Yinchuan

Seeing as I'd accomplished so much in that one day in Yulin, I decided to press on the very next day and caught a bus out to Yinchuan, capital of the tiny province of Ningxia. I get the impression that this little province is left off the itineraries of many people, and the province itself is quite poor as a result of this and encroaching desertification, but it has a wealth of sights and I spent a good couple of days here taking them in. Again my bus ride from Yulin followed the Great Wall, or what was left of it. I never again saw stretches of the wall in good condition. It's not inconceivable that it will disappear one day but then, in the middle of nowhere who'd miss it?I liked Yinchuan a lot. It's a provincial capital, so has plenty of facilities and entertainment, but is also still fairly small and comfortable. It was friendly and attractive too. It took me a little time to find a decently priced hotel that didn't have electrical outlets right next to shower heads but once that was done I could explore. First up was Bei Ta, a monastery and pagoda on the edge of town. This place was completely empty when I was there but impeccably maintained. The pagoda itself is about 300 years old and has a little exhibition of photos of other styles of pagoda inside. I couldn't read where they were all from, but I recognised a fair few that I'd visited myself.
Back in Yinchuan town I visited the Ningxia Provincial Museum. This is set in another former monastery and was pretty average. Ningxia is one of a handful of provinces in China dedicated to a minority group - in this case the Hui, a muslim group descended from Persian and Arab traders who moved in along the Silk Road to trade with China many centuries ago. It was truly ironic then that this is what passes for an exhibition on Hui culture in the Hui's own museum. I have to say I laughed out loud when I saw the wispy beard stuck onto an old shop mannequin. Maybe that's why I couldn't focus my camera. It was ridiculous.
Some of the other exhibits were alright, but I've seen better. There was another tower to climb though, which was fine. I spent the evening checking out some possible destinations and planning my itinerary. Thanks to my extended stay in Beijing awaiting my visa I'd all but kissed goodbye to the possibility of going all the way out west to explore the huge frontier country of Xinjiang as there just didn't seem to be time to fit everything in. This was a huge disappointment for me as this province was one of the places I'd always wanted to see. However, I'd made good progress these last few days and after a few hours research on the internet I decided that if I skipped a few little places along the way I could squeeze in a few days on the eastern side of the province before flying out to Shanghai. I'd never make it to Kashgar and the lakes and mountains along the road towards Pakistan but a small taste is better than nothing at all and besides, I'm sure I'll be back one day. So it was with renewed enthusiasm and excitement that I went to bed that night ready for a day of full-on exploration and travel to come.

The Great Wall: Take Two

My trip out west roughly parallelled the route of the Great Wall and each day I could glimpse it's remains at least once. I passed it leaving Beijing and criss-crossed it again between Baotou and Yulin. Here just ten minutes or so out of Yulin there is a restored fort and beacon tower called Zheng Bai Tai. It was quite an impressive structure, but essentially empty. Far more interesting were the remains of the Great Wall here that ran out from the fort on either side, so Gao Xiang and I set out to explore it.The remains of the wall here are slight. The brick lining had long disappeared, probably robbed away for building material, and all that was left was the earthen core. Over the years this had been eroded away or indeed removed completely. Sometimes the best you could do was attempt to play join-the-dots with the watch-towers and walk from one isolated square tower to the next. One tower we came to had had it's base cleared to expose the lower few courses of bricks and drainage channel that had been preserved under the fallen rubble and earth. All the spoil from this little excavation had been just pushed to the side and as I scrambled round past this my inner archaeologist was reawakened and I spotted something in the dirt. I reached down and pulled out a little piece of pottery with a nice little pattern on it. I looked around and found more. And then more, and more again. It was everywhere, along with bricks and plenty of animal bone. I was never a fantastic archaeologist, despite 4 years of trying, and in any case I was more at home with bits of bone than pottery but I could tell that some of this stuff was old. There were plenty of modern pieces but also some genuine archaeological material. I was very impressed. It was good fun too. Before anyone accuses me of archaeological rape, all the pieces were from the spoil and therefore completely out of context with the monument itself and as such relatively useless for proper archaeological analysis...probably. We had quite a good collection in the end, and this photo is just part of it. They were too good to leave behind so with a pocketful of cultural relics, we went on. We were diverted away from the wall just then as a brickworks had been built across the site, completely erasing all traces of the wall at that point. You can see a watch-tower and some small remains of the wall just across the void that had been created for the works. One cool thing about this diversion is that as we skirted the gap we discovered some cave houses in another small depression just next to it. They had been abandoned for some years and were missing doors and windows. Some had damage from subsidence and erosion but they were really interesting to have a look round. Just another part of the local cultural heritage that I was lucky enough to experience here.From the cave-houses we made our way back to the wall and followed it for a little way more before returning back to the tower and catching a taxi back into town. Not bad for an afternoon!

