Taklamakan means “to leave alone/out/behind.” One will surely feel left alone in this empire of sand and sun, the biggest desert in China. “The ocean of death,” they said, “once you get in, you will never get out.” It occupies an area of nearly the size of Germany. After two months of traveling in it, I decided to leave that afternoon. I took a bus, went outside of town and tried to get a ride. I hitchhiked for half year but this was the first day I could not find someone to take me. Not because drivers didn’t want to, it was because they couldn’t reach my destination. It is one of the most dangerous routes for drivers. I’ve never heard of anyone who hiked through it. Sixty hours driving to cross this wonder land into Tibet, the roof of the world.
There were many times I gazed at the horizon and couldn’t find the end, felt that I lost the sense of scale. I filled the enormous emptiness between sky and desert with pictures of moments in my past. Somehow the emptiness helped my brain to work through life experiences and see a better picture of myself. I grew up in a small southeastern Chinese city where we produce millions of products in thousands of factories, where we believe that life quality is about what you have at home, where we find ourselves picking up one toothbrush among a few hundred different choices, where the happiness level depends on the amount of luxurious handbags. So the desert to me seemed very empty at first glance. I was so sympathetic to the locals; I muttered to myself, “Oh my, what do they have beside dry sand and the bright sky?” Well, perhaps they enjoyed the view of the desert and Mount Kunlun, relaxed while feasting on the well-known wine, the sweetest watermelon and the delicious BBQ lamb. I had one watermelon a day in those days, forty cents each.
Three days before my exodus I crossed the center of the desert; I got a ride from a Uyghur uncle. He drove a whole day to drop off his daughter at school; he looked at me suspiciously and asked, “Why don’t you get a bus ticket?” Later that day he told me that he didn’t mind having someone keep him from falling asleep. When I finally arrived and opened the car, a powerful heat wave pushed directly right onto my face. I felt out of breath for a moment, searched my phone to double check the time. It really was 8:30 at night but it still felt like early afternoon. I found a dirt house in a small alley. A triangular place with five little rooms, two on both sides, one faced the front door, an open space with a well was in the middle. There was one small bed and an old table, enough space in the room to walk in and out, three dollars per night. Each afternoon when I went back to this place, all the lodgers stayed in the small yard in the middle chatting. An old man traveled to sell his goods in a fair, an auntie stayed here for a temporary job at a vineyard, and a coal mine worker traveled home to see his family. I listened quietly and felt like life lifted its veil and gave me a bitter smile. When I left, they were all out, only the socks and towels hung next to the well, forecasting the crowed scene later.
After waiting for hours, eventually someone told me that only the big cargo trucks would drive regularly on this road. So, I went to an auto repair place, asked truck drivers I saw for a ride. One of the drivers gave me an address and told me to be there in the evening. I went for an early dinner then got on the truck. Four trucks left together so that they could help each other out if any issue occurred.
The feeling of the emptiness came again next morning. We stopped at a tiny store built of abandoned wood and plastic pieces. It was very empty inside. I only saw the dirt floor; a big piece of wood on top of two empty oil drum was the merchandise table. I bought a bottle of water, soon realized that it was a reused spring water bottle, it wasn’t sealed. Then we waited in line to go to bathroom at the back, which was an empty dirt yard with a hole on one side. A door size plastic was the only shield. It was a two feet deep, one foot wide dirt hole, two big wood blocks nicely put on the top. It turned out to be the most luxurious bathroom throughout the whole trip. But it wasn’t a pleasant experience. The second I squatted down, my phone slipped through the pocket and fell into that hole. I paused and stared at the phone laid on a pile of dry wastes. Hmm, luckily it fell at the edge.
Finding places to stop for food or tea or even just hot water was hard, but it was harder to find bathrooms. Everywhere we went in to rest and eat, the owner would greet us and serve whatever they have. Food was mostly meat with rice or noodle, no veggies. At these places I could at least hide behind the house when I have to go to the bathroom. After we left one stopping point, it would take six hours or longer to get to the next place. My anxiety and helplessness in searching bathroom reached the limit the next evening. I couldn’t do it two hours ago because I couldn’t relax in the wildness and I was holding it in pain. When the sound of screeching break reminded me drivers would stop here. I opened the door immediately, ran as far as I could to find a spot that could offer me a little cover. It was such a hard mission with no plants or buildings. I rarely found anything that could protect me from exposing myself. The next truck soon arrived so I couldn’t try any longer. Poor me, walked back to the truck and waited for the next stop, still holding.
