Chapter 212

Distance covered: 615 km (total 10 282 km)

We got up, packed, and drove to Dulan to have breakfast at the same dumpling place we went to yesterday. Then we hit the road, going southeast through the Tibetan plateau. Huge snow-covered mountains appeared, sheep got replaced by yaks, and we reached altitudes of over 4000 m. I took the wheel for the first three hours or so, then the girlfriend, then her dad.

I had been to a different, but nearby area of the great plateau and the northern Himalayas in 2009, and it was wild as hell, with narrow gravel roads snaking up and down the mountains, and it took two full hard bumpy days to cover just a few hundred kilometers down to Sichuan province, packed in a minivan with a bunch of Tibetans drinking rancid butter tea from Thermos bottles. Now, there are smooth two-lane highways and long tunnels, and we could cover a lot of distance at a more than reasonable speed.

Above some of the villages were a walled temple with a golden roof, an undeniably beautiful piece of architecture, but also one that reminds us of the creepy theocracy that the Greater Tibet was until it got liberated. The integrality of the population lived in serfdom, tending the herds and toiling the fields and getting scraps from the elite monk class in return. There were also instances of sexual slavery, and no, I don’t think ALL of it is propaganda from the Chinese to justify bringing them roads and electricity and opportunities to do something else than live and die at the whim of a bunch of crimson-robed overlords.

And even if we omit the political aspect, at this point it might feel like beating the brittle bones of a long dead horse, but I’ve always found and will always find obscene that you have ridiculously luxurious and opulent religious buildings surrounded by slummy looking farms. Especially when it’s for a religion that supposedly pushes asceticism and parting with material possessions. Buddhism sucks.

At one of the 328 509 618 picture stops we had, I took a pack of salami and a beer from the icebox. It’s apparently not a very good idea to consume alcohol at a high altitude but hey, *whistles innocently*. I haven’t felt the effects of altitude much, aside from being short of breath faster.

We arrived in the small town of Jiuzhi in the late afternoon. We got inexpensive, but beautiful and enormous hotel rooms, and for once there was zero problems with getting me in. We all had to go get covid tests done though. Or at least it seemed, we got to the brand new clinic (they were still unpacking medical equipment from cardboard boxes) and the guy in charge, clad in a hoodie and sweatpants to ensure he looks really official and professional, looked to be making up stuff on the spot rather than enacting clear policies. In Caucasian-Chinese slang, this is refered to as yinggaishuring (*).

So we got throatfucked by those long Q-tips and paid 65 yuan each for the pleasure, and then went to eat at a muslim restaurant of peace. The meal was fantastic.

I checked my e-mails, for the first time in a few days, and one from my dad was ominously labeled URGENT. It’s some kind of document from the Canadian government I need to fill regarding my non-resident status for tax purposes. I printed the PDF at a neighboring copy shop manned by five or six sisters (Tibetans, like other ethnic minorities, are not subjected to limits in number of children) and then was about to fill it and scan it, but I didn’t have my Chinese tax number handy. I fired up the website and the app from my provincial tax bureau, but having been programmed by the severely mentally handicapped nephew of the nepotist in charge, who just hammered randomly at his keyboard while drooling, it didn’t work. Great. I called my dad’s phone using Skype, we tried to figure it out but eventually just settled on solving the problem when I’m home in a few days, the document is not due for two more weeks.

(*) Yinggaishur is Chinese for “probably”, which is a very frustrating thing to hear when you’re looking for a clear-cut answer or, if not possible, at least a “I don’t know” or “I’ll confirm”. Barstool specialists of Chinese culture would tell you it’s related to the fear of losing face (fuck do I feel dumb aligning those words together, it’s so infantilizing), I’d say it’s more due to rigid hierarchical structures and, paradoxically, a total lack of accountability.

- So, what documents do I need to bring? Passport, work permit, one recent picture?

- Yinggaishur.

- ... Goddamnit.

(and then you either look for the info from another source and find out you also need to bring some other obscure documents, or you make the trip for nothing)

Chapter 211

Distance covered: 20 km (total 9667 km)

Next to my concrete slab was an empty lot littered with garbage, sheep shit and discarded construction materials. There was a two-foot tall hill that was the battlefield for turf wars between stray dogs, constantly barking through the night. So yeah, I didn’t sleep wonderfully.

We ate mutton dumplings for breakfast and then drove a short distance to the mountain range and stopped at some kind of low-key tourist site, with yurts to rent, a large enclosure with horses and a small visitors’ center. The gate wasn’t manned, so we just waltzed in, walked on the wooden platform in the grasslands, and enjoyed the superb view. 360 degrees around us were green mountains, it looked like Switzerland, minus the fucktardedly high price tag associated with everything in that Nazi-money-laundering country. The girlfriend, the dog and I climbed one, it looked easy from afar but was some serious work, it was much higher than it initially seemed. Those grass-covered mountains don’t look like much, with their uniform green color nd no point of reference like buildings or people or even trees. It was a super nice hike, and when we reached the summit, we could see the other side, which was a huge contrast, a flat grey desert with the small cluster of low buildings where we had spent the night.

I had a victory beer back at the car, and soon after we had instant mashed potatoes for lunch. The in-laws proposed we just hang out and camp here, and why not, not every day needs to involve a ton of driving.

So it was a lazy afternoon, after setting up the tent. I sat on the lawn chair under the tent’s tarp, wrote and read and watched the dog running after birds and butterflies. The in-laws drove back to Dulan to get the car washed and to buy stuff for dinner. We had mutton, cabbage and noodles, watched the sunset, and went to bed early. There were a bunch of locals hanging out at the reception center, having a campfire in a round brick pit, and listening to loud shitty Tibetan music. Their Bluetooth speaker started crackling and died, which was very very nice. I slept peacefully.

Chapter 210

Distance covered: 591 km (total 9647 km)

I woke up at 6:40 and went for a run. I didn’t plan a route, I just went in a random direction, knowing Golmud is a brand-new city built on a grid and I’d find my way back easily. There were indeed more than a few military bases, with austere soldiers guarding the gates, when I passed in front of them I pointed at them with my stretched index finger and did a small upwards motion with my wrist, as if I was shooting them. NO, JUST KIDDING. It was pretty damn cold, my bare chest covered in cold sweat and the tips of my ears feeling a bit numb.

Back at the hotel, shit-shower-shave-snuggle with the dog under the warm blankets for a bit, and then we went downstairs with our luggage. The day started on a pretty bad note: we have a 50-liter Esky(*) icebox, that we keep nice and chilled with ice packs and frozen water bottles. That implies having to refreeze the ice packs every two or three days: sometimes it’s very convenient, like if the hotel has a restaurant attached to it, or if we stay at a friend’s place. If not, we just ask neighboring corner stores, and reactions vary from “Sure! No problem!” to “Uh, I have to ask my boss, saowdengeehwar(**)” to “How dare you interrupt my shitty Douyin video watching session, you stinking peasant? You want me to HELP YOU without getting anything in return? Fuck outta here” Well, anyway, yesterday a shopkeeper was nice enough to let us put the icebags in his ice cream freezer overnight, and also a bag with beer, lunch meats and other small bags of perishables in the fridge. And soon after, that Mensa candidate took the bag from the fridge and put in in the freezer. Even if he didn’t peek in the bag, I’d have imagined he’d have gone “Uh, there’s the telltale clink-clink of glass containers in there, perhaps I should not stuff this in a freezer, unless I’m a fucking bumbling retard” So of course one of the beers exploded, filling the bag with shards of glass and some kind of beer slushy. I thought about smashing it all on his floor but just took the beers that survived and the rest of our stuff, now reeking of beer.

