Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Troy Lee Hudson's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, July 6th, 2006
8:00 pm	Last Days Wednesday, July 5, 2006 11:00 pm Beijing Our last day in Xinjiang was quite busy. We woke up in Kuytun and split into two groups. One group, the smaller of the two, went back to our site on the Anjihai anticline and did another round of seismic profiling. The larger group took two buses and high-tailed it for Urumqi. We didn’t go to Urumqi first, we went beyond it to a place called Tienchi, or ‘Heavenly Lake’ up in the Bogdashan. We spent about 5 hours there and it was definitely worth it. High mountains surrounded this beautiful, peaceful lake. In thi distance, snow-capped Bogda peak was occasionally clear, but frequently shrouded in clouds. Along the shore of the lake there were a number of people selling traditional Uyghur clothing, food, and other items. I took some time on my own to walk around the eastern rim of the lake. They had built a walkway that was variously cut into the hillslope (which was rather steep) or built out from a vertical cliff face leading down into the water. Most of the time I was alone. I could see a few boats out on the lake. When I walked through or close to glades of grasses I heard the loud droning buzz of summer insects doing their thing. It was a very moving experience. I see why people come to this place. Following that, we drove into downtown Urumqi to go to Erdo Qiao. This is the modern bazaar. The epicenter of it is this large courtyard with a massive minaret in the middle. I’ve seen this structure before, both in my books on the Silk Road and in a music video made in the region. I don’t know if there’s more than one of these, but it was pretty impressive. We didn’t have a long time to wander around the market. Ultimately, after dinner, we had plenty of time. But we weren’t aware of that then, so we urgently did some super-fast shopping. Not all of us were present, though. The seismic team was supposed to have met us up there, but they were running behind. And one of the buses from the Tienchi team got a flat tire on the freeway in the middle of the city and was delayed for repairs. After we all met up again, we went into the same courtyard where now there were set up a bunch of tables in a portioned area and a huge buffet. We were to have a banquet and entertainment. It was excellent. The fool was varied and quite delicious. Kebabs, nan bread, yoghurt, many meats and noodles, fresh fruit, soups. It was wonderful. Then, following dinner, we had our entertainment. The first half consisted of a tight-rope walking act along a line strung across the courtyard about 4 floors up. A man and a woman did several ‘runs’ across the tightrope, at times using implements such as hoola-hoops, stools, or chairs. It was very neat, but after a while got a bit boring. Following that, we turned our attention to the stage which was set up and watched about two hours worth of traditional dancing and singing. The acts were almost all done with the same people, but there were many costume changes and the cultures represented ranged from Uyghur and Chinese to Kazach, Mongol, Russian, Turkic, and Uzbek. At the end of it all, the dancers came into the audience and plucked out many people to go dance on stage with them. Many Caltech folk got up there and some of us (Valerie, Andy, Min, Sarah, myself) gave them quite a show. They seemed rather happy and somewhat impressed. I found it interesting how generally unresponsive the crowd watching the whole show was. When some of the singers (particularly those who weren’t singing in Chinese) were up there and made motions indicating they wanted the crowd to clap to the beat, I noticed that most of the Caltech people would comply, but almost no one else would. The clapping that did start would rapidly die down. I don’t know how often they put on this show. If it’s once a day, I understand the lack of energy. But overall I found the response of the crowd to be generally flat. Sleep. Bus. Airport. Goodbye Chinese students. Fly to Beijing. We’re staying this time at a hotel which is somewhat closer to the middle of the city. It’ll make for a longer trip to the airport, but we’ll have an easier time going around and looking at things. And, in fact, we found some really cool stuff. First, before leaving the hotel to wander, we arranged a tour bus for tomorrow to take us to the Great Wall and Ming Tombs. 150 yuan for admission, lunch, and transport is a good deal. Thirteen of us are looking forward to going. So, after that a bunch of us left and walked generally south-east towards the middle of the city. After about an hour, some of the group were getting really tired and hungry and split off from our group. They went back towards our hotel and, ultimately, had some KFC. Yes, Kentucky Fried Chicken exists here. Apparently, it’s slightly spicier than American KFC. The four of us remaining walked south-east again and headed for a restaurant mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide book. We walked down this long, narrow street. The norther part of the street was just a residential area, but residential in the sense of what you’d expect from old Beijing. One-story buildings, tiny alleyways, lots of dirt, junk, and people on bicycles. It’s the sort of place that looks like people actually live there, but at a standard of living quite a bit below what I’m used to. When we got into the sourthern half of the street, we started to see more and more shops with appealing items. Valerie bought an ink-stone for calligraphy and some brushes and an ink block. I found a few more souvenir items for my friends. We also came across this awesome Asian Fusion restaurant called Drum and Gong. It had a menu end both Chinese and English. The staff didn’t speak English, but by pointing we could make ourselves understood. We got what was perhaps the best meal we’ve yet had on this trip. We’re gonna try to get everyone to come here tomorrow. We continued to walk after dinner and found a great many neat shops. Shirts, coats, scarves. Tea, scrolls, fans, knives. So much stuff here. All very cheap. We even found a bar called ‘Shut up and Drink’ which advertised a “Fucking good Mojito”. I want to stay here a few more days. China Rocks!! Thursday, July 6, 2006 1:01 Pm Beijing China SUCKS! I have turned around completely in my opinion of this place. It may be unfair of me to judge a whole country by one bad experience, but judging from the warnings printed in the guide books, the statements of my friends that have visited China before, and a few of my experiences here, I’m now quite firmly disenchanted with the whole F*cking place. Thirteen of us got up this morning at 5:00 am with hopes of getting on our tour bus and going to visit both the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. About 5 minutes after the bus was supposed to have arrived, the hotel manager on duty came over to our group and told us something like there was some problem with our tour and that we’d need to pay 100 yuan extra. Oh, but not just 100 yuan, 100 yuan per person. WHAT THE F*CK! We, as a group were totally indignant and demanded therefore to have our money returned to us. The manager then got on the phone (presumably with the tour company) and remained thus for about 10 minutes. I then walked over and demanded that we be given back our money. He was, at the time, looking through a Chinese-English ideogram dictionary. Don’t know why. But after looking through this for another 2 minutes he starts explaining to me that the 100 yuan extra is for the cable car at the Great Wall. His English is quite poor, so I can’t really figure out what this cable car is for, but I tell him that we don’t want the cable car, we’re happy to walk, and if he can’t honor the agreement made yesterday that we want our money back. Finally, he gives me back the 1950 yuan for the 13 of us. He then starts telling me that the receptionist yesterday didn’t explain to me fully what the costs would be and that he’s sorry for the miscommunication. Miscommunication my pasty-white American ass. We had Ying Wang right there with us when we made the arrangements, both the manager and the receptionist were there, and according to Ying, the engraved metal plaque advertising the tour group on the front desk counter specifically said “150 yuan for admission, lunch, insurance, tour-guide, and bus”. Nothing about an additional 100 yuan. What’s more, Rob Clayton of our group who has a Lonely Planet guide book with him said that it mentions the Great Wall cable car, and that it only costs 50 yuan. So, the upshot is that someone along the line was trying to fleece us dumb, desperate Americans. Regardless of whether it was the hotel, this manager, or the tour company, I’m very, very pissed at the hotel. If it’s not the fault of them or their staff, they’re making excuses for a shitty tour company. Ultimately, a reduced group of us took 3 taxis to the Forbidden City where, two weeks ago, a number of us had been accosted by people hawking tours of the Great Wall. Of course, that was a Sunday and NOT at 6am in the frickin’ morning. So, we walked around for about an hour with barely a nibble from hopeful tour guides. Most were out to sell tours to other Chinese and weren’t interested in English speakers. After a while, we broke up into two groups. My group, which included Rob, Becky, Tony, Brian, Sarah, and myself walked around and up the east side of the Forbidden City through a long plaza of shops. Many were not yet open, and most were higher-priced versions of the stuff I saw yesterday. So, after about a hour of that Brian, Rob, and I took a taxi back to the hotel and the other three went to the Forbidden City (which didn’t open until 8:30am anyhow). Back at the hotel, I napped until just now and Brian puttered around on the computer (The one thing this hotel does have going for it is wired internet in every room). In a while, we’re going to meet Tony and Becky for lunch (who, by the way, seemed rather under whelmed by the forbidden city). Later tonight, we’re gonna go back to that street we found last night and do some final shopping and dinner. I can’t wait to get home. Friday, July 7, 2006. 9:42 am Beijing I’m sick. Rather, I was very ill yesterday and last night. I’m feeling somewhat better this morning. I think something I had for lunch yesterday didn’t agree with me. It ended up coming out both ends. Blech. Hopefully the worst has passed and I won’t be totally miserable (or getting up every 5 minutes to go to the bathroom) on the flights home. We check out at 12:00, leave the hotel at 1:15, and take our flight at 3:50. I’m ready to get going. Thank you all for following along. Don’t know if I’ll keep up the journaling after returning. Definitely gonna take a few days and just veg at home in my own bed and spend time with my friends whom I’ve missed so much. Cheers, y’all. Current Mood: ill (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 3rd, 2006
10:50 pm	many miles, many entries Friday, 10:43 am. June 30, 2006. Road 314, approximately 100 km north of Korla We’re on our way to Urumqi. We have three geological stops today with a diversion into the Turfan basin (which contains the lowest non-submerged spot in Asia). It’s a cool day, somewhat humid, with a variable overcast cloud covering that forms a nice ceiling on the landscape. Horizontal visibility is good and I can see mountains in the distance whose tops disappear into the mists. The basin just north of Korla, whose name I can’t recall at the moment, is quite green. There’s a good deal of agriculture lining the roads and extending as far as I can see to the horizon. Many stands of poplar trees border the various land plots and it’s all very peaceful and pastoral. Quite a sudden change from the dustier, drier environment of the northern Tarim. I’m starting to long for a real Western breakfast. We have hard boiled eggs at breakfast, but otherwise my palate cannot distinguish between morning and evening meals. Indeed, a number of the dishes are exactly the same. Sure, they’re quite good. Pan-fried tofu, eggplant, cucumbers, all in various types of moderately spicy sauces, noodles, and numerous steamed or fried dough dumplings (with or without fillings). It’s not quite like dim sum – many of them have no fillings at all. There are, I presume, there to allow us to soak up the sauces on our plates. It’s all quite greasy. I want bacon. Eggs over medium with toast. Ooohhh – eggs Benedict! Heck, even some cereal with milk and a glass of real orange juice. When I get back, I’m definitely going out for breakfast. I’ve finished reading Stephen J. Gould’s “The Flamingo’s Smile”, his fourth collection of essays. I’m not onto Jared Diamond’s “Why is Sex Fun – the evolution of human sexuality.” I enjoyed the former and am enjoying the latter, but I came across an interesting juxtaposition. One of Gould’s essays attempts to debunk (or at least, call into question) the ‘well known’ tale of certain spiders and praying mantis eating their mates either during or immediately after copulation. In Diamond’s book, published something like 10 years later, he uses the example of sexual cannibalism in these species explicitly and in considerable detail. Now, Jared’s an accomplished researcher, and I’m sure he’s familiar with Gould’s work. So what is going on? Gould DID say that much research was lacking and that which was available was limited and somewhat inconclusive. So perhaps in the decade since his essay and Diamond’s book the practice has actually been confirmed. Can somebody who’s closer to the Internet than I run a wikipedia on this one? Now I’d really like to know. Saturday, July 1, 2006. 