A Goal and a Path to Get There

Leaving Kyrgyzstan went smoothly by any standards we'd managed to maintain. The trucker drove us the three or four kilometers to the Chinese checkpoint (which turned out to be only one of five), but we were then told by the guards that we'd be required to take a special (pricey) ‘international’ bus to Kashgar, the first city over the border, 'for our safety.'

As the Chinese border guards searched all our things, they paid particular attention to books. They dug every book out of our two backpacks and thumbed through them for anything that was obviously not allowed. For closer inspection, they were all delivered to the apparent head guard, who spoke and read English. When he came across our Lonely Planet China guide, it was clear that he recognized the sort of book it was, and in the conversation between the guard I picked out the word ‘Taiwan.’ Sure enough, after sifting through the pages and the index, the guard settled on the double spread map of the region on the inside cover. It showed China in illustrated geographic detail – mountains and rivers and deserts and forests with blues and yellows and greens and browns. But, all of the surrounding countries were grey without any detail included. Taiwan was grey, and consequently we were informed that the book could not be brought into China lest the illustration cause confusion amongst the citizenry.

Uh-oh. That book is vitally important. Not only does it contain the only maps we had to use, but it provides the only descriptions of the area in general. Without that book, we would have no idea where to go or why, and would likely end up drifting from one city bus terminal to the next heading slowly East to Hong Kong. We would have no idea where to find the old palaces, towers, walls, and other hallmarks of the ancient ancestors of this land, and actually we wouldn’t know how to find even the bus or train station in even a medium-sized city. If we’d spoken Chinese, it wouldn’t really have been a problem, but because we didn’t (and not even a little), it was a problem.

But then, the guard presented the option that he merely remove the map fromt he book, and I opted for this before he finished the offer. With one swift and spiteful motion, he tore out the page and handed back the book. Our passports were collected as military men conducted a thorough search of the official ‘international’ bus, complete with hammers and screw drivers and drills, tapping and listening on all hollow places. Then our small group of border-crossers on that day was herded inside.

There, our identities were checked once more as our documents were handed back, and the bus was cleared to leave. Apparently, they had to be absolutely sure that no undocumented human could enter China and sink off into anonymity amongst the 1,400,000,000 others. There were only a few people on board, mostly Kyrgyz, one Tajik, and two Americans. The four hour bus ride lasted 10 hours, and took us through some ruggedly inhospitable terrain in the process of a massive development effort.

There are certain construction projects that bear the unmistakable mark of imperial capital, and in this era a solid hallmark of that is one piece of work that disappears off into both horizons. Also in our modern era, this project don’t come from many sources. In fact, there have only been three who build on such an epic scale: the USA, the USSR, and now, China. These continental empires build (or used to build) great and colossal works to feed their populations. In the same fashion of the Roman aqueducts, power cables are run on huge steel towers, anchored in concrete, across vast expanses of land to bring electricity where there would not be. Here in China, they were building roads on the same fashion as our own Interstate Highway system that was built in a mad rush of productivity.

 For hours and hours we passed work crews laboring away on a wide and modern highway to lead up to one of China's most remote border crossings, but, as a cause of great discomfort to us, the road was yet to even nearly be completed. So, we didn’t quite reap the benefits. But, so spectacularly, they were constructing the entire thing at once, and not laying it out before them in a line progressing westward towards the end of their country. No, for hours and hours men and beastly machines worked beside our small dirt road to cut through mountains, pour pillars for bridges, flatten fields of boulder, and lay the path for China’s modern era. There were jack-hammers and scooper machines and dump-trucks and even sites of clear explosions to remove huge swaths of mountain. And, to heighten the intensity, we were hours and hours away from any sort of town. Where did those men and machines come from? I can’t imagine.

With such power at work besides us, our bus lumbered bumped along at a deathly ironic crawl, pressing onward through clouds of intrusive dust and deep desert road ruts. We passed multiple checkpoints, at each of which we were taken off the bus, our documents were collected, the bus was searched, and then our passports were handed back as we entered the bus again, single file. Each time, we lost a little bit of sense of what was going on. We passed each checkpoint then asked each other, “So…   Was that it? Are we here?” But, each time, everyone got back on the bus, so we got back on too. I tried to ask the driver what was going on, and I did this by pointing to the ground then putting my palms face-up at shoulder height with cocked elbows in what I believed to be an internationally inquisitive stance. “Where are we?” was what I was trying to get at. But, I think that in his eyes I was dancing for him, because he only ever chuckled.

But, things cleared up when we approached a checkpoint facility 25 times bigger than any we had passed through. This giant complex consisted of a long line of checks, four separately staffed desks all in a line, by which we had to pass in succession, through the length of a long, epic hall with ten-meter-tall ceilings. At each one we handed in our documents and were given some degree of approval before passing to the next one. Clearly, each ran our passports through different systems, printed out different colored registration cards, inquired in bad but excited scraps of English who we were and where we were going.

I told them, “Hong Kong” and they laughed like I was crazy. They understood it in the way that an American border guard would asking a traveler with no personal transportation and just a backpack where he was going as he crossed into Texas at Laredo. The traveler says, “Alaska.”

 Thirty minutes later and 40 meters farther than when we had begun, we handed our passports one last time to the guards protecting the exit gate, and got the go ahead to be free.

 

And finally, that was it. This battled that I had waged against the Chinese bureaucracy, the Central Asain transportation infrastructure, and the monumental geographic barriers of that land seemed over. Ever since my hunt for the Chinese embassy in Bishkek began to draw its self out, this was the moment I had fantasized about. As far as I could tell, we were officially in.

But, wisdom tempered the thrill. I had felt this same ‘victory’ when I got my visa, when we caught a car to the border, and when we walked up to that wretched crossing facility in Irkestam. I had planned to be in China eleven days before but had been met by such unexpected resistance from all around. Something was beginning to become clear: I’d been thinking about this journey all wrong. The thrill, and the sense of accomplishment, was not ever going to be in the destination but in the arduous trek down the path that eventually and inevitably ends. Consumed by the idea that I had somewhere to be, somewhere to get to that seemed fantastically more glorious than wherever I was, I had convinced myself that the eleven days past were days spent in passing; in preparation. In trying to get to the peak, I hadn’t really paid attention to the rest of the mountain. I thought of a proverb I’d heard once from the Andean people: The goal does not exist. The goal and the path are the same thing. How true it is. This path that I was on meant much more, served me much better, than would simply being in China. The lessons, the memories, the insight, the stimuli, and the adventure were hidden all along the way. This struggle I’d just overcome was the path that I had taken, and from my time on this path I have written these stories. It is the same in the course of a human life. Too often we fix our eyes on where we are going, and thus forget that the life we are given is but a single path. It has no great destination, no peak called adulthood or success, but rather is a short time that we are granted to learn and explore, to grow and develop each day given our surroundings at that time. Being alive, we must always live to learn and to explore, to collect the information around us and synthesize it as only a human being can, then store in in our great databases of wisdom housed within every human head. Now I was ready to go forth into China and turn of the mysteries that danced throughout my dreams.  

The bus continued some hours farther to Kashgar, the westernmost city in all of China.