The Trans-Mongolian line

As we boarded the train to Irkutsk, we realized that nearly everyone else in the carriage was an English-speaking tourist. The majority of the compartments were occupied by an Australian-based tour group, evidently all retirees going from Beijing to Moscow. Our roommates (for we were four to a room) were a newly engaged couple in the middle of a year's journey from southeast Asia to Italy. They were kind and pleasant people, and they talked with us for a long time over the next 36 hours, sharing tales about their journey and their lives in Hawaii before traveling.

A bed makes a world of difference. The hours really did fly by, and it seemed like we reached the border in minutes. Rick from our compartment performed a bit of a song and dance for the border guard, as he had changed significantly since his picture was taken. "Tilt your head. No, to the left. Open your eyes more. Hmm..."

But we were eventually let through and we watched with amusement as some minor smuggling ring was broken and about a dozen bottles of vodka were confiscated. The customs agents had been extremely thorough, shining flashlights into air vents and pulling back rugs, even though they didn't open any of our bags. I found out later that it was actually the railway workers that had tried to sell it, and all they had to do was pay a small fine. The forests of northern Mongolia became the (very similar) forests of Siberia, and we continued into our third country of the trip.

When you're on a long sleeper train ride, you get to know the others in your carriage, first by voice, then by sight. I first spoke to some of the others when I caused a minor incident by unplugging somebody's charging iPad so I could snag one of the precious electrical outlets on the train. But of course it was fine, and now that the silence was broken we said hello when we passed in the hall. I talked to one couple and shared my same story about where I had come from and where I was going, finding it a bit new and different to deliver this speech in English to other native speakers. They were very unsatisfied with their trip so far, which told me immediately that they were used to the kind of travel pampering rarely experienced by young people like me.

Later, though, I chanced upon a woman, Allison, staring out the window in a kind of rapture. She was in Siberia and amazed by this fact. In talking to her it became clear that she was quite different from the other couple I talked to. She looked perfectly ordinary, like someone you'd see in a grocery store, and so as she revealed how much of a lifetime adventurer she was I was amazed. She told me about selling cigarettes on the black market in Burma in the 1980s, and then another woman who had done the same thing joined in with her own stories. Allison's husband walked by and was dragged in with the introduction "Pete got stabbed in Indonesia," which was about the point that I realized my own adventures were terribly boring. I stood and listened for half an hour to tales from the 1970s and 80s about bribing border guards in Pakistan, motorcycling to Iran, meeting Thai drug kingpins, refusing to smuggle hashish in Morocco, and more. I had started the train ride thinking of myself as the Paul Theroux figure next to the more ordinary travelers (this is a feature of his books), but as it happened I was very small potatoes indeed.

The hours kept flying by, and in no time at all it was early morning in Irkutsk. We shook hands, said goodbye, chose a direction, and walked off again.

Pictured: Siberia.

A snippet of Mongolia, part 2

Also inside the park was a Buddhist temple complex. We paid an inflated foreigner price ($2 instead of $1) and started our climb up the mountain. It should really go without saying that the temple was on a mountain. The path was clear and easy, and marked by scores of Buddhist teachings on signs along the way. Roughly halfway up there were prayer wheels and then additional signs started, 150 thoughts on the nature of enlightenment and how to reach it. This path led to a stairway with 8 black steps and 108 white steps (the symbolism of which I've forgotten) leading up to the temple doors. This number was convenient for me as it was the exact number of times that a nearby sign told me to repeat a mantra. At the top I marveled at the view and meditated in the temple while a monk was teaching a group of children, easily ignoring the tourists. After the pensive walk it was very easy to meditate, and I found the whole experience very fulfilling.

Our guide took us to a river for our next stop, the Terelj where the park takes its name. It reminded me strongly of scenery in northern California, with a wide, cold river cutting through stony banks and forests. There weren't too many tourists around -hardly any people at all, actually- and so Auberon and I walked around as our guide kept up behind us. One thing that sadly stuck out was the trash. Heaps and heaps of it, some clearly measuring years' worth and others hinting at a picnic recently concluded. It didn't seem like anyone was coming by to straighten up anytime soon. On the bright side, the water remained very clear and the trash seemed confined to the banks, several yards away from the river's edge. We took pictures and soon walked off.

On the way back we stopped at a large gravel mound with a sort of pole erected on top, draped with scraps of blue cloth. This was a traditional Mongolian shrine, predating Buddhism in the country. It was used by shamans to communicate with the heavens, and in their absence, ordinary people could make contributions. The taller the rock pile the better, so we found some spare stones along the road and walked slowly around the shrine three times in order to bring good fortune on our travels. As we left we heard another car honk three times - the symbol of respect for people too busy to contribute to the shrine.

Back in the city we found a Korean restaurant and reflected on the day after Auberon managed to select a dish that the restaurant wasn't out of. We had little else to see in the city, having discovered through vigorous wandering that it was actually quite small. I wanted to find some more socks, so we resolved to make the next day a shopping day.