7:00 pm Shinezi, Xinjiang Happy Canada Day everyone. So. We left Korla and headed back to Urumqi. It was a very long day of driving, made longer be the fact that we had a significant side-detour to the flaming mountains on the north side of the Turpan basin. We didn’t really stop any any towns, just various road-side pit stops and the field sites. The Flaming Mtns. were beautiful, and had some awesome looking formations. We arrived in Urumqi sometime around 10pm. We didn’t stay near downtown, but at a hotel far on the western edge of the city. I suppose such a thing facilitates our travel to the west the following day, but so far we haven’t stayed anywhere near the center of the cities we’ve been to. Pity, cause they’re usually the more interesting areas. Actually, looking back over my Silk Road, Xi’an to Kashgar book, I’m realizing how much of this territory we’re NOT seeing. Lots of lakes, rivers, waterfalls, city centers, bazaars, ruins, etc….remnants of the Silk Road and the present-day life of the people are passing us by. Or rather, we’re passing THEM by as we drive lickety-split from one city to another. Occasionally, we stop at a field site, far from any people, for an hour or more. But our interactions with the locals have been mostly our free evenings in Korla and Kuche. Last night in Urumqi, most people stayed in and watched the Germany vs. Argentenia World Cup game. I have a feeling we’ll be watching a lot of the game tonight, even though we’re supposed to get an early morning start to avoid the heat of the day. We made a stop along one of the anticlines on the north side of the Tien Shan today as we began skirting west along the southern end of the Junggar depression. It was quite ridiculously hot. Additional hotness was experienced by me, sitting, as I do, in the front seat of the bus. It usually gives me a nice view out of the front wind-screen. But when driving West into the setting sun, the raw wattage falling onto my body tends to overwhelm the feeble attempts of the bus’ air conditioner. I’ve got a number of thoughts, opinions, and other such ‘bloggable’ tales to tell, but none of them stand our particularly at the moment and I’m anxious to see if I can find an internet cafÈ. So, for now, signing off. Sunday, July 2, 2006 7:30 am Shihezi, Xinjiang. Yet another hotel. My recent international travels have shown me many new things. I’ve seen architecture, clothing styles, standards of living, and cuisine different from that which I was used to. One of the most striking things, though, has been the various styles of bathroom. Speaking both about WCs and the bathrooms where you shower, I’ve seen quite the gamut. Greenland had a sort of dorm-style bathroom with individual compartmental rooms for toilets and showers. These were complete rooms with locking doors and light switches. The shower rooms had a small anteroom with a sink and some clothing hooks. A step up and you’re into the shower area. A flimsy curtain separated the two, but was completely ineffectual at keeping shower water out of the anteroom. The shower also drained VERY slowly. In Copenhagen, our room at ZLEEP had a combined toilet / shower. Not only that, the sink and shower were practically the same thing. A diverter nozzle on the sink sent the water through a flexible hose to a hand-held shower head. A small curtain between the sink / mirror and the toilet prevented the latter from getting too wet. However, the wall-hanging position of the shower head pointed directly at the door to the room. I found out that if you didn’t take the head off and use it as a hand-held unit, LOTS of water got under the door and onto the all-weather carpet in the room. They should have designed a better seal. The whole ‘bathroom’ was about 10 square feet. In China, they do things a bit differently. Differently, but the same. The showers, for one, vary from regular bathtubs with regular shower heads to a small suspended water heater and hand-held shower head hovering over a fully tiled bathroom. Curtains usually exist, but they even more diaphanous than the ones in Greenland. The toilets…well…if you’re in a hotel, you get a real toilet on which you can sit down. Most anywhere else, it’s a trough (occasionally separated by low partitions) or a rectangular hole cut into the floor. In higher-class places, the trough is continually flushed with water. At most road-side pit-stops, the hole just leads to a stinking pile below. Think of national park toilets and you’ve got a much classier version of what we have here. Toilet paper is a special commodity, most hotels only give you about 1/4 of a full roll… but at least you can flush what you use. At pit-toilets, you either throw the used tissue into a waste basket or onto the pile. Either way, a significant stench can build up. Also, the hotel bathrooms here. They’re not really messy, they’re Meth-y. If you’ve seen the movie “The Salton Sea” which is about speed-freaks, or the movie “Saw”, which featured a rather hideous bathroom, you’re getting an extreme version of these. They’re grungy but not dirty. You could scrub that grout for 3 weeks and it’d still be brown and mildewy. Tiles are missing, the lighting is awful, pipes are exposed, and the ‘amenities’ of soap, shampoo, etc. are below the level of Motel 6 (that is, if Motel 6 actually gave you those things, which they don’t). Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:41 pm Anjihai Anticline, Xinjiang We’re in the middle of doing a seismic line. This involves deploying 48 geophones along a special cable, connecting them all to a computer, and firing a specially built device, called a ‘Becky gun’ into holes in the ground. The becky gun looks like a pogo-stick with a shotgun shell in the base. You bury it, cover it with a plate, then hit the top with a rubber mallet to set off the charge. Also, the whole sensing apparatus, with attendant computer, is powered by an external battery. I mentioned before the lack of battery we were experiencing; this was mitigated by the purchasing of two very large car batteries this morning before we left Shihezi. While acting to help out setting up the line, I carried the battery from the bus to the deployment site. As a result, I now have numerous small holes in my field pants and have completely destroyed my GPS division t-shirt. Battery acid leaks. Bad. Fortunately, I don’t seem to have any burns on my skin (not even my hands) and I’m incredibly thankful that this didn’t happen while I was wearing the camouflage pants I’d bought in Copenhagen. Sure, I could have Jan buy and send me another pair…but that would suck. As it is, I can keep wearing the pants for a while longer, though they’re going into the trash as soon as I get home. I only brought two pairs of pants (in an effort to back light) so I’m sort of stuck with what I’ve got. We’ll probably be here for another two hours at least. Some of us, like me, are just chilling out in the buses while the team deploys the Becky gun in 5 different holes. Once they’re done, we have to move the seismic line, then shoot the same 5 holes again. It seems to be going smoothly though. We’ve already done 4 (possibly 5) of the first 5, out of a total of 10. Once we’re done, we head to Kuytun where we spend the night. It looks like we’re already more than halfway there, so I may have a bit more time this evening to locate internet cafÈ and do some shopping. There’s discussion that we’ll be able to do both the Bogdashan mountains and the Erdo Qiao market in Urumqi on our last day in Xinjiang. But I’m thinking that at least one of those will be dropped. Probably Bogdashan. I wouldn’t mind that as much as missing the market. Surely, the mountains will be beautiful, but I’d rather have one chance to really buy some Uyghur stuff. Shihezi is a very Chinese town. I’m expecting that Kuytun will be the same. It’s quite different from the towns in the northern Tarim basin. Those were at least half Uyghur and most of the farmers I saw were obviously not ethnic Chinese. Kuche may well have been the most heavily Uyghur town we’ll be visiting. 5:49 pm So much for my estimate. We’ve just now finished the seismic line and are movin on. It took longer than expected for a number of reasons. Starting from the most recent reason and going backwards: We had to do 48 hammer-hits at each geophone along the line to get reflection seismics (as opposed to refraction lines, which you can see better with the higher energy pulse from the Betty). We involved the Chinese students and a number of them got into it. But it was still a long process to get the plate set up, signal back to the computer team to arm the system, hit the plate, and confirm the acquisition of data. It, and much of this process, would have been much easer with small radios or Motorola talkabouts. Why we didn’t bring them, I have no idea. Second reason: We got into a bit of an argument with the Chinese. It’s become obvious to us that one of the ‘professors’ on the trip, a so-called “Professor Li” is more likely a communist party bureaucrat sent to watch over this little trip of ours. The evidence is manifold. He rides up in the front car with our professor and the real Chinese geology professor, Prof. Lu. He shows absolutely NO interest in the geology or the work we’re doing. He’s fat and balding, as you’d expect an aging Chinese bureaucrat to be. He’s also the source of all our problems. By problems, I mean being told, after we’ve already deployed our equipment that we have to stop what we’re doing. It happened in the Tarim with the laser and the GPS system. And it’s sort of happened here. Appparently, they weren’t aware that doing a seismic line involved explosives. Or they consider the Betty, which as I’ve said looks like a pogo stick, is actually a gun which apparently are forbidden in Xinjiang. The charges look like shotgun shells and probably have the same explosives in them…but there’s no shot or bullets. How they can be ignorant of this, how they could care, and how it could take them an hour or more to speak up and say something is beyond the realm of logic. I grant that I may not have the full story, but I do know that this Li guy chased Nathan around as he was trying to load the Betty and kept trying to grab the shell away from him. JP is as frustrated as we all are. I mean, they applied and WERE GRANTED permission to do a seismic line in this area. What the hell? Finally, the first reason for the delays is that at first we had something like 30 people trying to help. In laying out the geophones, it no doubt made the process go quickly. But when we were trying to give hand and arm-wavy signals back and forth (remember the lack of radios) people kept getting confused. Plus, there’s only so many signals you can make with your arms over long distances. Raise one, raise two, make a hgh x, make a low x. That’s about it…and we didn’t even use all of those. So. We’re continuing along this side road on our way to what we’ve been promised is a “Spectacular” outcrop. We shall see. AT least the clouds came in and the afternoon was pleasantly cool. The acid holes in my pants are getting bigger. Sunday, July 2, 2006 11:30 pm Hotel in Kuytun, Xinjiang A word about dishes and hotels. We’ve experienced approximately 10 Chinese dinners since being here. Each one has been slightly different. Different dishes have been served which range from a tomato / scrambled egg concoction to whole fishes to soups with inedible bits of bony meat to delicious spiced meats. Yesterday’s meal in Shihezi and the night before in Urumqi were, by common consensus, the best we’ve yet had. The worst, in my opinion, has been the formal banquet with the Tarim oil company. Too many obscure things which I suppose are delicacies. Still, I did get to try the ‘thousand year old’ eggs – an oddly textured pickled egg with a yellow yolk and a transparent, gelatinous, brownish albumen. All of these dinners except a very few were served ‘family style’. Eight or ten people sit at a round table with a large revolving glass plate. Dishes are placed on that and you take what you want to your own small plate with chopsticks or a small Asian spoon as it comes around to you. Some dinners, they’ve brought out one dish at a time, slowly, so each dish gets decimated (or left untouched, depending on its suitability to the American palate) before the next one arrives. Another way is to have many dishes brought out in rapid succession. Tonight, we experienced the extreme version of the latter style. Not an excessive number of dishes in total, mind you, but way more plates than the area of the table could handle. They were served on round plates, very large soup bowls, shallow glass (think pie-pan) vessels, and a long, elliptical one with a tail for the whole fish. Wouldn’t be so bad, but they kept moving things around ineffectually trying to get the damn plates to fit. Ultimately, they ended up stacking several at the intersection of three other plates. The platter of watermelon sat on top of the soup until we removed all the mellon wedges and they took the plate away. I think that either the wait staff at these hotels should move a bit more slowly in getting the food to us (I mean, we’ve spent our longest day in the field and were ravenous – we were eating as fast as we could and it STILL wasn’t fast enough) or they should study the matter in careful detail and figure out the most efficient delivery and packing arrangements for the dishes they’re serving. That, or they should invest in hexagonal plates. Now, onto the hotels. All of the hotels we have stayed at have a number of idiosyncratic features in common. I’ve already mentioned the whispy shower curtains and the various styles of bathroom. Other commonalities include: Wall-mounted AC unit. Not typical of the ones found in America – these are 1 x 3 foot rectangles about 6” deep mounted high on the wall, operated by remote control (which has anywhere from 4 to 18 buttons, all written in Chinese). Night stand between twin beds with master control switches. These include dimmer knobs for the sconces above each bed, and such things as “room light”, “corridor light”, “tv”, “floor light”, “desk light”, and (my favorite) “do not”. We’ve figured out that this activates some sort of “do not disturb” signal. But I prefer to think of it as the Douglas Adams variety: “Do not push this button.” A sign lights up saying, “Do not push this button again.” Whee. A wall-mounted slot in the hallway just inside the door which says, “Insert Key for Power.” There’s a small switch inside that activates power to the whole rest of the room. You can’t get any of the other lights or the television to work unless you insert your key here. Actually, any plastic card will do, and I’ve used my Caltech ID a number of times when I go out (‘cause I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that AC unit go off.) Hot water boiling pot. Good for boiling tapwater if you didn’t bring bottled water to drink in the middle of the night. Also good for making tea. But some of them appear to not have been used or cleaned in years and would probably make you worse off than if you just drank the tap water straight. Of special interest is that the last few hotels we’ve stayed at have had these features in common: 1) pretty red-shaded lights, 2) physically attractive, young Asian women wandering the halls, and 3) strange, unsolicited phone calls at various hours of the evening. We’re convinced we’re staying at semi-brothels. Or at least hotels with a very friendly staff. Brian has had several come to the door when I’ve been out asking him, “Ni hau ni hau ma?” Which apparently means, “Hello. Do you want?” The phone calls are similar. I’ve taken to answering all such phone calls with, “Penguin?” (an inside joke amongst us Xinjiang trippers that I’ll share with you at a later date.) Brian answered the last call to our room this evening with, “WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?!?