Chapter 220

I woke up around 9 and fired up the live UFC event. After a somewhat forgettable bantamweight clash between two Mexicans, a striker from Kyrgyzstan named Rafael Fiziev got his fourth victory in a row in an exciting banger with the ever-game Bobby Green. That concluded the prelims, and then two of my British pals showed up at my apartment for the main card.

Song Yadong broke the 2021 Chinese losing streak with a pressure attack over the promising Casey Kenney, Tecia Torres outpointed Angela Hill (but it was more exciting than a usual Torres fight), Vicente Luque reversed Michael Chiesa’s deep choke with a choke of his own, and José Aldo showed he’s still got it.

I cooked a big greasy breakfast in time for the main event, with eggs, bacon, toast, hash browns, baked beans and fried cherry tomatoes. Not quite a full English but my British homies seemed satisfied. Then Ciryl Gane completely outclassed Derrick Lewis, negating the big gorilla’s one-punch chance. His athleticism, movement and technique are quite unique among heavyweights, and he has a very humble, fun-loving and endearing personality, I’m looking forward to his fight against destroyer of worlds Francis Ngannou.

The fight was for an interim belt, even though Ngannou won the title in March and isn’t injured. The UFC promotion threw the Cameroonian under the bus, saying “he doesn’t want to fight”, which sounds like horseshit to me. Sometimes I hate myself for being a MMA fan and giving so much attention to a scummy org like the UFC, but they’re the ones who put up the big fights so I tune in.

I chilled a bit during the early afternoon, and went outside to get the 20-L bottle of water. Usually the guy delivers but now because of those half-measures for the new covid scare he can’t come to our apartment building. I also bought vegetables at the market for a recipe I wanted to try, I applied myself for an hour in the kitchen doing just that. It’s a “savoury cheesecake”, similar to the original dessert recipe but with no sugar and with fried peppers, bacon, ham and tons of fresh herbs. Let’s see how it turns out, I put it in the fridge after baking time, it has to be completely chilled before we cut it.

I went to play soccer at night. Part of the old gang was there, and a bunch of new guys from Africa. We played for an hour and a half, sweating buckets, a good time was had by all. Two guys couldn’t make it, they got hit by a car on the way to the pitch, but word is they are okay, just a bit bruised.

The savoury cheesecake was pretty damn good, I can’t say I ever had anything like that before. It was like a quiche in some ways, but creamier and heavier, and eaten cold with a big salad (and a white beer).

I looked for something to watch and saw I have the first seasons of The Sopranos on my external hard drive. I watched 20 minutes of the pilot and got bored as hell, I just couldn’t feel anything for the obese balding main character, and for some reason, that kind of New Jersey Italian-American accent grates me to no end.

Chapter 219

I woke up leisurely, chilled for a bit, reading the news and writing my diary. I listened to the first three albums from Satyricon in order, their opus Nemesis Divina is one of the highest points of Norwegian black metal and an absolute must listen. Then I went to Metro to buy imported groceries. I briefly considered going by bicycle like I did dozens of times but it’s so damn convenient to just use the car.

Back home, I made baloney and cheese sandwiches in a baguette bread, and ate it with steamed broccoli on the side to make it a bit “healthier”. I watched a documentary called Fighting In The Age Of Loneliness, a great two-hour piece about the history of MMA with political context of the times mixed in. Some of the parallels were a bit far-fetched and had a clear left-wing bias to them but it was a very well done doco, recommended.

I went to BJJ practice, for the first time in six weeks. I was all excited. There were some new guys, so we drilled some basic moves that I “already know”, quotation marks are there to emphasize that it’s still very useful to practice them to tweak out the small details that make it successful. Then we rolled, one of the new guys is a big bulky Kazakh with wrestling and judo experience, I tried to get him in a triangle choke but it felt like grappling a car, and he smothered me until I tapped. Fair play to him! Good times were had by all, I’m looking forward to get back in the groove.

The girlfriend made eggplant fried with ground pork, and cold noodles. The meal was fantastic. We ate while watching Training Day, one of my favorite movies ever. I must have watched it ten times, and yeah there’s a bit of plot armor and the unrealistic “one in a million chances” clichés I usually dislike but I still love it.