Actually it was another wandering day, but we did chance upon a magnificent street market. This was apparently where all the people were. It was a densely packed market the likes of which we hadn't seen even in Vietnam, for it sprawled out on all sides of a dedicated covered area and had hundreds of stalls selling most everything you could imagine. I say most everything because Mongolia was sadly devoid of the easy access to street food that we'd gotten used to over the last month. Only one little kebab stand offered hot food, and nobody was eager to try it. But the market perfectly satisfied that desire for a bit more chaos and unpredictability. I overpaid handsomely for some beads and got a pair of Mongolian socks (they say "Mongol" in traditional script) for a song. I got some red and yellow Chinese socks in China and I have a vague goal to get socks representing each country as I continue. Other than that I'm really not one for souvenirs, though I've been carrying around a wonderful calligraphy scroll I was gifted in Vietnam.

Our train would depart late the following evening, and we were unable to store our bags in the hostel. So we resolved not to walk overmuch the next day, and set out for the national library. After brief confusion about whether we were allowed in, we passed some enormous and beautiful calligraphy and sat down in a silent reading room. Auberon switched between his Kindle and a book on ethics, and I updated my journal and nearly finished a book on Uzbekistan. It was very peaceful and the students took no mind of the out-of-place tourists. After a few hours we found another empty yet tasty restaurant, then after we had overstayed our welcome by some time we again set off in the direction of the train station. There I read every single issue present of the English-language government magazine, and increased my general knowledge of Mongolia by about a thousandfold. Did you know that there are 25,000 Mongolians living in the United States, and slightly more than that in South Korea? How about the fact that the Indonesian government recently removed visa restrictions for Mongolians in order to boost tourism? Or that child labor laws are cracking down on the tradition of using children as jockeys during the Naadam festival races?

When the train arrived I was essentially an expert. We collected our bags, hoped that it was the right train, and climbed on for our ride to the north.

Pictured: two things most people would not expect in Ulaanbaatar.

A snippet of Mongolia, part 1

I had done only the vaguest of research about the border crossing from China to Mongolia. I knew that thanks to a strange immigration law, it was mandatory to cross in a vehicle, and a train crossing didn't work with our timetable. So we decided to go with one of the locals making a killing renting themselves out as drivers for quick border hops. Because we had arrived remarkably early, we were ready to go well before the border opened and thus well before any touts were awake.

Erlian (also Erlianhaote or Erenhot or Ereen depending on how you feel) is a small city but with a bit more life than we expected. At five thirty in the morning people were setting up vegetable stalls, opening shops, dancing in the park, cracking whips in the park (for very loud exercise, I imagine), and erecting a huge sound system and stage for a music festival.

We harangued the earliest tout until he took us to be the first people of the day to cross into Mongolia, then at the border we were given free passage to the nearby town of Zamyn Uud. There we changed money and became aware that there was no cheap bus to the capital and that it was about twelve hours until the train left. This information was provided by a crowd of thirty or forty drivers all begging us to part with a large pile of bills in order to hire them. One highly multilingual woman (surely hired by the drivers) came over and told us in fine English about all the advantages of the car over other modes of transport - we could drink beer, stop for selfies, and listen to the radio. We bargained down to $10 more than the train and got in. As it happened, there was no beer, very few selfies, and the radio was Mongolian NPR.

If asked to guess the most popular car in the harsh climate of Mongolia, the Toyota Prius might never even enter your mind. But this was the vehicle whose middle seat I occupied for six hours to Ulaanbaatar, and the vehicle which filled the streets once we got there. Due to certain import regulations and pricing schemes, it is actually preposterously cheap to import unsold older Priuses from Japan to Mongolia. Although the average salary is very low, workers abroad can send back enough remittances to buy the car outright in a few months.

Another interesting thing about this is that they're all right-hand drive. About a third of non-Prius cars are also right-hand drive. Thus, on the drive-on-the-right roads of Mongolia, our driver tried out both lanes until he found one he liked best or other traffic forced him to change his mind. But on the whole we found Mongolian drivers incredibly polite and deferent, especially in light of six weeks in China and Vietnam.

Our guesthouse was easy enough to find and surprisingly close to the central square. The rest of the people living there seemed to be in various yet constant states of arrival and departure, filling the hall with luggage more often than not. The majority of budget accommodations in the city also offer tours, since practically every tourist wants to go to a park or desert at some point. Our host seemed impossibly busy at all times yet managed to be our guide for a day trip a few days into our stay, which I will detail soon.

The city of Ulaanbaatar gave us kind of a shock. It has much more of a Western feel to it, visible in architecture and advertisement and cars and food and everything - at every turn we were reminded that we were not in China. There was also not very much going on, at least not that we discovered at first. Outside the main avenues, restaurants were empty all day and streets were essentially silent. Tourists stuck out everywhere, perhaps more than we'd ever seen in one place. Even with the low turnout, prices were more expensive than I expected. These things kind of made us pine for the more familiar cities of China.

