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.