That raises the question, do you have the right to be mad at someone doing you a favor, but doing it in such a half-assed or incompetent way that it ends up not helping you, or even causing you more problems? In my opinion, yes. Noone is entitled to anyone’s help (except in life-or-death situations I guess), but if after asking politely they say yes, they have at least somewhat of a social obligation  to not shit in the shovel. Cooperation and altruism are what got mankind through the ice ages and living alongside sabertooth tigers and all that.

Anyway, can’t let it ruin my day, can I?! At least the Belgian white beer and the Tibetan beer are intact, it’s only a cheap lager that got lost. I joined the family at a muslim eatery, but because they didn’t want to let the haram dog in, I stayed out with him and ate my noodles on the stairs just outside.

We headed south in the plain where Golmud is located, with intimidating rocky mountains on the horizon. The beginning of the Himalayas. There was an old man and a young man walking on the side of the road, kneeling down every three steps and kowtowing before getting back up and doing it again, and again.

“What are they doing?!”

“Some kind or prayer thing the Tibetans do. They’re walking all the way to some monastery, you see them on every road in Tibet”, baba-in-law answered.

We showed our ID cards at a police checkpoint and for the first time, the dog had to show his vaccination booklet too. Then we kept going, there was quite a bit of traffic, as it’s the main road leading to Lhasa. A lot of slow-plodding trucks would create long lines on the single-lane road, and at some point we started overtaking a long convoy, when an angry policeman got out of his Jeep and told us we’re not allowed to pass it, as some of the trucks carry sensitive secret military shit. So we followed a bit longer at a painful 30 km/h, before we took a narrow side road and had a long picnic. I cooked a curry with fresh pumpkin, coconut milk and a bag of Japanese pre-made curry, and it was delicious. The girlfriend also finished the can of Spam.

“Do you know why Hawaiians like eating Spam that much?”, I asked her.

“Because they live in the middle of the ocean?”

“Yeah, that’s one reason, a lot of the food they get has to come by boat. But also because a lot of Pacific Islanders were cannibals and canned pork reminds them of the taste of human meat, the pig being our closest relative and what not”

Baba-in-law piped in: “Some Chinese also ate human meat, during the Mao Zedong years”

I’ve heard first-hand or second-hand stories that made me shiver, from the dark days of the failed commie programs. And not from 98-year-olds mind you, from people my parents’ age or younger.

We packed up, got in the car, and I drove further, among the mighty Himalayas. At some point, someone asked “Hey where’s the dog?!” A classic case of “I thought he was with you” “But I thought he was with YOU”

Fuck!

I immediately did a U-turn and hauled ass back. We’d been driving over 20 km on winding mountain roads, I went as fast as I could safely go. At least, there were no plodding slow military convoys. I turned on the small side road we’d been on, opened the windows, and turned down the music. We screamed his name for a bit, and then separated. I circled the area, and asked the few people I saw if they had seen anything: a Mongolian or Tibetan, well, a brown guy who dwells in a big tent, and a group of engineers of some sort working at a dam a bit further down. All negative. I wrote down my phone number in case they see him.

I then backtracked and went along the shallow muddy river, with the logic that the poor pooch probably ran after the car, and eventually got thirsty, in this arid desert heat. I hoarsely called his name every fifteen seconds and looked for paw prints in the mud. Every time I’d see a white rock or a plastic bag on the horizon I’d get hope, but no, still nothing. I wasn’t filled with sadness or dread just yet, no use, all I can do is keep exploring and be thankful I haven’t stumbled upon its body, squashed by an 18-wheeler.

My phone rang, the tent dweller. “I saw your dog! Your girlfriend is here, she’s going to get him” Thank Jeebus. He had crossed the road and climbed a huge mountain. I hugged him tight and gave him a ton of water as soon as the Subaru driven by baba-in-law came back, he was unsurprisingly very thirsty.

By that time, it was past 3 PM, so we went back towards Golmud and went on the highway. I was driving and selecting the music, and when some tracks by French electropop singer Yelle came on, I couldn’t sing along to the high-pitched bits, my voice was shot after yelling the dog’s name two thousand times.

The highway was pretty much deserted, the way (ah-ha, ah-ha) I like it. The scenery went from barren and desolate to colorful and spectacular and back, and one thing puzzled me a teeny bit. Usually, if there’s English at all on Chinese traffic signs, it’s correct and not the weird Engrish/Chinglish lazy dogshit you often see elsewhere, but now, in Qinghai, I was seeing all sorts of mangled barely comprehensible translations, complete with incorrect capitalization and even some letters upside down. I wonder if the Mongolian and Tibetan translations are also like that.

After an uneventful drive, we reached the town of Dulan and checked in a hotel. Three generations of ‘Betans were behind the counter, the grandma wearing a T-shirt with “Let’s unfuck the world” on it. After entering our info in the ledger, we got upstairs and lied down on our beds for a bit, until there was a knock on the door. It was Let’s unfuck the world lady, here to do the exact opposite. “I called the police station and they said it can’t stay here”, she said with her toneless accented Chinese.

“What if it goes to the station in person to register?” I’d had to do it more than a few times at bumfuck rural towns I stayed in back in my avid bicycle touring days.

She called, spoke in Tibetan for a bit, but nah.

Mama-in-law called other hotels. Same answer.

“Look, you guys stay in the hotel, I’ll sleep in the tent. It’s no big deal” They didn’t want to subject me to that, but I insisted. There was no patch of grass nearby (and if there were one, it would be a city park, jealously guarded by fierce shurgwaydingers) but the ‘Betan lady was kind enough to lend me a broom so I’d sweep the rocks and litter and sheep excrement from an area of the dusty parking lot nearby.

Back at the hotel to gather my stuff, the girlfriend was crying. What did I do this time?! I didn’t yell at anyone nor did I disrupt the Chinese harmony by calling people racist for enforcing racist regulations, I was pretty stoic through the whole ordeal, for a change.

“It’s not you! It’s... them. Why do they treat you like that? Why do we have to go through this every day?”

It was compounded with all the other shit we dealt with, like the travel restrictions, the police checkpoints, and the stress of almost losing our dog. Her mood was still crappy throughout dinner, with the three of us trying to console her.

“You say you already want to go home? But remember in 2018, we spent seven weeks in South America, roughing it, traveling by night buses and carrying our backpacks everywhere, through dangerous shitholes! If you survived that, you can survive this!”

“But in Buenos Aires and all those places, we didn’t get denied access to hotels for being foreigners! Same in Europe, and in Cuba, and everywhere we went!”, she said between sobs.

What can I reply but the obvious? The feeeeewings of the Chinese peopur be damned.

Then I added:

“And when we’re at home working, you’re always talking about how much you want to chuquwar and go on vacation! You’re tired and stressed, that will pass”

Her smile slowly came back. Dinner was mutton ribs with a thick layer of fat, that we dipped in a mix of spices, followed by flat noodles. It hit the spot.

Then we retreated to our sleeping quarters: them in a three-bed room, me to a tent set on a concrete slab, as if I was a crackhead on Skid Row. I read a bit under the stars and crawled in my sleeping bag.

