As I strolled back from a feed of shashylik, spiced bread and beer, and carrying my wedge of watermelon for desert, I spied a group of teenagers sporting identical t-shirts with big I <heart> China slogans branded in red across the oversized white garments. I admire the country, but I could not agree with them, China is not a place to love. It holds too many disparities, too many unwelcome contrasts, too many uncomfortable realities, both glaring and insidious. China has the precarious feeling of an over-inflated balloon set to burst. There is this constant spine-chilling grating of things that just don’t seem right. This may be a subjective view, but it’s definitely perceptible to many.
Urumqi is a sprawling city of apartment blocks, “high-tech” industrial quarters that resemble a conglomerate of local mechanics interspersed with pre-war industrial quarters, streets of Chinese fashion houses, and newly planted open green spaces flanked by official buildings of fascist proportions and architecture. It is set against a backdrop of dry rocky hills flanking snaking waterways and a line of impressive mountains in the distance. Like the rest of the engineering and construction works in China, everything appears in a state of constant disrepair, no matter how new and glistening it is. Government buildings, gargantuan structures shining grey and solemn at passers by, are known to be of a much higher construction standard than anything else that is built. One pertinent comment a western reporter made regarding the Sichuan earthquake was that people were muttering why it was that government buildings stood whilst the rest of the city lay as rubble. But even these structures, newly birthed edifices of the new strength of China, reveal crumbling rendering in patches, and missing tiles.
Walking down the street, hotels from a distance sport modern sparkling exteriors. On closer inspection, the shine is peppered by rusting pipes ejecting from walls to the streets below, a film of grime grades down to a general clutter of refuse at ground level, and there may even be the occasional smashed window. One who has travelled in China will also note the interior will generally be dingy, grimy, with spit-greased carpets rubbed bare and coming loose at the edges, and crumbling paintwork. Rooms will generally contain hot water that may be anything from permanently scalding to requiring a day’s preparation to simply permanently chilly, have power points that either spark dangerously or sport no power, and will provide a view of the neighbouring apartment’s utilities. But cities still glitter. There is obviously no shortage of power. Neon lights flash in multitudinous synchronisation hanging off every structure in every street. Cars of European brands that, imported into Western countries remain there the toys of the wealthy, are ubiquitous on Chinese streets. Certain models are made in Chinese factories, so as to be within reach of this burgeoning middle class of discerning consumption. Like everything else with the stamp ‘Made in China’, the glitter and label cannot always blind enough to conceal the lack of lustre in the finishing, the not-quite seamless joins, and an engine that doesn’t quite purr as croak. Another status symbol is the phone. Even your average stall owner will own a phone that puts my ancient (but, might I add, travel-reliable) Nokia to shame. Cameras with zoom, large screens, gadgetry and features are the norm, and shame on anyone who doesn’t try and keep up with the latest phone trends!
However, the contrasts are not always so unwelcome. China is an expansive country, and the range of geographies, topographies, climates and cultures is phenomenal. Having travelled, literally, across the country from its southern shores in Hong Kong to a hill that looked out across the border to Russia and Kazakhstan, its land is awe-inspiring. Travel from Urumqi to Kanas Lake in the most northwestern corner of the country, and the contrast that occurs here is humbling. As you exit the sprawl of Urumqi and speed along the spanking new freeway northwards, you travel through a barren landscape of rolling mounds of rock and sand dotted by tussock grasses. In the background are the peaks of the far arms of the Tian Shan, tiered from the dry slopes of the badlands to craggy snow-covered mountains in the distance. The mountains gradually disappear, though, and a series of flat expanses open before you, separated through the ten-hour bus rise by the rise and fall of lines of hills. Eventually these expanses widen to a basin stretching as far as the eye can see. In the glare of the bare earth and bright blue sky, small structures approach from the horizon. Trees? No, oil wells. The road skirts fields of wells, sprouting from the ground like a forest in the desert. In the largest of these fields wells stretch, literally, to the edge of vision. More rolling rocky hills mark the end of the basin. Then, in one sandy expanse, a series of stratified rock formations appear along the road. These are known as the ‘Ghost Town of the World’ (to the Chinese, who think they are at the centre of the universe, everything is globally superlative in China). The place is given its name because the formations howl with the winds that rake the region and carve the landscape. Gradually, with the ascension of each new line of hills, a greener valley is revealed, until finally one reaches Bu’erjin, and one day’s journey is complete.
Bu’erjin, apparently, sits on the banks of the only river in China to flow to the Arctic. When I visited, it’s muddy waters were swollen with the new snowmelt, and it’s current certainly looked as if it could carry me to the Arctic. Bu’erjin is s a non-descript town, with a faint faux Russian influence. Peaked red roofs and new facades built in some mock Franco-Prussian style and local Kazakhs selling wares and more shashyliks at the tourist markets just off the river bank give the area a strangely un-Chinese feel. But it’s a false sense of individuality, as the distinctly Chinese hotels, shops and signage proclaims. The tourist façade should have warned me of things to come.
