I finally finished blogging about my travels this winter with that last post. (I know, I know--it shouldn't have taken me until 4 months after the trip ended to finish, but oh well). I posted this map in an earlier post, but now I've updated it to include a picture and a link to the blog post about each place. So for anyone who missed a blog posts, here's a good chance to catch up:
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| Handan Picasa Photo Album |
After visiting Rayleigh in Pucheng, Drew returned to Qinhuangdao to begin spring semester at his school. I traveled to Handan, a city in south Hebei Province, where I met up with Mike (another ELT Edge teacher at my school). We visited two of our students, Jeff and Angel.
This is some famous old structure in Handan, called something like Cong Tai.
Angel and her family.
The streets of Angel's village. They don't get many foreigners here, so everyone would just stop and stare at us.
The kitchen in Angel's home.
Angel's father is a doctor, who specializes in mending severed fingers. This is the sign above the entrance to their clinic/home. I guess it comes in handy so people know where to go when they have this problem...they can just hold their hand up, and say, "Yep, my hand looks like that, so I guess this is the place to go."
The artwork inside the clinic is a collage of photos of all the severed hands that Angel's father has mended.
Mike and I with Jeff's family at his home.
We played Mah Jiang one evening with Jeff's family.
I rode on the back of this motorcycle for about 30 minutes to get to where we could catch a bus back to Handan.
From Handan, I returned to Beijing, where I caught a train to Qinhuangdao. So that's the end of my trip :).
After our time in Urumqi and Kashgar, Xinjiang, Drew and I needed to head back east, so that Drew could make it back to his school on time for the start of classes the next Monday (my classes didn't start for another week). Our original plan was to take a train from Kashgar to Urumqi (which lasts 24 hours), and then take the train from Urumqi all the way to Beijing (which is another 48 hours or so). We managed to get train tickets from Kashgar to Urumqi, but the train tickets from Urumqi to Beijing were all sold out, unless we wanted to stand for 48 hours (and you can imagine how we felt about that prospect). We decided to see what kind of discount airfare we could get. Urumqi to Beijing was pretty expensive (about 2,000 RMB or $300, if I remember correctly), but there was a flight to Xi'an for less than 1,000 RMB. Xi'an is one of the main train hubs in central China, and there are lots of daily trains to Beijing (taking 12-24 hours). Drew and I also know a student from a Xi'an suburb, so we called Rayleigh up to see if she could help us out and buy our train tickets in advance. Unfortunately, tickets from Xi'an to Beijing were almost entirely sold out, but Rayleigh managed to buy us one of the last tickets left--a standing ticket on the slowest (24 hours!) train to Beijing. The ticket was a train leaving two nights after we arrived, so Rayleigh invited us to come hang out with her family for a few days. We spent February 14th and 15th in Pucheng (a suburb of Xi'an) with Rayleigh and her family. This was still during spring festival, so we got to meet all sort of aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.
The ancient pagoda of Pucheng.
Drew and I with Rayliegh and her parents.
Rayleigh with her mom, two aunts and two cousins.
When we arrived in Beijing, Drew headed back to Qinhuangdao to start his classes. I still had a week, so I headed to Handan to visit two students.
In my last post, I mentioned visiting a musical instrument store in Kashgar. Tim asked "what did the long-necked instrument sound like?", so I thought I'd share this video I took at the store.
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| Kashgar Picasa Photo Album |
After spending a few days in Urumqi, Drew and I flew to Kashgar, landing in Kashgar on February 10th. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an "official" English spelling of Kashgar. "Kashgar" is how it is spelled in my Lonely Planet guidebook, but I've also seen it spelled Kaxgar and Kashi. Kashgar is only about 100 miles from the Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan borders.
We had heard that the Kashgar Sunday market was a "must see", and since we arrived on a Sunday, that was the first thing we went to see. However, when we asked our taxi driver to take us there, we wound up at this livestock market instead.
The Kashgar livestock market.
A local Uighar man.
Drew and I met Copper, a local Uighar English teacher. He was very eager to practice his English with us, and took us around town a bit.
I'm not sure what animal these heads belong to. But it still makes for an interesting picture :).
One of the highlights of our time in Kashgar was our visit to the local musical instrument store.
Id Kah Mosque, built in 1442.
Inside the mosque.
Some local Uighar men praying at the mosque.
The streets of Kashgar.
