Travelling in ladies' underwear

"Wo xiang liang zhang piao dao Pingyao!" It's another tongue-twister but we pull it off and the woman behind the counter gives us two train tickets to Pingyao, in Shanxi, a province near to Beijing. This little place has a well-preserved old walled town and it's been used in countless films, too many to count apparently. It's a long journey - a whole night and day on the train from Chengdu and we arrive in the dark. Even then we can detect huge piles of snow everywhere. Our guesthouse is in an old Qing courtyard house and we have a small but cozy room with a stone platform bed. It's no more uncomfortable than all the other rock-hard beds we've had in China, but the place is a little more atmospheric than we're used to.
And so is the town. In the cold light of day, very cold light, we wander the quiet streets and really feel like we've travelled back in time. No wonder the film crews like the place. Unlike so many other old places, this one seems to have escaped the excesses of the normal Chinese makeover. Inside the city walls are small paved streets, thankfully free of vehicles except those pesky electric bicycles that seem to be all the rage. They seem to make a real difference to our immediate environment though - no noise and no exhaust fumes (those are generated at the power stations elsewhere), but it seems a pity that no-one actually pedals anymore. One day they'll be wondering why everyone is so unfit in modern China.
Everything is grey in the weak winter sunlight, but that's probably because all the buildings are built in grey brick. Doorways into courtyards reveal snippets of daily life - washing on lines, bicycles being repaired, snow and ice beng cleared away. It is too cold though - a wind howls down the lanes and much of the time the buildings put us in the shade. We can only stand it for so long. Gayle spots a shop selling tights and gets a pair to wear under her trousers. They're one-size-fits-all so the next day I get a pair as well. Wow, what a difference it makes. Nothing can stop us now.
Our onward train to Beijing is another night train which we take with Silva, a young German who has also been staying at our guesthouse. Silva is teaching German at a private boarding school in Beijing. She tells us how the children get up at 6.30 am for exercises before classes begin at 7. In the evenings after tea, they continue studies until 9pm. On Friday afternoons they are collected by their parents and return on Sunday afternoons, but this free time is often taken up by further private tuition. It's a real insight into how much pressure these children are under to achieve. In one newspaper though, there is a discussion on job opportunities for graduates. Over six million students will graduate next year and there's a real struggle for good jobs. The worldwide economic recession has slowed China's growth rate and now the government wants to encourage the people to spend more money and consume more Chinese goods.
We talk about these things before finally turning in for the night in our super-warm carriage. I'm beginning to wonder if wearing ladies' tights is such a good idea after all....

Beach Time

One of the locals favourite pastimes in Chengdu is hanging out at tea houses and drinking tea. The parks are full of tables and on the one sunny day we spend here, the scene is lively. Unfortunately the rest of the time it's a bit grey and chilly. Still, we are ready for a break from travelling and although the city's not the ideal place for some 'beach time' , there's no sea, no sand and no sun, we end up stopping for a fortnight. The time flies. There are a few sights to see and thankfully Chengdu's enlightened authorities have made them all free entry with a Panda Card. The Panda card costs 10 pence. So civilised. We visit a couple of museums that are located on the sites of two remarkable archaeological finds both from China's early Zhou dynasty (about 1100 to 700 B.C.). In China's typical grandiose way, the museums are on an epic scale, and the finds are well displayed. Sanxingdui is thought to have been the capital of the ancient Shu kingdom of China and most of the finds here are incredible masks, mostly bronze and some gold. They look like nothing we have seen before and are very large. There are a couple of life-size bronze figures too. At Jinsha, the finds indicate a later capital, as if the Zhou moved west. There are an inordinate number of elephant tusks found in the sacrificial burial mounds. What's excited the Sichuanese is that there is evidence of connections with China's central plains, which was the most developed area in ancient China. What excites us is not so much the history, but the sheer art and craft of some of the pieces. There is a large amount of jade knocking about these sites too - something the Chinese still seem to be partial too, judging by all the jade jewellery and carvings we see for sale everywhere.
Whilst we're here we also become acquainted with Sichuan pepper. Now we thought Sichuan was the place for spicy hot food in China, when in fact everywhere we have been seems to dollop chilli into the cooking. What is special here is the mouth-numbing peppercorn which has a flowery fragrance when you bite into it, just before its numbing properties spread across your tongue and mouth. I love it. Gayle hates it.
We have become very comfortable and settled at Sim's. It's great to be able to dip into a huge dvd library and pull out a few very good films - something we have been starved of for so long. But ultimately it's not a reason to prolong our stay here. We have got another 30 day extension to our visa and, despite the cold, Beijing calls.

