May 6, 2011
Here in the Turpan depression, the sun scorched, Death Valley like, below sea level area of Western China the temperature can get to 135 F they say. Can’t say anything about that but it was 100 yesterday, and after lunch when we all fled to our rooms to write, do laundry, sleep after the sleep-deprived train ride, or do whatever needed to be done. Megan went for a walk. She’s a tough gal.
Our train ride here was, as advertised, the toughest of the lot. Prior to this trip the trains had all started in the city where we boarded, but this was the equivalent of a Southwest Airlines flight where you get on and people are already on board who came with the plane. And like a SW flight, it means that people have been in your compartment who are no longer there but they have slept in your bed and they don’t change the sheets or pillow case during the trip. We had been forewarned to have our sheet sack out for such a case. Luckily, the four amigos got the only cabin which did not have locals sharing and the only thing we had to deal with was my coughing fit in the middle of the night. The others would have loved to have only that. Fran and Alan came into their compartment and a family with a baby were firmly ensconced. While beds are numbered and assigned, getting there first means getting the best place to put your luggage, feed bags containing who-knows-what, and all the accoutrements of travel. It means that you get what space is left over, which may be minimal. On Fran’s bed was a big wet circle. Did somebody spill something? Did the baby do its thing? What else might it have been? Who knew? In another cabin the men talked on their cell phones all night apparently not being able to sleep in the lurching carriage. Others had to deal with people who read all night and kept the lights on or slept all night and snored loudly.
We had four hours of waiting at lovely Liu Yuan station where the toilets became the joke of the evening. The men had urinals. But for defecation purposes and for the ladies there was what appeared to be individual stalls. That was the good news. The bad news was that inside the stalls, instead of the “Squat hole” was a tile-lined trench with no flush. On what appeared to be 30 minute intervals there would be a rush of water and it would wash away all the droppings for the last half-an-hour. As I said in my last letter, we all knew what we were getting in for in general, we just didn’t know the specifics. So when Megan came back and said: “It was great, I got in on the flush,” we all roared in understanding and began making jokes about the royal flush. Finally we boarded our train at 10:30 and began our ride which ended at 5:30 a.m. That left us an hour ride from that way station to Turpan.
Turpan, a city of 300,000 is really quite remarkable. An oasis town along the silk road, the people developed one of the truly remarkable engineering feats of the ancient world. 2,000 years ago the people in this griddle hot flat plan devised a way to dig holes up to 300 feet deep and aligning those holes were then able to dig underground channels which brought the water from the Tian Shan mountains up to 40 miles away. In all they have over 3,000 miles of channels dug. Having done so, they turned this land into a veritable green valley. Still today over 30% of the people in Turpan receive their drinking water from these systems. What the systems did in the ancient days was to provide irrigation which turned the arid desert areas away from the oasis into a green ribbon of agriculture which richly supported the population and allowed it to grow into a major point on the silk road. It’s a city I’d never heard of and it was critical stage along the Silk Road. We were told that the grape growing industry of Turpan rivaled that of any area of the world. That may be true in terms of quality, I can’t say, but what I can say is that it is different from any grape area I’ve ever seen. Napa Valley, the Borossa Valley in Aussie land, French Bordeaux, South African Stellenbosch and Lodi, CA are all wonderful vineyard areas but they’re all high tech, mechanized vintnaculture. Here it couldn’t be more different. Everything is labor intensive, use whatever you can and let nature do its thing. Instead of neatly organized rows evenly spaced with wires strung at exact heights where the harvesters can come rumbling down stripping the vines and spitting the grapes into gondolas for transportation to the winery, the rows here are hodgepodge, mishmash, disorganized plots of earth. The rows are strung together by a collection of whatever wood is left over from something else. A tree went down? Take the branches, cut off the side shoots, and stick them into the ground letting the grapes wrap around them at whatever height the branch is long. There’s some lumber left over from a job nearby? Take that and string them together with the branch to form an “Arbor” and let the grapes grow from there. There’s a lot of grapes planted. We visited an area called “Grape City,” but Chateau Lafitte it ain’t.
The children of where ever we are continue to be an absolute delight. What wonderful little smiles they continuously give. Cheery “Hellos” are followed by convulsive laughter when they are returned. Turpan is Uighur country. We’ve gone from the near homogeneous Han population of Beijing and Xian and traveled through Mongolian, Tibetan, and now Uighur. We’ve seen the near non-existent religious structures of the east and into Buddhist areas, and for the last few days it’s been dominated by the Islamic faith. There’s no seeming limitation of religious expression this far from the power structure of Beijing. The Uighur women wear the veil and the men the skull cap. Colorful long dresses, like the jelabas of Morocco are everywhere on the street, and we’re never offered pork as one of our dinner options. It’s all lamb, chicken and beef.
We drove this morning to Urumqi. It was an interesting drive with our vehicle cutting through the western edge of the Gobi just below Mongolia and the snow capped Tian Shan mountains opening up and showing us a path through that wasn’t difficult to traverse. The main roads here in China have been excellent. All have been four lane toll roads which are well-maintained and easy on the butt. 75 mph is the speed for cars, but there aren’t a lot of them. Buses hauling people to and from create some of the traffic, but it’s the long haul trucks that take up the bulk of the road space. 22 wheelers hauling industrial goods to and from the hinterlands keep up a good pace and they really don’t inhibit traffic with the two lanes in each direction allowing easy passing, even in the mountain passes. The city itself is another of those 3+ million metropolis dots on the map that are so prevalent here. As a prerequisite, it’s heavily polluted, but again as we’ve seen, everybody seems to just go about their business.
The sick bug is running rampant in the group. First it was Allen, then John, then me, and now Saci and Minh have it. We thought it was a sexist bug, but Megan announced this morning that she was “Crook.” Saci blames me naturally since we spent the two train rides when I was sick, and he may be right. Ben said on his last trip everybody with one exception became ill. I think it’s the sudden changes in temp (yesterday’s 100, was greeted by 72 today and rain here in Urumqi), not sleeping well on the trains/hotel beds and the “do it all while you can” pace we seem to run at. Thankfully, Carol is still in the pink, although it’s actually a darker red today.
I’ve got to do something about my drastic weight control. After getting hurt, I lost 30 pounds, and while I’d put some back on over the last year, I left home at 175. The other day I weighed myself on a hotel scale and I weighed 235. Today I weighed in our new fancy 5-star hotel and I weighed 66. I hear dramatic fluctuation in one’s weight is not healthy.
We fly to Kashgar, our last Chinese city, tomorrow evening and then travel into Krygyzstan. Everybody is really ready to move on. Ben asked us what we wanted to do for dinner tonight – Chinese? Muslim? There was some intense debate about Pizza Hut, but he said it didn’t fit his budget. We decided on Muslim. It’s been Chinese three times a day lately and we’re ready to move on, both literally and figuratively.
John continues to be a source of interesting conversation. He is extremely interesting to talk to, very engaged in all that we do, open to all ideas and yet………………I just found out he is a personal friend of Rupert Murdock, for whom he worked for 20 years running many of his business interests in Japan. He’s even stayed at his California house when the neighbor’s “Ronny and Nancy” dropped over for an evening of video watching. Had to be 20th Century fox films, of course.
