Entrance to the People's Republic is Not so Easily Attained

            We've crossed Xinjiang province, and having made our way far across the dry and dusty Central Asian desert, we sit now high in the mountains on the very threshold of the Himilayan plateau.

It hasn’t been so easy to find a computer here, especially without a slightest shred of proficiency in Chinese. So, dispatches from here on out will be far in between. This is rugged country – worlds away from the Far East of Beijing, Shanghai, lush green river valleys, pagodas, dumplings, and even white rice. Instead, I’ve found myself in China, surrounded by Arabic script spelling out the Uighur language. I’ve seen great gold and turquoise mosques, men with long hardened beards and women under veil. I’ve not yet eaten rice, but rather thick wheat noodles made from dough to order. The tea is salty. The air burns. The oldest hard of these Silk Road cities stand tall, towering piles of human construction, thousands of years in the making, in which small mud-brick houses sit atop the crushed remain of those built for so long by the ancestors of the people who surround me now.

But, I will begin the story of how my brother and I have arrived in the mounts where now I write.

Eight days ago, I won the desperate two-week battle for a Chinese visa. What fun it is exploring national bureaucracy as it relates to foreigners. In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, I spent three full days in search of the embassy its self. One would believe that a state house for such a nation would be so easily located online, but it was not so. My Lonely Planet book gave me the location of what used to be the Chinese embassy, and internet searches gave me the locations of every Chinese government school or other institution in all of Bishkek.

In one day-long walking tour I sweat myself stinky exploring every address that the internet hinted could possibly house the Chinese embassy. But, of course, I didn’t find it. I suppose that I should mention this as well: I speak absolutely no Kyrgyz and such flawed and basic Russian that it’s not even worth assigning a level to. I can’t remember well exactly how many days I wandered aimlessly through Bishkek. Being so stingily frugal as I am, I knew always of one easy remedy that I could elect when I gave up the search on foot.

So, one day I stopped a taxi and told him “консул китайскй” – Chinese consul (at least that’s how I think you say it). I knew all the downfalls of this method. Primarily, there was a good chance that this poor taxi driver would recognize the opportunity of having a wealthy American student in his cab to buy his family something extra nice to eat, or maybe his friends something fancy to drink. He would likely take me in some wild shape around the city while the meter racks up, the drop me off with a friendly smile at the embassy so I could fork over my money. I’m as comfortable as can be taking a taxi here, but just when I know where I am going. Once the driver catches on to the fact that I don’t actually know the location of the place that I’ve asked him to bring me, well, business is business, and he found a customer who requires some special, high-dollar service.

So, I took the taxi. I imagined all the maps I’d seen online of where the Chinese embassy could be and I tried to imagine the streets so that I could formulate some remedy to my feeble helplessness if this guy got really clever. Quite quickly, we headed straight out of town. The buildings started to fade away, the air grew clearer, and the mountains grew larger before us. I slumped down in hopelessness. Where was thus guy taking me?

“Oh my gosh,” I thought. “This is as bad as the taxi-scam could be.” What would he do? Drive me for a hundred miles around all of Bishkek then ask me to pay for it? Take me to a place where his friends were waiting to beat me and strip me of everything I own? Sell me off into the global trade of sexual slaves? I tried to express my dismay. We spoke in Russian, though I grasped very little of what he said. To my ear, the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Where?”

Driver: “…(Talking Russian)…  Chinese Embassy.”

Me: “No. Chinese Embassy, Bishkek.”

Driver: “Yes, yes, Chinese Embassy Bishkek…   …very far…  …very big… …new.”

Me: “No. Bishkek. This not Bishkek.”

Driver: “Yes, yes, Bishkek. (Talking Russian).”

            Well, it doesn’t take so many taxi rides as a wealthy American in far away places to become familiar with this story: The place that you want to go to has recently moved to a new and far away location. Come into my car and I will drive you there.

            “Great,” I thought. I only wanted to go to China, and things were getting harder every day.