Panda Heaven?

The road to Chengdu, winding along the same river valley for 300 kilometres, is being rebuilt. The whole length of it at the same time. There's signs of the 2008 earthquake damage on some stretches - landslides and collapsed bridges - and we travel through new unfinished tunnels. Well, obvously they're finished, otherwise we wouldn't come out the other end, but they're crude, long, unventilated tunnels. For ten hours we drive along a buildng site. Along the way there's signs of new towns that have sprung out of the ruins of old ones.

Chengdu is at first appearances quite uninspiring. It's China's fifth largest metropolis, sitting below the mountains to the west and on the edge of the Sichuan basin that spreads eastwards around the Yangtze. The journey across town to the guesthouse seems endless. Everything looks like it was built in the last thirty years. It probably was. But Sim's Cozy Garden Guesthouse turns out to be just that - an oasis in this pitiless urban environment. Sim, a Singaporean, and his Japanese wife have created a wonderful comfortable hostel in an ugly modern building. There are two garden courtyards, lots of communal space and the rooms have been furnished for travellers. Look - hooks for clothes, somewhere to stash rucksacks, a DVD player. There's also a steady flow of punters of all types and ages e.g. the young Americans on a 3-week tour of China and South East Asia, an older Aussie/Canadian couple ambling through from Central Asia. We meet Jan who is cycling from the Netherlands to Astralia. He's full of stories and enthusiasm and joy for cycle touring (it's his first time) and he scratches our cycling itch. Then there's Phil, a Brit, who's on a visit with his Sichuanese wife, Yan. While he's here he's buying chunky Tibetan jewellery to hawk back at home when he's not teachng English. We're also very happy to see Jurek again and having spent a few lazy days doing nothing but laundry and watching a few films we've missed whilst travelling, we're keen to get out and see the pandas with him.

On the outskirts of the city is China's Panda Breeding Research Centre and an easy place to see these wonderful animals. The panda is native to Sichuan, living in the mountainous bamboo forests - they eat a lot of bamboo. As their natural habitat gradually disappears so do the pandas. Their survival as a species is more remarkable considering their mating habits - pandas only get it on once a year and tend to live a solitary life. In an attempt to keep the species gong the Chinese have spent years on research and at the centre in Chengdu we learn a little of how they have successfully bred pandas in captivity. In an attempt to find compatible partners the scientists first placed small ads in the local papers. Next they organised 'Speed Dating' events. In a remakable example of diplomatic detente, a specialist from India was invited to help. Dr. Virender Sehwag runs India's leading matrimonial agency in Uttar Pradesh, when he's not opening bat for the Indian cricket team. After years of failure the Chinese scientists went back to basics, rolled up their sleeves and gave the pandas a 'helping hand'. So far, hundreds of pandas have been bred successfully by artifical insemination and none have been reintroduced to the wild. As we wander around with Jurek we can understand why. The place is really just a zoo. The pandas live in concrete jails and are ejected each morning to sit in their enclosures and chew bamboo for our enjoyment. They are lovely creatures to watch. One happy looking panda picks up a fistful of bamboo and as he puts it to his mouth rolls backwards in a universal gesture of satisfaction. You can almost detect the smile. We have been advised to visit in the morning to witness ths morning ritual so it's disappointing to discover afterwards that we missed afternoon sports time. Apparently the pandas are encouraged to play ping pong, badminton and even kung fu in order to keep them in trim. Fooball had been tried too, but the pandas kept mistaking each other for the ball. The Centre is a green oasis in Chengdu, but it's hardly a substitute for their wild origins.

Wild West Frontier

The early morning bus ride to Langmusi takes us across beautiful high-altitude prairie grasslands with grazing herds of shaggy yaks and horses. Snow-topped mountains brood in the early morning light. The landscape is unutterably beautiful. At least this is what Gayle tells me. I sleep through most of it, like the locals, who are always away with the fairies the moment the bus is in motion. That is, unless they are throwing up. When I am awake we passby a truck that's managed to hit not one, but three yaks. He must have been really trying.