But then we took a day trip to one of the nearby national parks, and everything was better. I am a miserly person, and on this trip we've been especially tight-fisted, very often sacrificing our comfort for a few extra dollars. So when our host told us the price of the day trip he'd planned, we discussed it at length before agreeing. I'm very glad we went through with it, since he was a wonderful guide and filled the day with things to see and do.

We first went to a museum built under an enormous statue of Genghis Khan (who else), with sparse yet pretty exhibits about the Mongols and those who came before. You could climb out onto the statue a ways, but it was foggy and we couldn't see much. Near the base was a small collection of life size metal cavalry warriors. Our host said that the museum plans to eventually have ten thousand of them, which would just be hilariously oversized and cost a fortune. Apparently there are plans to charge people to put their own likeness on the soldier to help fund it - any takers?

Then we drove into the Gorkhi-Terelj park itself. Gorkhi means "wellspring" in Mongolian, and I suppose the Terelj river has its origin somewhere in the park. The first stop was on a stunning meadow with grazing yaks, shaded by mountains as the sun peeked through the mist. It was phenomenal. I ran from place to place taking photos under the amused looks of the farmers who had undoubtedly seen the same excitement hundreds of times.

Our next stop was Turtle Rock. Months ago as this trip was being planned, Auberon and I read about and saw pictures of this rock in the park that looked like a turtle. It stuck in our minds as the secret true goal of the trip - to travel thousands of miles over months to see a big rock. It was silliness of course but as the big moment drew near the excitement was real. The best thing was that this rock really did look like a turtle, and it was far larger than we thought. Many selfies were taken and we were thoroughly satisfied Right next to the rock was a tiny camp where we gladly parted with $5 to be led around on camelback for a few minutes. Then it was lunchtime, and after that we continued on into the park.

Pictured: Ulaanbaatar from an apartment building roof, Turtle Rock, and camel riders.

Footnote: the Mongolian name for Turtle Rock actually translates to Frog Rock, but everyone agrees that this is ridiculous.

The land and language of many

My China travel posts were more in-depth than my Vietnam ones, so I don't think a full China retrospective is very necessary. Suffice it to say that Auberon and I both really enjoyed our time there. We both had expectations about what "China" would be like (he had visited 9 years ago on a very organized tour bus trip) and some were true and some were not. For one, it's a lot cleaner and more orderly than I thought it would be. I think Westerners have a tendency to stereotype mainland China outside the powerhouse cities as poor and dirty, and perhaps the people as rude or uneducated. Nothing could be further from our experience. Everywhere we were greeted with gleaming streets and amazing hospitality, and I've already written about the excellent people we met. Americans can easily apply and obtain a ten year multiple entry visa now, and I'm glad I have mine.

Now for the language. People say that Chinese is very hard. It is. But it's not impossible. I started my self study of the language in January 2015, and then a year later started classes at the intermediate level in college. The classes were immensely helpful and I worked hard to catch up to my classmates, focusing really on pronunciation. When I finished classes I didn't really self study much during the short break before travel, instead cranking up the study of Russian and Vietnamese.

Arriving in China, I initially felt way out of my depth. I could communicate much easier than in Vietnam, but my knowledge of the written language was limited to the most common characters in the textbook dialogues. But there's an interesting thing I've learned about immersion in country. Dear reader, if you've ever studied a foreign language, try to think of a few words: Wet floor, to pull, caution, garage, repair, exit, center. A strange list, but these are the type of words that you see every day, a dozen times or more, when walking around a city. They're not really what the beginner learns in a phrasebook or classes, but instead what is so common to the native speaker that it blends into the background. Thus as a language minded tourist, I noticed this repetition and then noticed myself acquiring the words without ever studying them.

Of course I studied too. I got the excellent Chinese learner's dictionary app called Pleco, and filled several pages in my tiny notebook with characters and pronunciations. Forcing myself to try and read Chinese around me day after day got me used to it, and (though it took me longer than I expected) I eventually became relatively literate in terms of signs and menus.

Speaking was interesting. Once I came to Chengdu I really started using a lot more Mandarin* throughout the day, and it came more naturally by and by. Every day I used Mandarin to buy food, ask directions, use public transport, and chat. I rarely asked whether someone could speak English, and in any case the answer was usually no. The locals loved it, praising me for using the simplest of words and always being generally patient while I spoke.

I'm still not fully satisfied with my conversation performance, because I quickly grind to a halt when I'm not sure of a word or I mishear something. I was also surprised that I got frustrated and disheartened (and tired!) when I couldn't keep up, I guess because I felt a certain pressure to be able to say more than the basics.

But the constant practice did have an effect. At the end of my last Chinese class we made a video, and I showed it to my Chengdu hosts for a laugh. Laugh they did, but they also said that my Chinese had improved since the video - even after the classes stopped and I hardly thought about Chinese until I arrived. Language learning takes time, and skills like speaking and listening settle into muscle memory in a process that can't really be rushed. Consistent, regular practice is the best path to good results.

Pictured: A sign in Xi'an advertising milk of all things.

