Nearing the Finish Line
After a couple of false alarms, a meeting with our one Jiangxi client was finally arranged in early 2013, and I was able to put the penultimate pin on the map. I was excited about this. Jiangxi is more towards the South of China, and so I was thinking that the sun might be out, providing a respite from the tail end of a miserable Shanghai winter. As well, there was the interest in going to a new city and new province. Would I see something interesting? Would they have some new dish at lunches that I had not tried before? Some strange local customs? The possibilities raced through my mind.
We landed in the capital, Nanchang, and I looked out of the window. It was pouring with rain, grey, wet, and miserable, much like that first day in Shanxi nearly twenty years ago. I was herded straight out of the airport into the client’s car and driven to a café in the centre of town, where I was due to wait for an hour until my other colleagues turned up from different parts of the country. I flicked through the menu. The café prided itself on its ability to cook Western food. I could have spaghetti, toast, cake, or other apparently exotic dishes. There did not seem to be any local specialties. My earlier enthusiasm ebbed away. I had not missed anything in not coming to Jiangxi before this. I ate my cake, held the meeting, got back on the plane, and returned home as soon as I could.
Underwhelming though Jiangxi was, I did go. Box ticked. Which meant … one left. Last province. Mission about to be accomplished. Here we go. By now, quite a few people had heard about my quest, and I made sure to let people know that I was down to the last one. A few months later, I was all excited when I was invited on a business trip to Xining, the capital of Qinghai, to see yet another aluminium smelter. It seemed fitting that, having been to so many places due to aluminium clients, one more would see me complete the set and put that final dot on the map. Maybe I should buy a cake as a mark of celebration, or have a party. It seemed fitting.
Then I saw the schedule. Overnight in Beijing, then a 6.35 a.m. flight (are you sure?) from Beijing to Xining, an hour’s drive to the client, two hours to tour round the factory, and then back to the airport, just in time for the midafternoon flight back to Shanghai. That was it, just a few hours in Qinghai. Did that even count? OK, I had been to one or two other provinces just for one day, but this was barely even a morning. It did not really seem worth buying a cake for, not that you ever should need an excuse for cake, of course. The trip came and went. I saw the smelter – by my reckoning, the twelfth that I had visited in China over the years – and then hurried back to the airport for the trip home. I reacted to this in the way that you would surely expect of me by now: a few weeks later, I went back.
My way of returning was by agreeing to yet another first, which was joining a Chinese tour party. At pretty much every tourist site you go to in China you will see local sightseers flocking around, often wearing matching baseball caps and always following a hardy tour guide carrying a flag on a pole. Everyone follows around dutifully, taking pictures of each other in front of every site, and the masses become as much part of the event as whatever it is you might be seeing. Now I was going to be one of them.
The opportunity to do this actually came through Heidi’s company who, in a surprising piece of corporate generosity, treated their staff to an annual trip. In 2013, they had the choice of going to Greece (read: Europe, but cheap) or Qinghai. I think Heidi was probably hoping I would show interest in Greece, but of course I did not.
Sitting alongside many of Heidi’s work colleagues, we had an early start to take the flight back to the north-east. Our flight was not going to Xining in Qinghai but instead to Lanzhou in Gansu. The official reason was that it was company policy not to put all senior management on the same flight. And so the tour party had been split in half, with some going direct and some going the scenic route via Lanzhou. Heidi was not particularly impressed to find that we had drawn the short straw and were taking the longer route (or, if you ask me, because she had not qualified for the senior-management treatment). I was not particularly impressed because it meant going through Lanzhou. Do you remember my comment on Lanzhou from the Gansu chapter? Most. Polluted. City. On. Earth.
Thankfully, when we arrived, although Lanzhou seemed pretty dark, grey, and grim, it was not quite the chimney-belching, acid-rain falling hellscape that I had been imagining on the plane. At the airport we were immediately herded onto a bus, which had clearly seen better days, and were soon speeding (OK, chugging) along, out of the city and towards Qinghai.
