在中国感到沮丧
Zài zhōngguó gǎndào jǔsàng
There’s always a learning curve in a new country. There’s always a bit of a culture shock.
China has taken that culture shock, run it backwards through Google translate and garbled it back at us wearing a look of incredulity.
We’ve been travelling in Xinjiang, China’s most western province.
You want to stay in a hotel? Don’t be ridiculous.
You want to buy some petrol? You must be joking.
Get a train? The local train station is 50km away.
Oh and can I see your passport?
Usually when things get tough we just get on our bikes and life is quite simple. But this week we’ve found ourselves turned back by police due to “snow/roadworks/rain”. So adament were they that we did not continue on the road they couldn’t decide on the reason. We duely turned round and cycled the 30km back to the town they suggested only to be told by a different set of police that there was no international hotel.
Because, “for your safety” foreigners are required to stay at approved hotels. When they spaced these out across the province they did not have cyclists in mind. They tend to be in big touristy places, several hundreds of kilometres away from eachother.
Also, “for your safety” you are required to register with the police whenever they desire. At checkpoints on the road, in villages when you stop for a snack. It is not illegal to camp in China, but you are required to register each night. In this province, however, the police do not want you camping.
For your own safety of course.
So, on this occasion the police gave us no option but to go back to where we started that morning, the closet place with an international hotel. We couldn’t ride, it was too late. There were no buses. We thought a taxi too expensive. They gave us a lift, in two cars, with our bikes. And they took us out for dinner first. The service is incredible, if unwanted.
We gave in and took the bus to Urumqi the next day. We ended up negotiating directly with the driver, and got on the coach with no idea what would happen. That night we were piled on to another bus, a sleeper this time, with bunk beds. We arrived, dishevelled, the following morning – we’d thought the bus would take 10 hours or so, it took 20.
Oh well.
Leaving Urumqi we thought we’d planned better. We planned to break our journey in a town with a business hotel marked on the map, available on booking.com. However when we arrived there we were told that they can’t accept foreigners. We didn’t hang around for negotiations, not wanting to be sent back, we announced we’d go to Turpan, 100km away. Happy to be not their problem they let us go.
We almost made it too.
We were riding on the highway, but for some reason both streams of traffic were sharing the same lanes.
Jamie’s dynamo had been making weird noises all day, and as night fell decided to give in and stop working. No lights. We got out headtorches, but it didn’t feel great.
In the deepening darkness we spotted an empty road on our left. A brand new, smooth, empty six-lane highway parallel to the one we were on. We ducked under the road and scrambled up on to the new one. We cruised another 40km or so in the dark expecting to be stopped by the police at any point.
The road began to veer away from the old one and we got a touch anxious that it wasn’t going where we wanted. It wasn’t on the map. We reasoned that this is part of the new silk road network we hear about, and where else would it go?
Around 10:30, Beijing time (Xinjiang unofficially runs 2 hours behind as a form of protest), we decided to give in and find somewhere to camp. Still 20km away from town at least, with no hostel booked. We jumped the barrier again and made our way under a road bridge and set up camp overnight. We’d done 175km. My first century.
The following morning we worked out what we’d say when we arrived in town and saw the police. We hoped they wouldn’t notice that we couldn’t have cycled 200km in one morning. But to our surprise we rejoined the highway after the checkpoint and for the first time since we arrived didn’t need to hand over our passports once.
The police presence is unbelievable. In town there is a “convenient” police station on almost every corner. You are scanned going in to shopping centres, shops, hotels, train stations and parks. At most you need to present your id. There is so much razor wire you start not to see it at all.
When requested we accompany the police to their shed and they record our details. Sometimes they can decipher our passports, sometimes they need to ask colleague after colleague to assist. If we’re lucky someone will speak a smattering of English, otherwise if they look baffled we try to show them answers to frequently asked questions we’ve pre-programmed in Google translate.
Where are you from?
When did you enter china?
What is your phone number?
Where are you going?
Unfortunately sometimes they appear to struggle with their own technology. I think there’s an app some of them try to use. On the journey to Urumqi we were held up for an hour, with a bus load of people waiting for us, while two young men tried to work it out. Finally one phoned a friend, and someone more technically savvy turned up. We eventually got out, got on the bus to cheers, only to be stopped half a kilometre further down the road again.
For us this is an annoyance, that we respond to with as much goodwill as we can muster. We are treated very well, sometimes given tea as we wait and water to take away. But we know the background to why there is such an extraordinary police presence here and know that in places we can’t see there are people suffering .
