Silk Road Series: Post 2: Answers To Questions You May Or May Not Have Asked

Ekscursionist's Note: In point of fact, I wrote this entry some months ago (early November, when I still thought I had time to do such things), and have been meaing for en longtemps to post it.  Apologies preemptively/postemptively/all-the-emptivelies for not having posted this before, but life sort of fell on my head in November.  I will, in theory, be posting more in this Silk Road Series at later points in time, but I figure this post's good anyway: it gives some of the basic information about what this trip was, and why it's important, interesting, and awesome.

Besides.  Old posts are like wine.  Everyone thinks they get better with age except for those people who know better.

SO WITHOUT FURTHER ADO: 

Silk Road Series: Post 2.

~:~

So.  There are a few certain things that are probably on The Collective You’s minds. Please feel free to check multiple of the following:

□ “Oh, you went to the Silk Road!  How exciting!"

□ “Why did you go there?”

□ “Wait, what’s the Silk Road again?”

□ “And uh, where is it?”

□ “I didn’t know the Silk Road went into China.”

□ “Who did you go with?”

□ “How much did it cost?”

□ “How on Earth did you go out there?”

□ “Why didn’t you go there earlier?”

□ “Why didn’t you go there alone?”

□ “I didn’t know the Silk Road still existed…”

□ “I wouldn’t actually check any of these boxes.”

□ “Why are you still offering checkbox options?”

□ “Stoppit and get to posting already ugh.”

□ Other: ___________________

(fun fact: you can’t actually check any of those checkboxes.  Sorry!  I call this my Patented Bait-And-Switch Checkbox Technique (not actually patented).  If you actually want to tell me which ones of those would you check if you could (but you can’t so you won’t), you can leave ‘em in the comments!)

Actually, since those questions above have given me a perfect framework from which to write this post, I’ll use ‘em to … write this post.  (“Wow, Ekscursionist, you’re a genius!”  “Thank you, Hypothetical Reader, but I wouldn’t go that far.”)

IN WHICH THE EKSCURSIONIST ANSWERS HER OWN QUESTIONS

□ “Oh, you went to the Silk Road!  How exciting!”

---- With this I certainly agree!  It’s not really a question, more of a statement, but I certainly agree – there was a whole lot on this trip that I’ve never seen, nor would never have gotten to see, had I not gone. 

I’ve been so long in China that it’s familiar to me – I’m familiar with the culture, its rules, its mores, its weirdities.  I know how people do things, I know the overall ways to expect people to behave, I know what to eat and why, etc etc.  Going to a place that’s still technically China, but that already changes some of those things – that’s new and awesome to me, and I really enjoyed having that difference around me.

□ “Why did you go there?”

---- Well, hypothetical reader, I gotta say it’s because I was curious. 

I’m like this: I love to travel, but I’m not really particular about where.  (Note that doesn’t mean I’m up for going to dangerous or iffy places – I’m leery about going to a place I can’t walk around alone.)  What I mean here is that if I have the chance to go to a place I’ve never been, and it looks reasonably safe (and is not ballsingly expensive), then there’s a good chance I’ll say yes.

So I’m up for going to a lot of places in China, and I have indeed done that.  However, there’s four main things in China that I’ve solidly Wanted To See for a while:

+ The Silk Road (various cities)

+ Dali and Lijiang (and I guess if I’m down there Guilin and Kunming)

+ Chengdu and Chongqing

+ Tibet (eventually, when it’s open again?)

I’ve picked these places because they’re all so starky different from each other, and from what I’m used to in China.  All my time here, I’ve lived/traveled in the East, North, and Center.  I’ve been to a ton of cities, sure, but I’ve never seen (past passing) the West or South, and I want to see how it differs from the China I know (and sometimes love).

□ “Wait, what’s the Silk Road again?”

□ “And uh, where is it?”

