China VI, Henan Province

Zhengzhou
After a night on my seat, I arrived in Zhengzhou early in the morning. There I checked into a hotel and slept for two hours. Then I took a bus to a Shaolin temple close to the city. The temple was destroyed frequently in its history. A large part of the buildings date from the 1980s and 2000s. Monks trained in Kung Fu were not always popular with the changing rulers. The tempel is not that different to other great Buddhist temples. I had a bit too high expectations for this place.
On the next day I had time till 6 pm, the departure of my train to Chengdu. I wasn’t going to do anything big in Zhengzhou. So for a large part of the day I was hanging out in a park. When I left the park, an older woman with very limited English skills talked to me. She offered to show me around the city for a while. A few minutes later I found myself on the backseat of an electric tricycle. I saw nothing really impressive, but the altered perspective was interesting. The fumes of cars and buses, as well as the madness of the electric scooters were much more intense than from the pedestrian’s perspective. After this tour I had more time to board my train than in Beijing.

China V, Beijing

Beijing
In Beijing I used couchsurfing once again. I was Lesley and Malcolm, an Australian couple, hosted me for almost four days. I began my stay in Beijing, as in most other cities, with getting food and purchasing tickets in Beijing’s western railway station. After I had done these important things I tried to find someone, who could tell me the best way from the western train station to my place to sleep. After some time I found a well hidden tourist information and was provided with the bus number.
My bus stop was north east of the second ring road of Beijing; from there it was a short walk to my accommodation. Upon arrival I was greeted warmly by Lesley. When Malcolm came back from work the warm welcome was repeated. In the evening the two had no time for me, but they suggested me to feel like home. After I had jumped from one mode of transport to another for most of my stay in China, an evening on the sofa with an extensive DVD collection was very welcome.
On the second day I started doing the tourist program. I drove to Tianmensquare and realized that the spontaneous idea to visit Mao's mausoleum, would not be as easy to realize as I expected. The queue was incredibly long and as much as I would have liked to see this drollery, a long wait was not worth it. In the morning I visited parts of the Forbidden City. Later in the afternoon I went to see the temple of heaven. Both places were impressive. However, if I would live in Beijing, I would visit these places in the early morning to avoid the plethora of tour groups. After a long day of sightseeing, I enjoyed a relaxing evening with Lesley and Malcolm. Who would have thought that playing Domino could be fun?
The next morning I was on the edge of manhood, if you believe Mao. I wanted to climb the Great Wall. With the help of my hosts, I had managed to get to the wall on my own. The last kilometers I had to use a taxi. During the ride, the driver gave me a brochure of the section that I wanted to visit. These contained images, alongside pictures of guard towers, there was also a cable car and a toboggan run. During the taxi ride I thought on how to criticize that in my blog. After I bought my ticket, which didn’t include cable car and toboggan run, I had realized my bigotry. The cable car was there for a good reason; the climb to the wall was steep and longer than expected. I am still not sure about the toboggan run on the Great Wall though. After my arduous climb, I spent two hours on the wall.
In the evening I met Andrii, whom I had sent a request on couchsurfing. We had dinner in a nice place. Later I went to have a couple of beers in Beijing's nightlife. I ended in an Irish pub, that evening. However I had to end the evening at 1 am due to acute tiredness.
My last day in Beijing was different due to the abstinence of sightseeing. I spent some money, took the subway back and forth across the city and in the early evening arrived back at Lesley and Malcolm's apartment. In the late evening my train from Beijing’s west train station was going to Zhengzhou. Unfortunately, I had the wrong departure time in mind. A combination of incorrect departure time, an everlasting signature procedure with the porter and waiting for a bus, that wasn’t going at this time anymore, let to a taxi ride across the city. Ten minutes before the train was going to leave I arrived at my seat.

