Workers paint one of those brilliant slogans that the Chinese government is so well known for on a wall in Ningxia. This one appears to relate to the railroad.

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Evan's tent sits among sand dunes in our first evening in Ningxia. A note to potential sand-campers: if you've been fighting a fierce headwind all day, don't set your tent up in the dunes. Evan and I awoke the next morning with an inch of sand in our tents that had blown in through the mesh the night before. Dad and Ellen somehow escaped unscathed.

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We plan to arrive in full bike regalia at Beer Mania in Sanlitun between 5pm and 6pm and hope everyone can join us! Arrival in padded spandex and bike jerseys or with hands covered in chain grease will earn you a smile and a well-deserved pat on the back.

For the occasion, Beer Mania will be offering up local Beijing draught beer at 10 kuai per half liter all night, as well as the full selection of excellent imported beers (the thought of this has kept us pedaling for the last month!) at happy hour prices until 8pm.

So come join us! Sorry this is happening on a Monday night.

Portrait of an LBX Beijing Homecoming

September 13, 5pm

Beer Mania (Map)

Address: 北京市三里屯南街16号泰悦豪庭103

Phone: 010-65850786

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Evan, Ellen and my dad stand atop a hill overlooking the scraggly desert where we pitched camp in our last night in Gansu. Our last couple weeks have been marked by headwinds, great campsites and a rush to cover the distance back to Beijing in time.

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… continued from last post. After thanking Rinchen for his gracious hospitality, we took our leave from him and inspected his monastery, which is populated by 300 monks, from the hill behind it. The premises were about as large as an average American high school with scattered buildings organized around two large temples with gilded roofs. Even from hundreds of meters above, we could tell that even the parts of the monastery not currently under construction had not long been around. Almost no monasteries we came across had existed for over 30 years, since all their previous incarnations had been destroyed by red guards during the black period.

Dorgye then drove us back to the town for Tibetan dinner in the restaurant of his ex girlfriend, a plump, rosy cheeked girl in her thirties. Over yak dumplings, noodles, and butter tea, we tried our best to describe America, the place our new friend most wants to visit in the world, despite the fact he’s sure he’ll never be able. During the meal, a short man with curly hair and sharply arched hunchback joined us at our table. He, like pretty well everybody in the town, was friends with Dorgye, and he was another example of Tibetan eccentricity that makes us love these people. Sitting next to us for nearly an hour, he neither spoke a word nor ate any of our food, despite our repeated offerings. He was subjecting himself to a day of fasting — to feel the pain of hungry people — and a day of silence — to feel the pain of the animals, who cannot speak — apparently both common practices. At the conclusion of the meal, Dorgye drove his friend to his home and us to his own, where his mother had prepared for us about two gallons of yoghurt from fresh yak’s milk — probably the best I’ve ever eaten in my life (no, we didn’t finish it, but god did we fart that night from the overwhelming of our systems by dairy products).

The next morning saw yet another overly generous meal prepared by Dorgye’s mother, the most caring Tibetan momma around. At breakfast, we chatted some more about his personal life, during which time he told us that he has two children by a poor herding girl out in the country — whom he supports financially — but no intentions of marrying that or any other girl. Apparently this is accepted practice among Tibetans, whose religion — like so many others — is a moral iron trap on certain all-important issues and a blank road map on the rest.

After replying affirmatively to his mother that we had found our time with Tibetan nomads to be enjoyable and bidding the family adieu, we proceeded on a wild goose chase in town for decent Tibetan cowboy hats (which Andy did end up finding a week later). During the search, however, we ran across a monk about my age, dressed up in deep maroon and pink robes and built like a tank — with some deep scars on his face. He turned out to be one of Dorgye’s best friends, and the only other Tibetan in town to receive a two year sentence for being the “lead instigator” of the 2008 protests, a term from which he had recently been released. I asked him through Dorgye what his prison time had been like, and how he viewed the overall situation. His reply, likewise through Dorgye (he spoke almost no Chinese), began, “I don’t know if you’re good people or not, and I am not sure why you want to know, but since you ask, I’ll tell you…” He had initially been beaten severely and subject to a number of cruel punishments, such as bouts of starvation, having his mouth spit into by soldiers, and prolonged interrogations while being deprived of sleep. The guards lectured him for hours about how good the Chinese had been to his people and built up their infrastructure, and demanded that he answer what had ever been done for him by his beloved Dalai Lama or American government (I cringed to hear that our government was invoked in his torture). Now that he’s been released, he hopes, like every Tibetan, for peace, but he will “never forget” what he suffered at the hands of his Han captors.