Langmusi is unfairly described as "enchanting" in our guidebook - a terrible misrepresentation of an ugly village plonked on the border of Gansu and Sichuan provinces. It is undoubtedly Tibetan - there are two monasteries here - and freezing pilgrims and locals go about in long coats from sunrise to sunset. They probably sleep in them too. At night the streets are virtually deserted. In the daytime young men ride into town looking like real cowboys from days of yore. Except nowadays they're riding Chinese motorcycles. They swagger into the noodles shops, doors left swinging in the wind, to slurp their dinner, picking out the vegetables from the broth in disgust. A beer is swigged and then Vrroooommm! they ride off in a cloud of dust.

There are snowy peaks close by and we once again plot a route and set off up the slopes in search of a sheep trail leading to the top. It turns out to be another great walk and we're lucky with the weather - clear blue skies and sunshine. No-one to be seen or heard. We climb up to a peak with prayer flags, snow and an impressive clutch of large wooden arrows tied together - the symbolism of which we know not. It's low season here but we still meet a few tourists in a traveller's cafe with apple pie just like our mums make. Well, sort of. We end up walking the next day with Jurek, a very jolly Czech who is going our way. We then travel souhwards together to Songpan, through more stunning scenery. Herds of yaks again, grazing the wide open flats and then an eventual descent into a narrow valley, passing some tidy and attractive Tibetan villages. New houses are being built in the old style. And then we reach Songpan itself - a disappointing town that's had an attempt at beautification i.e. a newly-bilt old fashioned pedestrianised shoppng street, red lanterns aplenty, and restored old walls. The weather has turned grey and Gayle has developed a Capstan on-Filter Cough - irritating to both her and me. Although it's still cold and a bit miserable (no heat in our guesthouse), we stay another day just to put off another bus ride. It's ten more hours down to Chengdu.

Yellow Hats

Well, the state we're in when we get off the train in Lanzhou is Gansu - a province shaped by the desert of Inner Mongolia in the north and mountains in the west. It's early morning and a freezing wind tells us that winter has arrived - everyone but us is wrapped up to the hilt. We're heading to Xiahe but the provincial museum gets rave reviews so we detour there on the way to the bus station. It's modern, free and heated so we enjoy it all the more. There's a lot of Silk Road archaeological finds, including Roman and Persian coins and ancient ritual jade daggers and vases. One item is decorated with silkworms. We are accosted by students as we walk around and stop for the obligatory photos.
Then its back out into the biting wind and onto a bus that takes us into the mountains and drops us into a grotty town peopled mainly by Hui, Chinese Muslims. In the 1800s there were two major rebellions by Muslims in Gansu that ended in their almost total eradication, but some communities have survived. This small town looks like it's missing out on China's new growth - the buildings are sad and ugly, the streets are scruffy. Thankfully there's a connection to Xiahe. Our crusty but trusty bus plods into more mountainous landscapes and finally deposits us in a muddy yard at one end of the very long one-street town. The sun has dropped behind the mountains and the sky is ominously dark.

In the morning Xiahe looks a lot better than first impressions. The sun is late to rise - a reminder that we're just a little further west - and there's a chill in the shade. The town's main draw is the Labrang Monastery, one of the six major monasteries of the Dalai Lama's sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The majority of visitors are Tibetan pilgrims who come here to pay homage and walk the kora, the circuit of the monastery lined with prayer wheels, stupas and temples.

The first sound we hear on this morning is not the chanting of monks or pilgrims but the unison shouts of soldiers returning to barracks behind our hotel. In the grounds their riot gear is laid out - for inspection or easy access? The riots in Lhasa in early 2008 also sparked protests here. It's alleged that 19 people died, but some think more. It's hard to know what tensions exist here - all seems peaceful and tourists have been allowed back since last July - but the town is visibly divided into three parts. There's the old Tibetan side, the Hui Muslims in the middle and Han Chinese at the other end, where big new buildings are going up. There are CCTV cameras on the main street and soldiers' barracks dotted about the valley.

