Counting down to departure
Big news! No, not about the fellow with the 100% conviction rate, 34 for 34. Not even about planes falling out of the sky, scary as the thought is (perhaps surprisingly, I don’t really like flying).
My Chinese visa has been granted. I was quite apprehensive about this, as my plans didn’t fit their idea of what I should be doing at all. I’ve been to China twice before, and my visits were straight forward - my last visit only required a visa because I touched down in Ürümqi on the way back from Tblisi and so didn’t qualify for transit without visa.
Those visas involved paper application forms, but now it’s all digital, with selections for various fields in pull down menus. I struck a problem with a question about lost passports - the information I needed to answer was in the lost passport. I did ask DIA, but they just told me the number of my current passport, something I had already given them to help them identify me. There’s a “not applicable” button on the visa application website, which turned out to reveal a free form field, where I could write my own story.
I had to use this several times - to explain that I am an independent traveler, so have no sponsor, and have no letter of introduction. It was only hours after I submitted the form that I remembered a hotel booking works as an introduction. Perhaps worst of all - the question about my departure point only gave cities as far west as Zangye, a full 2,000 kilometres short of Huoerguosi, on the border with Kazakhstan. Oddly, there was no requirement to provide evidence of my departure. There was also a question about my parents - no option for deceased, but they did have “other”. For dad, I could then input that fact, but not for mum - so I just said she’s retired. Accurate, but a trifle misleading.
So, with all that going on, I was really worried I wouldn’t get a visa. Thursday, they asked for evidence of my flight in, and my hotel bookings. Sometime between 4 o’clock Friday afternoon and noon on Saturday, my status changed to “bring us your passport”. So, yes, I’m in.
I did learn something surprising through this process - I though I’d have a plan B, make it easy by flying out of Ürümqi. I discovered I could fly there from Auckland next week for $NZ360 ($US220)! That’s a bargain.
There have been a couple of strange trends showing up in my YouTube watching. Several travelers I started watching for their Malaysia and Thailand content have recently arrived in China - Shanghai and Chengdu are popular. Stranger is the trend to title videos with a title something like “we were warned not to come to China - we prove them wrong”. I don’t know what they were being told to scare them off, but I can say that spending 24 hours in Shanghai stuffing one’s face doesn’t really make anyone an expert.
After China, I’ll be heading into Kazakhstan, and some how exploring Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan but I still haven’t got a plan of attack sorted. This map shows the problem: the shape of the land has caused borders to be drawn in complicated ways and with few places to cross. Add limited transport options and political differences that leads to borders being closed, and sorting a route is complicated.
I have to give a shout out to Macpac. I’ve been looking for a light raincoat that goes below my waist. I went in today and found this coat in their clearance section, with a price of $70, reduced from $290. What I hadn’t noticed was that the price tag said it is a “mini mountain hoody - kids”: quite the mis-labelling. The actual price in their system was $140, but they sold it to me for the sticker price. Good on them.
Thanks to my slightly not-permitted digital borrower account with Auckland libraries, I have piled my tablet up with as many books about the Silk Road as I could find, and have started reading Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster. I don’t think I’ll be travelling quite as he does, with his bottles of Amontillado and cases of Polish champagne - it will be more noodles and a coffee plunger for me. He is heading east from London, as part of a tour group - he spends all his time hiding from them and keeping his identity secret. So it’s very funny when the other travelers are reading his earlier book about the same journey, and asking what he thinks of it. Since he doesn’t really talk to any of them, I wonder if they have cottoned on and are taking the piss. It’s what I’d do.