Linxia

Boy monk at Labrang Monastery

"Warmly Welcome to Xiahe"

Ever since that awful town a few days ago I've been shy about taking off my helmet in the presence of more than five or six people. But I haven't gathered more than five since then... if it looks like more are coming I just take off. I keep my spare jug of gas full so I'm never forced to stop, I check the oil and tires on remote stretches of road, use the toilet in villages where everyone is out in the fields, and stop for food at stands close to a getaway route. This all makes me feel a bit like an escaped convict whose photo is out in all the papers.

But the men who gathered outside the hotel where I'm staying remained around the motorcycle long after I'd dragged my bags upstairs. These bikes are more and more rare the further west I get. I've hit maximum interest, I think. After Xiahe I'll be heading back east to Xi'an where all kinds of strangers and vehicles are seen.

A SIDEBAR ON HOTELS

This is China. Hotels with hallways that echo like schools or hospitals. Only one hour of hot water, from 8 to 9 or 9 to 10 at night, or from 7 to 8 in the morning. With a tiny package of toothbrush, paste, and comb and ten squares of toilet paper wrapped around the core. With a hand towel for drying your entire body. With no bathtub under the shower head and the drain on one end of the room and the low end of the room on the other. With the blue faucet hot and the red faucet cold (80% of the time), with the hole in the tile where the pipe comes through the wall, and no ventilation. With the flusher handle installed upside-down (80% of the time). With the light switch installed upside-down (80% of the time.) With a coat rack and a thermos of boiling hot water and two bags of tea and cups with lids and plastic sandals for wearing in the shower and a little enamel bucket with an inch of water in the bottom of it for what reason I have yet to figure out. With a floor girl who opens and locks the door for you, even if you run in and out twenty times a day and have to wake her from her only sleep in the afternoon. With the old guy in the parking who watches the motorcycle by sitting on it and explaining to everyone where you've come from and what you're doing and then letting them work the clutch an the brake and take the spark plug wires off and on a thousand times and fiddle with the carb adjustments and air filter latch and turn signals so that when you come to start it it's got several little problems of some sort or other. With the other guy in the parking lot who is in charge of keeping the boiler fueled with coal, and who invites you in for tea to his little one-room house and two canaries in wicker cages in back and talks in Chinese while you talk in English and you understand each other perfectly. With the sales staff who say 120 yuan and okay 50 will be fine without any sense of bargaining whatsoever. With the horns outside the window beeping at the slow motorcycle trailers filled with bricks and the staff yelling to each other from each end of the hall and the people in the next room shouting a beer drinking ritual over the TV on full blast to the Kung-Fu show and the sledgehammer at seven o'clock in the morning. With thick blankets of cotton batting and two tiny pillows filled with beans that rattle under your head. With an ashtray upside-down on the coffee table and sign that says please don't smoke in bed and cigarette burns in the coverlet and a radiator that doesn't work and two outlets, one for the TV which does work and the other non-functional (80% of the time).

But then, this is a developing country.

The road rises from the Yellow River at Lanzhou into mountains terraced into thousands of tiny plots of in varied greens and browns. Where it isn't terraced there are workers making it terraced, hacking at the earth from above with hoes. All this work for a two meter-wide strip for planting! Tiny villages gather just below, and the air is cool and moist in the morning,traffic is light, and I am in such a good mood that even the fact that I have to dodge motorcycle-sized chunks of red earth in the road seems charming.

Here I finally leave the banks Yellow River, which I've been following upstream since Inner Mongolia thorough Ninxia Province, and arrive in Ganzu Province -- the Ganzu Strip, they call it, where the traders caravaned their goods to and fro between China and the Middle East and India.

The mountains look like photos I've seen of Indonesia. Hilly, rich, terraced, a the sky perpetually threatens rain. But immediately upon crossing over this area is another semi-arid stretch of land entire communities of Muslim Hui, men in white caps, women in black or emerald green head scarves leaving their round pie faces exposed. The Hui people are Islamic descendants of Central Asian Muslims who have intermarried with Han Chinese, which is what I see in these faces. They've kept a distinct culture, probably because of their religion and their distance from Beijing, says one of my reference books, and Beijing, apparently, is often worried about their great numbers, about 7.5 million of them who have historically revolted in conjunction with other Muslim minority groups. For me they are a relief from the homogeneity of all the Han faces of Central China, and I like their villages which are clean and airy and centered around a mosque about three stories high, its high tower is hand-painted with colorful intricate scenes and it's all topped off with a shining green dome and a pole with the moon and stars.

