Bananas Don't Travel Well

Chinese touristsTurpan is famous for its grapes, and infamous for being the hottest place in China. The town is set in a depression 80 metres below sea level, on the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert. The train stops an hour short of the town, in the village of Daheyan. We alighted to find that in October the weather was pleasantly warm and sunny, not scorching. On the platform an adjacent train was transporting hundreds of gleaming new mobile missile launchers, presumably to one of the Taklamakan desert testing zones. We stared, but refrained from photographing.

Out of the station, we found our way to the bus depot and before long were en route to Turpan proper. The bus trip took longer than anticipated, as several kilometers of the road had been washed completely away by rogue floodwaters. The deeply carved canyons impressed upon me how much more obvious the effects of water are in places that normally have so little.

An ugly scene

On this ride we witnessed our first rather disturbing incident in China. The bus driver, and the majority of the passengers, were Han Chinese. After a few kilometers, two Uighur women and a young boy got on board at a small village. They paid the attendant and he accepted their fare. Not long after heading out into the desert, however, the driver turned to the attendant and said something inaudible. The attendant came to the back of the bus and demanded more money from the Uighur ladies. They grew irate. The attendant threatened to put them off the bus. One of the Uighur ladies lost her temper and began yelling at the driver, so furious she was spitting. I didn’t catch what she said—her accent in Mandarin was strong and she was yelling fast—but the gist of her message was clear. The giggles of the other passengers didn’t give the impression of being spawned of embarrassment or shame. Rather, it seemed they were joining in the mockery. In the end, the woman paid up, marching to the front of the bus and throwing the coins at the driver venomously. In Kashgar, we’d met tourists who felt that the presence of the Chinese in Xinjiang was largely beneficial to the Uighurs, citing education, roads, modernization. But this incident, along with the treatment of our Uighur truck driver by the police as we had crossed the border, suggested to us that it is not all peaceful coexistence in Xinjiang. And we’d only been there a week.

Turpan and the Emin Minaret

We got to Turpan in the late morning, and set off to find a hotel. We discovered that it is quite easy to bargain for rooms in China. Chinese hotels all have price lists at their front counters, but if you just ask the price it is almost always already discounted by 50% or more. Most Chinese hotel rooms are also virtually identical in design, so it doesn’t take long to discover what they should be worth based on how clean and how run-down they are. In Turpan, we negotiated a room for about 1/3 the posted price.

Emin minaretWe found Turpan itself to be pleasant enough, but fairly boring. Travel guidebooks make much of the grape-trellised streets; no doubt in summer they are a welcome respite from the ungodly heat, but they are made of concrete and seemed somewhat contrived to us. We also found the dining options fairly limited in Turpan. But there are some interesting attractions on the city’s outskirts. We tried, twice, to rent bicycles to do our exploring, but the tourist season had ended and we couldn’t find anyone to rent them to us. So we trundled off on foot to the Emin Minaret, a few kilometers to the east of town. It was a really enjoyable walk through sleepy vineyards. Turpan’s grapes are mostly turned into raisins—the sweetest we have ever tasted—and the countryside was characterized by square mud buildings laced with ventilation holes in which the grapes are dried.Emin skylights

The Emin Minaret was, like so many attractions in China, encircled by a wall, flanked by souvenir vendors, and accessible only after paying a steep admission fee. It used to be that foreigners were charged a higher price for admission to tourist sites than locals, but there are now so many wealthy Chinese traveling their own country that foreigners are no longer the subject of price discrimination. The Minaret was a mud brick construction, remarkably reminiscent of the Kalon Minaret in Bukhara. But, like many old things in China, it had been so thoroughly restored as to look brand new.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Chinese toilets but were afraid to ask

I got slightly lost trying to follow the signs to the toilet, and was put right by a friendly Chinese woman. So friendly that she squatted down next to me to continue chatting as we peed. Chinese toilets become such a topic of conversation among travelers that I figure they deserve a few words here. The squeamish might want to skip to the next section.

Unless you’ve been to China, it’s hard to fathom just what a Chinese toilet is like. Public bathrooms come with very little or no privacy. Stalls, if they exist, are usually only a couple of feet tall and usually have no door. The Chinese have absolutely no shame when it comes to bodily functions, and can often be seen chatting away, reading a newspaper, farting and groaning loudly as they do their business. Chinese toilets come in three designs: flush, pit and trench. All three can be unbelievably filthy and are whiffable from a remarkable distance—you often smell the toilets well before you could locate them by sight.