*I use the words Chinese and Mandarin interchangeably here, though some people make a distinction. Mandarin refers to the standard spoken language of China, based on the Beijing and northeast accent, used on TV and in school and understood by everyone. The written language is Mandarin save for some special usages too detailed to write about here, though I could fill hours on the subject. I, like all university students outside of special programs, studied Mandarin.
Though there is a common language, there are also innumerable dialects and local varieties. They all fall under the broad banner of Chinese, though most of them are mutually unintelligible. Therefore on the train from Chengdu to Xi'an, I sat next to a woman from Beijing who told me in Mandarin that she couldn't understand the man across from us at all when he spoke Chengdu dialect to his friends. He overheard and began to speak with us in Mandarin.
Or a specific example: on a Hohhot bus, a woman was asked a question and replied meidei, which I had learned was Sichuan dialect for I don't have any. Her questioner was confused until she repeated the answer in Mandarin: meiyou.
The concept of so many different local languages is fascinating to me, especially how different ones get used in different social contexts. Most Chinese people can speak two or three varieties of Chinese, and more if they've spent time living in different cities. You can see why this country would appeal to me.

Warmly welcomed in Hohhot

We left Xi'an late at night but planned to arrive in Hohhot at a leisurely late morning hour. The railway had different plans, and we ended up stopped instead for five hours on some lonely tracks. Eventually it was revealed that passengers would receive a tiny refund and would be on their own for additional transport. Fortunately a woman nearby translated the announcements into more understandable Mandarin for me, and accompanied us in a taxi to the city bus station. There we greatly annoyed a woman asking for donations by not giving her money - making perhaps our only enemy in China. But she got off the bus and we got on the road to Hohhot, arriving slightly before sundown. Accustomed to walking, it was a wonderful surprise to see that we were about a minute from our hotel, itself right across the street from the train station.

The next morning we wrote down some cool looking sights nearby and asked the front desk about how to get there. In an interesting twist on a common theme, the porter decided I probably couldn't understand his spoken directions and so instead presented them to me in handwritten Chinese characters. This was in fact much harder than understanding him directly, but I determined that there was no bus to the meadow, the ancient fortress was six hours away, and bus 2 went directly to the mountain. We went to the mountain.

Eventually. 大青山 (Da Qing Shan) turned out to be the name of both the mountain and a safari park, the latter of which was the destination for bus 2. We didn't realize it was a zoo until we had already entered, and just after entering we had look-at-the-westerner selfies taken with three or four families. So we decided to just go with it. I talked to a young Chinese couple who turned out to also be looking for the mountain, and thus we felt a bit less foolish for wandering into a zoo. Actually, it was my second time this trip wandering into a zoo, the first being in Hanoi on a long walk looking for noodles.

The park was nearly deserted, at least as close as any tourist attraction can be in China. The weather was very pleasant after the hot days of Xi'an, with some warm sun occasionally peeking past the clouds. So we spent an hour or so strolling from monkey house to bird cages to yak enclosure. I'm afraid I don't have any tales of wacky Chinese zoo antics, just animals and people doing their thing.

We met up on the other side of the yaks with the other potential mountaineers, and they had new information directing us to another area about half a mile down the road. There we found another large park with some sort of traditional Mongolian building at the far end. Auberon and I made a beeline to it and saw that there was some sort of car show set up. We had seen dozens of rally cars already, with maps and city names on the rear windows. Could this be a race related event?

As usual we walked straight up to the staff booth to find out. Unusually, we heard a voice call out to us in perfect English, "Hey guys, what are you doing?" One of the staff came up to us and let us know that the area was off limits to guests. But she was interested in our story, and as more details emerged about who we were, where we had come from, and where were going, she became more and more excited. She offered to drive us to the mountain personally (for we were still far away) as an excuse to get away from work and to hear more about us. It turned out that she, at 21, was running a media company and coordinating the models for this upcoming Audi exhibition. She had studied in Canada for six years and had only recently returned, shocking us at just how fast she was growing this business. We arrived at the mountain in twenty minutes or so and were told to call for a pickup later. Shaking our heads at our good fortune, we started up the ascent.

I'm going with the local use of the word 'mountain' but it really wasn't that big. More of a peak. The Chinese had thoughtfully built wooden steps into the side to help us along, and in no time at all we arrived at the summit. It was gorgeous and much cooler than the walk had been. From the top the buildings of Hohhot were clearly visible, as were some smaller settlements receding into the distant green hills. We took many pictures and then turned down again, using a second path that took us past some pagodas and cairns adorned with Tibetan prayer flags.

Grace, our new friend, returned soon and took us into the city. Continuing our stroke of luck, it happened to be her mom's birthday and we were invited to a hot pot dinner. This was different from the hot pot we'd had in Chengdu, with more peanuts and less spicy oil. It was still excellent and with Grace as interpreter we talked about China, America, and the world until we were all full. Afterward we saw the very closed Buddhist temple complex and took part in one of the constant Chinese choreographed dances organized by women in parks. It was a wonderful day made possible only by the lovely hospitality of Grace and her family.