It looks like market day, and many men in white caps are towing large green zucchinis to the village center. The squashes are stacked vertically in the carts so that the green stem ends all peek above the planks. Other Hui men and boys lead the sacrificial lambs and sleek sacred calves on rope leashes. Horns blow and hoofs stomp and clatter. Then I have turned the corner and there are only trees on the left, some cultivation on the right and a cool breeze from the valley below. In the near distance are sudden jagged mountain peaks of soft red stone that define where lies the trade route. Here it is. The Silk Road, all paved over.

The road surface is lovely and smooth except in the villages where potholes force traffic to slow to about 20 kph. It has rained all night but now the sun shines making it a perfect day for motorcycle touring. I am having fun riding, almost for the first time I am not worried about the bike, which is taking the hills almost without effort. We are passing slow trucks and busses stuffed with people that lean dangerously from overload. There are many of those woven white bags of things -- dates and beans, probably -- lashed to the top. Suddenly there is another village where a hundred little boys have just been released from school for lunch. They stream down both sides of the road, their little white caps bobbing up and down as they run and stop and punch and laugh and yell and run again. The high graceful dome of a mosque rises from the trees, three girls at a food stall turn their white veiled heads briefly my way.

In the next village men plane wood for child-sized stools which are tied at the joints with flat knitted rope. Everywhere in China you see adults sitting on these, and tiny child-sized chairs. The smell of sawdust and wet straw lasts for as long as there are shopfronts littered with curled wood shavings. A four-foot high stack of sheepskins sit in the dirt, the tips of their furry paws move lightly in the breeze as if they might come alive and scatter.

Four hours of one after another of pleasant villages and long stretches of near solitude and I am in heaven. But Linxia arrives, sprawling with wide streets and beeping horns, and shops from here to the mountain.

Linxia was once a big trading outpost on the Silk Road, long used to foreign faces, and wandering the streets people do look twice, but don't gather to stare. There are many rugs and fabrics for sale, shoes, and strange ornate spectacles that are two heavy for my face. I pay about four dollars for colorful woven Tibetan backpack to replace my frayed shoulder bag and sit in the shade to sip from a glass bottle of yogurt. Green eyes meet my green eyes. She has an angular face with high cheekbones and a long nose. We both jump a little. And then there are more.

In the 13th century the Dongxiang were forced out of the middle east and into this area by the armies of Kublai Khan.

They are Dongxiang, forced here in the 13th century from the middle east by the armies of Kublai Khan. They chatter in their own language as do the Tibetan monks who stroll down the shopping street in orange robes. This is why people aren't bothering me. They regularly see three different races, and Xiahe's proximity (and the Labrang Monastery) means they've seen many travelers on their way from Lanzhou.

5/22 Xiahe at the Tibetan Plateau

The ride to Xiahe was even better than the one into Linxia. Smooth black asphalt and lush mountain scenery, some quite like Blue Ridge mountains in North Carolina. But instead of the Appalachian hillbilly houses there are tiny mud villages tucked into the crevices. They are cold, clean, sleepy places in the pine trees and in the shadows of steep mountainsides and sharp valleys. Then it is absolutely alpine... suddenly rocky mountains topped with soft green, short grass spilling over the gray stone. In the valleys are little hardy ponies that much the tops off. .

A few miles from Xiahe I round the corner to see three monks walking in the middle of the road. As soon as they hear my engine they hit the ground, lying flat on their stomachs. I swerve and barely miss them, brake, and look behind me. They get up and start walking again as if nothing had happened.

I round another corner and there is a solitary monk lying the same way, full length on his stomach on the asphalt in the middle of my lane. He is up before I get to him, and walking. After several more of these incidents I figure out that this is some sort of pilgrimage ritual. Definitely a road hazard. The was the busses that come this way careen around corners I wouldn't be surprised if they nab one every once in a while.

