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Published: November 8th 2006
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25 September- 1 October
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Before leaving Dharamsala I had promised a student that I would deliver an English dictionary to her brother, who is studying at a university in Xining, China. Which I was happy to do, but it had some strings attached. The first issue I was able to spot right away. It wasn't just any dictionary, but the latest and most comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary for students, and this thing was massive. It weighed a good 5-6 pounds and took up loads of space in my backpack, but I carried that thing all through Nepal and Tibet and was happy to see it go. It is a really nice dictionary, though, and it should help him quite a bit in school, although his English is quite good already. The other issue that I didn't see right away is that Xining is in the middle of nowhere. It's a big city of about 3 million people, but it's way out there. Fortunately the brand new train line that goes to Lhasa has a stop there, so I was able to take a completely new train across the highest plateau in the world.
While on the
train I had the brilliant idea to listen to my iPod to help pass the 24 hours or so on the train. The iPod didn't work, though, and to prove the point is started to heat up like an oven, then the hard drive literally started shaking and making noises other than music, and finally I could smell faint odors of smoke. At this point I thought for sure that I was screwed, because this thing literally had days worth of music stored on ot an ot has saved me on long train and bus rides many times. Just thinking of these trips without music sent a shiver through my headphones. So I made my book last as long as I could and got off at Xining. For some reason I thought I would try the iPod again even though it obviously had a severe meltdown. To my great surprise it started right up and everything was there! The train had crossed some high passes and the average elevation of the train ride is 4700 meters or something like that. Then I remembered that when I was hiking up to Thorung-la pass on the Annapurna circuit the iPod didn't work
then either. So I think that the wonderful engineers working at sea level in the Apple office haven't managed to get these things to work very well at 5000 meters. But it all worked out in the end and instead of writing about how awful and short-lived iPods are I can now happily report that they may smoke and they may rattle, but they keep on rockin' too.
From Xining I decided to take a side trip from Xining to the monastery town of Xiahe. This was a nice little town in a valley with beautiful grasslands surrounding it and I stayed here for three days. Unfortunately the last two days were rainy and I never got out to the grasslands. But on my last day I got to see something that I had not seen in either India or Tibet. The Dalai Lama's Gelug sect is also called the Yellow Hat sect because of the distinctive headgear they wear during ceremonies. I finally got to see them in action on my last day in the Tibetan region.
The ceremony took place in a plaza with a group of monks walking in and sitting in a block in
the center of the plaza. Soon more and more monks entered the plaza and formed rows on three sides of the main block of monks. Nearly every monk was wearing a yellow hat (some quite old and ratty) and their thick winter robes as it was cold and drizzly. During this time an officiating monk walked around to make sure everything was going smoothly. Chanting and singing in low voices filled the plaza during this time. After some time the columns of monks rose and in a slow swirling pattern began to join the main block until they were all sitting together in the middle of the plaza. Once this happened, two senior monks took their place in front and behind this large block of monks and began to officiate. The monk in front of the block had this fantastically large robe on that made him appear twice as large as he really was. This lasted for a good 15 minutes before I decided enough is enough with this rain and is this any kind of weather for a ceremony like this? I headed for coffee, happy to have finally seen a Yellow Hat ceremony.
But now the travel
woes begin. I was trying to get to the small city of Yangshuo in southern China, which is just a short distance from the city of Guilin (about 2 million people) and a nice train would have been perfect, but since I had stopped in the middle of nowhere direct train travel was now impossible. In the West, direct train travel between cities of 2-4 million people would be no problem, but in China a city with 3 million people is as common as a sex scandal in Congress and there is no direct train travel. So that left me with a series of trains leapfrogging from city to city, and none of these cities really held any interest for me. It was just take a train to the next city, spend the night, and get on a train to the next city. It was during this time that I slowly realized that noone was really smiling, laughing, or enjoying themselves in any way. Everybody just seem sort of...dour. Since almost no one spoke any English in this part of China I was reduced for the most part to smiles, hand gestures and body language, but most times I smiled
at someone they just looked at me like they were thinking "what in the world do you have to smile about and why are you smiling at me". It really started to get to me after a while, and I was thinking that, with another 2-3 weeks in China, it was going to get really depressing if everybody was this gloomy. Travelling was complicated somewhat when I learned that Golden Week was fast approaching. Golden Week is a national holiday when close to a billion Chinese go on holiday from October 1-7, and it is nearly impossible to get train/bus tickets, hotels, etc. So now I was in a mad dash to get to Yangshuo before October 1st. By some miracle I was able to pull into Yangshuo right on October 1st with no problems at all concerning the travel complications of Golden Week.
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