Going Where the Tourists Aren’t
From an early age, I have been drawn to the obscure - people, places, books, music. I’m not sure why…I don’t even think it was a conscious thing at first.
When I discovered the Chicago Cubs (all on my own because my parents are hippies who hate sports) at age 9, my favorite players, right off the bat, were two middle relievers, Dave Gumfert and Drew Hall. Even with my limited knowledge of the game, I could tell they weren’t particularly good, or important. I just liked them. Later, I began to like Greg Maddux for the same reason. Sure, he became great, but (check his numbers), he wasn’t at first. My cousin Jim mercilessly mocked me for this. “Hey Danny, your hero just gave up five runs in the first inning!” It was like I was intuitively drawn to players who weren’t well known, weren’t revered. As I became more knowledgeable, this changed of course, but I was initially drawn to the end of the bench.
This continued on into my taste in music. When I became a fan of Pink Floyd (far from obscure) it was through The Wall and then Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon. But, as I got older, and more ravenous a fan, I explored more of their catalogue, and discovered I was drawn to the lesser known end of their canon. My favorite songs became those that weren’t on the radio. This was because I liked them, sure, and really responded to their more inventive, freewheeling side, but I also felt like I was part of a much more exclusive club when I listened to them. Everyone knows “Comfortably Numb,” but how many people can sing along to great songs like “Cirrus Minor” and “Point Me at the Sky”?
So too with Neil Young…my favorite album of his is Broken Arrow, which is also, believe it or not, one of his least selling. I do love some of his hits, but his songs that move me the most are usually too long, too strange, too loud, or a combination of all three, to be hits. (Thankfully, he usually peppers his setlists liberally with these songs, so I am always happy when I see him live.)
And when I found, by accident on a Russian CD burning website, the band Brazzaville, I loved them immediately…and more so when I found that they were mostly unknown in the US (despite being a US band). The fact that they are fairly popular in Russia and Turkey didn’t really dent my enthusiasm – maybe because those are fairly obscure places?
And then there were books.
One day in 6th grade, I found, in an overlooked corner of my middle school’s library, amidst a bunch of dusty tomes from the 60s (and earlier), a few books that called out to me…primarily because I felt as though they were calling out only to me. Lonesome Longhorn by John H. Latham was my favorite, and I read it often. When I looked it up, years later, on the internet, and found that it had been unknown even in its time, I loved it all the more. Desert Dog by Jim Kjelgaard was also great, an obscure book by a less-obscure writer.
In my twenties, I found a book in a used book store in Galena, Illinois that called out to me in the same way. The title, Go Now in Darkness, grabbed my attention immediately, and the fact that it just looked obscure sealed the deal. I read it and looked diligently for anything else by the writer, S. W. Edwards, but for years, could find nothing. Eventually I found that this was a pseudonym, and that the author’s real name was Walter Sublette, a professor at Joliet University. I called him up and found out that that was the only novel he’d ever published (he had a couple books of poetry). “I don’t get many calls about that one anymore,” he told me. We became friends, sharing our writing with each other, and remained so for many years, until he passed on a few years back.
Even amongst well known authors, I find myself immediately heading for the dimly lit corners of their bibliographies. One of my very favorite William Faulkner novels is A Fable which, despite winning the Pulitzer and the National Book Award when it was published, was very lightly read and ostensibly out of print until only a few years ago. (I loved it, both because it was great and because it felt as though I alone felt it was great.) I went through many, many channels to read Mark Twain’s unfinished Tom and Huck Amongst the Indians just because, well, it seemed no one else had. And, when I read that Richard Connell, author of the very famous story “The Most Dangerous Game” was prolific in his output (having written some 10 books in his life) but had only one story in print, I made it my mission to read everything he’d written. Some of them were doozies to find! His novel Playboy (1936) has been out of print since its first run, and was available for checkout at only three libraries worldwide! It is not even available on used book site abebooks.com, a site that offers literally billions of titles. (It was a few years ago, with the cheapest copy going for $250.)
I wouldn’t call it an obsession with unknown people, places, and things - more a healthy interest. There were no negatives. As I grew up, I felt I was walking my own path. Sure, I was into popular things as well (if I weren’t, I would’ve become an Expos fan and not a Cubs fan), but I also felt as though I were conscious of a world that few around me were.
And as I got older, I set out to explore that world.
Anyone could go to Brazil or South Africa. I wanted Paraguay, Uruguay, Equatorial freakin’ Guinea, too.
This predilection for traveling to the edges of the map began I was 16, when I decided that I wanted to go to Anderson, South Carolina. My reason was the same reason Sir Edmund Hilary gave when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest. “Because it’s there.” I knew nothing about Anderson whatsoever. I’d never even been near South Carolina. I just saw it on my Rand McNally map and thought it looked cool and, well, obscure…like a place tourists did not visit.