Flush toilets are usually the porcelain squat version, but Western toilets are also becoming popular. They are common in the cities, where there is plumbing, but relatively rare in rural areas.

A pit toilet is basically a hole with (usually) some sort of foot rests and a pile below—think outhouse without the toilet seat, or the house. In the mountains, these are often on the second or third floor and you get the thrill of watching your waste products free fall to a compost pile several meters below. But in most pit toilets you hover just inches away from the pile; in some cases they are so full that there is nowhere to place your feet without stepping in it.

Trench toilets are, as their name suggests, a long trench in the floor that you squat over. Periodically, water is flushed along the length of the trench, sweeping its contents away. The operative word here is periodically; in the interim, the buildup can be ghastly. I once took the stall at the end of the trench, in hopes of a little more privacy. I never did that again. There was a grill at the end that I suppose was meant to protect the plumbing from large objects. Its effect was to trap all the shit at that end, unable to pass through the blocked grill.

Then there was the time that the flush toilets were blocked, and I was earnestly and matter-of-factly instructed to pee on the floor. “Are you sure?” I asked. “You mean right here?” This was in a modern building in Kashgar, and I’d been told to go in a broom closet with no drain. “Of course! The toilets are blocked. Mei ban fa! Here, I’ll watch for you.” And she handed me some toilet paper. “When in Rome!” I figured.

Mei ban fa

There are two expressions in Chinese that explain a lot in China. One of these is mei ban fa. Literally translated, it means “there is no way.” In practice, it’s equivalent to throwing up your hands. Here are some examples:

• Why do the toilets stink? Mei ban fa. Shit smells so of course the toilets do too.
• Why do people push and shove in a crowd? Mei ban fa. There are a billion people in China. What else are they going to do?
• Why do people spit everywhere in China? Mei ban fa. They have phlegm they have to get rid of.
• Why do we have to build the Three Gorges Dam? Mei ban fa. There isn’t enough electricity to meet demand.

Cha bu duo

The other expression is cha bu duo, which literally translates as “lack not much.” It is generally used to mean “good enough” or “close enough.” It goes like this:

• Is this doorknob installed well enough? Cha bu duo. There is a flimsy, stripped screw holding it in place.
• Am I done translating this sign? Cha bu duo. Most of the words and letters are there.
• Are these sheets clean? Cha bu duo. They were washed before last week’s guests arrived.
• Is there hot water? Cha bu duo. After ten o’clock on Tuesdays, if we remember to turn it on.

Lest we give the wrong impression, there is an awful lot that does work in China, and many things that once were dismissed with a flippant “cha bu duo” or “mei ban fa” have now been taken care of. Hygiene, though still sketchy in places, has been vastly improved in China in recent years, and there is a great deal of function driving China’s insane economic growth. But there is still a lot to amuse the foreign visitor.

Jiaohe

JiaoheWe headed west from Turpan by bus and rickshaw to visit the ruins of Jiaohe. Just inside the gate, we ran into Cat, a young English woman we’d met in Kashgar. Together we toured the site. Jiaohe was one of the best ruined cities we saw on our trip. Unlike most Chinese tourist attractions, it hadn’t been restored, only excavated. There were a couple of Chinese tourist groups that stayed near the entrance gate; once we ventured a few hundred meters out we were completely alone with the wind whistling over the ruined city walls.

ancient wellWhat makes Jiaohe special is its state of preservation. The buildings and street plan are still discernible, and there is even an old well and a series of stupas and temples with faint outlines of Buddhist statues. The city prospered from its position in an important oasis along the Silk Road from the 1st century BC through the 8th century AD, when it was sacked. We thoroughly enjoyed looking around, and were thankful to be there in October when it was merely hot, for there was no shade.

Onward by sleeper bus

Cat was moving in our direction, and it turned out she’d booked a ticket on the same bus out of town. This was an overnight “sleeper” bus, an entirely new experience for us, and utterly bizarre. Sleeper buses contain three rows of berths (with two aisles between) that are stacked on two levels. The beds are about a foot and a half wide and about five feet long. Your feet fit into a compartment that forms a backrest for the berth in front of you. Despite the cramped quarters, you actually get a fairly decent rest—more than you would in an upright seat anyways. As we pulled away, a Chinese man went up to the driver to complain that the TV wasn’t working. “Score!” we thought. Halfway through the night we stopped for a bathroom break. Here we encountered the other type of Chinese toilet—the side of the road. All the women went to one ditch, and all the men the other. After our stop we were able to get some sleep, and we rolled into Dunhuang feeling refreshed.