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.