The Silk Road to Golmud

The village of Qarasay was...disappointing. At first my heart jumped as I saw the poplar trees and mud houses of the settlement. We followed a jeep track down the west side of the village, which petered out almost immediately. "That's it?" I asked, while Martin was even less generous to the place. It looked nearly abandoned. Two donkeys were tied to a post, and there was a gate locked and blocking access to a now fallow wheat field. I walked up a sandy lane past three houses, which appeared to be empty: a cat sauntered out of one, looking up at me and meowing loudly. Across the field there were more buildings, including one with an antenna of some kind hoisted up on a wooden pole.

We made our way back to the top of the village and tried the other direction. We met an older villager, with a furry black sheep's wool hat on, and I asked if there was a shop in town. He equivocated (this was in sign language). Another two shepherds came up, and a discussion of what to do with us ensued. We were kept standing for several minutes as they discussed the finer points of our presence, and kicked our tires, commenting on our mode of transportation. I said we were looking to get to Minfeng, a small city on the Silk road that looked to be about 120km away to the northwest, although our map showed a road heading more or less straight north from Qarasay to the Silk Road, joining at Andi He, the junction for the paved "Oil Highway" across the sand dunes of the central Taklimakan and the Tarim Basin. The discussion ended with a younger man on a donkey guiding us into town to the shop.

The village was aligned along a sandy lane lined with poplars: the trees were leafless, but piles of yellowing leaves in the irrigation ditches told me that it hadn't been long before that the place had been warm (we were now at about 3000m elevation, but it was overcast, cold, and windys). We passed slowly along, looking out of the corner of our eyes into the courtyards of the houses, usually holding piles of firewood and wool. A small group of men were gathered near the store, but the shopkeep was not around. "Wait a few minutes, we'll get him" said a young guy about my age in Chinese. While we waited, one of the men from our first foray into the village came out with a few papers folded and clipped together. He pulled out one, which I gathered was the document naming him the local deputy. He asked to see our passports, and tried to write down our names in a tiny book usually reserved for phone numbers. The pen barely functioned, and eventually I was asked to fill in my own name. This sort of officialdom put a smile on my face: I could have written anything I liked, and noone would be the wiser. A toothless grandmother hunched down next to me and returned a gummy smile when I "salaam aliekum"'ed her.

The shopkeep showed up and unlocked the store. It was a dusty room with no window that we couldn't see in for all the people crowding the threshold to see what we would buy. There were four items for sale: honey, candy, walnuts, and batteries. We bought some of the first three for the equivalent of about two dollars. We shoved this stuff into our bags, and another old man produced naan for the journey to the next village. The young guy who spoke Chinese offered to show us the way to the next town, named Qandaghay, since he was going there today. He jumped on a donkey, grabbed a friend on another donkey, and said "let's go".

The ride to Qandaghay was anything but easy: the way was very sandy, and there were tracks heading out in all directions. The men, Ghassem and Juman, told me it was 23km - not a long way, but it took us three hours to cross the desert. Without the guides, we might have gotten hopelessly lost in the sand dunes, although we eventually found a river canyon and followed it along the western rim much of the way. We stopped twice, the two of them singing and talking playfully, while Martin and I panted, exhausted from pushing our bikes over sand dunes. The scenery was spectacular, as was the moment, but I had no time to take any pictures: Ghassem and Juman were in a hurry to get there, and as it turned out, we didn't arrive much before dark anyway.

Ghassem asked if he could wear my winter army coat from Ali: I said sure. As we approached Qandaghay, he took it off and brought it to me, beginning "The weather here is nice, right?" I could see he was angling, in a friendly way, for my coat. I cut him off at the pass: "Truly, but I'm only here for two weeks before I head back up into Tibet." (This is my plan; I wasn't having him on.) He smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and strapped the coat to the back of my bike. He pointed into the town: "Follow that road into town. You'll find a shop. I've got business on the other side of town." I thanked him with a "rahmat", we shook hands, and he was gone.

Martin and I crossed the irrigation ditch and walked down the treelined lane, leaves still clinging to the branches at 2500m, and watched an old shepherd threaten sheep with a shovel to drive them into their pen for the night. The light was a warm orange, the water babbled in the irrigation channel, and when we approached a tin shack, the stunned looks from the local men and women quickly melted into smiles. The shop was a room with a diesel grain mill and a guy selling grapes, raisins, walnuts, and dates out of big sacks in the dirt. I bought some raisins for a ridiculously low price and asked if there was any food to eat in town. There was a short discussion among a few men, and we were referred down the road to another shop where we would be able to get dinner.

The villagers laughed and followed us along, children staring and women looking out from underneath their red headscarves as they did washing or collected water. A building with three doors was where we stopped, and soon the owner, Osman, was called out. Osman showed us a room with beds, which wasn't exactly what we were looking for, so I asked about food. "Sure, sure, you can eat with my family" he signalled. I asked the price for the beds. "On guai". 10Y, or about a dollar. "OK, yakshi". He set up a candle and hung a drape from the door, shooing away the kids who had come to see what these two foreigners were about. He gave us a couple of apples and some dates, and said we should wait a bit. We reclined on the wooden boards and talked into the darkness.

About half an hour later we were led to his house, around the corner, and shown into a very warm room with the smell of cooking. Three women squatted in their skirts next to the stove, chopping vegetables, and preparing laghman, the noodles that form a large part of the central asian diet. The broth was cooked in a heavy iron wok, vegetables were added, and the noodles were stretched and slapped. The process was mesmerizing to watch: the women giggled when I showed an interest, probably because it was so mundane to them, or perhaps because the men in town took the whole thing for granted. In any case, sometime an hour or so after dark, we were served, and then several more men from the village appeared, ready with their appetites. The whole thing was eaten by candlelight, since the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling didn't want to work, much to Osman's consternation. Two men came in, one of whom spoke Chinese, and identified themselves as deputies for this village. Again the process of writing our names on a scrap of paper, again the request for me to write my own name. They asked how we had come to Qandaghay, and when I told them we had come over the Kunlun from Tibet, they were quite surprised. I honestly couldn't really see any other way someone would go to the town: no other tourist would make the there-and-back trek from the Silk Road to this incredibly out of the way place. We filled up on our first real meal in weeks, and were then escorted back off to bed by Osman. I slept splendidly on the wooden boards under a real blanket, not my tired sleeping bag.

Osman came to wake us up shortly after sunrise, offering us chay (tea) and naan (flatbread) at his place. We warmed ourselves by the stove and sipped tea, looking around the place in the morning light. The walls were slanted away from floor to ceiling, and were made of mud. A broken cabinet rested at an angle along one wall, and the whole place was draped with tapestries. The place we were seated at was the raised platform the family used for sleeping, and was covered by a large rug. Osman's wife, Amina, told me the names of all the different carpets and rugs, but I could only remember the top one, called a ghillem, which she herself had woven on a loom sometime long ago. It was deep red, with geometric patterns in strips colored green, yellow, blue, and purple. I was impressed by its size, and it seemed to be well-made. She smiled when I complimented her handiwork. More names were passed around, with Osman's father and both of Amina's parents in attendence. We were told to stay for lunch, which I was not at all opposed to, still savoring the taste of anything other than instant noodles, so I proposed to Martin that we clear out and give them some space, taking a stroll around the village.

The place was smaller than I had thought, perhaps 25 families in total, each with its own compound. There were squares of irrigated land, divided by poplar shelterbelts: beyond the village, the desert began again abruptly. It is a lot of work to grow anything in the desert: an irrigation channel must be built, carrying water from a perennial stream, trees needed to be planted, and the soil has to be somehow converted from lifeless sand to decent ground that can sustain crops. The process is long and slow, I imagine, especially without modern trucks and heavy equipment to irrigate and bring in topsoil. We watched an old couple herd sheep out to some pasture out of town, and wandered past the local school, where children played in the sandy school lot. After an hour we had thoroughly taken in the village, and returned to Osman's household to watch the final preparation. Lunch was somian, a soupish broth of flat pieces of noodle, with mutton and potato in this case. Again, several men appeared magically, ready to eat, although Osman was not among them. Afterwards, a price was quickly determined, which ended up being about five dollars for the two of us to eat three meals and spend the nighgt. Not bad, said I, and Martin responded, That's ridiculously cheap. We collected our bikes, and were seen off by a large part of the village, directed to follow the river to the north where we were told there was a "good road".

The road was indeed quite good for much of the day, and we passed a couple of groupings of wild camels in the stony landscape. We sat out a sandstorm in a ditch created by the now dry river, munching on candy and raisins, and then carried on, camping in a sandy terrain about 50km from Qandaghay and (we guessed) 30km from the Silk Road. I gathered driftwood from the riverbed near sunset, and we sat around a fire for a couple of hours, thinking about our trip, which for Martin was about to end.

I slept well on the sand, in a tent which didn't even get below freezing for the night: Martin woke feeling like hell. He suspected food poisoning, but I had eaten the same food and felt fine. Whatever it was, he was vomiting and had a fever. We waited for a couple of hours, but without more water we couldn't wait out the day, so we moved on, finding the road very sandy and difficult to follow. Martin's pace was very slow, and I just hoped we could make the Silk Road before nightfall. After more than 10km of pushing our bikes through saharan sand, we found an improved road, with a bed built up over the sand, and an area with trucks going up and down the canyon walls a few hundred meters away. A Uighur driving a tractor came bouncing down the road, and he went slackjawed when he saw us. I hailed him and asked how far it was to the road, and he signed 15km. I told Martin this, and he just sighed and moved on.

Five kilometers down the road, a truck came the opposite direction, with a 4WD behind it. Martin was collapsed on the ground, not looking good. The men, all Han Chinese, jumped out and asked if he was OK. I said he was sick, but not dying. They said we could get food in 10km, and that if we waited a bit, the jeep would be returning and could give him a ride. I told Martin this, but he wanted to cycle the last bit, saying "I'll hate myself if I have to take a ride the last 10km..." We cycled slowly down the road past a grove of dessicated Dr. Seuss-type trees, and an hour before sunset, found ourselves at the junction with the Silk Road.

