. He asked 30 yuan for a 2 minutes ride so we tried to bargain, which was impossible. But when we agreed for his price, he suddenly raised it to 50 yuan!

So we just took our stuff and started walking! On the way we saw one of the Tibetan guys who didn't agree to take us, going and coming back twice to the town! Luckily, a Chinese with a tuk-tuk (three-wheel truck) picked us up on the way and drove us to the village.

Walking!

Picked up by a tuk-tuk

This village was even smaller than the other with maybe five houses and we suddenly saw two horses! So Amori asked him about getting other three horses. Meyou

According to what he said no one had more horses, we couldn’t believe it and we kept asking everyone in town including a nomad family living around (supposedly the guides with horses are usually nomads).

So we called again to one of the agencies from Xining telling them that we can’t find horses or a guide, and we begged them for a phone number. The woman from the agency evaded the question by saying that they always start from the other side of the mountain, Xiedawu, where there is also a guesthouse. The road that passes through the mountains can only be traveled by vehicles with four-wheel drive if you don’t ride horses or walk 4 days. Being kind of late and feeling stuck, we decided to find a jeep to go to the other side, sleep there and maybe do a short horse riding from the other side.

One Tibetan seeing us trapped asked an exorbitant price for taking us, and didn’t agree to bargain. In the meanwhile, Iohi and Maya got inside a house that had a jeep parked outside, and somehow convinced the woman of the house to wake up his husband from his nap and ask him take us to the other side…