A snow lion guards the gate of a sacred temple.

I was staying at the Friendship Hotel, which may have gotten its name from the fact that every twenty minutes or so my phone would ring (mostly wrong numbers, of course, though I was secretly hoping someone would offer to send a massage up to my room). The city's location as one of the more Eastern stops on the silk road was evident in the Persian influence to the architecture and the many Muslims I saw walking around, all of whom stopped and stared at me. (I would have stared at me, too; I was the only Westerner that I saw in Lanzhou.) After some time spent reading by the banks of the Yellow River, I wandered around the Muslim outdoor markets looking for food. I picked a spot crowded with Chinese and threw myself on the mercy of the wait staff when I found that the menu had no pictures and was written entirely in Chinese. Fortunately, mushrooms seem to be a delicacy here, and I had several great dishes of fungi and meat.

The next day, I took a bus to Xiahe — a beautiful though long (seven hour) trip. We passed through many Muslim towns with pagoda mosques dominating the town center. I also had the opportunity to use the worst bathroom in China — literally a cement lined hole down which three people lined up to do their business. I told myself “just hold your breath and don’t look down,” but of course I looked down and saw an army of creepy crawlies marching over a field of mud, shit and tissues. I swore that on the return trip I was going to hold it even if I turned yellow.

Xiahe, Southwest of Lanzhou, is nestled among fertile green hills on which goats and sheep graze. The town was crowded with Chinese, Tibetans and Westerners, most of who had come into town for a special festival occurring in the monastery that I had no idea about. It was a frontier town, on the border between the old and the new China, the East and the West, with Han on one side and Tibetans on the other.

Stepping off the bus stiff legged, I began to feel that I had not properly prepared for this leg of my trip when I retrieved my mud-soaked luggage from the belly of the bus and plopped it down into a morass of muck and rock in the parking lot. As I lugged my heavy roly-poly to the sidewalk amidst my fellow booted, ruggedly attired backpacking travelers I felt completely out of place. I was a Saucony wearing linen-shirt clad city boy, reeking of freshly applied lavender spray, come to the country.

From all of my readings about this town I had come to expect a bucolic Norman Rockwell-esque small village of peasants, with a quaint dirt road perfect for peaceful, quiet strolls where I could reflect on my journey of the past few weeks. Nothing could be further from the reality of Xiahe, whose name I could never seem to properly pronounce (it sounds something like shwa-hey, but to my ears everyone pronounced it with slightly different emphasis and inflection and I could never get it down). The main road in town was a chaotic mess of cars and motorcycles over which reined a cacophony of honks and yells. The air was thick with pollution from the vehicles and the wood burning stoves of the mostly peasant population. In addition, the altitude of 3,000 meters made for weak air, which led to a semi-hyperventilation panic attack after my first brisk walk through streets.

That night I laid awkwardly on my Tibetan style bed, a flat, hard shelf over which a thin mattress pad had been laid, and rested my head uncomfortably on a small pillow stuffed with what felt like sand and covered in a red, lacey heart pattern. I was not happy. My chest felt as though someone was laying on it; I couldn’t seem to get a full breath. On the floor next to me I had thrown my used tissues, blackened with the grit of pollution caught in my snot. I was listening to Paul Simon very loudly on my ipod, trying to drown out the people talking in the common room just a few inches from my head and the sounds of the honking from the street just a few feet in the other direction. This was not the solace and refuge I was looking for. As I lay in bed I began to count the things that sucked about this town — with the poorly flushing Western toilet I thought I just clogged prior to crawling into bed topping the list — and hoped for a better day tomorrow.

The next day a quick hike out of the town provided some relief from the noise and pollution and set me down in a pasture. Writing in my journal on a mountain slope, I looked up to find myself eye to eye with a massive black bull. The bulls shared this slope with napping monks, Chinese tourists clamoring for the good views of the town and Tibetans drinking beer and having picnics. The animals run in response to the whistles, catcalls and stone throws of their herders — kids who look to be no older than seven or eight. These bulls with their curved horns made me nervous. One never knows when a bull will run wild.

The majority of the Xiahe population is Tibetan: ruddy faced, dark skinned people who wear cowboy hats and colorful patterns. Many of them projected an attitude of tough disdain for this lone Western traveler. Some of the leather jacket clad young men, their motorcycles parked nearby, stood in my way, smiles on their lips but not their eyes, forcing me to go around them. The old people glared at me while clutching at their prayer beads and said things under their breath in hostile tones.

I could not blame them their antagonism. Extreme travelers flock to this town on their extended vacations to see a Tibetan monastery in action, snapping pictures of the devout turning prayer wheels (myself included) or performing venerations in front of the temple. Most of the people who live here are extremely poor, living in either tents or in mud huts. Piles of garbage fester on the street corners and pigs root in the muddy gutter next to the street. Early in the morning I saw an old woman squat down on the sidewalk and relieve herself. Her back was bent from a life time of carting things around on it, which is custom for Tibetan woman. The day before I saw a girl in her late teens with a chest of drawers strapped to her back, its bottom edge resting on her tailbone, her backside jutted out to support it.

I did not feel good about being here. I felt lonely among my fellow travelers, who were less interested in discussing the Tibetan culture and lifestyle and more interested in name dropping exotic places they’ve visited or plan to visit next. Xiahe was just another town on the road to or from Tibet that they could check off their list. I was unhappy about the poor air quality and the general noise and chaos of the town. After a packed three week tour, I was in great need of rest and quiet, which the town and my cramped accommodations did not provide. For the first time in my life I found myself traveled out, unable to stomach one more site seeing trip or meal out at a restaurant. So, after a day and half exploring the town and surrounding hills, I departed Xiahe, and ended up making my way not just back to Beijing, but eventually back to New York.

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