The Wild, Wild West

ULAANBASHI, Mongolia – Hollywood scared the shit out of the Soviet censors. Very, very few films were allowed to pass the Iron Curtain, and nothing in John Wayne's canon was on that list. The quintessentially American westerns – "High Noon" and "The Quick and The Dead" – never screened in Warsaw or Moscow. Instead the proletariat a revisionist take on the genre: the Red Western.

As with their American brethren, the Red Westerns are a diffuse group, but in general these movies subverted and questioned the Western's moral compass. Many times the Native Americans are shown to be heroes, and the maundering cowboy an enemy. Instead of making off with a pile of money, the Red Western hero distributes it amongst the people.

With these plotlines, the Soviet Film Agency couldn't just call up the National Park Service and request a three-week shoot in Monument Valley. The Red Westerns had to use stand-ins for the scenery of the American West, and by far the most popular alternative was here in Mongolia.

After a long drive back to Ulaanbaatar today, I realize that the directors needed to alter very little to make the shooting location seem American. Our route from Kharkorum is more southerly than the one we took out, which means we are much closer to the Gobi Desert. Soon after leaving, the terrain goes from light brown to a deep rust. Rolling hills are replaced with strange rock formations dropped randomly in the plains. The steppe winds have blown oblong curves into the rock. This could be Colorado or Arizona.

Bobby is apparently not desperate to get back to Ulaanbaatar. Three hours into our trip, six rotations into Battir's new tape – a collection of Buddhist mantras acquired at the Kharkorum Gift Shop – she asks if we are up for one last tourist attraction. "Do you want to see dunes?" she says, and half-hour later the van is parked on the top of a small hill of sand.

Although they lobbied for the stop, Myriam, Cing and Bobby decide the biting wind is too much and just take a few steps out of the van. Caleb and I plunge into the wilderness. Here there are no trees and no grasses, just sand and a few scattered pieces of scrub brush. I run toward a high dune, a couple hundred meters from the van, scamper to the summit and then jump off the sharpest face.

Thud! I land not in a cushion of buoyant sand but on a patch of crusty sand hard as cement. My knees scream in pain. I have been the victim of a mirage. The toffee dunes and blinding sunlight so much resembled the Southwest for a brief moment, I deluded myself into believe I was in a real desert. I hobble back to the car, cursing not to make the same mistake again.

Perhaps it is lingering skepticism from the fall or the combined effect of four nights of questionable sleep and hard drinking, but I am slow to realize the other Western parallels as we pull off the road for lunch. We stop in the first settlement since our ger the previous night, five bumpy hours from Kharkorum.

Our destination is a canteen smack dab in the middle of a one-street town. Inside a young waitress, bland expression practically bursting with ennui, moves her hand to indicate open seating. We choose the only table big enough to accommodate a party of six. The menu sticks to familiar favorites: noodles with mutton, mutton soup, fried mutton rice and buuz, which are mutton-filled dumplings. On the walls is a collection of crap that looks pulled out of someone's storage closet: yellowed surveryor's maps, a brochure for a ger camp, a couple family photos and a wool hat. This is an old time saloon, a watering hole for grizzled locals (two old herders sit at the table opposite ours, sipping milk tea) and travelers passing through.

Hunger abated, I am able to examine the rest of the town with a clear mind. The dozen or so structures in this town are all on the same side of the street, built so they connect in one long row. They are each the same heigh, with matching shutters and all made out of wood. Each building is seperated by a different bright paint color, either a coral blue, fiery orange or magenta. This place is a couple tumbleweeds and a hero short of being a Sergio Leone film set.

Too soon I am in the backseat of the van, speeding back towards civilization. Mongolia is true the Wild West. Here there is no need to remember a time when the place wasn't "tame." We still cut our own path, choosing where to explore in a virgin land. Authority is far away; no one is coming to rescue the idiotic adventurer. It is a place where people still live as they please, mostly unfettered by the pressures of the information age. I will miss it.

Behind the Door

KHARKHORIN, Mongolia – Traveling, to some extent, is about limits, journeying to the edges of the Earth and seeing if it is possible to cross thresholds hidden in our home communities. On this trip I have done many things that I previously thought too complicated, foreign or illegal to consider. But here I found the place where even I will not venture, my line in the sand: a fern green door covered with deep scratches in its thick hardwood.