We never went, and I eventually realized Anderson was 1. Hard to get to and, 2. Most likely a clone of every other medium sized southern city. But, for a few months in 1993, it loomed in the peripheries like some kind of Mecca (a Mecca with AutoZones, Captain D’s, and plenty of McDonalds, but a Mecca nevertheless).
A few years later (1999), when I graduated (while heartbroken from a recent breakup) from Purdue University, I chose to go to Saskatchewan (more on that in a bit) for the same reasons - because I liked the name, because it called out to me from the pages of my road atlas, and because no one went to Saskatchewan.
Madagascar was one of the first lesser-known places that truly captivated me. I thought it so mysterious, so isolated…one of the most obscure, cool places in the world (despite being one of the most useless territories in Risk), a place, like Patagonia or Tasmania, whose very name just conjured up thoughts of profound foreignness, profound otherness.
I fell in love with the place – or at least the idea of the place – while I was working as a substitute teacher in college. One November day in the year 2000, I was subbing in a middle school social studies classroom. One of the walls was given over to maps of the world, and one of these maps was a nocturnal satellite map of earth; this arrested my attention immediately. I spent much of my prep period studying it. The eastern U.S. and Europe were basically just blobs of glowing light…as were India, eastern China, the big cities of South America. Soon, however, my eyes strayed to the dark places…central Asia, northern Canada, most of Australia.
Then I saw Madagascar, an island at the end of the world that had one dot of light on it, right in the middle. For some reason, I went (inwardly) apeshit over this…and wanted suddenly to know everything about the place…about that one point of impossibly distant light, and all that remote darkness that surrounded it.
I went to dinner with my friend Elton a few days after this, after I had spent many internet hours learning everything I could about Madagascar. I told him, over pizza, all about the “Isle of the Moon” and that I could fly there for just under 4,000 dollars, roundtrip. He looked at me, smirking, and said, “The hell?” Then, dropping his voice in a parody of mine, “I’m gonna go to Timbuk-fuckin’-to!” Then: “Why the hell do you want to go there? It’s useless as hell in Risk.”
“Because it’s there…unknown, foreign, hard to get to.”
“You’re strange,” he said.
Over the next fifteen years, I read books about Madagascar, wrote songs about it, wrote stories and even a (bad) novel about it. I always held out hopes of going, but prices were simply out of my league.
Finally, after years of searching airfare sites (and after becoming a teacher and building my salary), I found a deal that was semi-doable. I’d always vowed if I could get roundtrip tickets for under $2,000 a piece, it would be a go (especially as actually traveling in Madagascar is cheap as hell). For the longest time – more than a decade – I never even came close. In November of 2014, however, I decided to look at two separate bookings (Chicago to Paris and then Paris to Antananarivo). I found one itinerary that came in at $1,995. I told Patricia, my wife, and she was excited, and I was excited, and we were going to Madagascar!
Just telling people we were going to Madagascar made me feel like a big time traveler – and I had been to India and Japan and all over the US and Europe by this point. Madagascar just felt bigger somehow, more awesome, than almost anywhere on earth.
Arriving on a chilly early winter’s day in June, I felt as though I’d been there before. I knew so much about the place, had done so much research and reading. (As a writer, I always ignore the maxim that you can only write of places you know…that you need to have lived in, or at least thoroughly visited, a place before you can write about it. I’ve always made a point of doing the opposite. There is nothing cooler than writing about a place and then visiting it afterwards. Small, minor landmarks become huge attractions – “There’s Lake Anosy and the World War One obelisk in the middle of it!...And there’s the Carlton Hotel, the tallest building in Madagascar!” Sometimes – often – I am wrong in my imaginings, but I can always go back and change things, and the benefit of doing things like this outweighs the costs rather handily.)
Anyway, I loved almost everything about the country of Madagascar, and found that most of what I wrote about it was pretty well spot-on.
I really didn’t like Tana, the capital (and source of that point of light that had so riled me fifteen years earlier). It was hard to get around, and very polluted. There wasn’t much to see or do. In fact, were it not for how great our hotel, the Chez Anna, was - our room and bathtub (!) and quiet, little garden wherein we could eat meals and read and pet the many cats who lived there – I would’ve been ready to vamoose after two days. (We had booked five nights there at the beginning of the trip, as well as two at the end.)
