Day 310: Lamas and Trains and Bears, Oh my!

Okay, I know. But you see, my computer is broken, so I can't go online as much at the moment. So here's a massive update on the rest of travels and some of what has happened since then.

So, the train to Lanzhou was hell. It was a hard seat, and 24 hours. The people around us were really obnoxious and talking about us, and as soon as they relaised we speak Chinese, switched to Sichuanese, which we don't understand. Then the little girl opposite us was a horrible little girl, bullying her brother and annoying everyone on the train.

We extended our tickets to Xining, as to get back to Urumqi we had to go back to Lanzhou anyway, and we arrived in Xining mid-afternoon. We got to the hostel, and the door was locked. It was the only hostel we knew about in Xining (the capital of Qinghai (literally green sea, but as the Mongolian word for lake is like the Chinese word for sea, they used that word)), so we persisted in ringing the bell. Turns out, the door was locked because there aren't many tourists at that time of year. But they were really nice and let us stay anyway. Only problem: no water. Because it was around -20 degrees, all the pipes had frozen except for one toilet which flushed. I don't know how that worked and nothing else did, but it was really annoying.

Anyway, in Xining we did all the important bits: the Qinghai (the huge lake that the whole province is named for) which was beautiful and still frozen over - the ice was 4m deep. It was cool to walk across the huge lake, but as it was just scenery and there was nothing to do, we didn't stay long. Getting a bus back to a very long time, as you just stand by the road and wave down a bus, but the buses are very infrequent and the first bus we tried to flag didn't stop. But we made it back that evening in time for a really good dinner and an early night - being at high altitude and having been travelling for 5 weeks really takes it out of you.

The next day, we did the Kumbum monastery, famous for it's yak butter statues, which really weren't as amazing as I expected, but they were still incredible. Having seen that, we were ready to get back to Lanzhou to get the train back to Urumqi.

The train to Lanzhou was fairly uneventful, although there were loads of Tibetan people. The coolest part of Xining is seeing all the monks just walking around in their full-on monk clothes. It was quite weird, but cool.

So, we got to Lanzhou, and the plan was from there to go to the farthest west reaches of the Great Wall, see the caves at Dunhuang, and then head back to Urumqi. But by this point, we were just so physically exhausted and missed Urumqi so much we decided just to head straight back. Only problem: very end of spring festival holiday, so there were no train tickets for the next week. So we tried the bus station.

Hurrah! There was a bus to Urumqi. A sleeper bus, which is stupidly expensive, and takes a very long time: 31 hours to be exact. It should have taken around 26 or 27, but we kept making really long pointless stops. Just when it couldn't get worse, the beds are around 4'8 long. Now, I'm 5'10. This made for a very uncomfortable journey. Add to that the ice inside the window, and we were pretty miserable by the time we got back. By this time, it had been about 5 days since we'd showered, so we smelled rather unpleasant, so as soon as we got back we showered and then sat around doing nothing. It was great.

For lantern festival (the last day of Spring Festival), we went up Hongshan (red mountain) in the centre of Urumqi to look out at the city and watch all the fireworks. I took some photos, but because Urumqi's pollution in the winter is so bad, it's just a hazy glow, so I'm not putting photos on here.

A week or so later, classes started back, and it was back to normality until March 18th.

March 18th, 10:30pm local time, I went to the airport. To collect Nicki (my high school classmate and second year flatmate, also a fellow Invernesian). It was really weird to be in China with her, but it was totally awesome. We did the full tour of Urumqi, including places I'd never been to due to lack of motivation. We ate every type of food you can buy in this city, and we went to the Heavenly Lake.

The Heavenly Lake is astounding. We walked up to the lake from the car park, which took around an hour, and was amazing. It was so quiet and peaceful, the air was so clean you could actually taste it, and there were no people to be seen for the whole walk up. I personally think the walk is better than the lake itself (not that the lake wasn't amazingly beautiful). For someone who had just come from the UK, it was probably nice and all, but for someone who has lived in a grey polluted city for 7 months, it was amazing.

Wow this is an abridged version of events.

So after Nicki left, nothing interesting happened until the end of April, when Nikki and I went travelling once again. But I'll tell you about that in the next post, because I remember it more clearly and can post some photos. And also, a lot happened on that trip.

So until next time...