Silk Road Series: Post 3: Arrival in Dunhuang and the Dunhuang Villa

I took the plane from Harbin to Beijing on the Sunday before the trip.  Beijing I won’t spend inordinate amounts of time describing – it is not, after all, the intent of this series to be describing Beijing, but to be describing the Silk Road.  So!  Suffice it to say I tooled around Beijing’s hutongs for a day or so before heading on out to the airport on the first of October.

Now, the October Holiday, in China, is one of the long holidays.  You may know it as the Golden Week; in China it’s also called the National Day Holiday (国庆节).  Schools, offices, and other places of work are generally given a week off (but with makeup days added on the weekends for the weekdays missed – in China, three-day-wekeends aren’t three-day-weekends; you have to make up the weekdays missed on the weekend days), and overall, people take the opportunity to travel.  Not everyone can – some people are constrained by work (restaurants, shops, etc), some by other duties, some simply by the wish not to be crushed by that enormous migration.  But still: imagine 200 million people making up their minds to  Vacation, and imagine those 200 million buying up every bus, plane, and train ticket they can get their hands on.

A word of advice to the Alert Reader of this blog:  Don’t.  Just don’t.  Don’t ever go to Beijing during the October Holiday.

Why not?  Well, if I have to spell it out: imagine Tiananmen Square at full capacity – a giant open-air square filled with so many people you can’t turn around without bumping into someone.  Imagine two hundred thousand – I’ll write that out in numbers so it looks as big as it is – 200,000 people circulating through the Forbidden City in one day.  In one day.  Have you seen the pictures of the Great Wall filled with people?  No?  Go.  Google it.  “Great Wall October.”  I’ll wait.

Back?  Yes?  That’s why.

Now, the Perspicacious Reader may be wondering: “Oy, Ekscursionist!  Aren’t you just the biggest hypocrite?  You’re telling me not to travel on that holiday, yet here you are, travelling on that holiday!  HAH.”

And I’d say, “shush, Reader, I have my reasons.”

My reasons are these: it’s a week-long holiday: of course I’m going to do something.  I’ve lived long enough in China, though, that I know to pick my battles.  And this battle was won early – a month before the holiday went into action.

I bought my tickets for the trip at China Culture Center (http://www.chinaculturecenter.org/)’s website.  CCC has three prices for its trips: the early bird, the normal, and the latecomer.  You buy your tickeys early, you see a couple hundred fewer kuai of price, and you also can recline upon your ticket-buying laurels, secure in the knowledge that someone else is going to be doing that frantic ticket-buying and scrambling for seats, and that that someone else is Not You.  In short, you prep early for October Holiday, you take a tour rather than fight the crowds, and you have got your ducks in a row.

(Note that I have, in fact, gone through the fun-filled fight-the-crowds experience enough times to be able to tell you: you do not want to do it.  It will turn you into a hot, sweaty, temporary misanthrope.  So, though I generally don’t spring for tours, this one’s a weighing of convenience over pain and relaxation over irritation.  Kids?  On October Holiday, spring for the tour.)

At the airport, we had a particular meeting place and time – one Alex was meant to be there, meeting us by one of the entrances.  I duly met Alex, but, as it turned out, no one else did.  I very quickly found out that this is one of those tours where, rather than travelling as a group, you’re instead thrown together incidentally and actually regroup once you’re on the tour itself.  Thus, I ended up talking to a few of my travelmates before flying, but didn’t actually meet them til we landed.

The flight was an evening one: the sun was going down to the right of and behind the plane, under a clear sky and over a Beijing haze.  We flew over mountains in the dark, and landed in Dunhuang airport at 9pm, in full dark.  So my first impression of Dunhuang was based not on the land, which I couldn’t see, but on the two things I met that evening: the airport map, and the hotel.

In the airport, after getting my bag and meeting the tour guide outside the baggage carrels, I gravitated toward a map on the wall.  I wanted to read up on the places we were to go.

Not To Scale - those train stations are two- or three-hour drives.

This map is a delightfully accurate look at Dunhuang: this city is made of its sights, and aside from the sights, there’s barely a city.  I saw this, in full glory, from the dune the next day: the city really does look like that map – long, single lines of streets with small clusters of tourist-buildings around the main sights – and then nothing.

