Heading to Lhasa

I plucked this choice bit off of the New Yorker's website. It's from 2007, when the train to Tibet first opened.

Between this and the consideration that the ethics of the train to Tibet were complicated, maybe it was for the best that I couldn't get a sleeper and had chosen to fly instead.

Pandas!

The coolest tourist attraction in Chengdu has got to be this.

PANDAS.

Here are plenty more photos of Panda Day, the most-bestest animal day since Lemur Day with Guy back in Madagascar. 

Wandering around Chengdu

A young blond woman approached me in the backpackers bar. "Do you have iTunes on your laptop? I'm desperate for movies. I can't get on a train or bus without them!"

I resisted the urge to point her to the lodge's huge shelf of free books. Anyway, who am I to question how people spend their time? I'm probably just jealous because I wish I had free time instead of always having to either work, write, or blog when I get a moment.

I suggested she try the teenagers at the front desk. Chinese teenagers are no different from any teenagers anywhere. They have movies on their iPods, their computers, and their flash drives and copyright didn't seem to phase them. They set her up.

Chinese teens were really impressing me. Not because they are better or worse than other teens, but because they were the same. I wondered about the ridiculous censorship in China, and the role of the USA, the hackers, and Google, if there even was one. I'd met a 27-year-old Chinese backpacker in Chiang Mai whose perfect American accent fooled even me—I'd assumed he was from the US West Coast but he'd been from Shanghai and had an American teacher—and he'd laughed when I told him that people in the US were worried about China.

A Blip in the Plan

"What do you mean there aren't any train tickets to Tibet for the entire first half of August?"

"There are seats."

"But no sleepers?"

The young travel agent at the hostel in Chengdu, China sadly shook her head.

"You can buy two seats together," she offered.

I thought back to the seats on last night's train from Kunming to Chengdu. Two of those wouldn't do much for me. I'd need three and I'd still be curled up like a cat for the two nights of the 44-hour journey.

"How much per seat?"

"500."

So that would be 1,500 yuan, or $235 US, plus food, and the pleasure of experiencing charming toilets, no doubt.

Kunming to Chengdu

I reeled from the smell of leftover stale tobacco in room 404 at Kunming's Camellia Hotel. I quickly opened the window for air, and was surprised to see a group of 20-something Chinese workers being drilled in a morning exercise routine. They were giggling and awkward.

I showered and soaked all my sleeper bus clothes.

Delightful. I was so glad I hadn't gone for the sleeper train today. How bad could a seat be? At least it was tomorrow.

I was spaced out from the night on the bus, so I didn't get out of my room until after two, when hunger sent me out prowling for sustenance. I had the hotel map, which showed a mall, an ATM, and a Walmart nearby.

Take That. And That.

I managed to get my IP address to look like this (more or less) from Kunming, so that I could get online in China without being blocked from social networking sites, news sites, and my work servers.

This doesn't work from internet cafes. Only from your own computer. And I sometimes had to combine a web proxy with a VPN. Other times using just one was fine. My work email wouldn't send at all with a VPN or web proxy on, so I was doing quite a complicated e-dance overall.

Dear censors and esteemed policy-makers of the PRC:


Give it a rest. Your people deserve better than you protecting them from Twitter.


Best,
-Marie

Arriving in Kunming

The bus jerked to a halt at three in the morning. The sudden lack of motion woke me up, and I peeked out of my berth to see people shuffling off the bus and into a concrete toilet block.

I joined them, carrying my shoes to the bottom of the bus steps, slipping them on, and following the females to the squat toilets, through the door adorned with the icon of a skirted person.

Chain-smoking men squatted near the bus, desperately inhaling their only cigarette of the night. Smoking had certainly changed in China in the last decade. No one is allowed to smoke on sleeper buses now, or at least not this sleeper bus. Last time I was here people had smoked anywhere and often.

I removed my shoes at the bus door and carried them back to my bunk, slipping them under. The Irish guy had finally woken up and gone in to the facilities, but the Korean traveler was still asleep. I folded myself back up under the Snoopy comforter—the berth wasn't quite long enough for me—and went back to sleep.

Sleeping On Board

Here's the sleeper bus bound for Kunming from the border town of Mohan.

Looks surprisingly pleasant, doesn't it? Or at least new and safe. And here I'd imagined myself sleeping on the disco smoking bad-action-movie bus.

The man with the dark-green shirt and the wheelie bag is a Korean tourist. Next to him, the guy with the red-and-black backpack is an Irish architecture student who is interning in a city close to Shanghai. Bonus: He speaks Chinese.

Whisked Across Laos

I checked and double-checked my web-access back-up plans for China. I was up early in Huay Xai, the Laotian border town I'm made it to yesterday from Thailand, borrowing a random open signal that was near the Kaup Jai guesthouse. The typical travel route from here is to proceed on to Pak Beng and then Luang Prabang, Laos—which I'd done in the year 2000—but I was taking a bus to China this morning.

China doesn't like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, or, as it turned out, the various servers I needed to get onto to do my paying jobs. I'm pretty well-schooled in circumventing IT systems, having lived and worked in the Middle East, but those are small fry compared to China. You can use the best-known web proxies in the Gulf and wham, you're online.

Those don't work in China.