(*) Esky is a brand of portable coolers, the name obviously derived from Eskimo. And that’s one thing that puzzles me, how come it still hasn’t been changed? If I remember well, Eskimo is the word used by Crees (their mortal enemies) to describe the Inuit, and it is very pejorative, meaning “cannibals”. God knows I’m not the biggest proponent of all this PC woke bullcrap, but in the era where Aunt Jemima and the Native American chick from the raisins boxes and the Cleveland Indians are cancelled, I’m just surprised none of the SJWs came after Esky, at least not that I know of.

(**) Saowdengeehwar is a Chinese phrase that literally means “Wait a moment” but more often than not means “I’m going out of your field of view now and never coming back”. Service people and hotel staff are particularly fond of using it.

Chapter 209

Distance covered: 423 km (total 9056 km)

I slept wonderfully for ten hours, and it was in fact a bit hard to pull myself out of the warmth of the sleeping bag and into the cold desert morning. Breakfast was instant noodles, some sickly salty vacuum-packed hard-boiled duck eggs, and honeydew melon. The in-laws had slept in the Subaru, by removing everything from the trunk, lowering the back seats, and setting up a mattress in there. Comfortable enough but not very sustainable, as it requires emptying the car and packing it again in the morning.

We said goodbye to our “single-use friends” and got on our way at around 9:30. I was behind the wheel, negociating the bumpy road, with the catchy Quebec folk music of La Bottine Souriante on the speakers, which weirdly fit my mood at the time, as that mighty desert was pretty damn far away from a Quebec coniferous boreal forest.

That is, until we reached a lake and crossed it via a narrow causeway. On the left side, the water was greyish green and the edges were white patches of salt deposits, but on the right, the water was a sparkling blue and teeming with aquatic plants and birds. It looked like the lakes of my homeland, and one of the bird species was white with a black face, which would no doubt get Justin Trudeau’s approval.

Further down the road, there was another lake, that was so big we couldn’t see the other side. There were pretty cool rock monolith formations by the shore, and as their frequency increased, it became a fenced tourist site. There were, no joke, thousands of people, coming by tour bus or self-driving. The parking lot was a mess, as there were some fucknuggets who instead of parking at the end of the line and walking an extra five minutes, double-parked and caused a mayhem of honking and yells about mothers’ genitals. The big plaza in front of the ticket office wasn’t much better, with stalls selling ice cream or Xinjiang raisins or other snacks, all advertizing their fare with loud speakers or bullhorns as if people were blind or illiterate. Mama-in-law went to investigate, and decided that 120 yuan a person is way too damn steep of a price. So I wandered around, walking the dog, people-watching, while I waited for them to use the toilet. I was amused by the outfits most women wore: large rimmed hats, long sleeves, gloves that go past the elbow, umbrellas, face scarves, sunglasses, god fucken forbid they catch even the slightest tan. Some had not a single square inch of skin exposed.

An old Australian man came and asked me if I got in, he said he got refused at the entrance, as foreigners are banned from the site. I somehow doubt it, likely he got asked to show his stupid health code or wear a mask for the 2.5 meters that make up the entrance, and when he didn’t understand, he got shunned away. Like I pointed out in Chapter 19, a lot of those “Woe is me! Those Chinamen are being mean to me because I’m a foreigner!” are oftentimes just the result of a misunderstanding (but not always; read on).

We drove a few minutes along the lake and went to park at a place that also had cool views over the water, and I had the idea to deploy the tent’s outer layer as a tarp, fastening it on the Subaru’s top rack and using the poles and ropes to make some kind of shelter. It worked OK, and we huddled under it to eat our lunch of cold rice, Spam and some kind of pickled vegetable. Hardly a gourmet meal, but with a spoonful of Laoganma chili paste and washed down with a cold beer it was satisfying. We chilled a bit longer, taking walks to the cliffs, it really felt like we were on the seaside.

More uneventful driving ensued, and we reached the outskirts of Golmud, where we were to spend the night. As soon as I walked in the inn, I knew exactly what the guy at the counter was saying to mama-in-law, and as I stated before many times, it’s the thing that pisses me off the most in China. He was quite intransigent about not letting me stay, refusing any sort of compromise that worked in other rural hotels. Being a huge jackass who doesn’t know the meaning of shut the fuck up, I started harping on about racism, about sleeping outside like an animal, and that rubbed him the wrong way. Now the option of them three sleeping there while I find a spot nearby to pitch the tent, which I was OK with, was off the table and I felt like shit. “You talk too much!”, mama-in-law said on the way to the car. She is usually the epitome of patience and I felt triply bad for letting her down, but soon after she empathised, she knows how absurd and insulting that whole crock of shit is.

So we went to Golmud proper. I was warned by a cop earlier that perhaps the whole city would be off-limits to foreign nationals, because of its numerous military bases, but there were no checkpoints. I had heard of Golmud (its Tibetan name; the Chinese call it Geermu) being a remote-ass backwater on the way to Lhasa, and in a way it is, being the only urban settlement in a radius of hundreds of kilometers, but it’s grown a lot in the past years thanks to the oil industry. Now it’s got neons, tall buildings, shopping malls and all that, but it’s still far from exciting, especially in the depressed state I was in as we rolled towards the center. Like so many tier-nowhere cities in China, it’s got the drawbacks of being in a city (traffic, limited parking, crowds, high prices) with none of the positives (microbreweries, decent restaurants serving non-Chinese food, any speck of a cultural scene). Yeah, I guess if you want to, like, buy shoes or get medical treatment, you’re better off there than in some row-of-houses-and-a-gas-station hamlet in the middle of the grasslands, and if you travel by bus or train you’re bound to transit there, but I felt we could have skipped it altogether. Nobody comes to remote central Qinghai to visit Golmud, they merely end up here as a civilization stopover or drive through on their way to or from the deserts, grasslands and mountains that are the real draw here.

The rest of the family were upbeat though, god bless their souls. I don’t deserve them. We went to a chain hotel that had paid the extortion money to be able to welcome filthy passport holders without attracting the wrath of the local NICs, and had to be sneaky in order to bring the dog in, going to check in in turns. When the two guys were bent over my passport trying to decipher its contents, I saw the security camera footage on the big TVs behind them, capturing the girlfriend walking in the halls with a small hairy animal under her arm. Ni vu ni connu, and for later ins and outs, I used the fire exit.

We went for a stroll, and while Golmud was indeed like hundreds of other provincial cities, it also had a bit of local flava, with several visible and Han-passing ethnic minorities walking around or selling local specialties. We went to a “famous” restaurant, but it must have been too famous, because it was packed to the brim, with young muslim waiters carrying all sorts of mouth-watering dishes back and forth. So we retreated to some kind of market, with hundreds of plastic tables surrounded by small counters where food is ordered, and took place among the diners, mostly groups of men drinking beer from 1.5-L plastic bottles. It reminded me of Thailand more than anything in China, and I approved. We had fried noodles, cold appetizers and barbecued mutton, the barbecue was OK but not quite the standard I grew to expect in that pastoral part of Eurasia.

Chapter 208

Distance covered: 490 km (total 8633 km)

I woke up at 5:40 and forced myself to run to the river and back, which is a total of 5.4 km according to Baidu Maps. I didn’t bring the dog along; he tends to stop to sniff everything and I wanted to do an uninterrupted jog.

To go with our habit of patronizing the same places, we ate breakfast at the same eatery we went to yesterday. Some people praise the variety of flavors in Chinese cuisine but don’t care for traditional Chinese breakfast food, but I for one like it quite a lot. Hard-boiled eggs, porridge, soy milk, some long strips of fried dough (called youtiao, like a donut but not sweet), stuffed buns, sure it’s not as interesting as the explosion of tastes you get in lunch of dinner dishes, but it’s good, filling, and so inexpensive I wonder how can those places even turn a profit.