“ [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<slam!>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] Friday, 10:43 am. June 30, 2006. Road 314, approximately 100 km north of Korla We’re on our way to Urumqi. We have three geological stops today with a diversion into the Turfan basin (which contains the lowest non-submerged spot in Asia). It’s a cool day, somewhat humid, with a variable overcast cloud covering that forms a nice ceiling on the landscape. Horizontal visibility is good and I can see mountains in the distance whose tops disappear into the mists. The basin just north of Korla, whose name I can’t recall at the moment, is quite green. There’s a good deal of agriculture lining the roads and extending as far as I can see to the horizon. Many stands of poplar trees border the various land plots and it’s all very peaceful and pastoral. Quite a sudden change from the dustier, drier environment of the northern Tarim. I’m starting to long for a real Western breakfast. We have hard boiled eggs at breakfast, but otherwise my palate cannot distinguish between morning and evening meals. Indeed, a number of the dishes are exactly the same. Sure, they’re quite good. Pan-fried tofu, eggplant, cucumbers, all in various types of moderately spicy sauces, noodles, and numerous steamed or fried dough dumplings (with or without fillings). It’s not quite like dim sum – many of them have no fillings at all. There are, I presume, there to allow us to soak up the sauces on our plates. It’s all quite greasy. I want bacon. Eggs over medium with toast. Ooohhh – eggs Benedict! Heck, even some cereal with milk and a glass of real orange juice. When I get back, I’m definitely going out for breakfast. I’ve finished reading Stephen J. Gould’s “The Flamingo’s Smile”, his fourth collection of essays. I’m not onto Jared Diamond’s “Why is Sex Fun – the evolution of human sexuality.” I enjoyed the former and am enjoying the latter, but I came across an interesting juxtaposition. One of Gould’s essays attempts to debunk (or at least, call into question) the ‘well known’ tale of certain spiders and praying mantis eating their mates either during or immediately after copulation. In Diamond’s book, published something like 10 years later, he uses the example of sexual cannibalism in these species explicitly and in considerable detail. Now, Jared’s an accomplished researcher, and I’m sure he’s familiar with Gould’s work. So what is going on? Gould DID say that much research was lacking and that which was available was limited and somewhat inconclusive. So perhaps in the decade since his essay and Diamond’s book the practice has actually been confirmed. Can somebody who’s closer to the Internet than I run a wikipedia on this one? Now I’d really like to know. Saturday, July 1, 2006. 7:00 pm Shinezi, Xinjiang Happy Canada Day everyone. So. We left Korla and headed back to Urumqi. It was a very long day of driving, made longer be the fact that we had a significant side-detour to the flaming mountains on the north side of the Turpan basin. We didn’t really stop any any towns, just various road-side pit stops and the field sites. The Flaming Mtns. were beautiful, and had some awesome looking formations. We arrived in Urumqi sometime around 10pm. We didn’t stay near downtown, but at a hotel far on the western edge of the city. I suppose such a thing facilitates our travel to the west the following day, but so far we haven’t stayed anywhere near the center of the cities we’ve been to. Pity, cause they’re usually the more interesting areas. Actually, looking back over my Silk Road, Xi’an to Kashgar book, I’m realizing how much of this territory we’re NOT seeing. Lots of lakes, rivers, waterfalls, city centers, bazaars, ruins, etc….remnants of the Silk Road and the present-day life of the people are passing us by. Or rather, we’re passing THEM by as we drive lickety-split from one city to another. Occasionally, we stop at a field site, far from any people, for an hour or more. But our interactions with the locals have been mostly our free evenings in Korla and Kuche. Last night in Urumqi, most people stayed in and watched the Germany vs. Argentenia World Cup game. I have a feeling we’ll be watching a lot of the game tonight, even though we’re supposed to get an early morning start to avoid the heat of the day. We made a stop along one of the anticlines on the north side of the Tien Shan today as we began skirting west along the southern end of the Junggar depression. It was quite ridiculously hot. Additional hotness was experienced by me, sitting, as I do, in the front seat of the bus. It usually gives me a nice view out of the front wind-screen. But when driving West into the setting sun, the raw wattage falling onto my body tends to overwhelm the feeble attempts of the bus’ air conditioner. I’ve got a number of thoughts, opinions, and other such ‘bloggable’ tales to tell, but none of them stand our particularly at the moment and I’m anxious to see if I can find an internet cafÈ. So, for now, signing off. Sunday, July 2, 2006 7:30 am Shihezi, Xinjiang. Yet another hotel. My recent international travels have shown me many new things. I’ve seen architecture, clothing styles, standards of living, and cuisine different from that which I was used to. One of the most striking things, though, has been the various styles of bathroom. Speaking both about WCs and the bathrooms where you shower, I’ve seen quite the gamut. Greenland had a sort of dorm-style bathroom with individual compartmental rooms for toilets and showers. These were complete rooms with locking doors and light switches. The shower rooms had a small anteroom with a sink and some clothing hooks. A step up and you’re into the shower area. A flimsy curtain separated the two, but was completely ineffectual at keeping shower water out of the anteroom. The shower also drained VERY slowly. In Copenhagen, our room at ZLEEP had a combined toilet / shower. Not only that, the sink and shower were practically the same thing. A diverter nozzle on the sink sent the water through a flexible hose to a hand-held shower head. A small curtain between the sink / mirror and the toilet prevented the latter from getting too wet. However, the wall-hanging position of the shower head pointed directly at the door to the room. I found out that if you didn’t take the head off and use it as a hand-held unit, LOTS of water got under the door and onto the all-weather carpet in the room. They should have designed a better seal. The whole ‘bathroom’ was about 10 square feet. In China, they do things a bit differently. Differently, but the same. The showers, for one, vary from regular bathtubs with regular shower heads to a small suspended water heater and hand-held shower head hovering over a fully tiled bathroom. Curtains usually exist, but they even more diaphanous than the ones in Greenland. The toilets…well…if you’re in a hotel, you get a real toilet on which you can sit down. Most anywhere else, it’s a trough (occasionally separated by low partitions) or a rectangular hole cut into the floor. In higher-class places, the trough is continually flushed with water. At most road-side pit-stops, the hole just leads to a stinking pile below. Think of national park toilets and you’ve got a much classier version of what we have here. Toilet paper is a special commodity, most hotels only give you about 1/4 of a full roll… but at least you can flush what you use. At pit-toilets, you either throw the used tissue into a waste basket or onto the pile. Either way, a significant stench can build up. Also, the hotel bathrooms here. They’re not really messy, they’re Meth-y. If you’ve seen the movie “The Salton Sea” which is about speed-freaks, or the movie “Saw”, which featured a rather hideous bathroom, you’re getting an extreme version of these. They’re grungy but not dirty. You could scrub that grout for 3 weeks and it’d still be brown and mildewy. Tiles are missing, the lighting is awful, pipes are exposed, and the ‘amenities’ of soap, shampoo, etc. are below the level of Motel 6 (that is, if Motel 6 actually gave you those things, which they don’t). Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:41 pm Anjihai Anticline, Xinjiang We’re in the middle of doing a seismic line. This involves deploying 48 geophones along a special cable, connecting them all to a computer, and firing a specially built device, called a ‘Becky gun’ into holes in the ground. The becky gun looks like a pogo-stick with a shotgun shell in the base. You bury it, cover it with a plate, then hit the top with a rubber mallet to set off the charge. Also, the whole sensing apparatus, with attendant computer, is powered by an external battery. I mentioned before the lack of battery we were experiencing; this was mitigated by the purchasing of two very large car batteries this morning before we left Shihezi. While acting to help out setting up the line, I carried the battery from the bus to the deployment site. As a result, I now have numerous small holes in my field pants and have completely destroyed my GPS division t-shirt. Battery acid leaks. Bad. Fortunately, I don’t seem to have any burns on my skin (not even my hands) and I’m incredibly thankful that this didn’t happen while I was wearing the camouflage pants I’d bought in Copenhagen. Sure, I could have Jan buy and send me another pair…but that would suck. As it is, I can keep wearing the pants for a while longer, though they’re going into the trash as soon as I get home. I only brought two pairs of pants (in an effort to back light) so I’m sort of stuck with what I’ve got. We’ll probably be here for another two hours at least. Some of us, like me, are just chilling out in the buses while the team deploys the Becky gun in 5 different holes. Once they’re done, we have to move the seismic line, then shoot the same 5 holes again. It seems to be going smoothly though. We’ve already done 4 (possibly 5) of the first 5, out of a total of 10. Once we’re done, we head to Kuytun where we spend the night. It looks like we’re already more than halfway there, so I may have a bit more time this evening to locate internet cafÈ and do some shopping. There’s discussion that we’ll be able to do both the Bogdashan mountains and the Erdo Qiao market in Urumqi on our last day in Xinjiang. But I’m thinking that at least one of those will be dropped. Probably Bogdashan. I wouldn’t mind that as much as missing the market. Surely, the mountains will be beautiful, but I’d rather have one chance to really buy some Uyghur stuff. Shihezi is a very Chinese town. I’m expecting that Kuytun will be the same. It’s quite different from the towns in the northern Tarim basin. Those were at least half Uyghur and most of the farmers I saw were obviously not ethnic Chinese. Kuche may well have been the most heavily Uyghur town we’ll be visiting. 