Chapter 218

I woke up even more stupid late than yesterday, in the PM hours, for the first time in ages. I wasn’t hungover, but I was stiff and sore from the calisthenics workout, so I drank a lot of water and tea and stretched a bit.

It was a lazy day, I didn’t go outside during daylight hours except to walk the dog a bit and buy food at a neighborhood store. It was damn hot, the kind of heat that makes you wonder if humans are even meant to dwell in such conditions. Not hairy white-skinned humans, at least.

So I watched history documentaries and videos about the upcoming UFC event this weekend. It’s headlined with an interim heavyweight championship, which is a bit meaningless since the undisputed champ won his belt in March. I hope Ciryl Gane takes it, not just because he’s French and a nice guy, but also because I’m intrigued by the idea of his athletic, movement-based style stacking up against the destroyer of worlds that is Francis Ngannou, I’d rather have that than a rematch against Lewis. But Derrick Lewis is also one hell of a cool fighter, and hopefully if he and the Cameroonian lock horns again, this time it won’t be the literal most boring fight ever.

I also started reading a book called Time Crumbling Like A Wet Cracker, written by an American guy I was working with on my first China posting in 2008. It’s about a mad scientist who developed a time travel machine to go kill bad people before they do their bad deeds, but it ends up unraveling the fabric of time. Pretty fun novel thus far.

At around 18:30 I went to play badminton. It’s in a new venue, and I rode the 2 km there with a beautiful sunset to the west. I played for an hour and a half with randos, and it was great. Badminton is life.

The girlfriend made thick savoury pancakes with ground meat and beans embedded inside, it really hit the spot. We watched the new Rick And Morty and then read a bit before going to bed.

Chapter 217

I woke up stupid late, but whatevah, I’m a strong independent black woman who don’t need no man. Most of our luggage from the trip was strewn all over the living room floor, the only stuff we took care of upon coming home was the food in the icebox. I did laundry and unpacked, and did the calisthenics routine.

Our storage space in the basement is full of garbage and has been since we moved here. I’ve been wanting to ask the landlord to clean it up and the girlfriend disagreed, because “Chinese harmony” or whatever. She finally caved in, and it was no big deal at all, the old lady and her son came, removed all the dusty hoarded crap they had left there, and now we had much more space. Yay. It was extremely hot, I feel like I’ll be taking a cold shower after every time I go outdoors in the upcoming months.

I ate a plate of scrambled eggs and then the girlfriend and I drove to a hospital to get the nucleic acid testing. It sucked shit. I’d give it a 7/10 on the scale of shit sucking, knowing how high the ceiling is. In fact, I’d dock a point since we were a bit lucky and got in line at the right time, only a few minutes later the queue behind us was a hundred meters long.

After a bit more tidying up and sitting around at home, the dog and I rode the longboard to the bar. I had beers with some British pals, then the girlfriend met me at the sushi place, and then I went back to the bar. More of my British pals were there, but the bar was very quiet. The owner said they might be forced to close in the next few days, or stop serving food.

They closed early, just as some more of my old pals came in. They all packed a cab to go to another bar, and I jumped in, why not? The other bar, for whatever reason, was packed, and didn’t seem to be subjected to the covid limited hours of operation. We made a beeline for the pool table upstairs, and since there were five of us, we played a game of protect your balls, that I miraculously won. A Chinese middle aged man, who looked like an art teacher with his shoulder length grey hair, challenged me to a game of 8-ball with 100 yuan on the line. I was dumb enough to accept, and though I played much better than I usually do, he got me. Then he played another one of my homies, and pocketed another red Mao Zedong bill.

One of my buddies who was there is Portuguese, and so is his friend who came over from Macau. I happen to speak Portuguese. They disagree. In their minds, I speak “Brazilian”, and at a very low level, since I can’t understand every single slangy mambo-jambo thing that comes out of their mouths, when they don’t just flat-out refuse to speak to me in their language and reply in English instead. It grated me more than a bit, but not to the point of starting an argument other than pointing out that of course foreigners are more likely to learn Brazilian Portuguese rather than the old country version, since Brazil is a massive country that exports tons of culture while Portugal is a little insignificant corner of Europe.