Over greasy breakfast, we discussed travel plans. They had decided to skip Xinjiang altogether, after a bunch of mama-in-law’s friends got turned back one checkpoint further than the one that cockblocked us. One of them had been to the city of Wuhu, which has a suspected Covid case, and that was enough. Too bad, I was really looking forward to go back (after my visit in 2010 on my way to Kazakhstan) and visit the places in the south I had skipped the first time around, like Kashgar. And I also wanted to witness, as much as I could, the tense political situation there.

So we headed southwest towards Qinghai. The creepy lifeless flat desert scenery eventually turned into sand dunes, like the Sahara, and on the horizon we could see mountains appearing, some covered with snow. The road started snaking through those mountains, and the view was breathtaking. We stopped at a viewpoint to walk around and take pictures, the dog was happily running and sniffing everything, and then I saw a huge bird of prey gliding a few hundred meters overhead. I got the dog’s leash, because even though he weighs 6 kg (we weighed him yesterday on one of those scales in front of drugstores), the bird was magestically gigantic and I have no idea if he could take him or not. Plus, the area was full of marmot burrows (with a sign by the road saying not to shove an arm in!) and there was a herd of sheep grazing, that the dog eyed curiously. The temperature had dropped 20 Celsius in less than an hour, going from the dusty desert to these verdant mountains, and I was pretty happy with that.

On the other side of the mountain, we stopped at a small town to fill our water bottles and buy beer. In front of the store were three rough-looking men having 10 AM beers and speaking in a language that sounded as if they were choking on a handful of fish bones. I asked the shopkeeper if he understands and he said he has no idea, they’re Kazakhs. On my way out, one of them tssktssktssked the dog and extended his hand to pet him, I engaged a conversation.

“You guys are ethnic Kazakhs?”

“Yeah, what’s your ethnic group?”, the bald one barked in heavily accented Chinese, sneering.

Weird question! “I’m a laowaizu” (“ethnic foreigner”)

They didn’t seem to appreciate my quip. Those western Chinese visible minority guys aren’t typically a very friendly bunch, and I can’t blame them for having a chip on their shoulder. They make mean barbecue though.

We kept going through grassland-covered hills and then entered a patch of desert we were not to come out of until late the next day. There must have been just enough moisture to turn the sand into something like rough concrete and form monoliths, that had a different shape depending on the wind, I guess. Some were round like the hills in Super Mario games, some had a long gradual slope on one side and a steep one on the other, and some looked like stupas or vol-au-vent flaky pastries. Surreal, and awesome.

We stopped at a shallow salt water lake. There was another tourist SUV there, with its occupants walking around. Just as we were about to leave, mama-in-law frowned and said “Aya! That woman just dumped a bunch of garbage!”

Baba-in-law and mama-in-law are well-mannered and if more Chinese tourists were like them, they wouldn’t have such an horrible image abroad.

“Should we do something about it?”

“I’m going!” I opened the door and jumped out. I gathered the pile of plastic bags and empty cups and walked to the woman and her daughter (the shitty example they gave to their kid grated my in-laws almost as much as the intrinsic act of littering).

“This is yours?”

“Uh... uh... we were about to take it away, thank you, thank you, just put it by our car”, she babbled.

Yeah fucking right. And my name is Abraham Lincoln.

I opened the door and dumped the whole pile on the driver’s seat. Of course she was mad, and reiterated without much conviction that they were about to carry their shit away. I’m sure every sprawling pile of rubbish everywhere the Chinese go in numbers is also something they were about to carry to a proper disposing place but just forgot.

Normally the girlfriend and the in-laws don’t approve of my brusque manners and unChinese, unCuntfucian, unharmonious way of dealing with scumbags. But this time their hatred of pollution took over, and mama-in-law nodded while she handed me a tissue to wipe my hands with.

We kept going further and further into the desert, on a tourist road named “Mars Road Number One”. It did look like the red planet, indeed. There was even a “Mars Base” established there, with low buildings grouped together to look like a space colony, some kind of domes made from triangular white plates, and they rented astronaut suits for photo ops. My jaw dropped at the infinite tackiness of the place, though I couldn’t hate it, it’s quite original, way more than those Yuan Dynasty temples built in 2019.

A caravan of RVs were parked in a square formation, and the in-laws proposed we pitch our tent nearby. I wasn’t too down with the idea. What’s the point of coming to the desert if we’re going to camp with a dilapidated garage on one side, a group of RV enthusiasts who are more likely going to be extremely loud on the other, and an ice cream stand with a noisy generator behind them? I pointed at the vast expanse of desert 360 degrees around, went on a preliminary recon with the dog, and eventually they reached me with the Subaru.

It was quite windy, but I couldn’t find anywhere that was sheltered. We set up the tent on the leeward side of the car, which alleviated it a bit, and the girlfriend had the idea of stuffing bags and suitcases between the inner and outer flaps of the tent to stop the outer layer from flopping back and forth. This would spell disaster in case of rain, but it worked quite well.

Two SUVs appeared a bit further in the valley we were in, parked, and deployed a tarp. And then another one. Here goes our quiet evening, I brooded. We can’t be that surprised though, being so close to a tourist spot, and with most visitors unwilling to pay the out-of-this-world retarded prices to spend the night in one of those space capsules.

I was in charge of making dinner. In between sips of beer (first a local thirst-quenching light lager, then a porter from a South African brewery called Drifter), I boiled water, cooked pasta, drained it, made a sauce with bacon, salami, cherry tomatoes and a jar of bolognese, mixed it all, and topped it with cheese. We sat around the camping table and ate it with a can of herring. It was nice but the pasta went cold very quick, in that weather more reminiscent of autumn than summer.

The dog went to investigate the two other camps, hoping his cuteness will bequeath him a few morsels of meat. I went to get him, as good as an occasion as any to go say hi. There was a couple from Chongqing, eating the spicy hot pot their region is famous for, and three kids from Beijing, cooking mutton and potatoes on a hot plate. We exchanged pleasantries, talked about where we’d been, and compared each other’s glamping equipment. Eventually, all of us climbed a small hill to see the sunset over the western horizon. Just another nice day overlanding in China.

Chapter 207

Distance covered: 331 km (total 8143 km)

...or is it zero?! Read on.

I woke up at 5:40, put on my running shoes and shorts, leashed the dog and went into the pitch-black streets. I did a combination of jogging, sprints, calisthenics, tai chi and capoeira exercises at a park nearby, nothing really structured but more than enough to sweat buckets, despite my bare chest in the cold of the morning (that way, I don’t have to deal with a soaked t-shirt) and to feel really good.

We were on the road a bit past 7, I was behind the wheel. There was a police checkpoint just before the highway entrance, when I lowered the window a burly cop pointed a prodded wand three inches from my face and I pulled back, startled. I thought he was about to taze me in the face for being foreign, but then he grunted “Blow!” A booze test, that early in the morning?! What the hell are those Gansu colonists up to?

I drove on the smooth and perfectly straight highway, among desolate flat scenery. There were thousands and thousands of windmills on either side of the road, feeding high tension power lines. This must have been a huge investment but I was in China at the tail end of the third-worldly times when most of their power came from burning coal, and I lived in cities that were on the way of the huge dark grey soot clouds, so I applaud heartily those efforts at deploying a cleaner energy grid.

We reached the border with Xinjiang, and there was a police checkpoint, likely the first of many. There was only a very short line-up, and it took a few minutes, I didn’t even have to get out of the car. The cop looked at my passport, said “Handsome”, and handed it back. I suspect if the car was full of Uyghurs we wouldn’t get in as easily.

