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.