The road to Xiahe

I was woken up early on Tuesday morning by the morning call to prayer. Lanzhou is predominantly a Muslim city, and the skyline is dotted with minarets. I wasn’t aware how loud the call to prayer was in such a city, and as it woke me out of a sound sleep at like 6am I got the answer pretty fucking clearly.

I headed down to the bus station and came across an Israeli named Ted who was having issues getting a bus ticket to Xiahe because China is all up in every foreigner’s grille about going there. You need to give a photocopy of your passport and your visa to the bus station, which has no facilities with which to make them. There’s a print shop across the street, but it very conveniently isn’t open until after both buses leave for Xiahe for the day. I attempted to help him out, pointing him towards a few hotels that might help him… but I didn’t see him on the 7:30am bus .

The scenery from Lanzhou to Xiahe (夏河） was actually very different from the scenery from the Lanzhou airport to Lanzhou. That is, it has the notable addition of the color green.

That’s more or less the scenery you see for a few hours. Hills. Mountains. Some green. It’s really cool at first, but then gets boring after about the first 10 minutes of your 4 hour bus ride.

Thankfully we got to spice it up a bit with a drive though Linxia (临夏）!

So we got to Linxia and I saw this baby in the distance. I was all, “Man this thing is way fucking bigger than the one in Hangzhou!” so I took a picture. Then I saw another and was like, “Wow two mosques!” Then the bus kept going through Linxia and I eventually lost count of all the mosques. Counting the minarets would have been even more foolish. It was the most Muslim place I’ve ever seen. Even the mannequins had headscarves on, which I found strangely charming!

We didn’t stop in Linxia, however. We kept on trucking from Islam-land to Tibetan Buddhist-land! I actually found it almost jarring how quickly and completely this change happened. I mean, one second you are in Huiville (Hui are Chinese Muslims, not to be confused with Uighurs who are Muslims who live in China but are more closely related to all those -istan dudes to the west of 天朝) with little white hats and lamian stores as far as the eye can see, countless minarets and old dudes with five mile long beards, the next everyone is bald and wearing entirely too much clothing for the warm weather.

Here’s the Labrang monastery! Whoaaa!!! It’s big!

It is big. This part of China is often referred to as “Little Tibet”, and with good reason. Most Tibetans I talked to actually consider small places like Xiahe and Langmusi (Where I would later visit) much more authentically Tibetan than most of Tibet. This monastery, for instance, is the real deal. There are no real entry fees, pilgrims and monks are walking all over, you can see Tibetan nomads in the mountains every which way, and the monks are constantly in class or debating scripture to each other. It’s a real, living, breathing monastery.

The Tibetans and monks are pretty friendly to foreigners, and maybe a little less so to the Han tourists. I had the following conversation with a monk, for instance:

Monk: HELLO! WHERE ARE YOU FROM?!
Me: America
Monk, pointing to himself: Tibet
Me: 西藏 (Chinese for Tibet)
Monk, waving hands: No! America good, Tibet good! 西藏 is China… China bad!

He then high-fived me and we were bros or something. It was cool.

Just another to show the scale of this place. Most of that is dormitories for the Monks. Labrang used to house over 4000 in its heyday, but nowadays the Chinese government caps them at about 1200.

SOME LOSER RUINING THE VIEW.