China IV, Shanxi Province

Taiyuan
The bus arrived at 6.30 am in Taiyuan. I took a taxi to a hotel that was supposed to accommodate foreigners. This did not of course. After looking for a hotel for some time and a decent amount of rain poured down, I had found a hotel. Close to the train station and rather modern seems to be the formula for moderately priced hotels that host foreigners.
In the early afternoon I drove to the outstanding museum of Shanxi province. Admission was free; the museum is relatively new and has a largely interesting exhibition. The only thing I did not like was once again the behavior of most Chinese. While some, like me, took the time to look at the exhibit, a large part would just take pictures of each exhibit, but didn’t give it a second glance. This ignorance bothers me, but I was able to ignore it, since the museum was not as crowded as the Terracotta Army site on the day before.
Following heavy rainfalls in the morning, I was witness to the fact that there is no need for a functioning drainage system if one disposes over an almost endless amount of cheap laborer. A huge puddle, which occupied half of one of the main roads was swept away easily.
In the evening I was the victim of the paranoia of the Chinese government. Internet cafes have tp 0ask for a Chinese ID card, so you can surf there. Actually, they should also accept a foreign passport, but usually they don’t. Most of the time I could surf using the ID card of an employee. In Taiyuan, I was already sent away by two Internet cafes; in the third I was able to bribe the staff.
The next morning I got myself a Western breakfast in a huge supermarket and then went by bus to Datong.

Datong
In Datong, I invested a little more in my hotel room since it was pouring rain and I had no desire to look for alternatives in that kind of weather. It was a new hotel and breakfast included. The majority of my first day I spent in the hotel room, because of a slight cold and persistent rain. I left it in the evening to buy a train ticket to Beijing and to book a tour to the two great sights around Datong. At the only internet cafe in the vicinity of my hotel I was not allowed to use it without a Chinese ID card.
After breakfast I got around the restrictive policies of Internet cafes by asking the customer directly. So I was able to secure my accommodation in Beijing. Then I went to the meeting place, where the tour bus was supposed to leave. Actually I prefer to get to the sights on my own, but in this case I would have only been able to see one of the two sights. With the help of the tour bus I did see both the Hanging Monastery and the Yungang Caves. My tour group was European, except for a Dutch and an Italian family it consisted completely of native French speakers.
First we went to the Hanging Monastery some 70 kilometers away from Datong. It is located in a narrow valley with a river. In order to avoid damages from floods, the monks came up with a slightly crazy idea; the monastery was built in the middle of a solid rock wall. The monastery is not very big, but impressive because of its unusual architecture. Especially when standing at the edge of the low balustrade and looking down.
Having lunch at the tour restaurant was not an option for me because in my experience, the tour food is usually at best modest and the drinks are overpriced. Instead, I bought huge bag of baked goods for less than a dollar at a local bakery.
On the way to the Yungang Caves Datong’s split personality became apparent. Datong is a prime tourist destination on the on hand and the center of a vibrant coal mining industry on the other. We drove past a huge coal power plant. It was completely supplied by truck. In the area surrounding this power plant it was hard to see anything, because of the swirling dust from the trucks and the emissions from the plant.
A few kilometers further down the road, next to a coal mine is the World Heritage site Yungang Caves. Thanks to the Chinese government it is no longer possible to stop directly at the caves. Today the path to the caves leads through brand new temple and over an artificial lake with boat tours on offer. The majority of people seem to like this extension, most of the Chinese tourists and a large part of my tour group, took loads of pictures there. The Yungang Caves are a series of man-made caves with Buddhist sculptures in them. There are some large caves, which had been funded by royal family and many smaller caves of individuals. The variance of the Buddha sculptures ranging from 2 centimeters to more than 18 meters in size. The earliest sculptures have an Indian look, while newer once have more Chinese features. This place indeed deserves World Heritage site status and didn’t need the extension at all.
The bus ride back into town was a little delayed, after heavy rain flooded over an underpass. At the end of this exhausting day of sightseeing, I enjoyed my unusually luxurious hotel room for one more night and went on to Beijing on the next morning.