I kept going, the creepy desert scenery not changing much aside from the signs now being bilingual with the added Arabic-like squiggles of the Uyghur language, and even more signs urging us to “cherish the Party” than usual. But then we reached another checkpoint, this one manned by soldiers and health workers in big hermetic space suits. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where we fucked up. The girlfriend had left Jiangsu province on the 13^th. Last week there’s been an eclosion of cases in the city of Nanjing, which is in Jiangsu province, albeit far from where we live. If we had waited a day (or maybe two to really be safe, not sure if the 14-day period is counted inclusively or not), Jiangsu wouldn’t have be listed in the places she visited in the past 14 days on her phone tracking app and we would have been good to go.

So we went to another area and the four of us had to undertake nucleic acid testing, which involves a nurse sticking a Q-tip deep in your throat. A bunch of people were in a similar boat, and in the big dusty parking lot where we had to wait for the results, we had conversations with other stranded poor fucks, talking about our travels and comparing overlanding gear. It was still a bit early for lunch, but what the hell, if we’re stuck here. We deployed a foldable table and were about to start making pasta, when a soldier came and yelled through a bullhorn to go back to our cars and to hate our shitty lives, the way they’re meant to be hated. I was a bit mad, but it kind of makes sense, after all if you just let a bunch of possibly infected people fraternize in close proximity like that, it’s not the smartest thing. I have to be coherent, since the onset of the pandemic what has been angering me is not the strict measures that make sense, but the nonsensical ones (mandatory fayssah mursks on the airplane except when people are served food and shoot spittle everywhere, fucking useless glass-fogging fayssah mursks in general, retarded partial lockdowns like those in Quebec, tracking apps developed by fucktards that crash your phone with all the bloatware they put in). And if I’ve been living a life mostly unaffected by the pandemic, well, it’s mostly because of those strict measures.

Speaking of fayssah mursks, it had been weeks since the last time I was told to wear one, so I didn’t even bother to carry one in my pockets. The girlfriend gave me one from the glovebox while we went through that sausage machine, and at some point I got out of the car to go pee, and had to walk near other people. I reached in my pocket and it wasn’t there, then I saw it, rolling around on the dust, carried by the wind. I put it on, but then when I came back to the car, my mask was there, under my computer. Gross. I hope the person the other mask belonged to was an attractive woman and not some old grampa with halitosis.

The results came in, all negative. We still had to backtrack to Guazhou. On the way back I sat on the backseat, sipping a red ale imported from Ireland, and watched the UFC event from last weekend, that I downloaded yesterday. It was a smaller card mostly filled with prospects rather than established talent, and the main card delivered like a caffeinated Meituan waimai guy. All the fights were very close and involved multiple momentum changes and incredible displays of toughness, and unfortunately when it’s so evenly matched, some split decisions went to whom I feel was the wrong fighter. I thought Miranda Maverick edged Big Carb Barb, Kyler Philips should have gotten the nod or at least a draw over his zombie Brazilian opponent, and the main event between TJ Dillashaw (returning from a two-year suspension for shooting EPO like Lance Armstrong) and Cory Sandhagen was also a high-level banger I thought Sandhagen won.

Back in Guazhou, we checked in the same hotel and went to eat at the same restaurant, having a big meaty feast. Mama-in-law bought five huge melons from a streetside cart, baba-in-law scolded her because the car is already full of stuff but her justification is that they’re cheap, and we’re about to head into the desert, which is notoriously melonless.

The girlfriend and I walked a few blocks until we reached a pet shop and bought a bag of dog chow, as we’re running low. On the way, a young guy with a big hammer and sickle on his T-shirt engaged in a short conversation in English, he had lived in Hamilton, Ontario, for two years. I imagine foreigners are rare here, to say the least. The city was full of SUVs with license plates from every province, but not many laowai go on self-driving trips, so if they go west, they’re more likely to fly.

Back in the hotel, we watched the new Rick And Morty. It was funny and all, but too absurd and too much shit was packed in. I hope the show doesn’t go in that direction too much.

Chapter 206

Distance covered: 624 km (total 7812 km)

I woke up at 6:30 with the alarm and walked the dog a bit. The dusty streets were nearly totally deserted, until I reached a square with a bunch of old people dancing or playing badminton. I said yesterday that the place was as unremarkable and insignificant as any, but now, looking at it, the architecture of some apartment buildings puzzled me. They were not built on the same template as every damn glitzy condo tower that has sprouted from Guangzhou to Harbin and everywhere in between in the past decade, yet they were newer than the sinister squat concrete cubes from the dark days of commie rule. In fact they looked like the nondescript low-income blocks you see in France or Germany. My hypothesis is that obviously they were built between the two aforementioned time periods, and while there’s likely some impetus to destroy and replace them, the costs of bringing all the materials to this remote-ass patch of desert are too prohibitive.

We got in the car at 8 on the dot and kept plodding west. After two hours we stopped at a service point on the highway, and it was positively crowded. In the first segment of my trip, most highway gas stations and rest stops were occupied by 18-wheelers, but now it was full of new cars and SUVs with license plates from everywhere in the country, and even a few RVs. The domestic travel industry has ballooned up by about 800 000 000% in the past years, as people have more and more disposable income, and a lot of them come here to see the western terminus of the Great Wall and the aerospace base where the rockets are launched.

“Fucken hell, the Chinese are going to space now?”

“The Chinese are everywhere, do you know~”, the girlfriend replied nonchalently. “If the Americans go to Mars one day, they will think it’s full of aliens, but no, they’ll be Chinese”

We kept gobbling the kilometers like Pacman eats his pellets, eating in the car, only stopping to buy gas. The scenery was now positively desertic, with grey rugged small mountains all around, but once in a while there would be massive fields, no doubt the result of irrigation works. We took a smaller road leading to a tourist area, and on the way there were a few oddities, like a giant sculpture of a baby sleeping on its side and some kind of skeleton of a temple built with long thin white rods. Maybe I’d been watching too much ridiculously extreme wrassling, but it looked like one of those 3D lighttubes structures that those sado-masos in the CZW would gleefully bodyslam each other through.

We arrived at the Yulin Grottoes, some kind of small cave complex with paintings and primitive carvings in it. I didn’t go, as the shurgwaydingers at the entrance were very adamant about not letting the dog in, even if we promise to carry him. In front of my insistance, one of them called for back-up on his walkie-talkie. Pussy. So I volunteered to stay out. I could still see the view over the valley leading to the caves, it was somewhat picturesque but also way the fuck overbuilt, and there was a scaffold on one of the cliffs alongside a few parked bulldozers. Sitting there in the hellish heat, I ruminated on the sad state of affairs that led Mao Zedong and his gang to destroy nearly everything the Chinese had been building through their 3500 years of history to snuff any trace of “bourgeois” and “pre-revolutionary” culture and ensure that people are just cogs in the industrial/agrarian machine he wanted to put in place, and then half a century later, as China is now a giant shopping mall, the current incarnation of the Party (2.0 or 3.0, depending whom you ask) is rebuilding a bunch of those cultural and architectural and even archeological artefacts in order to foster a strong sense of nationalism and push people to spend money in those government-run overpriced and overhyped tourist sites. Ah well. What’s a boy to do?

