I opted to skip Heavenly Lake. Not because it was closed — it wasn’t — but because the lake has suffered the same fate as all the other natural attractions in China that have attained sufficient popularity. The Chinese have built a cable car over it and slapped on a hefty entrance fee.
I could have dealt with the cable car. The lake region is sufficiently large that the car can be safely ignored. But the principle of paying $19 (bus tickets plus entrance fee) to spend a day in some pretty scenery just doesn’t sit right.
These fees are a long-standing aggravation. They charged me $4 just to bike the highway through Tiger Leaping Gorge. It’s not as though a friendly park ranger took my money, or I received a nice four-color map and brochure, or the funds went to trail maintenance. The Chinese just set up a shack by the road, and a group of lounging men collared me when I went past.
Probably the most brazen example of this pay-for-nature scam is the desert outside Dunhuang. The sand dunes are magnificent, several hundred meters high and undulating off into the distance. The Chinese have dropped a turnstile right out in front of them. A turnstile to enter the desert.
Fortunately, it’s difficult to fence off the entire desert. Chinese wall-making capabilities ain’t what they used to be. So I trotted down a little ways and hopped the fence. It’s the principle.
I decided to skip Heavenly Lake, and this morning went down to the train station to fetch my bike. I had intended to send the bike straight through to Kashgar, but instead pulled it out of storage and spent a few hours pedaling the streets of Urumqi.
Urumqi itself is far from heaven. It’s a dirty, teeming modern city surrounded by desert, and the only thing it really has to recommend itself is its diversity. The road signs are in Mandarin and Uigur. The faces in the markets are more varied then I’ve seen anywhere else in China: Han Chinese, white Russian, Pakistani, Indian, bearded Muslim, and many that I simply can’t place. I sat for a while eating lamb skewers outside a restaurant; the restaurant workers peeling vegetables next to me chattered in Uzbeki.
It’s a grim, ugly place, but I’ll take city biking to too-fancy-for-their-own-good alpine meadows anyday. The streets are free, and on the bike, they belong to me.
