Health Care 101

May 5, 2011

Our third overnight train went from Lanzhou to Jiayuguan. Many the the group had to share their compartments with Chinese who had booked their tickets before ours were purchased, hence there were not sufficient compartments with all four beds available. However, Carol, Lise, Saci, and myself did get a room to ourselves. Our first reaction to the spacing was that there was much more room between the beds which made maneuvering in the compartment much easier. Since we couldn’t check our big bags as we had done in the past trips, we had all our luggage in the compartment. Most of it stowed above so it wasn’t as big a problem as we feared. Just difficult lugging all our stuff through the station, onto the train, into the compartment and hoisting it up.  However, at bed time we discovered that Newton was right, and for every action there is a reaction. The beds were correspondingly  narrower, and with the ”derry air” hanging over the edge it gave new meaning to the term “Flying Buttress.”

The train ride was further lowlighted by the fact that my health had been deteriorating and we all spent the nght listening to Jim cough and hack his way across the Chinese hinterlands. We were able to get into our rooms at the hotel at 7:30 a.m. which was a godsend for me. I just undressed, left my clothes in a pile on the floor, got into bed, pulled the covers up over my head and went out like a light.  Carol went downstairs and had breakfast, and when she came back we decided  it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get any better without medical attention. I hadn’t been eating, was weak, and thoroughly shot. Ben took Carol and me to a medical clinic where we received attention. I got an examination and an x-ray. It was efficient, professional, and courteous. The whole process cost me a total of 10 yuan, or $1.65. Saci said at that price I should have asked for two or three. Hey, if the Chinese can do it, ……….?   The lady who examined the x-rays said there appeared to have been a back injury recently. Uh….yeah.

Got some meds at the pharmacy and can happily say I’m on the mend. Not as quickly as my impatient nature would like, but doing much better. I went back to the hotel and essentially spent the next 24 hours in bed, sleeping for much of it.

Carol and the group went to see the western end of the Great Wall. Over 4,000 kms long as it weaves it’s way up, down, and across China, this is where it all came to an stop. I would have liked to see it, but had other priorities. Carol said it was very interesting. We’re really out in the hinterlands here, and the wind howls and the dust blows, and it’s generally a much rougher, tougher sled than the big glitzy cities to the east. The wild west still lives in China. A constant film of dust covers almost everything. Nose masks are part of the uniform and the weather is either a lot hotter or a lot colder than the rest of the country, depending on the season.

The next day was a very interesting road trip to Dunhaung. Our spirits were lifted by the bright sun and clear air. The first fully sunny morning we’ve had on the trip. The heavy industrial area  around Jiayuguan came with five hours of seeming endless stretches of desert. The kind of desert which is a mixture of sand and small rock, qualifying as neither, but having it’s own consistency. You could tell the salinity of the soil because it cracked beneath your feet as you traipsed across it as if it had rained and formed a crust on top. We stopped to inspect a fairly intact beacon tower, one of the many from which they alerted the forces down stream of enemy movements or impending danger. As the Native Americans did, they had a signal code which held them in good stead.

A train consisting of engine and four cars slowly overtook us looking like Strelnikoff’s (sp) train in Doctor Zhivago with the background of the vast emptiness of the area behind it. The Black mountains framed us to the North while the snow capped mountains to the South let us know we were getting into an area where the big dogs lay still hidden behind their shorter guardians. We’re skirting the Tibetan plateau. Nobody wanted to have to trek across that area. But the desert area just north of it was certainly no picnic. Each day brings a new appreciation and absolute amazement of these incredible journeys. 

 West, always west, on this trip. Around one in the afternoon we pulled into Dunhaung,  a lovely, warm, in weather and spirit, place of about 200,000 people. People generally ignore you, with the exception of me, who as Lise says: “You continue to have the ability to send the girls into fits of giggles. But probably not the reaction you would hope for.”  We all cracked up, but I explained to her that women have looked at me all my life and laughed, so it comes as no surprise :-)

We went out to the big sand dunes just south of town where you can climb the dunes, ride camels, go boarding down the dunes and generally have a play day in the sand. Because I’m still in recovery mode I wuzzed out and took the golf cart out to the oasis,  a beautiful spot of a crescent shaped spring-fed lake which has served a watering hole for centuries of travelers seeking relief from the elements. It’s this oasis around which the town developed. Because of its natural positioning at a sheltered spot, the drifting sands have never filled it in with the all encompassing sand. It’s a truly delightful spot and one which was greatly appreciated after days of drabness and sameness. 

Saci, Minh, and Alan climbed the dunes while most of the group took the camels around the dunes for an hour and a half of getting an idea of what it must have been like to do this day after day, month after month on the road west on the silk road. I sat under a shaded awning drinking an orange juice and pondered the same things with my bride at my side.