China III, Shaanxi Province

Xi'an
When I arrived in Xi'an, I instantly had the impression of having arrived in a very touristy city. The historic city wall divides the station’s court. Directly behind these are Chinese and Western 24 hour fast food restaurants, following that smaller shops and restaurants, then hotels and shopping centers.
I walked on foot from the station to my hostel. So I witnessed a crazy marketing campaign. I was approached on the street by a guy giving handouts and led to the store. In front of the store was a chariot with stuffed horses and a red carpet was rolled out. This was a William and Kate wedding photo promotion. I was shown two very well-made photo albums, after that I could continue to my hostel.
The hostel had beds for about 150 guests and was fully booked out. It also had its own restaurant and a decent bar. All in all not a place that promotes contact with locals.
On my first day in Xi'an I had a couple of things to do and wanted to explore the modern city. I still prefer to see the everyday life of locals, rather than four or five temples per day. The first thing I had to do was to buy me a new Chinese Simcard. My first one, I had bought at a slightly seedy dealer in Kashgar, stopped working two days earlier. This time I bought the Simcard directly from the mobile operator. It did cost twice the money, but it still works. After that I wandered a bit through the shopping centers and on the seventh floor of one of them I found an ice-skating rink. Then I went with the intention to buy me a train ticket to the station. There I was told that there are no tickets for the coming three days, only standing tickets were available for the ten hour ride. This was not an acceptable option. So I decided to buy a bus ticket on the next day. On my way back from the station to the hostel I walked along the historic city walls. In the park that runs along the wall, I witnessed martial arts, Chinese music, ping pong, and other everyday scenes.
In the evening I drank a few beers with three Americans and found that I am not the only one, who had experienced something like being touched on the train. One of the Americans leg hairs was plucked during a train ride. The other story is too long to be reproduced here. While walking with a beer in hand, we looked at the bar scene in Xi'an. At 11 pm on a Friday evening the busiest bar had twelve people in it.
The next day I went to the station and gave my big backpack for storage. Then I bought a bus ticket for the evening to Taiyuan. Most of the day I had left to visit the Terracotta Army. The Terracotta Army is about an hour by bus from Xi'an. The most impressive of is the idea to protect the grave of a clay army of that size. The views of the army were still impressive, but it was massively destroyed by tour groups on photo safari. Moreover, you can’t get close to the statues. So there was no intimacy between viewer and object.
Xi'an is regarded as one of the starting points of the Silk Road. The Silk Road chapter of my journey is therefore over. I have traveled it from the end of it in Venice to the start in Xi'an. Later that night I traveled on to Taiyuan in a sleeper bus

China II, Gansu Province

Lanzhou
Before I start writing about my stay in Lanzhou, I comment briefly on the train ride from Urumqi to Lanzhou. It was about 1200 km from western China to central China and the end of my Central Asian adventures. The first eighteen hours I had a bed. It was a very relaxing way to travel. Using my Chinese book, I came up with two sentences to explain that I wanted to buy an onward ticket on the train. At first I interpreted the response as that it is impossible to do so. But shortly before arriving at the destination stated on my ticket, I was led into a hard seat cart and allowed to buy a ticket for the next six hours. I found a seat and because I wasn’t able to answer the first three questions in Chinese, I was left alone by my traveling companions. Three hours later the guy sitting next to me, who had not spoken a word to me, grabbed my leg and gestured that my leg was so big and his small. After 21 hours on the train my patience was not very big, I still left it with giving him a look of disapproval. That did not stop him from touching my arm. After this experience I came to the realization that many Chinese people behave like little children. Perhaps because of their unbroken childlike curiosity is enviable, but also very demanding when it comes to social conventions or obeying the rules.
In the early afternoon I arrived in Lanzhou and bought a ticket to Xi'an for the following day. Then I tried to find a hotel. I found one after 17 or 18 attempts. The problem was that the cheap hotels weren’t allowed to host foreigners; the expensive hotels were clearly outside of my budget and moderately prized big were either fully booked or had the foreigner problem. Following this extremely frustrating experience I had closed the Lanzhou chapter. On the following morning I would take the train to Xi'an. After I had eaten dinner, I spent the rest of the day watching Chinese Kung Fu movies on TV and getting rid of prostitutes on the phone.