5:49 pm So much for my estimate. We’ve just now finished the seismic line and are movin on. It took longer than expected for a number of reasons. Starting from the most recent reason and going backwards: We had to do 48 hammer-hits at each geophone along the line to get reflection seismics (as opposed to refraction lines, which you can see better with the higher energy pulse from the Betty). We involved the Chinese students and a number of them got into it. But it was still a long process to get the plate set up, signal back to the computer team to arm the system, hit the plate, and confirm the acquisition of data. It, and much of this process, would have been much easer with small radios or Motorola talkabouts. Why we didn’t bring them, I have no idea. Second reason: We got into a bit of an argument with the Chinese. It’s become obvious to us that one of the ‘professors’ on the trip, a so-called “Professor Li” is more likely a communist party bureaucrat sent to watch over this little trip of ours. The evidence is manifold. He rides up in the front car with our professor and the real Chinese geology professor, Prof. Lu. He shows absolutely NO interest in the geology or the work we’re doing. He’s fat and balding, as you’d expect an aging Chinese bureaucrat to be. He’s also the source of all our problems. By problems, I mean being told, after we’ve already deployed our equipment that we have to stop what we’re doing. It happened in the Tarim with the laser and the GPS system. And it’s sort of happened here. Appparently, they weren’t aware that doing a seismic line involved explosives. Or they consider the Betty, which as I’ve said looks like a pogo stick, is actually a gun which apparently are forbidden in Xinjiang. The charges look like shotgun shells and probably have the same explosives in them…but there’s no shot or bullets. How they can be ignorant of this, how they could care, and how it could take them an hour or more to speak up and say something is beyond the realm of logic. I grant that I may not have the full story, but I do know that this Li guy chased Nathan around as he was trying to load the Betty and kept trying to grab the shell away from him. JP is as frustrated as we all are. I mean, they applied and WERE GRANTED permission to do a seismic line in this area. What the hell? Finally, the first reason for the delays is that at first we had something like 30 people trying to help. In laying out the geophones, it no doubt made the process go quickly. But when we were trying to give hand and arm-wavy signals back and forth (remember the lack of radios) people kept getting confused. Plus, there’s only so many signals you can make with your arms over long distances. Raise one, raise two, make a hgh x, make a low x. That’s about it…and we didn’t even use all of those. So. We’re continuing along this side road on our way to what we’ve been promised is a “Spectacular” outcrop. We shall see. AT least the clouds came in and the afternoon was pleasantly cool. The acid holes in my pants are getting bigger. Sunday, July 2, 2006 11:30 pm Hotel in Kuytun, Xinjiang A word about dishes and hotels. We’ve experienced approximately 10 Chinese dinners since being here. Each one has been slightly different. Different dishes have been served which range from a tomato / scrambled egg concoction to whole fishes to soups with inedible bits of bony meat to delicious spiced meats. Yesterday’s meal in Shihezi and the night before in Urumqi were, by common consensus, the best we’ve yet had. The worst, in my opinion, has been the formal banquet with the Tarim oil company. Too many obscure things which I suppose are delicacies. Still, I did get to try the ‘thousand year old’ eggs – an oddly textured pickled egg with a yellow yolk and a transparent, gelatinous, brownish albumen. All of these dinners except a very few were served ‘family style’. Eight or ten people sit at a round table with a large revolving glass plate. Dishes are placed on that and you take what you want to your own small plate with chopsticks or a small Asian spoon as it comes around to you. Some dinners, they’ve brought out one dish at a time, slowly, so each dish gets decimated (or left untouched, depending on its suitability to the American palate) before the next one arrives. Another way is to have many dishes brought out in rapid succession. Tonight, we experienced the extreme version of the latter style. Not an excessive number of dishes in total, mind you, but way more plates than the area of the table could handle. They were served on round plates, very large soup bowls, shallow glass (think pie-pan) vessels, and a long, elliptical one with a tail for the whole fish. Wouldn’t be so bad, but they kept moving things around ineffectually trying to get the damn plates to fit. Ultimately, they ended up stacking several at the intersection of three other plates. The platter of watermelon sat on top of the soup until we removed all the mellon wedges and they took the plate away. I think that either the wait staff at these hotels should move a bit more slowly in getting the food to us (I mean, we’ve spent our longest day in the field and were ravenous – we were eating as fast as we could and it STILL wasn’t fast enough) or they should study the matter in careful detail and figure out the most efficient delivery and packing arrangements for the dishes they’re serving. That, or they should invest in hexagonal plates. Now, onto the hotels. All of the hotels we have stayed at have a number of idiosyncratic features in common. I’ve already mentioned the whispy shower curtains and the various styles of bathroom. Other commonalities include: Wall-mounted AC unit. Not typical of the ones found in America – these are 1 x 3 foot rectangles about 6” deep mounted high on the wall, operated by remote control (which has anywhere from 4 to 18 buttons, all written in Chinese). Night stand between twin beds with master control switches. These include dimmer knobs for the sconces above each bed, and such things as “room light”, “corridor light”, “tv”, “floor light”, “desk light”, and (my favorite) “do not”. We’ve figured out that this activates some sort of “do not disturb” signal. But I prefer to think of it as the Douglas Adams variety: “Do not push this button.” <you push it> A sign lights up saying, “Do not push this button again.” Whee. A wall-mounted slot in the hallway just inside the door which says, “Insert Key for Power.” There’s a small switch inside that activates power to the whole rest of the room. You can’t get any of the other lights or the television to work unless you insert your key here. Actually, any plastic card will do, and I’ve used my Caltech ID a number of times when I go out (‘cause I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that AC unit go off.) Hot water boiling pot. Good for boiling tapwater if you didn’t bring bottled water to drink in the middle of the night. Also good for making tea. But some of them appear to not have been used or cleaned in years and would probably make you worse off than if you just drank the tap water straight. Of special interest is that the last few hotels we’ve stayed at have had these features in common: 1) pretty red-shaded lights, 2) physically attractive, young Asian women wandering the halls, and 3) strange, unsolicited phone calls at various hours of the evening. We’re convinced we’re staying at semi-brothels. Or at least hotels with a very friendly staff. Brian has had several come to the door when I’ve been out asking him, “Ni hau ni hau ma?” Which apparently means, “Hello. Do you want?” The phone calls are similar. I’ve taken to answering all such phone calls with, “Penguin?” (an inside joke amongst us Xinjiang trippers that I’ll share with you at a later date.) Brian answered the last call to our room this evening with, “WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?!?“ <SLAM!> They’ve stopped calling. Monday, July 3, 2006 3:09 pm Duhanzi Anticline, near Kuytun, Xinjiang. This is our last official geologic stop of the trip. We’re spending about 4 hours here and various groups have gone off in different directions to do different kinds of measurements and sample collecting. But those groups still didn’t use all the people here, so a number of us, myself included, were left to go explore the landscape on our own. Again, we’re blessed with low clouds which leave the mountains on the horizon clear, but block out most of the blistering sunlight. Sunburns are still a problem, though. I daresay this is the most beautiful spot we’ve yet been to. Well, the spot where we’ve stopped for 4 hours is nice, but earlier we had a stop on a beautifully sloping, grassy plain in a gap in the anticline which made a wonderful frame for the southern mountains in the background. This is probably the closest and clearest we’ve been able to see the main part of the Tien Shan. The peaks are lightly snow capped, the clouds are hanging low, and there was a wonderful cool breeze in the morning / noon time. I walked about halfway up the alluvial fan to our west and went to an old shepherds hut and corral. There was a low stone wall enclosing about half an acre and a steeply sloping hill above. There was no one there – apparently this isn’t the time of year they use this pasture. We’re staying tonight in Kuytun. Then most of us get up wicked early and high-tail it to Urumqi. We’re actually planning to bypass Urumqi and head to a lake up in the Bogda mountains east of the city. Once that’s done, we’ll come back down, check into our hotel, and then head to the bazaar. We’ve been promised a trip to the Uyghur bazaar in town before we leave. I surely hope we get to do it. I’ve figured out the souvenirs I want to buy. Now I just have to be given the chance to do so. One night in Urumqi (“… and the world’s your oyster.”) and then we fly to Beijing. We then have an entire free day in Beijing. Not sure how we’re gonna spend that time, but there’s been some talk of going to the Great Wall. Then we take off the following day for Seoul and from there to Los Angeles and home sweet home. We’re scheduled to arrive at LAX at 3:30 pm on Friday, July 6th (20 minutes BEFORE we leave Seoul!….. yay international date line!) I belive David’s coming to the airport to pick me up. I’ll be arriving at the international arrival’s terminal. Asiana Airlines, flight 204. Cheers. Current Mood: satiated (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 1st, 2006
11:02 pm	here and not here. The first time i have unlimited tiem to spend in a damn internet cafe here and I can't get my freaking USB jump drive to work. SO I can't upload the travellogs I've composed. And I can't download any porn to take back to my laptop. dammit. We've got an early start tomorrow, so I'm making this quick. talk again when I'm in Kunlun. Current Mood: frustrated (Comment on this)
Friday, June 30th, 2006
8:35 am	in Korla Friday, June 30th , 2006, 12:05 am Korla, Xinjiang Yesterday was quite a nice ride up and down the Kuche river. We saw a great deal of the geologic cross-section. We traversed stratigraphy from the Paleozoic all the way up to the Quaternary. That’s over 500 million years worth of rocks. Not all a continuous section, mind you, but it was impressive nonetheless. In particular, various sections of the Triassic and Jurassic rocks were these impressively tilted beds of red sandstone that weathered into some fantastic shapes. One section was even a tourist stop called the Grand Canyon of the Tien Shan. Unfortunately, we only used this as a restroom stop and didn’t do any hiking up the 3.2 km stretch of canyon. If ever I were to come back here, though, I would certainly like to. I got a great photograph of the ‘engrish’ description sign for the place. Among its more impressive slips were the descriptions of ‘cliffs overhanging emptily’ and (get this) the statement that the site was located as such-and-such degrees North latitude and such-and-such ‘degrees of East foot-path’. Yes, you read right. The Chinese word for longitude was translated directly as ‘foot-path’. Whee, fun! We did not, in fact, end up stopping at any Uyghur villiages. They’re just simple villages, not set up for any kind of tourism. The biggest amount of free trading goes on at the bazaar in Kuche itself. We, a group of 20 odd Americans and 20 more Chinese students would have totally overwhelmed them. And there’s not much we could have bought from them except fruit. All parts of the drive provided excellent scenery. The last bit driving along the Kuche river through the Quilitake anticline was particularly nice, though the road was very narrow and my confidence in our driver not very substantial given his record so far. But we made it through without incident. Our last stop was some Buddhist ruins just on the south side of the anticline. Not much to see, but they did have tourist trinkets to sell. I think a few of the girls bought some jewelry. Funny thing happened while we were there. To understand, you need appropriate backstory. Since we’ve arrived, we’ve been at the essential beck-and-call of our Chinese hosts. They’ve been quite gracefull and haven’t been obtrusive in most ways. But one of the guys assisting the professor has indirectly incurred the wrath of us all. This guy has a small yellow and purple megaphone. It’s a tiny little thing; perhaps better called a ‘kilo-phone’. Anyhow, this device is used on occasion to amplify the voice of the speaker at various stops, though usually it’s not helping very much in those cases. But the designers of this little trinket designed into it a most insidious feature. Pressing a particular button will cause it to play, at quite substantial volume, the love song from some popular Chinese movie…in MIDI. I can’t do it justice with any text, but trust me, it’s hellacious. And this guy, this ‘assistant’ uses it whenever we’re supposed to get back on the buses. I’ll admit, that when we’re widely dispersed it’s a great tool for getting us back together. But he uses it when a simply stated, “Time to go,” in a moderately authoritative tone would work just as well. The tune is distinctive, and cuts through intervening noise and the nerve cells of your ears with equal efficacy. Pavlovian response guaranteed, or your money back. And boy have we ever been conditioned. Today, he didn’t even have to go through the whole cycle of the song (about 20 second worth) to get his point across. A mere half-second press on the button, enough to let us hear the first note, and we simultaneously groan, hold our ears, and run for the bus. We’re almost to the point of ignoring it completely, adaptation coming quickly on the heels of maximum annoyance. But the ‘funny thing’ which I alluded to a few paragraphs back was that while we were at the Buddhist tourist trap (not, as the dangling participle might indicate, a trap for Buddhist tourists) one of our students, Steve, started whistling the ‘recall tune’ in quite perfect pitch… and got exactly the response he