Time for another China story, this one from 1992. It begins in Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, one of the most remote parts of China.
For reference: 
I haven't been to Xining for a while, so for I know it's a modern metropolis these days with Starbucks on every corner. But at that time, it felt like the an overgrown frontier town, like maybe St. Louis in the 1820s.
The town was dominated by a large Tibetan monastery (the province of Qinghai used to be part of greater Tibet, and the current Dalai Lama was born there).
Tibetan nomads camped in tents along the edges of the monastery kept large wooly dogs that came rushing out at me when they smelled the odd scent of a foreigner. The Tibetans all thought this hilarious.
The plaza outside the railway station in Xining looked like the bar in Star Wars. An assortment of exotic characters sporting inlaid daggers, staffs, prayer beads, and big Tibetan cowboy hats wobbled around tent-like stalls serving the best lamb shish-kebab you ever tasted.
At that time, the railroad to Lhasa had not been built. The railway did extend to Golmud, further west, where you could potentially hitchhike via truck into Tibet proper. I had already entered China via Tibet on this trip, overland from Nepal, so this was not my plan.
But if it had been my plan, it would have been illegal. Foreigners were not allowed past Xining without a permit. I wanted to travel to Golmud, at least, but when I tried to buy a ticket at the train station, they refused.
A couple young Han Chinese students saw me leaving the ticket office and asked if they could help. They offered to buy me a ticket on the bus for Golmud, leaving the next morning. I couldn't buy a ticket, but they could, and I could show up at the bus and see what happens.
So I had my Chinese-only bus ticket in hand the next day. The bus to Golmud would take two days, with an overnight somewhere along the way.
I piled my backpack on top of the bus, with everyone else's luggage, and boarded the bus. I waited for someone to throw me off. No one did. The bus driver looked at me a little oddly, but shrugged and turned the ignition key, and we were on our way.
The scenes out the window were incredibly desolate. High rocky desert. Lots of tan dust. The first stop I remember was at the shore of Qinghai Lake, a large inland salt lake. It was not beautiful, but bleak.
The bus stopped and everyone piled off. I naively thought they were going to take tourist pictures of the lake. Instead, they made a beeline for a little shack selling cigarettes, and each passenger came out with an armful of cartons. Not packets, cartons.
When we got going again, they all proceeded to systematically chain-smoke their way through these cartons of cigarettes. The windows of the bus were all closed, because of the cold. So the bus rapidly became filled with billowing tobacco smoke, for hours and hours on end.
The guy next to me offered me a cigarette. I should have just politely said "No thanks" but in Chinese I added "I don't smoke." He looked very insulted, and declared "Everyone smokes!" His look was like "If you don't want one, fine, but you don't have to LIE to me!"
Every once in a while, the bus stopped in the middle of absolute nowhere to pick up a local farmer or nomad. He and his family would hoist their luggage onto the roof and climb in.
What was in their luggage? Well, I found out by accident. At one stop, I climbed up to get something out of my own bag, and when I looked at my gloved hands they were covered in ... BLOOD! The locals were transporting sacks of recently slaughtered sheep, draped over my own bag.
I returned to the smoke-filled compartment, trying to filter the smoke through my now blood-stained olive-drab army scarf, and watching mournfully out the window as we passed the occasional Bactrian (two humped) camel standing out in the middle of nowhere.
The bus did not work very well. The gearbox seemed to break down repeatedly, for 20 minutes or so at a time. The driver had to double as a mechanic, constantly bailing out and trying to get the engine working again.
After a while - when we were long past any police checkpoints - the driver took me on as a kind of mascot, and let me ride up front. He literally smoked two cigarettes at once, holding the steering wheel with one hand while he alternated his two lit cigarettes with the other.
As we proceeded west, the Han Chinese passengers gradually got off and the number of Tibetan and other local ethnic minorities on the bus imperceptibly but steadily rose, until they were by far the majority.