            But what a surprise I encountered. Some ways out of the city heading off towards the mountains, past the U.S. Embassy and Air Force base through which all of our soldiers are shipped to our Afghan war, and even passed the Kazakh embassy, we came upon a massive military compound. The rectangular settlement was surrounded by concrete wall two stories high with big black metal spikes protruding from the top to meet anyone who had dared to approach the place with a two-story tall ladder. Guard towers watched the corners and towers inside housed a sizable and well-guarded Chinese population. In the very center a great big Chinese flag was flown high above anything else.

            I looked at my driver with a somewhat apologetic sentiment. Suddenly, I felt ignorantly defensive, overly convinced of my own value to others to have believed I was such a tantalizing commodity that I could prompt so much deceptive effort on his part.

He stretched out is open palm and said, “Five hundred.”

            “Five hundred?! Two hundred.”

            “Five hundred.”

            Ok, well, apologetic sentiment withdrawn. I considered the situation. We were the only car around this suspiciously deserted Chinese Embassy/military complex. I was in his car. Had I better language abilities I would have explained something along the lines of: “Look, I’ve been coming to this city for some months now. I know how much a taxi should cost. You would never charge five hundred, that’s ridiculous. For that I could eat for two days. I will pay you the fair price.”

            But, with my realistic communication capabilities, I said, “Five hundred bad.”

            “Five hundred,” he said in a raised and irritated voice. I considered again. There I was, and American college student out traveling the world who’d never know hard labor except in short, abbreviated, and novel instances. I had never known real hunger, never known deep sadness, never known helplessness or institutionalized humiliation. And yet, there I was arguing with the Kyrgyz career taxi driver over the equivalent of about six U.S. dollars. Whether or not I believed it at the time, I told myself that, have done so much less work for my money than this man had, it was right that I pay him what he unfairly demanded. I put the money in his hand in a manner that said, “I know this isn’t fair but I’m doing it anyway (because I don’t have any choice).” I got out of the car and he drove away.

            So presently, I stood before that massive wall and searched for signs human life which could provide some direction as to how I should go about extracting a Chinese visa from that mammoth concrete settlement. There was no one in site, but a booth near the great imperial red steel gate seemed promising. Inside I found a guard, and in a single word inquired where I could get myself a visa.

"Visa?"

He pointed down the wall and motioned me to go around the corner. I walked some 100 meters along this great wall, and turned the corner to find another large door under a long red pagoda roof, built rather industrially and heartlessly in the style of old east China. The sign read: Consular Office of the People's Republic of China. Working Days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

It was Tuesday. My god. Luckily, there was a sign outside telling me the location of bank I had to go to in order to pay the $140 for my visa. I told myself that the day had not been wasted, because at least I had located the embassy, and now I could pay and get that trip out of the way.

So, I aimed my attention at the bank. But, when I looked around, I realized again that I was in the middle of nowhere, in a place where no taxi had the business to be, and I was not likely going to find a ride out soon. I walked to the main road, which took about 40 minutes. There I caught another taxi to the bank that had been named, and was once again ripped off by the driver, who treated my suggestion of what I know to be the normal taxi fare as completely ridiculous and a downright stupid thing for me to say. 

I went in the bank, waited 30 minutes to be called by a teller, and approached him with my 140 US dollars in hand. 

"Visa Kitaiski," I said (Chinese visa), "Pay." I made a paying motion, whatever that is, with my hands. 

"Do you have the red ticket from the embassy?" he answered in fluent english.

"No."

"I'm sorry, we need your ticket number so that you can pay."

"Ok. Thanks."

I left. That sucked. So, I felt that to be all that could be done on that day. 

The next day I woke up early to head to the embassy.  My plan was thus: Go to the embassy. Get bank ticket. Go to bank. Pay. Go back to embassy. Turn in application. Tada!

The only disturbing part was the knowledge of how much money would be lost on taxis, but at least I would get it over with. I arrived at the embassy, once again got ripped off by the driver, and at last found myself waiting in an hour-long line of smelly people. When I finally arrived at the woman at the window, I said, "visa," and handed her my passport and 7-page typed visa application.

"Have invitation?" she asked.

"No."

"No invitation, no give," she so eloquently explained to me. Then, she handed me the business card of a Chinese tour agency who could arrange my invitation to be sent from Beijing, along with all the application materials I had so recently handed her.