But the rest of the country - how to tell of the rest of the country? The red clay uplands that look like nowhere else in the world, especially when the red sun of sunset shines on them, the red dirt streets shared by huge semis, cars, bicycle taxis, and zebu-drawn carts, the rainforests, so dense and green under lowering skies, the slow, clanking 1920s-era train that runs from high-up Fianaratsoa to the coastal city of Manakara on the Indian Ocean (through villages accessible no other way), the beautiful woodlands and vistas and towns off the grid and lemurs and friendly people in small, distant cities? How to tell of a place that felt like home before I’d even been there, and more so afterward? How to tell when I had tried for years, and failed, except to say that it surpassed even my mind’s air-castle conjuring?
The Great Red Island had called me to an unknown corner of the world, and I was so glad that I had listened.
The summer before, in 2014, on a four-week jaunt through Poland, Italy, France, Switzerland, and Germany, one of my favorite nights was an unplanned one spent in the small city of Grosetto, Italy. We had a Eurail pass, good for 28 days, and could pretty much go anywhere the trains went. One Sunday morning, we woke in our beautiful hotel in Salerno, thinking we would stay another night but, alas, they were all booked up, and so it was time to move on. We were heading for the north (Florence, Sienna) anyway, and thought about just going to one of those places. But then I saw Grosetto on the map…it was a much more direct shot there, and made for a less overwhelming day of travel. I’d never heard of it and so looked it up in our guidebook. When I saw that it was not mentioned, I knew we had to go.
We arrived at the small train station in the late afternoon. Everything was leaf-shaded, summery, quiet and still, as though held by charm. We headed first for the town center, looking for a hotel. We went in and out of a few until we found a nice but relatively cheap one, unpacked for the night, and then prepared to head out and explore. From our hotel room’s narrow window, we could see the nearly-full moon rising beautifully over a modest church. I thought that a good direction to start our peregrinations.
The city was pretty, not in a touristy way, but rather in a very real, authentic, lived-in way. I loved the fact we were seeing a place that almost no one who comes to Europe ever sees. We had a simple dinner, sitting outside at a chain falafel restaurant, and then strolled around the remnants of a castle, by a few medieval churches, down quiet lanes of apartments, shops owned by Indian emigres…Though there was nothing postcard worthy, I thought it beautiful in a way that the bustle and pomp of places like Florence and Sienna just didn’t match. Those were like museums, in which you can’t touch anything. This felt more like an actual place, where actual people lived.
The next morning, before heading on to Florence, we ate breakfast by a fountain in a small square surrounded by office buildings. I felt very at home, and loathe to leave.
From this point on, we’ve made sure to include one off-the-beaten path destination in every one of our itineraries.
*
In 2016, when we traveled to England and Scotland, we scheduled a stop in the northern industrial city of Kingston-Upon-Hull (known to locals simply as Hull) a place that, while mentioned in our Lonely Planet guide, was hardly spotlighted. I’d first heard of it reading David Mitchell’s excellent epic novel Cloud Atlas. It is the setting for a comic yet harrowing chapter involving a publisher confined against his will in a crooked nursing home. The way David Mitchell’s character Timothy Cavendish described it (disparagingly yet poetically) made me want to go.
Our itinerary on that trip was chock full of big-ticket places, and we were soon able to recite it by heart to all the Brits who asked about our travels: London, to Cambridge, to Hull, to Edinburgh, then hiking on the famed Coast-to-Coast Trail from Middlesbrough to Robin’s Hood Bay, then Scarborough, then York, then Birmingham (and a night on a canal boat with a friend), then Bath, then London again.
Every time we recited this, when we got to Hull, our listeners faces would twist with incredulity and their voices would rise several octaves. They would also, instantly, develop pronounced Cockney accents. “Hull?!? What do you want to go to Hull for?” This is not hyperbole…every single time we had this conversation about where we’d been or where we were going, it would be punctuated with “Hull?!?”
Contrary to the condescension, we found Hull to be, in the same way Grosetto had been, pretty great. Not only was it absolutely packed with Victorian architecture, it was also undergoing a massive renovation, as it had been named the 2017 European City of Culture. We found a hotel (only mildly sketchy) by the train station, got a room for the night, and explored. Our first destination was a vegan restaurant, purportedly hard to find, about a mile away.
The evening was quite cool, despite it being July; it hadn’t dawned on me until we set out how far north we were. We traversed lanes of rowhouses, passed shops along the harbourfront, marveled at a huge, somehow evil-looking Gothic cathedral. Everything was under construction. No one seemed to be about.
We found the restaurant - or at least a sign for it – beside a doorbell in an anonymous rowhouse down an anonymous empty lane. We rang the bell. There was no answer. I began getting an eerie, Charles Dickens’ feeling. Just as we were about to give up, a man appeared from an office building we’d taken to be untenanted. Amazingly, he was a vegan too, though, despite working literally right next to the only vegan restaurant in the city, he had never eaten there. He rang with us a few times, and then looked at us, perplexed.
