urumqi and turpan

I believe I have just gone insane for macadamia nuts. I just spent twenty minutes hunched over a low stool with a metal lever in one hand and a sack of nuts in front of me. I ate feverishly through the bag, and when I got to the last five filberts, which could not be opened, I tried to smash them with every hard surface in my hotel room that could be lifted and dropped: my boot, the hair dryer, the bedside lamp. It was when I found myself bouncing on the edge of the bed with an unopenable mac nut under the bedpost that I realized I was not only eating but also acting like a nut and that delicious as they might have potentially been the last five fucking nuts were not going into my mouth and it was time to stop.

Xinjiang turns out to be the land of fruit and nuts. Which is deeply satisfying, since it accords with my primitive understanding of what central Asia is like. Except there are no flying carpets here, which is a little disappointing. Breakfast this morning was an apple, two dozen longans, and twenty minutes of peanuts. The units are time not weight because they were shelled and therefore impossible to gauge as mass. I cracked them open as I read the final pages of a terrible dull uninspired New York Times bestseller, Little Bee, do not recommend unless you want something that makes you think, with every page, "Why am I wasting my time!!!" I went around buying shit on the street in Urumqi last night in the way I do when I’m traveling, pointing at things, saying, “HOW MUCH?” and being too unschooled in the native tongue to request anything but what is offered and then walking away with way more than I want of what I don’t need. And that is why I have a kilogram of green raisins in my backpack. To the apple, longans, and peanuts I added a hubcap-sized piece of Uighur bread and a bottle of water and I called it my peasant traveler breakfast. The bread was inlaid with onion pieces and cooked in a tandoor-like oven. Delicious but farinaceous and therefore completely devoid of nutrition.

Later in the day, I bought something similar in Turpan, except covered in sesame seeds and shaped like a huge bulbous bialy, which I ate lustily while asking a clerk in a China Mobile store how I could switch my Shanghai SIM card to a Xinjiang number. I don’t know why my performance of masculinity includes letting that store clerk see the opening stages of my digestion, but somehow I felt more like his bro doing so. Perhaps this is also why I pick my nose enthusiastically and clear my throat like I’m about to vomit and make fart noises with my mouth when I go into the squat toilets in the men’s rooms – the first two because they are acts I see other men and no women doing, and the last because otherwise it’s kind of weird that a man needs to go to the squat toilet just to pee. I’m only going into men’s rooms now. I doubt my performance is as convincing as I believe it to be – especially after I realized with horror, staring into the faces of cisgendered men sitting on the train across from me today, that I am completely lacking in male secondary sex characteristics (Adam’s apple, facial hair, receding hairline, voice) and not really able to contain my female ones (tits, hips, monthly blood birth, voice), so I am probably not perceived as even an 18 year old boy, as I had previously hoped, but a prepubescent twelve year old, or perhaps as just a weird butchy woman picking her nose and making farting noises with her mouth in the men’s squat toilet. I watch your eyes when you watch me, you know, when they go from my face to my chest to my face and back to my chest.

I unloaded a bunch of unnecessary clothing in Urumqi (and Little Bee, literally a weight lifted off my shoulders to get rid of that load of crap) and wandered away from my hotel this morning with a lightened pack on my back, gnawing on my hubcap. I turned left when it suited me and right when it didn’t. I ended up wandering along street after street of construction supply vendors. The stores selling the same types of materials were clustered together, so there were ten storefronts selling PVC pipes, then another ten selling plastic siding, nylon rope, steel joints, stone lions, kitchen sinks, air conditioning units, lumber, drywall, canvas bags, tile, doorknobs, 15’ by 15’ panes of glass. The air smelled like kerosene and welding and plastics everywhere, even far away from the construction supply store. Maybe that’s just what pollution in China smells like because I have experienced it in every Chinese city I’ve been to: Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Songjiang, and now Urumqi. One of those special Chinese fix-it cargo vehicles – a motorcycle engine on a three-wheeled base with a pickup truck-style bed in the back for cargo but no cab to cover the driver – whipped around a corner and dumped four pieces of drywall, a sack of dry cement, and a bundle of plastic siding hard onto the ground near me. The driver and the passenger hanging on bedside him stopped to load the fouled pieces of drywall back onto the tricycle. Had I been walking a few feet ahead, that mess of shit would have slid onto me and – broken my femur? I don’t understand how people don’t just die all the time here.

