Ci Cheng was nice enough to help arrange a ride to Yushu for me the next morning. It was myself and 8 other people crammed into a beat-up SUV. The road from Shiqu to Yushu was probably the worst road I have ever driven on. It wasn't that I ever felt in danger. It went over mostly flat ground, except for a hair-raising descent towards the end. It's just that this road was a barely discernable mud path over a grass field.

I was squeezed into the backseat with one lecherous man flirting violently with two of the ugliest Tibetan women I'd ever seen. I mean violently literally. They were wrestling over a screwdriver, trying to stab each other. Isn't love sweet?

If anything, it was often better to have driven on the fields next to the road because the road had developed these gigantic craters that could totally engulf a smaller vehicle. Journey distance: 140 km; journey time: 10 hours. You do the math.

Our SUV didn't have too much of a problem with the road, but we left at the same time as a crappy Korean mini-box and a logging truck, so we stopped every time they got mired in the mud to help dig them out. This was actually necessary since we saw a total of five vehicles going in the other direction in those ten hours and a couple of times the logging truck got stuck nearly up to its axles and required everyone to push it out.

Hello, blues skies

Besides the occasional being engulfed by craters, there were several other factors contributing to my misery. We were above the snowline. It was sleeting for a bit. My friend, Mr. Liquid Bowels, was making a guest appearance, and being a flat plateau, I had nowhere to hide but had to run pretty far away and squat in plain view. I also bumped my head really hard going over a particularly big crater. Furthermore, I was squeezed into the backseat with one lecherous man and two of the ugliest Tibetan women I've ever seen. They were violently flirting, wrestling with each other and trying to stab each other with a screwdriver. Isn't love sweet?

Things got a lot better during the descent. We stopped at a noodle place and had some non-yak noodles. Half the people got out. My stomach started feeling better and it was warm enough to take off 7 or 8 layers of clothes. I was actually enjoying the sublime pleasures of life as we continued to cruise along through this obscenely beautiful mountain scenery in a vehicle with leg room. The sky was an incredibly deep blue, a shade so deep that it would be impossible to see it in the US because of the low altitude and pollution.

Homes...

Getting into the city of Yushu was a bit of a bummer. I had heard from a friend that it was incredible; what I saw when I got there was like every other polluted Chinese city. Bathroom tile architecture, people squatting on the side of the streets selling plastic buckets, dusty, litter all over the place, and way too many "Hello!" shouters. Not even a kebab man to assuage me. I found a guesthouse with a surprisingly clean room but the most disgusting bathroom ever. (Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to read a description of the unflushed toilet I had to use.) When I checked in, nature was calling on the presidential red phone, so I hurried down to the public toilet. The stench hung through half the hallway like clumps of wet paper towels. It was a classic "squatter" i.e. no seat but instead a hole in the ground which you have to squat to use. It had clearly not been flushed after at least three uses. This I could tell from the different colors of the large, fly-covered piece of amalgamated turd sitting in the toilet. I tried flushing but there was no movement. It was an emergency, so I breathed through my mouth, squatted, and relieved myself. The flies weren't too happy and flew around me in a big cloud. Oh, the savage conditions I put myself through because I couldn't afford a decent hotel. (I told you not to read that.)

There was nothing at all to do that night outside of buying some souvenirs, like a fake yak overcoat for my dad and some traditional type clothes for my mom. There was this arcade where for Y3 per hour, you could play the latest pirated Japanese Playstation games. I played three hours of Biohazard 3. Although all the subtitles were in Japanese, I think the story of a biochemical company poisoning the water supply, thereby turning everyone into zombies, is a story told in a universal language.

...and temples...

The next day I walked around the outskirts, which was much nicer than the town itself. There's one really nice temple atop this hill overlooking the city. I met a small group of Taiwanese tourists. One of them spoke excellent English and gave me a crash course on Buddhism. For instance, I bought a T-shirt with a picture of two deer bowing before a Buddhist icon and he explained to me how deer were symbols of greed in Buddhist iconography and Buddhism's power is so strong that it even forces deer to be humble.

I took a mini-bus to another temple. Getting off the bus, some old guy invited me to his house where he "treated" me to some yak yogurt and milk tea. He then tried selling to me this rusty junk from his attic, passing it off as antiques. I declined and moved onto the second temple for the day. This temple was surrounded by a sea of brick shards that had Tibetan script painted on them. As you walk clockwise around the compound, these old women try selling you a brick for one kuai so you can put it on top of the pile. Of course, once you do so and round the corner, the woman will grab the brick again and try to sell it to someone else.

Finally I hit up a third temple on the other side of town. On my walk over, I passed by a group of kids who wouldn't leave me alone. They went beyond the standard "Hello!" and started screaming, "Ha ha, foreigner! How do you do? Your nose is so big." and such. They would not leave me alone until I threatened them with a rock. The temple was OK at best, but it looked picturesque amongst the grass.

...along the outskirts of Yushu.