Leaving Bu’erjin, the barren landscape returns. However, in the distance a line of peaks, taller, rockier than the rolling hills of the previous day’s valleys, approach. Expectation rises with the incline of the road, as it appears that finally you are approaching the mountains that cradle the infamous Kanas Lake. As the road winds over the summit of the ridge, a spectacular view awaits. Not slopes climbing to the alpine expanse that is the destination of your travels, but a vast verdant plain containing shimmering rivulets that vein the green. A taller, rockier set of mountains looms in the distance, to which the road leads and becomes a faint line as it approaches the base of these hills. The process repeats: a climb into ever steeper mountains, then a decent into an ever more expansive plain. Several times this happens, each mountain range taller, each plain more wide. Finally, a descent brings you to a plain that is so vast you catch your breath as it stretches east and dissolves into an indiscernible blue mist. Across the plain a series of peaks rise and rise, although no snow-capped mountains are visible as yet. The grandeur of the scale of the landscape tells you that now the surrounds of Kanas lake approach. You wind through gentle and green but immense slopes. The views consist of iridescent pastures grazed by all manner of livestock – cows, sheep, horses, goats, camels, interspersed by protruding dark rocks and glistening patches of white snow, yet to melt despite the warming late spring sun. These fields meld into boreal forests of conifers and birch, a patchwork of dark and youthful lime green, respectively.
It is in this landscape that you might expect villas of log cabins or even community run yurts or campers pitching tents, snuggling around small communal wood fires or cooking their dinner on gas stoves. Signposts might point the way to trails that wind their way through the mountains to hidden gems and breathtaking viewpoints, a kiosk might appear with advice on how to remain ecologically sustainable in your visit to this pristine wilderness. Facilities, barely perceptible against the backdrop, might exhibit the latest ecological technology. Solar panels and techno-toilets might be the only revelation of civilisation. But This Is China. The gate to the reserve is a glaring concrete building more akin to a highway toll-booth or theme-park gateway, with lanes of entrances. Once inside the park, rows of glistening white buses stand ready to whisk you away to the various lookouts and scenic points along the brand new asphalt road that traverses the park. You get five minutes to snap away at each of these points, before being bundled back into the bus to the next point. The centre of the park is a “village” of snack bars and Kazakh restaurants, all overpriced and all resembling the eastern equivalent of a roadside diner. These are surrounded by the rough log huts of the workers of the park, whose livestock graze some of the slopes, seemingly more out of necessity for the atmosphere than for real agriculture.
Things get worse if you plan to stay the night. Just out of the reserve is a valley, once again a glowing green basin amidst rocky and snow-capped peaks. In this valley, the authorities have decided it is pertinent to build a town of hotels. The multi-storey structures glare stark white against the background. Construction workers dump refuse and wash concrete mixers in the alpine streams, which are rediverted through a series of sewage systems to reappear as streams beneath a concrete bridge built to mimic a rough timber structure. The buildings are not even complete, and already display the decay that plagues the rest of China. Power points hang out of walls on live wires. Render bubbles and peels. Concrete moulds that adorn windows are chipped and crumbling. Even windows remain smashed, opening the new rooms to the elements.
Kanas lake itself is spectacular. Not just for the scenery but because it’s a water body that appears clean. No rubbish bobs up and down on the surface, there appears no human contamination, as the village and hotel complex are downstream beyond the exit of the lake, livestock contamination appears minimal as the slopes around are too steep, and livestock seems limited. All in all, the crystal, chilling waters are almost trustworthy.
The climax of the trip is the climb to the top of the hill that affords spectacular panoramas of the lake and the mountain ranges in which it is nestled. A bus trip brings you almost to the top and this is followed by the slow ascent of 1200 steps to the pagoda that crowns the summit. Plain clothed attendants loiter at strategic points to berate you if you step off the path, all in the name of protecting the fragile alpine ecosystem. I even was nearly chastised for eating a nectarine, because the attendant thought I was about to throw the stone off the path. I felt like saying to the guy, look at the rest of your country, mate, a nectarine stone is the least of your worries. From here the emerald lake snakes out of view around the corner of the mountains. The eye is drawn upward to a prominent white peak in the north, Friendship Peak, the highest point locally at…m. Mountains and valleys stretch into the horizon. The slopes are a patchwork of a flush of green spring growth, yellow and purple wildflowers, and the occasional remnant of white snow.
Despite the raucous throng of Chinese tourists, panting at the climb or once recovered snapping away with their phones and cameras, there was a moment of bliss at the top of that hill. The vista opened before me. The brisk alpine air, sweet with the smells of life appreciating the spring, opened my lungs and expanded my chest. I looked back south, down the valley and the river flowing out of Kanas Lake. In that direction lay desert, the greatest mountain range in the world, and beyond that another of the most populous regions in the world, the Indian subcontinent. I looked east. There lay Mongolia, and further south, spread the whole of China, and the route I had traversed to reach this point. West I looked eagerly along valleys, spying snowy summits glistening on and on. There lay Kazakhstan, the country I was desperately trying to reach. After pausing on this view for a while, I turned north. There my eyes rested for a long time. This was possibly the closest I would come for a long time to the ultimate goal of my travels. Just beyond the spires of Friendship Peak lay the Russian border. The wind whipped up, coming in from the peaks to the west as bad weather clouded the horizon. I sighed and turned back into China.