Still, a good time was had. I made it to bed at 3 AM.

Chapter 216

Distance covered: 1250 km (grand total 13 253 km)

I was up around 6, and took the dog out so he’d get a bit of exercise ahead of the day sitting in the car again. Our inn was in an old town that wasn’t without charm, next to a big pond full of water lilies. It was definitely worth a deeper exploration but we had over 1000 km to cover today so we left as soon as we could, and when we stayed here on the way west it was raining.

We bade farewell to the in-laws, who made their way to Hefei, a good 800 km away. And then we headed home through Shaanxi, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. Not much to say here, it was a long unglamorous day. I can’t say it was really unpleasant at any point, with the little traffic and good quality of Chinese highways. The heat sucked, and I was wondering why the hell I was going back to eastern China and its muggy 36-Celsius days.

We got to the big neon-slattered cities of the YRD (Yangtze River Delta) just after it got dark, paid the huge highway toll, and entered the city. I was a bit surprised there was no police checkpoint, with the surge of the pandemic and all. We could be driving a van full of Nanjing airport workers shooting snot rockets everywhere and nobody would stop us.

When we got to the apartment complex, the expropriated farmers in uniforms didn’t want to let us in, and told the girlfriend to call a number. From the half of the conversation that I was overhearing, it seemed like the guy at the end was a massive yinggaishurrer who was making up stuff on the spot, and he didn’t know what to do with us. We came from out of town, but directly from the areas that are still unaffected. They then told us to go get tested, it was past 9 PM and all I wanted was a shower and some rest but we went along, driving a few blocks to a hotel where one wing has been requisitioned by the health authorities. The nurses in thick plastic burqas looked at our tracking apps, and said they only test people coming from the list of affected cities.

So if you’ve been to a hot zone, you get tested for free by the city, but if you haven’t and need a test anyway to be able to travel freely in and out of your own goddamn apartment complexe (or at least, yinggai you need one), then you need to go to the hospital and pay for it? Seems logical. We should have gone to one of those cities for a few minutes, just to get the free test.

So we went home, unloaded the car, and finally got some nice rest. I whipped up a quick pasta meal and watched some YouTube junk videos, enjoying the comfort of my couch. It has been a very nice trip and I’m looking forward to enjoy the rest of the vacation.

Chapter 215

Distance covered: 920 km (total 11 803 km)

Home stretch. Our plan wasn’t set in stone, initially we were supposed to go all the way to the Kyrgyzstan border, and after being refused access to Xinjiang, there had been talks of going southeast into Sichuan and up through Hubei province, or perhaps more camping and exploring southern Gansu and Shaanxi, but now, given the new covid situation, it’s been decided we’d just head to our respective homes. I can’t disagree with that, it had been a kickass and fulfilling trip, especially for me, who left home seven weeks ago. And it will be nice to have a few more weeks at home before resuming work.

But first we have to cross half the damn country. We had a fantastic breakfast at a Tibetan eatery, their yak dumplings were to die for. Then we drove, and drove, and drove. After a stretch on rural mountain roads, we hit the highway for a few hours, then had to ride on another segment of winding rural road before getting to the highway again. Both had their pros and cons, the most obvious advantages being a lot of distance covered in a short time on the highway, and a more interesting drive on the country roads, with its bends and patches of varying quality and proximity to beautiful rural scenery.

“Look at all those mountains and lakes! Why do we live in Jiangsu? It’s so boring and flat over there”

“Because Jiangsu has money”

That’s the bottom line. Those landlocked provinces might be picturesque, but their economic engine isn’t running at nowhere the speed of the eastern seaboard ones.

That got us talking about our jobs. I’m wondering if my coworkers who left China for the holidays will be able to come back at all, and if shit continues to go downhill, if the school will even open. In February and March of 2020, I taught online classes, and there are worst deals than getting full pay to teach seven periods a week from the comfort of my apartment. I don’t want that, though. I want a return to normal, with gyms and restaurants open and teaching face to face, especially if they’re students I haven’t established a rapport with.