China I, Xinjiang Province

Kashgar
At the Chinese border the luggage of everybody on the bus was first searched and tried by soldiers and then screened again a little later. Otherwise, the border crossing was easy and I was glad that I didn’t have to take a taxi from the border, for once. The bus stopped in a village for lunch. Laghman (an Uighur noodle dish) and tea cost about $ 0.75. After lunch some young Uighur man joined our traveling party. With one of them I listened to music on my MP3 player for about 45 minutes. I didn’t ask him how he liked the music, but at least he didn’t complain about Manu Chao. After a good 19 hours in the bus, I arrived in Kashgar.
Although Kashgar is located more than 1000 kilometers west of Beijing, Beijing time is officially in use. As a result, stores open at 10.30 am and check-out time at my hotel was until 2 pm.
In Kashgar, I stayed in a beautiful three star hotel for under $ 10 per night. This was possible because I had asked for a bed and not for a room. During my two nights I had the room to myself. Although in Kashgar, as across the country, there is very good "Chinese" food, I focused on the local Uighur specialties. On the second evening I ate in one of over a dozen of pigeons restaurants located next to each other. The pigeon was very good. But to my discomfort, just before I finished eating, I witnessed water brought in to the restaurant in containers. Due to the lack of a water connection in some of the places I traveled, this was nothing new to me, but it bothered me that they used old chemical containers with Irritant symbol still on it.
The change from Central Asia to China was particularly strong in the streets. In Kashgar, there was wild driving. A myriad of small shops, people and the annoying electric scooters on the streets made that place very different from what I was used to. There are fast food restaurants, coffee shops and shopping centers, as well. The difference between Kashgar and the approximately equal-sized city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan has been tremendous. At that time, I was convinced that I would have a 95 percent chance of getting involved in an electric scooter accident. Unlike their conventional relatives, they are silent.
Kashgar has a historical section in the city center. It is located in the midst of a modern Chinese city, an anachronism. The Uighur and their historic district had a difficult standing with me, while for the tourists who came from the east of China this culture was new and exciting, for me it was another part of Central Asia. I had already met Uighur people in Kyrgyzstan and the historical district could not match the sites in Uzbekistan. The Chinese part of the city on the other hand, was new and exciting for me.

Train Kashgar - Urumqi
When I bought a train ticket the day before I wanted to go to Urumqi, I realized that the Chinese had discovered traveling for themselves. My plan was a bit shaken, rather than get a bed in the sleeping cart; I had to resign myself to a seat.
Before I boarded the train I couldn’t imagine what to bring for a 24 hour train ride. I decided to bring just a little and go to the restaurant cart if I need to. In order to be allowed to use a train in China, one must first get his baggage x-rayed and go through a metal detector. Then one is left in the assigned waiting area. As a Western foreigner it felt partly like being on the wrong side of a cage in the zoo.
When I had found my place I realized that the backrest of the seats is almost in a 90 degree angle to the seating surface and is not adjustable. The train was also so crowded that all free spaces were used for sitting or lying down and vacant seats were taken while still warm. I had the luck that a young primary school teacher, who spoke passable English sat in my compartment. So I was able to talk to her and with her as a translator to the other people around my compartment. I had to answer many questions was, but also integrated nicely.
A German-Malay couple asked me if I would join them to the dining car. I was delighted by the change. Thomas (I hope the name is correct, it took place already more than a week ago) and Anita were on their way from Germany to Malaysia. Their originally scheduled trip was almost identical to the first idea for my trip. It should go by car from Germany to Malaysia. The regulations for China put an end to that plan. Instead, they flew to Moscow and from there on they wanted to go overland to Urumqi and then fly to Bangkok.
Later the other passengers in my compartment made the two of them, to sit with us. Anita could speak a little Mandarin to their delight. Until approximately one clock in the night it was loud in the train, then almost all passengers tried to get some sleep. In that night I managed to have about thirty minutes of sleep. After 22 hours of travel, the train emptied somewhat, so that I could occupy two seats and take a little nap.
An hour late and after a journey time of 25 hours, the train arrived in Urumqi. There, Anita helped me buying a train ticket for my further journey two days later. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a ticket in the sleeping cart for the entire route. But with the help of a map Anita got me a sleeper ticket for three quarters of the way.


