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19. Traveling in the West of China - Urimuqi
I left Chengdu and flew to Urimuqi, which is the most northwestern of the Chinese provinces and located on the old Silk Road. I was to be met there by the family of Grace Liu's husband. Mrs. Liu is a professor at my college, and a Chinese citizen.
The flight took four and a half-hours. We flew over high, rugged snow capped mountains, deserts with no vegetation except near the winding of rivers, and land with small roads that followed the river valleys. We landed, I collected my luggage, and exited the secured area of the airport through people crowding against a barrier and waiting for arrivals.
This time there was no sign to greet me and guide me to new friends. I held up my sign, written in Chinese, which had my name and that of the people meeting me. No one came forward. I exited the airport and found a cab and handed the driver a copy of the business card of the manager of a hotel in Urimuqi. A major highway construction project was under way linking the airport to the city and traffic, including buses, cars, taxis, bicycles, donkeys, and pedestrians traveled over rock strewn, pockmarked, dirt roads.
Urimuqi itself is a dirty, overcrowded, and unattractive city. It immediately felt different because of the dress of the people. The majority population here is Muslim. The taxi pulled up to the front of a hotel. I was immediately surrounded by men holding handfuls of Chinese money. There were at least fifty men milling around the entrance to the hotel. This did not look nor feel like China. I paid the driver, and wheeled my small suitcase through the crowds of men.
Inside the hotel was full of men and few women. The women were all veiled. Most of the men, like in other parts of China, were dressed in western clothes. A few were in robes. I went to the front desk and asked if anyone spoke English. No one did. I showed them my passport and signed that I wanted to check in, I got a confused shake of the head. I took out the copy of the business card of the hotel manager. That caused consternation. I waited.
A man came up and signaled me to follow him. He led me up some stairs. I drug my suitcase behind me as he walked ahead of me. We went down a corridor filled with small room. Many of the doors were open and the rooms were bare with cots in them and filled with poorly dressed men sitting, smoking, and playing cards. My uneasiness increased as I followed this strange man up another set of stairs, still dragging and carrying my suitcase.
Finally we entered an office with some women working in it. It consisted of overflowing file cabinets, one computer, and a few chairs. A woman motioned me to sit down, left, and returned with a cup of tea. A few minutes later another woman came in and spoke to me in English. They had no record of a reservation for me, the hotel manager was busy, but he would be with me shortly. I was to "take a rest."
A half-hour later the manager came. He had arranged for a car to take me to my hotel. We left the hotel with the manager, the woman translator, and a driver. On the way the manager said, "I am taking you to a good hotel. My hotel is not good enough for you." Later I would piece together the story. My host family was not informed of my arrival time. The hotel manager, a friend of the family, had arranged hotel accommodations for me, but not at his hotel. His hotel catered to people from Afghanistan and Pakistan and the crowd of men who had greeted me as I exited my cab were moneychangers operating on the black market.
My host family was waiting when we arrived at the appropriate hotel, which was of the four star variety and occupied mostly by businessmen. We immediately went to a restaurant for a late lunch.
Urimuqi, located on the old Silk Road, provided several days of fascinating sight seeing. I joined Chinese tour groups in small vans. I was accompanied by the sixteen-year-old son of my host family who spoke enough English to assist me and for us to become friends through the use of my inadequate Chinese and inventive sign language. We visited the Heavenly Lake. A glacier fed high altitude lake surrounded by snow peaked mountains. Mongolian nomadic people live in yurts and herd their cows and sheep with the help of small horses. I didn’t get off the tourist track here, so I wasn't able to see any part of this region that was unspoiled by the flocks of tourists that were swarming over the land.
Another day I followed the Silk Road for a long day of sight seeing. We drove though a desert with few towns to Turpan, the center of a grape-growing region. Water is moved from the mountains to the grapes and villages through an aqueduct system that is over 3000 years old. The vines were heavy with grapes, the air filled with dust and the smell of grapes, the land covered with vineyards, small villages of stone homes and dusty yards, and brick drying sheds for harvested grapes. The roads were filled with small vans of tourist and horse drawn carts driven by robed men and women. Many of the women wore veils.
This trip through the West of China showed me the immensity and diversity of the Chinese nation. China is the a little smaller, geographically, than the United States. However, the majority of its land is either mountainous or desert and is not arable. Think about putting four times the population of the United States on the land East of the Mississippi River and you can get an idea about the density of population in relationship to the available land.
This trip was challenging and rewarding. I trusted to the good will of strangers. That trust was not displaced.
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