I left. At least this time, since it was a working day for the middle-of-nowhere embassy, the taxis had swarmed to prey on needy people. I took one, and showed to him the card I'd been given with the address of the agency. Again, stupid high taxi price. He brought me to a hotel.

"What?" I inquired about by general situation out loud. He showed me that yes; in fact, the card said that the agency was located in one of the rooms of this hotel. I verified. So, I went in, climbed the stairs to room 304, and inside found 2 young Russian people filling out newspaper crossword puzzles. There was a small office with one table and 2 computers, but which otherwise was completely empty. I had no idea what to say to them, so I simply handed over the business card.

The girl took it, then discussed with the boy something. At last, she turned to me, and in fast-paced Russian, interspersed with a few basic English words, she explained to me what I interpreted as: "They left 5 days ago and I don't know where they went." So there was no Chinese tour agency there anymore. I thanked them and left.

My next plan was to call the phone number, but for that I needed to put money on my phone, a task which meant going on an on-foot search for a machine that would allow me to pay into my account. Did that. I called the number, and thank god the woman on the phone could speak English. I asked her if she was, indeed, someone who could get for me an invitation letter to China, and she said yes. Her office was neither that named by the business card, nor was it located anywhere even remotely nearby. But, I set off, once again, walking in the sun.

When at last I arrived, I sat to speak with her. I needed an invitation, she explained, and it would take 3 days to arrive from Beijing. If I wanted a visa, I would have to pay $250.

“$250?!?!?”

But, I pointed out, the application said that I would have to pay only $140. She explained: $140 or the visa, $60 for the invitation letter, and $50 for her work, which I could not find reason to believe was anything but absolutely necessary. 

And, she said, it would take 10 days.

“10 days?!?!?!” I pointed out, once more, that the application said it would take just 4 days.

"No," she scorned, as if I were some dumb dog, "10 day! 10 day visa!"

But then she clarified that for 10 days it would be cheaper, only $230, but that then the embassy would make me pay $20 to them and it would be $250. I could get a 2 day rush visa for $270, but for me she would do it for $250. I was confused with the logic behind this deal, but opted for the rush visa for $250. 

 She revealed, I would have to renew my Kyrgyz visa for some silly requirement that China has with visa over-lapse. More money. More time. More effort. More confusion.

What a simple thing I was striving to do! Somewhere to the east of me there was a land called China. I wanted to go and meet its people and see the history of its land as embodied in the mountains and deserts and jungles and rivers and lakes. I wanted to exercise my one transcendental right, to exist upon the surface of this world and perceive the spectrum of its wealth of glorious wisdom. I stood then in the high wooded grasslands of Central Asia, and I sought to descend from that plateau into the vast desert that lay below. I sought physical motion, to see a new place, to alter my surroundings by transplanting my perspective, and what futile resistance I found myself encountering.

I needed permission. Someone needed money, and someone had to know where I was. This was formality, and for that I spent so many days walking back and forth across Bishkek, emptying my pockets into the wallets of taxi drivers, banks, and various state institutions. Who had the right to demand my money so that I could descend the mountains?

But, so things are around the fringes of nations. I got my Chinese visa in the end, and my brother flew from Texas to Bishkek with his visa already in hand. We caught a car south to the Chinese border.

A New Saga in the Story: Crossing China

     A new story is on its way up; one that begins amongst the Kazakh and Kyrgyz herders of the ex-Soviet republics and the Central Asian mountains and steppes. This story crosses a high mountain glacier in June to the silk road Uighur nation in sand dune deserts of Xinjiang, China, the climbs the Himalayan Plateau to the high, vast, and treeless mountain plains of Tibet. This story descends the other side through Sichuan and the towering green mountains that stand like conical teeth point out towards infinity. It crosses the jungle and the Mekong, and meets the water buffalo of the of the far, far East, until the continent's end is befallen at Hong Kong harbor.  There are trains and minivans, super-highways and muddy Himalayan roads, sheep, camels, yaks, and friends, butter tea and innards stir-fry.

   Read about it soon.

Fences

It gets hard to find a place to sleep. Thus far we've not paid once for a camping spot (save one 2 dollar fee to get into a Navajo park on the Little Colorado Gorge), but it takes some good time to find our ever changing nightly destination.