Urumqi
Urumqi has nothing in common with its history as a Silk Road city. It is a modern Chinese city, and might as well be 1000 km eastwards into China. The lack of historical sites limited my opportunities for sightseeing. Since I only had one full day to spend there, it didn’t bother me too much. I wanted to visit the museum and a park with a pagoda and a good view over the city. Arriving at the museum, I was told that it is closed on Mondays. The park revealed a certain tendency of Chinese people to theme park entertainment. Rides, artificial rocks and newly built temple made up good photo opportunities.
The first night in the hostel was very nice. I had a good chat with Magdalena and Benni from Switzerland. The two had completed an internship at a pottery in eastern China and were traveling through the country to collect more impressions. Later another Swiss couple joined us. The second night in the hostel was one of those "there is something wrong here" moments. After I had eaten at a night market, I came back to the hostel. I wanted to drink a beer. When I entered the well-decorated common room, there sat 18 of 20 people in front of their computers. I don’t understand why anyone wants to spend the evening in a situation like this to change his facebook status, and chat with people at home. When outside of the hostel a foreign city can be explored and in this room were probably lots of interesting people. I spoke a little to with a French girl and confirmed my suspicions about interesting people. She is on the way back from Laos to France. However, it will take a couple of years, with various jobs during her journey.

Kyrgyzstan VI, Osh II

My first was also my last city in Kyrgyzstan, Osh. I had finished my loop of Kyrgyzstan and did not regret that I replaced Kazakhstan with Kyrgyzstan. In Osh I had to spend three days until my bus drove into the Chinese city of Kashgar. In the first article I have written about Osh, that there is not much to see in Osh except the bazaar. In the three days that I spent there on my second visit, my point of view has not changed. I only realized that the bazaar was much bigger than I thought it was. Besides the usual things (clothes, food, products of daily use and cafes / restaurants), there were carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, saddlers, live poultry dealers, bicycle salesmen and a number of other stalls, which I cannot remember anymore.
This time, the hostel was not fully occupied and the owner, with whom I had spoken only ten days earlier for a few minutes, spotted me on the street and called me by name. In the hostel I met the Dutchmen Robert, who had been waiting there since a few days earlier and until a fellow traveler would receive his approval for entering the Tajik-Kyrgyz border region.
My daily routine in Osh was getting up late, eat lunch and maybe buy something or go online. In the evenings I went out with Robert to eat and then a few beers. Bonjour tristesse.
On the last day I tried to spend about thirty dollars, I had left in local currency. After I went to eat, bought souvenirs and was in the supermarket, I had spent only a little over ten dollars. I gave up the idea and changed the equivalent of about ten dollars into Chinese Yuan. Fortunately, I asked at the travel agency, where I had bought my bus ticket, if everything goes as planned. Because they made me aware that the bus would leave from a place in the city center and not as stated in my guide books from the long-distance bus station.
I showed up at the departure point twenty minutes early. About three hours later the bus drove off. This was my first experience in a sleeper bus. Instead of seats the sleeper bus was equipped with bunk beds. The three upper beds at the end of the bus even had almost the right length for me. I cannot say anything about the panoramic road which the bus took to the border post. However, I can say that the potholes were of the highest quality. While driving, I was either asleep or airborne depending on road conditions. From about three to eight o’clock the bus had to wait in front of the Kyrgyz border. At eight o’clock the border was opened.