We’re approaching our halfway point. Tonight is our last train ride. Still don’t have tickets and Ben informed us that we may have the same cabin sharing situation as last time. They don’t allow tickets to be sold earlier than seven days to prevent speculators from buying up all the compartments and then selling them at a huge profit. I understand the logic since the trains are really the way the people get around China, but since the government controls everything else and clamps down on whatever they want to clamp down upon, why not bust the people who speculate and still let people get their schedules set. I mean, come on, give me a break. They can force Google to make changes and they can’t control train speculators? Ben said one trip they didn’t even have tickets when they got on the train.

  We have a couple very rough days ahead of us as we cross the border between China and Kyrgyzstan. 12-14 hours of rough road and bureaucratic hassle,  but I won’t get ahead of myself. I’ll concentrate on the delightful scene this morning when we left the hotel to walk and could hear this music coming from somewhere down the block. As we got closer we could see it was a pre-school and the munchkins were out in the courtyard doing their morning calisthenics to music;. Their little hands waved in circles and flapped up and down in rhythm. Some sang along while others struggled to just make their hands go where they wanted them to go. When they finished it was time to line up and march to the class rooms. Now they all turned into Max and Alex. They had to hold on to the person in front of them, hands, shirts, pants, whatever they could grab onto. They pulled, they tugged, they swung the person in from around laughing all the time at the opportunity to just be kids. Absolutely  wonderful.  Nearly all of of us enjoyed Dunhaung. The hotel was “Eh,” no hot water, lousy breakfast, but all in all we could cross the street in safety without fear of getting run down from either direction, it had a calm atmosphere where they really didn’t take notice of tourists, and we relaxed a little on our one day here.

Everything is Silk Road stuff now. Not just an occasional reference to it. The entire structure of things here began as silk road stopovers, exchange cities, and general mingling of cultures. Hence a few lily-white tourists running around the streets didn’t cause a stir. Saw our first other group of pasty-faced tourists, a group of seven kids studying in Shanghai on a week’s break. We’ve trailed them for the last couple of days. Looked like good ambassadors for the home sod. 

As we approach the Uighur “Semi Autonomous Region” we see a lot more security. More checkpoints, more bag scans, etc. The Uighur uprising of a couple of years past has not resulted in any changes, and the  people learned just What “Semi” means, just as the Tibetans have. Still no word on what was going on in Tibet. Can’t see any info on the net. Blocked? Or just another control factor?
[ed. perhaps something to do with this... China bans foreigners from restive Tibet - Reuters]

We left Dunhaung for the train station which is a 2 ½ hour drive. Here is a city of this size and we’ve got to drive that far to catch a train. They have a new station in town, but you can’t get to where we were headed, so it’s off on the road again. The landscape is ever changing, always the same. It’s desolate, it’s endless, and it fascinating. The road skirts mountains which look reddish brown and not rocky like we think of the Sierras or Andes, but rather as if the rocks have disintegrated over the millennia and have fused into another substance. Not rock, not gravel, just fused together particles. Then tilted fault blocks appear and you see the sedimentary layers which have formed over their own millennia. Later, it becomes the landscape of the dunes with it’s ever shifting hills and valleys. It’s fascinating to watch the beauty of the seeming sameness. But the overall impression that we keep shaking our heads over is: “How did they do this?” How could people endure the harsh conditions of this route and do it the length of time required to complete their journey.

Our train station is in an absolute dump of a town out in the middle of nowhere. We all said: “Why here.”
 The answer seems to be that it is a mining area or some metallurgical endeavor which brought the main rail line here. The needs of commerce come before the convenience of people. The town of maybe 10,000 is just awful. It looks like parts of South Bronx. Large blocks of concrete building run one after another, block after block. Windows have all been blown out, and everything appears abandoned. The courtyards between them are strewn with trash and devoid of any living plant life. Dead weeds are as good as it gets for flora. Saci and I walked around, and he just said: “Why would you live here? Why would you raise your children here?” The answer seemed to be they don’t. We didn’t see kids for the longest time until we finally saw one looking like the waif he undoubted]. China is such a land of differences. It’s truly a Jekyll and Hyde story. Rich, smart boutique strewn cities, and holes in  which I don’t think anybody should be forced to endure no matter where they may appear on this earth. I compassion goes out to these people. 

I’ve been increasingly troubled by what I see as an overly negative tone to my postings. Nothing could be further from what I’m feeling. The trip has been well organized by World Expedions, the group has been great to be with, and I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted to see out of it. But the reality is that this is not the glitz trips of the past. We’re not cruising down fjords listening to Grieg in my head. We not visiting places I’ve seen in my youth and where we could talk to most everybody and get our questions answered and exchange in Repartee. No, this trip has been what we expected, a journey into the past and into lands where the tourist structure is adequate but not spectacular. We’re in the boonies, we’re on the frontier and life in the boonies and on the frontier is stark, and as Hobbes would say, can be: “Nasty, short and Brutish.”  I try to relate what I’ve seen and what I’m feeling. This is not a Rick Steves travel guide. So please don’t take my comments as being anything other than what I’m seeing and feeling. It ain’t always pretty, but for me, as always, it has been an incredible journey which I would repeat in a heartbeat. Let tomorrow bring what it may. It will be good and well received.

Love to all,

Carol and Jim