Travels with Jiao Yun

I had hoped for more: the Silk Road was still a dusty dirt road making its way through the southern edge of the Taklimakan Desert where we joined it. "What the hell is this?" I asked out loud. Martin sighed. Not that either of us was interested in cycling much further: the plan was to take a bus, I to Hotan and Martin to Urumqi, by whichever route was most convenient (we suspected this involved a ride first to Urumqi). But it didn't say much for the easy ride I had been looking forward to when I did get back on my bike after a few days' rest in Hotan.

We were at the standard truck stop anywhere in rural China: dust, rusting pieces of truck, tires stacked up against derelict mud brick buildings, domestic animals of various stripes nosing through scraps of food and each other's dung. Not exactly the red carpet. A concrete block building was straight in front of us, and then several more buildings with cooking fires smoking to our right. We wandered slowly over to the cluster of buildings.

A guy in a baseball cap called us over: "Xiuxie, xiuxie" - "Take a break, take a break". I approached the group of men he was sitting with, mostly Uighurs, all underneath an overhand protruding from the clay block structure. There was a wooden platform and a few benches arrayed next to a table, and we took a seat on the platform. We were given tea straight away, and Martin asked if there was soda available. Our host called over an older Uyghur woman and asked about soda: she had some sort of Coke analog. So we sat and drank while I talked with the Chinese. He was an oddity, sporting a full beard and speaking Uyghur more or less fluently. He asked where we had come from. "Tibet? Oh, so from Yecheng to Hotan to here?"

"No, no, from Ali across the Kunlun Shan to Qarasay, then here."

He wasn't familiar with Qarasay (no surprise there), so he asked an old local Uyghur. The bearded old man with his dopi raised his eyebrows and pointed south out into the desert, saying it was about 100km from here. I pulled out a map, everyone gathered around, and I traced our route for them. There was a lot of quick talk; I mentioned we had walked most of it, since there wasn't really a road. Thumbs up. I smiled, then glanced at Martin, who wasn't looking so great. "He's sick" I jerked a thumb over at him.

"With what?" several voices asked.

"Nausea, diarrhea, fever."

A call went out for medicine, and soon several varieties were produced, with several suggestions on how to take it. The only thing that was consistent was not to take it on an empty stomach. I asked for naan. Martin was somewhat reluctant to take something he didn't know and which noone else seemed to be sure about either. I picked up one package and saw that it was amoxycillin. "Well, this one is an antibiotic." I asked how he should take it. More discussion, then "Four pills, not on an empty stomach. Wait eight hours, repeat." I had no idea what the dosage of each pill was. They were insistent. In the end, Martin took the pills. They hustled him inside their room, lit a fire in the stove, and put him in a bed with a blanket. So much bustle it seemed at first counterproductive, but things calmed down, and it was obvious they were being extremely friendly.

I asked the first guy his name. "Jiao Yun, from Hotan." It turned out he was a driver, and had occasional gigs driving foreigners around in Xinjiang and into western Tibet, including a few expeditions. He showed me a few business cards, including a couple from the US. I asked what he was doing in this place: I assumed he was passing through. He was trying to collect some money, and had been there for 6 days. I asked if it was going to work out for him. "Probably not...I'll leave tomorrow either way." I said I was heading for Hotan; he said he'd help us along. "How about the other guy?"

"He's heading home to Denmark, first via Urumqi."

"OK. He should come with us to Minfeng, then get the bus to Urumqi."

I asked if I might be able to eat dinner (Martin was not interested in eating anything, and was actually dozing at this moment). "You will eat with us," he smiled, "just wait a while."

Several others came in and out, including two brothers working on the road construction crews in the area. I asked what the plan was for the road, officially National Road 315. They said it would be paved by the middle of next year all the way to Qiemo. Too bad, I thought, I'm 6 months early.

These guys went out and left us alone. We talked in the dimly lit room as the sun went down, Martin shivering under his covers and I huddled next to the stove, even though it was much warmer here than in Tibet. Jiao Yun came back in and turned on a light, and went out again. I wrote in my journal for a while, and then he showed up with a melon. "My friend gave me this for free - it's yours." He produced a knife and insisted we dig in. I cut the melon and Martin ate more than half, being very dehydrated from the day's exertions and his illness. The melon was delicious: something fresh and juicy - how long had it been? Nothing like it in Tibet, except apples (even these I regarded as a major feat, but they were actually fairly readily available, even in the west). Jiao Yun brought in another: "My good friend" he laughed. Three others came back in, and we all sat around slurping up melon. The door was pushed open and a Uyhgur said dinner was ready. We all filed out: they marched an unwilling Martin out into the darkness. "But I can't eat" he repeated plaintively. "Tell them that." I did, but they wouldn't have any of it. "He needs food!" they said emphatically. It has usually been my approach to sit out illness, eating lightly. It has been my experience that the Chinese take the opposite approach: feed the sickness, eat as much as you can.