Not having any emotional experience for how to respond to his story, I thanked him for his frankness and expressed support for his people, which seemed to have some minor positive effect on his emotional demeanor. Just before we took our leave, I asked Dorgye what he would do after his full release was granted. “Try to find a job,” he answered, “and if I can’t, it’s ok too. I can always watch my father’s yaks.”

Urban sprawl... in Qinghai! by Andy

Dorgye is at least lucky that his family’s situation is stable (or maybe they’re lucky that he provided the money to stabilize theirs), and they haven’t had to depend on the government for their livelihood (Dorgye thought the Tibetans who relied on government yak semen for artificial insemination were insane, since “they know how to do it themselves”). The situation of some of his neighbors, however, was quite different. Along the highway in his town, as in dozens of other similar Tibetan towns, was a “nomad resettlement area (牧民定居點),” or a recently built group of single room, mono-style brick houses, with two windows and one door on only one side of the house, lined up in tight perfect rows, all facing the same direction regardless of which side of the road they were on. They cosely resemble inner city housing projects, with the exception that their backdrop is the vast Tibetan sky and endless grasslands, which makes them look ridiculous. It was explained to us that the government brings inland construction crews to build the settlements for the locals, providing about 40% of the funding outright and the other 60% (the ratio varied from place to place) in low interest loans, usually totaling 50,000 yuan for a completed unit. What at first glance seems like a stroke of great benevolence was explained to us over and over again as a plot to bring the “unruly minority” under closer surveillance. “What use are clustered houses like that to nomadic herders?” asked Dorgye, who said that the families accepting the deals generally consider them just-in-case insurance policies and mostly use them as storage sheds.

It’d be nice to think that the houses are nothing more than a humane gesture on the part of the government, kind of an atonement for their severe crackdowns and firm lockdowns in the last two years. But the sheer scope of the construction of these soul-deadening shack-towns tends to indicate that something less philanthropic is intended. Outside one town in Qinghai, we rolled into a deep crater valley and onto a grand, stupefying sight: about five hundred such shack dwellings broken into three “neighborhoods,” the mass of which increased the area of the town itself by 200%. Upon further investigation, we found that the vast majority of the dwellings were absolutely empty, but further construction, under the flag of a Jiangsu-based company, rages on. In the town, we came across a couple of sharply dressed men (I mean LBX sharp, black shoes, black slacks, and short-sleeve white staffords with oiled up hair) from the construction company eating at the table next to ours in a Han restaurant. Driven by curiosity, I engaged the most talkative one in the following conversation (you might think I’m making this up, but I swear I wrote it down word for word immediately following its taking place):

Me:     How long have you been building the houses outside of town? (你們建外面的牧民定居房子建多久了?)
Man:    7-8 years (七、八年了)
Me:     But they’re mostly empty? (可是大部分還空空的?)
Man:    Yes, they haven’t been fully occupied yet (對，還沒住滿)
Me:    Then why are you still building them? (那為什麼還在建新房?)
Man:    This is a minority area. Tibetans, you know? (這裡是少數民族地區，藏族知道嗎?)
Me:    I know (知道)
Man:    We have to build them, for harmony. (必須建，因為要和諧)
Andy:    [in his token incredulous voice] If you build the houses, there’ll be harmony? (建房就有和諧嗎?)
Man:    Yes. Before, they lived in tents. (是的。以前他們都住帳篷)
Andy:    Tents aren’t harmonious? (帳篷不和諧嗎?)
Man:    Tents are harmonious too, but the Tibetans need to know that they should live in houses! [I realize that’s an awkward sentence, but that’s exactly how it came out] (帳篷也和諧，但是藏族要知道他們應該住房子!)

I’m not sure if he spoke from malice, ignorance, or pure brainwashing (i.e. “bringing warmth to the frontier” à la Heavenly Road), but the whole time he maintained a kind, fatherly tone, like a patient math teacher explaining addition to a 7-year-old. Again, you can’t get mad at the messenger, but rather the system that convinced him that yak herding isn’t conducive to “harmony,” an abstract term which, by the way, is utterly meaningless unless those things being harmonized are listed (i.e. “harmony between man and machine”). Judging from the inner Mongolia grassland of Bayan Nur (where I now write this post), from which Mongolian pastoralism was over the last century erased without a trace before the expansion of Han agriculture, I have to presume that those “resettlement areas” will become something less than a convenient option in the years to come. If the Chinese follow our example of dealing with American Indians, the Tibetans are likely to be fed story after story and yield inch after inch until they’re completely subdued. We met and had dinner with a Harvard man researching Tibetan ethnic tourism, and his theory was that the government’s chief aim in locking them down is to get their kids into compulsory education, where they can be indoctrinated and slowly turned. Whatever the ultimate goal is I can’t say, but if I ever founded a religion, its cardinal sin would be to force a self-sufficient man into dependency.