When I wasn’t racing to find bathrooms, most of my trip was pretty slow pace. The road conditional allowed drivers to go proximately twenty miles per hour. I wondered in my mind while amazed by the view outside the window. Minute after minute, hour after hour, it was the static me in the moving truck feeling that the truck pushed a whole world of light brown color slowly to the back; after some time looking, all other colors started to appear. Primary Yellow, Diarylide Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Orange, Amber, Primary Magenta, Barn red, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red Light, camel, burnt sienna, dark chocolate, at one second the whole world looked like a cake to me. I looked, and looked, and looked, from cool early morning, to bright noon and sleepy afternoon, until midnight. The truck slowly left the desert and went up into the mountain. The elevation rose from four thousand feet to seventeen thousand feet. It got colder and colder. Mount Kunlun’s average altitude was eighteen thousand feet, dry and brown as the desert. I traveled through most of the mountains in China, but none seemed like Mount Kunlun, so high, so cool, so dry, and so desolate.
The two most distinct groups in China among the fifty-five minorities are Uyghurs and Tibetans. Hitchhiking in these areas could be challenging because of the difficult languages. Before this particular ride in that two months, if a driver let me in, it would be so quiet in the car until I pointed to a place to stop. Luckily my truck drivers were Han. We did get to talk a little even though they were shy and quiet. I had to explain why I was single at age thirty and why I wanted to travel by myself. I wanted to know why they would risk their lives doing this job. When I told them about many kind and lovely people I met during my trip, they warned me to be careful with Uyghur men and Tibetan men. I tried to tell them my one month of stay in a Tibetan family and what I encountered, but they insisted that I should beware of those people. This conversation about either they are good or bad and the bleak view made me very sad that night.
Human beings should be “One,” but many chose to be “Individual.” We just have too many conflicts in life, between men and women, between Han and Tibetan, between people we love the most, between people we will never meet in life. Falling asleep in the dolorous darkness, a while later, my driver woke me up, “Mei, wake up, we are at death valley, you will have to stay awake for a while.”
I woke up with bleary eyes. They told me this valley has only forty percent of the oxygen in the air compared to the plain. Many people got sick and died in this place. One pointed into the dark and said, “look! That’s the sign of the Tibetan border!” I realized my feet were cold even in the truck. This place must be very high. We stop at a little store for dinner. It was 10:30 at night already. Same as usual, there was no bathroom. I covered myself with a blanket borrowed from the store, walked out with a light headache from the altitude and sleepy eyes, went to the back and Boom! There I found the most beautiful bathroom ever! A full sky of stars was the roof of my bathroom, what else could I ask for? The Milky Way shone like millions of happy faces, I couldn’t stop smiling. The world had its unique way of saying, “Hey earth, you are not alone.”
The next morning, I gave my full attention to the sky, kept thinking of the view I saw last night. Sunbeams shone, and the sky was no longer dark and sparkled with stars. I thought to myself, “How could one mix the pallet to get this blue?” Nature is magical in producing colors. I remember I struggled for hours in my painting class to get the blue I wanted for that kind of dry sunny morning. Somehow, I felt the blue was the opposite of any other in existence, the cool color miraculously has a soft flowing water-like texture. This pure blue created a perfect balance into the world I was observing: Dry and wet, hot and cold, hard and soft, heavy and light, I even associated women and men with the lovely blue topped with the smooth edge of white tender clouds and the light brown sharp pointy contour outline of the mountain. The blue sky drove away that sorrowful desolation I felt last night. The mountain became this breathtaking beauty. I enjoyed it so much that even the bathroom problem faded away that morning.
The truck drivers dropped me off in a village at the foot of Mount Kailash. Here I would hike into the heart of this holy mountain where it is believed to be the center of the world in Buddhism and Hinduism; here I would lose my trail and eventually was saved by local Tibetans. The journey continues, no matter where I was and where I am now. Stood there with my dirty backpack, I saw a range of black mountains under the blue sky were topped with heavy snow, a group of Tibetan pilgrims prostrated themselves on the mountain trail. I recalled all my months of traveling and asked myself: “Why am I here?” Was that because of my thirty years of life come to a pausing point? Was that because of my confusion in the materialistic world? Was that because of my doubts about getting married due to my age and tradition? Was that simply because of the many beautiful places and people I watched and read so I had to see them in person? Was that because of my love to the nature? Was that because of my determination of creating my own significant memories? Was that because of my search of meaning in life? Or, just because.