Just Tourists Now, Not Cycle Tourists!

Saturday was spent in somewhat of a delicate state after indulging in one or two (too many) cocktails the night before.  We found the most unlikely of little bars, run by two guys who studied cocktail making (mixology?!) in Shanghai for 5 years before coming back home to Urumqi and opening this little gem of a place.  I’ve never really been one for cocktails before, not really seeing the appeal of overly sweet, artificially fruity, expensive drinks in small glasses but after being in this bar, I’m a convert. I think I just hadn’t ever had a good one before! These guys were artists and took their trade very seriously.  We sat at the bar and I watched them, fascinated, for the evening.  I think the reason it was such a great place was because the boys clearly loved what they do, and it showed.

Anyway, as I was saying, Saturday was spent mostly on the couch watching TV.  The dad of the house, who’s name we can’t pronounce and who we call ‘Pops’, came home about 7pm with fresh bread and a bag of green chilli peppers and proceeded to whip up a meal for us.  Charred peppers, pieces of marinated pork that we’d had the night before and big chunks of fresh bread. So simple, but so tasty.  Then out came the tea.  He told us that Chinese people love tea, but he especially loves tea.  He took out a huge big tin that was full of all kinds of different teas; black tea, red tea, green tea and who knows what else.  Loose leaves, but vacuum packed to preserve freshness and all in one-cup size portions.  We tasted about 6 different ones.  Our favorites were called ‘Golden Eyebrow’ and ‘Big Red Cloak’!

We're in Urumqi!

We’re in Urumqi. The capital city of Xinjiang Province, the most western province in China, and also the city furthest from the sea of any in the world.  We’re currently taking a compulsory week off the bikes while we wait for our Kazak visas and are staying with a Chinese family that we found on Airbnb.  There are three people in the family, the parents and their adult daughter.  The also have a kitten, called Chitah.  The apartment is big, spacious & modern and the family live in much the same way that we, or any other western people, do.  When we say that we are staying with a Chinese family I can only imagine the images that people will conjure up in their minds – eating meals on the floor, wearing conical straw hats, living in dimly lit, squalid rooms, bathrooms with poor sanitation etc etc etc – but none of these images hold, at least not for this family. They are part of the ever-growing Chinese middle class and with that comes a certain striping of culture, a leveling of the playing field so to speak.

Urumqi, and Xinjiang Province in general, is very different from the other areas of China we’ve been in.  The people fall mostly into two ethnic groups, Han Chinese and Uyghur.   Both Mandarin and Uyghur are official languages here and as a result English has been replaced by Arabic on the road signs, leaving us in a bit of a pickle!  The Uyghur people are a predominately Muslim people who look much more Central Asian/ Middle Eastern than they do Chinese, giving the place a much more diverse feel to it than other areas.  However, there appears to be considerable tension between the two groups of people, and as a result there is a scarily heavy police and military presence on the streets at all times.   Not so long ago, the two groups coexisted quite peacefully but now everyday life is pretty segregated with kids attending different schools and the people living in separate neighborhoods.  It’s an odd situation and one that we’d like to know more about but the lack of English spoken locally and our obvious failings in Uyghur and Mandarin make asking questions pretty difficult.  If you were to believe everything you read in the media then the Uyghur people are a bunch of violent, bomb detonating lunatics but we’ve been here long enough now to know that the truth, and what the Chinese media would have you believe is the truth, aren’t exactly well aligned.  From what we can see, the Uyghur people, who it would seem have been in this region a lot longer than Han people, are being persecuted.  They seem to be discriminated against much like ethnic minorities in many countries or regions worldwide, only they aren’t a minority and they were very much the majority until the government started to relocate Han people to this region not too long ago.  They seem to occupy the lower echelons in society, living in poorer neighbourhoods and working at the more menial jobs.  Anyway, like I said, it’s an interesting place, and one that we’d really like to understand a bit better.  I suppose we have a week now to try and delve a little deeper!

Tanks, Guns, Bayonets...

Leaving Qingdao and Hitting the (Chinese) Road

Once we got all our IT issues (basically the fact that the Chinese government block almost every form of social media, making communications as we know them, virtually impossible) sorted out in Qingdao, we were eager to get on the road again and begin our Chinese leg of the trip. 

On Wednesday morning, the 2^nd of March, we packed up our bikes while being watched intently by many passersby and people peering out from numerous nearby windows.  We cycled down to the local ferry port to get across Jiaozhou Bay so that we could start heading west and not have to navigate our way through the city.  There was a middle-aged Chinese man on his bike also waiting for the ferry when we arrived and he took us under his wing, showing us where to leave our bikes on board and offering us hot water – it was pretty bloody cold out.  When the ferry arrived to the other side of the bay, a whopping ten minutes later, the same man cycled with us.  There was no real verbal communication between us, understanding that the language barrier couldn’t be breached, but he just followed along beside us for about 20km before drifting off ahead, never to be seen again!  Later that evening Nick got an email from the man's daughter with the photos he’d taken of us and saying that his experience with us had left him a very happy man! Our first impressions of the Chinese people in general have been very positive.  Everyone’s been so friendly and kind and getting that email just solidified our thoughts on them.