Week 3: Beijing to Pingyao to Lanzhou

This has been a week in transit as we have been making our way west to Tibet. We left Beijing on Wednesday afternoon on a 12 hour train ride to Pingyao. We didn’t know what an adventure we were in for. As the national holiday is winding down, everyone was leaving the city the same time as us, making it extremely hard to get train tickets. When we first tried, they were sold out of seats and they could only offer standing room. We were ecstatic that we were able to find another train which got us seats, having abandoned entirely the idea of getting sleepers. They kept showing the trailers for The Devil Wears Prada and The Last Samurai in the waiting hall prior to boarding the train, which for some reason seeing Meryl Streep eased the fact that Chels and I were the only foreigners in the room of hundreds of anxious travelers ready to depart.

Boarding the train was pretty easy for two reasons: they use our number system, and I took a photo of my train ticket and emailed it to Wade, Dafeng, Brooke and Jamie with the note “what does this say?”. Isn’t technology amazing? Despite our efforts to pump ourselves up for the train, it was a rough night. The car was packed: every seat was taken and there were people standing as well. The ends of the cars were even more packed as people crammed in from when the train made stops. Even though there were “no smoking” signs posted, the conductors didn’t seem to enforce it. A group of kids played a radio almost the entire night. We made friends with the girl sitting next to us who had a 15 hour train ride ahead of her. Another guy came along about 6 hours into the ride who wanted to be my friend because I spoke English. He had a 12 hour ride standing, which he didn’t complain about once. If he could do it, I could suck it up despite my back starting to ache and not wanting this to be my first encounter with a public eastern toilet. When we got off the train, there were people sleeping in the aisle that we had to step over with our 20kg of luggage, one guy was asleep under the benches with his head under one bench, butt in the aisle, and legs under the bench on the other side of the aisle. We got off in Pingyao at 5:30AM and it was pitch black outside. There was some light from the station but beyond that was absolute darkness. We were able to get a taxi/ 3 row golf cart, and we were off to our hostel in the dark. There were no street lights. After about 5 minutes we could make out the slight contrast in the night sky of the medieval wall which was really interesting to see, went through the gate into the old city. Complete darkness, the sudden view of a massive castle wall, being in a golf cart and my lack of sleep made it seem as much like a backtour lot at MGM studios tour as anything else. It was quite an experience and I was very happy to be able to check into our room at 6AM and go to bed for a couple hours.

The city was very interesting. PIngyao’s wall still fully encloses the old city. It was a financial center until the 12^th century or so when it fell into poverty. Because of that its main streets were preserved and never modernized. Although most of the things there cater to tourists, the buildings are more or less original and very interesting to see the life of a medieval town. They had temples, houses and banks that you could tour that were restored as they were in medieval times. We were able to walk on top of the wall which provided interesting glances into current house courtyards. Lots of wash hanging, we saw a recycling place with an enormous pile of plastic bottles and a neatly arranged wall of green glass bottles. We made friends with 2 swedish guys at our hostel who we took another golf cart to a temple about 7km outside of the city. As interesting as the temple was seeing the everyday street life taking place on the way. There were older men playing cards on the sidewalk, fruit stands, street vendors selling dumplings, and many families on their mopeds, honking and beeping through city traffic.

We met a lot of interesting travelers at the hostel we stayed at. A guy from the Basque country trying to figure out how to get to Tibet, Tomas and Jens from Sweden, a german man and his wife who fell when she got off the train in Pingyao and got a stress fracture were among others. Cost at the hospital for her treatment: 130 Yuan (about $19). While talking to the German man I was reading an article online about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize and all of the political spin on both sides of the aisle about it. I had expected the German man to think Obama was undeserving of the award but his opinion was actually quite the opposite. The German man said “Obama is so popular abroad, it seems like the only place that he is disliked is in his own country”. I had to sadly agree that this did seem true, and made the case that there is a lot of money and an entire tv and radio empire behind the opposition dedicated to his destruction.

We left Pingyao on a 20 hour train ride to Lanzhou where we are catching our train to Tibet. Again we had a problem getting tickets and were only able to get seats, no beds. I was trying to persuade Chelsea to fly but she made me suck it up. About 3 hours before our departure, the woman who ran the hostel was able to get us sleeper seats! She was so thoughtful to try and do that for us, without us even asking. If you’re ever in Pingyao, stay at the Harmony Guesthouse. The staff obviously is superb, and they have pancakes on the breakfast menu! I’m now sitting on my bed in the 18^th hour of our train ride and am very comfortable. We have been going through beautiful mountains, seeing small clusters of housing, drying corn from the eaves of their roofs and green fields on the banks of a river. All is good! Tibet on Wednesday!

1: City Wall, Pingyao

2: Main Street, Pingyao

3: West Gate wall entrance at night, Pingyao

4: Our taxi/golf cart driver through a lane of trees, outside Pingyao on the way to Shuangling Temple

5: I’m getting really good at my secret photo shots, we opted not to get this photo done of ourselves, Pingyao

6: View from the train, en route to Lanzhou

7: My sleeper compartment-mate, en route to Lanzhou