As they came out and we walked to the parking lot, an ominous cloud came over the mountains on the horizon, and then it started rolling downhill at an alarming speed. People pointed and started getting agitated. “Sandstorm!”, some of them shouted, but I didn’t know this particular Chinese word. We hurried to the car, and baba-in-law asked the guards if it’s safe to go. They said there’s a mushroom farm a few kilometers ahead where we would be sheltered, but we likely won’t have time to reach it. We tried anyway, and after a few minutes, the huge wall of powdered debris was coming towards us much faster than it looked before, and we did a U-turn. It was pretty awesome to drive away with the cloud chasing us, until it caught up right as we reached the gate of the site. We immediately got engulfed in a thick orange fog and we could barely see anything past a few meters. The driver of the Jeep next to us, a big hooligan-looking type, came out and looked to be having the time of his life, his arms outstretched in the strong wind. I opened the door to go join him and it nearly flew off its hinges, so I noped and stayed in. Baba-in-law fished out some kind of scarf and wanted to go out to film, but the girlfriend and her mom implored him to stay in the car. I egged him on, but female wisdom prevailed and we waited for it to calm down before driving off.

The stop for the night was the city of Guazhou (“Melon State”), another brand new settlement. We were going to stay in a hotel for the fifth night in a row, camping in the desert would be pretty cool but with the long drives we have to do, better get some serious rest. Plus, they’re pretty cheap and of more than a decent standard, and there hasn’t been racist policies to keep me out, nor people who raise an eyebrow when we bring a dog in. We had dinner and retreated to our rooms, I was asleep by 21:30.

Chapter 205

Distance covered: 1050 km (total 7188 km)

I set my alarm for 5:30, and when I stepped outside with the dog, it was still dim. I was confused for a bit, only a month ago the sun was up at 4 something. Then I remembered that we’re pretty deep in western China, a country that has only one timezone. Everything is logically on Beijing time, so the western provinces are in a bit of an odd place, with the time on the clock way later than what it should be. If you get to the far west, like we’re about to, it gets frankly ridiculous, with the sun going up at 8 AM and down at 11 PM.

I went for a run on the deserted country roads, knowing that I’d be couped up in the car all day and needing a bit of exercise and “me-time” beforehand. It was drizzling, or maybe so damn humid that it felt like walking through a cloud, and my bare chest was covered in a film of sweat and water, my small beer gut jiggling rhythmically over the waistband of my drawstring shorts. It felt really good, but I was a bit queasy at the midway point, having pondered the classical runner’s dilemma before setting off: poop before or after? The third option was there and I took it, thankfully there were noone around and there was a concrete ditch with the perfect width on the side of the road.

I got back, took a quick shower, and we were in the car by 7. We made our way westwards, eventually entering the province of Ningxia, or rather the autonomous Hui Muslim territory. Some counties or entire provinces inhabitated by minorities have this special status, I don’t know how much extra power they have over their governance, call me cynical but I can’t imagine it’s much, in such a centralized state.

The southern part wasn’t very different from Shaanxi, with big verdant mountains, but then we started going through arid patches. I came to Ningxia in 2009, and when I woke up hungover and sore from my uneasy sleep on the hard seat of my third-class train car, I was glued to the window, looking at this out-of-worldly scenery. I was young and green, and hadn’t been close to a desert before. Now, of course the effect wasn’t quite as strong but I was still elated to be this far west, with the intimidating Helan mountain range on the horizon and the vegetation slowly disappearing, the trees being replaced by small spaced out round bushes, which from a distance look like a black guy’s hair.

We stopped at a service station on the highway, deployed a foldable camping table, and had a lunch of rice, Spam and pickled vegetables. A lot of people around us had cylindrical hats, stringy beards or head coverings, this part of the vast Chinese midwest is where they originate, and those who didn’t take the trek east to open a noodle restaurant are still here. They’re not extremely orthodox muslims, and while hijabs are not that uncommon, many women either let their hair loose or tie it with a scarf and rather than evoking modesty, it gives them some kind of “biker chick” look that is rather attractive, especially added to their slightly curvier frames and the Central Asian admixture in their physionomy. I can’t stare too long though; their husbands and brothers are protective, and I don’t want to get stabbed by a Lanzhou lamian bench scraper.

I hadn’t brought my aux cord, thinking that the new Subaru wouldn’t have this antiquated technology. Turns out it does, just that the port is hidden. I bought a cord at the highway truck stop and could play some of my music, it would be a long, long, long road if the girlfriend was the sole DJ. I put on some Bob Dylan and then an album by Canserbero, a Venezuelan rapper that my homie from Nanjing introduced me to. Next in the alphabetical order was Crypts Of Despair, but I quickly changed it. I’ll ease the in-laws’ ears slowly, too much death metal without any warming up is going to produce a negative backlash.

As I was driving, I thought about how the act of flashing one’s bright lights repeatedly feels like the rudest thing to me. I don’t remember doing it once in my five years of driving in Quebec, where it’s mostly reserved as a warning in extreme cases, but Chinese drivers do it all the time, to signify “GET OUT OF MY WAY YOU STINKY PEASANT”. After dodging a few idiots driving at a snail’s pace in the left lane, I got around to trying it, and I was astonished at how powerful it felt. It could have been Jocko Willink himself with Francis Ngannou as a passenger in the car in front of me, yet, encased in 1.5 tons of metal as I was, I felt invincible as I shot my high beams in short bursts as if they were lasers in a sci-fi movie. My penis even tripled its size, but as I’m already way above average, it was incomfortable and almost debilitating, I just imagined if I was an 1.8-incher how much I’d finally feel like a man. Flashing bright lights is the shit!!! Next time I’ll even honk.

When it wasn’t my driving shift, I sat in the back and read a book about the phenomenon of modern mercenaries and “private security” companies (the most infamous being Blackwater) and how it’s a symptom of “neomedievalism”, a paradigm change in politics going from states to a variety of nonstate entities. Fascinating stuff.

We arrived in a small town called Danshan and went to the hotel mama-in-law booked over the phone. She asked if foreign residents can stay there and got the green light, but when I walked in with our luggage I could tell after 0.1 seconds what the pinched expression of the woman at the counter meant, having been through that shit countless times. “Buhaoyisi, buhaoyisi, I talked to my boss and he said filthy non-Yellow genetically inferior disease-carrying foreigners are not welcome here, here’s the name of a hotel down the street that can take it” (bullshit, bullshit, bullshit). I was seeing red and was about to unleash a torrent of profanity but the girlfriend saw it coming and hit me on the head with her phone, urging me to sit down and let her and her mom smooth it out. Eventually, to my surprise, I was told it’s a misunderstanding and as long as we don’t go in and out too much and leave early in the morning we can stay. Way to make me feel like a fucking criminal on the run instead of a documented, law-abiding, tax-paying member of society.

We took a stroll in the town, which wasn’t unlike tens of thousands of other insignificant provincial concrete pits, except that more buildings were sand-colored, the skin tones were browner, and people spoke a very “potato in mouth” version of Mandarin that even confused the three native speakers among us. There were also more visible adherents to the Religion Of Peace, but they were vastly outnumbered, thanks to the Manifest Destiny With Chinese Characteristics. We stopped at a little eatery that made something I’d never seen before, a bunch of mutton pieces quickly fried on a huge flat cast iron plate. It looked and smelled appetizing, then I took a bite and nearly gagged: sheep stomach, with a strong taste of digested food, to be polite. Then, second bite, almost as foul: sheep liver. I was picking the next bits parcimouniously, eating only the heart (which tastes like normal meat, just chewier and more tender at the same time), onions and pieces of bread soaking the spicy goodness. We also had a jug of rice wine, which was very low in alcohol and had a pleasant sweet taste. And thus ended this long day on the road, and there are more of those to come, looking at the map of China’s huge landmass.