The nothing at that point was darkness, though.  I didn’t know what kind of landscape to fill it in with.  So I went out to the tourbus and sat down.

In typical style, the seat you first claim on your first day is the seat you have from then-on-out.  I grabbed myself the first seat behind the driver because I like to get a good view, and the others filed into their respective places.  The bus was curiously empty – our tour guide, Christie, didn’t tell us why.  She just bundled us on and had us driven, through dark and empty streets, past long stretches of nothing punctuated with bright-lit hotels and tourist sights, about an hour out to our hotel.

Our hotel was – there’s no other way to put it – a spectacle.  It was done up in the style of a great old fort, with imposing sand-colored walls and turrets on top of the roof, and Chinese gables on all of the roof-corners.  Huge red signs above the main doors proclaimed that this was the DUNHUANG VILLA.  (Its English name, the Silk Road Dunhuang Hotel, is much more lackluster).  Its arched entrance had ten-foot gables swinging majestically over the driveway.

This was the entrance hall:

And, as I always say, when you’ve got three floors of columned entrance hall filled with twenty-foot murals, you’ve gotta be compensating for something, amirite?

… okay, maybe that’s not a joke that works, but the point is sound: this lobby is magnificent!  Majestic!  Grande with an E on the end!  But it is precisely in this grandeness that this lobby is clear in its aim: you have entered the Impress You Zone.

Let me note here that Chinese folks and Westerners come at tourism from very differing angles.  In the West, folks, want to see difference, and they want to see it in comfort.   They want to see what make This Place unlike their own – they want to see those oddities that make the place “foreign”.  There’s a wide variety of this: some people (like me) want to see what daily life in this place might be like; some people want to experience everything in new ways; some people want to see the amazing, impressive stuff; some people want variety and no repeats; some people want the stunning, flashy tricks, with all the lights and sound effects.

In China, tourism is different.  There is overlap – big sights, yes, foreign places, yes yes.  But three things that are often parts of Chinese tours are Spectacles, Photo-Ops, and Shopping. 

1.) Spectacles: sometimes a place is beautiful on its own.  Sometimes, though, in the Chinese tourism industry, it is considered necessary to the touristic value of the place to add to it a certain je ne sais quois, and here by “I don’t know what” I actually mean “tourist trap”.  Spectacles are constructed in front of, behind, around, and among tourist sights in China – Potempkinlike structures that can often be eyesores, and serve no purpose other than…
2.) The Photo Op.  In China, taking pictures is elevated past a pastime: it is what the trip is all about!  Selfies with Spectacles are popular, since the Spectacles are big and flashy and show your opulence and ability to travel – and isn’t that what travel’s about?*  Often, in Chinese tours, you’re given X amount of time to view a thing and take pictures with it, and then you’re rushed off to the next thing to take picturesof that, and so forth, all the way until you arrive at …
3.) Shopping!  A great tendency on Chinese tours is to stuff in a visit to a shopping district, to sanctioned or sponsored stores that cooperate with the tour company in order to sell things, sometimes at force.  I’ve been on tours – several of them – where they’ve locked tourists out of the bus until a certain amount of sales were made.  I’ve also been on tours where Chinese tourists were eager to make those purchases, and spent more than the allotted time in the shopping area, buying local products they couldn’t get at home.

* Let me note here that, of course, there’s ugly tourists and good tourists of every stripe in every country.  This I know.  But I will also note that there’s a far greater tendency for Chinese tourists to prefer Spectacle and Photo-Ops than other countries’ tourists I’ve seen. I’ll give more example of this in later posts.

So!  The Impress You Zone: that area of tourism that makes the tourist either “Wow!” or “well … there’s that.”  This hotel had a little of both: the thirty-foot murals of historical splendor were both impressive and gaudy; the bossed ceiling with octagonal lights was both pretty and ostentatious.  I’ve experienced a lot of this in China: mixed reactions, with one reaction being the sought-after one, and the other battling it and saying “yes, but!”  In this particular case, I accepted the ostentation as a given, and just set out to enjoy the hotel. 