After spending two days in Kashgar, Drew and I took a train back to Urumqi, where we caught a flight to Xi'an.
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| Urumqi Picasa Photo Album |
From Lanzhou, Drew and I took a flight to Urumqi, Xinjiang on February 8th. Xinjiang is the northwestern most province of China. It is also the largest province in China by a huge margin, being about the same size as Alaska. Xinjiang is also home to a large ethnic minority known as the Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs). The Uighurs speak a Turkic language with an Arabic script, providing us with the 5th written script we had encountered on the trip (the others being Chinese, English in Hong Kong, Thai and Tibetan).
Urumqi is a really interesting place. It's part of China, but it really doesn't feel like it. Many of the local people have lighter skin color, looking almost European. The architecture, as you'll see in the pictures below, doesn't look Chinese at all. Urumqi also has the distinction of being listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as being the most remote city from any sea in the world. The nearest sea or ocean is about 1,400 miles away.
The Urumqi night market.
Some of the interesting architecture of Urumqi. It kind of reminds me of Russia.
The cheese motherload. I've never seen a stash of cheese like this anywhere in China, even in Beijing or Shanghai...and yet here it is out in Urumqi, one of the most remote cities in the world. You have no idea how much I miss cheese :(.
One evening we went to the XinjiangInternationalBazaarBanquetArtTheater (gotta love that Chinglish lack of proper spacing!). The theater had a nightly program featuring local music and dancing.
This guy stood in the lobby, acting like a statue.
A few of the dances. The Uighurs wear some of the most colorful clothing I've seen anywhere.
Virtually all of the local Uighurs are Muslim, so I was surprised to see that they don't quite have the strictly enforced dress codes of many other Islamic cultures.
Check out the snake!
This dancer has gotta be the world's best hula-hooper.
After spending a two days in Urumqi, we flew to Kashgar, another city in Xinjiang province.
After spending about a week in Lhasa and Shigatse, Tibet, Drew and I took the the train to Lanzhou in Gansu province. The "Lhasa Express," as the train is often called, is one of the most amazing trains in the world. It's the world's highest railway, with sections going over 16,000 feet. The train is equipped with special oxygen masks for all passengers to assist with the lack of oxygen in the air at the high altitude. There were also significant engineering challenges in building the track, which you can read about at the wikipedia article. The view from the train is also pretty incredible, as these pictures show:
After spending 28 hours in the train, Drew and I arrived in Lanzhou on Chinese new year. Lanzhou isn't really a tourist destination, and the few things that might have been worth seeing were closed because of the holiday. Drew and I had only visited Lanzhou because it was a key transfer point to get from Tibet to Xinjiang, in northwest China. (Unfortunately, there's no way to go directly from Tibet to Xinjiang). We flew out the next day, February 8th, to Urumqi, Xinjiang.
The Lanzhou city sky line.
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| Shigatse Picasa Photo Album |
Drew and I spent a total of five days in Tibet. We spent most of our time in Lhasa. We also took a two-day excursion to Shigatse, the second biggest city in Tibet. Many Han Chinese (the dominant ethnicity in China--over 90% of the Chinese are Han) have moved to Lhasa, creating separate Han and Tibetan sections of town. In contrast, the residents of Shigatse are almost all Tibetan, which was the main reason Drew and I chose to visit. We were also hoping to continue on to see Mt. Everest, but that didn't work out :(. It's a shame that we made it to Tibet and didn't get to see the tallest mountain in the world, but we were short on time since we had bought a train ticket to leave Lhasa the morning of the 6th. Tibetan new year was coming, and we were told there would be less transportation availability in the next few days as a result. If we had chosen to continue on to a point near enough to Everest to see the mountain, we essentially would have spent the rest of our time in Tibetan just getting rides.
The Tibetans don't seem to have any problems selling corpses or heads on the street, as we saw this in several places. I think these are lamb corpses and lamb heads.
A few Tibetans we met in the Shigatse main square.
The Tashilhunpo Monastery, built in 1447.
The view of Shigatse from the monastery.
This is what remains of the once imposing Shigatse fortress.
I'm not sure what purpose this little fake mountain serves, but it makes an interesting picture :).
Some Tibetans we met in the van we took back to Lhasa.
After spending two days in Shigatse, we returned back to Lhasa to catch our train on to Lanzhou on February 6th.