---- You may remember this from your high school history classes (or maybe from reading lotsa books), but if you don’t, I’ll remind you:

The Silk Road was a mass of roads and caravan routes that intersected, interspersed, and circumvented Asia anywhere from a thousand to two thousand years ago.  There’s evidence for older than that (and in a later entry you’ll see evidence that there was indeed long-distance trade up to 4000 years ago!), but the Silk Road’s heyday was in the 0’s to 500’s, though it got a little less major as history went on long enough that ships became more expeditious ways of trade than did overland routes.

Saying “The Silk Road” is kinda like saying “the vein in your body”.   There’s really not just one – it’s more like a Silk Web, really.  Tons of roads and routes went from East to West, and, concerning China, there’s a few main areas you shouldst know about:

+ Chang’an: Chang’an’s the old name for Xi’an, a major city in China today, and the place where the Terra Cotta Army was discovered.  It was a major city even Way Back When, being a capital in several dynasties*, and it’s one of the termini of the old Silk Road.

+ the Taklama Desert: huge desert in the West of modern-day China – it split the Silk Road into Northern and Southern routes, depending who wanted to go which way around.  (A couple people did go through the desert, but, uh, it’s kinda hot.)

+ the Tarim Basin: a large lowland area in the West of modern China: lotsa mountains around it.  Silk Road(s) ran through/around/into-and-out-of here, too.

+ the Dzungerian Gate: an amazing mountain pass just outside modern-day China – the only (and literally only) way to get overland through those massive mountains north of India.  Good place for bandits and windstorms.  Bad place to try to get through.

So the most accurate way of talking about my trip is to say “the Silk Road that I went to”.  Alternately I could name the cities I visited, and you could find them on the Googly.    We’ll get to that.

* note that China’s capital has changed in various dynasties, at the whims of emperors and for economic and military and dynastic reasons as well (“we can’t leave the capital here for the enemies to come in and loot! we’re taking the capital with us.”)

□ “I didn’t know the Silk Road went into China.”

---- I kinda covered this above, but yes, it does!  The Silk Road had multiple termini in China, and several of those cities still exist today.  The Wiki of Pedias has an entry  about just this - some of those cities don’t exist anymore, but a good handful of them do; some of them have been outdone by other cities (eg one I’ll tell you guys about later whose nearest railroad connection is three hours outside of town) justbecause of changing priorities and so on.

□ “Who did you go with?”

---- And now we get to the tour group! 

Me being on a tour group is already a rarity.  You see, the Ekscursionist is 1) familiar enough with much of China, and 2) familiar enough with Chinese-style tour groups that she very rarely takes Chinese-led tours.  (I’ll expound more upon this subject later, but long story short: pointless shopping trips instead of main sights, touristy attractions as opposed to genuine natural/untouched places, not enough time to look  upon things, and generally being led around by the hand like a six-year-old: these are not how I wish to be toured around.)

So!  The group that I chose to go with for this trip is called the China Culture Center.  ( here, and no, I’m not getting paid by them, either.)  I was originally recommended the CCC by a friend who lives in Beijing – she’d gone on precisely this trip about a year or two before, and came back absolutely raving about how excellent it was.  This was already a good indicator that I maybe ought to try ‘em out, but then I took their Ming Tombs/Great Wall tour.

Son, I was impressed.  Our guides knew what they were talking about, and were able to talk about the subjects lucidly and interestedly; we weren’t pushed to Buy Things From these Friendly Vendors, we weren’t herded like a gaggle of six-year-olds, and we were given ample time to wander, look at, and do things that were out of the way but still interesting.  None of this “and now you will take pictures okay done please follow me!” that I’ve found to be endemic of a lot of tour companies here – CCC knows its tourists are adults (mostly) and treats them accordingly.

So!  I chose  The Silk Road trip, and kids?  It was worth it.

□ “How much did it cost?”

… which leads us quite nicely into price!  I’ve lived long enough in China that I’m not squeamish about talking price details anymore, and when you’re considering a trip like this in China, neither should you be.  I recommend CCC’s trips, but they are a bit pricey – I paid 13,700 RMB, which translates to 2,249 USD, or to 1,664.88 Euros.

Your opinion of this price may vary.  I look at it like this: for people from/living in developed countries, it’s a bit pricey but worth it (everything’s covered and the only thing you-the-tourist have to pay for is souvenirs); for people from/living in developing countries it’s pretty high-bracket and you really have to want it.  Including my Single Room Supplement (paid because I ended up never getting a roommate), I ended up paying 15k, which on a Chinese paycheck is three months salary.

Kids, it was worth it.

□ “How on Earth did you go out there?”

Planes, trains, and automobiles! 

No, really. Plane’s the best way to get out to that area from the Eastern part of the country – you take a train and you’ll be sitting on that train for two days straight, and when you’re pressed for time, you wanna weigh price with time-spent.  Xinjiang is about 1,500 miles (3,700 kilometers by rail) from China’s capital, and it’s rugged and remote enough that really, you don’t want to go on a non-mass-transit form of transportation unless you’re really sure of what you’re doing.

□ “Why didn’t you go there earlier?”

□ “Why didn’t you go there alone?”

---- These two tie together, so I’m going to answer them together.  They mostly have to do with remoteness, China’s economic situation, the tensions in the region and between Eastern and Western China, and linguistic troubles.

+ Remoteness: Xinjiang (the province most of these cities are in) literally means “new border”, and it’s in some ways a very fitting name: it’s the far, far, far west border of the modern PRC.  I classify it both in the ‘China’ and in the ‘Central Asia’ categories – it’s massively far away from the mainland.  It’s as far from Beijing as London is from Venice, or as far as Maine is from Miami, or DC to Houston.  It’s a huge, massive amount of space, and it takes a fittingly massive amount of time if you’re not willing to drop a couple thou on a plane ticket.

+ Economics: China divides itself economically into “East part” “Middle part” and “West part”.  The thing you should know is: due to centuries of shipping, trade, dynastic et cetera, wars, and the availability of arable land, the East Part is the most economically viable.  Second is Middle part.  The west of China is considered 落后: lagging behind, retro, not up-to-date.  There’s a wide disparity between West and East even within China, and even some basic things like infrastructure and non-agricultural development are rather lacking.

+ Tensions: This is one thing I’m going to be a little quiet on, since it’s so inherently political.  There are political tensions between China’s east and China’s west, and they’re a mix of economic, political, cultural, and other.  Due to the fact that I’m living in China right now, I’m not going to go into any great detail about these – You-the-Reader can use the Googly if you’re curious – but I’ll just give them a nod, say they’re there, and mention that yes, they played a part in why a single female traveler wouldn’t want to wander around somewhere.

+ Linguistics: This one’s a factor all over China, but especially in far-remote areas that aren’t north or east.  China’s a huge country, full of people who speak regional dialects.  Some of these dialects are true dialects (like the differences between Britland and US of A English), but some of them are straight-up languages, completely discrete from each other and from Mandarin.  The Uighur language is one of these – it’s totally unlike any Sinitic language, and is in fact most closely related to Turkic languages (apparently it’s about 30% mutually intelligible?  I’mma check up on that and get back to you guys).  It is, in other words, so completely different from Mandarin that for me, it wouldn’t matter how good my Mandarin was, it’d do me no good out there.

So: TL;DR: I didn’t want, as a single female traveler, to go out to the far end of China with only touristic knowledge of the area and no knowledge of the language, and then fumble confusedly around a place I didn’t know.  Far better, safer, and more exciting to go with a group, who can tell you the history and culture of what you’re seeing, and who can help you learn.

□ “I didn’t know the Silk Road still existed…”

---- It sort of does.  The cities – some of them do.  The highways – those are paved-over versions of a lot of the old routes.  The people still live in some of the same ways, off most of the same crops/animals, with some of the same technologies (more on the irrigation system later!).  Sure there’s differences, but it’s still there.

□ “I wouldn’t actually check any of these boxes.”

---- No?  Well, that’s okay – feel free to put any thoughts you might have in my comments section – if I get questions I’ll endeavour to answer them, as it’ll up my NaNo wordcount whee :D

□ “Why are you still offering checkbox options?”

---- Because it’s funny.

□ “Stoppit and get to posting already ugh.”

---- Okay, hold your horses, hon.  It’ll happen.

□ Other: ___________________

---- Again, if you wanna say something or would answer something that’s not on my Lovely Little Bait-And-Switch Checkbox List, feel free to comment!  Next post I’ll be getting into the trip itself, so if you’ve got any questions, let me know now and I’ll endeavour to answer them!

See you next post!

In Which The Ekscursionist Flies Over The Ice

Hello, people and bugs! I keep making these aborted attempts to return to this bloog, and they keep, well, being aborted, like this:

 What I blame: my schedule. This last semester was like a multi-car-pileup on my brain. It was like the energizer bunny of semesters: the work just kept going and going and going. The homework was interminable. This is mostly because I had four Academic Writing classes, composed of 104 students all told, who kept giving me things. Every class! They just gave me more things! And then my Listening and Speaking students (72 of them) also gave me things! There was no relief! The flood of things never stopped!

 Until the second week of December, when I gave final exams, wrapped up my classes, and waved a warm goodbye in my students' direction. All 176 of them. And then I just graded the things I already had (all 9000 of them) and returned them/turned them in to the department, inputted my grades, and went my merry way on home.

 So right now The Ekscursionist is at home. How, then, could she call herself the Ekscursionist? Ah, gentle reader, that's because she intends to write about advnetures she had, as well as about adventures she will have. So: this bloog has been transformed into a sort of retrospective as well as a current-adventure blog. Also, I don't intend to stop having adventures anytime soon, so there's that.

 ONWARDS

 ~:~

 My return from China begna precisely three weeks ago. (I know, I know, I left off on a Silk Road post, but I wrote that post a while ago, and right now I want to tell you about my return home.) Anyway, that last week was a pile of stress. On the 18th of December I ran from bank to bank to bank, getting an online version of my account set up. The rest of the day was last-minute packing, then last-minute seeing, then I went. I took the Foreign-Office-sent taxi with two of my chorus friends to the airport, and at the airport we checked my bags in and talked for a while til I get antsy and left. Security with my bag that weighed some ridiculous number of pounds, and then sitting in the waiting room for 20 minutes, and then sitting on the plane, and then sitting on the BCIA shuttle, and then stumbling up the lane to my hostel.

 I always stay at Ming Courtyard when I go to Beijing: it's a quiet little place right off Beixinqiao, this little nook of quiet being the gobble and bustle of Ghost Street, Beijing's premier Food Street. Most of the staff I'm on friendly terms with, but a new girl this time - friendl, but as yet unknown; she put me in a new room. I'd opted for a women-only-four-beds place, and, it being off season I was the only one in the room: a nice way to get privacy without going the extra hundred kuai. The other 4women room is a cave, but this one had a long, wide window set in the opposite wall, and so when I slept it wasn't like being in a tomb, but like the world was still going on out there.

 Drop bags. Lukewarm shower. Buy a drink at the corner store. Stumble back. Bedtime.

 I slept from ~1AM to ~10.45AM.

