Air Quality
There was a news article today that Beijing just started trying to improve its air quality before the Olympics by instituting odd-even driving restrictions: if your license plate is odd, you can only drive on odd days, etc. When we were there, the air quality was quite nice on Sunday, but really smoggy the other days. In Xi’an, it was really smoggy. In Xining, it wasn’t so bad, but it was cloudy about half the time.
Cloudy is a bad thing when you’re going to see an eclipse. We hoped that once we hit the desert, the skies would be clear all the time. And indeed, most of the time in Qinghai, they were, though there were occasional cloudy days. And not discrete puffy clouds — whatever one part of the sky decides to do, the rest of the sky decides to do the same thing. It is the Chinese cultural influence.
Now we’re getting pretty close to where the eclipse will be, and today it was cloudy all day. This made it a comfortable 85 degrees instead of 100, but still — if today had been eclipse day we’d have been out of luck. The eclipse tour people have reported that the Chinese want our tour to observe the eclipse in an “official viewing site”, but if the weather is bad, I hope they let us drive off away from the clouds, if that’s even possible.
Other than the clouds, Dunhuang has been a pretty nice place so far. Today we got up early and went to see the Mogao Caves, which is one of the most incredible things we’ve seen this trip. A few hundred rooms were dug into the side of a cliff about 1500 years ago, and the walls were decorated with elaborate murals depicting Buddha, his Bodhisattvas, and many flying Apsaras. Many of the rooms have statues, and there are two enormous Buddhas, one of which was claimed to be the third largest in the world (it was fourth, but the Taliban moved it up to third a few years ago). It has been very well preserved due to the dry climate, and many of the paintings have been restored over the years by various dynasties. Tomorrow we’re going to the Gansu version of Monument Valley.
With so many local tourist attractions, this is an easier place to find an English menu in a restaurant, or at least one with pictures. The last two nights we’ve eaten in the “night market”. You sit down at a table with six lounge chairs, and order from a menu which consolidates offerings from many small kitchens. There’s one attendant per table who fetches your drinks, and delivers your order to the appropriate kitchens. Most of the items on the menu have pictures, and English names which are pretty funny — “the unofficial receipt grasps”, “cram food into one’s mouth pit meat”, to name a couple. Last night we had some great noodles (“Dunhuang ties the knot” or something) kind of like spaetzle, and a very scrawny leg of lamb with a few skewers stuck into it. Tonight was less successful — a plate of corn and pine nuts that was sweet like Jolly Green Giant, and pork and fennel dumplings in which we didn’t taste any fennel. But they were good anyway.
The second day of our recent drive across the desert was complicated for me by the fact that the hotel at Qinghai Lake didn’t have coffee. So I think I was suffering a little from a combination of caffeine withdrawal, dehydration, and high altitude — I felt feverish and headachy. The hotel in Golmud didn’t have coffee, either, but by then I’d bought some packets of Nescafe, preblended with milk and sugar so it doesn’t taste so bad. It seems to have done the trick. This place is certainly different than the center of Xi’an, where there are four Starbucks within a half a mile of each other. But there’s hope — our tour guide in Xining showed us the business card of a Starbucks executive he’d showed around.