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.