Life In A Northern Town

My long overnight 5-in-a-bed bus ride across the Inner Mongolian plains brought me to Baotou for 5 in the morning of August 2nd. There isn't really very much to see in Inner Mongolia so I didn't want to hang round much and was on another bus to Yulin, in northern Shaanxi, an hour later. What was interesting at Baotou bus station was that all the signs were dual language - Chinese and Mongolian. China seems to take good care of its minority groups and promotes them well (while still keeping a good firm hand on things) and I've come across many different minority groups and cultures throughout my travels, but up here and throughout my journey to the far west of China this became more and more apparent than it ever had been elsewhere. I think that's what made this part of my trip extra special for me, along with the usual amazing landscapes and monuments...I arrived in Yulin for midday and after a shower went off to explore. I didn't know very much about this town, except that it's an out-of-the-way northern town with some well-preserved yet not overly restored original features. This was enough for me to add it to my itinerary and was a good decision, I think. It has a fairly modern centre which was quite average but when I branched off the main drag I came across a 'restored' tourist street of completely new old-fashioned shops complete with bell-tower and ornamental wooden gates. These were so new that they were still putting on the final coat of paint as I walked past. The area was pretty dead. Obviously Yulin is not yet on the tour routes, but it intends to be. It was a shame that around this little area you could see that original buildings had been demolished to make way for all this development. This is the problem with rapid tourist development in many areas it seems; knock down the old and build a Disney-version of what used to be there before.I walked straight through all this and came to the city walls. These made the trip worth it alone. The walls still stand round a good half of the city, mostly still at near-full height and most retain their outer brick layer, even if this is in a pretty poor state of repair. Parts were already being cleared to be rebuilt and I felt extremely lucky to see such a sight in original, untouched condition. I appreciate the need for repair and restoration, and these walls do need it as they really didn't look that safe, but there was something special about the sight that you just didn't get in other restored walled towns like Pingyao and Xi'an.Also quite cool was the opportunity to take a look around a normal northern town. It was pretty dry and dusty, and all the buildings were a fairly uniform shade of grey, but not in an unattractive way. I walked up a hill to one side of the town following the walls and around this side of the town there was still quite a lot of original low-rise architecture. I was having a great time just walking up and down these little streets, just wandering wherever I fancied. It was along one of these streets that an old man and a young lad passed me walking down the hill. They made some comment about foreigners and I gave them a wave to say hi. A few minutes later the young lad came back up the road and asked me where I was going. I told him that I didn't know, so he asked me again, 'where do you want to go?'. I told him 'nowhere' and tried to explain that I was just walking. He didn't quite get it though and ended up following me around for the rest of the day. I was a bit non-plussed by all this but he seemed nice enough so I let him. His name was Gao Xiang, and he was a Senior 2 student. His English wasn't great, but he'd run home to grab his notebook so he could practise with me and that was cool.After discovering an amazing double gateway surviving in the mudcore wall that was all that was left at the top of town, we walked together back down to the main centre of town to catch a taxi out to Zheng Bai Tai, a restored fortress on the ruins of the Great Wall which runs past Yulin. This was cool enough to warrant a post of it's own, so read on...