The door lies in a part of Mongolia I am sure my hosts would rather I not see. I found it by wandering off, going on another "walk" that confuses the Mongolians so much. After my companions and I arrive at the ger camp in the mid-afternoon, we are not interested in sitting around the cast-iron stove and drinking salty milk tea. Instead, Caleb, Myriam and I excuse ourselves after just one cup (rather than the customary five or six) and set off for the town. Bobby, increasingly in-tune with our need to meander, looks at her watch and declares that we can go, as long as we are back in precisely two hours. It might be a strange request coming from someone who on this trip has shown a lax regard for puncuality, but we promise to return in time for more milk tea and steamed mutton dumplings.

Our accommodation is an enclosed ger in the middle of a string of fenced lots running on an east-west axis. The ger entrances face south, toward the town of Kharkhorin. For a front yard, the half-dozen or so families that live here have a kilometer-wide zone of boggy meadow between them and the town. There is no established road leading toward town, so the three of us walk the shortest course available: a straight line.

As we walk, looming to our east is a decaying flour factory, a reminant of the country's attempted industrialization. In the post-war period, when Stalin and Krushchev's Five Year Plans pushed the Soviet Union to recover through massive expansion of heavy industry, the regime's puppet rulers here in Mongolia tried to do the same thing on the steppe. They encouraged nomadic Mongolians to cluster in agricultural communes and newly constructed communities and export commodities to other Soviet republics and allies. For fairly obvious reasons, it didn't work. Fercriously independent people accustomed to packing up their house and moving every few weeks did not take kindly to sixteen hour shifts in an airless factory, grinding grain for the Ukrainian Youth League.

After the Communists lost power in 1991, the suddenly sponsorless factory shuttered its doors, leaving most of the people in the town unemployed. A grant from the Japanese government allowed it to reopen several years later, but there is no sign of activity among the rust covered pylons and smoke stacks caked tar black from decades of grime. I cannot believe that this complex produces a basic food staple. I imagine any flour that comes from this place to be inedible, laced with carcinogens and additives.

We press on. The late afternoon sun is intense, even in the middle of the winter, and I am forced to unzip my bulbous down jacket and remove my scarf. Today, for the first time in weeks, there is water mixed in with the thin crust of snow on the ground. Approximately halfway between the ger and town, we encounter a sheep train. Two herders, both young men in dirty deels, solemnly march back toward a fenced in era to our north after a day of grazing in the mostly barren fields. The sheep seemed well accustomed to humans, and do not baa or complain in any nonverbal way as we snake through the herd.

These few animals are the last sign of natural life we will see on this walk, for Kharkhorin appears to a Hollywood post-Apocalyptic set brought to life. The first building we pass in the town proper is a prison, decaying like every other structure here. Thankfully, no inmates are about, the only sign of life is a couple bare light bulbs glowing in the middle of a window. There is no fence around the building, as if there is nothing worthwhile about the place for people locked up inside to escape.

The prison is one of the more solidly constructed places in town. The streets, all unpaved and filled with slushy potholes, are lined with cheaply constructed buildings of concrete. Some are shops, others small homes. The residences are designed in the same style as in Tsesterleg: square lots, fenced in with mismatched hardwood pickets, with a ger or tiny house placed in the middle. Many lots have a latrine in the back, and I suspect no running water inside.

As soon as I arrive in the town, I realize that we have no reason for coming here. We have plenty of provisions back and dinner waiting in the ger, and there are no tourist attractions or museums on the town's few streets. Every business we pass is shuttered, presumably for the Mongolian New Year, but perhaps because the owners have fled someplace nicer.

Kharkhorin is a blot of the beautiful landscape of Mongolia. It is an argument against urbanization, for here there are not enough people for an interesting, vibrant gathering of people, but enough so that the combined waste and pollution of several hundred families can congeal into a bloody mess. This is perhaps the most depressing place I have ever visited, sadder than the Killing Fields of Cambodia or the KGB Prison in Lithuania, for here the despair does not seem to be improving.

With no other plan, the three of us walk a rectangle around town, with each small street more depressing than the next. We walk mostly in silence. I am amazed at how forlorn this place is; it is so down that it seems beyond a cheery joke or two. Just as we are about to make our third right turn, and begin the last segment of the rectangle, a small building catches my eye. It appears to be a small bagoda, but there are no windows to peer inside. But under the scratched door I see a light.

I want to go inside. I want there to be a point, some redeeming value in this ugly place. But as I make a move to go in, Myriam stops me.

"Wait," she says, and I reconsider. What is behind the door? And why do I need to go inside?

In all probability, there is just a gaunt, frail Mongolian man on the other side of the door with a small selection on canned goods. But I realize there is no reason for me to found out, nor do I want to take the risk of endangering my friends by going inside. The entrance is closed, and there is no sign I can tell that the store is open. This, it appears, is my limit.

