Tour Is Always Be Stupid
Ray has been writing to a nice young man we met in Beijing in Beilin Park, commenting on the eclipse tour we’re now on. He wrote back with an e-mail with the above title.
Tour, in fact, is always be stupid. When you have 48 people in two tour buses, you can only eat at places which will accommodate that many people in a hurry, and in most cases, that means lots of pre-prepared food which is not piping hot. Since we haven’t been served tripe or donkey, one has to assume that someone purposefully ensured that the menus would be somewhat consistent and “palatable to Westerners”, robbing us of much of the variety we could have experienced were we not on a tour.
Also, we are in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. A large percentage of the population is Uighur, and several other Islamic minorities. Yet almost all of the food we’ve gotten on the tour is your basic Han Chinese tour food. We see all this wonderful bread and delicious kebabs cooked on the street, and served in Islamic restaurants, but the only time we get to eat it is when we bail on a tour meal and go get it ourselves. And the way the Uighurs are presented is a little “cleaned up” from reality. Ray writes:
Is it acceptable again for the majority race to engage in blatant racial stereotyping nonstop? I know that Richard Pryor and everybody reclaimed some images but jeezis. I know that a tour guide must encapsulate the experience of a territory the size of Western Europe into 6 words for variety of people who speak a variety of English but jeezis. Wherever we weren’t being sold jade, we’re being told that Uighurs are a happy hospitable people and born dancers. About 6 times a day. No exaggeration. We went to a Uighur “home” today. Our guide said we were invited. We were not invited. The contempt on the faces of our nominal hosts will show up on every photo these Eurotrash put up on flickr. The Uighur were militarily defeated by the Han Chinese and they dance for money. Some of them plant bombs when they get tired of grinning back at the stern billboards which dot the landscape showing Han Chinese members of the People’s Liberation Army and their dedication to protecting the peace and social order of the former East Turkestan.
In addition to the stupid food, the weather has been somewhat stupid — the clouds have continued to make our tour through the desert quite a bit more pleasant than it would be if they weren’t there (30 degrees C instead of 40) but clouds are a bit of a bummer for an eclipse. There is a weather forecaster on the trip, who is quite convinced that the clouds will disappear tomorrow and be gone by Friday. So we all have to be optimistic.
The stupid weather feeds into the stupid Chinese or Xinjiang governmental restrictions: there is one viewing site in this area of the eclipse zone, and we can’t watch it anywhere else. If the weather is bad, we can’t try to go somewhere else. (Of course, this could be true anyway, because there aren’t many roads, and the clouds are usually nowhere or everywhere, but there are more than zero roads, and discrete puffy clouds are possible). We’ll get to the site tomorrow (which won’t have any Internet). Apparently there are many tents for many groups, but our tents will have restricted access to us. There are a few large viewing sites, but we have a small viewing site to the west of all of them. We can bring as much water as we want into the tent area, but not into the viewing area. (We should be able to see the eclipse from the tent area, so it’s not obvious we even have to bother with the viewing area). Our viewing area is restricted to us, but we should be able to view from the general area as well. I appreciate how people with cameras will like not having them overrun by thousands of locals, but I kind of like hanging out with locals during an eclipse, to show them what’s going on, and to see their reactions. So we’ll see how things look once we get to the site.
The people on the tour are generally pretty nice, and there seem to be only two eclipse virgins among them (plus the Chinese tour guides). One of the tour members was on the tour with us in Niger. I wonder how many from that tour are on the tour in Russia put on by the same company; if we’d known about the Chinese restrictions, and if it had been advertised sooner, maybe we would have gone on it instead. Probably half of them are from the Netherlands, nine from the US, a lady from Sydney, and the rest from elsewhere in Europe.
The tour has been to many tourist attractions which have the usual jade and silk shops attached, or, if out in the desert, lots of little stands with people selling various kitsch. We saw the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi which featured dessicated corpses from the desert that were many hundreds of years old; we went to the Heavenly Lake outside of Urumqi which was a beautiful green lake at the foot of a snowcapped mountain range; we moved to Turpan, a desert oasis town 100 meters below sea level which is a huge grape-growing area, currently for raisins, but like all grape-growing areas I expect them to learn a thing or two more about wine. At Turpan, we saw the ruins of two nearby ancient cities. The thing that struck us about Jiaohe was that it was located on a high plateau that was almost exactly the same shape as Manhattan — we walked from Battery Park up to Lower Harlem. Several of the tour members have rebelled at some of the more touristy sites, and requested stopping the bus in some somewhat more “real” places in order to take pictures of people or cemeteries or beds on roofs or whatever looks interesting from the windows of the bus.
Now we’re in a little town called Shanshan, and tomorrow we head to the Official Viewing Site. As long as the weather is good, and we’re reasonably comfortable, we’ll try hard not to complain. But it comes so naturally…