Stupa at Labrang

Xiahe arrives too quickly, a long dusty street and hundreds of costumes: Tibetan girls with long black braids tied together at the ends, wearing hats and layers of skirts that make them waddle. Their cheeks are pink with long exposure to the sun at high altitude, even the babies, slung behind their mothers' backs, have rosy sunburnt cheeks.

About 40 percent of Xiahe are Tibetan, another 40 Han Chinese, and about 20 are Muslim Hui. The Tibetans are most colorful in their jangly earrings and stripe-trimmed robes. The monks wear red robes with heavy pink cloth overtop. These, I am to find out later, identify them as medical students at the Labrang Monastery, one of the 6 most important Tibetan Monasteries of the Yellow Hat sect.

Tibetan men wear heavy clothes, lots of fur and some have hats. Their boots are leather and fur, and they carry long sticks. Many sell furs, many just stand around looking picturesque. Shops open to the street sell saddles and blankets, Tibetan hangings, woven goods, fur-lined coats, oilskins, shoes, boots, daggers, horns... everyone on the street eats ice pops, it's a hot day, there are orange and yellow ones, and softie cones covered in chocolate.

Tomorrow I will explore.

23 May 98
Xiahe, Gansu Province

A Tibetan-Chinese-Hui town on the border of the Tibetan Plateau

Suddenly I am a real live human again. There are tourists here, from Switzerland, France, and even America. I am speaking English. I am complaining about the Chinese with other people who are complaining about the Chinese. “They have such a capacity for crowding,” it scares me sometimes,” says one woman. Everyone agrees. “No personal space... no concept of the sacred... no respect for the land...but developing. Definitely developing.”

Several have bicycled from the very south tip of China and are here, at the border of the Tibetan Plateau and headed for Mongolia. They think I'm nuts to motorcycle. I think they're nuts to bicycle. Those of us with our own wheels think Marcel and Mary Jane are nuts to depend on Chinese transport.

“It is very much better now than several years ago,” say Marcel, a third-time visitor to China. "I can now often get a seat in the bus in the cities, and the last time here I could not. But the white tile, this new thing, and the cellular telephones, these are new things.”

Mary Jane, head of the art department at a Wyoming University, agrees. “Next year here in Xiahe there will be a 23 story white-tile Bank of China building on this end of town. They will bus Chinese tourists here by the thousands. They will visit the monastery, take photos, buy souvenirs, take horseback rides, all in one weekend, and then they will go home.”

“I've had it with Chinese tourists to the monasteries,” says someone else. “They laugh and take photos and talk loudly inside the temples, and they want to buy the fabrics that the pilgrims have brought all the way from Tibet.”

“I don't know what they are thinking when they are putting up all these white tile structures,” says Marcel. “I think that in twenty or maybe thirty years they will look back and wish they constructed in the old style, here the wooden buildings with the traditional rooftops. You know in the south, where there were once all wooden buildings the whole village is white tile. They have kept the roofs traditional but it is not the same feeling.”

The Chinese in this heavily-touristed village are living with the Tibetans, about 40% each in this town on the border with the Tibetan plateau which is visible to the west. The rest are Muslim Hui people, the men in white caps and the women in headscarves. Perhaps there is an additional five percent of the population which is tourists. Everywhere we go we hear “Hello! Hello! Come in! Thank you!” We walk down the street and “Hello!” follows us everywhere. We get tired of hearing “Hello!” and stop responding. By day two we do not hear it any more. The beggars have received all our little money and we do not have more and are tired, anyway, of being poked at five times a day by the same old leather-faced person in thick wool robes with runny eyes and sores and no teeth who smells like yak butter and urine while, for example, you're in the middle of an international phone call at the booth in the middle of the monastery parking lot while your motorcycle is being molested by 10 year old monks who can't keep their hands off it no matter how hard you poke your long black umbrella at them or you are in the middle of a meal of yak meat and noodle soup at the local restaurant. I am longing again for the solitude of untouristed territory but I know as soon as I have a couple of days of that I'll want it again.

Whether I like it or not I'll get it in Xi'an, where the “Hello!” will certainly reappear.

