新疆 Day 1 - Airport Hopping

We rose early (5:45am) to drive to the airport. There is something about waking up in an unfamiliar place that makes me awaken faster, as though there are unknowns that I need to be alert and prepared for, things to be discovered, battles to be fought. The traffic of early morning wasn't as crazy as the night before. Though it was a Monday, the workday in Guangzhou doesn't start until 8:30. The highways were cool, there are trees and bushes planted in the middle divider between opposing lanes. It has a neat feeling of driving down a boulevard lined with forest, where Toronto would simply have been gray and urban-flavoured. Of course, seat belts are a joke here.

Our first flight was from Guanzhou's Bai Yun Airport to Urumqi (capital of Xin Jiang I think). The airport was pretty modern-looking (see above) but my uncle and cousin were nervous wrecks already, taking two "esteemed Canadian guests" on a trip.

The customs are pretty slack in China. The officer found a little screwdriver my dad had left in his camera bag, and then waved it around and told us not to use it before giving it back. Waiting to board the plane was conducted outdoors in the heat rather than in an air-conditioned waiting area inside. The tunnel/walkway thing that typically leads from the terminal to the plane was there, but we weren't using it for some reason. The crew and pilot had to squeeze past the crowd of passengers to get on the plane themelves.

On the plane, the seats were definitely not as comfortable as I was used to, but it was a domestic flight anyway. They did hand out drinks and a meal shortly after take-off. There is nothing much to be said about the service as it was mediocre, and the most notable thing was one of the girls dropping a lunch box foil-cover-down onto my dad's leg. At least the foil cover was intact...

We were supposed to catch a connecting flight from Urumqi to the small city of Altay, but the flight was delayed so we ended up with five hours and nothing to do. My uncle and cousin being too timid to venture out into the city in that short span of time, we had a very long and drawn out lunch at the Urumqi Airport's KFC instead. My dad went to buy a cup of coffee which was both pricey and vile-tasting (88 yuan, making it a >$10 cup of coffee, served in a plastic bubble-tea-type cup FTL) I exhausted the possibilities of the airport (there are two very small floors in the terminal, both of which can be navigated in under ten minutes probably), and left the building on my own while trying to dispel a headache. I wandered around the parking lots until I lost the sense of being very vulnerable, somehow crossed a highway after seeing an old lady do it, wandered around a hotel lobby on the other side, crossed back, and made my way back to KFC where I was met by my uncle in a state of crippling anxiety. We then had some really spicy noodles and some really expensive water, and finally got to board the plane.

I'm guessing some of the Mainlanders more accustomed to the inefficiency of their airports choose to pass their time doing things like paying for a 5 minute session in a massage chair and proceeding to fall asleep and remain there for hours. Before boarding I also had a somewhat horrifying encounter with a Chinese washroom, made horrifying mainly by the fact that some of the stalls were missing doors and yet people used them anyway...also the odours were so strong I couldn't stop sneezing, then breathing in more, than sneezing even more.

Finally we got to Altay's airport sometime in the evening, where we were picked up by our guide and our driver with his minivan. The airport was very very very small. The planes parked in an area probably smaller than my school field, and the terminal itself was probably smaller than my school building. Picking up our luggage from the conveyor belt thing was a quick and painless ordeal. =)

新疆 Day 1 - On the Road

After arriving, our guide and driver took us on our way to where we were supposed to spend the night. As the day cooled down to a comfortable temperature, the sun set a brilliant fiery orange over the mountains. We passed shining golden fields of sunflowers, interspersed with empty dirt fields. Then it was into the mountains, rolling hills at first which rose in and out of patches of desert. In the desert segments, perhaps they’d tried to plant stuff, sparse little trees whose greenery was only little tufts stood sadly here and there. It made me think of the hair on those creepy troll dolls.

The hills and mountains were beautiful too, in a plain sort of way. The smaller ones looked like a bulldozer had simply piled dirt and sand at a construction site, but then they got higher and higher, until it was impossible to say they were anything but mountains.

As we drove on, the moon rose, glowing and swollen in the night. I swam in and out of sleep, as by this time it was nearing midnight at the end of a very long day, and each time my eyes managed to open it was darker and darker. The sun sets impossibly late in the summers of this place. We drove through mountains, the only road for miles winding back and forth with no lights whatsoever, save for our own headlights. It was a mysterious sort of thing; I kind of liked it. It was almost like being on an airplane, where nothing can be recognized or defined outside the windows, but unlike the sterile and detached capsule of a plane, the van had many windows through which the night could seep in and consume us.

新疆 Day 1 - Midnight Madness

We drove until we finally reached a point where they’d closed off the road for construction, and we were stopped by a soldier. We parked the car, being told it was blocked for an indeterminate amount of time, and got out one by one to stretch our legs and assess the situation. The tour guide seemed calm as he spoke to the people there, and our driver was simply tired and quiet. My uncle and cousin got briefly out to relieve themselves, then quickly retreated to the safety of the van. The guide brought out a melon from somewhere and had one of the locals help us cut it open. I had two pieces since I was hungry, but I never really liked melon and this one tasted strange to me. Perhaps it was just the hour of the night and the tense, unfamiliar atmosphere.

I wanted to go back to sleep but the situation was getting a little bit exciting at this point. There is something wildly exhilarating about knowing that you are stuck in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in a country you do not understand with people you do not know well. I wandered further and further away along the moonlit road, away from where we had stopped. There were low dwellings for the local people, in which lights occasionally flashed and wobbled. The stench of animals was floating around, but the clear night breeze carried it along without giving me much trouble. I was getting pretty chilly in just a raincoat, but the moon was absolutely stunning, and everything was strangely lit, like an afternoon in negatives.

There was a creek that came down from the mountain on one side and tumbled its way through the five-house village. I stood at the “bridge” where the road passed over the bubbling water and tried to stick my hand in it (it was cold). I noticed something moving by my foot, and bent down for a closer look whereupon I saw some kind of rodent sniffing around. It was probably the size of a hamster or rat, but very sleep without much of a tail. Just then, a truck rolled by with materials for the roadwork, and when the headlights shone on it, the rodent squirmed back and forth, as if suddenly confused and intoxicated. I went back to the car for a flashlight but when I came back I didn’t find any others.

While we waited for the signal to pass through, a local Kazakh man treated us to tea. My uncle and cousin opted out, but the tour guide took my dad and I to the man's tent/house. It was round, made of cloth draped over a metal frame, about 4-5 meters in diameter. Inside there was a little wood stove warming the whole place, a small bed, a table, and a chest of drawers. He gave us tea in bowls--local tea. It wasn't the Chinese tea I'm used to. It was thick and rich, almost like broth, and slightly salty like it was fermented (I found out later they put salt and stuff in it because it tastes good when you have it together with the locally produced goat cheese--which, by the way, I also tried there but it is smelly and sour and hard and I saw a white hair sticking out of the side of the chunk they gave me). The tea was kind of filling, and it was nice that it was hot.

Finally, we got the all clear to move ahead from a soldier in a long Soviet-style overcoat. Somehow we drove over/around the newly paved part, singeing our tires and leaving a smell of burning rubber inside the car, and when I woke up again we were at the “hotel”. In the dark, it appeared to be a complex of many different buildings, with the main common one for meals in the center.

Our room was clean and cozy, although with a strong odour. In the closet where most hotels offer bathrobes, we found two of those Russian coats. So of course, we got silly since it was almost 3am by this time, and I found out how well that coat goes with a side helping of Default Face.

(It was also very useful later on for helping to make my bed feel softer…)