Friends in Many Places

Certainly one of the benefits of traveling is meeting people from all over the world. One of the benefits of that benefit is that you can meet up with these people further on in your travels and have a friend in a strange city or have a place to stay and be lazy when you don't know what else to do.

Way back in Laos, Adam and I met a couple of German travelers on our way to Savannakhet from the 4000 Islands. It was Lalita's birthday and she was celebrating by spending a day in steaming buses and vans on Lao roads, and occasionally puking. Martin was flying home the next day.

We found a cheap hotel in town, and spent the next few days together, fruitlessly waiting for Thai visas, exploring a river and cave that Lalita fortunately convinced us to go to, and moving onward to Vientiane and beyond, meeting up again in Luang Prabang.

Fast forward to Berlin. Thanks to the beauty and horror of Facebook, I met up with Lalita at a show, and she offered me a place to stay in her flatmate's room while it was empty. Mom was leaving the next day, and I didn't know where to go or what to do, so it was a perfect situation.

I may have overstayed my welcome, but Lalita is too kind and knows what it's like being a traveler. I didn't do much besides sleeping in, lounging in the apartment, lounging in parks, going to yoga classes as part of a cheap promotion and frequenting CouchSurfing meet-ups. It was a carefree and unproductive week. In fact, it was remarkable for it's high level of unproduction.

I did make a decent meal one night to justify my presence there, and we watched a couple movies together. When she wasn't working or out with her boyfriend, we had some good talks about traveling and life and hipsters and yoga and cats.

I also met another friend from one of my Australian trips in Berlin. We ate cheeseburgers on the Fourth of July and I felt truly American. In Baku, Jamie and I stayed with a friend of his he met through CouchSurfing in London, and I also went out for dinner with a Dutch friend that I kept running into throughout Russia, Mongolia and China. And in Amsterdam I had a couple drinks with a friend from Korea.

Spend enough time traveling, and you have a network of travel friends who can actually become real friends if you actually follow up with staying in touch and making visits. I'm theoretically off to see some more friends, but with how lazy I've been the last week and a half in Berlin, I'll be surprised if I wind up actually getting anywhere.

Urumqi - The Good and The Bad

In an interesting dichotomy, Urumqi is the place I found most interesting in all of China and the place where China really pissed me off the most.

Urumqi is interesting because it is probably about as diverse as China gets. It's the capital of Xinjiang (New Frontier) Province, and it's home to the Uighurs They're the region's largest minority, people who have been living in the area for thousands of years. They're largely Muslim and central Asian -looking. In Urumqi and the surrounding areas you can also find Manchu, Mongolian, Hui, Kazakh, Khalkhas, Xibe, Tajik, Russian, Tartar, Daur, and Uzbeks.

According to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Museum, "Since the modern times, the various nationalities in Xinjiang resited against foreign aggressions together, worked hard for development and unity together, and all these composed deeply-moving patriotic chapters."

In fact, the museum insists on ethnic harmony so often throughout the museum, you know it's a lie. Uighurs generally don't get along with Han Chinese, and for good reason. I met an Italian girl doing human rights research concerning the Chinese and the Uighurs as soon as I arrived in town. The Chinese government flatly denies Uighurs driver's licenses, passports without unpayable collateral, and forces Uighurs to study Chinese, among other things.

Urumqi's most appealing aspect is easy to see: It's the diversity of people. After the general homogenity of the rest of China, stepping off the train into the streets of Urumqi was a feast for the eyes. So many different faces and features from the long history of multi-ethnic land were everywhere. The women were stunning and beautiful in a way I had never seen before. The men seemed to have stories written into their eyes and mustaches that I couldn't even begin to imagine. It was my introduction to people of central Asia, full of enigmatic faces that look somewhere between European and Asian.

The best part about Urumqi was the people I met and the food I ate. The wide range of cultures and ethnicities hugely expanded the choices of food, already amazing as Chinese food is great. I ate a lot of great Uighur food - kebabs, round disks of bread, samosas, all sorts of lamb.

I would've gone crazy in the city for the eight days I spent waiting for my visa if I hadn't met Laura. An Italian, she was staying at my hostel, the only other westerner. She speaks Chinese and introduced me to Eunice, who introduced me to Jane, two Chinese girls who speak near flawless English. I spent time with them singing karaoke, playing Scrabble, dancing, drinking, eating.

I also got to meet Manus, the Irish owner of the only expat bar in town which happens to also be one of the only places to see Uighurs and Chinese coexisting happily. I went there nearly ever night I was in Urumqi. He's got a great corner on the market, there's nowhere else to go. He fleeced me and an British couple in poker one evening. He deserves a bit of pleasure though, he's been in Urumqi for a decade.

What drove me crazy about Urumqi was what had been driving me crazy about China throughout all my travels in the country: too many people, nothing organized, astounding inefficiencies.

I arrived on a Saturday, intending to apply for my Kazakh visa on Monday. I found the visa office Monday morning only to be informed by these helpful signs in Chinese and Uighur that it was closed until Wednesday.