But that wasn't it for stupid kid antics. After a fun, sun-burnt day of temple watching, I decided to drop by the post office to send some postcards. As I sat down to write them, another group of kids happened to walk in and thought it would be funny to make fun of my nose again. (My nose is bigger than most Chinese people's noses.) I told them "qu si ba" i.e. you should die, which only encouraged further taunting. I finally grabbed one kid's hat, threw it outside, and kicked him on his way out. At last, some responsible authority figure told them to get lost.

Just as my disgruntlement was at its peak, I passed by the first lamb kebabman I had seen in a long while. I sat down and ordered 30 skewers (he put less meat on them than most other kebabmen do.) Sitting there after having ravenously devoured the lamb, with 30 metal skewers in one hand, an iced tea in the other hand, I probably had the biggest smile on my face I've ever had in this frustrating country. Cars will always break down, computers will always go obsolete, women will always leave you, but lamb kebabs will never let you down.

Cars will always break down, computers will always go obsolete, women will always leave you, but spicy lamb kebabs will never let you down.

I got back to my room and watched some CCTV-5, the commie sports channel. The Chinese love a stacked match in their favor. I watched a basketball game between China's national Olympic team and the "NBA Ambassadors." Luckily for the Chinese team, the latter team clearly had nothing to do with the NBA, the basketball league. They were constantly throwing it away and letting this skinny 5'4" point guard drive to the hoop. It was a rout that no doubt contributed to the audience's sense of patriotism. Afterwards, I watched some platform diving competition. Admittedly, this is a sport that the Chinese, from an objective viewpoint, dominate; at this meet of 14 divers, the top six places were held by the six Chinese divers. But the announcers were horribly biased. Whenever this poor Venezuelan guy dived, even when he scored an 8.0, they would mutter, "How deficient," or "Look at that splash." But when a Chinese diver scored an 8.0, they would exclaim, "Awesome!" or "Absolutely brilliant!"

I watched a basketball game between China's national Olympic team and the "NBA Ambassadors." Luckily for the Chinese team, the latter team clearly had nothing to do with the NBA, the basketball league.

The bias goes the same for the table tennis announcers. Ping pong is one of the sports that they consistently tool everyone in, so of course it's on TV all the time. The only team that is at least semi-competitive with China is Sweden. I really sympathize with these Swedes when they do a tournament in China. They're stuck in a hot, sweaty room with thousands of people beating on drums every time they mess up. The announcers scream, "Hao qiu!" on every Chinese point and are silent on every Swedish point. Now, I would it would be unfair to characterize the Chinese as the only people with jingoistic sports broadcasters. The Olympics on NBC would rather focus on how Marion Jones's shoelace once came untied during a meet than on a Belarusian gymnast who escaped persecution by hiding under a pile of corpses. But I just thought it was interesting to see this phenomenon from a different perspective.

From Yushu, I took a supposed 24-hour sleeper bus ride to Xining, which turned into a 32-hour ride because of the multiple flat tires we got along the way. I must say that the ride was incredibly boring. Qinghai province is a vast nothing. It's too dusty to be good grassland scenery, too many weeds to be good desert scenery. It was a flat nothing that was somehow degrees of magnitude more boring than that three day bus ride that I did. My bedmate was this old man from Shanghai who was constantly paranoid about altitude sickness (we were down to about 2,000 m.) He had brought this special inflatable bag filled with oxygen. When some guy tried lighting up behind us, my bedmate verbally assaulted him.

This poor old guy seemed to do a perfect imitation of Grandpa Simpson, whining softly about having to go to the bathroom. I continued to pray that I wasn't sitting next to a potential bed-wetter. We finally got a response from the bus driver, "We're going downhill. I can't stop." Great.

"I'm an old man! We're at such a high altitude that I have problems breathing! Are you trying to kill me? Kids today have no respect for the elderly…"

When we stopped for dinner at a rest stop, I bought myself a bottle of cheap baijiu, knowing that I wouldn't be able to sleep and that the midnight hours might be more bearable with an elevated blood alcohol level. I felt like a pathetic alcoholic who had finally hit rock bottom, trying to sip from my bottle of erguotou but having it dribble all over my face as we hit pothole after pothole.

Entertainment came around 4 AM, right when I was about to fall asleep. My bedmate had to take a pee. For about 15 minutes, he sat there and shouted pathetically, "Xiao bian!" i.e. "Pee!" Since we were at the back of the bus, the driver couldn't hear him. He woke up everyone else in the back, though. The back soon started screaming in unison, "Stop the bus! He has to pee!" For another 10 minutes we got no response except some sarcastic Tibetan guy sitting in the middle of the bus yelling, "I don't care! Must go on!" This poor old guy seemed to do a perfect imitation of Grandpa Simpson, whining softly about having to go to the bathroom. I continued to pray that I wasn't sitting next to a potential bed-wetter. We finally got a response from the bus driver, "We're going downhill. I can't stop." Great. Gramps was silent. I was expecting to hear, "Never mind!" followed by a warmness running down my leg. But the bus eventually stopped and everyone got out to take a pee and so the fun ended.

On arrival in Xining…