Dinner was in a building about 50m away; two rooms, one for cooking, one for eating. A few women worked over the food, the servers were a young boy and a young girl. The dining room had a few Uyghurs in it. The walls were covered with large posters: one of Al-Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca during the Hajj, the others of white-bread American kids smiling and drawing in their coloring books. Fur-hatted Uyghur elders lounged underneath the latter sipping tea. A vase of fake roses sat in the center of the table. When the food arrived, it came one plate at a time. Here was where the Chinese dinner ritual began: someone tries to give the food to his friend, his friend pushes the food back, voices are raised, I start laughing. It is quite a pageant, nearly every time. They stopped and looked at me, smiling. "It's the Chinese way" and then one outmaneuvered the other and the plate ended up in front of Jiao Yun. He grunted, then turned to us, demanding that we start eating. Martin muttered under his breath he couldn't eat any of the noodles. I dug in. We all slurped for 10 minutes, then everyone's plate was empty except for Martin's, which had barely been touched. Melons came out, more pageantry, and then we were done. "Let's go. Don't worry about it, Martin," Jiao Yun said.

The older brother went out drinking with his work friends and stumbled in at about 2am, but we were asleep, and though everyone else got up and ate more melon, I pretended to sleep through the whole thing.

The next morning, we got up, they asked how Martin was feeling ("Much better"), and then we were walked over to the concrete block shack we had seen first as we reached the Silk Road. An old Uyghur was chopping wood in his underwear just outside. We were shown in, and his wife was shuffling around inside in her longjohns. This was all a bit weird. An enormous amount of food was piled up on a table: a stack of naan, a large tomato-cucumber salad, more melon, roasted mutton, chicken soup, fried potatoes. Nothing too light for breakfast for these folks. Then there was the alcohol, which I passed on (I noticed that Jiao Yun also waved it off: he also didn't smoke, another rarity among Chinese men). Folks started toasting each other ("Ganbei!"), the old Uyghur man included. Martin had a bit: they said it was good to clean out the bacteria (I thought back to the Russian woman Olga in Tibet who had called vodka an "antiseptic"). Food was devoured at a very rapid pace, and then we were out again. I tried to pay for something: they wouldn't hear of it. "We're all good friends!" they said.

Martin and I packed, and an hour later we were squatting in the dust waiting for a bus coming from Andi He, a few km farther into the desert, heading for Minfeng, the transit point for both of our journeys. Jiao Yun accompanied us. The bus showed up, a rattling mid-sized thing looking pretty beat up, and we tossed the bikes up on the roof, alongside a shipment of melons in cardboard boxes labeled "Andi He Melon: A Special Product of Xinjiang, China" (Is Andi He a hub of international trade?). The bus was crowded but there were exactly enough seats. We crawled over the remainder of the melon shipment, which was stacked waist high in the aisle, and took the rear seats. The driver mashed the transmission into gear and off we went.

Progress was miserably slow for the first part. Jiao Yun had said it was 5 hours to Minfeng, and 137km: that's not much more than 25km per hour. I thought this was a low-ball figure, but in the end it took 5 1/2 hours to make the trip. We swished across the sand, through ditches, and got the obligatory flat about halfway through. No big deal, everyone was expecting this. We filed out, the driver and his assistant jacked up the bus, swapped out tires, and within 15 minutes we were back on the road. While we waited slices of melon were cut up for everyone. The scenery was pure desert, some of it dried out weeds clinging to sandy soil, some of it the occasional forest of dry trees throwing roots deep down to some buried water table, and some of it Saharan-style dunes, rippled by wind. We approached Minfeng, a river watered a valley, and the road became paved.

Minfeng itself looked particularly dismal, but this was only the outskirts. Collapsing dusty buildings, piles of trash, donkey carts coming perilously close to being road pizza. The road was being improved - widened - at the expense of the old houses. Oil slicks merged with slimy water channels from which grape vines rose up. I began to despair, but the center of town was much better, or at least cleaner. The architecture was socialist realist: concrete blocks with small nods to central asian styles in the form of arched windows or a stylized minaret poking from above the iron gate. We unloaded our things and then Jiao Yun went to ask about buses to Urumqi and Hotan. He came back saying both should be leaving tonight, first the Urumqi bus (which was a sleeper originating in Hotan), and then its opposite number returning to Hotan.

We went for a dinner, which was laghman down the street. Jiao Yun met several people he knew in the 200m from the bus station to the restaurant. I paid for dinner, finally. Martin had an appetite, saying he could eat twice as much. I said that was good. We returned to the bus station, I gave Martin whatever money I could (I just needed enough to get to Hotan), and sometime after dark, the bus arrived. Jiao Yun and I put him on, he got settled, we wished each other good luck and remarked that it had been a hell of a trip, and then he was gone into the night.