Laura informed me that the offices were closed due to some software upgrades. Fair enough, I thought that might mean some decently paced service when I went back on Wednesday. I think it was actually closed for International Women's Day though, a national holiday in Kazakhstan, falling on Monday.

What a stupid holiday by the way. Now don't get all riled up ladies, I'm for equal rights and treatment for the fairer sex, but isn't giving a group of people a special day completely contrary to the point of equality and acceptance? Laura was incredulous when I said I'd never heard of the holiday before. I think she just wanted some chocolates from me.

Wednesday was worthless. I waited in a frantic crowd of Kazakhs and Uighurs for four hours. Everyone was trying to shove their way to the front of the seething mass of humans and force their way into the steel doors on top of a low cement stoop. The Chinese guards seemed to enjoy screaming and pushing people away. I was told to come back the next day. I demanded to talk to someone in English and at least get my application form, and I was let in briefly. The office was warm and empty and could've fit at least half of the mob outside. I got my application and left.

The next day, Thursday, I came back and the guards let me through after having me wait in the surging crush of humanity just so I knew who was in charge. I guess sometimes it's good sticking out as the only westerner in Asia. You get noticed, but usually it's not for a beneficial reason like skipping the crowds at a visa office.

I was told to come back Monday, which I did. I took a reciept they gave me to a bank, paid, and brought it back and was told to come back at 4PM to recieve my passport back. My bus left for Kazakhstan at 7PM, plenty of time, I thought. I had to get a bus because getting a train ticket to Kazakhstan proved to be as simple as getting the visa. The special ticket office was only open certain times, and none of those times was when I tried to go there. I asked at my hostel about having a travel agent get my ticket. They couldn't even tell me where a travel agent was. Par for the course in China when it comes to simple logistics.

I waited from 4PM to 6PM. No one was at the counter in the office. I knocked on the glass and asked when I could expect my visa. I showed the beautiful office assisstant my bus ticket. She told me that the supervisor wasn't in. When is he coming back? 'I don't know.' Where is he? 'I don't know.' I got it at the last minute. I'd been imagining, to my horror, what it would be like to throw away my bus ticket and spend another night in this city - Laura had left by this point, and I'd said goodbye to my other friends as well.

I made it though, with enough spare time to pick up some food for the trip. I settled into my bunk, happy knowing that I was moving again, that I had gotten a good time out of this city that also harrassed my patience. I felt like I had nothing left to take from it.

Vang Vieng

The thought of this town is actually one of the reasons I decided to completely derail my original plan to go west through China. After fall in Russia and Mongolia when the temperatures started to get truly frigid, the promise of floating down a lazy river in the sunshine with a bucket of whiskey and coke was too much to pass up.

The more time I spent in Vietnam, Cambodia, and southern Laos though, the less appealing it got. It's not hard to see how well-trodden this part of the world has become among backpackers. Going to a town that promised an even greater concentration of drunk twenty year old tourists in hippie parachute pants started sounding not so good.

We went anyway. After all, I had to see for myself what the place is like. It turned out to be a small ugly grid of streets lined with Internet cafes, restaurants, and souvenir shops selling the ubiquitous "In the tubing Vang Vieng" shirts you see backpackers wearing all over SE Asia. More and more dull cement guesthouses are under construction and I got the overall impression of an abandoned Soviet resort town overtaken by Laotians unimpressed with foreigners' shenanigans, but willing to take their money.

It is a town that is anything but quaint. For years it's had a borderline legendary reputation for hedonism, and the bars that long ago grew popular for showing a never-ending loop of Friends episodes still play the same show. I don't know why, the show is terrible and outdated. I saw a few places showing Family Guy which is only marginally better, but I guess when you're catering to catatonic Australians that barely have peach fuzz on their chins, you can play whatever crap you want.

The town is, by the way, 80% Australian. It's uncanny.

But the tubing is what put the place on the map, despite plenty of other activities in the surrounding karst peaks, along with the availability of all sorts of technically illegal drugs.

After renting a tube, we were dropped off about 3km upriver, and then walked another few hundred meters to put ourselves in the greatest concentration of bars. It was noon and the sun was shining. The whole place had the look of a third-world river circus. Bars were built on shanty decks over the water, and huge wooden poles had been erected over the water for zip-lines and trapezes. There were water slides and diving platforms, and the river bent around piles of stones that had been dredged up out of landing zones. I can't imagine anything resembling safety regulations existed.

Tubing in Vang Vieng is really a euphemism for bar-hopping by a river. The only time people are in tubes is getting from one place to the next. I had the idea of floating down the river back to town, but we made it only about 200 meters in the course of five hours, and had to get a taxi back to return our tubes by the deadline. Most of our time was spent on the trapezes and slides, and my body was sore the next day from hanging and swinging and hitting the water.

The river was fun, but the scene is so over the top, I don't know how people can survive there more than a few days. We spent a total of four nights there, two going north to Luang Prabang, and two coming back south to Vientiane. I'm glad I went, but I wasn't sad to leave.