“I know they have strange hours,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve never been.”
His name was Nigel and he looked a bit like a young Pete Townsend. He was actually one of the main planners for the next year’s City of Culture events (which entailed organizing at least one event for every day of the year). He hailed from Sheffield, in the south, but had developed an extensive knowledge of Hull.
Accordingly, he knew where we could get good vegetarian fare, at a pub just down the road. We had dinner together and he told us all about the city – it’s prominence in the 1800s, its decline from overfishing in the 60s and 70s, its planned resurrection. I told him about Cloud Atlas, which he promised to read.
After dinner, he showed us a few sights (amongst them the smallest window in Europe, a slit in a brick that is a sort of local tradition/ joke), and talked about what Brexit, which had just passed, meant for the U.K. He had to be up early, so soon bid us adieu, but not before giving us a few suggestions for a walk.
There was, surprisingly, a great deal to see – the highlight of which was the aquarium, an architectural marvel of a building called “The Deep”, which looked, from a distance, like the hull of a colossal ship, lit up, right on the edge of the North Sea. We also traversed a small college campus and several city parks, bridges, and quiet neighborhoods before heading back to the station hotel…and the Gothic church.
The church alone would have been worth the stop in Hull. It looked like something directly out of an H.P. Lovecraft story, “The Haunter of the Dark” perhaps.
The next morning, we departed for Scotland, and though I was excited to see Edinburgh (which did not disappoint), I was sad to leave, and wished we could have stayed a few more days.
In 2017, our ten year anniversary year, Patricia and I planned to redo our Honeymoon, which had taken us to Montreal, Quebec City, and all over New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. But, as none of these places were obscure enough, I suggested we fly to Saskatchewan, (the first truly obscure place I had gone, back in 1999).
I loved that 1999 trip…I had no money and my car (a harried Ford Escort) seemed ready to give up the ghost at any minute and I had no one to go with. But driving alone under endless, living skies, through small, distant cities with strange and wonderful-sounding names (Regina, Saskatoon, Prince Albert, Moose Jaw) farther north and farther away from home than I’d ever been, awakened something dormant in me that has never been bedded down (thankfully). I’ll never forget walking along the streets of Saskatoon in the late summer autumnal air, then sitting alone in an empty diner eating Saskatoon berry pie and drinking coffee over maps, or traversing endless flat highways that ran parallel to trains miles long, with grain silos looming like friendly waystations in the misty rain. I’ll never forget the morning, camped in the chill at Prince Albert National Park, when something awakened me in the early dawn. Raising my face to peer out of my tent screen, I almost touched noses with a fox. The next day, lying on a beach, a big thunderstorm came in, and lighting was hitting the water far out. I met a girl who invited me to a party; I didn’t go (it was too late and too far away), but it was nice feeling belonging in a place 2,000 miles from home that felt much further. On the way back home, I stayed in Moose Jaw, at a hotel that looked old and felt so scary and haunted, I almost decided to spend the night in the car. I kept thinking that something was going to come out of the bathroom, kept repeating in my head, almost like a mantra, “Something terrible happened in this room!” The trucks going by on the Trans-Canada Highway seemed too distant to be hopeful, and sleep was a long time in coming. (I found out later that there was much mob activity in Moose Jaw during the Depression years, and that Al Capone and his cohorts used the place as a base of operations. Hmmm.)
Apart from that night, the trip was amazing – important and amazing.
So, I suggested we go there first, then from there to Toronto, where we would rent a car and retrace our steps of ten years earlier. Patricia, who had never been, thought this a fine idea.
We saw more of Saskatoon this time (I, in my naivete, had only traversed its nether regions 18 years earlier) and found it a lovely, charming, quite cozy place…but still (thankfully) obscure and distant-feeling. We walked for miles along the Saskatchewan River, through lovely parkland, and, after dinners in several great restaurants, the quiet streets of quiet neighborhoods. A giant, modern mall was near our hotel; we visited several times, as it felt very cool to be in some place so simultaneously familiar and far-away.
One evening, after driving to a farm that specialized in Saskatoon berries, we visited the train station, now rarely used, just because I wanted to see it. The trains only stop there twice a week, and it was out in the hinterlands, lonely and empty. A prairie wind blew. I had tried to find tickets to Toronto by rail, but it was a three day journey and far out of our price range. Just being there, though, looking in through the locked doors at the empty, dusty concourse and empty storefronts from long ago days, made me feel both sad and more grateful than ever that I had come.