wanted. People started moving towards the buses. Amazing. I need to get a mp3 file of this and blast it though the halls of GPS. I’d get lynched for sure. Last night after arriving back at the hotel and grabbing a shower a bunch of us went off do do our own thing. For the first time in the trip, there was no scheduled dinner, so we were truly on our own. A number of folk walked all the way to the Kuche Old City, which is at least a 2 hour walk from our hotel. We drove through it briefly as we returned to Kuche at the end of the day, and the bazaar looked interesting; but I later learned that in the later evening it was less active, had only a few vendors, and all the food to be had was on the street (i.e. no ‘restaurants’ as such). Rather than go that route, JP, myself, and a number of other students went to a sit-down Uyghur restaurant that the Chinese students had located. We had an excellent meal. In addition to two kinds of kebabs (both with lamb, but one had meat on the bone, and the other was just meat), there were bowls of noodles with lamb or beef, nan bread, a sour yoghurt, and a fantastic dish of candied, cooked, dried fruits like figs, grapes, apricots, and other stone fruit, as well as walnuts, all in a moderately thin, sweet syrup. Delicious. Certainly the best sweet food I’ve had here, even though it wasn’t desert. Most of the Chinese meals we’ve had have had no sweet offerings at the end at all. Definitely no fortune cookies. Sleep, then off again in the morning, heading back to Korla. Amazingly enough, we didn’t take any wrong turns on the way out of town (a running feature of our field days, thus far). Our first and only substantial geologic stop was at an exposure of the Yakeng anticline, a newly forming structure at the southernmost stretch of the range. It’s actively deforming, and so holds clues to the physical mechanisms underlying the shortening of the Tien Shan foreland basins. In addition to just telling us about this, we were going to actually use some of the equipment we’ve been lugging around for a week and make some geological measurements. First, we were going to set up a laser gun to measure the precise curvature and dip of the beds in the exposure. To the best of my knowledge, this went well. The second activity was to set up the GPS receiver base station and get hyper-accurate (i.e. down to the millimeter) recordings of the outcrop shape. This was a total SNAFU. No discrespect intended to anyone involved, but it was an amazing display of unfamiliarity with the equipment and a striking lack of preparedness. Putting the whole thing up should have taken 10 minutes. I think it’s a pretty good benchmark that when I, a total novice at this technique, was able to provide as much assistance in figuring out how to put it together as the individuals who had been trained on it beforehand. I admittedly have a rather strong knack for intuitive understanding of how things fit together, but when most of the boggle for the team comes from figuring out which cable goes into which hole, I think it’s a pretty level playing field. Several times during the assembly, it was realized (note that clever use of a non-specific grammatical construction in the fine tradition of Ronald Regan…”Mistakes were made.”) that various critical parts, like the battery, had been left back at the trucks and needed to be fetched out over several hundred meters of increasingly hot desert pavement. When it was all put together, we found that we didn’t have ENOUGH battery power. Apparently, at all other field deployments of this stuff, a vehicle had been near enough that the 12V car battery could be extricated from the vehicle and used to give the amplifier extra oomph. No such luck here. We sure as hell didn’t pack one from the US and all the vehicles were waaaaaay far away. To prevent a long story from getting longer, the icing on the whole thing was that after fiddling with this thing for nearly two hours we were informed by the Chinese that the appropriate permissions for the use of either the laser gun or the GPS had not been granted or received (or both) and that we had to stop. Well, we got some data out of the whole thing and hopefully it will be enough (and will be politically insensitive enough for someone to publish it). So. Filed stop done. Back on the buses, head for Korla. Make one stop on the way at a road-side fruit stand (actually an agglomeration of several) where dried and fresh apricots, dried plums and dates, and some other fruits were procured for the rest of the ride. It’s a good thing too. I’m getting tired of the same old lunch every day. Lunch menu consists of: 1-2 large pieces of some kind of sweet cake, muffin, or ‘danish’. One day, I had something indistinguishable from pound cake. A nice treat, but not, to my mind or body, a substitute for real bread. 1-2 ripe tomatoes. Yummy, but without salt or pepper or a proper way to slice and serve, they’re both a bit messy and a bit monotonous. 1 hard-boiled egg, sans salt. See above description for tomatoes. 1 packet of salty, pickled cabbage OR 1 Capri-Sun style poke-with-straw pouch of warm milk. 1 long, unpeeled Chinese cucumber. 1-2 meat sticks. These come in two flavors: ‘Vaguely Chicken’ and ‘Barely Beef’. They are not, in fact, meat sticks at all. They’re mostly moist starch, with possibly a little fat, that at some point in their careers have sat atop another box containing boulion cubes and have thereby acquired their subtle ‘meaty’ flavor. I stopped eating them after the third day. 1-2 peaches. Yum. (though not as ‘yum’ as the flat, white peaches that Liz discovered). 1 packet of wet-nap handi-wipes. While not actually very nutritious or even that flavorful, they’re quite possibly the best part of the whole lunch experience: a brief glimpse of the ecstasy that awaits in the form of a low-pressure, drippy shower at the next hotel. Fast-forward. We’re back at the hotel in Korla we stayed at a few days ago. After dinner, shower, and a brief respite, a group gathers downstairs to go exploring. After we meet up with a random bloke from Michigan (and his buddy from Ireland) who were in Korla teaching English, I break away from the group and attempt to find an internet café. Ultimately, I don’t succeed. But I do take a nice walk around a very large block of the city, eventually ending up on the river-front walk where a great many people are enjoying the evening air. It’s quite a beautiful place, and a beautiful time of day…le bleu heur (apologies for the mangled French spelling). I get lots of looks, no biggie. I walked past a shop selling calligraphy scrolls. Didn’t buy any, but I stopped and admired for a bit. The far bank of the river (in which some people were swimming) has an elaborate bas-relief of various scenes, and occasionally there were large bronze sculptures with bowls of fire. That, the impressive skyline (for a city so far from most anything else), and the lively nature of the whole place gave me the impression that I wouldn’t mind spending more time here – a week or a month. Kuche, on the other hand, was like an expanded and overpopulated Baker, California: Hot, dusty, flat, and boring. I’m liking Korla better. Too bad we’re only here one night. After walking most of the way along the river back to the street on which our hotel was situated I came across a public concert of sorts. Various dance troups and singers were performing. I arrived just at the end of a Uyghur dance and unfortunately didn’t get to see much of it. There were no other Uyghur events – just Chinese dancers and singers. Man, was this ever amateur night. The dancers were poorly choreographed (we did better in high school) and the singers were quite impressively bad. Sure, I’m no expert on Eastern music, but these people were not even singing at a semi-professional level. It was like community theater. Some of the dances were comically bad. Two in particular stand out. The backdrop of the stage was red with the right side bearing some white Chinese characters. The left side was dominated by a giant golden hammer and sickle. I’m already overwhelmed by the socialist sentiments wafting over the audience. It’s really brought forth in one of the dance numbers, though, when 15 women in red work boots, white pants with silver lame stripes down the outer legs, yellow shirts and bright yellow hard-hats come out and do a dance. Rosie the Riveter, meet Yin Wing the Oil Worker. What made it even better was that one of the women had her whole costume but had forgotten her hard-hat. Doh! The second noteworthy dance was the ‘finale’. This had a cast of about 10 men and 10 women in quasi-traditional costumes, each with a double-sided, double-tapered drum strapped around their neck and resting on their chests. Think the human version of a St. Bernard, but with drums instead of whiskey casks and you get the picture. But instead of actually playing anything on those drums, they all just pranced around and pantomimed as if they were playing things. The recorded soundtrack didn’t even feature drums prominently. To add to the effect, each of the guys onstage was a slightly different size – thin and wiry to tall and chubby. But they all had on the SAME SIZE COSTUME! Got to see a lot more pale Chinese belly than I really wanted to at that point in my evening’s drinking. The end of the number featured a main dancer running up a small human staircase of his troupe-mates while pulling a large sheet of imperial yellow silk across the stage. The expressions on the individual ‘stairs’ faces was priceless. “OOOFH!”, “UUUNGHH!”, and, “OH MY GOD!! MY SPINE!” about cover it. Back to the hotel and ready to bed down. One final thing deserves mention. I bought my first souvenir today. Actually, it’s two copies of the same thing, one for me and one for my friend David. He wanted a cool shirt. I found a cool shirt. Picture a black polo shirt with prominent lettering in a somewhat art-nouveaux / haphazard way down the left front lapel. Sounds like the sort of thing you could easily pick up at Macys or Target. But, it’s written in the most spectacular variant of “Engrish” I’ve ever seen. Rather than being random English words thrown together in an ungrammatical way, it’s random English LETTERS thrown together in what could have possibly been real words, but aren’t. I’ll conclude this ridiculously long entry with some examples from the shirt. Thoes of you who played the Davinci Code challenge on Google can try to decipher these. Share and Enjoy. NOFAWO. AIE. WYAN. ITUDCYGFS. EIYA-IE4MCN I’UT WLITASD. I’UT ITAE I’UT DU IEYA UIYXJKGSM DUTA. DLLBE. IN AINEIYA. ILYD. TAICIEYACDT. Current Mood: rushed (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
8:40 am	halfway through china This is the first chance I've had to connect to the internet. I can't reach g-mail, but I can post my accumulated travellogs here. So excuse the LOOOOOOOOng post, read, and enjoy. China Travellog Entry 1 Thursday, June 22, 2006 10:49pm Los Angeles International Airport. International Terminal. Gate 105 So begins the China trip. It’s less than a week since I arrived home from Greenland and I’m already off again. It’s been a whirlwind week of making lists, running errands, shopping, packing, and taking care of various administrative rabbledash. But it has been a manageable set of tasks and on the whole this week has been rather rejuvenating. I owe this last to my wonderful friends who have kept me company 95% of the time I’ve had at home. David picked me up from the airport and made my first day at home most enjoyable. Then we had a crowd (David, Jasun, Carlo, Mike) over to my house for dinner the following night. Incidentally, it was at around 11pm that evening that my checked baggage that Continental had lost finally made it to my home…approximately 30 hours after I’d landed at LAX from Copenhagen / Newark. I then spent the next few days running around with Mike, having a great time and taking care of essential errands (Chinese Visa being the most important). Then yesterday, Thomas came up, we three went over to David’s for a fantastic dinner and a bit of televised hilarity. Finally, today, I bade farewell to Mike, David came over, we took Thomas to the train station, and David dropped me off at Caltech for my ride to the airport this evening. I just can’t tell you guys how wonderful you all are and how great you made this past week. I feel totally recharged and ready for the trip around the world. So, a few remarks. The Chinese Consulate for visas and passports was amazingly efficient. It may have something to do with my going there at 9 am on a Monday and again at 12 pm on a Tuesday. Still, I was impressed. It took 5 minutes in line to get my passport submitted for visa approval. Coming back the following day, I presented my receipt after only 2 minutes in a different line, pay my $70 with a credit card, and voila! There’s my passport, with my very own Chinese Tourist Visa. Wow. They do bureaucracy well. An interesting linguistic note. According to the Consulate website, they are at 500 Chateau Pl. in Los Angeles. But when actually following the directions and getting to the appropriate street, you’re presented with a street sign (stardard, white on vert City of Los Angeles street sinage) which says “Shatto Pl”. Huh.. I wonder which is ‘correct’ according to the city…and which version came first. So, we’re now at the airport waiting for our flight. We got here around 9pm and made it through everything and to the gate by about 10:20pm. This AMAZES me. Not only because I’ve done international travel before and realize what a hassle it can be… But also because the baggage check in process was a total CLUSTERF*CK! We were all urged to try to pack light and only take 1 checked bag so that we could fill up our extra checked-baggage slot with the scientific equipment we’re taking to the Tien Shan. But at no point did someone take charge and say, “You, you’re responsible for this yellow plastic case. And you, you must make sure this tripod get’s checked.” No – we sort of nervously divided them all up for the security check…then people lost track or ignored the principle of multiple check-ins and we had to do the whole process again an the actual baggage check.. And I use the term ‘process’ loosly. It eventually ended up that four of us (out of something like 20) were standing there with our personal bags, one or two pieces of scientific equipment that we’d tagged as ours, and a sea of bags. We could ASSUME that all the other pieces of equipment had been checked. But they don’t all have big “CALTECH” stickers on them, a uniform color, or other means of unique group identification. Lacking that, it would have been nice to have someone who was familiar with all of the equipment to be able to say, “Okay – I don’t see any of our equipment here. We’re good. Head to the gate.” But so far as I could tell, the four of us left there were just…well…kinda guessin’. Ah well – if we’ve missed something, we’ll do without. For the moment, I’m hangin’ here. I’ve changed my currency (exchanging both US dollars and leftover Danish Krone for Chinese Yuan), have my bottle of water and energy bars. My laptop is plugged into a wall socket and I’m even able to sit in a comfortable airport chair. I’ll beg you to look beyond the glaring oxymoron at the end of that last sentence and instead marvel at my good fortune. As any inveterate computer-toting traveler knows, power ports are a precious and rare resource at most all airports…and when they can be found they’re in the middle of a thoroughfare, under some pay phones, ANYWHERE but near a chair. As Thomas will tell you, I’ve been lucking out today (got Doris Day parking TWICE!). Hopefully the good karma continues throughout the trip. Cheers all. Here’s to long flights and sleeping pills. Saturday, June 24 2006. 