Xining, the high and dry fulcrum of central China

Does the time you spend in a place always match the general atmosphere of that place?

When Masayo and I spent three days in Xining (西宁), China, it certainly did. Xining (pronounced “shee ning”) is a city in vast Qinghai Province in western China. It’s a high, arid, chilly place, hidden behind huge red rock bulges in the earth with an opaquely muddy brown river storming through it.

And our time in Xining took on that spirit: we didn’t do too much or see too much, we just spent three days in slow motion, contemplating the high sun-shadowed rocks visible from town, passing time in large and mostly empty coffee rooms, and walking along the river like the only two people in a place left behind when humanity escaped to colonize another planet.

Well that may be a bit of an over-dramatization; Xining is in fact the largest city on the huge Tibetan Plateau, the capital of Qinghai, and thanks to the train line that reaches far into this remote part of China, a transportation hub. It has some nice things to visit – mosques, temples, and parks, and other remnants of Xining’s past as an important stop on the Silk Road – but it’s just as easy to relax here, to feel like you are visiting a place that no other traveler has ever heard of.

And after our very lively past couple of weeks, that was what we needed. After our three-day Yangtze River boat tour we had spent a couple days relaxing in Chongqing, but we were in the heart of that gigantic and dingy city; Xining, by contrast, felt soothing and calm. Distant, but welcoming.

It was a 21-hour overnight train ride from Chongqing that got us to Xining. Masayo and I each had a top bunk in the third-class sleeper car, where we were comically cramped but restful enough. As the train made its steady way through the high-altitude, dusty plateau, I was thrilled to find that there was a gadget on the wall of my bunk written in three languages – Chinese, English (“oxygen supply” it read) and Tibetan.

Tibetan! There is nothing like a new language and a new script to dramatically demonstrate that you are heading for new frontiers. We weren’t actually headed to Tibet (too much expensive paperwork involved; Tibet deserves a trip all of its own, not as a side trip from China) but the train was. Imagine! We were so far out of anywhere we knew that things were written in Tibetan! I loved it.

Around 5:00 pm the next day we rolled into Xining, where everything is brown. The street in front of the station was a wide muddy path beside the bright tan Huangshui River (湟水河), which flowed rapidly with choppy waves between long, straight concreted walls. The brownish-red cliffs rose behind the train station area and extended far into the distance on either side; the late afternoon sun brought out orange-reds of the prominent parts and turned the recesses into blurry shadows. Breaking up the color scheme were bursts of green trees.

Xining is earth tones writ large.

Crossing the river on one of the bridges we found ourselves in a nearby hotel. The rates were listed on the wall, as they usually are in China, and were acceptable to us. But the woman working there spoke no English at all, and seemed uncomfortable completing the transaction without it: she wanted to get it right. (She spoke to Masayo, thinking she was Chinese, but Masayo smiled in her practiced apologetic “actually I’m Japanese” way, and the surprised clerk gave up.)

So she made a phone call and in a couple minutes an older man showed up who spoke some English. He guided us through the check-in process and we had our room. Thankful smiles all around!

That night, as it rained, we walked around the busier part of Xining which was situated rather high above the river banks. We ended up at a food stall run by guys who looked Central Asian cooking up bread and lamb skewers. One of the guys had visited Japan and, in halting English, we discussed the land whence we ourselves had come. The food was excellent.

Otherwise we just existed in Xining for a couple of days. We walked around the town’s steep and then flat streets, looking at the buildings, feeling the isolation of its setting, and listening to the cheerful birds and the river, always hissing a few blocks away.

After recharging ourselves, and consulting various maps of China (both online and in our Lonely Planet guidebook) we made vague but exciting plans to go even further into the wilds of western China – maybe through the Taklamakan Desert, and/or to Kashgar or Ürümqi or Turpan. Our visas may be running out but we still have time to do some exploring.

So it was that we spent a few days in this ancient crossroads of a town, full of influences from a wide range of cultures and with its own style quite separate from the rest of China. And we used it as a way of psychologically adjusting to being in what is really a separate country – western China. This is clearly not the big cities of the east (Shanghai, Beijing, et al). This is like the dusty edge of the world, where only the hardiest go.

But there is (as always) much to be seen. We haven’t even seen the Great Wall yet!

What’s the most interesting place you’ve spent resting and recuperating during a long trip?

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