The road less traveled… and here’s why

Notes on the pickles one finds oneself in when, having completed a semester in Shanghai and having mastered at least eleven Chinese words, one decides to go to Tibet.

So there I was, trying to get out of Tibet.

First, I thought I would fly out, since the only other way is some crazy bus... But my judgement was unusually over-optimistic after my best night of sleep ever in Tibet. Altitude sickness is generally worse at night, resulting in long periods of blackness, breathlessness, and the unexpectedly psychedelic Tibetan design on the ceiling of my rented room doing unexpected things. Did I mention that you can't sleep? So I decide to buy a bus ticket.

Sleeper bus from Lhasa, Tibet to Golmud, in the Qinghai province of China, whose only claim to fame is that it is where you get the bus to Tibet. A sleeper bus, for anyone fortunate enough not to know, is kind of a misnomer to begin with, but I guess the idea is good. You have three rows of beds, two high, in the bus. I was on top, in the middle row, and at the front of the bus. The bed is wide enough for me to lie down on and hang my arms down both sides, not wide enough in plain words. And long enough for me lie flat in if I skipped my head and neck, which is to say, not long enough. What holds you on (since I was in the top bunk) is two little steel bar loops that stick up beside my knees. Which might work if my knees were flat on the bed, which they aren't because I have a head and a neck that take precedence over my knees. So hanging on is a bit like snowboarding blindfolded - all work and no fun.

Anyway, this bus was kind of amusing for a couple hours. I practiced my Chinese a little with the few Mandarin speakers on the bus. Then we stop at a fairly scenic spot for lunch. Lunch over, the bus doesn't start. So they play with it, spraying starter fluid in the engine which is right in front of my ‘bed.’ Crowds of curious and helpful people stand around watching them spray starter fluid (flammable) and smoking cigarettes (great idea!) So the bus smells not only like cigarettes, but like gasoline and starter fluid as well.

The bus still doesn't start, and we are towed by a little overgrown pickup truck and try to kick-start it. Yes really. That doesn't work either, so this guy tows the bus 20 miles or something to the next town where there is a garage. The pit crew tears a carburetor (I think it was a carburetor, but I'm not sure - it was too cold for me to tell) off an old truck sitting beside the road, and installs it in our bus. It still doesn't start. So somebody has to come out from Lhasa with more bus parts, which takes awhile.

In the absence of anything better to do, we all go to sleep in this bus that smells like various unpalatable highly flammable fluids and cigarette smoke. This was January. In Tibet. January in Tibet. I had on three pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, a shirt, a sweatshirt, a fleece, my North Face coat, and my hat, plus a nice big blanket that came with the bus. I was not too cold, except for my feet, which I kept waking up without. The scarf that I was breathing through had ice on it when I woke up and my water bottle was frozen. Eventually the bus was fixed, and at three AM after about twelve hours of no motion, we began to move again.

The worst part about the bus trip was not the altitude, although we were up to almost 17000 feet. It's not as if there was anything to do except lie there, so I could concentrate on maintaining the oxygen level in my brain. The worst part was the smoke. How ironic that in this barren and beautiful part of the world where they probably have some of the best air quality on earth, I was stuck for 36 hours in a bus full of people endlessly smoking cigarettes. When I opened the windows for some fresh air, things didn’t go so well.
"It's too cold!"
"Yes, but can I open it a little when it is smoky in here?"
"No, smoking is good, open windows are bad." (That, by the way, is a direct translation from some Chinese that I knew.)
"Actually, open windows are bad, and smoking is bad too..."
Well, I left it at that, and usually left the windows closed and tried to breathe through something to filter out the chunks of nicotine floating around.

Probably half the road, or at least half our time on the road, was in "construction," which just means there is no road. It would have been amusing in a jeep, but hanging on to my perch while four-wheeling was a bit of a challenge, never mind trying to sleep. Some of the scenery was truly amazing, but most of it was overshadowed by my green face and wire-brushed throat.

After 36 hours of that we get to Golmud. At about midnight I find myself in a motel with a nice flat bed, but no shower. It's Golmud, what did I expect? The next day at the train station, still feeling decidedly green inside and a bit like a burnt piece of popcorn, I buy a hard sleeper ticket to Lanzhou – not a place where I want to be, but where I have to go to get the train to Turpan. After waiting in the station a couple hours, I get on the train and discover why my ticket was even cheaper than usual. It is actually a hard seat ticket, not the hard sleeper ticket I wanted. Yes, I suppose the lady at the ticket counter told me that but she didn't do a very good job of making it clear. I am told I can probably upgrade my ticket after the train leaves Golmud, so against my better judgement, I stay on the train. After waiting by the conductor’s office for an hour or two, I give up and slither back to my hard seat.

Chinese trains are always interesting. There was one guy who, at random intervals, would shout "HELLO" in my direction, apparently just to make sure his one word of English worked. At first I reply ‘Hello’ then, 'hi, wa’s up’ and ‘hows it hangin’ etc etc. Eventually I respond by saying something like, “In 15 years half of China will be dying of lung cancer while jabbering incessantly on cell phones and still won’t be able to vote, and you want me to keep parroting ‘hello’ to you?!” That's when I realized that I needed something like a real bed, a hot meal, or just a couple seconds with nobody staring at me.

Seventeen hours, overnight, on that train. No sleep. The seats are actually hard, but the problem is really that they are not like seats; they are like the two unfriendly sides of a right triangle. I amused myself playing with the little kid next to me, who was fun although he did take up more room than the spot on his mother's lap allotted for him. Anyway, this morning I got here to Lanzhou, which I never heard of before yesterday. Had a shower, a lovely hot lunch of some nameless variety of tofu and fried stuff, and lots of good Chinese tea, and I get an actual night of sleep tonight before leaving on a REAL hard sleeper (I double checked this one) to Turpan.

That's all of six days from Lhasa to Turpan. Well, it was definitely cheap! And I have a new appreciation for wool socks, and the hot water they give you in restaurants here, and Tibetan mechanics, and little kids whose fascination with oranges is a refreshing break from my own foul humour, and Chinese farmers who DON'T spit all over the train floor (most of them do) and people who open the window now and then to let in a rare breathe of real (albeit frigid and oxygen-deprived) air, and the lady in the train station here who actually made sure that I understood her when I was buying tomorrow's ticket in spite of the 47 people pushing behind me, and the guy at the restaurant who, when I asked where an internet café was, got so happy that I could say “internet café” in Chinese that he just took off from his job and walked me like four blocks away to the cheapest one around... People are the same everywhere, they are all different!