Where In The World Is Evan?

If it’s possible to have a wilder week in Chengdu then I can hardly imagine what it would involve… probably someone’s death.

Once again I got fucked by the train system, and ended up arriving in Chengdu at 4 am on Saturday morning, after spending 53 hours on the train. Unbeknownst to me, however, a great party was just getting better at that very moment at a friend’s apartment across town.

I, however, had more pressing concerns to deal with. After getting stuck in Urumqi for three days, and spending three nights on the train, my tourist visa had expired. The problem being that the PSB isn’t open on the weekend to process a renewal. Thankfully you can’t live in China as long as I have and not learn how to deal with petty bureaucracy. After speaking to a succession of six different officials I finally managed to dodge the 1,000 yuan fine!
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One of the nicest things about my trip to Xinjiang was the discovery of Qingdao brand whisky, for 5 yuan a bottle. After tasting what turned out to be a quality whisky (far superior to Jonnie Red) we decided that a bargain this cheap couldn’t be missed and bought twelve bottles to take back to Chengdu.

As J and I sat around in our hotel drinking whiskey and coke with the Australian couple we’d met earlier that day J suggested a tried and true British drinking game. Being experienced at the game, however, J mercilessly exploited his advantage to force me to drink a bottle and a half of whisky!

After passing out on my bed, J and Chris decided that obviously I still wanted to go out… the only problem being that I couldn’t walk. Not letting this get in their way they half carried, half dragged my unconscious corpse into a taxi and took me to a bar across town–Weekend at Bernie’s style!
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The train network in China is an amazing engineering and managerial feat. The fact that it covers almost all of the country makes travel in China efficient in a way that I’ve only seen in Europe before. With that said, however, finding a Chinese person who can actually read a timetable is pretty tough. After being told that my train to Urumqi would take 28 hours I was alarmed to find a Chinese person pulling me out of bed by my left arm at 2 am while yelling about me needing to get off. Thanks China International Travel Service (CITS ) for telling me I arrive at 9 am and then booking me on a train that arrives at 2:20 am!

Staggering out of the station I find the bus into town only to be told that I doesn’t depart until 3:30 am. Considering that I had nowhere else to be I settled down in a seat and went back to sleep. Bus departure times in China, however, are a complete farce. Instead of departing at a fixed time most wait until they are full. In this case that took till 6:30 am!
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Once again I’ve allowed the frenetic pace of events to carry me away without recourse to update my blog. I’ve not yet reached the stage of O and J who seem resigned to the temporary abandonment of their blogs, but I must admit that it’s getting increasingly hard to keep writing this drivel. Anyway, I guess I’ll rally my memory with the intention to record, for posterity if nothing else, the events that have taken place since my last post.

From the very moment of my arrival in Chengdu I was overwhelmed by a growing sense of returning home. As my bus pulled away from the airport and entered familiar streets my mood, which had been sullied by the delay of my flight, lightened to the point that I was positively beaming by the time I arrived back at my old hostel. After checking in I headed straight down to Dave’s Oasis, one of my former local hang-outs. After taking a slight detour to add credit to my mobile phone I ran into J, of all people, wandering down the street. I’m not sure who was more surprised to see whom, as neither of us were supposed to be in Chengdu.
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There’s been so much happening lately for me that I’m not entirely sure where to being. As you may recall I was to begin a new English teaching job at Beijing Normal University in Zhuhai at the beginning of this month–Chinese universities with ‘normal’ in their name specialise in training teachers.

A rather upsetting element of my transition to Zhuhai is covered in Breaking Up (Again), however, a lot of other things were happening at the same time.

After arriving at my new job I found out that several important aspects of the position had been misrepresented by the school. The apartment was completely inadequate and required extensive (and expensive) additional furnishings.
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When Sergio and I were returning from Tibet my plans and expectations for my arrival in Chengdu were quite simple. I was going to roll into town, see a bunch of friends, score some ecstasy, and get laid. Unfortunately the reality of the situation did not live up to anyone’s expectations–Dong Dong’s family had insisted she never see me again, no one had any ecstasy, and I generally felt out of place returning to a city I’d lived in for almost 6 months and having to stay in a crappy hostel (my own fault considering relations with my former employer precluded staying with Jon or Richard).