Since our train left at 10 the next night, we left our bags with the endlessly patient receptionist and set out again. Grace mentioned the city's famous mosques (there is a large Muslim community with many restaurants sporting the halal sign) and our general goal was to find some of these. Find them we did, in and around a street market with a wonderfully different feel than ones we'd seen before. There was a service going on, so we didn't enter or stay very long. The architecture of the area combined the mosaics I associate with Iran and the now-familiar flared and tiled Chinese roofs. Also of note was the way the Arabic script was fit into the Chinese design, broken up like characters and stacked vertically. I got some fried things at the market that were essentially donut holes, and we ate them as we continued on.

We then came to a shopping center and found a bookstore after winding through the first few stories. It was surprisingly expansive and we found a few Chinese editions of familiar children's books. I got a Tintin story to give myself something to carry and a reminder to keep up my Chinese after leaving the country. Soon we found some small snack shop and sat, a bit wiped out from the days of wandering.

But there was another surprise in store. We picked a building at random and, as we often do, headed for the panoramic views at the top. In the elevator there was a short-haired young woman who clearly had places to be, as evidenced by the effort she expended in pressing the Door Close button after every passenger got in. Once on the top floor we looked for a window but wandered accidentally into a section of the floor that was being remodeled. A worker looked up, decided for some reason that we probably belonged, and led us to an office door where he knocked and left us. Forging ahead, I asked if we could take a picture out the window. To our delight, the managers were perfectly willing to let us in the office (also being remodeled) and happily posed with us and the other employees that had begun to file in. Soon we were drinking fancy tea, chatting about our trip, and looking out over the city, marveling once more at our good fortune while traveling.

The managers recommended a nice Mongolian restaurant, visible from the window. It turned out to be a bit too popular for its own good - they had run out of lamb, perhaps the staple dish of Inner Mongolian cuisine. We had camel instead, served in a pita-like arrangement that in Outer Mongolia is called khooshoor. For dessert, an excellent cheese pastry upon which we actually melted more cheese, reveling in the return to food for people who are not lactose intolerant.

The evening was drawing to a close. On our way back to the hotel we heard nearby fireworks, and though we rushed to see them we caught only a glimpse behind some buildings. Auberon waxed poetic on the theme: on our first night in Yangshuo some students had set off fireworks that burst directly next to our balcony. Those marked the beginning of our trip to China, a huge explosion of new experiences. Now the fireworks were further away as we left China, showing that there is always more to see, and that traveling the way we do means that there will always be things we can't fit in.

Our bags collected, we walked to the station and settled into our bunks for the overnight ride to the border, where we'd go through customs and carry on into Mongolia.

Pictured: The summit of Da Qing Shan, the mosque complex, and the view from the manager's office.

Around and around Xi'an

From Chengdu we had a pretty average hard-seat overnight trip to Xi'an. Once the silence around me was broken, I chatted to the people around me a bit and ate some of the great fruit offered to me by a man across the aisle. Lots of Chinese people take bags of nuts or small fruits on trains, and I don't know if they're snacks or for the home or what. Auberon was accosted by a few very persistent women who stormed through the language barrier to ask repeatedly for his nonexistent Chinese social media info.

We arrived very late at night and realized that we had come to the south train station, a good distance from the actual city. Some French tourists (also coming from Vietnam in a roundabout way) suggested that we share a taxi, so we walked to the end of the taxi hawkers and got into one that quoted us 50 yuan lower than everybody else. He immediately got lost on his way out of the station street, and the Frenchmen left once he had us all get out to hop a curb. This distressed him greatly, but I understood little of his shouting. Once on the lonely country road he flagged down another taxi and got out to talk with the other driver. This distressed me greatly, and I unbuckled my seatbelt and told him to give us our bags, and we'd walk to Xi'an if we had to. He became much more apologetic, and started the car once more. A short while passed in frosty silence until I started to understand his situation. Half his customers up and left after an embarrassing mistake, and the remaining two were either incomprehensive or bitter. He was just trying to do his job. So I told him that the weather was much nicer in Xi'an than Chengdu, which started the wheels turning a bit. As we got into town he recommended tourist attractions, and offered to call our hotel to make sure he had the right address. We left on friendlier terms.

The next day Auberon and I were seized by a desire to walk really far. His phone has a step counter which gives us a daily goal of 10,000 steps a day, and we generally reach this goal very quickly. Our high water mark was one day in Hoi An where we got to 43,000 since, as he put it, left to our own devices we just wander all day. Since then one or both of us has been laid ill or we've had company not as willing to put in the mileage. With both of us healthy and rested, the day promised to be one for the books.

Our meandering took us in a general southerly direction past the tall banks and malls of the city center. We came to a museum by and by, which my research had said was boring but we found perfectly nice. We continued our habit of presenting various cards from our wallets and claiming that they're foreign student IDs, which so far has a 2/3 success rate. I do have my actual student ID, but the picture on it wore off years ago leaving only a smudge. In the museum, I was particularly taken with the colored jade sculptures. In the shape of soldiers and animals, these used some combination of the natural color of the jade and a glaze to give a three color effect to the pieces. Usually I just breeze past glass cases with sculptures, but these really did catch my eye.

