Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [126]
“How about this one?” I asked at a café that offered bicycle rentals.
“No brakes.”
“And this one?”
“Broken.”
“So this one, then.”
“Is good.”
It was a bicycle meant for nine-year-old girls. Midget nine-year-old girls, I thought as I pedaled my way out of Dunhuang. And it’s hard pedaling a bicycle for nine-year-old girls when you’re not one. Without being able to extend my legs so that the thigh muscles could do the work, it was left to the kneecaps to do the pedaling. I rode like an oversized clown on a tricycle, grunting savagely as I made my way up a slight incline. Teenage boys overtook me on their big bicycles, laughing and jeering from their perches high above, and as they passed I hoped that one day soon they’d find themselves overcome by a debilitating bout of acne.
I was heading a few miles out of town toward the giant sand dunes that surrounded Crescent Moon Lake, which wasn’t really a lake but a small pond with a pagoda, a classic oasis in the desert. The sand was alleged to sing atop these dunes, which stretched for miles into a barren wilderness. When I finally arrived, I uncoiled my legs and briefly contemplated stealing someone else’s bike before hobbling though a gate, where I discovered to my delight that I was in the midst of a thousand camels, idling in the sun, waiting to ferry passengers up the golden Mountains of Shifting Sands, or Mingsha Shan. This thrilled me, because really, is there any better way to climb a sand dune than on the back of a camel—a creature so large yet so silly-looking, with its strange contours and perpetual countenance of dopey confusion, an expression I empathized with completely here in China. No, there is not, I concluded as I settled myself between two humps and with bewildered glee experienced the swift, staggered, doddering thrust of a camel rising. True, this was essentially the local equivalent of a pony ride, and I was led by a camel walker who guided the camels up the narrow, ever-shifting trail of sand. Lawrence of Arabia I was not. But it’s a graceless ride that can only be embraced. So trust me here. If you’re putting together a To Do list, include Ride a camel up a sand dune.
But hold on. Camels do not lightly set off their passengers. They collapse. First the front legs go, and just as you think you’re about to hurtle front over end, the back legs go. It’s a startling sensation. The camel doesn’t so much sit down as fall down, and it’s an interesting feeling—crumbling to the ground together with a 500-pound animal—and you feel lucky to have survived the experience. Still, we hadn’t quite summited this mount of sand. There was farther to go, and I clambered up a steep wall of shifting grains.
At the top, it was alleged that this was where one could hear the sand sing. I did not hear the sand sing. I heard only the whoosh and demented cackling of someone hurtling down the sand on an inner tube. But it was not the only option for getting oneself down the other side; there was also something alleged to be sand surfing. Boys had carried the lids of wooden crates up to the peak, and the sand surfers were meant to sit on these lids of wooden crates and gently push themselves down the slope, which, frankly, looked like a really lame way to get down a sand dune. No, I thought. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. So I went with the inner tube.
I settled myself inside the tube and gazed at the wonder of the scenery, the desert, the mountains in the distance. I considered going farther west into the emptiness, through Xinjiang, all the way to Kashgar, where China meets Pakistan. But what would I learn about China, Han China, that I had not learned in Tibet? There were Uyghurs out there, the poor Uyghurs, China’s Turkic minority. Like the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, too, would prefer not to be a part of the People