Back in the racist hotel after dropping the icebags in a neighboring corner store, I watched a bit of YouTube and downloaded some more music for the rides ahead. The internet wasn’t quite as fast as the one back home in the east, but still more than acceptable, it really has gone a long way in the remote corners of the country.

Chapter 204

Distance covered: 292 km (total 6138 km)

I woke up around 10, and lazed in bed a bit more watching some YouTube. Then we packed up, and went to rearrange some of our luggage in the car. The in-laws were already on the way from Hefei, and their ETA was 4 o’clock. I left the stuff I wouldn’t need in our car and packed a smaller bag.

It was pissing rain, so we didn’t feel like wandering around in the admittedly attractive town of Shangluo. We ran across the parking lot to get a dumpling lunch, then sat around for a bit, reading and writing. Then just before 4 we went looking for a long-term parking spot, and settled on a large mostly empty lot by an apartment complex. The in-laws’ Subaru soon pulled over, and we transfered our stuff in on top of what they’d already packed. It’s a sizable SUV and it has a luggage box strapped on its roof, still, with four passengers and a month-long trip ahead, it got stuffed to the brim.

Baba-in-law had been hauling ass since 6 in the morning (mama-in-law doesn’t drive) so he was more than happy to let me drive. It’s a car from 2021, so for me who drove mid-90s cars in my youth and then took a decade-long hiatus from driving, the whole thing looked like a spacecraft’s cockpit, with screens and futuristic shit and dials I had no idea what they were for, but I managed. It was an automatic, which was easy mode and a bit boring after driving stick all this time.

We got to Taibaishan (“Too White Mountain”, sounds like a Huffington Post or The Guardian article title), checked in a homestay, ate a big oily tasty dinner washed down with beers, and went to bed. A long day of driving ahead.

Chapter 203

Distance covered: 325 km (total 5846 km)

The wind was ridiculous and it seemed like our tent was about to collapse, but it held on. Then in the morning we got awakened by the baaing of a whole herd of sheep passing by, I opened the flap and there were at least a hundreds of them, accompanied by a stick-wielding man and a curious German shepherd who came to our door and stared through the mosquito netting.

We packed up, and then I decided to run to the tourist viewpoint midway on the long bridge, which corresponds to exactly 4 km according to Baidu Maps. The dog came along, trotting with his tongue hanging from the side of his mouth, and the girlfriend drove there. By the time I made it, she had already set up a little picnic spot and was about to cook breakfast. That 4 km felt a bit hard, I used to run 10 or 12 km with ease back when I prepared for a marathon. I’ll keep running and increasing the distance progressively.

We kept going west, and after two hours, reached Tongguan. We saw a path going up a steep cliff, with zigzagging stairs, and decided on a whim to climb it, after parking on a dirt track perpendicular to the main road. From there, we had an impressive view of Tongguan’s old town, still under construction. Yeah, you read correctly, and it’s exactly as retarded as you think. A preserved Ming Dynasty town, built from 2019 to 2022. We could drive in (paying the minimum parking fee of 10 yuan) and it was even more bizarre, because even though there were no open shops, there was a tiny amount of people going around by scooter.

We circled around the late Xi Dynasty clock tower without getting out of the vehicle, and then drove a few kilometers to the actual city of Tongguan, which claims to have invented the roujiamo, a kind of taco made from a thick chewy and crunchy flat bread stuffed with shredded meat and onions. Bold! They better deliver, then. We randomly chose a restaurant and they did deliver masterfully. All around us were fucknuggets watching shitty videos on their phones, at some point it came from five or six directions. But I’m becoming redundant now, I think the horse has been beaten to death: Chinese people are nice and all but they cause a tremendous amount of noise pollution. What can a guy do?

We drove two more hours on the highway, with breathtaking views of the mountains. In fact most of the time we were in the mountains, coming in and out of tunnels surrounded by steep green slopes. Then we got to Shangluo, the final destination for this chapter of our trip. Tomorrow, the in-laws will drive their Subaru here and we’ll join forces for the long road to Xinjiang. Shangluo is nestled in the mountains and has some old (actually old!) buildings that look cool from afar, we got a hotel room and relaxed a bit. We did laundry, put our refrigerated stuff in a store that was kind enough to offer us fridge and freezer space, and early in the evening we went to take a walk and eat. Dinner sucked shit, everything was too oily (even by Chinese standards), overly seasoned and the barbecued pork was more like barbecued rat, hey you can’t win them all. We walked a bit more, then we got back to the hotel and I watched a few videos on YouTube, downloaded a few podcasts for the road ahead and bought some books for my Kindle.

Chapter 202

Distance covered: 460 km (total 5521 km)

We could sleep for a bit, as the tent was somewhat sheltered from the sun by the farmstead’s walls and trees, and also it had been raining gently. The tent held up 100%, not even a trace of a leak.

Even though it was still raining, I started the day with a jog, down towards the main road and back, and the car’s GPS informed me later it was 4 km total. It sucked but felt great, simultaneously, in the weird way that fitness endeavors do. I carried our camping chairs and cooking stuff to the abandoned farm’s kitchen, which was dusty as all hell and a mess of straw, discarded wool and stray bricks, but the roof was intact so it was a nice shelter from the rain. I cooked bacon, eggs and leftover tudousi potato wedges from the Sichuan restaurant, and peeked around. There was no plumbing, and the oven was made with bricks, piled up at ground level. “Man, Chinese people lived 1000 years in the past before Deng Xiaoping came in”. The girlfriend quickly lifted her head from her bowl and seemed startled for a second, before she shrugged and nodded in approval.

She had been talking to her mom on the phone and gave me the news. We were heading south to Henan province to meet up with the in-laws and travel the four of us together in their car, but now there are some serious floods in the central impoverished province. So we’ll head west to Shaanxi instead and have them meet us there from Hefei.

Yeah, we just came from Shaanxi, didn’t we?! A bit of a waste of time to go east and then west again, but it’s not that bad, it leads us to potentially interesting places in the meantime. I took the wrong highway ramp like a derp and could only backtrack 13 km later, which added to the feeling of time wasting. But hey, what can we do but laugh?

It was a long day of driving with little to mention. We stopped in a highway rest area for a very scenic lunch with a view on a bunch of parked 18-wheelers, and I rolled us tuna wraps with mozzarella cheese. The girlfriend had a bit of a stomachache after the Sichuan food from two days ago, but it wasn’t even that spicy, especially compared to some stuff she manages to eat back home. Me, I was fine, my digestive system is coated with a permanent layer of protective oil. I don’t really get the dreaded “ring of fire” that much.

Ahem. Details. Anyway, while the girlfriend was driving, she asked me to scout on Baidu Maps for possible areas to check out for camping, as we were reaching the end of the afternoon. There was a city called Yuncheng that is next to a big salt lake, which was a little intriguing, so we headed there. We parked the car and walked a bit to a park with a view over the lake, which was in fact many shallow lakes. Weird, it had been raining a lot recently and parts of Henan province (not that far to the east) were flooded, I thought the water level would be higher.

From our vantage point of view, it seemed like the southern shore of the lake was very rural, with fields and small farms. So we crossed the long bridge and went that way, criss-crossing the small dirt paths until we found a spot at the edge of a field, with a view over the lake on one side and mountains on the other. Nice. Very nice. I cracked open a NEIPA from Panda Brewing, plopped in my camping chair and enjoyed the surroundings for a bit before setting up camp and making a dinner of sausages and asparagus.