We also found a nice tangle of alleyways in a style I had always imagined to be in Chinese cities: steam rising from street vendors' pots, clamoring crowds, and signs poking out overhead. The signs are probably the interesting point for me, since at first glance I can't read a thing. Little by little more emerges as I keep looking: noodles, beef, pork buns, fried rice. Auberon and I were close to the same level of being able to read food words in Chinese when we began the trip, so by now we've both picked up a lot of the common characters.

Xi'an has famous city walls, and they pair with a moat to encircle the old town. We walked halfway around the seven-mile loop and admired the effect the sunset had on the lanterns and watchtowers. It was very pretty and quite a draw for the Chinese tourists, many of whom mounted bicycles or trams to go around. The walls walked, we cut through the huge shopping complex in the center to end up with a step count of 53000, or just over 30 miles. I'm not itching to break that record anytime soon.

The next day we went to see the biggest draw of Xi'an, the terracotta warriors. It was sadly extremely hot, so our visit wasn't quite as leisurely as the place may have deserved. I was advised to see the excavated pits in reverse order, since pit one is the grandest one that all the pictures show. They recently started showing the excavation and restoration process right there in the viewing areas, which would have been nice if anyone had been there working that day. It was still neat to see the tools and equipment, including some process of shrink-wrapping the soldiers, possibly for moving elsewhere.

After bussing back to the city we kept up our walking by finding several big malls in the city center and seeing what they had to offer each time. Beginning with the Vietnamese markets and malls, each of these big Western style shopping centers has offered us a slightly different experience. Sometimes we get gawked at, other times not, sometimes the brands or slogans  are hilarious, other times familiar. In this plaza we found little strangeness, but there's something relaxing about the constant stream of placid music and bright storefronts.

The next day we left our bags in the hotel and set out once more. It was a sweltering day, seemingly taunting me for praising the weather in the taxi. We walked a good distance around the moat surrounding the old city. The authorities put some big fences and gates up to deter people from getting too close to the river (which was a brilliant green). Nevertheless there was a second path that was relatively shady and we spent lots of time on it. The path had a very dead riverfront bar and café complex and the usual assortment of Asian bodyweight exercise machines.

Once tired out from the heat and exercise, we found a tea house where we could sit and play chess. It turned out that it was far pricier than anywhere else we had been in recent days, so we ordered the cheapest tea and played for hours. It was a very long game ending in stalemate, and both of us had shaky hands at the end from dozens of cups of tea.

In the evening we collected our bags, hailed a taxi to the train station, and rode off into the night, to the plains and deserts of the north.

Pictured: tea and chess, a nostalgic Sichuan meal, and us with some clay guys.

Chengdu and Environs

Twelve days anywhere is a lot to fit into a blog, but I felt like my time in Chengdu was particularly noteworthy. So there will inevitably be things skipped over or left out this format.

We came to Chengdu because of another Workaway, one that was a bit sketchy on the details but again offered free housing in exchange for English speaking. It turned out that some Chinese college students had taken a gap year and opened a café which was essentially a front for an English school. Foreigners would share an apartment with the hosts and draw customers to the café so that they could practice their English. We arrived on the first day of business, though no customers came until the third day after some vigorous hawking by me and Auberon. The hosts weren't particularly worried about the low turnout, because at the end of August the nearby university would open and the floodgates of students would open. Based on the small but steady stream of people we got during this summer holiday, things ought to speed up soon.

On these slow days in the café, Auberon and I (there were other volunteers but they left soon after we arrived) chatted with the hosts, drew up business ideas, and played chess. I practiced the guitar and tried half-heartedly to tackle reading some books in Chinese. I've always wanted to get good at making those chalk art designs on sandwich boards in front of cafés. Sudden showers got the chalk wet more than once, but I practiced English and Chinese calligraphy and made some pretty designs.

The hosts were the best part (I've changed their names here). We mostly hung out with the two girls Lori and JD, since the third girl was gone for most of our time. A guy, Rob, also shared the apartment but kept to himself a bit more. He did take us out to the city one of the first days and put up with our endless wandering, so kudos to him for that. JD had a lot less English than Lori (our main contact through workaway) but studied Italian and wore high fashion. I poked fun a bit at the care she put into her appearance, but she told me that her parents didn't allow her to travel. I scrimp and save constantly to take trips, and as a consequence I have few nice things - stained clothes, broken phone, aging camera. She simply puts that time and money into art and fashion.

Lori was a language person like myself, majoring in Indonesian at university. She had traveled to Korea and Japan solo and had had wonderful experiences there that inspired her to start the café project. Since I was getting free housing, I thought I'd give her her money's worth and so when she asked me to help with English I jumped at the chance. My linguistics area of interest is phonetics, so we worked on advanced pronunciation techniques to get her closer to that eternal goal of natural native-sounding speech.