Qinghai sits predominantly on the Tibetan plateau and is named after the Qinghai Lake, the most famous spot in the province. On our first full day, we set out en route to the Qilian Mountains, part of a region locally dubbed “the Switzerland of China”. This seemed a slightly strange title to me – would the countryside be full of chocolate? Or cheese? What it turned out to be full of was rape flowers, the bright-yellow fields contrasting with the green grass that surrounded them. We took the opportunity to stop and wander through the waist-high plants, everyone taking photographs of each other with the yellow backdrop as they stood amongst the flowers. Given the bright sunshine, many of the women were carrying umbrellas as parasols, and I could not help but wonder if they had all been watching Room with a View and were expecting some dashing gentlemen to run through the field and kiss them passionately. This was not happening in real life.
We stopped for the night in the town of Qilian, although by calling it a town I am being a bit generous – there was not much there. In fact, the main attraction after dinner was a walk alongside the Babao River, a tributary of China’s famous Yellow River. My knowledge of rivers only extends to middle-school geography lessons, so all I can tell you about the Babao is that it flowed very quickly and looked pretty dirty. I could see where the Yellow River earned its name.
On the far side of the Babao River was the Qilian Rock, which to me looked very much like Ayers Rock in Australia, even in terms of height and breadth. I know China has issues with fakes, but to have a large fake rock in the middle of the countryside seemed a bit extreme. For once it did not seem that the tourists had jumped on this prime scenic spot, and we enjoyed walking peacefully alongside the rock and the river as twilight quietly arrived.
I felt that this excursion to Qinghai represented my completing a circle, achieving my goal to go to every province. I thought back to my first trip to China nearly twenty years before, and despite the huge changes that China had undergone in that period, I still saw some similarities. For instance, I was particularly surprised in Qinghai at just how many local people would come up to me and say hello. In Xi’an, in 1995, there had been a strong sense that many people had never seen a white face before, but that was not quite the case in Qinghai. There were obviously not many foreigners coming through here, and I was again a notable standout. This time around I quite enjoyed it. I would say hello back to people, shake hands with kids, or even smile and pose for photographs, hopefully prompting a host of you’ll-never-guess-who-I-met stories when the other tourists returned to their own corners of the motherland. One guy even said to me, “Welcome to our country.” I did not like to tell him that I had been living there for five years and had likely seen more of it than he had.
Next morning we were back on the rickety bus, which it seemed would be our transport for the whole tour. I was not over-impressed by this; the seats had clearly not been designed with the taller gentleman in mind, and I endured a four-hour drive with my knees close to my chin.
Our key destination that day was Zhuo’er Mountain, one of a series of peaks that ran through the region. We hiked up the side of the hill in bright sunshine, and I started to see where the Switzerland comparison was coming from. We could see out through the valleys in all directions, snow-capped peaks looking down on grassy fields and more yellow rape flowers. I half expected Julie Andrews to run past me and start breaking into song, or Steve McQueen to try and jump over the car-park fence on a motorbike. That aside, this finally ticked the box for Qinghai being a sight that I had not seen in China before, and we took our time walking up and down from the peak, breathing in the freshest of air and taking in the sun.
I mentioned the first similarity to Xi’an and the 1995 trip. The day after Zhuo’er, I experienced a second similarity, one that was less welcoming. That day we were supposed to go to the Qinghai Lake, but when I woke up, I felt a worrying churning in my stomach. I went to the bathroom and then back to bed. And then to the bathroom and back to bed. And again. And again. I did not know what I had eaten the day before, but however much I thought I had mastered Chinese food and developed an iron stomach resistant to all known maladies, it seemed there was always one superbug out there ready to take me down. Which it did. I sent Heidi out with instructions to take lots of photos of the lake, and I returned to bed, where I stayed all day. The Qinghai Lake eluded me. Although there was a certain synchronicity to finishing my tours of China in the same manner that I had started, this was not really the way that I had wanted to do it. I would have much preferred having that cake.