The monastery is a huge complex of several temples, college buildings and hundreds of monks' houses. There's a constant stream of weary pilgrims circulating, uttering prayers, fingering prayer beads and turning prayer wheels. The air is thick with prayers. Most of the pilgrims are in traditional Tibetan dress - layers and layers and thick (yak-skin?) overcoats with overlong sleeves. Many of the women wear striped aprons, heavy jewellery and a face mask - to protect from dust/sun/cold. It's a fascinating ancient ritual but the pilgrims look shockingly poor and scruffy, with thin weather-beaten faces, compared to the well-dressed monks in clean maroon robes, good shoes and their chubby well-scrubbed faces. But that's how it always is. We meet a young monk, Gedun, who wants to practise his English. He's from a herder's family in Qing Hai, the province north of Tibet. He studies Buddhist philosophy, and will do for many years to come. We meet him for tea a couple of times and talk about life, the universe and, uh, Barack Obama. When we ask about the monks with gold watches, and mobile phones , laden with shopping or tucking into big meals in some of the nicer restaurants in town, Gedun explains that many come from wealthy families and have "business in China". This makes it even more difficult to watch pilgrims kow-towing to monks in the street.

The surrounding landscape is dry and almost treeless. There are grassy hills on both sides of the valley leading to distant snow-capped mountains. Farther off up the valley are vast expanses of grasslands, but it's late in the year now and the herders have returned to their villages. The weather is perfect for walking and we climb to a peak with prayer flags, in the middle of a horseshoe ridge that gives extensive views all around. From up here we can see a longer ridge across up the valley, which we attempt the next day. The days are sunny but cool, but it feels warmer up on the ridges than down in the town. These are our first long walks since we left India and they're wonderful. Sitting in the long brown grass, looking down on minuscule villages fills us with an exhilarating joy. We have found a beautiful and untouched part of China at last.

Back in the monastery we meet Andrea and Gerhard, two German cyclists who have come across frm Uzbekistan. They fill us with Bicycle Fever. Like all cyclists, they seem to be always eating. With them, we witness the daily assembly of monks, all in their yellow hats, for morning prayers. It makes for great photos. If only we could capture the babbling chants and conch shell hoots as well. At night it's freezing and we wonder how long Andrea and Gerhard can go on in this severe climate. We are struggling to cope with long cold nights in our hotel - it would be perfect if there was heating and reliable hot water, but only on our fifth and last night do we get both.

The Terracotta Hoax

It's probably China's most famous archaeological find - an emperor's burial pits that contain an army of 6,000 life-size terracotta soldiers. The Terracotta Warriors now tour the world in displays to promote China's cultural heritage. The closest we'd been to this phenomenon was in 2003 in Sao Paolo. But the queue at the museum was snaking around the building in temperatures around 30 degrees Celsius and we couldn't face the wait. Never mind - we're in China now. So it came as something of a shock to discover that the Chinese Government admitted the whole thing was a hoax only a few weeks before we arrived in Xi'an. The timing of the announcement was interesting. On the day that the world's press was dissecting the news of Michael Jackson's demise, a government spokesman was announcing the arrest and trial of provincial heads for "intentionally misleading the people of the world". Apparently, Xi'an party bosses, searching for something to boost tourism and the city's prominence, dreamt up the idea of "discovering" the warriors back in the mid 70's. A local farmer was thus paid to dig for a well and, purely by chance, locate the very edge of the largest burial pit. To ensure the elaborate hoax was not called, the perpetrators also went to great lengths to make sure that each terracotta soldier was individually produced - the site is famous for the fact that no two soldiers are alike. Very clever. Indeed it appears that no-one outside of about twenty people realised the truth. Thus, UNESCO even granted the site World Heritage status in the 90's.We visited the huge site anyway. The scale is impressive - buildings have been constructed over the three main burial pits and work is "ongoing". In other words, only a small amount of the estimated whole has been uncovered, reconstructed (all of the soldiers are apparenty in pieces) and displayed. The soldiers stand in situ, in the pits, about five metres below the viewing balcony. This puts you at a distance from the pieces. The Chinese tourists' enthusiasm is undiminished though - group after group push through the entrance and crush up to the balcony. No-one appears to look at what is in front of them - the vital thing is to capture a few photos on camera or mobile before being shepherded off to the next building. There are four soldiers that have been put in display cases for closer viewing. They are magnificent, although none really show the colours that each figure was allegedly originally painted. On the way out we pass a hundred souvenir stalls all selling remarkably good replicas of the Warriors. Mmmm. Bit of a giveaway really.National press coverage of the hoax lasted for a couple of days only, and global coverage amounted to short paragraphs from Reuters and other press agencies. It's estimated that 10,000 people are executed annually in China, more than in the rest of the world put together. Recent death penalties in the news include two men involved in the melamine-in-milk-powder scandal last year, a couple of men trafficking children and nine men involved in the riots and deaths in Urumqi. Party officials involved in corruption seem to get lighter punishment - a proper telling-off and a hundred lines of "I must not take bribes". This might explain why party membership is on the rise. But for the hoaxers of Xi'an this might not be enough to save them.

