20th July 2009
LANZHOU – RUBBISH LINXIA
Well, we have moved on from Beijing and seen some gorgeous scenery and a very crap town along the way. After having only 3 hours sleep in the Shanglin hostel in Beijing – due to noisy, stampy-footed Chinese – we flew west to Lanzhou in Gansu province. On arriving in Lanzhou we were accosted by a lady offering us a taxi, which we stupidly accepted. Rather than getting the taxi to drive us to the bus station and then us catching a bus to the next town as we’d planned, we just let them drive us directly to Linxia at a cost of 50GBP. Which equates to about 3 days spending money. Good going girls!!
The taxi deposited us at the Linxia hotel, a huge ugly 1970s high rise building in the centre of a large, dated, industrial looking town. Our hotel was on the main road, where the cars continuously beep for no reason what so ever. Not the Linxia I had in my head – nor the Linxia the guide book or internet discussed. Clearly there has been some sort of communication breakdown.
The large portion of the population in Linxia are Hui Muslims, in fact there are equal number of Hui Muslims to Han Chinese. During their regional political and military dominance the Hui made Linxia one of their major bases since it was strategically located on the border of China and the Tibetan region.
A large Hui mosque is located in the center of town and old Muslim men with long beards and white caps are the most common site throughout the town. The Linxia Hui Autonomous region in Gansu Province has long been called the “Little Mecca of China”.
On approaching the desk in the Linxia hotel, the receptionists looked immediately disenchanted with us and tried to busy themselves with other more important things, like playing with the calculator or counting money.
We thought we’d get some food before we decided whether to spend the night. After making some eating actions at the uninterested receptionists, we were directed over the road to another hotel. In this hotel they seemed more excited to have two clueless blonde westerners and brought out our own personal translator, a young boy with reasonable English. We were shepherded in to our own personal dining room and the boy helped us choose some food. We were getting special treatment here!
We requested some chicken, rice and some soup. After numerous waitresses creaked open our door to take a glimpse at us – under the guise of heating up more boiling water for us to drink – our food arrived. A plate of hacked up chicken bones with the head as the centre piece. We were starving, so we ate what little meat there was. The soup was nice enough, a thin chicken broth with corriander.
The translator boy advised us in ‘Chinglish’ that we had probably missed the last bus out of town, so we went back to the Linxia hotel and booked a room for the night. Linxia only has about 17 tourists a year and the hotel was practically empty, but surprise surprise, they only had one of the most expensive rooms left The room was a rip off at 25GBP. After several room changes and much pointing in the phrase book, we at last got one with a hot shower. Needless to say, the receptionists were getting increasingly ratty with us.
We had a wander around the town at dusk and generally got stared at a lot. I saw some kittens chained up in a box on the side of the road and tried fruitlessly to get the owner to release them or at least take the rope from around their necks. Obviously, I left disappointed. Lizzie bought a nice peach for the morning.
We were so knackered we slept until 2.30pm the next day and subsequently lost our additional 15GBP deposit. So we’ve manaed to waste £90 getting to Linxia so far, which is a bit of a kick in the teeth. At the bus station, the locals were very friendly and personally showed us to the correct bus. We thought it prudent to make friends with the driver and his buddies. This was achieved by pointing at phrases back and forth in our handy phrase book, which contained a clever questions and answer section like “Are you married” & “Yes/No”. Who needs Mandarin!? The lady in front of me had a bag of tiny little terrapins, which were probably for dinner. Oh well. Onwards to Xiahe!
danilovescats - travels 