Travels with Jiao Yun

I had hoped for more: the Silk Road was still a dusty dirt road making its way through the southern edge of the Taklimakan Desert where we joined it. "What the hell is this?" I asked out loud. Martin sighed. Not that either of us was interested in cycling much further: the plan was to take a bus, I to Hotan and Martin to Urumqi, by whichever route was most convenient (we suspected this involved a ride first to Urumqi). But it didn't say much for the easy ride I had been looking forward to when I did get back on my bike after a few days' rest in Hotan.

We were at the standard truck stop anywhere in rural China: dust, rusting pieces of truck, tires stacked up against derelict mud brick buildings, domestic animals of various stripes nosing through scraps of food and each other's dung. Not exactly the red carpet. A concrete block building was straight in front of us, and then several more buildings with cooking fires smoking to our right. We wandered slowly over to the cluster of buildings.

A guy in a baseball cap called us over: "Xiuxie, xiuxie" - "Take a break, take a break". I approached the group of men he was sitting with, mostly Uighurs, all underneath an overhand protruding from the clay block structure. There was a wooden platform and a few benches arrayed next to a table, and we took a seat on the platform. We were given tea straight away, and Martin asked if there was soda available. Our host called over an older Uyghur woman and asked about soda: she had some sort of Coke analog. So we sat and drank while I talked with the Chinese. He was an oddity, sporting a full beard and speaking Uyghur more or less fluently. He asked where we had come from. "Tibet? Oh, so from Yecheng to Hotan to here?"

"No, no, from Ali across the Kunlun Shan to Qarasay, then here."

He wasn't familiar with Qarasay (no surprise there), so he asked an old local Uyghur. The bearded old man with his dopi raised his eyebrows and pointed south out into the desert, saying it was about 100km from here. I pulled out a map, everyone gathered around, and I traced our route for them. There was a lot of quick talk; I mentioned we had walked most of it, since there wasn't really a road. Thumbs up. I smiled, then glanced at Martin, who wasn't looking so great. "He's sick" I jerked a thumb over at him.

"With what?" several voices asked.

"Nausea, diarrhea, fever."

A call went out for medicine, and soon several varieties were produced, with several suggestions on how to take it. The only thing that was consistent was not to take it on an empty stomach. I asked for naan. Martin was somewhat reluctant to take something he didn't know and which noone else seemed to be sure about either. I picked up one package and saw that it was amoxycillin. "Well, this one is an antibiotic." I asked how he should take it. More discussion, then "Four pills, not on an empty stomach. Wait eight hours, repeat." I had no idea what the dosage of each pill was. They were insistent. In the end, Martin took the pills. They hustled him inside their room, lit a fire in the stove, and put him in a bed with a blanket. So much bustle it seemed at first counterproductive, but things calmed down, and it was obvious they were being extremely friendly.

I asked the first guy his name. "Jiao Yun, from Hotan." It turned out he was a driver, and had occasional gigs driving foreigners around in Xinjiang and into western Tibet, including a few expeditions. He showed me a few business cards, including a couple from the US. I asked what he was doing in this place: I assumed he was passing through. He was trying to collect some money, and had been there for 6 days. I asked if it was going to work out for him. "Probably not...I'll leave tomorrow either way." I said I was heading for Hotan; he said he'd help us along. "How about the other guy?"

"He's heading home to Denmark, first via Urumqi."

"OK. He should come with us to Minfeng, then get the bus to Urumqi."

I asked if I might be able to eat dinner (Martin was not interested in eating anything, and was actually dozing at this moment). "You will eat with us," he smiled, "just wait a while."

Several others came in and out, including two brothers working on the road construction crews in the area. I asked what the plan was for the road, officially National Road 315. They said it would be paved by the middle of next year all the way to Qiemo. Too bad, I thought, I'm 6 months early.

These guys went out and left us alone. We talked in the dimly lit room as the sun went down, Martin shivering under his covers and I huddled next to the stove, even though it was much warmer here than in Tibet. Jiao Yun came back in and turned on a light, and went out again. I wrote in my journal for a while, and then he showed up with a melon. "My friend gave me this for free - it's yours." He produced a knife and insisted we dig in. I cut the melon and Martin ate more than half, being very dehydrated from the day's exertions and his illness. The melon was delicious: something fresh and juicy - how long had it been? Nothing like it in Tibet, except apples (even these I regarded as a major feat, but they were actually fairly readily available, even in the west). Jiao Yun brought in another: "My good friend" he laughed. Three others came back in, and we all sat around slurping up melon. The door was pushed open and a Uyhgur said dinner was ready. We all filed out: they marched an unwilling Martin out into the darkness. "But I can't eat" he repeated plaintively. "Tell them that." I did, but they wouldn't have any of it. "He needs food!" they said emphatically. It has usually been my approach to sit out illness, eating lightly. It has been my experience that the Chinese take the opposite approach: feed the sickness, eat as much as you can.

Dinner was in a building about 50m away; two rooms, one for cooking, one for eating. A few women worked over the food, the servers were a young boy and a young girl. The dining room had a few Uyghurs in it. The walls were covered with large posters: one of Al-Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca during the Hajj, the others of white-bread American kids smiling and drawing in their coloring books. Fur-hatted Uyghur elders lounged underneath the latter sipping tea. A vase of fake roses sat in the center of the table. When the food arrived, it came one plate at a time. Here was where the Chinese dinner ritual began: someone tries to give the food to his friend, his friend pushes the food back, voices are raised, I start laughing. It is quite a pageant, nearly every time. They stopped and looked at me, smiling. "It's the Chinese way" and then one outmaneuvered the other and the plate ended up in front of Jiao Yun. He grunted, then turned to us, demanding that we start eating. Martin muttered under his breath he couldn't eat any of the noodles. I dug in. We all slurped for 10 minutes, then everyone's plate was empty except for Martin's, which had barely been touched. Melons came out, more pageantry, and then we were done. "Let's go. Don't worry about it, Martin," Jiao Yun said.

The older brother went out drinking with his work friends and stumbled in at about 2am, but we were asleep, and though everyone else got up and ate more melon, I pretended to sleep through the whole thing.

The next morning, we got up, they asked how Martin was feeling ("Much better"), and then we were walked over to the concrete block shack we had seen first as we reached the Silk Road. An old Uyghur was chopping wood in his underwear just outside. We were shown in, and his wife was shuffling around inside in her longjohns. This was all a bit weird. An enormous amount of food was piled up on a table: a stack of naan, a large tomato-cucumber salad, more melon, roasted mutton, chicken soup, fried potatoes. Nothing too light for breakfast for these folks. Then there was the alcohol, which I passed on (I noticed that Jiao Yun also waved it off: he also didn't smoke, another rarity among Chinese men). Folks started toasting each other ("Ganbei!"), the old Uyghur man included. Martin had a bit: they said it was good to clean out the bacteria (I thought back to the Russian woman Olga in Tibet who had called vodka an "antiseptic"). Food was devoured at a very rapid pace, and then we were out again. I tried to pay for something: they wouldn't hear of it. "We're all good friends!" they said.

Martin and I packed, and an hour later we were squatting in the dust waiting for a bus coming from Andi He, a few km farther into the desert, heading for Minfeng, the transit point for both of our journeys. Jiao Yun accompanied us. The bus showed up, a rattling mid-sized thing looking pretty beat up, and we tossed the bikes up on the roof, alongside a shipment of melons in cardboard boxes labeled "Andi He Melon: A Special Product of Xinjiang, China" (Is Andi He a hub of international trade?). The bus was crowded but there were exactly enough seats. We crawled over the remainder of the melon shipment, which was stacked waist high in the aisle, and took the rear seats. The driver mashed the transmission into gear and off we went.

Progress was miserably slow for the first part. Jiao Yun had said it was 5 hours to Minfeng, and 137km: that's not much more than 25km per hour. I thought this was a low-ball figure, but in the end it took 5 1/2 hours to make the trip. We swished across the sand, through ditches, and got the obligatory flat about halfway through. No big deal, everyone was expecting this. We filed out, the driver and his assistant jacked up the bus, swapped out tires, and within 15 minutes we were back on the road. While we waited slices of melon were cut up for everyone. The scenery was pure desert, some of it dried out weeds clinging to sandy soil, some of it the occasional forest of dry trees throwing roots deep down to some buried water table, and some of it Saharan-style dunes, rippled by wind. We approached Minfeng, a river watered a valley, and the road became paved.

Minfeng itself looked particularly dismal, but this was only the outskirts. Collapsing dusty buildings, piles of trash, donkey carts coming perilously close to being road pizza. The road was being improved - widened - at the expense of the old houses. Oil slicks merged with slimy water channels from which grape vines rose up. I began to despair, but the center of town was much better, or at least cleaner. The architecture was socialist realist: concrete blocks with small nods to central asian styles in the form of arched windows or a stylized minaret poking from above the iron gate. We unloaded our things and then Jiao Yun went to ask about buses to Urumqi and Hotan. He came back saying both should be leaving tonight, first the Urumqi bus (which was a sleeper originating in Hotan), and then its opposite number returning to Hotan.

We went for a dinner, which was laghman down the street. Jiao Yun met several people he knew in the 200m from the bus station to the restaurant. I paid for dinner, finally. Martin had an appetite, saying he could eat twice as much. I said that was good. We returned to the bus station, I gave Martin whatever money I could (I just needed enough to get to Hotan), and sometime after dark, the bus arrived. Jiao Yun and I put him on, he got settled, we wished each other good luck and remarked that it had been a hell of a trip, and then he was gone into the night.

Jiao Yun went to look around for another bus, or perhaps a trucker that could give us a ride: I sat next to a stall with an incandescent light bulb dangling above it, manned by a small boy of about 9. A Chinese taxi driver, drunk, came up to me, sat down and put his arm around my shoulder. "Wouldn't you like to go somewhere warm? How about my place?" I gathered this was some sort of come-on. I just played stupid, smiling and repeating "I don't understand" to everything he said, and after 5 minutes he gave up. I moved inside the stall the kid was working, which had a wood-fired stove. He was watching another movie about the evil Japanese (the Chinese movie market is awash in titles famously critical of the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s) and their machinations on the Korean penninsula during the 1930s on an ancient black and white TV. The movie was dubbed into Turkish, and there were Mandarin and English subtitles. Jiao Yun came back on a motor scooter, pushed open the door to the stall and said, "Come on, no bus, but we'll stay at my friend's hotel, no charge." I got on my bike and followed him for about 3 minutes to a small hotel with a courtyard. He parked the bike, and we went inside into a tile-floored room with a desk, a computer, and a large TV.