All the cool kids will be wearing Tibetan robes soon, by Andy

In our travels in the Tibetan regions, Dorgye was neither the only excellent English speaker nor our only gracious host. We met several Tibetans returned from the Dalai Lama’s schools all over Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai, most of whom know each other and have spent some time in jail for their escape antics. In another town, one such English speaker introduced us to his monk friend, who also spent a long time explaining the details of his religion and people to us over milk tea. It was this monk who took us to the store of his friend to buy our beautiful Tibetan robes (couldn’t resist) for 350 yuan, fully 100 cheaper than she offered to the Han tourist who followed me in (have I mentioned that they hate the Han?). We knew the products were legit not only by their heavy wool fabric or intricate patterns, but by the picture of the Dalai Lama she hung proudly on her wall. Incidentally, contrary to what I would have thought, you can find his picture displayed prominently ALL OVER the plateau, despite the inherent danger. I love their guts!

The morning after we had acquired our robes, our monk friend Tashi and his English speaking friend Dawa invited us over for tea and Zamba with some of their friends. At this breakfast, an older Tibetan man, well traveled and speaking decent Sichuanese, went on and on about the military clamp down on every aspect of life in Tibet and the terrible scale of environmental damage there through military mining projects. Again, I expressed sympathy and support as we left the room, but as we left the room, the man, my father’s age, was openly weeping. Looking back on the entire situation weeks later, the whole thing seems like a sad, romantic dream.

I complain a lot because I'm just in one of those moods, but there have been some cool places out here, as Pete demonstrates between corn and sunflower fields, by Evan

Although I wish I had gotten these posts up earlier, it is good that I’ve waited until now to delve into them. Returning from Qinghai into northern China was like being roused from a pleasant dream about a young girl feeding me breakfast and rubbing my head by a raging truck horn at 6am (how I actually woke up yesterday). The plateau truly was the crowning experience of the trip, the place where I felt most inspired and happy about the world, and since then, I’ve been too disillusioned to care very much anymore about LBXes. If I tried to write a post right now about the gritty pollution we’ve come through from Gansu to Inner Mongolia or the utter lack of cultural inspiration (almost no Hui in the Ningxia Hui Region and absolutely no Mongols in the Mongolian region where we now rest), it’d be a blur of hateful invective. All I will say is that is that between the redoubled “HALLO” and “LAOWAI” jeers and the stark ugliness of so much of this part of the world, I’m dying to leave the Mad Max dystopia and get to a place where I can feel like a real person again.

That’s not to say we haven’t had fun lately though, not the least part from our consumption of fine whiskies (we’ve gone through 6 bottles in the last 4 weeks) at night in our varied campsites: along lake Qinghai, in trash burning landfills, under desert dunes (woke up covered in an inch of sand), in fields of corn, next to fields of sunflowers (these have been the picturesque saving grace of our country jaunts in this region), etc. It was likewise nice to have the double pleasure in Yinchuan of being joined for a stretch on a Dahon by our old friend Pete (you may remember his drunken antics from my second Hong Kong post) and to spend time with Ellen Mosemen, our comrade-in-bike from 2wheels4girls and her riding partner Jason Yen. I’m also looking forward to looking for something interesting along our final route, which will take us 928 more kilometers over the next 12 days to the conclusion of our trip, almost one year after it began and 10,000 miles (16,000+ kilometers) cycled, into Beijing. Anybody who has read to the end of this horribly long post and is interested in joining us for beers at our finish-up party on September 13th in the Sanlitun area, please send an email to me or Andy for details. Until then, stay tuned for more from our final leg.

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Tomorrow we should hit the northernmost point of our trip. Unfortunately there's no time left to touch the actual Mongolian border #

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A family in Gansu loads straw onto a truck after threshing off the grain.

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After a horrendous climb, the newly expanded crew, including my girlfriend Devi, my dad and his girlfriend Ellen, set up camp in the green mountains well before sunset. We were worried that a nasty storm on the horizon would soak us, but it never materialized, and we spent a great first evening on the road with a bottle of Talisker 10-year scotch whisky from duty free. There's a mystery member to our crew in this picture: a Tibetan herder who sat down and watched us talk, eat and drink for more than an hour, turning down our offers of food and drink.

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A herder takes his sheep and goats to graze by Goat Gorge (羊峽) in Qinghai.

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