the random oracle

Although I’ve traveled many times in China before, I’ve never done so extensively with a foreigner and for so long without stopping back in Suzhou at my grandparents’ place.  This trip has opened my eyes to many aspects of the country that I’ve never experienced before.  The topic of this entry is one of the more disagreeable aspects, namely the fact that only certain hotels in China are allowed to accept foreign guests.

I’m not sure what the origin of this rule is, and from what the hotel staff have told me it has always been in place, so I guess that the fact that this is the first time I’ve run into it is just a coincidence.  Maybe we just always happened to stay at “international” hotels when I traveled with my family before (though I don’t think this is true), or maybe because when I traveled with my family the hotel staff figured that it would be OK since we look Chinese enough.

In any case, this time it has been excruciatingly tedious to find hotels because 80% of the places that we check out are not authorized to take foreigners.  This rule has been bent once or twice by kind (or shrewd) hotel staff, but especially in the big cities like Xi’an and here in Luoyang where we are right now, no one seems to be willing to bend the rules for us.

The upshot is that we waste a lot of time looking for hotels (about 3 hours and 5 bus trips today in Luoyang), and we are often not able to stay in the hotels that perfectly match our price point and desired criteria (location, cleanliness, etc.).  For example, there is a very cute old town in Luoyang with a pedestrian street that is located inconveniently far from the train station.  We wanted to stay there, but all the hotels in the region were either too expensive or did not accept foreigners.

I am really curious why the government insists on this archaic system when China is today so thoroughly open to foreign travelers.  I get (though don’t terribly like) the government’s need to keep a tab on foreign visitors, but couldn’t it do so and at the same time make travelers’ lives easier by just allowing all the hotels to accept foreigners, with the provision that they take the same information that the currently authorized hotels take now anyways?

Since this is the last stop on my trip before heading to the safety of Suzhou, I guess I won’t have to deal with it again.  But for all the people out there thinking about backpacking through China or just traveling without thorough planning, be prepared!

On the way from Zhangye to Xining.

Vast is perhaps the most appropriate word for describing China. The word is appropriate in almost all dimensions: geographically, historically, culturally, culinarily, economically… And this vastness is most dramatically felt when travelling by train.

I’ve never gone as far in America by train, simply for the fact that it’s impractical and exorbitant. Even by car the farthest I’ve gone is maybe 9 hours, which gets you basically from Boston to DC. For comparison this is roughly the distance from Lanzhou to Jiayuguan.

One feels this vastness even more when visiting the Great Wall in Jiayuguan. It’s incredible to think that this wall stretches all the way to Beijing and beyond, that man could build something so vast. And then one realizes that many sections were built over 2000 years ago and the vastness of the history also comes into the picture.

I’m a big fan of trains. They are comfortable, ecologically friendly, and don’t suffer the drawback of takeoffs and landings or turbulence. Fortunately, China has the most extensive and intensive rail network in the world, and we’ve been able to get everywhere so far without leaving the safety of solid ground.

Train travel isn’t necessarily convenient here though. The ticket system is a little archaic and does not work as well (for the technologically savvy) as say the SNCF does in France. The tickets can only be bought through official sales points, and not all the sales points have access to all the tickets. There is no discriminatory pricing for tickets so they tend to sell out very quickly, especially during rush periods like right now (the summer vacation season). Tickets only become available 10 days before the trip (sometimes 20 for high speed or express trains) and can sell out right at the moment when they become available. I hear this has a lot to do with scalpers (黄牛) buying them out right away. Anyway the ticketing system might make sense since lots of people might not be able to buy things online, but still there must be a way of implementing tiered pricing so you don’t get the kind of drastic shortages like there are now.

The trains themselves and the train stations are by and large comfortable and sometimes ultramodern. I took the Beijing-Tianjin express, which leaves from the new Beijing South Station and zooms along at an average speed of 300+ kmph to reach Tianjin in half an hour. This broke the world record for highest average speed for a regular passenger train service when it opened in 2008, and I think remains as of 2010 the fastest (along with the new Wuhan-Guangzhou line). I’m really looking forward to when the high speed lines are all finished, at which point one will be able to go from Beijing to Shanghai in 5 hours by rail.

This summer, my train from Beijing to Lanzhou was slower, taking about 17 hours, but this was fine because I had a bed. From Lanzhou to Jiayuguan we had a hard seat overnighter, which turned out to really suck becaus already it’s hard to sleep upright, but then we were also next to this big pack of loud obnoxious people who stayed up pretty much all night making noise and smoking. The last segmen from Jiayuguan to Dunhuang might have even been worse because we got a train without numbered seats, so we had to stand for the first hour, but luckily enough people got off so that we could sit for most of the ride. Altogether I guess I’ve probably already spent about 30 hours on the train so far, probably with many more hours to go.

One of the things that people often mentioned when I said I was going to Gansu is that the local people here are very kind. True enough the people here have been much nicer than Beijingers, even when they’re not trying to sell you something. It comes across in the ready smiles and the helpful tips that people offer up without any accompanying sales pitch.