We checked into rooms, and immediately there was issue: Christie had picked up the second half of our group earlier in the day, and to hear them speak of it, she hadn’t actually been there to pick them up – she’d just sent the driver.  She proved less than helpful in the room issue as well, booking private-room people with double-room people without notice or prior knowledge of either party.  (Note that among the three tour operators we experienced, Christie was by far my least favorite – neither helpful nor informative, nor particularly caring of her charges.)  It took some phone-calling and arrangement, but finally we were in our proper rooms, and most folks bedded down for the night.

I decided to go exploring.

The Dunhuang Villa became my favorite of the hotels we experienced on that trip.  It’s not only that the rooms were cool – small, high-ceilinged, with exposed-wood rafters and traditional weavings on the chairs and quilts, and a tiny complimentary stuffed camel For You – but also the surroundings were so extraordinarily extravagant.  Wood ceilings and floors.  Beautiful rugs linings the walls.  Clearly this was a hotel determined to Provide For You, and that’s what it was going to do, to the best of its ability.  I wandered the inside first – three floors constructed, fortlike, around a central courtyard, and bizarre signage along the way:

Now, looking at that sign, you’ve got to have figured out what I wanted to see.  But I restrained myself, going around the hotel methodically.  I went out the front and explored the outer buildings – the restaurant was a whole separate complex, complete with courtyard and huge red doors, closed now for the night.  Behind that was the garden of the place – queerly bare of ground, no grasses or flowers, just shrubs and willows with the occasional poplar. 

The garden led in perpendicular paths to the Health Center, which was an interesting interlude on its own: a complex of buildings with a central covered walkway down its central courtyard.  To the left, empty windows.  To the right, on the gravel, several long lounge chairs had been set up, and several hotelgoers were being massaged by young women, most of whom sat up to watch The Westerner go by.  Inside, the man at reception was eager to show me around – he gave me a list of massages and prices and showed me several rooms that were all the same – bed with towel on it, chair.  Then, though, with great pride, he introduced me to the VIP room.  A large bed with a towel on it.  A large TV mounted upon the wall, cabinet and candles and bowl set altarlike underneath.  A large shower taking up the entire corner of the room, the walls around it made of plexiglass.  A large, full-length mirror along the wall.  And, on the wall next to the door, a large, full-color, blown-up photograph of an attractive couple caught coitus interruptus.

Leaving the Health Center slightly faster than I had entered it, I returned to the garden.  Signs showed me that the Ghenghis Khan Camp Fire Party was somewhere to my left, and I made for it.  I found the Courtyard Villas along the way (a villa in a villa?  I guess they were feeling invilladated.)  – small-sized gravel courtyards with a donut of rooms surrounding them; the rooms were curtained with more traditional weavings, and the courtyards had little lounge-chairs with magazine racks, and little long tables with full tea-ceremony duds along them.  The magazines were all tourist things, about the trips you Could Be Taking, although one magazine rack definitely had Confucius’ Analects stuffed into its wicker folder.

The Courtyard Villas were, luckily, right across from the Ghenghis Khan Camp Fire Party, so I crossed the path and went to that.  After all this searching, it ended up being a bit of a letdown – there were a few slightly-greasy picnic tables and benches, a few propane-burning stoves and grills, a couple grass-covered tents and enclosures, and what would probably, in the Season, be a bar, but at the moment was just a sad little wire rack standing behind the grill-counter.  Desert dirt and gravel crunched underfoot, and over to the left, construction went on, despite it was eleven PM already, with giant bright lights leaking out acrosst the Camp Fire Party.

But if you covered the ground and the lights from your view and looked up, you could see the stars.  Not perfectly, not as bright as they could’ve been out in the open desert, but still enough that you could see the haze of the Milky Way stretched along the middle of the sky, with the few familiar constellations outshone in brightness, fading into the rest of the stars.

I headed back through the carpeted halls to my room, where my unexpected roommate was going in the direction of sleep.  I figured that was a pretty good direction to be heading, and we went to sleep around midnight, on the sixty-fourth anniversary of the founding of the PRC.