When Lisa showed up at the hostel I saw this, at first, as an opportunity to salvage part of my plans. Within ten minutes we were making-out in the luggage room, but after going out to dinner all of the crap that had plagued our earlier relationship came back to the fore.
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————— DAY 1 —————

Feeling rather pleased with ourselves after our achievements on Everest, Sergio and I understandably thought that the hardest part was behind us. Now, however, we faced the unheralded problem of how to get home. As we were the only group at EBC who had actually hiked up, everyone else had charted jeeps waiting for them halfway down the mountain–in the spirit of squeezing every last cent out of tourists the jeeps were not allowed to go all the way up to EBC.

After some hard bargaining with local Tibetans the four of us—Sergio, Jerome, his Taiwanese girlfriend, and me—organised to be taken from EBC to Rongbuk Monastery riding pillion on beat-up motorcycles for 5 kuai each. To save money my rider kept intentionally stalling his engine and relying on the steep gradient of the road to coast down. As a result the others had already stopped and dismounted by the time I arrived. We were, however, not at Rongbuk Monastery. From what we could gather the only people licensed to carry foreigners on this part of the road are the horse and cart drivers, who charge 40 kuai for the ride. What bothered us about this situation is that they had knowingly entered into an agreement that they had no intention of honoring. As such we refused to pay them and simply walked off. Not wanting to get caught by the police who were supervising activities at the monastery a couple of hundred meters away, they had to leave without payment.
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We started day five of our trek with renewed vigor after eating the first substantial food we’d had in several days and getting a good night’s rest in the Tibetan tent village at EBC. Having met up with Jacek, the day before, he’d informed us that in the four days he’d spent at EBC he’d twice tried to climb higher but been forced to turn back by intense headaches and shortness of breath. As he was feeling constantly ill at ease, due to the altitude, he went back down the mountain, with the intention of meeting us in Shigatse the following day.

When we’d arrived at EBC we’d met an experienced French hiker named Jerome, who was planning to climb further up the mountain. As such Sergio, Jerome and I left our main packs at EBC and set off on a day hike to reach Advance Base Camp I, at 6,100 m. We took as little as possible with us–a couple of liters of water and some nuts and lollies–with the intention of making a speedy ascent and descent in the same day.
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After spending a couple of days hanging out in Lhasa and seeing the sights Sergio, Jacek and I hired a tent and hopped on a bus to Shigatse–the second largest city in Tibet–on our way to Mt. Qomolangma (i.e. Mt. Everest).

Shigatse is by far the worst city that I have been to in China. Despite its relative size the streets remained almost constantly empty, giving the city the feel of a ghost town. In the middle of the afternoon when we arrived most shops were inexplicably closed and rubbish lay strewn along the roads and footpaths. Despite the Lonely Planet asserting that prices across Tibet decreased outside of Lhasa, both food and accommodation in Shigatse were more expensive and of a significantly lower quality. Requiring some additional equipment we found the only sizable trekking goods store in town. As I perused their selection of compasses it occurred to me that of the eight they had on display only three pointed in vaguely the same direction–the other five choosing their own unique perspective on north. What amused me most about this situation is the stupidity involved in placing such defective compasses next to each other, thus highlighting their worthless made-in-China quality.
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Since the liberation of Tibet, and the consequential exile of the Dali Lama, Tibet has been the focus of an extensive redevelopment plan by the Chinese government. On the one hand they have built much needed road networks, schools, hospitals, and a variety of other important infrastructure. On the other hand they have stomped all over the indigenous people, their culture, and their religion.

In many ways Tibet is still a police state. There are soldiers and police roaming the streets, and on guard at all of the major Buddhist sites–particularly Potala Palace, the former home of the Dali Lama.

Like Xinjiang, the largest province in China, Tibet was conquered by the Han Chinese during the Qing Dynasty. Subsequently the Chinese have encountered difficulties in maintaining political control and obedience to the Party in these culturally alien, and physically remote places. Since the time of Mao, however, the Party has maintained a deliberate policy of ethnic Han resettlement from the east coast into the western provinces. This means that the majority of people living in the cities of Tibet and Xinjiang are ethnic Chinese, and not the indigenous Tibetans or Uyghurs. In fact my ex-girlfriend, Li Dong Dong, is the child of Han settlers living in Xinjiang–they took a government incentive package to move there from Shandong province before she was born.
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