On the second day, we crossed over some rugged hills. The highway was paved but broken. The cliffs were steep. The driver struggled manfully with the fitful gearbox, which seemed about to give way.
The only other traffic on the road were a handful of trucks, beaten up army-surplus looking things doing the same long haul we were.
At one point, the road narrowed and ran alongside a steep cliff down into a ravine. The bus' gears whined in agony. Then, somehow, the truck in front of us faltered. Its wheel must have fallen off the roadway. It teetered ... and fell tumbling down into the ravine.
All of the passengers in our bus looked out the window in hushed disbelief, their mouths agape. A few went "oh!" The gears whined. We drove onward.
A few hours out from Golmud, on the second day, it grew dark. The land flattened into the desolate salt marshes that make up much of the Qinghai Plateau.
Suddenly, we could see them. Odd lights on the horizon. Willow-the-wisps flickered over the dark salt marshes. I know they're an electrical effect, but to the busload of Tibetan nomads, it was a spooky spiritual apparition.
The Tibetans started chanting in low gargling tones, prayers of protection. In the pitch black dark, with spooky lights glowing faintly outside, I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
We arrived in Golmud (pronounced Ge-er-moo in Chinese). I was not supposed to be there, of course, but there I was. The first place I went was to the train station, to buy a ticket back to Xining - the only way I figured might be open.
The ticket salesmen refused to sell me a ticket. Same at the bus station. As a foreigner, I wasn't supposed to be there in the first place. So ... I turned myself in at the local police station.
The police directed me to the local office of the PSB (Public Security Bureau), who were located in what passed for the local hotel. When I walked in, they told me "You're not supposed to be here." I said "I know. Must have been some mistake." They grunted.
They put me in a shared room at the hotel, basically under house arrest until they could fax Beijing and figure out what to do with me. There were a couple other foreigners there who they had picked up, trying to hitchhike their way south into Tibet proper.
There was a young German guy and his Japanese girl friend, who spent much of their time fooling around under the sheets. There was also an older Japanese gentleman who spent his time reading and trying to ignore them.
I was allowed to walk around the streets of Golmud, mainly because there wasn't anywhere to go and the local Chinese truck drivers had all been warned not to take foreigners anywhere. That was entertaining for about 1/2 hour. I think I remember getting a shave.
After about two days, I brokered a deal with the PSB. I said, "Look, you don't want me here, and I don't want to stay here. I'm not trying to get to Tibet. The other foreigners you've got obviously aren't going to get into Tibet either. So pack us all on a bus out of here."
"Where?" they wanted to know. I said: "Put us on a bus to Dunhuang," a well-known desert oasis in Gansu. That would mean traveling north, instead of backtracking east to Xining, and going up with the Silk Road heading west, which is where I wanted to go anyway.
The local PSB loved the idea of getting rid of all their detained foreigners at once, as I was able to persuade the others to join me (since they clearly weren't getting into Tibet that way). So they wired for permission and got it.
We boarded the bus and drove north, across the marshes, desert, and mountains into Gansu. Little did I realize, but the area is actually a major basing area for China's nuclear missiles. I have no idea why they gave us permission to cross it. We didn't see anything in any case.
And that's today's crazy story.
No. You know, there's one very important thing I forgot to mention, which prompted me to think of this story today in the first place.
On that trip, I carried a long-distance radio that allowed me to listen to BBC. The day I arrived in Golmud, in May 1992, I tuned in and heard news of the Rodney King riots in LA.
It was hard being so hard from home and hearing about an event like that, and not knowing how it would turn out.
In remote towns in western China, the locals often had pool (billiard) tables sitting outside, as a form of local entertainment. I remember a bunch of guys shooting pool in Golmud and coming up and asking me (in Chinese) about what was going on in the US, with the riots.
And I remember trying to explain, in my very limited Chinese, race relations in the US to these guys in remote China who had never seen a WHITE person before me, much less a BLACK person, in their lives.
So yeah, try to imagine that scene.