I drove the last segment, going through the endless urban expanse of Xi’An and then heading to the town where we had left our small car. It was still there, to our great relief, but then again it had been less than two weeks, and I can’t imagine the placid little town of Dixia has a lot of car thieves. We transfered our stuff from baba-in-law’s Subaru into our Nissan, the rubber lining on the doors was dry and they made a funny velcro sound when we opened them.

Then we got to the hotel we had booked, took showers, had a beer and crashed hard. When the girlfriend had called ahead to inquire about the possibility of filthy foreigners staying there, the lady just said “It’s fine, I won’t register him”. I wish more people would have this attitude in the face of joyless restrctive bureaucratic crap.

Chapter 214

Distance covered: 180 km (total 10 883 km)

We got up early as always, got a quick breakfast and walked to the famed temple Langmusi draws its name from. We had to pay a small entrance fee, walked through the dilapidated village among young and elderly monks in crimson robes sneering at us. I was volunteering to take care of the dog in case we can’t bring him in, as I’ve already been to a buddhist temple (and therefore have been to them all), but nobody stopped him from entering the courtyard. We did take turns with him while the others went to check out the rooms with idols and artefacts and golden buddhas though. In one of the side rooms were older monks loudly arguing (or having a casual conversation, not sure), I peeked in and they were sitting on cushions, making cheese from metal bowls full of curdled milk. Rarely have I smelled anything that foul, and I was a few meters away.

Like everywhere I go, curious people came to talk to the strange bearded foreigner. 100% of the Tibetans were bare-faced, like normal rational people, and maybe 20% of the Chinese tourists were wearing a stupid little fayssah mursk. One woman took it to the next level though, with some kind of electronic thing strapped to the lower part of her face that made her wheeze like the bad guy in Batman and gave her a robot voice. I asked her why she’s wearing that, and she replied “For safe” in Chinglish. But then she took it off to show the girlfriend and I the little fan inside and the USB port to recharge it. Man oh man. We’re always urged to “wear a mask according to science” and as someone who teaches actual science for a living, this shit makes me cringe so hard. Very little of it is scientific and rational, it’s all so goddamn dogmatic and dumb.

Past the temple was a big grassy yard with a creek, where I let the dog run around like a spaz. Then we went up a hiking trail, it was a bit of a tough one, with lots of huge rocks and creek crossings. The dog loved it, hopping from one stone to the other. There was a bit of a commotion ahead, the tourists splitting to let a herd of sheep go through on the narrow flooded path. The Tibetan family was whipping them with branches, and when one of the poor wooly animals would have trouble negociating the big boulders, he’d be grabbed and tossed ahead, landing with a confused “baaaah”.

“Oh no! Poor little yang”, the girlfriend said. Yeah, it sucks, but it’s not as if those little guys are not all destined to slaughter.

I climbed in a cave, using a knotted rope allowing me to get up the steep sandy slope, and then we made our way out to meet the in-laws.

We hopped in the car and got on the road for a day trip. I snaked on an impossibly picturesque road at the bottom of a valley, dodging or stopping for the cows or yaks who would cross the road.

Looking for a nice spot to rest and have lunch, we stopped at a village which had a walled park with some kinds of stupas. We asked a man if we can go in and he said yes, but after we set up our folding table and all the stuff we need, some random parasite came and said we have to pay 2 yuan (lol) each. I wanted to tell her to go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut and stop bothering us, but mama-in-law just paid the paltry sum to get rid of her. I remember how my first interactions with Tibetans in 2009 were mostly negative, I found them not nearly as friendly as the Chinese and constantly asking me for money (and I wasn’t a fan of the stench coming from the rancid butter tea they were guzzling by the gallon), but either the culture has changed or has been beaten out of them, as I didn’t have to deal with much of that nonsense this year and last year when we went to the Tibetan part of Yunnan province.