His friend was a Chinese migrant from Henan province in the east, running a business here some of the year, and working in a mine the other part of the year. "A mine?" I asked, intrigued. It was the very same one I had seen 5 days before in the Kunlun fault. I asked a few questions about the mine: How long has it been there? (3 years: that checked out with the information we had from the American expedition) How many people work there? (About 30) What is your job? (Bulldozer operator) How much gold do you get out each year? (He shrugged and hazarded a guess: 150 kilos - that made about 1.5 million dollars a year, more than enough to justify operation, and enough to grease some official's hand for the permit to operate the mine). He said it took almost a month to drive the bulldozer from Minfeng to the mine: this I could believe, having seen what he would have to go through, even though the distance was only 300km or so. He was a good guy, bringing us tea, warming some water for us to wash with, and then giving us a heated room around the courtyard. Jiao Yun and I tucked in and both slept soundly until sunrise the next day.

I woke up and went to the outhouse, passing a large billboard in Chinese and English outlining the tourist attractions of Minfeng county. These were primarily natural, but one of the attractions was "the many unsophisticated ethnical villages in the oasis or in the sanddy (sic) desert". I supposed that Qarasay qualified as one of these.

We went to the bus station and milled around for a while. We ended up taking a minivan, although the first couldn't accommodate my bicycle. While awaiting the second, two backpackers - a Brit and a Japanese - wandered over, looking for a bus to Qiemo to the east. The Brit was effusive, the Japanese silent. It was here, on November 15, I learned that George Bush was still the president of the US, 12 days after probably almost everyone else in the world. He shrugged his shoulders and said "Well, we get another four years of Tony, so we're not much better off". He had been teaching English in South Korea for two years ("Two years too long, mate") and was now heading back to the UK overland, although this tack to the east and then to the Indian Subcontinent seemed a bit of a backtrack. We chatted amicably about work, corruption in asian countries vs our own (not much difference, just on a grander scale back home), and about the futility of keeping a schedule while travelling here (he had been in Minfeng for a day and a half, hoping for a bus to Qiemo and finding none). I inquired about buses to Qiemo that day: "Should be one at about 12:30". I told him this, and his sensible response was "I'll believe that when I see it..."

The minivan ride was relatively fast, covering the 300km to Hotan in less time than the 137km from Andi He to Minfeng had taken. We whizzed past markets that spilled out onto the road, although our driver was undeterred by this and continued to speed through, just leaning on the horn. I thought back to the very graphic and gruesome poster hanging by the exit of the bus station exhorting the drivers to use caution: the scenes (real photos) were of the aftermath of a truck and bus colliding, with a police inspector surveying a landscape littered with bodies from the bus and a driver's bloodsplattered and half severed head coming out of the shattered windshield of the truck. I also noticed the cirular "Allah ho Akbar" pendant hanging from the rear view mirror, and tried to be reassured by it. I watched the cyclists on the side of the road and thought that what they were doing seemed dangerous, and then thought that was what I looked like, more or less. A different perspective can change your outlook a bit.

We pulled into Hotan, honking for bicycles and donkeys to get out of the way, and pulled into the bus station. Jiao Yun helped me unload my bike, and tossed it straight into a taxi. We wove through the mess of carts and people at the bazaar, then headed down "Taibei Lu" (this street name in mainland China always gets a chuckle out of me), and pulled up at his friend's guesthouse. We pulled out the stuff, put my bike together, had a look, and I said "Sure, sure" - the place had a shower and a bed, and that was enough. I had made it, finally, to Hotan.

Hotan

The hotel (or hostel or guesthouse or whatever other moniker you like - just not "luxury") was somewhat...disappointing. I had been as month without "conveniences", and had been looking forward to something a little easy. This place was a continuation of the conditions I had lived in for the previous 25 days. Water was pooled on the cement in front of the (squat, of course) toilets, it was full of folks chain smoking, the room resembled a prison cell, though without bars. I took the room; Jiao Yun was smiling expectantly, as was his friend, the hotel's operator. What the heck: how bad could it be? There was, in its defense, a shower - a hot one even - which I was quickly shown to and urged to clean up. I did so, dumped the sand out of my bags, and went for some dinner.

The proprietor showed me the local favorite restaurant, a place specializing in la mian (but doesn't every place in Xinjiang specialize in noodles?). He ordered me a plate of laghman for 6Y, and then retired to his hotel. The food arrived on a stainless steel platter: it was a mountain of food, easily enough for two. I set to work on it. Several Uyghurs walked by checking me out, all filing back to one of the private rooms. One of them, a pudgy-faced guy with intense eyes, bloodshot from some kind of hooch, approached me, shaking my hand and then going on and on loudly in Uyghur, none of which I could understand. The gist of it, from what I could make out through repetitions and sign language, was that there was a party happening in the back room, complete with dancing, and my presence was requested. I figured it couldn't hurt, I waggled my head in response, and the guy (his name was Ghayser) took up my plate of noodles and clutched my hand, crying out some happy sentence, along with "Amin, Allah ho Akbar" and pulled me to the room.

The door was pushed open, and I was greeted by a dozen pairs of eyes, a red ambient light, and blaring music. Ghayser began a long speech about me - I hope it was nice - and then kicked one of his friends out of a chair and sat me down. There were a few women, who looked on a bit stunned by my presence, while the men carried on toasting each other with whisky (this was Ramadan, but there is a lot of wiggle room for Islamic principles in Central Asia). The table was heaped with food, which began arriving on my plate in short order, everyone piling on something. Couples wandered onto and off of the dance floor, sometimes slow dancing, sometimes dancing more traditionally. Before I could get a piece of food in my mouth, Ghayser grabbed me, kissed my forehead and pulled me onto the dance floor. I made an attempt (pathetic) to dance Uyghur style, which involves lots of hand gestures, twirling arms, spinning, hunching down low to the ground and some sort of foot stomping, snapping fingers all the while: Ghayser, in his heavily intoxicated state, was not much better. I was asked where I was from. "Amrika?" then a thumbs up. There were cries of "Arapat...Allah ho Akbar" (Arafat was dead, I gathered - was this a party in his honor?). I tried to have a conversation with one of the more sober men, to ascertain what the party was about, and met with little success. I was able to communicate I came from San Francisco, and thought that Xinjiang was nice, Uyghurs were friendly, and that the weather in Hotan was much warmer than in Tibet.

Things got confusing when Ghayser, all the time kissing me on the forehead and the cheek, began giving Osama Bin Laden a thumbs up, then Washington and New York a thumbs up, and then pantomiming war in Iraq, and giving that a thumbs up. I looked for an exit, which came when Ghayser took a cell-phone call. I waited that out, then said I had to go, politely as possible. I gave him a big hug (playing the part, you know) and then thanked he and everyone else with a handshake. I left, chuckling, and the restaurant workers looked at me smiling. I jerked a thumb back at the room and said it was quite a party. We all had a laugh, I paid for the food and wandered into the street.

Hotan is a city of small businesses: stalls and street hawkers line the old lanes. I went from one to the other gorging myself on large slices of fresh melon (which go for about 5 cents each), naan (same price for a round flatbread), halva (a sesame seed-based sweet, same as in the Middle East), dates, figs, you name it. In the end I felt ill and overfull, but I needed to win back some of the 7kg I had lost in the last 3 months. I walked slowly back to the hotel, noting where the internet cafe was, and went to sleep, ignoring the shouts and tempers flaring at the mahjong game across the narrow hallway.

In the morning I was able to better assess my residence. I had a roommate, a Han Chinese, who wore a cheap blue suit and a ridiculously loud patterned tie which made him look like a game show host. His face was sunken and craggy, and he wore Mafiosi-style sunglasses indoors. I liked him immediately. The rest of the clientele were a mix of Uighur and Han, day laborers and the like: the place was basically some sort of SRO, except there was more than one person to a room. Three women appeared to work there, hard-drinking and smoking types with gravelly voices that climbed to a shriek any number of times during the day. Mahjongg for the unemployed or lazy began at about noon, and was endless, going on well past 2am every night. My roommate didn't play the game, but seemed content to park himself on the ratty couch, still covered in shredded plastic from the day it was new, and watch TV for several hours after work.

I washed and mended clothes, wandered around the town, read the news on the internet, catching up on the last month's events, and, of course, the US election. The bazaar bustled noisily during the day, the food was cheap and plentiful, and I wandered mostly aimlessly for a few days, napping in the middle of the day just because I could. I often ate 1Y bowls of noodles from a street cart next to a dirt lot, where some sort of motor driven swing set for children squeaked around carrying alternately frightened or joyful cargo while an old man beat out some sort of rhythm on a sheepskin tambourine. A sad looking park had a miniature train for kids to ride on, and the shaking cars you see out in front of discount retailers in the US, the children jostling about looking like they don't know what its all for, and the parents waiting for the smile to emerge to justify the change they just wasted on the contraption. Old men with beards and knee high leather boots competed with stylish young ladies in fashionable fur-trimmed coats for my attention: which one to stare at? I browsed the cake stores (there were no fewer than four large ones by the new (Chinese) town square, all named in English "Cake World"), and settled on a bag of chocolate chip cookies. Essentially, I had myself a good time.

I had to get a visa extension, and hoped for a 2 month extension, but the PSB were apologetically only able to give me one month. Ah well, I had been shooting for the moon, so I took it (at least the price was cheaper than I had been expecting). While I waited for my visa, I read the "Notice to Foreign Visitors" sign: I found out that I should not "threaten state safety or security in any way", nor should I be a "disturbance to public order". The text wrapped from one line to the next without any attention paid to word or syllabic endings: this too, I liked, something of the "old (ie more than 4 years ago) China" in it.

The plan was to get to Lhasa, back up on the plateau, taking a bus to Qiemo to save some time on the visa, and then cycling to Golmud and down the good highway there to the capital and cultural center of Tibet.