1:31 pm Beijing time. We’ve arrived in our hotel room. For tonight, I’m rooming with Brian Balta, a geophysics grad student in my department, about 2 years my junior. He’s in the shower now washing travel sweat off his body. I’m next. The flight from LAX to Inchon, near Seoul, South Korea, went surprisingly quickly. I slept through the most tedious part, but was awake for both meals that were served. The first was a choice between Korean Bulgogi or some sort of beef steak. I opted for the Korean food. Breakfast had either a cheese crepe or something that looked remarkably similar to the Korean dinner. I chose the crepe. I good flight all told. Had an aisle seat. TV in the seat in front of me had a number of selections, the most interesting of which was “Eight Below”, the story of the Antarctic sled dogs which get left to fend for themselves over an Antarctic winter. Decent movie, though I’d seen it before. We arrived in Inchon at around 4:30 am. Getting out to the international transit lounge was easy. It was eerie. The terminal was very clean and modern, rather large, and at that hour of the morning, VERY empty. Also, it was incredibly foggy – you couldn’t see the tarmac from the windows. It all contributed to a general feeling of being in purgatory…or waiting for the Langoliers to show up and devour what’s left of the wasted world. (Stephen King reference, for the interested.) Short hop flight to Beijing, another meal, and then a total clusterf*ck at the Beijing airport. Again, we had problems stemming from the fact that no one was assigned particular pieces of Caltech equipment. That, plus the delay of three items (two tripods and an ‘aseismic source’) through oversized baggage contributed to the fracturing of the group. Some went through customs without telling the rest of us and we waited around for 10 minutes trying to figure out where they were. Then Rob had to change his currency at the ATM. Then we got trapped in the sea of people waiting outside customs. Then we had to fit all of us plus the equipent and our luggage on a bus that was about 5 seats or two undercarriage luggage bins too small. Finally, we get to the hotel after a 10 minute drive, check in with fairly little incident, and Brian Balta and I go up to our room for a quick shower before heading out for a couple of hours in Beijing. (The logic being we need to stay awake for a few more hours to fight the jet lag…and we’ll get a taste of what one part of the city has to offer.) Sunday, June 25, 2006 5:50 am Beijing Tian Yi Hotel, room 421 Yesterday was quite neat. We got a group of taxis to take about 16 of us to Tien’anmen square so we could wander around for about 3 hours. That’s not nearly enough time to see the Forbidden City, but one could walk through the square, and through the Tien’anmen and Duanmen gates, and check out the parks on either side of the vast courtyards. Last week, I was in Copenhagen and climed the spire of a church which was built in 1669. Until today, that was the oldest man-made multi-story structure I’d ever been in. Today, I passed through these gates which are at least 1000 years older than that. But the juxtaposition of old with new is not as striking here as it was in Copenhagen…it was hard for me to see anything that WASN’T relatively new. Two reasons for that: The Chinese economy is exploding so there’s tons of recent construction. The other reason: we still have significant fog here. The whole city is in a haze; the Beijing version of June Gloom. As we drive towards the city, one building with weird architecture rises after another out of the dull grey haze. And by weird architecture I mean that each one looks quite interesting and some very stunning, but there’s no coherency among them whatsoever. There’s everything from Art Deco, to ultra-modern, to early asian ugly. The square itself was crowded, but not overwhelmingly so. Brian and I split off from the main group and did our own thing, though we frequently encountered other splinter Caltech groups. Once, I was accosted by some Chinese tourists who wanted a picture with me. Not sure why – either they want photos with foreigners or they liked my Mohawk…or both. We wandered around the square for a bit, making a large circuit. Then we walked through the Tien’anmen and Duanmen gates. We got all the way up to the gate to the Forbidden City itself, but chose not to go in due to time constraints. Instead, we walked a little bit around the left of the city along the moat. The moat, incidentally, was populated by regular and duck-shaped paddle-boats. Certainly says a lot about the cultural revolution that you’re allowed to buy a ride in a DUCK-SHAPED PADDLE-BOAT in the moat of the FORBIDDEN CITY! After just a bit of that, we walked back to the front of the city and chose to look into the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen memorial park (a.k.a. Zhongshan Park). It cost 3 Yuan to get in, something less than $1. Still, there were far fewer people in there. The park itself had apparently been around since the 1400s, but had been renovated and reconfigured a number of times. But many very old Chinese conifers were growing there. It was very quiet, peaceful, and the haze which before had seemed to shroud the city give the park an air of isolation and other-worldliness. It was quite beautiful. We wandered around for 2 hours. Very interesting architecture, ponds with goldfish (Coi and otherwise), trees, monuments, statues, and a rather incongruous concert hall with very modern architecture. I have a few pictures from Tien’anmen square, but many from this park. When we have our next free day in Beijing, I may just spend my time there. We all came back to the hotel around 7pm and had dinner at 7:30. Dinner was so-so. No really remarkable dishes, at least not for someone who lives so close to REAL Chinese restaurants. But it was hard to get the drinks we wanted to our table. Crashed hard after dinner and slept well until 5:30 this morning. Now we’re off to check out, breakfast, and then to the airport. I think all we have on our agenda today is to fly to Urumqi, so we may have a chance to go shopping / wandering there as well. Ready to get my travel on again. Cheers. Sunday, June 25th 2006. 5:19 pm. Mini-bus #3 Toksun, Xinjiang, China We’ve just stopped for a brief bathroom break and a slice of watermelon. Not sure exactly when we’ll be having dinner, but the plan is to drive from Urumqi through the Turpan Depression and stay in Korla tonight. I’m sure we’ll make it, but at the current rate we’re not going to arrive in Korla before 10pm. Many of my travel-mates are just fine with that, though, since the next World Cup match starts at 11pm local time. China has administratively declared itself (as only China can do) to have only one time zone, so the time in Beijing is the same as the time way out here in Xinjiang. I’m sorry if I gave you all the impression that the luggage claim procedure and customs at the Beijing International Airport was a bit haphazard and poorly organized. No, in fact, it was a paragon of efficiency compared to what we faced in the domestic flight terminal this morning. Apparently, there are special rules for Chinese airlines. Most airlines allow two checked bags per person and have a maximum weight limit on those bags of something like 40 kilograms. Well, here, the limit is 20. And the restriction is more about total weight than about individual bags. So, in a very seat-of-the-pants sort of way we had to choose the few bags that were way too heavy to even consider carrying on, and those other bags which were somewhat light, but too bulky for any carryon capacity. So, whereas I would normally have checked my hiking backpack and carried my regular backpack on, I ended up with both. Not too much of a problem, really. I had to make sure I put my leatherman tool in one of the bags that got checked, but I knew where that was and affected that change rather quickly. Others in our group were not so lucky. They, like me, were forced to bring their normally checked luggage. I guess you can’t blame everyone for not immediately thinking, “Ah, I’ve got to carry this through security now – gotta make sure it’s ‘free and clear’ of offensive items.” (which apparently, at this airport, also includes bottles of anything alcoholic – much to my friend Brian’s chagrin, who had to give up a 1 liter bottle of vodka to the security girl. Guess who’s havin’ a fun time tonight!) So, about a third of us are through security when the problems start to hit. Hey, we’re geologists. We have hammers. Geology hammers – specially designed with a square blunt end and a very sharp pick-like end. We also carry chisels, picks, files, knives, and small bottles of dilute hydrochloric acid for carbonate testing. These, as you might imagine, cause problems. After a few tense minutes, during which the capacity of our enlisted translators (the two Caltech girls of Chinese background who are along for the field trip as well) was taxed to the limit, we manage to get all the offensive equipment (though NOT the vodka) back through to the check-in counter where Jean-Phillipe manages to find an extra box and has them all checked together. Of course, after all of this, we arrive at the gate for our 8:50 flight at 8:35 and don’t actually board until 9:10 or so. We arrive and claim our baggage, to be greeted outside the claim area by a crowd of enthusiastic students from Nanjing University, along with our guide, and Jean-Phillipe’s (hereinafter ‘JP’) colleague professor. This goes VERY smoothly. They have a list already made up of which students are going to be on which of the four mini-buses. We end up with an even mix of Caltech students, Chinese students, and equipment on the buses and we’re off and out of the airport within 10 minutes of leaving baggage claim. Amazing. Aside: first exposure to Chinese pit-toilets in the baggage-claim bathroom. Mildly disturbing and amusing at the same time. Each has its own individual stall, but the toilet paper is by the sink. You have to use the paper and then throw it away…you can’t flush it or the toilet will clog. Also, the ‘toilet’ (to be polite) is really just an elongated porcelain basin in the ground. It’s at ground level. Do you hear me? You can’t sit on it. You have to squat and push. Hopefully, you have good balance. Immediately, we’re on the road out of Urumqi. It looks much like I’d expect any moderately sized (2 million people) Chinese city to look like. A number of high-rise buildings mark the downtown area and there’s an obvious impact of nearby rural activity. The only real giveaway, I suppose, is the dual signs in Chinese and Arabic script. We trek on out and head south. We eventually stop about half an hour out of town at a rest-stop in the middle of a windmill farm. Apparentely, it’s the largest electricity producing windmill farm in China and is funded (at least in part) by the World Bank. While the number of windmills (that I can see) doesn’t compare to the multitude in the Cochella pass East of LA, it is, in fact, more areally extensive – it took nearly 20 minutes to drive through it all at highway speeds. The rest stop ‘toilet’ was even less of one than the pit in the Airport. This was three rectangular concrete holes leading down to a mound below. The stench was awful. Still, the ride is quite pretty. I’m fairly content with the way the trip is going so far. Though I do hope we occasionally change seats on this bus. The one I’m in now doesn’t have much leg room. On approaching the town on Toksun in the Turpan depression, we went from a largely desert area (akin to traveling along the 40 from Barstow to Vegas) into a much more verdant and eye-pleasing area. A number of small fields framed the roadway. This was also the first time, I think, that I’ve ever seen, with my own eyes, humans with beasts of burden working a field. No trucks, no tractors. Just a few lone figures with their hooved companions doing the whole agriculture thing. Pretty neat. We’ve now passed through the Turpan depression, the lowest spot in Asia and are proceeding up the southern spur of the Eastern Tien Shan. They’re quite steep, even at this ‘low altitude’ end. A final note: at the rest stop in Toksun there were, at the entrances to both the men’s and women’s rooms (which incidentally had iconographic signs, as well as declarations in Chinese and English!), two super-gruesome posters showing actual photographs of people caught under the wheels of huge trucks, their heads wedged between wheel and asphalt, red streaks stretching across the road behind them. I didn’t as for a translation, but I’m guessing these are public service / safety announcements. Something like, “Don’t get super drunk and fall asleep in the middle of the road,” or, “If you need a ride, hail one from the shoulder.” Else it could be some sort of political statement. Still…. Tuesday, June 27, 2006. 