The travelers I'm meeting here in Xiahe -- with the exception of a wealthy American couple in their fifties with a digital video camera, clean fingernails, and a driver-translator and who pay the asking price for everything -- are real hard-core travelers, all of whom have been to China at least once before. We all ask each other about Indonesia but nobody really knows happening there with the riots and the killings, the Chinese TV news can't give us much with our lack of language skills.

We are eating our noodle soup with chewy yak meat in a restaurant where the Tibetans come to eat. The restaurant is run by Muslim Hui, and it is the cleanest and cheapest in town. For breakfast we have yogurt with honey and banana crepes and milk-coffee. For lunch we have fried potatoes and mushrooms and tea with the rock sugar and fruits, and for dinner it is always noodles and Xiliang beer. The bill never comes to more than 12 yuan, it seems, no matter what you order unless it's chicken. Chicken might as well be pheasant under glass around here.

Monks in orange robes and pink scarves sit sullenly watching the television set, and Tibetans in voluminous heavy brown robes with arms folded down and tied thickly around their waists chatter to one another. The women wear heavy turquoise earrings with thick silver settings and strings of peach-colored stone around their necks. Their little black hats are made of wool or felt, and their long black braids are tied together at the tips making a long U at the small of their backs.

The men's faces are tanned beyond the color of old leather and their hair is sometimes long and deadlocked. They all smell of wool and yak butter, even the children slung behind their mothers' backs.

The Tibetans and the Hui never say “Hello!” It is the Chinese who follow you down the street. Who ask for money when you ask directions. The Tibetans and the Hui let you finger through their goods without shoving a sample of something they think you ought to want in your face, obstructing the thing that you're really interested in buying.

“They are wheeler dealers, and they think that the minorities are stupid people,” says Marcel, who has been traveling in China now for two months and has been here twice before. “The Chinese really hate them, but they come and dress up in their clothing and take photographs.” This is the topic of conversation amongst the westerners who have been traveling now (me the least amount of time at a month). We are a little upset because we have visited the monastery here, and the Chinese run around inside like it's Disneyland. The monks look pained but they take their money and try to keep them from throwing trash on the altars or urinating on a corner of the building. Most of the Chinese tourists are impatient and easily bored, like children, which is the best that anyone can say about their behavior.

I'm trying to figure out why it is they are not showing respect for these sacred places. Even the atheists I know in America can appreciate religious buildings. I know we're missing something basic about the culture that will clue me in, but for now it seems there is a serious fault here, a lack of understanding or empathy.

The monastery is huge, one of six of the Yellow Hat sect, and I take an English tour of it, but the monk is not enthusiastic. He talks about the Dali Lamas, and the child who lives in Beijing. Marcel thinks he is one of those government-placed monks put here to give tours to the Westerners, to make sure nothing is said to feed the "Free Tibet" flame.

After the tour Marcel and I ride out to the grasslands where the mountains fall like pale green velvet into the valleys where herds of yaks graze by the roadside. A Tibetan man trains a dappled pony in the field near where we have stopped. He makes it prance in circles in muddy earth, the animal's feet step high as he keeps at its pace, and then he makes it switch sides to form a figure eight. It becomes confused and breaks its stride, so they do it again. The man is still upon the prancing horse, his brown robes flounce with the movement but his round hat with the wide brim follows a straight line across the pale blue sky.

It is bitter cold, even in the late May sunshine which is canceled whenever the thin wind blows into our faces. It may as well be snowing. I have bought a Tibetan wool vest with thick fur lining to wear over my heavy leather motorcycle jacket, and a colorful wool Tibetan scarf and am wearing my running tights under my jeans. My hands are covered with a pair of thin nylon gloves, thin cotton cloves, and my leather motorcycle gloves. It is two o'clock in the afternoon. From the west, gray clouds gather in a far valley and blow our way. The yaks continue grazing but the horses start running across the grass and the sheep huddle together. We race back to the village and seek shelter.

But the storm never comes. Only the wind blows cold and I cannot find Mary Jane who I have promised to meet this afternoon. I wander the one main street and take my braid down so that she will see my blond hair in the of sleek black pigtails. But it is eight o'clock now and at nine the hot water will come on in the hotel and I will have only that one hour to bathe before it goes off again.

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