So yeah, we met in the hotel in the morning, and it was a bit disorganized, and there was a bag on the table that nobody would claim, but we got off fine and went off on our 4-hour drive into the desert all the way to the border of Pakistan. That is about as far western China as it gets. Our car was cute, but it had a couple of funny little fold-out seats in the aisles so you could cram in the maximum number of people, and it was my luck that I should happen to have to sit in one of these seats for the whole way out there, and it was approximately the most uncomfortable seat ever, awkwardly tilted quite a ways backwards but with a really short back so it wasn't just like having your chair recline. Not fun. We stopped the van a couple times to take pictures, because there are some pretty nice vistas:
At one of the places we stopped, to my great amusement, there were some dudes with blankets trying to sell us stuff. This was funny because we were completely in the middle of nowhere in the desert, and no other cars passed by while we were stopped, but still they were there waiting for our little van. Nobody bought anything.
This was also the first time we encountered pretty young kids trying to sell us stuff. There was something amazing about the kid in the suit coat - he was probably about Jake's age, but he was already working next to the adults attempting to fleece the foreigners. Hen hao.
We drove some more, stopping again at a little place where I encountered the first of many sketchy public bathrooms that would become a theme on this trip. I think there will be a separate post devoted to this later. Anyway, at this place they gave us some tea in thin plastic cups that I was amazed didn't melt from the heat of the tea. This is also surprisingly common in China. The tea was supposed to help you deal with high altitudes. At the time I thought maybe the tour just took us there to prepare us for high altitudes on the day's trip, but we didn't actually go anywhere high up, and in retrospect I'm quite sure it was just another place where we were supposed to buy stuff.
I am not sure about other countries, but here is how travel agencies work in China: they are sponsored by local stores, and in turn they agree to take their tours into those stores, usually for a predetermined amount of time. Most of these places sell some kind of local goods that they think tourists would want to buy, like local jewelry or tea or Chinese medicine or carpets. If in the future I refer to a "buy-stuff place," this is the kind of establishment I mean. In addition to these places, tour guides will sometimes have personal deals with local merchants where they guide their tourists to a certain vendor's stall in exchange for a cut of the profits. This seems sneaky by American standards, but in China it's a normal way for tour guides to supplement their income, which I don't think is particularly impressive.
So anyway, there we were, out in the desert, and it came to be lunchtime. Lunchtime is lateish (around 2) in Xinjiang because it's actually 2 hours earlier than Beijing there but they have to use Beijing time because of Communism. It's super silly. Anyway, our daoyou was telling Richard to reach behind the back seat and get out our lunch, and Richard was saying that he didn't see it and the daoyou was getting a little annoyed and insisting that it was right there and why couldn't he find it. After a short while it dawned on her that the lunch was not, in fact, there, and had actually been left behind in the hotel. That bag on the table...that was our lunch. Good times. The (Han) daoyou yelled at our (Uyghur) driver about this, although I'm not sure exactly why our lunch was his responsibility, but we'll talk about this later too, in a separate post about racism/sexism, which, like sketchy bathrooms, is enough of a continuing theme to warrant separate attention. It wasn't that big a deal in the end that our lunch was left behind, though, because we weren't that hungry, and some of the ladies had brought snacks which they generously shared, and it was all okay.
I think it sounds really impressive to say that we went to the border of Pakistan, but honestly I was never entirely sure when we were at the border. I thought it would be more obvious. We did at one point go through a little booth where we all had to show our passports and on the way back through the booth they counted to make sure we had the same number of people and there was some argument between our daoyou and the passport-checking dudes, but it's not like we went over the border into Pakistan. I don't think. I saw some mountains that might have been in Pakistan. It looked okay.
One time we got out and there were more people selling us things and a man trying to get us to pay to ride a camel. We were planning to ride camels another time, so I just took a picture of the camel, which was free. Then I went and slept in the backseat of the van while everybody else took 8 zillion pictures, because I couldn't sleep in my uncomfortable seat on the way out and I still had a massive sleep deficit from the 1-hour-of-sleep night before we left Beijing. It was a good choice. Here is the camel:
The events in this day are all mixed up in my head, but at some other point I also saw this really tall mountain:
I can't tell from my pictures which mountain is K2, but whatever. This picture has me in it, which is the important part.
Besides mountains, the desert also had small, dirty children, specifically at a place where we stopped to go to the bathroom on the way back. They came over and talked to us in Uyghur and they were so cute and we had no idea what they were saying but we kind of made friends anyway. I think we also made that pit stop so our driver could take a nap, because he was losing it a little, which on skinny little mountain roads is not a good idea. Remember that China has no labor laws so sometimes drivers, who are not the most well-paid of people, have to drive really long amounts of time without allowing much time to sleep. I'm told that the reason Chinese drivers honk their horns so much isn't because they really need to alert other cars to get out of the way but in order to make sure the other drivers on the road stay awake. Isn't that nice.
After a nice 4-hour drive back, we got some dinner, to which the daoyou added the chicken we were supposed to have at lunch. They don't believe in refrigeration in China, and the chicken had been out since breakfast, but we ate it and were fine. In the evening we hung out in the Square in Kashgar, which is where everyone kind of goes to mill around. We practiced our Asian Squat, which is the special Chinese alternative to sitting on the ground, which as we will learn later has all sorts of incredibly nasty things on it and is far dirtier than regular American ground. Also we bought ice cream and chatted with the man selling the ice cream. We told him that we were all Americans, but he didn't believe us, insisting that Richard and Casey were Chinese. Chinese people frequently don't accept the "I was born in America hence I am an American" line of reasoning. I've heard stories from other white people, even, about how they meet Chinese who don't believe they are American because they don't have blonde hair and blue eyes. I didn't realize this was the stereotype, but apparently I have pretty much the quintessential *American* look to the Chinese. Sometimes when Chinese people are staring at me I hear the whispered word "Meiguoren" and I wonder how it is that they assume automatically that I'm American and not British or German or Swedish or anything else that I could theoretically be.
We didn't do anything interesting after that except go back to our hotel and sleep. Which is what I'm going to do now. Hen hao!
Semi-interesting note: there was a Playboy store in Kashgar, which we thought was hilarious, but actually in China Playboy is a pretty normal brand of clothes and shoes and whatnot, and has none of the word's American connotations, although they use the same bunny logo. Don't ask me why; it's China.
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