China, Lanzhou: Quick Glimpse of Muslim China

Our next destination was one of our most eagerly awaited places, Xiahe. In order to get there, we decided to use Lanzhou as a transit point. The good thing was, when we arrived in Lanzhou, that we were able to spend many hours there before boarding a bus to Xiahe. We saw many interesting people and things in this short space of time, and had a great eating experience, too, which is why we decided to included a Lanzhou travel journal in our blog.

After spending the day visiting the world's largest Buddha in Leshan and trekking in E’mei Shan, we had headed back to Chengdu to spend one final night in Sim’s Cosy Guesthouse. As you should know from reading the Chengdu journal entry, our flight from there to Lanzhou was cancelled and we had to change the flight to another day, either the next day or the previous day from our original booked date. We opted to leave Chengdu a day early since we felt we had seen everything there that we had wanted to see.

He kept spouting off the few English phrases that he uses to teach his class, such as 'I like to exercise in the mornings'

We woke up early at 5:30am and left Sim’s at 6am to go to the airport and try to sort out our flight tickets. The hassle we experienced the day before continued, and we left the ticketing counter after having bought a brand new ticket for the flight. The girl at the ticket counter was as helpful as she could be, but we still faced the problem that our original ticket was issued at the Xiamen airport, and that a refund could only be obtained at that airport. The girl serving us ended up giving us the guarantee that our ticket would be refunded onto a credit card, and she even offered to send the ticket to the Xiamen office for us. Let’s hope that we get the money back, but if not, we will be filling our first claim on our travel insurance!

When we first started dealing with the girl at the airport ticketing counter, we experienced another language difficulty problem that caused both us and the girl to get frustrated. We were in luck when a young Chinese guy, who was studying at an American university in Michigan, turned up at the counter. He was there to get a refund on a ticket that was cancelled for him back in January, ironically. He spoke excellent English and translated between us and the girl to allow us to get something sorted. It is so funny that we kept having people pop up from nowhere who spoke really good English, just at the right times…

Our flight was supposed to board about ten minutes after we agreed what to do about the tickets and, when we got to the security checkpoint, the lines were very long. We both did something that we have never done before – we walked straight to the front of the queue and asked a man in front if we could ask the security guard a question, all the while knowing that we were going to push in front of him. The good thing is that no one in the queue could speak English and they were probably hesitant to say anything to us for fear of getting it wrong.

Even though the plane we boarded was a little scary (it was really small and the outside was covered in panda pictures), the flight to Lanzhou was amazing. Seeing China again from above allowed us to realise how huge and diverse the landscape is, and also just how many mountains there are in this country. In one hour, we viewed bright green countryside below us change into enormous snow-capped mountains which then transformed into dry, arid desert-looking land with dusty mountain ridges that supported very little, if any, vegetation.

Both of us have had colds for about a week, due to the differing climates we have encountered in China. Dan had very congested sinuses that played up quite dramatically on the flight, causing him a lot of pain. As Kyle needed to withdraw some more cash at the airport, he offered to get Dan some tablets for his cold when we landed.

While Kyle went to withdraw cash and purchase some cold medicine, Dan collected our backpacks. During the time Kyle was gone, Dan had to justify to the baggage handlers that the bags were indeed ours, as the woman who checked us in at the Chengdu airport forgot to include our baggage claim tickets. Dan also had to fight off a swarm of taxi drivers who clearly wanted to target the only foreigners in the airport.

A ten minute conversation was held between Dan and a driver, and it led to nowhere as the driver could not speak any English at all. The guy was very weird and dirty, with teeth that miraculously were still remaining attached to his gums, despite being the darkest shade of black that rotten teeth could be. Let's just say that when Kyle came downstairs a few minutes later, to give Dan an update on what was happening upstairs, Dan was very relieved to escape from that crazy Chinese man.

When Kyle went upstairs to withdraw cash, he also wanted to try and purchase a top-up voucher for the China Mobile SIM card purchased back in Guilin in the middle of April. The first thing he did was go to the ATM machine, which thankfully worked. However, the daily withdrawal limit was only 1000 RMB, so pennies would have to be counted over the next few days as we travelled into the middle of nowhere in this large country.

No luck on the top-up - the only man in the airport selling vouchers could not locate Kyle's mobile phone number. Next, Kyle tried to find some cold medicine by asking every woman working at the various snack and drink counters if they had anything suitable. The trusty Mandarin phrasebook was in his hand, and a friendly woman, who finally grasped what was needed, offered to go inside the departure lounge to get some tablets, as she thought they were sold there. Kyle waited about ten minutes and the woman had still not returned, so he went downstairs to get Dan and bring him up to wait as well.

The woman had our 50 RMB note (it's worth around £3.33, or $6) and therefore we weren't going to leave without the medicine and the change. She finally came back but was empty handed, so we struck out on getting medicine, too. During the time we were waiting for her to return, a taxi driver, who had followed Dan upstairs, offered to take us to the bus station in downtown Lanzhou. Behind this new, sane taxi driver, was the crazy one from downstairs. We got rid of the crazy guy and agreed with the new guy to take us to the bus station.

The taxi journey was really long; it took almost an hour to get to the Lanzhou bus station from the airport. The friendly driver stopped at a pharmacy on the way, so we could get some medicine, and he also stopped at a Bank of China in the centre of Lanzhou so we could withdraw more cash. During the journey, we were amazed at such a dry, arid landscape with many dirt-covered hills and mountains surrounding both sides of Lanzhou. The town was very strange as it was built and expanded between a river and mountain range, so the town is about 20 kilometres long but only about 1-2 kilometres wide.