Something Old, Something Digital

TERKHIIN TSAGAAN NUUR, Mongolia – From the outside, the ger where the resident family lives and the one where I'm staying are identical except for a small detail: the family's ger has a satellite dish. That's right: the canvas tent next to mine has a satellite dish. Not the tiny kind that people in the Bronx string on a fire escape or rooftop, but a six-foot model that's wider than the door. Here I am 400 miles from the nearest city, in the middle of a mountain range, staying in a collapsible home, but my hosts get more channels than I do in the States.

Oh, I know I shouldn't be shocked that there is television on the steppes. The Indo-American author Pico Iyer traveled around the region 20 years ago and reported back about "Video Night in Kathmandu." In the rather ponderous final product, Iyer argued that people around the world, no matter how from "civilization" they may appear to live, are being drawn into our globalized world.

Good for them. Too often, Westerners come to places such as the Great White Lake, and expect to find indigenous people living exactly the way their ancestors did 1,500 years ago. Meanwhile, these same people have an iPhone on order to be delivered as soon as they are available in New York. I despise "native" rituals, so common in China, hate "sacred dances" and "traditional rites" performed three times a day for tourists.

Mongolia is refreshingly different. I won't say the place is "authentic," rather the Mongolians approach to tourism, at least on this trip, is just more laid-back. Once we left the capital, there have been no stops at souvenir stands, no detours to cheaply restored cultural relics with steep admission fees. People here don't apologize for their lives.

At our first ger, Battir's family extended extraordinary hospitality, but made no attempts to hide away the trappings of twenty-first century life. Some of the family wore the traditional Mongolian herder's outfit, the del, while the teenagers strolled around in jeans and knock-off sweatshirts. In one corner of the ger hung a series of family portraits taken during a visit to Ulaanbaatar's Sukhbaatar Square. At night, we listened to the radio.

Here at the Great White Lake, we arrive just before dark and immediately are shown the same kindness. Inside the family's ger, we down buuz and buuz in soup and take the obligatory shots of vodka. The oldest man in the house starts asking questions through Bobby, our guide. Where are we from? Are we students? How is Mongolia?

We talk until nine, when Bobby takes to our sleeping quarters. Rather than bunking next to the fire, this night we sleep in a ger specially for tourists, one with five beds and no wall of photos. The arrangement here is more a business proposition than the one we found on our first night, as this family relies on tourism for their income.

The next day, we wake up to plates of stale bread and a young girl warming the embers of the fire, making it safe to crawl out of our sleeping bags. As we wait for the adults to rally, the girl shows us a game. She takes out a worn bag of shagai, or sheep ankle bones, and shows us how to play shagai dice. The bone pieces, which are about two inches long and an inch wide with a S-shaped curve, are thrown in pieces. Each side is an animal: camel, horse, goat or sheep. Players take turns rolling the dice, moving a set number of places based on the animals thrown (horse is great, camels stink), until someone "wins" the race.

Cing is smitten with the game, and after Bobby arrives she has Bobby ask the girl the price of a set. The girl is visibly puzzled: She clearly brought out the dice as a way of making friends with the guests, not making a sale. After a lengthy discussion, she finally accepts 5,000 turgug, or $4.50.

Her mother arrives shortly afterward, and then there is a subtle shift in her behavior. They stop being just hospitable and start offering "service." The mother wants to know if we would like to try on dels and go horseback riding to the lake. I shoot Caleb a look and at the same time I see Myriam glancing a Cing: we all realize this is ridiculous, but don't want to offend the host family. They believe that we came to Mongolia and expect a bit of a show. So, as a courtesy we accept the mother's offer, and soon her husband appears with a large trunk. Inside are a few crisply folded del. A del resembles a one piece, knee-high dress made with thick cotton. As with all things Mongolian, it is extremely functional: the open legs allow a rider to comfortably be in the saddle all day while insulation protects against the wind. The four tourists are each handed a piece in his or her own size. Myriam and Cing both wiggle into plum-colored garments, Caleb's is maroon with a repeating gold circular pattern, and mine a dull shade of gray. Our hosts tie colorful belts to complete the ensembles.

We are then paraded outside, where our noble steeds await. A young man, perhaps 10 or 11, helps Caleb, Cing and I mount (Myriam, of course, needs no assistance). Our handler arranges us in a line, and then requests our cameras. Then, with the young guide and his even smaller brother in the lead, we are sent in the direction of the lake, three kilometers distant.