Killing Time In Beijing

I was back in Beijing for just one reason - to pick up my passport and newly-extended visa. This had been one long hassle from the word 'go' and really threatened to become a full-blown disaster at some points. My old visa was due to expire on July 29th and it was only about a week before this when I was first in Beijing that I found out that it could not be extended. That was a bit of a problem! Because it was a working visa, and I was no longer working, it could not be extended as the type of visa you have cannot be converted while you are in China itself. There was no way I could just apply now for a tourist visa without leaving the country!!So there I was, with a visa due to expire two weeks before my flight out of the country! It was either I leave the country, renew my visa and come back again, bring my flight forward two weeks and forget about my trip, leave China and go elsewhere for the remaining two weeks or try and persuade my agency to issue me a new six-month working visa while not actually having any contract or intention to work here again. For a while I was seriously considering going to South Korea for a fortnight but in the end my agency pulled through for me and I sent my passport off to Guilin for them to sort out and send back to Beijing for me to collect at a later date.
Now was that later date. I was in Beijing, my visa was officially expired and my passport was not there. So I waited. I waited three long days, with very little to do. As I was waiting around I couldn't go out anywhere far so spent it hanging round Beijing checking out a couple of art galleries, going for walks (long bloody walks - this city is so much bigger than it looks), meeting up with Anthony for one last time at yet another completely empty bar (but with a great band playing - best live music I've heard in China), reading books in Starbucks, going to the cinema and surfing the internet.
On the third day my prayers were answered and my passport finally arrived. So, with my passport in one hand, a ticket to Inner Mongolia in the other and my bag on my back I finally left Beijing, and not a day too soon. I was spending the price of a long-distance bus journey on taxis each day there and it was just not fun.
But before I did leave, I visited one last tourist attraction - the Temple of Heaven - and another one of Beijing's best. The buildings have all been ultra-restored and were super-shiny, but still interesting. Chinese tradition has it that the Earth is square and Heaven is round, which is why all the main halls here were built with a square base and round top, to reflect this arrangement. All the pictures here are from this trip. It's unique alright.It was a good last day actually. Sunny, and with a nice place to wander round. I even bought a new fake watch. It was another product I really didn't want. I don't even wear watches! I told the man all this and it only succeeded in getting the price down from 140 to 25 yuan! It was quite funny really. The fact he's still making money off that is evidence for the ridiculous over-pricing that goes on at these tourist spots. Loads of other punters must have been really chuffed with their 100 yuan watch. It's a joke...
So then it was off to the bus station. I was on another sleeper bus, and was actually quite looking forward to it until I saw my allocated berth. On these buses there are three rows of bunks down the two sides and the middle of the bus. In order to make the most of space and get a bit of extra cash, they board over the aisle at the very rear of the bus, creating two huge beds the entire width of the bus, accommodating five people each laid right up next to each other...and I was in one of them. It was inevitable that it'd happen one day, and I was not looking forward to it. All a little bit too cosy for my liking. Still, there was nothing else to do. I was leaving Beijing and was about to embark on the really interesting part of my travels. Not even five in a bed could dampen my spirits at that point!

Tianjin

So Sunday July 29th at 5.00am I arrived back in Beijing. Bright, alive and ready for the day ahead...not. My hostel didn't even have a free bed available at that hour, so I dumped my stuff and went off on a day trip to Tianjin, a city just outside Beijing itself that's reasonably well-known for it's concession-era architecture. It was somewhere that was not Beijing so, worth a look.
I think I severely underestimated how tired I actually was, and the day was a bit of an effort, but had a few highlights. The first was wandering round an antiques market trying hard not to buy things. I'd never had that much luck with haggling in the past and always tried to drag someone like Seven out with me to get the best prices, and now I know why. It's all down to your role. In the past I was out with the purpose to purchase. Wrong strategy.

This time I was out 'just looking' and was up to the sellers to flex their persuasive muscle and make me buy something I blatantly did not want. There was no shortage of takers. I was dragged into this shop, then that shop, all over the place. I looked at lots of antique vases, some 'apparently' over 800 years old. I didn't believe that. When the price went down from 1400 to 100 yuan plus an ancient scroll thrown in for free then you just know they're getting desperate! I had to laugh when one poor man pulled out a piece of pottery with a badly crazed surface and started to explain that it had been recovered from an ancient shipwreck, pointing out half a cockle shell polyfilla'd onto the side! I may not have been a fantastic archaeologist, but please, a little credit!

Some of the stuff was genuine enough, and quite nice, and the prices I was getting were pretty decent, but there was no way I was going to get some ming dynasty vase back to the UK in one piece so talked my way out of any purchase by pretending to be meeting my friend 'who was bringing the money', which in itself usually knocked another 100 or so off the price!! I did buy one little thing for myself but apart from that had an entertaining hour just looking round. When else do you get the opportunity to have a close up look at museum-worthy pieces for free?
After all this I had a crap lunch then walked round the old foreign concessions down Jiefang Beilu, which used to be known as Rue de France, which gives you an idea of what it's all about down here. It was nice enough, but some of the buildings are suffering a bit in places.
After a little while I got bored and decided to head back to Beijing. I was meeting Anthony's family that evening and had to grab a shower before we all met up. It was good to see them after all I'd heard about them, and we had a good time at the German Brauhaus next to their hotel, which was very nice indeed.