Some actual travelling on this travel blog

China is turning 70 years the very day I’m writing this! Besides gargantuan parades and tightened security controls all over the country, the birthday also brings a whole week of public holidays. My colleague and I added another three gap days so that in total we’d have 12 days at our disposition. That’s enough time to go beyond China’s well-connected coastal areas into its vast wild west. The five provinces Qinghai, Xinjiang, Gansu, Tibet and Inner Mongolia make up about half of the country’s surface but contain less than 8% of its population. Their territory is marked by deserts, high plateaus and some of the world’s highest mountains. The Chinese government is investing huge amounts of money in their infrastructure to spur economic development and strengthen “national unity “, but despite those efforts most places there are still only accessible by plane or endless bus rides through extensive and empty landscapes.

Flying into Qinghai...

Even 12 days are not nearly enough to really go deep in this far-off part of China, but we tried our best to get off the beaten track for a couple days.

Going west in China means seeing people and places that don’t resemble the dominant Han Chinese culture at all. It is for that reason the party puts in extra efforts to mark these territories as definitely and rightfully Chinese by means of innumerable China flags and propaganda posters wherever you look. The relation between the 90% Han population and the 10% that make up China’s 55 official minority groups ranges from sentimentalizing to patronizing to hostile. Some Chinese tourists still act like they’re in a zoo with the minorities practicing their rituals being the exotic animals, though this seems to be getting better. Especially in the case of Muslims there’s the concern that foreign influence might radicalize members of the communities. This is not entirely unfounded, but the means of dealing with it are everything but liberal and continue to raise media attention in the western world. I’m mentioning all this because most of China’s Muslims live in the north west where we start off our journey. Not all Muslims are equal to the party however, and the Hui group that is making up a big part of Qinghai’s population enjoys considerably more freedoms than their unfortunate Uighur counterparts in the adjoining Xinjiang province. The deal is basically that minority groups respect the party’s primacy over everything and in exchange are allowed to practice their non-Han culture as long as it doesn’t call for independence or opposes party positions.

Besides Islam, Buddhism is very visible in the foothills of the Himalayas and the closer you get to Tibet, the more stupas and fewer mosques appear around you. The bordering areas of Qinghai and Sichuan are merely different from Tibet itself, with the advantage that you don‘t need a special permit or travel group to be allowed to enter. Though you will definitely get a lot of curious looks if you’re white, because you’ll be one of a very few. Mandarin will also be essential, unless you happen to speak Tibetan.

The reward for full-day bus rides and altitude induced headaches is first and foremost a stunning scenery, which in turn makes the time spent in vehicles a lot more sufferable. Due to the elevation vegetation just like human settlements is scarce, so most of the time you‘ll be glancing at endless mountain ridges with gentle slopes and grass growing on them. Here and there you see pristine mountain lakes sprinkled into the landscape and in the background you might catch sight of a couple snow-capped 6000+m high peaks.

Our first stop was at Chaka Salt Lake, which is a tourist spot and salt mine at the same time. Chinese tourists love it for its instagrammable (e.g. Wechattable) surface reflections and there are many hawkers at its entrance selling brightly colored scarfs to fully capture the photographic potential of the scenery for one’s social media feed. It’s easy though to walk past the impromptu photo shootings and catch a glimpse of the vast unaffected lake surface beyond the entrance are. The strong wind on the high plateau is reminiscent of a sea breeze and I caught myself expecting to hear seagulls any second. Given the salinity of the water and the land surrounding it it’s surprising there’s any life at all. But some bird swarms and grasses are unimpressed by their extreme surroundings.

The climb from 50m altitude in Guangzhou to 3200m in Chaka caused some headaches in the literal sense, so after a day we headed back down to Xining (2500m) for recovery and one night with the amenities of a big city before heading into the wild. Well, not exactly wild maybe, but certainly less developed than what I’ve been used to in China. The overnight bus from Xining to Yushu takes an impressive 16 hours for the 800km. With passengers hopping on and off and parcels being stored and unloaded at street corners, the trip reminded me a bit of traveling in India or South East Asia. It was also an olfactory experience since many people in rural western China still don’t have access to warm water, shower less and thus create an odor that resembles a mixture of stale diary products and sweat. As the bus driver decided to take his own 3 hour nap on the highest point of the trip at 4400m, sleeping was all but impossible while I fought a pesky headache and nausea.

Yushu is the kind of place you’d imagine when thinking about Tibet or maybe Nepal. There are buddhist monasteries and stupas everywhere and the mountains surrounding it are dotted with prayer flags. Most Han Chinese you see are tourists themselves, the locals live in an entirely different cultural sphere where religion still plays a central role in life. What’s indubitably Chinese are the massive government buildings as well as ever present flags and propaganda. Yushu has been nearly eradicated by an earthquake in 2010 with thousands of casualties. The government’s response was swift and after only 4 years the city center was rebuilt, more tidy and modern than before and with possibly even bigger administrative buildings.

