No more aimless wandering... Everest is on the horizon

Arriving in China with 2 months ahead of me, I was left without a clue of what to actually do here. My original plans were to slowly make my way into Tibet and then overland into Nepal via the Everest Base Camp but China closed Tibet to travelers after the Olympic torch relay protests citing safety concerns. I had to change my plans a bit and then I decided to go deep into Sichuan, which borders Tibet, to get as far into the Himalayas as possible but then that massive earthquake happened reducing much of the province to rubble. As I arrived in China, a country with limitless travel potential, I, paradoxically, could not come up with any good ideas of places to go or things to see.

No big deal though, I was in China, and just trying to get a feel for the place is a full time job. If I had arrived here from Vietnam then I wouldn’t have been surprised by much but I got here from Japan where I had become accustomed to clean streets, efficient public transportation, and, well, order. I don’t think those adjectives apply here in any real sense of the words. But, China is a deeply interesting place full of history and culture. That said, it will test my patience.

I think train travel is a good subject to use for comparison. In Japan, the trains run fast, on time and the stations are neat, orderly and logically designed. One can arrive at the station and be in their seat within 5 minutes. In China however, just buying a ticket can be a harrowing ordeal. Today for example, the ticketing office in the station had over 40 ticket windows all having a 30-45 minute wait. It is never clear which window you have to use even though tickets for the same day must be bought at different windows than the ones for 3 days in advance. Of course, I can only really figure out which window is the right one after arbitrarily picking a line and then waiting for 45 minutes before being told that, actually window 3 would have been the right choice. Once I arrive at the window, I have to hand the attendant a piece of paper with the train, time, date and seat preference written in Chinese and hope to god there is availability because if there’s not, I’d have no way of understanding what my other options are. Seems pretty daunting but it could all be avoided if I wanted to pay the hostel a $5 commission to get the ticket for me… sometimes I wonder if it is even worth it but then I realize all that trouble bought me dinner and then some!

All comparisons aside, I’ll focus on a few of my initial impressions. China’s economic growth has been dubbed “miraculous” countless times and the effects of this are impossible to miss. There are over 30 skyscrapers where none existed at all just 10 years ago (Pudong in Shanghai). You will see a really nice BMW pull into a high rise apartment complex next door to a market where one could buy anything from pirated DVDs to live chickens. And the most prominent feature of any Chinese skyline these days seems to be bamboo scaffolding and construction cranes. All of this progress continues completely unchecked resulting in really dirty cities.

In case anyone is wondering, Beijing really is as polluted as everyone says and Shanghai isn’t too far behind. The smog is surprisingly thick making any clear picture of a distant object impossible. And what’s most depressing is how much the sun is obscured by all this. I’ve spent most the last two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai and didn’t have a single sunny day the entire time. Shanghai was rainy but Beijing is, well, just like that. I’m very interested to see the world’s reaction to all this during the Olympics. I’m currently 12 hours west of Beijing and though the sky was clear and sunny, there was still haze on the horizon.

On a completely different subject, the best news of the last couple weeks is that the Chinese Government has just recently reopened Tibet to travelers making my ultimate goal of seeing Everest a possibility. I’m currently hauling ass west to get as close as possible to figure out if the news is correct since it all gets censored by the Government and nothing is ever as it seems in these issues. Apparently bribing officials and costly transport is an ever present reality in Tibetan trave; but money is no object at this point and if I can get to Everest, I will. Should be interesting in any event.

That's about it for now. internet is slow, intermittent and sometimes censored here, especially as I get out in the boonies, so expect less blog posts but I’ll try to keep it up. As always, more detailed accounts of my exploits can be found in my Flickr sets.