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I had decided to head for Dunhuang, a Silk Road outpost deep in the Gobi Desert. The thought of another thirty-six-hour train trip didn’t much appeal to me, and so I resolved to fly. To that end, I had consulted my guidebook, which charmingly describes Lanzhou as “the most polluted city in the world.” But there was a business hotel in town, and I thought I could buy a plane ticket there.

I picked up my pack and headed toward the taxi line. There were no foreigners here and everyone stared with undisguised curiosity. I put my bag inside the trunk of a taxi, whereupon the driver pulled out a 20-yuan note.

Bullshit, I thought. The hotel was less than a mile away, not more than a 10-yuan ride, maximum. And then I wondered what, precisely, had happened to me. It’s not often that I take offense at the thought of paying $2.50 for a taxi. But China changes you. Simple commercial transactions are played like a zero-sum game.

I took my bag and walked away. I sensed that here, in a taxi line in front of the train station in Lanzhou, my presence was regarded in the same light as a hyena might regard the carcass of a lamb. A minibus driver offered to take me. He pulled out two tens. I walked on. A motorcycle driver pulled up. Not even if I were high on crack would I have gotten on a motorcycle in China.

I walked to the street and hailed a cab with the first honest face I saw. He put the meter on. It started at seven yuan. He made a couple of turns. He’s running the meter, I thought. Instead, he smoothly took me to the hotel entrance. Seven yuan said the meter. I handed him a ten. He gave me back four. Surely, he had miscalculated. I pressed one yuan into his hands. No; he shook his head, and with his hands indicated that the correct fare was 6 yuan.

I decided I liked Lanzhou.

But not enough to stay.

I had chosen this hotel because I needed a few hours to book a flight, get some laundry done, and check e-mail, and a business hotel was the easiest way to accomplish all this. Still, I had become accustomed to guesthouse prices and was wholly unprepared for the budgetary mayhem that followed.

“How about 395?” I tried.

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s 495.”

I swallowed hard. Not since Shanghai had I spent that kind of money, about $60, for a hotel room. But hey, I thought, at least I’d saved a couple of bucks by not giving in to rapacious cabdrivers.

I got up to my room on the sixteenth floor and admired the view. Yes, Lanzhou is polluted, all right. I couldn’t see beyond the neon Lenovo sign flashing outside my window. The pollution was literally breathtaking.

I took a quick shower, brushed my teeth with tap water—because I’m reckless that way—had my laundry taken care of, and went down to book a morning flight to Dunhuang.

“Big plane or small plane?” I asked the travel agent. These are the things that concerned me. She didn’t understand, and so I used charades, imitating the sounds of a jet plane and a whirring prop plane, and succeeded only in frightening her. Who was this sputtering laowai? Nevertheless, I soon had a plane ticket, and with hours to spare before I actually needed to be anywhere, I decided to get a haircut at the hotel barbershop.

I had become decidedly hirsute in the previous weeks. That’s the thing about beards—they keep growing. Some beards turn out to be Santa Claus beards. Or Tolstoy beards. Friendly beards. Some turn out to be Satan beards. Mine was such a beard. No wonder I frightened the woman at the travel desk, I reflected as I sat down in the barber’s chair. With my beard, I looked like a crazed biker.

“Just a little off the top,” I said. The barberess didn’t speak a word of English, of course. She proceeded to put multiple layers of cloaks on me. What, I thought, is this going to involve X-rays? Wrapping one towel around my neck, she proceeded to keep it all together with streams of toilet paper. Nevertheless, she did a fine job.

Next to me, a man was being shaved with a switchblade. The barberess