Prayer flags wrapping a holy site near Yushu 

Yushu's main temple complex

After a day in the city’s European-autumn like climate with barely any altitude sickness, we drove over the highest pass of our route. Reaching 4700m, it separates Qinghai from Sichuan and is considered a sensitive area. In our case this meant increased police presence and lots of roadside checks. The police got really curious – not in a negative sense – when they spotted me, but even more surprising to them was the existence of Karin. A Chinese looking girl with ethnic Chinese parents that is not a Chinese?? How could this be possible?? Her attempts to explain why she only had a foreign passport instead of a Chinese ID – parents migrated, born in Germany, never lived in China – were more or less futile, her passport was accepted but you could recognize that our interrogators didn’t actually comprehend what she told them. Chinese still very much define themselves by bloodline, not by identification documents. If you look Chinese, speak Chinese and your elders came from China, well how could you not be Chinese? On the other hand, if you look foreign and have foreign parents, you definitely can’t be Chinese. Not that I’d want to, but this clear-cut distinction that would be considered racist in the West is totally unquestioned here and applied by peasants in Sichuan and urbanites in Shanghai alike. The comparison is not fair – China is a very homogenous, developing country with little immigration in recent history – but the fact that Chinese deny racism even exists in their country because it is a “western construct” always gets me pissed in the face of these experiences. Just imagine how unacceptable a German 6-year-old pointing its fingers at random Asian and Black people excitedly shouting “Ausländer!” would be.

The highest elevation on our trip - the border between Sichuan and Qinghai

Either way we made it through the numerous roadside checks and spent a night in Shiqu, the capital of Sichuans westernmost, highest and poorest county. There’s not a lot to see and do. Matter of fact, there are barely restaurants to have dinner and only two hotels that accept foreigners (and even there we’d be such a rare attraction that police was coming over from their local headquarters to personally question and register us). The place was just a quick stopover to catch a bus to the bigger and more developed city of Ganzi 300km further. The ride there was full of stunning landscapes and herds of yaks being driven down the main road, thus blocking all traffic. There are certainly more yaks than humans in these areas! Ganzi then was the last stop for us in primarily Tibetan-Buddhist West-Sichuan and though there are not a lot of tourist spots either, we stayed for two days simply to enjoy the serenity, crisp air and space for one last time before diving back into the crowds of your typical 10 million people Chinese metropolis.

A crowd of locals waiting for a bus in Ganzi

In our case that metropolis would be Chengdu, capital of Sichuan and a brief 15-hours by bus from Ganzi. On the long way down you can witness the slow transition from dry grasslands as far as the eye can see to lush green vegetation and from empty, small provincial roads to highways congested by thousands of vacationers. Chengdu itself then was quite pleasant and fun. The temperatures in autumn are just right, tourists only flock to a small number of attractions, the city is otherwise empty and has a very chill vibe. The latter is probably because it’s not as developed as Beijing or Shanghai and known mostly for pandas, hotpot and rap music, less so for finance, banking or politics. For some reason or another, Chengdu’s youth is a lot more alternative than their peers elsewhere in China. Not only did they define rap music in China and continue to have stand-offs with censors, they can also choose from a range of bar and nightclub areas that don’t have to shun any comparison to Sanlitun and the French Concession. Just the one night I “went out” (basically just hopping from one place to another to see what it’s like) I found a couple low-key, hidden bars on the rooftop of apartment buildings, a techno club curiously located in a modern office complex and a corner bar with walls made invisible by graffiti tags and stickers hosting a live e-saxophone gig so noisy and weird I thought I was back in Berlin for a second.

Chengdu is also home to the world's largest shopping complex... 

...with an integrated indoor water park.

Of course, we didn’t miss out on the two bucket-list items for anyone travelling to Chengdu: Yelping at the cute clumsiness of pandas and groaning at the numbing spiciness of local the local hotpot, said to be among the spiciest in China.

I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves here. Watching a Panda climb a tree shows very clearly they never had to face predators in the wild, otherwise this species would long be extinct. As for the hotpot, you should have an emergency response plan with toilets in close proximity for the 12 hours following consumption…

Pandas are many things, but elegant animals they are not

What spicy looks like

After 3 days in Chengdu, work was calling and so on a Sunday morning we hopped on a bullet train and just 8 hours / 1600km later (you’re probably getting tired of my endless praise for Chinese high speed rail but ugghh I want this in Europe) arrived in Guangzhou were temperatures and humidity still defy the fact it’s autumn in the northern hemisphere.

Nightscape in Chengdu