Chapter 201

Distance covered: 471 km (total 5061 km)

Up at 8:30, we had a slow start, folding our laundry and packing our bags and doing a 45-minute yoga session (shoutout to Yin Yoga With Matt on YouTube). I retrieved the stuff I put in the hotel’s fridge and freezer, bought a 4.5-L water bottle, and we hit the road.

The little sliver of overlap between the girlfriend’s musical taste and mine is slowly widening, as we discovered we both like reggae and dark country music. We played plenty of that, and also some stuff that pleased one more than the other, like Zhou Jielun or Sodom or Charlie Puth or Fonky Family.

The destination we wanted to reach over these two days was northern Henan, and we were to pass close to the city of Taiyuan, where the girlfriend proposed we stock up on groceries we couldn’t buy elsewhere. So we made the small detour and went to Olé, a chain of upmarket grocery stores with a wallet-slaughtering selection of imported products. We walked in at the same time as two Africans did, the first foreigners I’ve seen since leaving Tianjin, about 10 days ago. We filled the cart with dry goods, tons of craft beer, and also a few meat items we’ll put in the icebox and eat over the next few days. The price tag was steep, the frugal minimalist in me shuddered, the travel logistician wondered if it was worth the detour, but the hedonist slowly nodded with a huge smile at the prospect of having all that food and alcohol to consume.

It was getting late, so we set our GPS for the countryside south and drove for a long time in the huge city and its equally huge overlapping neighbor of Jinzhong. When we got out of high density areas, we were among fields, not the ideal place to look for a camping spot, so we kept going, obliquing towards the mountains on the horizon. Eventually we got to a village, and I hit the brakes when I saw an abandoned farmstead. I went to do a little recon, it was a bit creepy but there were not too much sheep excrement in the gated yard, so we could pitch the tent there.

On two occasions we had farmers riding past on their three-wheelers and stopping to investigate. Both were initially a bit confused by our explanation that we were 1000 km from home and camping for the night, but then welcomed us and said to contact them if we need any help. Nice.

We ate leftover noodles and Sichuan food for dinner, that we had kept in the icebox. Then I tried to start a fire but failed miserably, I didn’t gather enough wood before it got dark. Ah well. We watched the new Rick and Morty and went to sleep.

Chapter 200

Distance covered: 64 km (total 4590 km)

Up reasonably early to avoid the day’s heat, and we drove half an hour to a “five star” tourist spot in the area. We parked and before we even got out of the car, a parasite started buzzing around us. There was one every 50 meters or so, all wearing the same uniform of dusty clothes and a straw hat, an absent expression on their tanned faces that made them look more like Bolivians than Chinese. They were saying the place is closed, but they can guide us to another valley nearby. Somehow I doubted it, we could see the entrance and groups of tourists walking through from the elevated point we were at. The girlfriend said the area used to be open and those guys would act as guides, and now that it’s a government-run tourist site they lost that source of income. I felt bad for them for half a second but then thought about how they’re so blatantly lying to us, so fuck them.

Tickets were 100 a piece, but what the hell, at least they welcome dogs in. We walked the 5.5-kilometer loop going up and down the valley, which looked unlike anywhere else I’d been before. The reddish-brown clay had been eroded by wind, giving some of the steep hills a circular shape criss-crossed with lines that are not parallel to the ground. I looked at the hundreds of stairs we had to climb or descend, and wondered when they’ll put an ugly-ass cable car there, it’s just a question of consulting with geologists regarding the feasibility and doing a cost-benefit analysis. Those tourist sites are not much more than a business in the eyes of many, and that’s why so many of them are so grossly overdeveloped. But for now, aside from a few skeletons of buildings under construction, the only really ugly sign was an escalator going down from the main path to a pond at the bottom of the valley.

Big sections of the trail were empty, so we could admire the natural beauty in peace. Once in a while we’d cross paths with retards playing music from their cum-slurping phones. Why? JUST WHY? I love music, I listen to music several hours every day, but I only play it if I’m in at home, in my car, or wearing headphones, because I’m not a fucking sociopath. Plus, I know that the music I enjoy can be esoteric and unnerving for other people, just like those elderly cunts’ god-awful Chinese opera, which sounds like a cat being anally tortured. The girlfriend told them to turn that shit off, knowing that if she doesn’t do it, I will, and not very diplomatically or Chinesely. I don’t really mind people having loud conversations and being a bit rowdy (except if they’re just outside my hotel room past midnight, in which case I hope they get murdered by islamic terrorists) but playing music from phones would be punished by confiscation and ten lashes (twenty if it’s cacophonic dissonant Chinese opera, thirty if it’s a succession of shitty Douyin videos with annoying sound effects) if I was the king of the world.

I rant and bitch, but it was a worthwhile visit, with the beautiful views and the nice exercise. Then we drove through kickass winding mountain roads to the county town of Jingbian, where we had noodles for lunch (served in portions sufficient to feed a whole team of Olympic rowers) and dropped the car off at a mechanic for an oil change and a wash, which was more than welcome, our white car was now covered in a quarter-inch layer of grey grime.

Jingbian is about as insignificant as a town can be, but is still sizable, especially considering that we were now deep into China’s midwest, not far from the remote desert provinces of Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. Once again, I was impressed by the length at which the local yokels went to demonstrate their ineptitude at driving. You know how if you want to turn left at a green light, you’re supposed to wait until there are no cars coming from the opposite direction? Not in the progressive 21^st century model town of Jingbian: there, they just throw themselves in the intersection as soon as the light changes. If, by any chance, a motorist who didn’t get his license in a fucking instant noodles packet stops and waits, he’ll get overtaken from both sides by impatient fucknuggets, and of course all of this will affect oncoming traffic, who will swerve brusquely or try to go through the queue of left-turners. That causes a lot of honking, impotent yells of “CAO NI MA!” and bumper-to-bumper mutual blocking, which means that by the time the light turns red (and green for the perpendicular road), there are still a bunch of retards in the middle of the crossing, unable to move in any direction, like a tangled headphones cable.

We went back to our hotel 8 km outside of town, where we just chilled the rest of the afternoon away. I watched the UFC main card from last week and it was great, all five fights were of high caliber and ended in submissions or TKOs. Miesha Motherfucking Tate made her return and looked like a beast, though I don’t see her having anything for the divisional champ Amanda Nunes. But then again, who does?!

In the early evening we went for a walk in the place I went running yesterday, taking the long road around the lake, which proved bigger than what we initially thought. Again, there were plenty of animals around, from flocks of cranes to herds of cows and sheep. We went close to a group of sheep and goats, and after a while some started to stare at us and slowly inch forward, the leader among them a fierce-looking ram with huge horns who didn’t seem to take kindly at the presence of a bearded human and a goofy dog in his ‘hood. I told the girlfriend, who was squatting to take pictures, that we better walk away from the soon-to-be chuanrs lest we become one.

The path around the lake went through a village that looked positively prehistoric, with the houses carved from tthe clay hills. Then we got to the big road and made our way back in the darkness, stopping at a Sichuan restaurant. We’ve had enough of the region’s noodles and barbecue so we thought why not indulge in one of our favorite of China’s cuisines? It was delicious, and the real shit, the only “local” adaptation was the small plate of spicy pickles they brought us at the beginning, as per local custom. Great stuff. We went back to the hotel and enjoyed its real beds (albeit hard as a plank of wood), internet and AC, before heading back on the road.