Shiyin??’s Blog

Gao is quite something: at the same age (just several months younger), he has been to Tibet 15 times since 1994, including 5 times by bicycle – he rode his bicycle alone along all routes: Chuanzang, Dianzang, Qingzang and Xinzang. He also rode his bicycle from Hangzhou all the way to Eastern Europe!

Gao’s MSN portrait is Winnie the Pooh – he always jokes that he is just a bear since he looks like one. But his inner world is truly beautiful: he has a big heart: he volunteered to teach in a hope school of the poorest region in China for one year, where he had to sleep on straw and spend his own money buying textbooks for the children; he always helps local people and other travelers since he is really good at mechanics. While we were in Lhasa, one evening he didn’t join us for dinner because he had to fix three bicycles for other people. Once he fixed the tracter of a tribe in Xinjiang and was invited to a local wedding as a honored guest:) He is good at calligraphy, loves classic music and his profession is artificial intelligence technology, and both of his parents are from very prestigious families in China but you can never tell if you see him on the street – he is probably one of the humblest people you know.

Jie and I were absolutely thankful to get Gao as our travel partner/guide – he knows the routes almost as the back of his hands: he remembers each mountain’s names which are really difficult to even pronounce since most of them were just translation from Tibetan or other minority languages. He knows where to stay or eat, when to leave and what to do, he knows the car so well that he can fix most of the problems himself, and the best is, he has so many adventurous stories to tell everywhere we go because he had experienced so much. 

I hope one day he would finally decide to write his stories down – that can really benefit a lot of people.

Sep 12 midnight Hangzhou home

Today is almost all about the upcoming trip: the first thing in the morning was to get the border pass for Tibet: Gao met up with me at the police station but was told that we had to go to another office to get it done – this is China, every district has its own rule. Normally I won’t need a border pass since a Chinese passport with valid visas can get me in Tibet, however, Gao had quite crazy experience in 2005: he was stopped by the border military and because of his US visa on the passport, he was prisoned as a suspicious foreign spy for couple of days, together with two of his travel partners!!! So a border pass can avoid a lot of unnecessary trouble. It was actually quite easy: we just filled out the form that has the company chop and in 10 minutes, it was done. The key is that you need to know every single town you are planning to go into in Tibet, otherwise, you will be sorry when you are there. Since we are planning to cover almost the whole Tibet, the space on the form was really too tight…

After getting quite a few notorizations done under my name for our business in China, Gao and I went for our last shopping trip at outdoor stores. But first comes to first, I got a 3G broadband card that will give me 4800 hours access to internet nationwide for the next two years – now I can keep up with my blog during the trip!:)

I just love outdoor stores – in Hamburg, I went to Globaltroetter so many times and could spend hours in there. Now there is also a Decathlon supermarket in Hangzhou – although most stuff are not that nice or very high quality, but they are cheap and useful. We got the headlight, water bottle, professional mountain climbing socks, etc. The next purchase was rather expensive – a Casio Protrek outdoor watch. I wish I had got it in Germany or US since the price here is just so much higher – I probably spent about 70 Euro more. However, it was really useful to have a 200-meter waterproof watch with compass, pressure sensor and temperature sensor for this trip. At another small private outdoor store I found most of other equipment there – God I could spend the whole day there!!!

It would have been a perfect day, except that I got a call from one of my best childhood friends: she told me that she is taking sick-leave at home these two weeks (I was wondering why I haven’t see her online for quite a while) because she had to have an abortion to take away the baby that she had by accident. Since she and her husband both work for the government, they had no choice but to abort the baby – otherwise they would lose their jobs. I was so sad, so so so sad…. The baby is almost 3-month old already!!!

Honestly I didn’t feel that much about this one-child policy before since I believed it was good for our country to control the population – we would be like India without this policy. However, today when it is so close to me, I was deeply hit. It is a life and my friend would have kept the baby if not because they both would have lost their jobs. The policy is much loose now and in big cities like Shanghai, the government even encourages people to have two kids, however, it’s still as tight for government employees. I can only pray for the parents and for the baby – I believe that he/she is now in heaven as an angel…God bless him/her….