Riding the Silk Road

I was delayed in leaving Hotan for two days, one because I was treated to an enormous dinner which laid me out flat with diarrhea the following day, and then another day because I missed the bus to Qiemo by 5 minutes. So I wandered Hotan the last day, eating little, and enjoying the sights and sounds of a large Silk Road city, not expecting to see another on this trip.

The bus to Qiemo, about 600km east, and 175km east of my initial contact with the Silk Road at Andi He, left at 11am. "Left" means the engine was started and the passengers were on board, but the two-man driver team tinkered with the engine before we had even left the lot, foreshadowing something ahead. And there was the predictable circling around the city calling out "Qiemo! Qiemo!" for another 30 minutes, picking up the odd passenger or two that way. At last we got underway, myself, two Han Chinese, and a bus full of Uighurs.

The bus was an older model, a cramped sleeper which shoved your feet underneat the head of the person in front of you. Heat was provided by a shaft coming from the engine running back through the middle of the bus - perhaps the exhaust, though I hoped not. The sheets on the sleeping berths were US Confederate Stars and Bars, which brought a small smile to my lips, being from the South myself. We picked up passengers in the small outlying towns between Hotan and Minfeng, stopping at Yutian for a meal at 5pm, having covered no more than a quarter of the trip.

The Uighurs were boisterous and jovial, while the Han, completely outnumbered, were quiet and reserved, unusual behavior for most Han on bus trips. We travelled on a paved road into the night, and I drifted off to sleep cooking on one side and freezing on the side shoved up into the window. At various wakeful stages I was able to look out and see that we were travelling the oil highway north from Minfeng - the worlds first road crossing a drifting sand desert, for an impressive 600km - and then turned right at some point, on another paved road, towards Qiemo. The dunes were stabilized by squares of straw tacked down by road workers, and apparently they did a good job, since the whole thing was free of sand.

I woke up with the bus stopped, the drivers poking their heads down into the transmission, which was gotten to by lifting up a cover next to the driver's seat, banging away with hammers, wrenches, and screwdrivers. The bus laughed about this good-naturedly: everyone expects this on a long distance bus trip in China. We sat stalled out in the desert for about an hour and a half, but the drivers were able to resucitate the bus - also not surprising - and carry on to Qiemo.

We arrived at five in the morning. It was cold, well below freezing, and pitch black. I figured I would be walking some distance to a field and pitching my tent, until someone pointed out a hotel 100m away. I went in, and woke up the front desk attendant from her sleep to ask the price of a room. She was very good-looking, with the sleep-pinched face, and long loosely curled dark hair falling down around her shoulders, something I hadn't been able to see on a Uighur woman since their heads were always covered. The room went for about $6, and I took it, not expecting much, but actually finding a room with an attached shower, running hot water, and clean sheets. The toilet was a sit-toilet, the first such I had seen since Nagqu, some two months before. I got into bed and fell asleep quickly under warm sheets.

The following day I wanted to get a decent start on the road, so I left in a hurry, rushing around town and only buying a few things, since my map indicated that there was a village about 30km away. The road was paved out of town, passing through the typical oasis poplar-lined lanes, donkey carts, and people working the end of the harvest: in this area, this was mostly cotton, with a few bolls still clinging to the woody shrubs being packed up by crews of Uighurs.

About 15km out of Qiemo, the oasis ended and gave out onto desert, stony and sandy. I pedalled on, expecting to make it to whatever was on my map at a bend in the road, where it turned northeast from its present southeastward course. I reached the mark, but this turned out to be a turnoff for a road to Tula, well into the Kunlun mountains, and not somewhere I was eager to go to given that I had just come out of those exact mountains a week before and was looking forward to a leisurely ride along the Silk Road towns and villages of eastern Xinjiang province.

The road crossed a river, and the pavement ended. I was somewhat disappointed with this, having hoped for more good road. I went down to the river and filled my water bottles, as a precaution, although I was sure I would reach something before long.

The road was corrugated and miserably sandy, and my pace was maddeningly slow. I camped, having covered only 50km from Qiemo in the afternoon, and went to sleep. A wind flapped at the tent all night, and the temperature dropped to somewhere around -8C (about 18F). I heard something brushing against the tent, and figured it was sand. I woke to a light dusting of snow in the desert. I packed up in the cold and carried on. There was no traffic, no telephone poles - nothing. The clouds blew in from the southest, a headwind in my face, and a snow began to fall, accumulating on the road and the waves on the low dunes. There wasn't much in the way of foliage, just sand and stones. A group of camels clustered along a low rise, though I couldn't figure out what they ate, and my best guess was that they were 30km from water. I was cycling at only 8km per hour, on account of the wind, the sand, the corrugations, and what I discovered, when checking my altimiter, was a steady climb, imperceptible in this landscape. Finally I approached some hills and the mountains came into view, pulling in quite close and turning white in the snow. I decided to make it over one last hill and then stop for something meager to eat, and as I did so, I found a compound laying across a stony riverbed.

Two men stood outside in the snow looking at me and wondering what I might be doing there in this weather. I stopped, smiled, and asked whether there was a shop or restaurant in the compound. An older man, wearing the typical worker's cap, said there was a restaurant, and that I should come in to eat. I was shown to a room along a row, and the door was pushed open to reveal several Uighur men sitting around talking and sipping tea, having just finished lunch. Room was made for me, and I sat, munching on naan, while an order of laghman (noodles) was served for me. The men were quite interested in me, what I was doing, and what I thought about the war in Iraq. More or less the normal routine: I gave them my route, my age, and told them I thought the war was "bad". Everyone laughed and I ate ample food, although there was nothing to take away with me. I asked if there might be some naan I could buy: the women had none, but a worker went and got some out of a jeep and gave it to me, refusing money and saying, "This is what friends do for each other". The whole bunch suggested that I stay the night there at the settlement (Munabulak) and wait out the inclement weather, but I said I had to keep going. The good news, they told me, was that from here it was downhill to the next place, Janggasay, 80km east. I looked at my altimeter, and found that Munabulak sat at the foothills of the Kunlun at an elevation of 2160m, nearly 1000m above Qiemo.

The ride after lunch was easy: the road was downhill, the corrugations and sand seemed to ease, and the weather cleared, so I was able to cover about 45km in the afternoon. I camped in the dunes, and had another cold night, down to -12C, which made me wonder what lie ahead when I gained the Tibetan plateau again...

The next day there was almost no traffic, just a couple of Land Cruisers speeding past kicking up dust and stones. The wind and sand returned, and it took me over 3 hours to cover the remaining 30km to Janggasay. Janggasay, as it turned out, was a walled compound with a restaurant attached to the outside of the wall, run by three women who urged me in to the heated room.

Lunch was laghman, which I watched them make with interest, hoping to learn the secret to the pulling, stretching, and slapping of dough into noodles. It is a mesmerizing process, the quick, sure movements, the twirling of the strands around the fingers and the wrists, and then the pounding of the noodles on a flat surface before tossing them into boiling water to be cooked. The food was good, and since there was no store in the settlement, and I had far from enough food to make it comfortably for another day, I asked to have a second serving in a takeaway bag - a strange request, but they delivered. A bus, heading from Qiemo to Rouqiang - the next large town on the Silk Road - pulled up, and perhaps 20 passengers filed in to eat, with three Han staying outside and kicking at the dust, one of them a woman wearing a skin-tight white outfit with knee-high go-go boots, looking very odd and out of place here.

I filled up with water, got charged too much (right in front of my eyes I watched everyone else pay the going price and then have a 30 percent tax applied to myself. I raised this quietly with her, asking repeatedly the price - giving her a way out that saved face - but she wouldn't relent. In the end, I just paid the extra money, and figured karma would set things right), and set off. The rest of the day was monotonous desert, just stones and sand, a few dry watercourses, and no plant life.

The next morning, in the cold of my tent, I warmed up my semi-frozen block of noodles with the last of my fuel, which didn't even last to heat the noodles up beyond cold. I thought to myself that I had left Qiemo seriously underprepared, with not enough food, and less money than I had wanted to leave with (the ATM in Hotan broke the day I went to use it, and the bank wouldn't give me an advance on the card I had just successfully used 3 days before, in a frustratingly arbitrary ruling by the bank official I couldn't reverse). I chewed on the greasy cold noodles, glad to have something, and headed off, unsure of what was to come, since according to the map I had bought in Hotan, I had about 100km to go to a settlement, and on this road I was unlikely to cover more than 75km in a day. In the distance, a cluster of trees appeared, meaning a waterway, and perhaps a house. When I got there, I found an abandoned restaurant, with battered couches and car seats outside, and piles of trash but no people. Across the street, however, was a road workers' compound, and I went in to see if I might find water and maybe a bit of bread.

A dog barked loudly, and a man was working on a truck, but the place was mostly deserted. I poked around, and found 3 men preparing lunch. I smiled and said hi, and (I was counting on this, I'll admit) I was invited to have lunch with them. We sat in the room, mostly silent, as the men washed rice, chopped mutton and squash, and cooked a large pot of polo (usually known as pilaf in the west). When it was done, it was tasty: fatty and sweet. I asked if I could buy a couple of pieces of bread for the haul to the village, which, I had been assured, had stores and restaurants - the whole works - and was given almost more than I could carry, with any attempt at money refused. Again, they said, "this is what friends do for each other". They also said that in 20km, the road became paved, which surprised me greatly. I left, smiling, full, and feeling good about people: with all the positive experiences I had had travelling among the Chinese people, it was easy to forget the incidents like the previous day's overcharging - I was still well ahead on the balance.

The road crossed an area with 50m high sand dunes in ripples running along ridges to both sides, and then entered a dry dusty forest, the kind that seems so out of place in the middle of the desert. There was no running water, nor any pooled, just sand and trees. After a low rise, I saw, just past a tin shack with smoke coming from a chimney, blacktop. My spirits rose as I rode up onto the smooth road, one of the best I had encountered in China. A few hundred meters down the road was a road workers' camp and an asphalt mixing tower. Two workers in orange jumpsuits said that the road was brand new, and, with the exception of a 20km stretch, ran the rest of the 110km to Rouqiang. I sped off past dunes stabilized by straw, racing past a settlement loading the last of the year's melons onto trucks in cardboard boxes, and covered 20km in no time. I couldn't make the village that night, since the last 15km I did was a construction zone, with a constant stream of trucks carting sand and gravel from pits to the new road bed being built up out of the desert. I camped at sunset, able to see lights in the distance: a town, and food, and water, and a good road.