The next day, we rented a car and drove a few hundred miles north, back to Prince Albert National Park, where we backpacked for two days. The mosquitoes were so bad, we had no choice but to hike hard, and may have set some sort of land-speed record…13 miles with heavy packs in just under four hours. The scenery was relaxing rather than exciting, and very evocative of the Northwoods. Both our sites were on small lakes, bordered by the northern boreal forest. The northern light was amazing, the twilight stretched on and on, and we were many miles from the nearest person. (On our last morning, an intrepid squirrel got it into his head that he was going to take my hammock, and managed to get all eight feet of fabric pulled out of its stuff sack. It took him a long time, and he was very noisy. (We didn’t stop him because we thought it was cute. Eventually, he gave up.))
Then it was back to Saskatoon, a night in the same cheap hotel I had slept in in 1999 (by the Golf Bubble Dome), a walk about the University of Saskatoon (and thoughts of what it would be like to live and teach in the city), a departure the next morning from the small airport.
(One of the flights on the board there was to Uranium City, a now all-but abandoned town in northern Saskatchewan near the Arctic Circle…I wished we could’ve flown there…or at least talked to the people who were going! Talk about an obscure destination!)
In 2018, when we flew to Spain (via Iceland on now-defunct Wow Air) the first stop after Barcelona was Logrono, a city in the La Rioja wine country that (surprise) no one really visited. I had found the name while flipping idly through a dictionary years before, had liked it, and had put it into a poem…in the meaningless but evocative line, “She begged me tell her of Logrono, and the blind merchant.” This spawned a horror story and then another of redemption. Thus, when we decided we were going to Spain, we decided we were going there.
After the loud, magic bustle of beautiful Barcelona, Logrono felt dreamlike, soporific. Like Madagascar, I had so thoroughly researched the place that my first arrival there felt like a homecoming. The train station, on the edge of town rather than in the center like most mid-sized European cities, was ultramodern, all angles and planes and late-evening light. I so wanted to spend time exploring, but Patricia had booked us an Airbnb (a whole apartment, with two balconies!) and our hosts had insisted on meeting us at the station and driving us there.
The city was surprisingly big (I had expected a tiny town), but not overwhelming. Our place was a huge modern flat with bedroom, bathroom (replete with a huge bathtub ringed with candles), kitchen, and living room, which, despite all the amenities, somehow still felt exquisitely antiquated. It overlooked a square, directly on the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail. And though the square sure got humming at dusk, our place was quiet and still. It was so beautiful, we almost didn’t want to venture out.
But we did. I pointed things out I had researched, man-splained the histories and significances of buildings, parks, lanes. We ate tapas in the old quarter, some of the most wonderful little meals ever (the best were these mushrooms sautéed in olive oil, eaten on a toothpick) until we were full, then walked around the city at night. In the center, there is a statue of a general on a horse. I had read that the statue is famous because of the size of the horse’s balls. They were incongruously huge.
Spain stays up late in the summer, like us. It was cool to see kids on the playgrounds, teenagers playing soccer, families strolling about at 1 a.m.
The next day, I strolled to the muddy Rio Ebro, along it. In the distance, through the heat-light, I could see the blue of the Pyrenees Mountains. There was a little, quiet campground across the river, and I inquired about a night there…we had a pup tent and an extra night, and there were plenty of spots available. You could see the river, which I had written of many times, from it.
Later, I walked out to the train station. Though not nearly as desolate as the one in Saskatoon, it was empty (I was there at a time when there were no trains due for more than two hours) and very quiet. Echoes stirred everywhere, almost palpably. I strolled through the upper level concourse and sat at a table (amongst many empty ones) in the atrium, overlooking the tracks below. High, late-afternoon sun filtered in. I drank coffee from a vending machine and wrote postcards home and felt happier to be there than I’d almost ever been to be anywhere. Though I could see some dinginess (dust, peeling paint, discoloration from the trains) beyond the ultramodern façade, I thought it as beautiful as any station in the world. “I am in the station in Logrono,” I said marvelingly. Afterwards, I went down to the track level, walked a long way along them in the underground, underworld light.
Later, I met Patricia for dinner at a vegetarian place, and then we took the long way home to our abode in the old quarter, wherein we could nap on the couch, watch Spanish TV, take a bath with candles, and sit on the balcony and watch the night progress and the square grow quieter and quieter below us.
The next day we packed up and walked over to the campground. We paid for a spot for the night, set up our miniscule pup tent, and strolled along the river for a long time. We stopped at a café in the shade of plain trees, and had coffee, and talked, feeling like characters in a Hemingway novel.
That night, after each taking showers in the huge, empty bathhouse, we fell to sleep under the stars.