On the way, with my horse frequently running off-course, I have plenty of time to ponder the family. They brought out a bit of kitsch - dressing us up in colorful costumes and taking snapshots to send home to Mom and Dad - but they didn't put on a mask in their dealings with us. There is no pretension that these people are herders who live off the land and spend their evenings reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead by candlelight. They're in the tourist industry, making three dollars a night for hosting and feeding a foreigner, and an additional two dollars for every hour someone rides a horse. It's not much, but with few expenses, it means enough for something special from time to time.

Here's my only question: When the yuppies in the Patagonia jackets arrive, do they hide the satellite dish?

Home Sweet Ger

Near BALGAI, MONGOLIA — Preparing for bed on the steppe is a strange ritual. First I take off the clothes I wore to keep warm during the day: the fuzzy brown sweater, the two layers of long underwear, the smoky pair of Gap cargo pants. All of them are covered in sweat, sweat that will freeze in the night and lower my body temperature. I rummage through my bag for new set of clothes: another layer of long underwear, blue sleep pants, a T-shirt and a hat. I put on the sleep pants and the T-shirt, but keep the long underwear tucked under my shoulder, to hide under my pillow for later. Only then can I put on a fresh pair of wool socks and tuck myself into the Mummy sleeping bag.

Maintaining the appropriate body temperature during the night will take balance. I must weigh the heat of the fire against the icy winds of the steppe outside. It's four hours after dark and already Bobby's pocket thermometer reads -20 on a quick trip outside. Getting through the night, like everything else out here in the Mongolian countryside, requires careful planning.

Thankfully, I don't need to invent a way to survive out here. Our hosts, with decades of experience and the wisdom passed down from generations of nomads, are experts. The most important line of defense against the elements is the ger. The ger, usually called a "yurt" in English, is a specialized tent with features even the most advanced North Face structure can't match. The base of the structure is a circular lattice of wood, about four feet high. At the top of the lattice, several dozen wooden poles are angled inward so they meet in a small circle. This opening is the chimney, and it is supported by two thick beams that drop to the floor. These wooden pieces (which aren't found out here on the steppe, they come from distant forests) are wrapped around the outside in a thick layer of white canvas. In the winter, wool felt blankets are hung around the insides of the tent to keep out the howling winds.

The felt is less than an inch thick, but it's throughly windproof. On this cold night I can hear the wind howl, but it doesn't penetrate this warm space. A small iron stove is the only source of heat, and it's placed right in the center of the structure.



Our party arrived an hour after an awe-inspiring sunset with empty stomachs. Tonight, our hosts are the family of Battir, who Bobby has hired as our van driver. We've only met a day earlier, but Battir's mother, father and sister are very welcoming when we haul our still clean bags from the van. They implore us to take off our coats, and start feeding us bowls of buuz, a fatty mutton dumpling, and airag, fermented horse milk. Vodka comes out later, and we do several shots to honor our hosts.

By 9 p.m. the bottle is put away, Battir goes off to an adjoining ger where Bobby and he will spend the night. Bobby then begins to figure out sleeping arrangements. This ger, like all others, appears cylindrical from the outside, but in reality is five-sided. One side is the entrance, another contains a small armoire, and final three sides have thin mattresses that serve as chairs during the day, beds at night. Battir's mother and grandmother take one bed, Jin and Myriam squeeze on another side, while Battir's father has the smallest bed to himself. Caleb and I are placed on the floor on opposite sides of the fireplace.

Maybe it's the heavy dinner, or the excitement of beginning the journey, but I'm not tired after getting in my sleeping bag. I scan the surroundings. Grandma is already asleep. Husband and wife, sleeping in separate beds, are conducting conversation in whispers. A portable short wave radio is quietly playing an Old Mongolian folk tune. Then I return to the ger. The outside seems so plain, just a circle of off-white fabric, but inside it is colorful. A ring of hand stitched flowers has been carefully sewn and placed at eye level. The wool blankets that provide insulation are colorful scenes from nomadic life: a strutting ram, a picturesque sunset. In between one bed there are a few family photos, one of Grandma on a visit to Ulaanbaatar many years, another of a young Battir in front of his home. Opposite these is a small altar, where Buddhist prayers can be performed. Although the interior of the ger is wide open, each bit of space has been carefully compartmentalized, to ensure that all basic life functions can happen in this small space.

After the radio is turned off and the married couple stop chatting, I take stock of where I am. As the dateline suggests, I'm not entirely sure. We are somewhere "near" Balgai, a town of a few dozen, several hundred miles from anywhere. All that separates me from that nothingness is a couple of layers of felt and canvas. The mind wanders: If my heart stops, there is no defibrillator to restart it. If a piece of an old Soviet Military Satellite falls on me, there is no government official to report it. If quicksand swallows the ger whole, there is no one to pull us out. But I've already let these worries go. My eyelids are closed and in my dreams I head toward the stars.