My Mandarin got quite a boost too. Lori and company (most everyone in Chengdu, actually) spoke Sichuan dialect to one another, which at first is incomprehensible to a speaker of standard Mandarin. But everyone was more than willing to use Mandarin with me when I wanted to practice, and I bought a small notebook to write down new things. Having had little luck finding resources for Sichuanese before I arrived, I was over the moon when Lori and Rob agreed to record a set of phrases in both Sichuanese and Mandarin. Through careful listening to these and the speech around me, by the end of the Chengdu leg I could understand a surprising amount of Sichuanese conversation, and my Mandarin speaking was a lot more confident. Perhaps most importantly, Auberon and I learned a colorful range of Sichuan curse words. As much as I love the idea of speaking colloquial street Chinese, I think the best strategy is to learn the standard register first. I'll try and publish the Sichuan recordings in some way, but for me just learning to understand a little is enough for now.

I practiced one particular Mandarin sentence many times: "We came to Sichuan because he loves spicy food" - punctuated with significant pointing at Auberon. He has an immense tolerance for spicy food, well beyond my own limit. We've asked for spicy food before, and they always take it easy on us. In Chengdu we found lots of food, generally oil-based, that had generous amounts of spicy sauce or powder added. Auberon only met his match once, though, in a hot pot restaurant where the diners were cook spicy food in boiling spicy oil, then cool it down by dipping it into room-temperature spicy oil. It was delicious. All the food in Chengdu was wonderful and very affordable. My heart lies, though, with the pork bun place right next to the apartment complex. The owner was always glad to see me even though he never quite grasped that my use of Chinese to order and pay was more than playacting. I'd order, he would prepare the food, then he'd double check by silently mouthing the order details (in Chinese) and making elaborate hand gestures. I'd confirm and say goodbye in Chinese, he'd smile and wave, and the process would begin again the next morning.

In the last few days we took a reasonably perilous car ride to Lori's hometown, a great place with excellent river views. We stayed there a night, enjoying her mother's fine cooking, then the next day went to a more touristy old town not far away. In both places we were the only Westerners, but surprisingly we weren't really pointed and laughed at the way we were in Vietnam. The old town reminded us both strongly of Hoi An, with the type of old storefronts you'd find someone being thrown against in a kung fu movie. Since it was very hot, these streets were peaceful and slow moving compared to the city bustle.  So far it's the only place we've yet seen insects (dead and alive) for sale like nuts or fruit.

When back in Chengdu, we said our goodbyes and left for our overnight train to Xi'an. It was really an excellent city, and I'm very glad I got to see it through the lens of the young people who live there. I'll miss them.

I didn't take that many pictures with my phone, and none of them are particularly representative. But here's a few (I hope the app lets me attach more than one). First, a view of the inside of the world's largest building by floor space, a wonderfully strange complex of a mall, a theater, a water park, apartments, abandoned rooms and busy startups. Next us with Lori (JD barely visible in the back) at one those sushi restaurants with the conveyor belt. Lastly us as we tried and failed to bring Mexican quesadillas to China, land of little cheese and no salsa.

Getting to Chengdu

When we went from Nanning to Guilin, we booked same-day and got the nicest sleeper beds we could. From Guilin to Chengdu, though, the route was more popular and we got the tickets too late. If we wanted to arrive any time in the next few weeks, it was the hard seat for us - for twenty-five hours.

The seats aren't particularly hard in hard class, just straight backed and tightly arranged. The train was mostly full, and I was denied when I tried to upgrade (bribe?) to a sleeper car. There were a few empty seats, and though Auberon and I hadn't been seated together we still saw one another.

Among the passengers of the hard seat carriages there is a certain camaraderie. (You, dear reader, are getting these posts on a time delay. After Chengdu I took another hard seat train ride and experienced the same sort of thing.) People talk and play games, children run and make noise, and food is constantly passed around. There were some other foreigners, possibly Italian, but they just greeted us as they passed through our car. Thus we were as usual a novelty, and once the ice was broken people were happy to talk to us.

The clacking of Chinese chess pieces drew us to the other end of the car where we joined in a few games and were soundly beaten. I made a single good move, received polite praise, and then lost. Later, the fruit seller came by and stopped to watch, eventually taking over much of the game for me. "A test for the foreigner," he said, putting me in a tricky end-game position and walking off.

As night fell I switched seats with somebody who had a window seat in the next carriage so that he could sit by his girlfriend. The other carriage was a bit smokier (the smoking section on these trains is between carriages and under the air circulation vents, defeating the purpose entirely) and a little warm for my taste. I folded myself up in the space between table and wall and had a few hours of surprisingly deep sleep. Auberon, however, reported that his air conditioning in the other carriage was on full blast all night. He described a Donner Party scene of taking down curtains to clothe small children and distributing the contents of his backpack as emergency blankets.

As day began, I went back into the other car and had an extremely pleasant chat with a woman from Beijing. She had a dignified air and a general soothing presence, which I noticed immediately as she calmed down a woman whose boyfriend had missed the train. She was very patient with me and my halting Chinese, which gave me the confidence and stamina to have a long conversation about Chinese and American geography, culture, entertainment, and politics - in simple words of course. She would make an excellent teacher.