I woke and rode into the village, past a host of cyclists heading out to fiels, past shepherds driving sheep into the dry stalks of the wheat harvest. The village, Waxixar, was nearly a town, with a market at the central junction with a dirt road, and the village mosque at the corner. I stopped in for samsa (tandoori-baked dumplings: the word comes from the same root as the Indian "samosa" and the east African "sambussa") at a small cafe, and then went to look for something a bit more substantial when the town had begun to open for business. I ended up in a small restaurant, being served mutton and squash soup - again greasy and sweet - and boiled dumplings. I was informed that the road to Rouqiang was new this year, and smooth sailing all the way.

I pedalled east, and the desert quickly closed back in on the road. A dune-filled landscape was broken up by a hardscrabble settlement of a few homes off the road to the north, where dry fields were able to sustain a few crops, and then absolutely nothing for 60km. The terrain was completely flat, and except for signs of road construction, such as tractor tread marks or scooped out areas of sand, it was the most featureless place I had ever seen. Literally nothing: no plant life, no dunes, no stones, nothing on the horizon. a completely flat calm ocean of sand stretching in a 360 degree panorama around me, with the occasional minivan running passengers from Waxixar to Rouqiang and back. At sunset, after riding 90km, the outskirts of Rouqiang rose up out of the sand, and as the light faded, I was on a road through the trees to Rouqiang, the last town on the Silk Road in Xinjiang before I rose up into Qinghai.

Rouqiang

I stopped more or less the first person I met in the town and asked if there was a cheap hotel nearby. The response was "Once more, in English please." I indulged him, and he said, "You should stay with me, at my house. It is just over here." I demurred, but he insisted, and I found myself standing outside o a stairwell in a state-built concrete apartment block two minutes later.

The man was Zhan Li Long, a schoolteacher from Korla (another, much larger city to the northwest) who was in Rouqiang on a year-long development program. "Development?" I asked.

"Yes, you see, this is a very poor town, a very poor county, so the government sends several teachers - about 30 - from Korla to Rouqiang each year to help teach the students."

I said I thought that was nice of them to do so. He replied that it was part of the provincial government's efforts to help develop this out-of-the-way place (read: poor and Muslim), bringing in Chinese teachers from Korla in a variety of subjects. His English was so-so, but he asked me to wait a minute, and he returned with two English teachers from the same apartment block (it turned out that the Rouqiang government provided the apartments for the teachers free of cost, though these were quite dilapidated). We went into Li Long's apartment, and the leftovers of a birthday cake from one of the English teachers' birthdays were brought in. Soon we were all chatting away in a mix of Chinese and English. A tall woman - the computer teacher - came to help prepare caihezi (deep-fried dumplings stuffed with chives and scrambled egg), and we talked about the state of education in our two countries. They said teachers were not highly paid in China, to which I replied that it was essentially the same case in the US. They said they felt good about their jobs, however, and that they felt the children were the future: again I said that most schoolteachers in the US felt the same way(I left out the fact that this idealism quickly faded in the face of bureaucratic red-tape and poor working conditions, causing many to leave the profession or to become jaded and just mark days to retirement). They asked what might be different about schools in the two places, and I said the most obvious was probably the attitude of the students and the parents: in China, teachers are still highly respected, as are adults in general. In the US, I said, children, particularly teenages, were apt to be a bit more...critical or unreceptive, more difficult to win over.

We carried on like this for some time, with deep-fried dumplings pushed on me until I had to push back, feeling the weight of the grease in my stomach. The room slowly emptied, and eventually I found myself in a room alone, with the TV on (always the TV), laying on a mat. I began to write in my journal, until the power to the building shorted out. My host, being the physics instructor, was called upon to fix the problem (a blown fuse) by candlelight, and about 5 minutes later, the power was back on, only to be blown out again 15 minutes after. He shook his head, pulled out another piece of wire, and tied it between the contacts at either end of the fuse carrier, which was blackened from heat. I asked him how old the building was: "Not very old, but it was poorly constructed, you know? So three or four times a night sometimes I am asked to fix it." I suggested he just show someone how to locate the blown fuse (well, what should have been a fuse, anyway) and wrap some copper wire between the two contacts. He sighed and said that noone wanted to learn something new, since there was already someone to do the job. Give a man a fish...

The next morning, we woke up with the sun and went out for a quick Chinese breakfast - meaning warm soymilk and fried breadsticks - and then he headed off to school, leaving me in his apartment, and saying that if I could wait until lunchtime, he would come back and see me off. I shopped for food and a set of warm thermals as another layer against the coming cold on the plateau, and around 1pm he came back, saying "Let's go", and we rushed off to lunch with the computer teacher.

I liked her manner: very aloof, with a critical tilt to the eyebrows that made her look like she wouldn't fall for anything. They asked what I wanted for lunch. "Something simple...maybe noodles." So we headed to a Uighur restaurant for laghman and at the end, of course, I was unable to pay. Li Long asked during the meal if I knew about the Lolan Beauty in Rouqiang; I had no idea what he was talking about. He said there was a museum across the street with some very old things from the area, and that if I was interested we could take it in before I left (I had wanted to leave that day). I thought for a minute, and figured Why not? So we went across the street, while the computer teacher went shopping.

The building looked abandoned: tiles had fallen off of the front facade, the courtyard cement was badly cracked, and the front doors had broken glass panes which made it easy enough to reach in and fidget with the cheap bicycle cable lock securing the building. It was closed, so he said we should come back later, if I wanted to stay another night with him. I suggested this might be putting him out, which off course he put off immediately, saying it was a great opportunity for him to practice English. We went back to his apartment, and chatted for a while, about politics, friendships between our two peoples, and so on. He was a bit of a bohemian, in a country and culture that didn't really have space for these kind of beliefs. So he was a teacher, bored with his job, and looking for a way out. His sister had married a French engineer, and lived part-time in Paris, part-time in Guangzhou. He said he had gone to Guangzhou last summer and had spend 6000Y in 3 weeks, which is an astounding amount of money for a Chinese teacher from the western hinterland. He had several amusing anectdotes about being fleeced by big-city cons, and had been pickpocketed twice, once in a red-light hair salon (he professed to having been ignorant of the red-light connotations before going there: "I never saw this in Korla". I figured this meant he didn't get out much, because every Chinese town of any size at all has the haircutters' brothels.) He asked why I travelled - a typical question - and I said part of it was to meet ordinary people, since you don't get that on TV or in the news. I said it would be nice to try to forge relationships of some kind with people of the opposite country, since the political and economic elites of the two were likely to force larger and larger conflicts in the relatively near future. He smiled in agreement: "Ordinary people around the world are good, and don't want trouble. It's always the politicians and the rich making the problems, and the ordinary folks are often led along". It was nice to meet a Chinese who had a similar viewpoint, and could express it.

He returned to school to finish his day, and I went shopping for some fruit, knowing that any money would be rejected. When school was finished, he took me to the museum building, which was now open, and we went up the dark stairs to the second floor, past the lobby which was empty save for a 6 foot high golden bust of Chairman Mao.

The museum itself, it turned out, was closed: this we found out from the administrator, a well-fed man sitting behind a large desk in a room, scribbling on several supplicants papers. My friend asked if we might see the Lolan Beauty.

"No, the museum is closed."

"But this is my friend from the US, he's only here for one day. Please, let's find a way to make it work."

The official was resistant, there was some quiet discussion, some numbers were thrown around, and I head the sum of 40Y (about $5) settled upon. I didn't want my friend to pay, but there was no graceful way out of it, so he left the room to find the appropriate person to pay the "fee" to. As soon as he was gone, the administrator called me over to his desk, opened a safe, and pulled out two pieces of pottery, obviously very old. He asked me if I liked them. I said they were quite nice. Then he asked if I was interested in buying them. There I was, standing in a room with a guardian of the cultural heritage of the region, and I was being given a chance at buying something old, perhaps ancient (I had been told the finds had been dated to 3800 years ago), for a probably small sum of money. It was the classic corrupt official, being played out in front of me. I smiled and said no thanks, and he shrugged and put the items back in the safe. Maybe sometime later, he will find a buyer...

The museum was opened for us by a Uighur employee. "Museum" meant a room, about the size of the typical living room in the suburbs, with a few cheap glass cases. I was expecting a few poor displays and perhaps some pottery shards. What was actually in the room was three glass cases at about waist level containing mummified humans, dug up out of the sand about 200km to the northwest of Rouqiang. The bodies were amazing: very well preserved, with the skin and hair more or less completely intact, their clothes - made of wool and dyed - were relatively undeteriorated. This had not been inentional, but just a result of being buried in such an extremely dry climate. The woman had died from complications at childbirth, and there was blood running down from her groin. I was stunned to find something like this in a dingy room on the second floor of a deteriorating building in a backwater town in western China. I was handed a few animal skins to look at, which were piled in a corner on the floor, with no special case for them.

"How old are these?"

"The same - 3800 years old."

Nearly four thousand years old and I'm casually handed relics which are lying on the floor. I asked if there had been other finds. Apparently, both Japanese and British scientists had dug up other remains in the area and carted them off to Tokyo and London in the early part of the 20th century.

"At that point, China was unable to protect its resources" Li Long said, "so many things were taken away. It is a sad story."

This was true: there are ancient pieces of cultural significance from all over the world in places like New York or the British Museum. Probably, these should be repatriated, since the items belong to the people of the land they were found in. I didn't mention that I had been given the chance to walk away with a piece of China's heritage a few minutes earlier by the same man he had had to bribe to get us in here.

We left after an hour, and had another dinner. More teachers came over, and I was asked by a jovial English teacher to come to her class in the morning to speak with the students. I said that would be fine, as long as I could get going sometime around noon. This would be no problem, I was told, so I agreed to go to a few English classes in the morning at the middle school they taught at.