In Dunhuang we’ve frequently relied on people from random book sellers to the bus ticket collector to our hotel receptionist to give us advice on where to go and how to get there. They don’t always know everything, but when they say they don’t know you can be pretty assured that they really have no idea, rather than just being too lazy or apathetic to find out, as is often the case in Beijing or Paris.

We spent a fun afternoon in Huyanglin (胡杨林), a garden of huyang trees, talking to the people who worked there and even learning a card game from them. Granted this had a lot to do with the fact we were pretty much the only visitors there for the afternoon, but still it was very nice that they were so open and friendly.

The most generous gesture that we experienced here was when we made the miscalculation of trying to walk back to the hotel from the Overhanging wall (悬壁长城) in Jiayuguan, and after about 1 hour on the deserted road it turned dark and we were in risk of getting lost. We saw a cab go by and we tried to wave it down, but it turned off a small road before reaching us. Strangely, the cab stopped but no one got out. A minute later the cab started moving again, this time coming towards us. When it reached us we could see that there were maybe 7 people inside (it was a sedan!) and the 4 people in the back got out and offered it to us. I think they were all a family heading home, and the grandfather and a baby stayed in the front seat to be dropped off after we got dropped off. The driver offered to drop us off, then the grandpa and baby, and would then go and pick up the rest of the people, who would just stand and wait for however long. We almost didn’t take the cab because we felt bad about them waiting there in the middle of nowhere, but they insisted. In the end it saved us maybe another hour of walking, and since it turned out that I had suffered a heat stroke that day it was a good thing we took them up on their offer!

One of the more surprising things so far this trip has been how clean and “modern” the cities in Gansu are. Of course we’ve only been traveling to large (Lanzhou) or tourist-friendly (Jiayuguan and Dunhuang) cities, but they have uniformly surpassed my expectations about how comfortable and clean things in Gansu would be.

My biases come from the fact that it is commonly known (or maybe believed is more accurate) that Gansu is one of the poorest provinces in China. But maybe all of the government stimulus money has been used here to clean things up and make them more friendly for visitors?

There was a big push in the last decade to speed up the development of the Western regionsand maybe the modern looking cities are the product of that. On a related note, things are not much cheaper here than in Beijing either.

So tomorrow I head off on my summer adventure through the great Chinese interior.  I’ve never done any independent travel in China before (always went with organized trips) so this will be quite the experience!  The trip starts off in Lanzhou where I meet up with FS, and then we’ll explore the area at the border of Gansu and Qinghai provinces, which is known for its diversity (large Muslim and Tibetan populations) and also for being along the Silk Road.  The plan is to end up in Dunhuang in Eastern Gansu province where there are the Mogao caves, and along the way to see Jiayuguan and whatever else is there in the oases.

One thing along the way is this formation (click through to see the satellite photos) on Google maps, which looks like a huge valley, but it does not turn up on any searches about the surrounding cities.  Definitely gonna check that out…

Any suggestions for things to do after this part of the trip?  We’re thinking about going to Henan and seeing Luoyang, Kaifeng, and the Shaolin temples.  Anyone know if there other things in that area or in Shanxi/Shaanxi that are worth visiting?

I was on trip through the French countryside once and asked off-handedly just what, exactly, did people do in such rural areas.  FS thought this was a silly question and said they just lived there, what else were they supposed to do?

I was quite sure this was not a silly question. The original motivation behind my question was more economic than anything else.  A more detailed version of my question would have been, “What exactly do the people here produce so that they can enjoy a decent living?”  We all know that the Bay Area produces high tech, Boston produces brains, and New York produces financial crises, but what exactly does Bucey-les-Gy, France produce?  The answer to that question should have been obvious, since the food and wine that all those big brains in SF, Boston, NY, and Paris consume has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was the sleepy countryside that we were driving through.

But his answer also addressed an undercurrent to the question that I wasn’t thinking of at the time, but which upon further reflection is more fundamental.  What, exactly, do people in sleepy country towns yearn for?  We know that people in cities, at least the vibrant ones, yearn for success, money, power, sex, and so on.  We, and by we I mean the privileged class that I happen to be among, namely the financially secure, educated, well-traveled, upwardly mobile, professional or intellectual class, I think we tend to think of life as having a “goal”, whether it be making lots of money, doing the best research, and so on.

But taken from a different point of view, such goals seem, if not silly, then at least misguided.  After being in France for a while, where people seem less driven by such external forms of success, it has become more and more apparent to me that it’s worth asking ourselves whether we have our priorities straight.  Maybe living itself is enough, and all those other goals that we set for ourselves are not really bringing us closer to some abstract fulfillment, but rather taking us farther away from the fulfillment that comes from just enjoying each day as it is?

Not to say that we should all move to the countryside and start planting crops.  But almost by definition the desire for something more, something better seems to imply that what one has today is not good enough.  Is there a way to pursue success and be ambitious while at the same time cherishing the moment and the way things are?  And if not, what’s the right balance to strike between the two?