I heated the rice, bean and meat mixture, plopped a spoonful or two on a tortilla, added salsa, and made burritos that were very well-received. We also had nacho chips, the last of the honeydew melon from Guazhou, and soup made with the beef broth. A group of kids were amassed along the wall, curiously looking at us, no doubt finding the pale-skinned eastern Chinese almost as strange as the overseas barbarian. I went to play basketball with them for a bit, laughing and high-fiving when one of them would score. Great fun. Then I shared some of our food, they were very polite, saying “xiexie” after each piece they took. They spoke Chinese without any trace of an accent (to my ears) but also babbled in Tibetan among themselves and with the adults, that’s nice.

When I went back to have a sip of my now lukewarm beer, there were two donkeys by our table. We fed them melon peels and that only emboldened them to overstay their welcome, inching closer and closer. The dog was in a state of confusion in front of those two imposing herbivores.

Then we made our way to Zhagana (a lot of place names are a bit odd here, as they are Tibetan names turned into Chinese), one of those superfluous tourist sites I described in yesterday’s entry. After an hour and a half driving for free through yet another superb valley with imposing rocky peaks on the horizon, I questioned the point of going there, but the price was fair and my companions really wanted to go, having been sold the hype by the popular travel TV show Baba Qu Nar?, which features young hip dads going on trips with their almost inevitably annoying primary school children.

Well, one can’t deny that the place is seriously breathtaking, even after all the traveling I’ve done on all corners of the world. The village is nestled in a valley with huge steep mountains all around, and the asymmetric buildings on a slope are very reminiscent of those touristy but magnificient towns in Italy, like the in-laws (who went there last year just before covid hit) pointed out. And despite what the ominously packed parking lot suggested, it wasn’t packed with tourists and the horse flies who typically follow (and annoy the fuck out of) them, we walked in the quiet narrow streets before going down an ad hoc hiking path down a barley field, across a stream and up a long staircase, only encountering occasional adventurous tourists, and hardy Tibetans harvesting bundles of barley.

After circling back, we stopped for victory cold drinks at a rustic hotel managed by a young skinny Tibetan guy with a mullet. The in-laws wanted to stay until the sunset, a few hours later, so I drank beer over beer in the meantime. I had a Yellow River, which had a surprising subtle spiced aroma to it that reminded me of the Coup De Grisou (but much less potent), and then a Qinghai Lake, a white barley beer with fruity notes. It’s rare you stumble upon locally made beers that are not run-of-the-mill Chinese light lagers or the occasional chocolatey stout.

Mama-in-law looked at the menu of the downstairs restaurant, with a selection of Tibetan and Sichuanese, and said we should all pick one item for dinner.

“Mapo tofu”, I said, sipping my third beer.

“You want to look at the rest of the menu? They have...”

“Mapo tofu”

“We had mapo tofu yesterday. Don’t you...”

“Mapo tofu”

I love mapo tofu.

After the meal, we went to a viewpoint, which involved a pretty long ascent up a long staircase. I was feeling nice and bloated, after all those beers, and had a cold one in my small backpack for when I arrived up top. The round platform was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people waiting for the sunset, but there was a big expanse of grass where we could sit, picnic style, and watch the sun disappear over the rocky peaks. The sky then took a bunch of orange hues. Nice.

On the way down, I kept farting unconrollably, something that had been afflicting me a lot in the past few days. The girlfriend said:

“I’ve been fangpiing a lot too! I think it’s because we’re at an altitude of 4000 m, the pressure outside of bodies is lower than the pressure inside.”

That’s... not the dumbest hypothesis I’ve ever heard. I’d say it’s more likely to be the meat-heavy diet but who knows.

The way back to Langmusi was smooth, aside from a near hit with a yak that baba-in-law swerved around at the last second, the dumb jet-black long-haired cow being nearly invisible in the night. We got in past 9 and went to bed soon after, tomorrow is going to be a long day.

Chapter 213

Distance covered: 421 km (total 10 703 km)

Up at 7:20, we had breakfast at the same muslim restaurant across the street and went to retrieve the covid tests. I waited in the car while the girlfriend went in, and she forgot my passport inside. That could have been a huge pain in the ass if I didn’t notice just as we were about to get on the road.