Its the fences that get us. Barbed wire fences. They run endlessly along the side of the road, taughtly displaying a sharp and rusty reminder that the land is not ours. Someone else has bought it. The fact of the matter is that, there is no room for people who don't own land. Unless you've paid for it, it isn't yours.

I find it silly, quite often, how long we look for a place to stay. Parks charge money. Ranchers will shoot you. Police will ticket you near even slightly urban streets. The idea is that, in order to live comfortably and securely, you've got to have a plot of land that is yours and no one else's. You must buy it before you can build a house. It's a fundamental part of life in the United States - absolute ownership of your part of the Earth.


So where does that leave us? We live on all the land. To date we've lived in the mountains - we lived in the plains of Eastern New Mexico, in the dry and sunny deserts of Utah, on the banks of the Colorado river, in the high pine forests around the Grand Canyon, and now in the scourching hot desert wastelands in the south of Nevada - we pretend to own nothing. Frankly, it doesn't make a damn difference if anyone does. To us, the Earth is a place to dine a hold to build a fire. It's a magical mass that miraculously sprouts fuel in the way of firewood and food. It's rest from the long long road we travel every day. It'll be there always in the twilight, when the desert heat subsides and we can sit and breath and dress the day's wounds and bruises of the body and mind.


There is where the value lies, and it can never be quantified numerically. A purchase of land is like a purchase of the air - the transaction of currency earns you little more than the right to keep other people out. Why is that so necessary? Answer: it isn't. We're proof. Of course, it depends on how you want to live your life, but the more time we spend in this world that we spin around us, the more absurd it seems each time we're asked to pay for a plot of land to park and sleep on. 


But it doesn't make much difference. We've slept in the forest, as far down the darkest road we could wander, to where Ponderosa Pines stand tall and silent, silhouetted by the milky glow of the sky. We've slept by the bank of the muddy Colorado, right as the murky bronze fury of strength blows out the walls of the Grand Canyon and flows swiftly with apparent determination where the water's flowed before it. We slept aside a canyon in the Indian Country, where a tossed rock ignited a clamour of crushing claps of rolling rocks, bounching endlessly between the looming stone walls. Last night we slept on the property of a mine in the desert, and trucks passed by the dusty dirt road all night long, coming in empty and carrying out some hefty loads.


And now, we're leaving the desert. Through Western Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and now Nevada, we've sat out the daily highs of 115 and more, spending any time we can in the water we find along the way. We've sat nightly in the bus, waiting for the sun to go down, yielding the most hospitable time of the hot desert day. There is sand in everything, most noticeably in our food. Death Valley is our last of the burning frontiers, then its up the Sierra Nevadas to a more accommodating land in the North.


Tomorrow's my birthday, and we'll be in Las Vegas. I'm turning 20, so we're gonna set out to find some cheap come-in-our-casino lobster dinner offers. We'll be around until the 5th, when Antoine lands en route from Belgium. Antoine is a friend I encountered while in Cordoba, Argentina, and I remember him as being the one who was always willing to spend a couple pesos on a drink for a friend, but only so he could see them drunker and laugh and laugh and laugh. With him I shared my technical ignorance and my appreciation for minimalism. Likely out of my conversations with this silly French Belgian that much of what I believe first popped into my head. He's a loose wanderer, ready to disregard anything and just go because it seems nice at the time. I can't wait to see him again.

Medicine Song

Two days ago, I sat and pondered the situation my busmates and I had found ourselves in. As I drove west across the bleak and sandy desert, three Navajo men, two brothers and their uncle, bellowed the heart song of their sacred cactus. We were bringing them to some dinosaur tracks, a few miles outside of Tuba City, and had spent some good time listening to them sing the archaic songs of their tribe. They told us of their language, their home, their view of the outside world, and their ceremonial use of desert plants - rubbing on the knees, head, and chest.


We'd ventured into the Navajo reservation hoping to learn some about this people that we know well by name, but not much else. A short while after we took aboard our three hitch hikers and given them water and canned fruit, it wasn't long before we had a solid 5 Navajo tribes men, prodding us about our lives back in Texas, asking us to sing songs in exchange for theirs, sharing with us the quirks of their home, and all the while bantering in Di' neh, keeping us from really grasping the holistic picture of what the hell was happening.