We had only what we could carry in one school-sized backpack with us (Wow Air, though cheap, charged like hell for carry-ons, and so we packed light). Our camping equipment, thus, consisted of a tiny bike tent, two small, warm-weather sleeping bags, two headlamps, and a candle (for a lantern). Our extra clothes served as pillows. We fell asleep, smelling the slowmoving Ebro, looking at the candle’s flickering flame just outside.
The next day would bring a train ride across the country, to Malaga, the southern coast, good friends, Ramon y Manuel, whom we’d met in Madagascar, who mocked Logrono gently when we told them where we were.
We had to rise before dawn and walk several miles to get to the station. The station was much busier in the early morning, but no less lovely for it.
We drank coffee and had pastries under pastel skies, and then went down into the underworld, where the first of our trains waited.
In 2019, it was China, and the city of Taigu.
I read about Taigu in The Best American Travel Writing 2017, in an article, originally published in the Missouri Review, called “One Person Means Alone” by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers. I read it while traveling on the train in southern Spain, from Malaga to Ronda. I loved the article and its descriptions of the city and the communal life therein, and immediately started thinking of going there…We had almost gone to China that summer (2018) until the aforementioned Ramon and Manuel invited us to come stay with them, and we decided to make that our 2019 trip instead. This made sense – we had traveled extensively around Europe in the past, and didn’t need a whole lot of preparation to do so again, so allowing ourselves a full year to plan a trip to somewhere completely different seemed wise.
Reading that article was pretty much the beginning of our planning.
Taigu was the type of place that appealed to me immediately…a small, nowhere, industrial city that no one who wasn’t from there had ever heard of.
In May of 2019, we bought plane tickets to China (Chicago to Beijing) and began planning our tour. As Taigu was essential, we decided we would spend a few days in Beijing, then take the train there first – and then it would be on to the jewels of the south (Zhangjiajie National Park, Yangshuo, Hong Kong).
Of all these places, even though it was obviously the least spectacular, I looked forward to Taigu the most…a place so small and obscure it didn’t even show up on our National Geographic laminated map of the country (which was pretty damn detailed).
Getting there from Beijing was hard, but not for the reasons one might think; it was quite accessible by road and rail. The problem was, Taigu lay along the very busy Beijing to Xian line, which (I was to find out a few weeks before our trip) is often booked solid a few weeks in advance.
Sitting at my laptop on a hot night in June, navigating Trip.com (which had only recently started taking reservations for non-Chinese residents), I felt myself losing my grip…if we weren’t able to even make the first leg of our journey, how in the hell were we going to get all the way down to Hong Kong and back?
Luckily, there was a major city only about 30 miles from there (Jinzhong), and, on a whim, I looked into trains there. Success! Here was a whole other train line! From there, we had only to take a local train into Taigu. It was going to happen!
In celebration, I booked a hotel (a really cool-looking one) for three nights.
A few weeks later, we arrived in huge, clean, wonderful, friendly Beijing, and explored it for a few days. We immediately loved the place and laughed rather sardonically that we had booked more time in Taigu than there. (We consoled ourselves, however, that we would be back on the far end of the trip.)
Leaving our Day’s Inn basement room at dawn on our fourth day in China, we hurried to the subway, which would take us to the massive Beijing West Station. (We had made a trip out there to pick up all of our train tickets for the whole trip the previous day, so somewhat knew the layout.)
We found our train (and our seats) easily. The train was beautiful, an ultra-modern (and scary fast) bullet train.
As we rolled out into the Chinese suburbs, then countryside, it began to rain. I read ghost stories on my iPad and peered at the seemingly endless high-rise apartment buildings looming far out in the rain haze – miles and miles of them. Patricia, as is her wont, got into conversations with people; though the language barrier was almost total, smartphones (and much improved translation aps) helped surmount this.
After one conversation, she turned to me, looking troubled.
“I told a few people we were going to Taigu and they asked me where we were staying, and I showed them the hotel…they all said that that is not in Taigu but Pingyao.”
“Well,” I said, inwardly worried but trying not to let on, “the map at Hotels.com was very clear that the hotel is in Taigu. Those guys are probably just confused.”
“Okay,” Patricia said in the tone she uses when she is pretty sure I am wrong (a tone I hear quite often when we are traveling, and usually for good reason).
We disembarked at Jinzhong Station, which lay in the middle of a huge parking lot (mostly empty), surrounded by woodland. Everyone who left the train looked very sure of where they were going. Peering out and seeing a line of cabs, and feeling too meek to barter, we looked up buses to the city. There was one; the tickets were the equivalent of about fifteen cents each (for an hour-long journey) - and it was idling just outside. We hurried to it, the only non-locals. We got a lot of nods and hellos and curious stares.