The Start of the Silk Road

Our 5-hour train journey to Xi'an takes ten hours. We seem to be stuck forever on sidings with nothing but a desolate landscape of flat land fractured by deep ravines. This is China's Yellow Earth - the loess blown southwards from Mongolia that makes up much of Shaanxi province. We are starving - thought we'd have arrived before lunch. Luckily Vivien stops to chat. She's on her way back to university and she has some french bread to share. She produces from her bag tiny little polythene packets of sweet white bread - the kind of crap you get on aeroplanes. We wolf them down, and in between chews, chat to Vivien about, y'know, life, the universe and everything. Well, no, not really. We only talk about China. Vivien tells us she wants to have a baby by a blue-eyed westerner with a "high nose". No marriage though. Her mum's divorced and she thinks men are not so good. Fair enough. She has a younger brother. It seems the one-child policy isn't uniformly applied. Exceptions are allowed for ethnic minorities and couples who are both single children. And some people break the rules. After visiting India and Indonesia it seems like the one-child policy is a critical social policy for development here. But it's also a frightening restriction on people's liberty and perhaps best demonstrates the state's control of lives.
Xi'an had become a bit of a Mecca for us since we seem to have traversed large portions of the old Silk Road on this journey. As the old capital of China, Xi'an was the starting point of trade with countries to the west along a variety of routes that stretched across the western regions of present-day China. Perhaps it was the start of globalised world trade. At its peak there would have been a huge amount of trade in goods and ideas and inventions between China and the Middle East and Europe. We still remember the silk cloth recovered from the ruins of Palmyra in Syria on display at the National Museum in Damascus, over 2,000 years old. It came from China and it travelled by camel from trading post to caravanserai right across Asia. In the opposite direction came Roman vases and glassware. Buddhism and Islam came with monks and traders. Why not the knife and fork? Eventually sea trade brought an end to the Silk Road and China's capital city moved further eastwards with successive dynasties. Xi'an is now a huge city once again and amazingly still retains it's impressive city walls around the centre. We walk most of their 14kms on a sunny day. There's not a lot of anything from olden days left here and surrounding the walls is another of high-rise buildings. But in the centre there are the grand drum and bell towers and an old Muslim quarter with a couple of mosques, built in Chinese pagoda style, and, more importantly, a couple of streets of food stalls and restaurants that get packed at night mainly by Chinese tourists looking for the L.S.D. Yep, that's right, it's the in-thing on your holidays here. Wherever you go, you must try the Local Speciality Dish. To be honest, I'm not sure what it is in Xi'an, but the fresh bread meat sandwiches are good, and the beef noodles hit the spot.We're hostelling again, but this time in a busier place that seems to be filled with mainly English people with northern accents. Bizarre. But kind of comfortable and very sociable. Hayley and Ben are travelling around the world with their young daughter. Their speed is dizzying to sloths like us. Before we leave, we take a bus out to a road junction on the west side of the city. In a little park area there's a huge stone sculpture of a Silk Road Caravan setting out. A little boy is clambering over the camel backs and heads of the traders. Down below an old fella is flying a kite about a kilometre above us. We give another old man in a greatcoat a fright - he takes one look at us and shuffles off quickly. If we wait long enough a tour bus will turn up for photos. Sure enough here it is. Out step the middle-aged tourists, to pose for photos, have a quick fag, then back on board and off. We will also be heading west, but only on a cheap and slow night train. This begs the question - what state will we be in when we get off the train?