Li Long took me to the school in the morning, just down the street. We filed in with the students. I chuckled to myself as I watched groups of students sweep the grounds, pull weeds from planters, wash windows. I mentioned to Li that he would never see this in the US; he seemed mildly surprised. One of the buildings was new, but still sporting concrete floors. His office was a large room shared by 7 or 8 teachers, all sitting at small desks grading workbooks. A coal stove sat to the side of the room. The English teacher showed up, and I was taken to a class.

I walked into the room and was immediately treated to a round of applause. "Say hello to Jeff" the teacher said, and a loud resounding "Hello, Jeff" from the students. They were all well-behaved, listening intently to me talk as I searched for something to talk about, not knowing their level of comprehension. It turned out that many students understood English quite well, having studied it for several years, as required by the Chinese educational system nowadays. The problem, I was told, lie in the fact that they have noone to speak with, not the "proper language environment" to practice and hone their spoken English. So many Chinese have a good grasp of written English, and probably a better understanding of English grammar than most Americans, but speak it rather poorly. I fielded questions from the students, mostly about myself and what I thought of China ("Do you like China?", "Do you like Chinese food?", "Can you speak Chinese?" and so on. More than one student invited me to their houses for dinner. I had the image of kids throwing spitwads at me and heckling me from the back of the room in the US, and looked out at the well-behaved kids in front of me. It was easy, but I missed the spirit of rebellion, even if I was the target.) Someone suggested I sing a Christmas carol, so I sang "Jingle Bells", humming through the parts I couldn't remember. It was a poor rendition, but I received a standing ovation. I was led to three other classes where this was repeated (including "Jingle Bells"), and then it was lunchtime.

The teachers asked what I thought, and whether I might like to stay in Rouqiang and teach for the year. I politely declined, although it might have been instructive to live in a backwater like this and teach - speak really, since the Chinese teachers instructed the students in grammar - my native language. This was not the sort of place I would choose to live in the US, so it seemed unlikely that I would choose it in China. As for what I thought, I said that the students were remarkably well-behaved (the most striking thing for me), and that the facilities seemed not all that different from some school districts in the US (the school had a computer lab, probably something a few schools in the US still don't have).

I parted ways with the teachers, thanking them for their generousity. Each gave me an email address and phone number, asking me to call them if I ran into problems. Li Long, who had already fed me and housed me, insisted on stuffing my bags with more naan, and he smiled at me as I rode away, I thinking to myself that I could not begin to repay the kindness I had encountered in this town, let alone during my trip in China.

Up and Out of Xinjiang: The Road to Golmud

The road out of Rouqiang passed through oasis farmland, peopled by a mix of Hui, Han, and Uighurs. Bicycled traffic, heavy at first, decreased, and I was on my own 10km down the road. The pavement ended soon after, and again it was desert. Work had begun on continuing the sealed road towards the east, but hadn't gotten very far at this point. I came across a solitary Uighur worker, shoveling sand into a trailer bed. It seemed ludicrous to shovel sand to take anywhere in a place with nothing but sand, but there he was, standing alone, doing his job 20km from anywhere. We smiled at each other: I probably looked just as ridiculous.

The road was stony and sandy, and progress was slow all day. Just before camping, about 60km from Rouqiang, a truck nearly ran me off the road staring at me, then stopped behind me. I wondered what they could want. A woman called out to me, and jogged over to where I stood. What did she want? Nothing, only to give me a large bag of apples, oranges, a couple of bottles of water. Having done that, she just smiled and ran back to the truck. I camped right there, figuring it was an auspicious place.

The next day I began to climb after crossing a mostly frozen river. The climb was slow and sandy, and I spent several hours winding up into the mountains that I knew were leading me out of the Taklimakan basin and back up to the fringes of the Tibetan plateau. Traffic was almost nil. The road had washed out in many places, forcing crossings of unstable ice, and at one point, my foot broke through the ice and plunged my left leg in up to mid calf. I cursed and pulled it out, and in so doing slipped on the ice and dropped the other foot into the water. Again I cursed and pulled this foot out, this time plunging my left foot in again and dropping my bicycle. I groaned and just took my time, carefully removing my foot and pulling the bike from the stream. I forded the stream a few meters away and then sat down to wring out my socks and think to myself that at least the temperature was above freezing.

A place on indicated on the map turned out to be nothing but a home for 2 ravenous dogs, who charged out, hackles raised, and I had to throw stones for several minutes as I slowly walked up the canyon. The road started to climb up higher and higher, and by darkness I had climbed over 1600m, to an elevation of 3000m, and no end in sight.

The night was cold, down to -18C, and the morning started out windy - a headwind, unfortunately. A couple of trucks hauling sheep passed me by, and the climb began in earnest. The snow level was about 3500m, and the road became slippery. A final series of switchbacks came into view, and I could see the pass several km up the last hill.

A Land Cruiser drove be with a westerner in the front, and stopped around the next switchback. The man and a Chinese partner stood taking photos of me as I approached. We stood in the snow and talked for a while. It turned out he was an American biologist, working in China with the government and the nature reserve system to make assessments of the resources in the parks and do various field assays of wildlife. His particular area was in the Arjin Shan, the range which I was now crossing, and one that butted up against the northeastern corner of the Changtang reserve. I told him I had recently crossed the northwestern corner of the Changtang reserve: we talked briefly about what I had seen, and about protection of the area. He said the EU had recently given China $60 million to manage its parks and preserves, and that the laws on the books were strong, but as I had seen, there was no enforcement capacity. I mentioned the signs of poachers or prospectors far into the reserve, and he said that since the Kunlun had been more or less mined out (I had heard sporadic dynamiting from the mountains as I left Rouqiang, and Li Long had said there were still some hardy prospectors pushing well up into the mountains in search of gold and jade), miners were now pushing into the Changtang itself. He gave me a business card, and I told him I would send him whatever data I had on wildlife sightings when I could.

The pass top was just shy of 4000m, and the snow on the road, which had been made icy by passing trucks made cycling impossible, and walking with a loaded bike difficult. The view was great: a snow dusted desert badlands, with mountain peaks rising up well over 4000m to the southwest. I spent most of the afternoon trying to get down below the snow level, and succeeded just short of sundown. I passed a truck winching a 4WD out of a ravine, and the workers, seeing my approach, greeted me with water and naan. The generousity of the Chinese was beginning to weigh on me, since I had no real way to repay their kindness, other than a smile and a compliment. I found a Uighur road workers' camp close to dark, and they said there was a restaurant 8km further on, although I was welcome to spend the night with them. I declined, feeling like I was overdrawn on kindness to strangers, and pedalled on into the evening. Darkness fell before I could cover the 8km, and I camped just shy of whatever sort of restaurant there was.

The wind picked up at night, and the morning dawned windy and cold. I took my time, waiting for the sun to heat the tent, and then when I was packed, I decided to inflate my tire a bit, which had a very slow leak. The pump, which Martin had left me since my original pump broke in the Changtang, snapped off the lever used to create a seal for inflation. I cursed again and again, and started walking down the road.

The restaurant was not part of a village, it was a forlorn building a long way from anywhere. Three people lived there, all from Chongqing in Sichuan province. It was a very lonely existence, and I doubted many people called at this station. A dog charged out, but its front wrist had a nasty compound fracture exposing splinters of bone through the skin. A man followed the dog and called the dog off. I asked what had happened.

"The stupid thing charged a truck, and got run over," he said. "Come in, come in, get warm."

I sat in a warm room, by a stove fired by brushwood from the sides of the stream running down from the mountains, and fixed the pump with bailing wire (which, by the way, the touring cyclist should never be without). I had a huge bowl of noodles with fried egg for about a dollar, filled up with water, and thought to myself, "This is it, for 250km." It was still 100km to Mangnai Zhen, where I hoped to get resupplied.

The road was poor that afternoon, running through a valley, crossing a low rise, and then traversing a very large plain which opened out far to the north: the road hugged the mountains to the south and headed east. Again, all day there were only 4 or 5 vehicles, Land Cruisers speeding someone important from Qinghai to Xinjiang or in the reverse: heavy truck traffic used the road farther to the north, which avoided the pass I had just climbed (about 3000m vertical climb from Rouqiang to the top). The next morning a frozen lake and wetlands came into view in the low part of the depression, and I had lunch near a group of camels. There was a short climb through a canyon and another washed out section of road, and then a cloud of dust that I assumed signalled Mangnai Zhen.

The dust was from the Qinghai-Xinjiang border, a large cement works and gravel rock quarry, a place called Shimingkuan-Qinghai. The place defined "dumphole": fine chalky dust settled on everything, workers wandered in and out of the cloud, dogs rummaged through trash, trucks with smashed out windshields rumbled by. I asked a man if there was a restaurant around, and he referred me down the road a couple of km.

A restaurant at a junction provided the venue for my long-awaited contact with modern China. Several workers were staying at the place, which doubled as an SRO of sorts, one of whom had a smart phone with a Chinese to English language dictionary. We talked about my trip, the news, whatever, and I sat warm in the place, watching a young woman wash her very long hair expertly in a small plastic washbasin without so much as splashing water on the floor. The woman who ran the place was a rugged Hui, who was bringing in shovelfuls of coal into the place when I entered. There was a shop with a few items; I bought what I could, and headed off, told that the road became paved two km farther on, and that a real town was about 60km away.

The sealed road was wonderful; I didn't miss the all-day bumping of the desert roads I had been on for two weeks. I sped along for an hour, making 20km, and camped. Unfortunately the next day, the wind blew as a strong headwind, and the next 40km to Huatugou were a struggle to cover by lunchtime.

Huatugou was a town which had so far missed the facelift happening all over China, a collection of empty buildings with broken windows and oil containers. The population was mostly Hui, and I looked for the first restaurant to get lamian. I found the flapping green flag, and was ushered in by a friendly-looking Hui in his skullcap.

I sat down and ordered lamian - vegetarian, since I felt it was time to get back to myself (Xinjiang had not been a good place for a vegetarian). A older fellow with a long beard asked me where I was from, and once they found out I spoke Chinese, it was a long succession of questions and answers in both directions. The family was from eastern Qinghai, near the Gansu provincial border, and had been here for about a year. Same story, here to make a few bucks, and hopefully go back home. This place, I was told, sucked. From what I had seen, I couldn't disagree. The noodles came, and then I followed up with a request for huajia (steamed bread in a sort of flower (hua) shape). Everything was good, I took photos with them, and asked how much. Nothing, they declared, you are our guest. I said, Well, yes, but this is a restaurant. They wouldn't take money, and on top of that, they insisted on my carrying another 4 steamed buns with me. Again and again, the kindness never seemed to stop for the lone traveller on the back roads of China...