We found the next station easily…and, as we had a bit of time to kill, grabbed some omelet-sandwiches from a small, outdoor stall. These came with hotdogs and, no matter what, we could not get the stall owner to leave them off. We tried, in every way imaginable, to tell her that we were vegetarians, but though the words seemed to resonate with her, their meanings did not. Finally, we just had to take them off ourselves and leave them for a dog.
In the station (small, crowded) we were again the only non-locals…as we were on the crowded train.
This train was older and much slower. Our seats were not together - this was a common occurrence, as Trip.com sold seats that were consecutively numbered, but not always adjacent one another - but some friendly passengers moved so that we could sit together.
The day was still, humid, lowering, poised on the edge of rain.
There wasn’t much to see outside…fields, mostly. There was one impressively-evil looking factory, belching smoke heavenward from perhaps fifteen different stacks, but I didn’t lament too much that my seat was not by a window.
Arriving at the tiny Taigu station (which was dark, dinghy, and completely concrete) we exited the train. Again, some friendly locals came up and inquired if we knew where we were going.
We showed our hotel info to a young man who spoke English. He immediately looked at us, concerned. “This is not here,” he said. “This is in Pingyao.” He waved his hand behind us in an unmistakable gesture that said, “Far away.”
Well, with little else to do, we decided we’d follow the directions to the pin Patricia had dropped from the Hotels.com website. We told our new friends we’d be okay. They drove off, looking worried for us.
Our first glimpse of Taigu was underwhelming…by the station at least it was rather rundown, with litter on the sidewalks, potholed roads, puddles of dirty water. After Beijing, where neither of us could recall seeing a single piece of trash, this was quite the contrast.
We followed the directions, feeling hopeless, to the pin…We arrived shortly thereafter - at a long-abandoned building down a side lane. A rusted wheelbarrow full of bricks stood sentinel outside a door that looked as though it hadn’t been opened in years. The windows were dusty, like eyes with cataracts.
“What the hell?”
We doubled back, looked around. Nothing. The day had cleared and the afternoon grew hot. (I’ve heard China’s weather in the summer described as “yellow, liquid heat” and that is perfectly apt.) Eventually, we decided to doff our packs and call the hotel.
It was, indeed, about thirty miles away, in Pingyao (which, it should be noted, is a famous tourist city, filled with beautiful hotels and attractions.) They added that they didn’t do business with Hotels.com anymore, so our reservation wouldn’t be honored anyway. They told us to rebook using Booking.com, and then come on by!
Well, damnit, I didn’t want to go to Pingyao…I wanted to go to Taigu. And though our first impression wasn’t overwhelmingly positive, and though everyone we met seemed to be a drunk man sans shirt, we (I) vowed to stay the course.
Thus, we walked until we found a hotel at random, procured a room for the night using our translation feature, and headed up the grimy stairs.
“This has the chance to be a really bad experience,” I said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Patricia said.
Our room was okay, though it was definitively on the low-end of the hotel spectrum, and though the vent high in the wall seemed to do nothing more than usher in cigarette smoke. It was a huge, spare space, and looked as though it hadn’t been remodeled since the 80s…the early 80s. A window looked down on a bustling industrial park.
We took a nap and then had a shower and ventured forth; we hoped to find food and then see this obscure place in all its glory.
We were met, not long after we set out, by a throng of teenage music-college students. They were all very friendly, and, through Patricia’s phone, asked us questions, gave us advice, told us about themselves. I had been hoping to eat and then walk, but couldn’t balk at such a welcome.
They told us that the place we were staying, “Was not a good atmosphere.” Duly noted. We vowed to look for new digs soon. Their teacher, a guy in his twenties, recommended an adjacent restaurant for dinner and also another hotel (on the other side of the city).
We sat down for dinner, next to a group of teenage boys who were pretty drunk. At first, I was annoyed, expecting to be made fun of- or worse. But they were ultra-friendly and ended up not only (unbeknownst to us) picking up some of our tab, but also heading out and buying us a famous local desert called “Taigu cake.” They, too, asked us many questions and told us all about their city and their lives.
After dinner, we bid the guys goodbye and then left, feeling very welcomed, very at home, and took a long walk through the sleeping city.
The next day (a Sunday which dawned very hot and yellow), we hoisted our packs and began the journey to the other end of the city, and the recommended hotel. On the way, we stopped at a very American coffee shop, which was filled with students, and drank and read. Then, after much walking, much sweating, and much searching, we found the hotel. It was quite easy to miss, one unobtrusive storefront in a long row of them, the signs of which were all in Chinese.
