It's somewhat daunting to try to sum up that much time and that many new experiances in a single post, so I don't think I'll try. But here's the short version:
First I went to the Northwest to Gansu province which has significant groups of both the Hui (Muslim) and Zang (Tibetan) minorities. After Lanzhou (the worst city I have ever been to), I went to the Tibetan region called Gannan. I visited Xiahe, home of the most important Lamist temple outside of Tibet, Langmusi, another beautiful Tibetan town, and a bunch of dinky dirty little cities in between. This trip was educational, but it was not much fun, largely because my new boots gave me ankle problems and it is almost imposible for me to find new shoes in China (most stores only go up to a 43 which is about a 10 American, I wear a 46 or 47 [12 1/2 or 13 American]).
Ultimately my inability to climb on a bad ankle or to find new shoes to help solve the problem necessitated a trip to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, which was my eventual destination anyway. So I took a 12-hour bus ride to Chengdu. This ride was incredibly unpleasant and yet stunningly beautiful at the same time. I had made the tactical error of going drinking with two Korean brothers I met in Ru'ergai the day before. I wan't hungover, but alcohol and tea are both diuretics, so I spent the first four hours on the bus in pain, repeatedly trying to get the driver to stop for 2 minutes so I could pee (and, for the first four hours, failing). The remainder of the trip, I was unable to fall asleep (like the rest of the bus) and suffered through the endless cigarettes of the two men behind me (who refused to let me open a window). But the scenery was amazing. We traveled from the dry, rounded mountains of Northern Sichuan and Southern Gansu into increasingly craggy ones. The flora changed from wasteland scrub and grasses to evergreen forests, deciduous forests and eventually vegetable farms and bamboo forests. We passed through three decidedly different ecosystems in the course of one bus ride.
Chengdu was everything I hoped it would be, but somehow very different. It is a very modern city, but it seems to have a real middle class (which cannot nessisarily be said of Zhengzhou). The weather was the way I like it (a little warmer but not terribly sunny). I ended up meeting a bunch of really cool people, both foreigners and the Chinese staff of the hostel, and so I stayed in Chengdu for a little more than two weeks doing very little. I told myself that after my travails in Gansu, I really needed some time to drink coffee, buy shoes, play ping-pong and generally waste my time. I did see Pandas and a few temples and the History Museum at Sichuan University (where I was offered a job), but mostly I just bummed around, talked about philosophy and economics and culture and all the things I missed talking about and rested my ankle.
I finally went to Yunnan province in an attempt to go down toward the border with Vietnam (and to see some more minorities). This trip ended rather quickly as I got tired of being followed around by annoying Chinese guys who had never interacted with a foreigner before. I'll talk to anyone for five minutes, but somehow in Yunnan there was a real rash of kinda boring people trying to impress themselves upon my activities. So I left.
The full list of cities and towns that I visited (in order):
Gansu: Lanzhou, Linxia, Xiahe, Hezuo, Langmusi
Sichuan: Ru'ergai, Chengdu
Yunnan: Kunming, Yuanjiang, Honghe, Kunming
Other things that happened that didn't make the narrative:
- 5 days without seeing any other foreigners
- Dinner with a Korean woman conducted entirely in Chinese (our only common language. This is the way to learn a langauge: we were similarly restricted in Chinese and so neither went off and used a whole string of difficult words, but we had to speak Chinese)
- Climing a mountain to discover what I thought was snow was actually millions of paper prayer tickets
- Staying in a tiny Chinese guesthouse that had never had a foreigner before (in fact it was probably illegal for me to stay there)
- Hiking down a mountain (with a 70 pound pack, on a bad ankle) to try to catch a bus at a highway spur only to have the bus drive by without stopping
- Catching a ride (my first motorcycle ride ever) back up the mountain from a 16 year old Tibetan
- Eating a yak-burger (named the McYak Attack) almost as big as my head made by the Hui version of Lurch
- The taxi from the bus station to my hestel in Chengdu running out of gas on the highway
- Looking for shoes with a young teacher from Shenzhen
- Stopping for lunch where he and I both ate 26 different Sichuan xiaochi (small eats)
- Looking for shoes with my new friends Patrick (from New Jersey) and Sandra (from the Netherlands), ultimately buying shoes, giving Patrick the boots that hurt my ankles (they seem to work fine for him)
- Crashing a dinner for an online community of outdoor sports enthusiasts (with Patrick and his Chinese friend)
- Missing the train to Kunming to sit and have coffee with Patrick and Sandra
- Getting on a random bus and finding the city's main Doaist temple
- Jumping into shop windows (with Patrick) and posing with the manequans
- Looking (unsucessfully) for the silk market (with Ruth and Amy from England), instead spending the afternoon critiquing people's outfits as they walked by
- "Cooking dinner" at the hostel (the hostel staff basically did everything and the big group of foreigners stood around and got in the way)
- Visiting a big temple for the New Year, getting my wallet stolen
- Getting driven around by the police in the process of recovering my wallet (but not my cell phone)
- Chatting with the staff at the hostel
- Loosing repeated games of xiangqi (Chinese Chess)
- Traveling to Kunming and then Yuanjiang to discover that the river on the map was not big enough to take a boat to the Vietnam border (as I had planned to do)
- Eating endless bowls of rice noodles (which just don't fill me up)
- Seeing the "tallest bridge in the world" over the most worthless little river
- Chatting with the staff at the guesthouse in Yuanjiang
- Chatting with the staff at the hostel in Kunming
- Flying back to Zhengzhou so late that I had to climb the wall (in my pack) to get into my appartment
Hopefully I will post some commentary on what I learned soon. Because I learned a lot about culture and minorities and poverty and imperialism by observing things on this trip.