The reservations are well a part of the third world. The way of life I observed in Tuba City sported obvious parallels to the Native Americans of South America. The dirt lot in the middle of town had been converted by early morning into a market square, with men, women, and children out to sell piles of used clothing, construction tools, herbal medicines and spiritual remedies, and spectacularly random assortments of tea kettles, hats, blankets, and hammers. To the side, women prepared grilled mutton, blue corn mush, stewed squash, fried bread, grilled peppers, and several spam dishes on home made and portable kitchens, all set under and onning and next to foldable tables, like the gypsy restaurants of La Doma.


It's so strikingly obvious, straight from the start, that this is another country. People live in conditions that Americans could never imagine forming a part of hour motherland. In the household that I visited, and infant lie sleeping on her back, atop a folded wool blanket with a pillow beneath her head, as all the 8 or so members of the family sat around the room they had to sit in. It's life in the third world (although the people themselves half-jokingly recognize themselves as a part of the fourth world - the onle left completely behind).

Neighborhoods are mostly void of plant life - an attribute accredited to earlier Americans' quest to find the nation's worst and most inhospitable land for the indians to inhabit. They are ghettos, with most homes, as I can tell, build by the hands of the inhabitants, of stacked stone, mud and wood. If not, they are trailers made imobile and left to disentigrate under the ware of desert heat and populants seeking refuge.


Our first night on the reservation, we picked a cliff overlooking the Hopi village of MoenKopi to sleep. From the canyon walls, we sat and gazed downwards at the many farmers pushing plows through their small family fields. The valley settlement consisted of a small hillside stack of adobe and stone houses, built long ago by the canyon's earlier inhabitants, that cascade motionlessly down the side of the canyon wall. As you reach the flat dry bed between the cliffs, the land transforms into a jigsaw pule of family farms, all small enough to be worked by a farmer and his wife and kids. The fields are irregular in shape - not perfect squares or rectangles - a testament to the laborious man hours that had been put into tilling, raising, and digging irrigation for the farmland.


The consistencies I find between these places and the farming communities of Bolivia and Peru through which I've past spotlight what I can see as the culture, philosophy, and ways of life that radiated amongst Americans before the first European ever made an appearence. It's a lost philosophy. As distinct as we would find Western thought from Oriental, Muslim, or Hindu, that is how much the roots of American society differ from our own. My fascination is in the continuity of the people's ways across the continent. That, more than anything, brings to attention the cohesive mass of many different peoples, tied together by the common thought and regard that distinguished the Americas. In the ways they think of eachother, of the Earth, of the world outside, of friends, of family, of spirituality, there always exists the same fundamental tweaks that differentiate any major world culture from another.


And this is all something the we've lost. The Navajo disparingly recognize themselves as a people with a stolen future. Imagine everything that's become of Western society since the turn of the 19th century. Think of our developments in science, humanity, spirituality, thought, and in life since then. The indians here know well that their people had a future before them that was taken away, and they were left to unknowlingly wonder what the Navajo could have become.

So our Navajo friends stepped off the bus after a full day of we're-not-quite-sure-what, but we met some people we learned well from. Our following days put us in through the Grand Canyon, and Flagstaff, AZ, where we replaced our camera and left rear shock. Hooray. We're trucken northwest towards the other part of the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas where Antoine comes flies in to meet us.

Our Time Machine

We met a grey and bearded trucker in a rest stop just south of Arches National Park in Utah. He looked like a plump and jolly Santa Clause, dressed in jeans and a sunset-themed hawaiian shirt.

He never shared his name, but we sat and listened to his stories about life on the road, living on the highways, surviving on the move, and how to take it all in.

We live in a time machine, he told us. In The Bus, we understand. Out the windshield is the future. In our mirrors we see the past. Everything inside is the now. We roll through time, watching it flow from future to pass, and as the hills and mountains subside before us, and a vast expansive plane comes into view, we have a better understanding of what's to come. Them, we're back into the cliffs, with towering stone protrusions from the Earth casting uncertainty on the distant future. We just can't see it yet.