 I woke the next morning rested for the first time in a week. Did some errands, then went and lunched with my Filipina Beijing friend in 日坛, the Temple of the Sun. Every Beijing tourist knows the Temple of Heaven, with its main sacrificial hall ubiquitously printed on bus passes and tour sites alike; what The Mass Public is less familiar with are the Temples of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. The Temple of Earth is off in Andingmen, a lovely little hutong (traditional Beijing housing; four-walled courtyards in gridlike, mazey patterns) area; the Temple of the Moon is in Fuchengmen, off west of the second ring road. Ritan, the Temple of the Sun, is a place just outside Jianguomen, a line-change on the subway and a crossroads of highways above. The area's thick with embassies, and consequently with barbed wire and young, nervous, good-looking armed guards who all watch you very closely as you pass.

 Pass on by all of them, though, and you're headed into a small but serene little park, closed off from the streets around it. The Temple of the Sun isn't just one single temple - it's a park, which in China means a planned garden with many parts to it. There's a long, wide avenue rowed with aspens and leading up to a carven wall. There's a pair of asymmetric, curved ponds, with bridges and gazebos. There's a tiny few rolling hills with paths crossing them all over, and planted with cherry trees for the Spring and roses for the summer. Toward the back of Ritan Park is a long little restaurant called Xiao Wang's. It gives the impression of having been several unrelated buildings once that had gotten built into each other, but is nice for all that. Large, pleasant, airy rooms, and a traditional atmosphere. My friend was waiting for me upstairs, and we had a good variety of standard Beijing foods: shrimps-with-pineapple, fried tofu in sweet-and-sour sauce, green beans and pork. My favorite was the mutton ribs cooked in cumin and hot pepper. What can I say? I've acclimated to Dongbei more than I realize :)

 We wandered a bit and talked a bit, and my friend invited me to a dinner, and, as she still had work, we parted ways. I hopped onto the subway and zoomed over to Nanluoguxiang, another Beijing Favorite of mine - a long street full of traditional shops and eats. No time for window shopping now, though: I was an Ekscursionist on a Mission! It was called Mission: Umbrella, mostly because it involved zooming through NLGX to the traditional umbrella shop down at the far end.

 

 若水堂 (Ruoshuitang) is a traditional Chinese umbrella shop. You'll know it when you smell it - it's a thin, small alcove hidden between larger shops, but the smell of tung oil pervades the neighborhood. Inside, bright lights illumine painted umbrellas from behind. There's the traditional umbrellas, solid brown, blue, red, or purple ones, that can withstand a downpour; there's the pretty-girl brellas, painted with cherry-flowers or peony or lotus or villages and mountains, that act as parasols and little else; there's the childrens' umbrellas, little cloth-covered things sewn with sequins.

 

 I've wanted one of these for years. I went for a mid-size rain-withstanding umbrella of deep purple. It was so thick with tung oil that it thrummed when you flicked it with your finger, and when the saleswoman demonstrated its hydrophobic qualities, she did it by taking a spray bottle and kssshing it right against the paper. The water rolled off like - well, I'll spare you the anatidae, but suffice it to say: I now had an umbrella.

 I also had nowhere to pack it.

 My bags, filled with the detritusof three years' life, were overstuffed. I took a bus back to Beixinqiao and discovered, to my delight, that the Post office shut at 6!

 It was 5.30.

 So: a ZOOM down the hutong backstreets, half-lit grey mazey corridors that, did I not know this area, I would've been irretrieveably lost in. Grab up my lighten-the-load bag from my hostel (extra stuff I'd removed that morning), and ZOOM back, veering aroudn cars, trucks, car washes, tricycles, bicycles, cycles, chidlren, dogs, and all manner of household items - and get to the post office with ten minutes to spare.

 I posted my umbrella and lighten-the-load bag, and Metro'd on over to Sanlitun. Sanlitun and that nights' concert I should save for a whole nother adventure. In fact, so ought I to do with the next day, my wander through 798 Art District, because that's a whole adventure unto itself. But I'll sum up that I returned and erranded and public-transportation'd my way to the airport on time for my 6.30PM plane back to the US of A on the 20th.