I asked one policeman why we couldn’t stay overnight in the town. “It’s government policy, for your own safety”. “Why is that?”, I pressed, innocently. “It’s not a safe neighbourhood”, he said, apologetically. I inferred that he meant that it’s full of the indigenous locals.
We are kept away from them, on the whole.
We are very aware of the situation here, reported with more and more frequency in the media back home. It makes for an uncomfortable journey. We see little, and from the little we do see we interpret much.
At the same time I’ve become increasingly suspicious of the western world’s sudden interest in the woes of a people who have suffered for decades, if not longer. That this interest coincides with the rapid development of China’s new silk road seems significant. In the meantime the situation is reportedly getting worse and worse for the indigenous people here…
We’ve now left Xinjiang, deciding to forgo the joys of the desert, and have taken a train 1000km to Jiayuguan in the Gansu province.
Negotiating the train, in the Chinese holiday, was an experience I don’t want to repeat. We spent a couple of hours trying to hunt down the ticket office in town, only to be told it was probably shut anyway. We tried the bus station. No bus we’re told. None, whatsoever, going east. No explanations. We cycled go the closet train station – there are two, one 14km from town, the other 50km. They can’t deal with our bikes, they say, we’ll have to go to the other. We can buy tickets though.
With an impatient queue forming behind us we end up buying tickets for a train at 1030 before realising we’d need to leave around 4am to cycle there and negotiate our bikes.
Back at the hostel one of the staff comes to our rescue and finds us a taxi that will fit the bikes. When we arrive they the station they tell us they can’t deal with our bikes after all.
“But they told us to come here” a phrase we seem to use quite often. I remember to smile.
After trying to convince us to put the bikes in a bag, or take them apart and put them in our panniers, they finally let us on with the bikes as they are. The guards are lovely and help us with our bags, we dont even get any of the hassle we’d foreseen about the gas canister.
While we’re waiting we gather quite a crowd. One woman speaks a little English and acts as translator, eventually leaving us out the conversation altogether telling a growing crowd all about us. People are fascinated by the bikes, they come and poke and prod them. Surreptitiously they’ll squeeze the saddle and finger the chain.
Language is certainly the biggest issue, unsurprisingly. Nothing is familiar. We can’t read signposts, menus, instructions, shop names…
Walking in to restaurants we often have no clue where to start and if I’ve got too hungry it becomes a huge source of anxiety. We often choose restaurants based on the number of pictures they have on the wall.
As time goes on we’re getting more familiar with them. We know the kind of questions to ask, or where to start pointing our translate apps. We know what sort of thing we might want to eat.
I think I can now recognise the character for noodles, in the right context.
I remind myself, as my frustrations rise again and again, the privilege we experience most of the time being English speakers.
The occasional conversation with someone who speaks English is fascinating. An American who’s lived in China for years talks openly to us about Chinese culture and politics. We discuss the situation in Xinjiang and acknowledge again or privilege in being able to do so. He also shows us how to negotiate a hot-pot restaurant.
A doctor we meet on the train talks about the healthcare system and wants to know our views on China’s politics. This last question we gracefully dodge, he’s waving his phone around for one which makes us a little suspicious and secondly I can’t claim to coherent opinions – the more I learn the more I understand I just don’t know enough.
Another more prosaic concern is the rate that we seem to be leaking money at the moment. We’re told things are easier after Xinjiang. Hopefully we’ll find more places to camp, we’ll find a way to get fuel for the stove and we won’t need to take – or negotiate – public transport so often, fascinating as all these things are.
I realised how rarely I get seriously frustrated, especially since we’ve been travelling. Unfortunately I realised this by acknowledging how frustrating I’ve found our first week in China. Eye opening and baffling, but sometimes utterly, utterly, bewilderingly frustrating.
I’m sorry to leave Xinjiang without getting a deeper understanding of what makes this province unique, but perhaps now is just not the time. There are too many barriers in our way, so on this occasion it feels better to just move on. We don’t have long and this is a gigantic country.
It’s time to get back on our bikes where everything is simple.
Autumn in Xinjiang, China … After crossing in to China on the last day before our visa expired, through a border post which hadn’t opened yet we’ve spent the last week traversing Xinjiang by bike, bus and train. We experienced the infamous police ‘hospitality’, invited to register up to 7 times a day. We were driven back to our starting point one day because they couldn’t find anywhere for us to stay, after telling us the road we were following was closed due to snow/roadworks/rain. They bought us dinner first though. Another day, to avoid a repeat, we rode 175km and slept under a bridge before rolling down to China’s hottest city, Turpan. Beautiful at times and frustrating at others. Always an adventure. #canijustridemybikeplease
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