8:12 am Kuche hotel, Kuche, Xinjiang, China. Yesterday, after something like 90 hours of traveling, we actually stopped and did some geology. It’s taken us a great while to get here, a fact lending credence to the idea of the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility (which we’re within 500 km of right now). Our stop an the Quilitake Anticline was brief, only about an hour and a half, but the features in the rock were quite impressive. I’m given to understand that this particular feature is world famous in the parlance of structural geology. No doubt – it was very impressive. That was our only real ‘field’ stop so far. We also went to an gas field of the Tarim oil company and saw a few parts of gas mining up close. It was a new facility, only around since 1998 or so. But, coming from Houston, I’ve seen oil and gas mines, wells, and refineries before. It wasn’t the highlight. We finally got into Kuche around 10 pm last night and went to have a banquet in our honor given by the representatives of Tarim Oil. The food, like all we’ve had so far, has been authentic Chinese (as opposed to Uyghur). I’ve enjoyed most of it. I’d say I’d eagerly partake in over have the dishes we’ve been served again. Many of the flavors are very salty, and the Chinese apparently don’t have a problem with lots of little bits of bone that you have to chew around or through in their pieces of meat and fish. Last night there were two bottles of alcohol on the table. All of the Chinese at our table opted for the red wine. I and one of the other Caltech students at the table tried the Chinese wine – a clear liquid which I think is the Asian equivalent of grapa. It was something like 50% alcohol by volume and had a very pungent, sweet odor. I couldn’t get down more than two small sips of it. For the numerous toasts we were subjected to, I had to fake it and just touch the glass to my lips. I’m sure you’d all like to hear more about the terrain I’ve been going through. As a geologist, surely I must have a lot to tell about it. It’s true, there’s a lot I could say about the landscape. But unlike my recent Greenland trip, this expedition has covered enough ground to take me from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City. Not easy to say anything unifying about all of it. The mountains have mostly been in the distance. What passes we’ve gone through have been interesting, but unspectacular. Not a lot of views of high, snow-capped peaks except for our pass near the Bogda Shan in the windmill farm. I hear we’ll spend a day going up in the Bogda Mtns. at the end of the trip, as purely a scenic exercise. One thing that has struck me in most places is the amount of green. I suppose I didn’t excpecet to see that much forest. I use the term ‘forest’ even though what I’m seeing is mostly a monoculture of orderly rows of planted trees. They are too tall to be fruit trees, so I wouldn’t call the stands ‘orchards’. I’ve seen such things in Beijing, Urumqui, Korla, Kuche, and on all the roads between these. Having just read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” wherein he talks about the deforestation of China, I’m guessing these are efforts by the local people to reduce soil runoff, increase wind protection (very important on the rim of the Taklimakan desert), and provide a timber resource. Though I’m not sure how much of a timber resource these trees would be. Many stands had trees that were up to 5 stories tall…an impressive amount of growth and indicative of a decent amount of time in the ground. But the trees are tall and slender, like poplars, but with more serrated leaves (occasionally palmate, like maple). It’s now time for breakfast, then we’re off to the field! We’re told that we’ll be staying in this hotel for 3 nights. W00t! We may actually deploy and use today some of the seismic and GPS equipment we’ve been lugging half-way round the world. Tuesday, June 27, 2006 Kuche Hotel, Kuche, Xinjiang. 7:42 pm. We’ve had what amounts to a half-day in the field and a half-day doing ‘culture’. We stopped at an interesting fault-bend fold anticline and spent about an hour looking around and another hour taking samples for OSL. That’s optically stimulated luminescence. Certain minerals can retain electrons in high-energy states after they’ve been knocked off their parent atoms by natural radiation. These high-energy states are meta-stable and can decay back to their ground state with the addition of a little energy…like sunlight. So, if a particular bit of sediment has been buried for a long while and hasn’t seen the sun, an amount of ‘damage’ proportional to the both the time of burial and the flux of local radioactivity accumulates. So, we can sample fine sediments using a technique that doesn’t allow them to be exposed to light. Then, back in the lab, we can administer a controlled amount of light and get a burial age. We do this for two widely separated layers in a section and can get a deposition rate for the whole section (assuming that, to first order, the deposition rate is constant.) Getting the actual samples required a lot of effort with a pick axe and rock hammers – which also required us getting very, very dusty. I’ve just taken a shower and a ton of griddlies came out what’s left of my hair. We had lunch and then continued up the road to visit the Kizil Buddhist caves. There are over 300 caves there, most of which have been heavily damaged by earthquakes, local looters (chipping the gold leaf off the Buddha frescoes, or distant ‘looters’ like von le Coq who took away whole sections of them for ‘preservation’ and display in places like Berlin. Still, what remained of the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th century artwork was stunning, and the whole area was surrounded by various little pavilions and a large grove of Mulberry trees (the only plant on which the silk worm can feed) and poplar. Yes, it turns out that nearly all of the tall, slender trees I’ve been seeing have been poplar, just various different varieties from the smooth-leaved ones I’ve seen in the US. We wouldn’t have had the chance to go to the caves if we’d been able to do a seismic transect today. But apparently, we’ve been denied permission to do the necessary blasting (i.e. shooting the ground with a gun. If you’ve ever seen the original Jurassic Park, one of the early scenes gives a highly Hollywood-ified version of this sort of tomographic profiling.) So, we’re gonna lug this equipment around until we’re on the north side of the Tien Shan in the Junggar basin and do some profiling there. Tomorrow’s gonna be a munch longer day with lots of stops (according to the printed itinerary), but we probably won’t spend much time an any one stop. Other things I’ve learned since being here: I need a new power adaptor which can handle three-prong (i.e. grounded) plugs, like the one I have for my laptop. Or I just remember to bring the little apple frob that allows you to plug the transformer directly into the wall. Most postcards you can by won’t be delivered by the Chinese post office – they’re just souvenirs. If you want to post to someone in the US, you should buy a postcard from the post office directly. Soy ice cream bars taste darn good. Chinese tour guides are desperate and brazen. This one asked a girl in our group, Valerie of the green hair, if she would ever come back to China and would she be his future girlfriend. We were all quite amused. Valerie was speechless. Well, except for her standard expletive, “Balls!” I want to buy a traditional Uyghur hat. I didn’t think I would, but they’ve got beautiful patterns. I also want Uyghur food. I can get authentic Chinese food easily in the US…but I’ve yet to sample true ‘local’ cuisine. We’re off for dinner at 8:30 tonight. Maybe we’ll get some local color. Pity we’re not here on Friday – that’s when the Kuche Bazaar gets happening. Wednesday, June 28, 2006. Kuche Hotel, Kuche, Xinjiang. 8:15 am Last night, after having dinner at a local Chinese restaurant (looked like a banquet hall and had Kenny G playing over the PA system…YUCK!) a group of us gathered around 10 pm to go to a ‘night market,’ a place apparently hopping after the sun goes down where we could potentially get some beer. Brian, myself, and a Chinese student walked the 2.5 kilometers there, while the rest of the travelers took taxis. The was was interesting – we got stared at a lot! Nothing hostile, but these people have probably seen Caucasians very infrequestly if ever, and I’ll bet they’ve NEVER seen one with a Mohawk. The was was also very dusty. We were walking west, which is the direction from which the prevailing winds blow, so we got a lot of that in our faces. We were also walking along one of the main streets in town – so we got the smell of lots of car pollution. I wasn’t looking forward to walking back. The night market was pretty neat. It was mostly food that people were selling, but there were some small, portable kiosks set up where kids could shoot small balloons with fake guns and make lots of noise. Nearby, a colorfully lit playground where more children were playing. After one orbit around, Brian and I found the other Caltech students and joined them for a few large bottles of Chinese beer. Elizabeth had purchased some oddly flat white peaches for a ridiculously low price (something like $0.5 per kilo) which tasted fantastic. I hung out for about an hour on this pleasantly warm evening before beginning to feel the ache in my bones and needed to get back to the hotel to sleep. About 5 of us headed back; and after checking that Brazil was up 2-0 in their World Cup game against Ghana, I went to bed. Time for a long day of many field site stops up the Kuche river. Apparently we’ll be stopping at a Uyghur village along the way. Looking forward to that. Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)
Monday, June 12th, 2006
1:52 pm	Catching y’all up - Part II: Why are we here? Why are we here? Philosophical considerations aside, I’ll tell you the proximal reasons why the four of us, myself, Kevin Lewis, Oded Aharonson, and Hermann Engelhart have traveled to the Russel Glacier on the western edge of the Greenland Ice Cap. You see, we’re all planetary scientists interested in Mars, and Mars, too, has ice caps. In the southern hemisphere, due to colder temperatures resulting from both higher elevations and Mars’ eccentric orbit, solid carbon dioxide ice forms in the winter. The warmer northern hemisphere, however, doesn’t have this but still retains a permanent water ice cap in the summer. This ice cap, like those on Earth, contains a record of Mars’ past climate. It also holds layers of dust which are indicative of some sort of climate cycle. But we have no idea, as yet, whether each layer represents a year, a decade, a century, or even longer time scales. One way we learn about past climate on earth is by drilling cores of ice in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and analyzing it for oxygen isotopes, air compositions of trapped bubbles, pollen grains (palynology) and wind-blown dust, and a host of other measurable quantities. We’d like to do this on Mars as well, but it’s very impractical to send a conventional coring drill to Mars. For one, each moving part that goes up is just one more thing that can break. Also, once we get the cores out, we have to analyze them somehow, and we haven’t yet returned ANY material from Mars’ surface. Not so much as a lipstick container full of dirt, much less 100 meters of frozen material. So instead, we melt. The cryobot is a cylinder about 10cm in diameter and about half a meter long. It consists of a grooved brass head embedded with cartridge heaters, a hole in the middle of that head to permit water flowthrough, a pump to get the water up to the surface, and various instruments like a side-looking camera, temperature sensors, and body heaters. The general idea is to let this thing slowly melt its way through the ice, sending the meltwater up to the surface as it goes. At the lander, a suite of analysis instruments will look at dust, isotopes, etc. while reeling the bot down on a tether. If the water hose in the tether is narrow enough, you don’t get a lot of mixing, even if the tether is 100 meters long. There are still some moving parts…but on the whole the concept is quite elegant in its simplicity. The thing is, it’s slow going – less than a meter an hour - and therefore impractical on Earth where you have people and heavy machinery to speed things up. Thus, there’s not a readily available technology base or literature on the construction of melting ‘drills’. So, we’ve built a little, tested a little. In the lab, and last year it was tested out on the Athabasca Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana. Now, we’ve advanced some, added some sophistication, and are testing in Greenland. If our funding proposal is approved, we’ll be doing this in Antarctica with a still-further-sophisticated and (hopefully) robust robot in the ‘winter’ of 2007-2008 (that time being, of course, southern hemisphere summer). So, it’s sort of a proof-of-concept thing, sort of an engineering test (in the hopes of one day doing REAL science with the thing), and a very fun adventure for all of us involved. (Though for Hermann, having been above both the arctic and Antarctic circles many times, there’s little novelty for being out on a glacier again. Still, we all find it beautiful.) (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 11th, 2006