Jiao Yun went to look around for another bus, or perhaps a trucker that could give us a ride: I sat next to a stall with an incandescent light bulb dangling above it, manned by a small boy of about 9. A Chinese taxi driver, drunk, came up to me, sat down and put his arm around my shoulder. "Wouldn't you like to go somewhere warm? How about my place?" I gathered this was some sort of come-on. I just played stupid, smiling and repeating "I don't understand" to everything he said, and after 5 minutes he gave up. I moved inside the stall the kid was working, which had a wood-fired stove. He was watching another movie about the evil Japanese (the Chinese movie market is awash in titles famously critical of the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s) and their machinations on the Korean penninsula during the 1930s on an ancient black and white TV. The movie was dubbed into Turkish, and there were Mandarin and English subtitles. Jiao Yun came back on a motor scooter, pushed open the door to the stall and said, "Come on, no bus, but we'll stay at my friend's hotel, no charge." I got on my bike and followed him for about 3 minutes to a small hotel with a courtyard. He parked the bike, and we went inside into a tile-floored room with a desk, a computer, and a large TV.

His friend was a Chinese migrant from Henan province in the east, running a business here some of the year, and working in a mine the other part of the year. "A mine?" I asked, intrigued. It was the very same one I had seen 5 days before in the Kunlun fault. I asked a few questions about the mine: How long has it been there? (3 years: that checked out with the information we had from the American expedition) How many people work there? (About 30) What is your job? (Bulldozer operator) How much gold do you get out each year? (He shrugged and hazarded a guess: 150 kilos - that made about 1.5 million dollars a year, more than enough to justify operation, and enough to grease some official's hand for the permit to operate the mine). He said it took almost a month to drive the bulldozer from Minfeng to the mine: this I could believe, having seen what he would have to go through, even though the distance was only 300km or so. He was a good guy, bringing us tea, warming some water for us to wash with, and then giving us a heated room around the courtyard. Jiao Yun and I tucked in and both slept soundly until sunrise the next day.

I woke up and went to the outhouse, passing a large billboard in Chinese and English outlining the tourist attractions of Minfeng county. These were primarily natural, but one of the attractions was "the many unsophisticated ethnical villages in the oasis or in the sanddy (sic) desert". I supposed that Qarasay qualified as one of these.

We went to the bus station and milled around for a while. We ended up taking a minivan, although the first couldn't accommodate my bicycle. While awaiting the second, two backpackers - a Brit and a Japanese - wandered over, looking for a bus to Qiemo to the east. The Brit was effusive, the Japanese silent. It was here, on November 15, I learned that George Bush was still the president of the US, 12 days after probably almost everyone else in the world. He shrugged his shoulders and said "Well, we get another four years of Tony, so we're not much better off". He had been teaching English in South Korea for two years ("Two years too long, mate") and was now heading back to the UK overland, although this tack to the east and then to the Indian Subcontinent seemed a bit of a backtrack. We chatted amicably about work, corruption in asian countries vs our own (not much difference, just on a grander scale back home), and about the futility of keeping a schedule while travelling here (he had been in Minfeng for a day and a half, hoping for a bus to Qiemo and finding none). I inquired about buses to Qiemo that day: "Should be one at about 12:30". I told him this, and his sensible response was "I'll believe that when I see it..."

The minivan ride was relatively fast, covering the 300km to Hotan in less time than the 137km from Andi He to Minfeng had taken. We whizzed past markets that spilled out onto the road, although our driver was undeterred by this and continued to speed through, just leaning on the horn. I thought back to the very graphic and gruesome poster hanging by the exit of the bus station exhorting the drivers to use caution: the scenes (real photos) were of the aftermath of a truck and bus colliding, with a police inspector surveying a landscape littered with bodies from the bus and a driver's bloodsplattered and half severed head coming out of the shattered windshield of the truck. I also noticed the cirular "Allah ho Akbar" pendant hanging from the rear view mirror, and tried to be reassured by it. I watched the cyclists on the side of the road and thought that what they were doing seemed dangerous, and then thought that was what I looked like, more or less. A different perspective can change your outlook a bit.

We pulled into Hotan, honking for bicycles and donkeys to get out of the way, and pulled into the bus station. Jiao Yun helped me unload my bike, and tossed it straight into a taxi. We wove through the mess of carts and people at the bazaar, then headed down "Taibei Lu" (this street name in mainland China always gets a chuckle out of me), and pulled up at his friend's guesthouse. We pulled out the stuff, put my bike together, had a look, and I said "Sure, sure" - the place had a shower and a bed, and that was enough. I had made it, finally, to Hotan.