The wind had changed direction and increased to a steady 20kph. Dust blew across the streets, men clutched at their skullcaps, everyone sqinted their eyes, and I pulled into a shop to buy a few things before heading to the short-cut road on the map to Golmud.

I made over 100km that day, with the strong wind blowing me past a large oil field, derricks moving slowly up and down in rows in the sand. Large storage tanks occupied a plain to the south. The road remained sealed all afternoon, and I camped in the sand off to the side of a road which saw a couple of trucks every hour.

The next day a climb took me to a low pass, and then a long fast descent to the junction with the road to Golmud. A tin shack stood at the corner, with a Hui sign, so I figured it was a restaurant.

"Zhe shi fanguan ma?" I asked.

"Dui, shi fanguan"

Having confirmed that I could eat something here, I went in. A handsome Hui couple ran the place, which had two rooms. I sat on a chair about 2 feet from their bed, where a toddler of 18 months wormed around. "Restaurant", in this case, meant instant noodles. I wasn't excited about this, but that was what there was, so I ate them. The couple were from western Gansu, and had been trying to make a living here in this completely out of the way place for 6 months. I thought this was a brave idea, to try to make it serving instant noodles to sporadic truck traffic. It seemed unfeasible, but I wished them luck, bought a soda for the road and headed off.

The road was sandy, with no blacktop. I wound down to a dried out wetland, to a place on the map I had hoped would have a shop. No, no, it was just a water tank (the Chinese character for water, shui, I know, but the other character in the place name might have informed me that there really was nothing else there...). I pedalled on, past a few Kazakh yurts, remnants of a group of rebel Kazakhs who had been pursued into the area, the Qaidam Basin, by the PLA in the 1950s. The road climbed a low pass, and I camped, frustrated again at my unpreparedness: I had been ready for an easy ride to Golmud on a paved road with a shop more or less every day.

As it turned out, the sand road to Golmud had almost nothing on it. Places marked on the map were pumping stations for the pipeline running from the oilfields of Huatugou to the refineries of Golmud. The second night, I stopped a truck to ask for water, which was completely unavailable in this sand desert wasteland. He gave me about 250ml, and I asked if there was a place with people anytime soon. He said there was something in 10km. In 10km, at sunset, there was a pumping station. Outside was a tarpaper shack with piles of scrap wood, which I assumed was a restaurant of some kind. It turned out to be the quarters of a hardy handful of road workers, who offered me a bed to sleep in and dinner and breakfast. The following day I found a lone restaurant in an area of chest high grasses.

I pushed open the door and found a curious scene: a Kazakh, a Han, a Zhuang (from southern China's Guangxi province) and three Mongolians, one clutching his head and moaning. It turned out this guy had really tied one on the night before, drinking two liters of whisky, and was badly hungover. He staggered to his feet to vomit just outside the door. The proprietor was a Han from Golmud, dressed in the blue cooks coat familiar to the traveller in China. I asked for noodle soup, which came a few minutes later. Several local Mongolian girls came in and began tormenting the hungover man. Outside, next to a yurt, two men tried to crank start a jeep which was cold from the night. The men asked if there were such things in the US: "Not for about 50 years" I said. "I've never seen anyone crankstart a truck or jeep in the US, and I'm 31."

After breakfast, well-fed and warm, I headed out, along a road which passed scattered Mongolian yurts in the grasses. The desert returned after about 20km, and near sunset I saw the tall smokestacks of another pumping station. A Land Cruiser pulled up and stopped, with four men getting out and saying hello. One was a Singaporean engineer who spoke that dialect of English one finds in Singapore and Malaysia, peppered with lots of "la"'s at the end of words or sentences. He said they wanted to invite me to stay at the station, and I accepted the offer, agreeing to meet them in about 20 minutes, since that was how far away it was.

The gate was open and I went in. I was expecting to lay on the floor in some concrete room in a corner of the facility. Instead, I was given a very nice room, with an attached hot shower, given a fantastically delicious dinner, and invited to play Chinese chess with several workers. It was a wonderful reception. I talked well into the night with the Singaporean about all manner of things: it seemed he was bohemian at heart, but lived in Singapore, where this wasn't really an option. The next morning, I was given several packages of instant noodles, a can of beef, and told to stop at the next pumping station if I made it there.

The road headed across sand dunes, and then into a long stretch of grass and low trees. A Mongolian yurt doubled as a restaurant, and I stopped and had noodles. The people there told me that they occasionally saw foreigners on bikes, a few per year, but not this late in the year. I said that december wasn't my preference, but things had just turned out this way. They laughed and said, Why not try January. No thanks.

A few km on I met a vagrant, completely filthy, blackened from dirt, with dreadlocks and dressed in rags. I gave him my can of beef and a package of cookies, and he tossed a 1Y note into my bag after I had repeatedly refused it. I thought to myself that this man was hardy and a little crazy to walk down this road, since there was a stretch of 300km of nothing, and then another 80km of nothing to Huatugou, and then again nothing. I wished him well, and pedalled on.

I reached Golmud the next day, a real city, full of Hui shops and restaurants, tall minarets, and lots of trucks coming and going from Lhasa. I found a cheap hotel, got a room, and went out for dinner. When I came back, I was informed I couldn't stay there, because I was a foreigner. Every once in a while this strikes the travelling cyclist in China: the local police require you to stay somewhere "nice", since you couldn't possibly want to stay in such dismal quarters as a two dollar room (it had been actually quite acceptable - clean sheets and everything). So the women flagged a cab, my bike was tied to the trunk, and a few minutes later I was walking into the lobby of the Golmud Hotel, feeling that I was about to be separated from a lot of money as the doorman opened the door and the bellhop took my bags.

The price was actually pretty reasonable - 100Y (about $12) for the night in a very nice room, with a strange shower stall with "romance lighting" options on a computer display. I washed my clothes in the tub, laid them out in the warm heated room to dry, watched Stuttgart play Bayern Munich in German soccer on the television, and drifted off to sleep, with the plan to get money and a visa extension the following morning.

The 910 to Xining, a Bus, a Visa, and the 903 to Golmud

I woke up early, happy to go to the complimentary breakfast buffet and sample a variety of Chinese food: steamed buns, various hot and cold vegetables, pickles and so on. As a solo traveller, or even two people, you rarely get a run of the cuisine like this, so I took advantage of the opportunity and dug in.

I took a stroll over to the PSB office, past frozen sidewalks and men calling out from their bicycle rickshaws offering their services to whoever might want them. One sees these itinerant workers, without a steady job, riding about or standing on corners with signs mentioning what sort of work they could perform. With the decommisioning of state enterprises, and the poverty of the countryside pushing people into the cities, there is a profusion of these men (and occasionally women as well) looking for work. The areas where they congregate are called "job-markets", and they aren't very different from what you see in US cities, particularly in California, where migrants stand on corners and find sporadic work as day laborers.

I found the PSB office, only to realize that it was Sunday, and the place was essentially closed. I spoke with a young guard, and he suggested I come back on Monday. A higher level man asked the guard what I wanted, assuming I didn't speak Chinese, and when the guard said I wanted a visa extension, he emitted a low snort that said to me "Not Very Likely". I talked a while longer with the guard, who was very keen on sports and listed a host of international sports figures, most of whom I had never heard of. I thanked him and walked out of the compound feeling a bit uncertain about what my next step should be.

I figured I should try to get money as well, since I was underfunded for the ride to Lhasa, especially if I was to pay for another night in the hotel and for a visa extension. As it turned out, I couldn't get money at the main branch of the Bank of China. "Try Xining, or Lhasa" they said. Thanks a million, I'm on a bicycle, so those places are a bit inconvenient for me right now. I walked out, figuring that my next move had been decided by circumstances: head to Xining for both a visa extension and money.

The train to Xining, the 910, left in the late afternoon, so I placed my things in the hotel's left luggage room, and said I'd be back in a day or two. I killed time wandering around near the train station, which was on the outskirts of town, far away from anything interesting. Buying the ticket was relatively easy: the stainless steel corral that was set up to combat the Chinese habit of jumping lines - or not even bother to form one - meant that someone managed to shove their money in the ticket agent's window a half dozen times before I got near. Unfortunately, the agent went on break, and another window opened with a mad rush to the front, and I found myself in the same place in line I had been 25 minutes before. Sigh.

I bought a hard-seat ticket - the cheapest class - because I figured it would be interesting to rub shoulders with the Chinese working-class. A 13 hour train ride ran me about $5. To kill time, I had noodles, shopped at a large market full of vegetables, snack food, bread, and the like, and then headed back to the station to sit and wait for the train to leave. I sat in the ticket hall watching a variety of people, some from Tibet heading east, some from Golmud or its environs, cram into the seats, or sit on their luggage, spitting sunflower seeds on the floor, blowing snot out of their noses at my feet, chainsmoking cigarette after cigarette，toddlers pissing on the floor. To kill time, I had noodles, shopped at a large market full of vegetables, snack food, bread, and the like, and then headed back to the station to sit and wait for the train to leave. Occasionally a railway official would come into an area and brusquely order everyone to clear out: sometimes this was so that the floor could be cleaned, sometimes it was for no apparent reason. The rail employee uniforms were modular: the outfit was the same, and then some red diamond shaped patch was pinned on the left arm, flopping around, describing what their duty was today, or this hour.

The call went out for the train, and a line of sorts, in places 8 or 9 abreast, formed, snaking through the hall. I passed through the gate eventually, and found myself on car number three, looking for seat number 20. The numbers started at the high end: 144. It was incredible to shove 144 people, more or less, into a single rail car. I passed Chinese dressed in the old blue caps and cheap suits, nearly every man shod in loafers. This was the China I had seen in 1997, the proletariat, or what was left of them, since state-run enterprises had been and continued to be dismantled at a rapid pace. I took my seat, a window seat at least, and looked at my fellow bench mates. "Hard-seat" is apt: the seats are merely benches, with the backs set at 90 degree angles from the seats, and about 2 feet between rows. This means that you can't help but put your knees into someone else's thighs. and the three-across-the-bench wasn't spacious either. Cigarette smoke clouded the air as we were treated to muzak on the train's PA system: favorites like "The Sounds of Silence", "You Could Get Lost Between the Moon and New York City", and "Take a Look at Me Now".

