Independent travel in China

Independent travel in China

From a month into China...

Obviously, all of our visas came through without any more problems. Subject as they seem to be to snap changes in regulations, especially in sensitive areas of Western China, I was relieved. But it means we are skipping out on Xinjiang Province, since a required tour group is way out of our budget right now...

That said, the major challenges to traveling independently here have amounted to our massive language barrier, and the way China's tourism infrastructure is oriented to tour groups.

Stop into a tourist information center looking for public transportation out to a major sight in the countryside, and we're only information on signing up with a group tour instead. So we go off to try to figure it out for ourselves, and public transportation information is generally only written in Chinese. Buying an inter-city train ticket can mean standing in long crowd-lines until reaching the ticket agent, trying hard to communicate by phrase book while squeezed in on both shoulders by other impatient travelers, and realizing it's a heavy travel week and the next available ticket is five days from now.

Tickets become available only 3 to 10 days ahead of the travel date (depending on the route and time of year), and travel companies buy in bulk -meaning that sometimes the only way to get a seat is to go through a privately run travel agent and pay their commission charge on top of the ticket price, a source of some frustration among the Chinese.

All in all, it hasn't been too hard now that we've gotten out of Beijing and into smaller cities, figured out how to buy from the train station ticket counter, and most importantly, gotten past the major holiday week called Golden Week, known by some as "Hell Week" now that so many people here go traveling...

The photo is of Beijing Xi Zhan (West Station), the largest rail terminal in Asia

Visa adventures

I'm going down to the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan in the morning to pick up our visas and passports (hopefully), and I just completed our Indian visa applications for a submittal appointment Thursday morning. I really hope it all goes smoothly since there isn't much time left for me to be sent away by a bureaucrat to come again another day...

As this isn't a very interesting or geographical post, I'll just refer back to the second one I did for this blog back on July 10, 2008, in which I said that the blog will be maintained whether or not I have anything interesting to show or tell. (I'm going to try to return to that plan, since I've missed the simple journal aspect to doing this) The only likely barriers to regular posting should be periodic lack of internet access. The other good reason to cycle back to July 2008 is that I'm back in the same place mentally -departure is coming fast, so to-do lists are clouding up my mind.

New direction, new view

So, having finished an intensive summer full of design classes and a street photography course as well as final preparations for going abroad again, I feel exhausted, dizzy and excited.

Since classes began in June I see typefaces everywhere -ones that have always been there, good ones looking good and bad ones looking bad, but now my eyes are tuned in to them. Everything looks richer. As for photography, I feel like Iv'e peeled back another layer -we'll see if it shows.

At the same time, the oven buzzer has finally gone off on applications long cooking for overseas work. We're watching the crust brown as we wait for formal placement documents. Interim travel plans have ripened simultaneously, so the first bite will be a 19-hour flight over the Arctic (I think -it's the shortest route) to Beijing (via Shanghai).

move along now...

A lot is going on now in life that is very exciting -especially regarding the nexus of my own geographic and visual lives- so I need to find a way to make this blog relevant again and stop seeing it as just a journal that I'm badly behind on...

Home in Kemmerer

Finally in Kemmerer to visit with the folks, as always it feels like home again. I've never spent more than ten days at a time there but it's all so familiar for being so far out there... 

the Great American Desert

Independence Rock graffiti

Independence Rock

sunrise on the Oregon Trail

on the Oregon Trail

Oregon Trail marker

On the road through central Wyoming the desert is so unbelievable. It's so easy to imagine walking along with a convoy of covered wagons and cattle, carrying all you own in the world having left everything you know to start a new life... But to start it by making your way across a wilderness unlike almost anything left on earth today is so much to fathom.

so, as I was saying...

We headed west along the Oregon Trail, among others. The museum we stopped at in Casper reminded me again what fun little dioramas can be...

Out of the Emptiness and onto the Oregon Trail

shade in Douglas, Wyoming

a jackalope in Douglas, Wyoming

drive-up liquor window in Douglas, Wyoming

Casper, Wyoming

We emerged from the huge emptiness of the Powder River Basin at Douglas, situated on Interstate 80. The town provided the first shade all day in the form of cottonwoods and a tall jackalope.
From there we picked up the route of a number of trails responsible for the westward expansion of the US, including the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express and the Santa Fe Trail...

Wyoming power!

coal train

Black Thunder Coal Mine in the Powder River Basin

natural gas refinery near Glenrock, Wyoming

The Black Thunder coal mine in eastern Wyoming's coal fields is one of the largest coal mines in the world, scraping enough coal off the earth's surface to send 25 miles of full trains out around the country every day (or 8% of all the coal used in the US). This place explains how so many of the trains we saw crossing the grasslands here headed to distant power plants measured well over a mile whenever we bothered with the odometer.

Wyoming has been through so many booms and busts in its short modern history, and right now its energy extraction economy is certainly booming.

Powder River Basin, Wyoming

pronghorn antelope

windy picnic

Upton, Wyoming

After passing through Upton (population 872) there were 106 miles to drive before the next town appeared. Bill (population 11) had a post office, a small motel where railroad employees mandatorily change shifts, and a tiny general store.

Looking for recreation in the coal fields of the Powder River Basin, we stopped to buy cold drinks for a picnic. I finally found the National Grasslands map I'd been looking for since before we left New York. It was pinned to the wall, yellowed and curling apart at the folds. Oh well, most of the public lands were behind us, so we picked a spot next to the highway a bit out of town and laid out our blanket, cracked open our root beers and looked through the barbed wire fence at the horizon so far away.