Our notion of time on Earth is broken into moments - and infinite stream of infinitely minute instances, and perceived individually and in sequence. It's like planes in the second dimension. All of them are there, and together they yield recognition of depth, but from a two-dimensional perspective, they're only instances, and come one after another with no connectivity.

And that's what we learned from the trucker, who took the time to reflect, out loud, on his appreciation for encounter "three would-be hippie kids (if this were the 60's) sitting a whittling sticks at a highway rest stop by the cliffs." He had just come out to talk to us and see what we were doing.

Since last I wrote we crossed the Rockies. From the sputtering crawl up to Independence Pass, we found the other side, and glided west, down and down from icy tundra to alpine woodlands, to foothill forests, and onward to the red and rocky deserts of Utah. 50 miles past the border into Utah, we picked a road to wander and look for a spot to camp and cook the chicken we'd bought some days before. Along the way we encountered another one of those hidden treasures, set in the Earth for drifters to find. The town: Cisco. Population: 0.

It was a small but spectacular glimpse into our apocalyptic future. Collapsed wood workshops and houses, refrigerator, truck transmissions, over grown prarie grass, and a healthy selection of about a dozen abandoned buses and RVs.

There was no one; not a single sign of life or human occupation for a long long time. We parked to explore. Old one-room houses were littered with rusty metal and relics of their heyday - books for them 50's, 60's, and 70's, eight-track tapes of Kenny Rodgers and Steve Earl, old and broken vintage appliances. RVs were left out - wood rotten and collapsing, preserving a livable interior left dusty by the countless years. We salvaged some treasures off this old and rocky dirt road.

No explanation comes to mind for the state of poor old Cisco. Plague? Radiation poisoning? Mass exodus? It's a modern ghost town that's sat for 30 years. I don't know why.

The next day, many miles down the desert road, we found Arches National Park, a red and sandy desert preserve sporting gigantic stone gateways - arches that rise and plummet to the Earth, like trail markers of divine and giant desert wanderers. From the Devil's Garden trail head, we set out straight into the desert, leaving the trail before it started to find our way. That's hiking, after all. Traveling trails warrants no special name, and aside from carrying a small and personal water supply and wearing some nice and pricey shoes, it differentiates little from common walking. The true sport and adventure implied in the word 'hiking' comes from thinking about every step - sidestepping cactuses and desert brush, maintaining orientation on the mountains far ahead as you round the dunes and boulders as they try and throw you off your way. We walked for hours in the sandy basin, climbing each stone mountain we encountered, and sitting at the top to absorb each spectacle we found.

Two days and an illegal parking citation at arches gaves us our fill of the rocks, and the full time walking in the sun left us yearning for some driving time. So, we moved a short ways down the line to Moab, a little desert town advertising adventure tours to European tourists, then on to the rest stop where we spent the night. The road lead through the great Canyonlands of Utah, an endless network of towering canyons carved by the intermingling Green and Colorado rivers. There's really no end to the spectacle of constant motion.
Yesterday we made it just a short ways south before running up on a blue and placid lakes, walled in by the desert cliffs and grown with Ash trees and lake-side scrub. It was too tantalizing to pass up, so we called it a day, and pulled aside to bath, wash some clothes, cook some hot dogs and veggie stew, and sit and wait for the night to arrive. Unfortunately, this is where photographic records end, at least until we get to Flagstaff, AZ and find someone to fix our camera.

At the lake, and at each patch of land we make our camp, we leave the same things behind: a fire pit surrounded by rocks, filled with ashy coal, some cut up bushes, burnt to keep warm, and some chicken bones strewn in the soil. Our marks are hardly distinguishable (minus the tire tracks), from those left by our founding generations for tens of thousands of years. It's all we need. We pick our camp, never paying to use the land, and sit to whittle, carve some rocks, make a little music, clean our home, and cook our food before the sky goes black and starry. During the day we're on the move, slowly creeping west, taking the turns and hidden roads that pique our interest along the way. That's how it is.

Now we're in Arizona, planning to spend some time with the Navajo in the northeast before heading for Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas.