As expected, sleep was elusive, and oft broken. At some point, needing to take my prostate for a walk, I stumbled around the carriages, finding all the toilets locked. I awoke a porter to open one, then returned to my bunk, the light spilling around the closed curtains as the train pulled into Korla, a onetime great Silk Road city that the guide books tell me has lost all its former charm. More than Genghis Khan, or Tamerlaine, or any of the other invading forces, the greatest destroyer of the old ways (world-wide) was the 20th Century, and its myth of progress.
We are again given the morning to sleep. A player piano echoes noisily through the marble lobby of the hotel. It is far too early for this. When we depart later, the heat is up. The ride out of Kuqa is through a landscape that could be Arizona, high spiky mountains that abruptly thrust themselves upward, as if trying to escape the dry earth. The intricate patterns of their spires could only have been carved by water, though in an area devoid of rain, this would have been formed by ocean currents when this entire region had been underwater.
Sadly we are given a little too much time to admire them, as we three times sit a long while at police checkpoints. This is the road to Bai, a region closed to foreigners, and security is tight. It is a pleasure then to eventually walk beneath the shade of poplars to the ruins of Kizil Grottoes, past the statue of the old Buddhist translator Kumarajiva, a bright black mass against the dull brown of the cliffs behind. The site is far more run down than Magao, and the staircases steeper, as they run up and down the rock face like a faded Escher print. We are led through a number of caves (Caves 34, 32, 27, 8, 10, 17 to be exact) by a young woman who is obviously disinterested in her job. She'll immediately turn to her phone every time our own guide translates her explanations. The frescos in Magao had been grander, but these shine with much more color, are more vivid. It is little wonder the area had been so badly vivisected by the German Albert von Le Coq and the American Langston Warner. Le Coq got in there first, and sadly a lot of what he carted away was destroyed by the Allied bombing of Berlin four decades later. This of course provides fuel for the argument that the artifacts shouldn't have been removed in the first place. But another of the caves had served in the early 20th century as the hermitage for a Chinese man who initially found inspiration in the European explorers who studied the place, then later shifted to a more patriotic point of view. He left behind a treatise on the wall of one of the cave, railing at what he perceived as theft and plunder. Yet how did he fail to see that in covering an entire wall with his own scribblings, that he too was contributing to the damage?
What should have been a three or four-hour excursion became eight due to all the checkpoints. It is approaching 8 pm, and I decide not to go to dinner. I'm beginning to dread them, for they start far too late, and the ordering process never fails to take 45 minutes, as everyone's preferences are given far too much attention. Granted the food tends to appear quickly, but it is never that good, and the volume far too much. While traveling rough, I tend to skip most evening meals, but on this trip I hadn't been able to opt out until now, mainly because the days go late and we eat before returning to the hotel.
And partly, I want some time to myself. I am enjoying the group, for Wild Frontiers clients tend to be well traveled and well read, but I am tired of being around people all the time. LYL decides to join me, which of course is fine. We drop into a supermarket across from the hotel, careful to dodge the scooters that negotiate intersections by using the pedestrian crosswalks. Not far off, I spy a construction worker with a T-shirt written with, "It's not OK." Hidden political message? As I ponder this, I exchange a smile with an old Uighur gentleman, who bounces his grandchild in the front seat of a car.
The supermarket is the basement of a larger department store, and while my wife buys tea, I fiddle with musical instruments next door. We buy a few simple things for dinner, but fail at our attempts at finding ice. Earlier in the day I was given a can of beer by our guide, and I want to chill it. Being told they don't sell ice (and why would they?), we ask if we can take a scoop or two from the racks that ice fish. As is always the case in China, more and more people get involved in the discussion, and after a great waste of time, we are inevitably told no. In the end, I raid the ice bucket at the buffet back at the hotel.
We eat and relax in our room, as the sky darkens outside. A sand storm is blowing in, but the people on the streets many stories below don't see it at first. When it finally hits, the streets clear quickly. I open the window a smidgen, and a gust of sand blows in my face. What I don't know at the time is that the storm and the sand will remain in the air for the
next six days.
It is of course there the following morning, as we wander the ruins of Subashi, a name that sounds Japanese to me. We trace a simple loop, around a half dozen tall crumbling walls. It would be more impressive if we hadn't see the far more expansive Jiaohe a couple of days before. Yet another section of the city beckons, a crop of low ruins silhouetted against the low hills across the river, the haze enveloping them contributing to the mysterious allure.
Later, we take a quick walk along Rasta street at the center of town. (Not a dreadlock in sight.) We are unable to visit the mosque, of course, but it is a pleasant walk down the main road. The shops and homes have colorful and ornate wooden doors, and the area is not what I'd call lively, but functional. People go about their daily business. This is nice to see, for up until now we've occupied ourselves mainly with monuments. Mid-walk, the police arrive for the predictable passport check. Our cops are friendly, yet at least four police vehicles roll slowly past before they are through.
There is a small market at the far end of the street, and I set off alone to find a place to pee. I walk up a grubby alley to an even grubbier courtyard, following a sign for the toilets. The men's is closed, and I consider the women's for awhile, worried about what kind of cultural issues might arise if I'm caught in there. A woman sweeps nearby, and I ask multiple times in my halting Mandarin if I can use it. She ignores me every time, then finally locks the door, dismissing me with a curt 'Mei yo!" as she walks away from me. Such a terrible attitude, but one somewhat understandable. Xinjiang is not a very relaxed place.
The rest of the trip never return to the heights it reached earlier on. What followed was a two day drive through the dust. The sand storm had narrowed the visibility to that of a pinhole camera, and I never got to see the Tianshan mountains rising dramatically to the west. But this time in the desert allowed me a new appreciation for it. Though I'd spent many years in New Mexico, I never really noticed how such a harsh environment could be purposely acculturated, how man is able to shift the landscape to meet his needs.
Likewise, I also began to pay better attention to the sand itself. I hadn't realized the vast number of colors that sand can take. But it was the shapes that truly captured me. Looking at them for hours and hours, one began to see the surface of the sea. Waves and dunes took the same form, shared the same principles. It brought to mind an almost Thich Nhat Hanh-type query: in looking at dunes, does one see the shape of wind, or of the earth? And at waves, the shape of wind or water?
The high security meant too that activities were limited, which added to the claustrophobia. Not only was there nothing we'd be allowed to visit, but we couldn't even leave the hotel apparently. You get what you pay for I suppose. We'd wanted to travel the Silk Road, and we were, getting warts and all. Still, things were a lot easier going for us than they had been for most of the old route's history.
The highlight of the final few days was the camel ride outside Makit. Here too we faced a compromise, for we'd originally been told that we'd ride them out to a campsite for an overnight in the desert, but that had been rescinded earlier in the tour. (It made more sense once we drove out there, passing a large reeducation camp a few miles away.) We disembarked our vehicle to a scene right out of Mad Max, of souped up dune buggies parked at all angles, and a variety of characters sitting about with a vaguely threatening look. And in the midst of it all were a quartet of traditionally dressed old-timers, oblivious to all but the ancient tunes that they played.
Not far off were a pair of umbrellas made of thatch and tree trunks, which reminded me of payottes. But lazing beneath them were not topless French sunbathers but our Bactrian camels, whose harnesses and saddles made them looked partially clothed, as if wearing the little vests of Mongolian wrestlers.
It was pleasant to ride in the fading heat, the breeze and the jingle of little bells the only sound. A pair of young camels ran alongside, darting beneath the harnesses and trying to get to a female who must have been their mother. As they ran their flaccid humps flopped back and forth like the happy tails of puppies. It took some time to find a comfortable way to sit, but eventually the body adjusted to the motion, from which it was easy to see why they are called ships of the desert. I rode with my feet kicked up on either side of my camel's neck, but when they climbed or descended a dune, one had to hold on for dear life.
A number of our team had opted instead to ride out in dune buggies, as did the musicians, who then set up to play us a few of the old songs. We sat on carpets before them, drinking warm beer that I was both used to, and sick of, by now. One musician came out to dance, trying to entice others to join him. I too took my turn, the only male to do so, but then again, this was a culture very divisive along gender lines. I tried to follow the best I could, dancing in what could only be described as disco dervish. But the frenetic motions could have been because of the biting sand fleas.
The night finished up with a farewell dinner of sorts, since LYL and I were setting off alone the next day. I'd prepared a limerick for the group, inspired by the town in which we'd pass this final night, and by the police who seemed so worn down by the place that they couldn't be bothered to stop us for security checks:
There once was a town known as Makit,
Whose charm was that of a shit bucket.
While most cops are great sports,
At checking passports,
The ones here appear to say fuck it.
On the turntable: Krishna Das, "Pilgrim Heart"
No comments:
Post a Comment