We all have been reading the news, the pandemic is in full swing again, first there were a few cases among workers at the Nanjing airport, but then it spread like wildfire, which makes sense, as it’s summer time and a lot of people are traveling. Now my friends in Nanjing are in a world of suckitude, and everyday more cities report confirmed and asymptomatic cases. So far it hasn’t really reached the remote west, but we have to be extra careful regarding where we go and how we go there. We’re on our last leg anyway, preparing to do the long drive home.

We entered Sichuan province through a quick and easy police checkpoint, after mama-in-law had done her research and confirmed that the cases in the province are limited to the densely populated east and that the far western Tibetan counties don’t have any restrictions or anything that would affect negatively our health QR code.

The scenery was of verdant valleys, with sometimes a village built on the hillside, and of course thousands and thousands of grazing animals. It was absolutely magnificient, words wouldn’t do it justice. I don’t think at any moment through the day did I look at something not incredibly picturesque, even the towns we crossed were cute as hell, with squat square buildings and Tibetans walking around with their wide rimmed hats or red robes.

Consequently, the government officials in charge of tourism are in a bit of a pickle: since the attraction of the region is its natural beauty, how can they set up tourist sites to extract as much money as possible from obedient domestic visitors? You can’t really build Ming Dynasty structures or tacky theme parks. Sure, there are those low-key spots where people can go horseriding and camp in a yurt, but they only attract a certain demographic and you don’t want too much money going into the Tibetans’ pockets, do you? Fencing off the whole province or implanting a chip in people’s brains to charge by the minute every time they look at a beautiful mountain or grassland valley isn’t feasible (though I’m sure it’s been brought up in brainstorming sessions), so then what they did was quite smart, they found a place with particularly dramatic rocky peaks, turned it into some kind of national park (not with preservation in mind; quite the opposite, instead they just overbuilt a site around it), slapped a ridiculous price on it, and got a hype machine rolling.

“Hey look! Lianbaoyezi is that way, down this side road, only a 36 km detour!”

“Well, 72 km if we have to come back to this road. What is Lianbaoyezi?”

“It’s a famous site”

“Why is it famous? What’s there?”

“It’s famous! There are mountains, a river valley, and a Tibetan village”

“Like... what we’ve been driving through for the past hour?” It’s hard not to be snarky and cynical sometimes.

We went, decided it was too damn expensive, and did a U-turn. It wasn’t a waste of time though, the road along the river was beautiful and fun to drive. Some of the lightly sloped green plains reminded me of the Beauce region of Quebec (the golden buddhist temples not withstanding) and the valley with thick coniferous tree cover also reminded me of my homeland. We stopped by the river for lunch, mama-in-law bought a piece of beef from the muslim restaurant and cooked it in the electric pressure cooker they had been lugging along, the meat was very good but tough, it should have been braised for much longer. After we ate, I chopped the leftover beef in tiny chunks, mixed it with leftover rice and beans, that I’ll use tomorrow to make burritos. We chilled there for a bit longer, my driving duties were completed for the time being, so I had a beer and a nice glass of apple pie Bailey’s, something the Venezuelan had in his fridge in Nanjing, and that I fell in love with.

After a whole afternoon driving on those remote, but excellent quality country roads, we got to Langmusi. Unlike the backwater dusty towns of Jiuzhi and Dulan, Langmusi is a full-on tourist city, with guesthouse after guesthouse after knickknack shop. Some even had English signs, hoping to cater to a foreign backpacker crowd who’ll likely never come, backpackers are notoriously lame and tend to stick on a very beaten path, especially those who come to China.

We had a meal at a Sichuan restaurant, all the classics, and then got back to the hotel. I had a Skype convo with my dad, my brother and his two kids, the connection was a bit spotty at times but I’m still grateful we’d been able to use the internet at all, in this faraway corner of the mountains. Also the dog peed on the bed, something he hadn’t done in a long long time. I punished him and he bared his teeth at me like an insolent teenager, which looked more silly than threatening, with his underbite that separates his front teeth by a good centimeter.

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.