The invitation came unexpectedly. An old friend on Facebook saw that the post I put up on our Silk Road Hitchhiking project. She contacted me in a message, telling me that a friend of hers was in Huazangsi, in Tianzhu County, just along the Silk Road in the Gansu Corridor, and she and an Australian …
Continue reading ‘Tibetans along the Silk Road – Tibetan Gansu Part I’ »
We were leaving Lanzhou trying to make an appointment in Huazangsi, an hour and a half northwest along the Gansu Corridor. Lanzhou is a dump of a city in country known for its dumps. It is an industrial wasteland of two million people. This provincial capital is surrounded by desert mountains, and, in the winter, …
Continue reading ‘Red Flags and Lemonade – Failure and Success in Hitchhiking’ »
One thing I love about living in China: trying to decipher the meaning of the English language t-shirts. I have always tried to figure out what the people who buy shirts like this see in them. Whatever it is, I love it because it is hilarious. Somebody needed to say it.
I thought I was imagining things. We were just about finished with a temple dedicated to Fuxi when I saw a score of oldish people hustling into the temple, orange sashes tied around their waist, all speaking Taiwanese, a language related to Mandarin about as closely as French is to Portuguese. I was only able …
After getting a ride back from Maijishan, Galen and I went to the temple dedicated to Fuxi. Fuxi is an ancient Chinese god/mythical ancestor who was the first at a lot of things in Chinese mythology. According to Chinese legends, Fuxi and his wife/sister, Nuwa, created all humans after a flood washed everyone else away. …
One of the reasons we chose to try to hitchhike our way across China is because we wanted to meet people and show folks back home the real China, in all its weird variety. When we hitched a ride from Anna, the spazzy girl I mentioned in the previous post, she struck us as one …
Anna was clearly interested in Galen, which made my asking for a ride easy. She had wanted me to ask. While we were weaving our way through the Buddhist caves at Maijishan, we were approached by three young women. This was nothing unusual; we had already twice been asked to take pictures with people since …
America has two kinds of national parks: one is a place of natural beauty, a Yellowstone or a Yosemite. Another is a place of historical significance, a Gettysburg or a Governor’s Island. In America, natural beauty and historical importance segregate themselves from each other naturally, like oil and water, as if a place cannot be …
One of the things I found most troubling at Huashan was, despite the fact that we were hiking up through this gorgeous granite mountain, it rarely felt like we were “in nature.” We were constantly surrounded by thousands of other climbers. Along the way, there were stalls where old folks were selling trinkets. Most annoying …
Here are two videos from our hike up Huashan.