 There were so many white faces. So many! It was weird to see and listen to: a whole different type of small talk. I sat myself down in my window seat and enjoyed the journey, particularly after dinner, by which time the lights had gone off and it was dark inside and out. We were, by then, flying over the Kamchatka peninsula - always one of my favorite parts of the US-China flight. This night was particularly excellent, because, aside of being 30k feet overtop the cold land - there was a moon out.

 It was a gibbous moon, and there was almost no cloud. I first started watching out when I saw, below us - but not so far as it could've been - mountains like sand dunes. This place hadn't unfrozen since - well, hell, for all I knew it didn't unfreeze even in the summer, by the look of those mountains. They were like drifts of sand, only white, with a bluegrey cast from the night. They were sharp and long and along the edge of them was the edge of the land. We were flying right along the coastline most of the way, and you could see how the mountains' smooth white turned into the ivory, striated white of the plains, and then rolling back up again into cliffs, and all along them, the edge where they ran into the coast. It was scalloped like lightning, crusted with rime. You could see it in blue and white lines of broken and clumped and close-floating ice, all drifted up against the edge of the earth, with some openings of black and flowing sea between them.

 The sea showed more often as we flew further north, and further east. Mountains again, on the land-side, and over above them a haze of diamond dust - high-altitude ice crystals falling slow and flat - that reflected the moon hazy below as well as blinding bright above. Then the mountains stopped and there was the dark sea again, this time breaking off the ice into shoals and then large reaches of black water with a little sheen of moon over it. There was one place where I could see, below us, if I concentrated, darker patches -- land? islands? an archipeligo that hadn't been iced? -- but when the moon's reflection rode over them, I saw in their place, giant waves. They must have been monstrously huge, because I saw them moving, tiny and ribboned, even from 30,000 feet - and between then, the normal sea waves were like little lines acrosst the surface of the planet. You couldn't see horizons - everything went to dark mist along the edges - but you could pick out the stars beautifully. I saw Orion rise - first low and large on the horizon, early in the journey, then creeping up and Taurus after it, and the Pleiades, and meanwhile the moon, brighter than you could ever see it from the surface.

 Past the huge waves, we continued over land, long and snowy, broken by lakes ice-edged and black. Then plains again, with rivers, whiter than the scruffy white around them, flowing down to the water. Once, on one of these, I saw one yellow light. Only one. Monitoring station? Border? Fishing? How did they have power? How many people - five? Two? One? I watched that one til it fell behind us, and then watched for more. There were few others - one, one ,and then nothing for a long time. I got so excited when I saw two, within - I guess it must've been miles of each other. One was toward the end of one of those twisting, giant rivers of ice. One was somewhere in the haze above the black water, a couple lights instead of one. Once, later, I saw a whole row of lights - five? six? twenty people? fifty? it was out on the black water, and then we returned to white land again, and stay for a long time.

 The east came to us after 8 hours in the dark. I'd forgotten that, so far north, even late afternoon is in the dark. We flew into the lightening sky for an hour, and after a time my camera grew confident enough in its abilities to deliver non-fuzzy pictures I could take photos of the blue and white and windblown land. Here there was all snow and no sea, and the lakes were frozen over, and the rivers were so old that they had oxbows on their oxbows and curves overlaying their curves, all those extra tiny, unfinished flows and round little loops looping back in; they looked like if I left my braids in for three days.

 The stewardesses made us close the windows, then, because the sun was finally up, and this far north it shone directly in our starboard windows from two fingers above the horizon, brighter than you'd ever conceive of below. But it almost didn't matter anyway - three hours later the sun was setting behind the plane wing, and the darkness we'd just flown out of came back over us from in front. By now, though, there were orange splotches below us, spread out and patched across the land. It faded into cloud, and then there was greydark cloud for a very long time. Only at the end of the flight could we see again - lowering over the capital, flying over the Kennedy Center and the Potomac, and the spread-out suburbs of Reston and McLean, and then finally coming down into Dulles airport.