Tom: Huatugou (June 30)

Huatugou (June 30) · Jul 5, 11:31 AM

I woke up early and went down early to see about hiring a car to take us across the border into Qinghai; I found one, and ran back up to the room — the driver wants to leave in fifteen minutes, and nobody’s packed. Ida and Katie do an impressive job of getting everything together. We’re off. Except for the shirt I left hanging in the closet.

My sole long-sleeved shirt is now in my backpack where it belongs. It’s back at the hotel hanging cleanly in the closet. Last night I spent two hours washing my clothes in the bathroom sink. My red shirt and the khaki pants I wear every day are new and shiny. I hadn’t been aware of how ineffective a quick scrubbing in the shower is; the stuff was filthy.

Our drive takes the three of us and a Uighur family and a couple others in an SUV out of the desert and up a mountain valley. The road is bad, washed out, or non-existent some of the time. Halfway up we meet another car coming down and stop. Everyone gets out, and my inner pessimist senses the road is temporarily impassible, but this is not the case, and we are on our way shortly. The car drops us off six hours later in a dusty outpost on the western edge of the Tibetan plateau in Qinghai province. The driver says we have to wait until tomorrow for a bus to Huatugou, so do the people who run a dirty concrete-bunker guesthouse. Katie and Ida are pissed mad — the room is heavily overpriced at 20 yuan per person. They head off to find another place to stay, but instead of finding a room, they find a 13 yuan bus to Huatugou. I head the honking — buses often honk on their way through town to pick up riders. We are off, happily screwing the guesthouse out of 60 yuan. That place was bleak.

The drive was worse, into piles of dusty mining debris. Everything is colorless. The landscape is scarred and desolate. I fall asleep onto Ida’s shoulder to much of the bus’ amusement.

At Huatugou we meet a helpful lady with badly broken English. She’s so helpful and eager and probably new to the moderate altitude of the plateau here that she hyperventilates speaking English. And she won’t leave us alone until we are checked in somewhere. At one hotel, I distracted her on the second floor while Ida and Katie worked a deal with the reception desk, but it was somehow off as soon as the two of us came down. She took us to three hotels. Eventually she figured out that we weren’t going to make a decision with her around, so she left. Or maybe we just ourlasted her. Back at the second hotel, we ressurected and secured our earlier deal. We’re splitting a double; Ida and Katie will share one of the beds.

We wander the large, quiet town and find a Chinese place for dinner. We get tomato and egg — a favorite of ours — and a couple vegetable dishes. After dinner we run into a group of kids. They are jumping-up-and-down thrilled when we pull out cameras. At the room we played through out sik road photos on the television.

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http://tom.spacing-guild.net/2006/07/14/enroute-to-golmud-july-01

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