The Xining
(pronounced “shee ning”…)
We’ve been spending a few days in Xining in Qinghai province.
Things continue to get less and less Western as we continue west from Beijing. For a fixed $50-$60 a night, as we progress from Beijing to Xi’an to Xining, the hotels get fancier (i.e. providing “more services”), but the actual quality goes slightly down. This trend will definitely continue — our next two nights will be in a “tent hotel” by Qinghai Lake, and then we’ll be staying in some small towns as we drive towards Dunhuang, a small city. Presumably the hotel rates will subside as well.
China has four kinds of accommodations on their railroads, literally called “hard seat”, “soft seat”, “hard sleeper”, and “soft sleeper”. The Qinghai Hotel in Xining is definitely a hard sleeper — the bed is pretty equivalent to the floor. On the train, we’ve been in a “soft sleeper”, a compartment with four people. We got stuck with a snorer the first night, but Ambien solved that problem for me.
All of the hotels we’ve stayed in have had wired internet in the rooms, something I haven’t really ever seen anywhere else. None of them “just worked” — some kind of service call has always been required to get stuff set up. But it has been nice to be able to communicate. I expect that this, too, will be our last opportunity, probably until we get to Urumqi in about a week.
There’s a great restaurant, Ming Hao Seafood Restaurant, right next to the hotel here in Xining with no English menu, but with a picture for pretty much every item. Uncharacteristically, we’ve been eating there each night instead of walking twenty minutes into town and gambling on finding a good one.  One of the head waitresses (in black, not red or yellow) knows a lot of English food words, and has been very helpful to our picking stuff out. It may be our last opportunity to have fancy city food for awhile — we’ll probably be having Muslim Uighur street food most of the next several days (actually, we had a little this afternoon in a market we were walking through).
Yesterday, we arranged for a tour of the Ta’er Si Lamasery and the North Mountain Temple. In Xi’an, our three-day tour included an enthusiastic young guide and a driver with a car. His English was pretty good, and he encouraged our corrections to his pronunciation. We got along so well that he hung out with us an extra three hours after the tour was over, and had dinner with us. Our guide here in Xining, Niu Xiao Jun, was a “recommended by Lonely Planet” guide/interpreter, but the experience was much different.
He showed up at our hotel with no transportation, and suggested that it would be cheaper to go on the bus. We walked a few minutes to a bus stop, and got a bus which was leaving to stop and wait for us. There weren’t enough seats, and though people got up so Ray and I could sit down (we look “old”) our guide stood in the aisle. They’re not supposed to do this — three times they saw a policeman up ahead, and had everyone in the aisle get out and walk or something while we zoomed ahead. It took an hour and a half to get up to the lamasery. It struck us as odd that a tour guide would place such little value on travel time.
When we got to the lamasery, he pointed out that the $11 for his ticket wasn’t included in his price, but he was willing to wait if we didn’t want to pay it. Gee, what’s the point of having a guide? Telling us where the bus stop is? We bought the tickets and he showed us around.
Inside, there were lots of little temples with various Buddhas and arhans and other dieties and demons. By far the highlight was the 10 x 30 foot double-sided sculpture mural made out of yak butter, kept in a refrigerated room.
The guide came in handy when Ray took a picture of a statue, which angered some monk; he insisted that Ray “cancel” the picture. Ray told the guide to tell the angry monk that he had. While all this was happening, a couple other monks gave us the “we love your beard can we get a picture with you” gesture that we’re pretty used to now, which made the angry monk even angrier.
We took a taxi back to town, which went directly on the freeway, and went to the Northern Mountain Temple, a Taoist temple built into the base of the mountain next to the city. It had plenty of interesting images, and unfortunately is crumbling in many places — we weren’t able to go to the most precarious areas.
Today we decided to visit the little provincial museum, and the great mosque. On the way to the museum, we noticed that the road we were walking along had ropes strung along it, and that it was closed to traffic, and people were lining up. What was happening — a parade? The next clue was a sign mentioning a “race”. Soon after some VIP cars drove by with spare bicycle wheels and Trek logos. OK, so it was a bike race. Actually, it turned out to be the Tour of Qinghai Lake, a multi-segment race like the Tour de France except that it all happens at an average of 3000 meters above sea level. We hung around and watched about the first 50 riders complete the stage, which was probably about 30 km or so. Then we visited the little museum, which has many more English labels since the guidebook was written, and the mosque, which indeed had a mixture of Arabic domes and Chinese eaves, but which was pretty opaque to non-Chinese non-Arabic speakers like ourselves. There was a guy with a fabulous three-color beard, and a kid visiting from near Shanghai who was the only one who could speak to us in English.
Tomorrow we get picked up at 8 in the morning for the drive to the lake. It may be awhile before you hear from us again.