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.