We pulled out at dark, and I watched out the window at the darkening sand and the flares from refineries burning off natural gas to the south of the city. Soon there was absolutely nothing to look at - even if there had been daylight - and I turned back to my staring benchmates. It wasn't that they were rude, or even curious: one had no choice but to point one's eyes at someone, since people were all around. The man across from me was sick, sniffling, groaning, and spitting onto the floor. An older map in a blue cap met my eyes with a vacant stare. A couple, very much in love, sat across from me, he looking exhausted, and she squeezed improbably into very tight black pants and knee-high go-go boots. We all alternately stared and closed our eyes, with no way of passing the time. Conductors walked up and down the aisle selling water and instant noodles, or - a more recent addition - TV sets with VCD players to watch in your booth.

Time moved intolerably slowly. I was miserable, but I was obviously not alone: everyone in the car was shifting and contorting their bodies to try to find the evasive comfortable position. Strangers gave up on keeping any sort of distance, and the man to my right slouched over onto my shoulder and began to snore. Occasionally he would wake up, wipe drool off of his cheek, give me a wan smile, and drop off to some sort of semi-conscious state again. I got up to eat a snack in the vestibule, joining a few smokers who wanted to dare the subfreezing temperatures inbetween the cars. I had to step over people sprawled under the benches on the filthy floor, feet poking out into the aisle. Men and women lay crumpled on top of each other, or using someone else's feet as a pillow for one's head, or trying to bridge the space between two benches with ones midsection suspended in the air. I read the English sign by the sink: "Please don't drop odds and ends into the pond". A sign in the toilet exhorted occupants to "Please flush the chamber pot". Beautiful translations, I thought to myself, I couldn't do a better job.

I returned to my seat, and dozed off uncomfortably. I was jolted awake by the man in the couple, who had fallen asleep with a bottle of juice in his hands which had slipped out as he lost consciousness and spilled onto the man in the blue cap who now lay on the floor underneath us all. No apologies, since this was bound to happen, just a quiet passing around of toilet paper to wipe off the juice from pants or jackets or hair. The sick man groaned. I looked at my watch; he asked me the time, and I told him it was 11:30PM. "Ey-oh". He groaned again. We still had 8 hours to Xining.

The night dragged on interminably. At some point, someone in the car rented a VCD player, which stopped working after 10 minutes, and began pounding on it and cursing the conductor. Everyone looked up and smiled, glad of the distraction from our individual misery. Finally, Xining came into view, and we walked out into the cold pre-dawn air into the city.

I had a couple of hours to kill, so I wandered around looking for soymilk, finding it in a small alley, and paying almost nothing for a bowl and 3 breadsticks (the total was 8 cents). I walked up towards skyscrapers, and watched the city come awake. Traffic was haphazard, with people making impossible cross traffic turns but somehow avoiding a collision. Hui were hauling out sheep carcasses on meathooks. I found a police station that was open and asked about where I should go for an extension. The woman wrote it out on a piece of paper for me to show a cab driver. As I walked out to flag a cab I found a large Bank of China, and in 15 minutes I was back out on the street flush with cash.

I hailed a cab and went to the PSB visa office. I was invited back to an office with a uniformed officer, speaking English, and a plainclothes officer, rather staid, across the desk from him. He asked me what I wanted in a gruff voice. I politely asked for a visa extension.

"Let me see your passport." I handed it to him. "You have already been in China too long. No extension." This was bad news.

"Well, you see, I'm traveling by bicycle, and it takes a long time to cross China - its a big country (forced smile here). I just want to get to Xi'an (a lie - mention Tibet and you can forget about it) and then go home."

He sat silent for a few moments, and then said "OK, I think I can give you 20 days - it's enough to get to Xi'an, I think. Fill out the forms and come back in an hour."

I filled out the forms, and walked around for an hour. The street was full of boutiques selling the middle class dream to consumers. English signs cluttered the sides of buildings. People walked lapdogs down the sidewalk: I watched a man urge his tiny furball to jaywalk with him across 4 lanes of traffic. The dog was obviously terrified, but all the man could do was whistle encouragement. I wanted to say, Pick the damn thing up! but refrained, and watched instead, as they miraculously made it across the street without the dog (or the man) being struck by a vehicle.

I went back into the PSB office. The stiff uniformed man came out and said "OK, I will give you 20 days. Please pay 440Y." This was a completely outrageous sum of money to pay for an extension - the going rate was around 125Y for a full month. I said to him, "I'm sorry, how much?"

"440 yuan. If that is acceptable..." He smiled.

I just laughed, said "No thanks" and walked out. I wasn't going to play into that sort of corruption. In two seconds I decided to get on a bus to Lanzhou, only a few more hours away, and try my luck there.

I flagged a cab to the train station, and told the driver my sob story on the way. He just clucked and said "Gong An" while shaking his head. Chinese experience hassles from these people as well.

Fifteen minutes later I was on a bus to Lanzhou. We drove out past the polluted suburbs of Xining and were soon in the countryside, driving alongside fallow fields waiting for the winter and te following spring. Groups of men squatted over games of cards or lounged on piles of hay in the weak winter sun. Women worked. All was normal in the hinterland.

We drove through a river gorge, losing elevation, and then passed through a coal mining area, with everything covered in soot. Hui restaurants had hopeful looking signs of green fields with flowers and sheep. Men and woman sat on rockpiles and smashed boulders into various sizes with mallets, day in and day out. The scene was depressing. I drifted off to sleep, listening to the warbling bus radio play the same 5 songs over and over again.

We arrived in Lanzhou, passing along the banks of the Yellow River, which was lined on this side with a well-manicured park, full of older Chinese out and about for their constitutionals, kicking and stretching and swinging their arms wildly. We pulled into the bus station a bit too late for me to make the PSB office that day, so I went to catch a bus to the hotel I had stayed at in August, when this whole thing started. Circular movements, the Tao of Travel in China.

An English speaking man with a soft voice asked me if I needed help. What he really wanted was for me to speak English with a group of students from Lanzhou University. I said I would try to do so if I had the time. He was very eager to get an answer, but I told him my schedule was unsure. He asked for my telephone number, or where I was staying. I said I would likely be staying at the Lanzhou Dasha, across from the train station. He ripped out a piece of paper and wrote down "Tim" and a phone number. I said I would try to call him in the morning if I had time.

The hotel was the same, with the electric shoe cleaner by the reception desk. I asked for a dorm bed. "We don't have those anymore".

I said that I had stayed in such a room on the fourth floor only four months before. "No more". The woman smiled.

I said "China is changing fast", and then asked for whatever was cheapest. I got a room with three beds, looking very much like a dorm, but for two dollars more than I had paid in August. I dropped off my bag (I only had a plastic bag with raisins, travelling light...) and then headed out for dinner and a bit of time on the internet. When I came back to my room, I found that Tim had called for me repeatedly, to the annoyance of the floor attendant. I apologized and said I would call him in the morning.

Two minutes later, she knocked on my door and said he was on the phone. I was annoyed as well, but I went to put him off. "Hello."

"Hello...This is Tim. Is this Jeff?"

"Yes." A drunk man came into the room and began slapping my back and breathing into my face.

"I called because I wanted to make sure you were safe. I was very worried, because you weren't there."

"No, no, I'm fine thanks. Just tired."

"I want to come to see you tonight."

"Ah, well, I'm quite tired from my long trip. Tomorrow would be better."

"I really want to talk to you tonight. I can be over very soon."

I didn't want to entertain him, but I thought of all the Chinese who had put themselves out for me during my trip and decided I would indulge him. "OK, you can come over for a while."

He knocked on my door five minutes later. I let him in and offered him an orange and tea. He sat down on one of the beds and we talked a bit. He asked me if I wanted a massage, Kung-Fu style. I said, Maybe, but not tonight.

He told me he had studied the I'Ching for four years and that he could tell my future from looking at my hands. He asked for my hands. I gave them to him. Then he had a close look at my face. He said, "You should lie down, so I can look at your penis".

This was a bit much. I said, no thanks, and showed him the door, politely but firmly. I wished him well, and lied that I would try to call him in the morning. He was distressed at having overstepped, but I wasn't in the mood for what was pretty obviously a pick-up. I closed the door behind him and fell asleep very quickly.

The next morning I went to the PSB to ask - pray, really - for an extension. The bus took me past the downtown shopping and business area. The commercial assault was massive: a TV was on the public bus, the hand straps had ads on them, giant Santa Clauses popped out of departments stores wishing you a Merry Christmas, women in uniforms hawked batteries as part of a promotion. It was horrible that the People's Republic of China had come to this: not even the US was this overrun with blatant consumerism. It made me glad to have spent most of my time in the Chinese countryside, away from all this pollution.

The PSB visa officer was a well-dressed plainclothes woman. She was warm and friendly. We bantered back and forth in English and Chinese, I being as flattering as possible, trying to up my chances of getting the extension. She seemed to receive this well, and said to come back at 4PM - roughly two hours before the train back to Golmud - to find out of I had been granted the extension.

When I came back at four, a different woman was staffing the office, but my passport had a new one month extension in it, and I was happy. I paid the fee - 125Y - and went straight to the train station. This time I got a hard-sleeper, and less than two hours later, I was lounging on my back, car number 5, train number 903 (the Lanzhou to Golmud Regular), looking out at the sunset, glad to be able to stretch my legs and looking forward to a good nights sleep.

The train ride was uneventful, easy, and comfortable. The three men around me all fidgeted with their cellphones like they had new toys. The conductors sold hot food out of a cart. I began to wonder what first-class ("soft-sleeper") was like.

I slept deeply, and we arrived in Golmud at 10AM. I walked out of the station to find that there was a free bus to the hotel I had left my things at, so I got aboard, and checked into the Golmud Hotel. I mended clothes, cleaned and maintained my bicycle, and wandered out for a few things to take with me on the ride to Lhasa.