We have been celebrating Chinese Spring Festival this week, ushering in the new year. This one is pretty special as it is the Year of the Golden Pig, which symbolises great good luck and wealth and comes around once every 600 years, so please allow me to wish you luck and prosperity this year. The atmosphere has been incredible: like a nation-wide festival everywhere with huge crowds of families taking time just to stroll through streets lined with stalls selling every kind of Chinese delicacy (warning: heavy use of euphemism), music being performed from all directions, and fireworks lighting up the evening sky with beautiful showers of silver and gold. Our train journey to Chengdu sticks in the mind especially: by day we were passing through really spectacular mountainous scenery and by night every village and town we passed through seemed to hail our arrival with pretty explosions and swirls of light.
We reached Chengdu, like every other city now festooned with red lanterns and ribbons as if it were part of some gaudy dreamscape, in good time and on 19th Feb I went to the train station here to repeat my earlier Kunming experience. Same queues, if not more so, but this time I was a little more savvy and so approaching a policeman I looked bewildered, muttered 'ticket office?', and refused to understand anything said back to me (which was easy, because I couldn't). Taking pity the policeman marched me around to an otherwise sectioned off booth and granted me immediate access to the ticket lady thus ensuring that 4 hours was slashed to 4 minutes which was a blessed relief, I can tell you. I will say this for the police in China: apart from one minor incident outside the Forbidden City involving an elderly dissident, some pamphlets and swift bundling in to the back of a riot van the police have appeared helpful, kind and courteous throughout prompting me to think that they have a thing or two to teach the British Bobby. Certainly until now I never realised that policemen were genetically capable of smiling and it has contributed to a very relaxed and civil atmosphere all round.
Sadly on the ticket front there were no spare seats to Urumqi until 27th Feb, so I took a couple of hard sleepers for that date. This delay of some 8 days seriously compromises our plans and will mean that because of immovable visa dates we have little if any time in north-west China (Xinjiang, Uighar country) or indeed in Kazakhstan. As it turns out the staff at our hostel were amazed that I got a ticket for February at all, but that was only a minor consolation. Still, no use crying over spilled milk and this has afforded us the opportunity of exploring the extremely interesting West Sichuan area. Bordering Tibet it has a very dramatic landscape as it goes from low-lying flatlands in the east right up to the 4000+ metres Tibetan plateau in quite a short distance. Additionally the region is home to a great many Tibetans now, unlike Tibet itself which continues to be settled by Han Chinese at such a rate that we now have the ludicrous situation whereby a small section of the capital, Lhasa, is known as the 'Tibetan Quarter'. There is a one-week circuit from our hostel that is serviced by intermittent public transport and which should be perfect for us as it allows us to live amongst Tibetan families and see a wide variety of this special land...
..Or it would do. Unfortunately the Year of the Pig has little to say about health, and we are both currently laid low with another stinker of a cold: I would gladly settle for Year of the Lint-free Tissue right now. Most frustrating, and looking back it is possible to trace every illness we've suffered since October to journeys on Chinese public transport. The constant repeated hacking and spitting by the Chinese has to been seen to be believed and I'm sad to report that the government's attempt to curb this filthy behavior has been about as successful as the Great Leap Forward - a Pathetic Stumble Backwards if ever there was one. So no Tibetan adventuring for us and now our only consolation is that we get to recover in this chilly but not unbearably so region rather than Urumqi with its -16C. This has to be a good thing but I can practically taste the adventuring to be had right on my doorstep, tantalizing, frustrating and so completely out of reach.