The new place was decidedly better, and we took a room for two nights.
After unpacking, we spent the afternoon exploring. We went to the town’s one real attraction, a huge, white pagoda called the Wubian Temple, and then headed into the central shopping district. There was a mall in the middle of a huge square, in the basement of which was one of the biggest grocery stores I’ve ever seen. We stocked up on fake meat and other vegetarian food (we had some big train trips in the coming days) and some mangosteen (a tropical fruit you cannot get in the US) then headed out into the twilight for a snack. We sat in the square, feeling like very accomplished travelers. Soon, a big group of friendly, curious people had gathered around us again, and we “talked” with them through our phones for quite a while. On the way back to the hotel, we talked about how different Taigu was from Beijing. In Beijing, no one looked at us twice…in Taigu, we were like minor celebrities.
We decided that we would go to Pingyao, for the afternoon, the next day. We felt we had seen most of Taigu, and our Lonely Planet guide listed Pingyao as an essential stop. Not everything has to be obscure.
Unfortunately, my digestive system had other plans, and I spent much of the night and early morning hours moored to the toilet…and we did not go. We had to eat the four dollar train tickets we had bought.
I made one brief venture out the next day. Patricia wanted me to meet a family she had met (who were doing our laundry for us). It was nice being in the home and shop of a local family, and it was nice seeing a very severe thunderstorm rolling in, but my stomach kept telling me that I needed to get back to our room, pronto. And so I said my goodbyes and went, wishing I could be more present with the day, the environs, the city.
Lying on my back, watching rain fall through the branches of a pine in our window, smelling the wet evening, seeing the gray sky beyond…it began to feel like an image from an ancient Chinese poem. I worked to recognize the beauty in the moment, despite my sickness and frustration. Eventually, I did. Sometimes being in a place meant, well, just being in a place. I dozed off to the sound of the rain and modest rush-hour traffic, feeling mostly grateful.
Luckily, the next day, I felt far better, and was okay to venture forth.
Leaving Taigu was profound. The station we left from was far out of the city (most Chinese cities, even small ones, have two – or more – train stations, the result of China modernizing its train system by building a high speed rail network pretty much parallel to their antiquated, slow-rail network; the two exist side-by-side, often confusingly) and quite pretty in a quiet, off-the-beaten track way.
We took the high speed rail out, and it was wonderful, moving from the flat, baked, farming country into the hills. Fair weather cumulus dotted the blue skies. In the distance were mountains, big ones. My hope and happiness began to surge.
How to tell of arriving in bustling Xian, during a hot, locust-haunted twilight, passing under the city walls, eating a spicy noodle dish at a station restaurant and feeling fantastically hungry, making our way through the huge, crowded, old station to our gate, marveling at the way the sun looked slanting through the high windows onto the vaulted ceilings…the long walk in a slow-moving queue to our train, arriving in our soft sleeper room and unloading our stuff, sighing in the very cool, air-conditioned air…Meeting our roommates, a young, plump, friendly man probably in his late twenties, a furniture dealer heading on business to a faraway city on the Vietnam border, sharing a tiny bunk with his tiny daughter, and his friend, a stern but friendly older man who vaguely resembled Chairman Mao. Of setting off, at twilight, moving through the city into the mountains, as the man and his daughter made spicy noodles for dinner, as classical Chinese music played softly through the speakers…Lying back and pulling our blankets over us as we communicated back and forth through our phones. Feeling not only well but divine…feeling as though I had found everything I had set out to find in China in one swoop.
That was one of the best moments of the trip, and of my life.
In conclusion, let me say I am not drawn exclusively to obscure places. On our upcoming trip to Australia, we are planning on spending substantial amounts of time in Sydney, near Uluru, in Perth. I know that famous places are famous for a reason, usually beautiful, usually well worth seeing. Many of the best moments of my life have been spent in these places.
But, sometimes, it’s nice to venture off the main highway, the main trail. To travel the backroads. To go somewhere the tourists don’t.
That’s why we are also planning on going to Darwin and Alice Springs (the city right in the heart of the Outback), where we will (hopefully) stroll the streets like the locals do, and not encounter any tourists.
(It will be winter then, and we’ll have many hours to view the Southern Cross. Look!)
That’s why someday I hope to visit Paraguay, Uruguay, Equatorial Guinea (all of which I’ve written of extensively).
That’s why, someday, I will probably go to Anderson, South Carolina, and stay in a chain hotel, and eat in chain restaurants, and walk nondescript streets that few tourists have ever walked.
Because it’s there.
And I’m so happy it is.
Hyde Park, Chicago
March 10 – May 24, 2020
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