To get to Lanzhou, we passed many mosques with both Arabic and Chinese architectural styles. The villages and neighbourhoods we passed all had brown houses made of bricks held together with mud, and roofs that slanted down inwards, towards a walled courtyard, built to keep out the wind and dust. It was so completely unlike anything we had seen in China, or that we expected to see, that it threw us quite a bit and made the experience of travelling through Lanzhou and that part of China even more memorable.

When we arrived at the bus station, we were nervous because there were so many people that wanted to sell us tickets or help us. We didn't know who to trust, so we went with our instincts and followed people who pointed us towards the actual bus station, or who wanted to take us inside to sell us tickets. Our instincts fared well and we booked ourselves onto the 2pm bus, which would arrive in Xiahe at 6pm. We found out later that afternoon that the bus would be quite comfortable, despite the narrow Chinese person sized seats.

We booked our tickets at around 10am and had a few hours to walk around the town, or at least the area around the bus station. Lanzhou was a very busy place the day we were there, with many people walking about in the streets, waiting on buses or working on various construction projects underway nearby. There was a lot of dust in the air and we could see why our Lonely Planet guide mentioned that Lanzhou is one of China's most polluted cities, due to it growing so fast and not having a proper infrastructure to support itself. It didn't help that the area was very industrial and that there were many factories around the city.

Walking around Lanzhou was something we will never forget. The people we passed in the area that we explored looked physically different than most of the Chinese people we had encountered in the south and east. Many of them dressed differently, due to their Muslim beliefs and traditions; men with skullcaps and women with headscarves abounded, and some of the women were also wearing some sort of large skullcap that covered pretty much their entire head. All of the people we met that day were extremely friendly and curious to see two foreigners in their neighbourhood.

We made a stop in a China Mobile shop to see if they could help us with a prepaid voucher for the mobile phone. Luckily, the girls working at the shop could figure out what we needed after we pointed to several different words and phrases in our little companion Chinese language guide. Once we had this sorted, we decided to walk to a large mosque down the road, which we had passed when riding in the taxi, and we also decided to scope out a good place to have some lunch. We had high hopes for a nice little cafe of some kind, so we could possibly write some of our journal whilst eating, but that didn't happen as we were distracted by the fun we were having by walking around and talking with everyone we met.

Arriving at the mosque, we almost didn't go inside as we couldn't find the passageway that led upstairs to the mosque entrance doors. Just as we turned to leave the front gate, a young Chinese Muslim man on a bicycle passed by us and pointed in the direction we needed to go. A few moments later, we were looking into the impressive prayer hall of the mosque. After visiting the mosque, we walked back along the main road towards the bus station.

Before we went to the mosque, we spent some time in the Muslim neighbourhood around the holy place. We found a small cafe that was full of people both working and eating, and we figured it was bound to be a good place to grab a quick bite. The food smelled delicious - it was a basic noodle dish with a few different toppings and sauces poured on top, which ended up being spicy to our liking. The noodles were vegetarian, too, so we didn't have to worry too much about the hygiene.

After lunch, Dan needed to use the bathroom. The toilets inside were basically just large rectangular troughs cut out of the concrete, and the ground was about 10 feet below the holes. There was a stream of water below that was supposed to carry the excrement away but the fecal matter had built up so much that it just sat there, looking absolutely disgusting and giving off a most horrific odour. For the record, Dan didn't go number 2, and it was a major struggle to finish his number 1 quickly enough to get out of there. The grossest thing about this was that the toilet was very close to the kitchen; it's lucky that we had eaten before Dan's bathroom experience!

When we made it back to the bus station, we met an English teacher who works in Xiahe and who was travelling back there with his wife. His wife uncannily looked like an old flatmate of ours from London, a Polish girl named Aga. We hope that she reads this journal and checks out the photo album to see her twin living in China. Of course, she would have to dye her hair black, but the photo we snapped of the woman bears a striking resemblance. The teacher was funny; he kept spouting off the few English phrases that he uses to teach his class, such as "I like to exercise in the mornings".

The bus we boarded was nice and air conditioned, but when the bus climbed uphill (this happened to be nearly the entire journey), the driver turned the a/c off in order to conserve petrol. It made the journey boiling hot at times and very uncomfortable, and with both of our sinuses playing up because of the altitude change, and because the seats were too narrow and small for us, we were very excited when the bus pulled into Xiahe's bus station promptly on time at 6pm. Transport in China has been good to us as it has been very punctual and efficient, as well as inexpensive.

The view from the bus offered us amazing scenery yet again. We climbed to 3000 metres and when we got off the bus in Xiahe, we could immediately tell that we were at a much higher altitude – the thin air caused our breathing to become very laboured. We walked about 10 minutes to get to the hostel we had booked, the Overseas Tibetan Hotel. The staff there were very friendly and you can read the next journal entry to find out more about our time in the cool Tibetan town that is not actually in Tibet.

When we left Xiahe a few days later, we took a bus back to Lanzhou, in order to catch an overnight train to Xi'an. The Overseas Tibetan Hotel had their own bus and we were transported in that, directly to the train station. We were the only passengers on the bus and it was a great trip as a result, even though we suspected the driver of falling asleep at the wheel on a few scary occasions. Upon arriving in Lanzhou, we had a few hours to spare after purchasing our hard-sleeper rail tickets, and we walked along the main road leading up to the train station to get something to eat. There was a nice restaurant chock full of people, so we gave it a try.

The waitress serving us decided to take the liberty of ordering for us, which was very nice of her, but she delivered a huge feast of three very large dishes - a tender pork joint, spicy tofu dish with vegetables and a large soup of some kind that had small egg pieces inside and was sweet and salty at the same time. The entire meal only cost us around 70 RMB (just under £5, or $9), and it was definitely some of the best quality Chinese food that we have eaten on the trip. It's a shame that we can't tell you the name of the place, though, as it was only written in Chinese characters that we have yet learned to read!