Today I also heard my neighbors in the hotel having sex loudly through the thin crepe that passed for our shared wall. It was clear enough that I heard the man’s phlegm popping in his throat and could guess, by the rhythm of the woman’s noises (an interrogatory series of “Ohh? Ohh? Ohh?”s), that she was paying more attention to the television that was playing in their room than to the phlegm-popper laboring over her. I also saw someone trying to beat a stray dog that had run off with a scrap of something with a standup dustpan. Also, the man that shooed me out of the seat I had chosen on the train to Turpan (because the seat assigned to me was occupied by a young man with red rimmed eyes and a shirt covered in nonsense English) ate a bowl of instant noodles, stripped to his undershirt, and fell asleep stretched across three seats and a suitcase. Our train stopped 58km short of my destination, so I followed a tout into a shared cab to make the rest of the trip and waited while he drove circles around Daheyan shouting and honking at pedestrians to fill up the final seat in the car. We never found one so each of the three passengers agreed to pay 5 RMB more for the trip. We rode a twenty year-old Volkswagen whose interior was upholstered with dusty rugs and seatcovers bearing the Beijing Olympics mascots but captioned in a Cyrillic language. I tried to offer a macadamia nut to the woman sitting next to me, but she refused and called me very keqi, which pleased me. The driver shared a cigarette with the passenger in the front seat, who then hocked a loogie out the window that came back to hit me in the face. The driver accelerated into speedbumps. The landscape we crossed was flat, dry, dusty, and so devoid of life that I thought for sure if we were to die in a crash out here, my body would never be returned home. When a Uighur family standing next to a broken down cargo tricycle flagged our taxi down, the driver put the Volkswagen into reverse to get back to the scene. The car made several loud banging noises, after each of which the driver said, “Aiyo!” but kept on reversing just the same.

I’m going to be immodest. I’m fantastic at the mechanics of travel. I’m a champ at buying train tickets, walking out of a transport hub and orienting myself using one street corner and the position of the sun in the sky, collecting provisions before long-distance trips, hunting down a hotel room in a new city, finding a café in which to page through a travel guide, stringing together activities that are the right mix of high energy and rest. Or at least I tell myself I’m fantastic at these things, which gives me an inflated sense of my own competence, which means I don’t make plans ahead of time when I travel because I just rely on my instincts to steer me to the right places once I’m on the ground. Which is dumb, because I end up in mild situations, e.g. running out of money and sleeping in bus stations or riding a subway from terminus to terminus in order to sleep the hour in between, or the one I found myself in last night, dead tired, sweating through my chest binder, needing to find a squat toilet, but with two hours ahead of me of wandering to Urumqi hotels asking the same series of questions: Do you have a room free? How much? Do you accept foreigners?

Today’s activities after my arrival at Turpan from Urumqi were (1) triage my total failure to plan an itinerary by assaulting my hotel attendant with questions about the feasibility of each one of my travel permutations; (2) walk purposefully to the mud-and-straw minaret at the edge of town while gnawing on a sesame seed-covered super bialy, stopping along the way to startle a German woman with a Rolleiflex with my cheerful English language commentary on her choice of camera; (3) eat noodle soup in a big outdoor food stall area; and (4) wander through a supermarket discreetly releasing noxious gasses due to aforementioned noodle soup for the next half hour, buying only a roll of vitamin C candies and a tiny metal spoon but leaving so much atmosphere behind. I also attempted to enter an Internet cafe but my Chinese was apparently so incomprehensible that I was redirected to the second floor, which turned out to be a video arcade where people were bent over bed-sized tabletop flatscreens playing a multiplayer game in which each player seemed to control a type of fish and the object was to throw away one’s pocket change and waning days of youth as quickly as possible, and when I returned to the wang ba to ask for my half hour on the computers I was told that I needed a Chinese identity card to register my time. Why does China need to know which Internet bar I am surfing porn I mean sending correspondences from? Twice today I gave impossible instructions to taxi drivers (“Take me to a busy intersection where I can walk around and shop and eat; you know, re nao!”), once in Urumqi and later in Turpan.

The landscape out of Urumqi went like this: city city city, construction zone, cranes, exhaust chimneys, then suddenly rocks and very low scrub and flat hot dry dusty plain, the color of office carpeting. Windfarms, unexpected dense stands of birch trees, orchards, then back to flat hot dry dusty plain. We passed by wings of dismantled windmills on the cab ride to Turpan. They were so massive I thought they were reclining Buddhas statues at first. Apparently Turpan is the third lowest place on Earth. It is 154 meters below sea level and also the hottest spot in China – though only a merciful 80 degrees these days. The people here look a lot less like me than they did in Urumqi. There appear to be lots of Uighurs, and Chinese language is not getting me as far. Signs here are in Chinese, some language with Arabic script, and sometimes some language with Cyrillic script. Wonderful to have three options to not comprehend.

Tomorrow I will be traveling from local spot to local spot, probably exacerbating my bunions, eating unwashed things bought on the street that will make my intestines go “Ohh? Ohh? Ohh?” Saturday is a twenty-four hour ride on a sleeper bus to Kashgar and the Sunday they will contact the consulate to say that this flatulent woman dressed as a twelve year old boy needs to be repatriated but her body can’t be found. Oh my God I love to travel.