After several more hours we arrived and said our goodbyes to the train companions. A quick taxi to the hotel, a small break to collect ourselves, and we were ready to go out and explore.

English, cornered

Though lots of people come to Yangshuo for the mountains (photo included), we went there for the free housing and food. Through a volunteer placement service called Workaway, I contacted an English school and arranged that we would exchange English teaching for room and board. Upon arrival I was pleased to find that we were only asked to teach for two hours a day, three days a week. The rest of the time was ours.

Just as in Poland a year before, I found the students intelligent and engaging, and really a joy to talk with. They were mostly around the age of 20, generally university students taking a summer course improve their English. Some, though, were taking a much longer course of eight months at the school, which I found incredible. For young Chinese people, better English pretty much means more money. But the students were forking over huge sums every month, and putting in long hours each day for classes. In addition, the accommodations and food were perhaps less than five-star. Auberon and I both got pretty bad food poisoning, and even the students said it happened to them too.

Kept relatively dorm-ridden thanks to air conditioning and illness, we didn't stray too much from the school or the section of town we were in. I really enjoyed the nightly English Corner sections I led. While I was infirm, Auberon gave an extremely well-received presentation on places to see in California, from Lake Tahoe to Hollywood. On the last school day, we were judges for a speech competition. The students all did great, overcoming nerves and a formidable language barrier to tell stories and give speeches on current events.

I did take time to explore the paths into the hills, past some burial shrines and to a nearby strangely deserted little village. It was the heat of the day, and anybody that had any reason to be inside was taking full advantage of it. The hills were just as beautiful on the other side of the river and it was very pleasant to walk alone on the the path. I also took a bike into town from the stock kept by the school. Remembering my Vietnamese lessons, I made liberal use of the bell the whole ride. "Town" meant Yangshuo proper, removed by a few miles from the area with the school. It was naturally much busier and with lots of construction going on, and it was hot enough that I didn't stay long that afternoon.

But on the last or next-to-last evening, some students invited me out to the touristy West Street, which was very exciting. It reminded me a bit of the tourist area of Hoi An, though most of the tourists there were Chinese instead of foreign. They had some traditional methods of making a kind of dough on display, with muscular men using a huge two-handled pole to pound the flour while chanting. Also of interest were the girls in military costume selling ice cream out of refrigerated ammo boxes, and the your-face-on-a-shirt stall that was evidently providing work for the blind.

The next day two of the same students dedicated essentially their whole day to making sure we could get our train and bus tickets, and the day after that one of them actually accompanied us to Guilin to help us deal with the train station. We're very thankful to Grace and Hedy for getting us safely to Chengdu.

The First Things in China

The Chinese government doesn't want you to know about my trip, so they block access to the blog. Interestingly it's not actually illegal to circumvent the Internet filters, so a good proportion of young people (and even some businesses) have third-party software to access Facebook and Google. 

We came to China via train from Hanoi to a city called Nanning, which we were told was not used to foreigners at all. We didn't explore very much of the city because we quickly found a same-day train to our destination of Guilin. I recall that we were greeted in the train station by a series of helpful cartoons illustrating highly competent Chinese police officers stopping various bad guys who were hacking computers or hijacking buses. Soon we were off to the much more popular southern city of Guilin, home of scenic mountains and river cruises.

Once there we took a taxi to our hotel, and though the driver got briefly lost we were there before too late. The hotel had nice and soft beds and was actually surprisingly swanky on the whole, considering that we had booked it last minute and in keeping with our bottom-dollar price range. In the morning it was revealed that the hotel complex was right next to several scenic mountains and had a garden of Chinese sculptures. 

Ignoring the advice of everyone to take the river cruise, we instead crammed ourselves and our bags into seats on the bus to Yangshuo, where we would meet our hosts. We sat next to a Spanish couple who seemed bothered by the driver's gentle use of the horn. Clearly they had never been to Vietnam. Auberon described the scenery as reminiscent of some growing communities on the outskirts of San Diego. Every few miles the highway became single-lane due to construction, and there was near-constant building on the sides of the road. Even my Chinese textbook had example dialogues about the fact that the country is growing and changing rapidly, and everyone we talked to was of the same opinion. 

Yangshuo is a tourist destination, but with a decidedly rural twist. The majority of the tourists are Chinese, so little English is spoken. Less English is written, which meant I lamented not practicing more Chinese characters. But the town was less interesting than the scenery. The mountains were unbelievable. Sadly I'm writing this on a borrowed computer, but I'll put a photo of mine in the next post. Auberon was especially enraptured by the sight of the green karst mountains surrounding the rivers and rice fields. The first night, we walked along the river as the heat of the day began to wane and kept bursting into amazed laughter at each new sight. It looked like postcards, or stock photos, or sample images for selling picture frames. I have been to many places and seen wonderful things, but the mountains of Yangshuo may be the most beautiful sight I've seen in my life.