The Morning Express to Xiahe

XIAHE, China – The loud knocks on the door woke me. I opened my eyes to see the $5 hotel room was still pitch black.

"Xiahe! Xiahe!" A man screamed as he continued to knock on the door. "Six o'clock, Xiahe!"

"What time is it?" I said to Rebecca, my travelling companion. Her stiff Chinese mattress was a couple inches closer to the nightstand and a cellphone.

It was ten to six. Last night the hotel manager told us the bus to Xiahe would leave at 7:00 a.m. Our dingy accommodations overlooked the bus station, and there wasn't any hot water for a shower, so we set our alarms for 6:40. All we had to was throw on a pair of pants, put our packs on our backs and pile into the bus.

The man's calls became more intense. He tried English. "Six..." He fumbled for the right word, and not finding it, went back to Chinese. "Six-thirty! The bus is leaving at six-thirty!"

Thirty minutes later, Rebecca and I were the second and third passengers on an old Chinese bus bound for Xiahe. The town's dusty south bus station, had several other vehicles waiting to depart. These buses showed "Hezuo" as their destination, and were filled with Chinese Muslims with neat skull caps and head scarves.

The bus started trolling the streets of Linxia, looking for more passengars by inching along and having someone shout "Xiahe!" out the window. Linxia is a mostly Muslim town. The largest buildings are the town's grand mosques, which combine modern Chinese white tile with the curved domes and minarets of Islam.

We left the station as three, but slowly the bus began to fill up. A Tibetan woman her small child got on the near the market, two old men waved the bus down on the side of the street. Rebecca and I got out and bought steamed buns, a Pepsi and a local fruit that resembles large, brown grapes.

A kung-fu movie started playing on the bus' lone television. There were English subtitles, but I couldn't read them from the my seat at the back. The bus driver used the horn not only into indicate imminent danger, but also to point out all passing cars, motorcycles, pedestrians and domestic animals. This is to say that he honked constantly, blocking the movie. I put on my iPod, cranked up some repetitive techno, and looked at the changing landscape.

The boundary between the Muslim lands to the north and east and the Tibetan ones south and west are clearly marked. There's a toll booth and a giant rectangular written in the white-and-gold Tibetan style. From here the road signs are marked in Chinese and Tibetan. Out the window I see farmers with round faces and rosy cheeks, some leading their tiny cows to grasslands away from the villages. The mountains on each side of the road are higher and more brown, at points they seem to rise thousands of feet above the dusty road.

The begins stopping at villages, and slowly the bus begins to empty. By the time we pull off the highway there are only a dozen people abroad. We enter Xiahe by driving down the town's main street, a wide and dusty lane the recalls the boom towns of the Wild West.

We got off the bus, and I looked down at my cell phone. 10:30. We still had the whole day to explore.