9:02 am	A day off We got in at 6am today after nearly 24 hours on the Ice. We spent the early part of the day sleeping while my advisor Oded got on a plane around 11am bound for Venice (for a science meeting) and then on to Israel to see his parents. The rest of us slept until around 2pm. Then I got up, had some much needed food, and we left to run our errands around town. We went by the airport tourism office and gift shops to pick up postcards and stamps. I also got a cd of the Greenland band “Chilly Friday”. I’d read about them in the tri-lingual in-flight magazine on Greenland air. They sing in Greenlandic, but we’ll see if the music is actually any good regardless of language barriers. Some of the band members look hot, though. So, we finish there, hit one other sourvnier spot, mail our postcards, then discuss what we’re to do. Hermann suggested that we spend the rest of the day recouperating in town, then head out early tomorrow morning for a good 2 days of drilling, a day of rest, and another two days of drilling finished off with breaking camp and packing up to go home. Kevin and I agreed. But before heading back to KISS, we took a drive along the fjord road towards the harbor. We stopped along the way to pick up some rocks and take pictures of the fjord. Even though it was a cloudy, overcast kind of day, we still had a great ride. We went all the way up past the “Incoherent Community” of Kellyville, population 8, and saw the remains of the original Bluie West Eight, established during WWII. Driving back, we picked up Kim and went on to the Restaruant Roklubben. (rowing club restaurant) which overlooks the rather large lake Ferguson (126 m deep) from which Kangerlussuaq gets all of its fresh water. Anyone who’s got low expectations of Greenland food would be surprised by this place. Dinner consisted of: A bottle of South African shiraz, 2002 vintage A light starter of shrimp, thinly sliced reindeer, and whale carpaccio served on a bed of lettuce, garnished with sweetly pickled cucumbers and lemon. Main course was vegetables and potatoes with reindeer steak and musk ox loin wrapped in bacon. Garnishes included waldorff salad, more sweet cucumbers, gravy, and sweet rhubarb compote. We passed on dessert. (Comment on this)
2:00 am	Today I understood the appeal of the Arctic We’d had a rather stormy two days up until now. Lots of clouds, occasional rain and even some snow out on the ice cap. But around about 7 pm (though it could have been 5 or 9 – they all look the same here) the sky began to clear up and we had the sun poking through the clounds. Having just fixed some rice and vegetables for the other guys and some soup for myself, I decided to enjoy the comparatively warm weather and watch the scenery while I sipped my soup. I chose, as listening music, Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Sinfonia Antarctica”…which though it’s the wrong hemisphere is still singularly appropriate for the locale. I couldn’t have made a better choice. The sun, peeking in and out of the remaining cloud bank to the west was keeping time with the movements and sections of the music. At several dramatic points in the music, the sun would come out or go back behind clounds. Between each movement, I rotated my chair to take in a different remarkable view. It was breathtaking. Later than evening, while Hermann was in the tent pumping the bore hole, I went for a little walk. It was after ‘local sunset’, around 12:30am, when the sun dipped below the glacial horizon to the north. But I found I could walk to the next highest hill and still see the sun. It was an amazing time…from the high hill I could see the whole horizon around me was still illuminated with a heavenly pink light from the low sun. Not just the sky, but the distant glaciers as well were aglow with this radiance. It was cold out, but I hardly felt it. Most of the streams on the tops of the glacier were frozen over for the night. It was so quiet. I walked over to the small moulin we discovered the other day. A moulin is a place where a glacier-top stream flows down into the body of the glacier through a hole in the ice. They cane be quite large and very dangerous – if you fall in, you could get stuck in a narrow passage and drown in freezing water… or you could be swept at very high speeds through the bowels of the glacier, banged against rock and ice, until your mangled body comes out the far end. Herman told Kevin and I a story about a man who fell into one and came out alive on the other side. Perhaps…but I don’t want to take that chance. When we discovered this one, the opening was only about a foot across. Now, it was nearly 2 feet wide, though oddly shaped. Still, I get a bit nervous standing around it. Walking over in the early morning, I found the stream flowing into it had reduced in volume, but not completely stopped. Got some good pictures. On the way back, though, I had an experience that I could never capture on film, and will yearn to repeat whenever I can for the rest of my life. At the top of the tallest nearby hill, I laid down on my back and looked up at the sky. It was completely cloudless, a peaceful, medium blue, fading to pink and red on the horizons…which stretched a complete 360 degrees around me. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 9th, 2006
11:07 pm	A note on Greenlandic Language and Pronunciation The Greenland Inuit (singular: Inuk), who are actually the sub-groups Kalaallit and Inughuit, did not have writing until about 100 years ago when a German decided to help them create a written language. There are a number of sounds that not occur in English, or at least are not given the status of letters or common consonant confluences. I’ve learned what I’ve learned speaking mainly with our guide, Kim, who is Danish, though he has lived in Greenland since 1985. He states that he can’t speak Greenlandic, but he can understand others speaking it. Some rules I’ve been able to discern thus far: - K is pronounced like G - G is more of a glottal stop than an English ‘G’, pronounced way back in the throat…almost like a K - T is pronounced like D - Q is pronounced like K - SS is a consonant cluster similar to what in English would be ‘SCH’ – sounded with the tongue pressed firmly against the hard palate, and the air whistling around the sides of the tongue past the teeth. - RL is another cluster which is a very hissy ‘SCHL’. If you’ve seen “Finding Nemo” and remember the scene near the beginning of the movie where Nemo swims out towards the boat away from the reef when no-one is looking and one of his classmates yells out, “Oh my GOSSCH! Nemo’s SSCHwimming out to SSCHee!!!”, you’ll understand what this sounds like. Not lispy, but definitely heavily aspirated. - dipthongs are pronounced completely. ‘UA’ is sounded like in ‘oo-aah’ - double vowels are slightly (imperceptibly to my ear) longer than single vowels Examples: Kangerlussuaq (meaning: Big Fjord) – sounds roughly like “Gan-ker-Schloo-Schooak” Kalaallit Nunaat (meaning: Land of the People – the Inuit word for Greenland) – sounds like “Ga-laa-schleet Nunat” Akuliarusiasuup Kuua (meaning: unknown. It’s the name of the sandy stretch of the glacier meltwater stream east of Kangerlussuaq) – “Ah-Goo-lee-ar-OO-si-ah-soup Koo-ah”. Akuliarusiasuk (the tall hills on the south side of the same sandy wash: “Ah-Goo-lee-ar-OO-si-ah-sook” I’ve noticed that a lot of words here have many similar parts. It dovetails nicely with the explanation I’ve heard debunking the “Eskimo’s have 40 words for snow” urban myth. It turns out that they don’t have 40 ‘words’ for snow. It’s just that in Inuit, word are easily compounded into new words, like in German. Hence, where we would have a 12 word phrase for “slightly wet, puffy snow that packs easily and is bad for sledding”, they would have one long ‘word’ made of various compounded roots and modifiers that would express the same meaning. And listening to the music of Chilly Friday, a Greenlandic Rock Band, I’m actually getting to like the language quite a bit. The heavily aspirated consonants are still sticking out, though. Current Mood: mellow Current Music: Chilly Friday - Kalaallit Nunaat (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 8th, 2006
12:20 pm	Brief update and exact location Russel Glacier, Cryobot site. GPS Location: N67.14845 W50.02940 It’ll be interesting to see what the position is at the end of 10 days. Wonder if GPS can notice any glacier flow in that time. The place where we are is undergoing compression as the glacier abuts the mountain and moraine that it built up in colder times. So, there may not be that much flow going on in this particular area. We’ve been drilling for 2 days now. Our first day started slowly since we had to set up the whole cryobot rig. We also encountered problems with the first cryobot, the pump apparently got stuck somehow and wasn’t giving us a good rate of water flow. Fortunately we had a spare and were able to deploy that instead. Current Mood: frustrated Current Music: Gentle hum of generators and pumps (Comment on this)
10:09 am	Impressions of the Land 10:09 am Greenland Time Ice Cap road, East of Kangerlussuaq Greenland has no roads. Sure, there are paved streets in the middle of the towns, but between settlements there is no means of overland transport in the summer. In the winter, one can use snowmobiles to move between places like Kangerlussuaq and Sisimiut (the capital of the municipality of the same name, of which Kangerlussuaq is a part). Snowmobiles can get up to 120 miles per hour, so can be a pretty efficient way of getting from A to B. Especially if you don’t need to carry a lot of cargo. It’s the Arctic equivalent of motorcycles, except here the ‘riding season’ is in the winter. As a consequence of Greenland having no roads, there’s no car rental business. So a major concern of our coming out here is how we would get a vehicle to use for our frequent trips to and from the Ice Cap along the Ice Cap road (a rather bumpy gravel road which is, in fact, the longest in Greenland at 25 km). Fortunately, our quasi-guide “Safety” Kim leased us his personal vehicle for the 10 days we’re here: A nice green Land Rover with permanent 4-wheel drive. So, as Hermann drives he and I out to the cap to relieve Oded and Kevin, I reflect on my first and continuing impressions of the ice-free Greenland landscape. The land here is old. Very old. The moss-colored hills on the far side of the Akuliarusiarsuup Kuua (the low, sandy wash which drains part of the glacier and joins the tip of the Kangerlussuaq fjord) look strikingly similar to images I’ve seen of the Scottish Highlands. I’m sure there’s some connection between the rocks of Greenland and those of the northern British Isles and Scandanavia. Perhaps they were all part of the same craton before the rifting of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. The vegetation is low, constrained by the thin soil which has scaercly managed to form over the glacier-scoured rocks since the last Ice Age. It hangs now, tenuously, onto the slick faces of bare rock, sloughing, wrinkled, down to the base of the hills like so much rotted skin. It is an ooze lapping against the sides of the steep mountains, leaving them bare and exposed above. Up close, the slopes reveal a hummocky texture, like the skin of a basketball….little hills of moss and grass covered soil about a foot across thrown up by decades of frost-heave. Here and there, pretty patches of a small purple-pink flower add a barely perceptible dash of color to the otherwise dull green, yellow, and grew landscape. It’s beautiful, but old. Fragile, like a cracking oil painting. On the horizon looms what looks to a former San Franciscan like a low bank of fog, hovering on the hillcrest between the coast and the valley. But unlike the roiling fog terminus, this wall of white doesn’t move on a human timescale. Unlike Illulissat up in Dasko Bay, the pressure of the Northern Hemispheres largest ice cap is sufficient only to push the Russel’s glacier forward at a barely perceptible rate. And global warming has been causing the whole cap to retreat for the past 30 years. Illulissat, however, remains the world’s most productive glacier, calving of enough fresh water each day to provide for a year all of the needs of New York City. We have passed many lakes on the way to the cap, ranging from tiny ponds in small saddle depressions between two small hills to the very large Aujuitsup tasia, which is about 10 by 2 km. Any map of the area shows innumerable lakes, all elongated along the direction between the ice cap and the ocean: the direction of glacier advance. It looks a bit like a map of Minnesota. I’ve also seen some waterfalls, again ranging in size from barely a trickle to impressive cataracts. As we approach closer, I see the cracked and dirt-streaked face of the ice cap. In places, water from the base of the glacier pours down over the rocks and into the wash on its way to the sea. We drive up onto the terminal moraine, a mass of rocks and debris plowed ahead in front of the glacier. From here, we leave the Land Rover behind and walk ahead of the snow cat, which follows us as we search for a good spot to drill. We want to reach at least 60 meters, so we have to be sure we’re far enough above the bedrock for that. As we walk over the ice, the mineature-go