Previously: "Welcome to Our Home"

Sun, Moon & Stars

TÔV AIMAG, Mongolia — Life happens in seconds, seconds that turn into hours and then days. Sometimes, though, a moment yanks us from the dreary tick of the clock and lifts the ordinary into the sublime. Today, incredibly, featured two such moments.

I'll start with the second. It was around 9 p.m: I stepped out of our ger with Cing, Caleb and Myriam. We told our hosts we were going for a walk, which Bobby translated into Mongolian only to receive a puzzled grin in response. Why leave the warmth of the fire, their faces said.

The night is chilly. It touches my face even though my scarf covers most of my cheeks. Caleb lights a cigarette. He quit in America, but after traveling through Russia and Mongolia, he's back to the habit. We set off in no particular direction, wandering a few steps to the west, then back toward the east before settling on the north. We stumble around for only a minute and then stop. There's no point in continuing. I look around, and in each direction there is nothing — only the faint glow coming from inside the ger. I strain my eyes in all directions, scanning 360 degrees to the limits of my near-sighted vision. I cannot see a thing — no other source of light.

For many city slickers, a formative childhood moment occurred during an early childhood vacation, staring up at the clear, dark sky. I signed up for the astronomy merit badge two years in a row at Scout Camp, so I could stay up late as a teenage counselor picked out constellations with a laser pointer. Tonight is ten times more intense. There is no faint glow of the city on the horizon, no summer cabin on the other side of the lake. This is a pre-civilization state of darkness.

The unobstructed sky is overflowing with points of light. The Milky Way rips a broad swath through the center. There must be several commercial airliners and 100 satellites high above. And I then realize then the night moves, flows like a body of water. I don't go back inside until my nose is frostbite white.

But before the stars can rise, the sun must set. Today the sunset made the van stop, even though Bobby wanted to reach the first camp by nightfall. The brilliant orange rays shone directly through the windshield. When they started to mix with deep pinks and rich shades of magenta, Cing suggested we pull over. Everyone rummaged desperately for a camera, to capture the last rays of light. In the foreground, the rolling hills of steppe went on and on until they covered the horizon. The thin, hard layer of snow sent the light bouncing off and toward our eyes.

The sun sets everyday, and the stars are always shining. But today something beautiful happened: the inevitable became incredible.

I don't post many pictures here, mainly because I believe this should be a place to practice my writing, to put my travels into words. I'm reminded of something the author Paul Theroux says in his essay collection, "Sunrise with Sea Monsters." Young Theroux explains that he doesn't carry a camera, because he's afraid the technology will make him lazy. Instead he pushes for the right words to describe the experience. At the time of the writing, Theroux wonders if he'll ever have the skills to capture a moment in Paris when a group of pigeons took flight from a spire high on Notre Dame. He'd been three years trying to find what to say, and hadn't succeeded. Maybe someday I, too, can present this post without images, but for now I think the image below helps one appreciate the awesomeness of that sunset.

On the Way to the Land of Snows

BARABISE, Nepal — Driving north from Kathmandu, the road to Tibet is a series of sharp turns around blind corners, ascents of steep hills with subtropical vegetation and breathtaking views of quaint Nepali villages. Four hours north of the capital the paved road abruptly stops, disintegrating into a mess of pebbles, stones and small rocks. About 100 meters into this section there is a yellow sign on the left sign of the road. "Welcome," it says, "to the Last Resort."

The Last Resort is the playground of the Westerner on vacation. Here, 8,000 feet above sea level, is excellent river rafting on deep, fast streams, luxury tents with thick mattresses and oil lanterns, a full bar with a selection of several dozen cocktails and a restaurant that makes a mean macaroni and cheese. I came for the bungee jump, the second highest in the world. My travel companion Jeremy paid $90 in Kathmandu to walk off a 500 foot high bridge and plunge very close to a raging river. He did this willingly, placing his life in the hands of a Swiss-made rope.

I came just to watch. The bungee bridge connects the road to the resort, and also provides access to the couple dozen villagers who live on the other side of the deep canyon. Between jumps the villagers carry heavy baskets of hay or herd goats across the bent beams of steel. Then another Swede spends four seconds in free fall.

Calling it The Last Resort is accurate, because it is one of the last businesses before the Chinese border. After The Last Resort the road rises even further, and by the border it's left the subtropical Nepalese climate and entered the frigid Himalaya.

The resort is popular with tour group coming and going to Tibet, as its huge bridge makes for the most entertaining pit stop in a fairly monotonous seven hour drive from the border to Kathmandu. This is how I met a party of seven Chinese men who stopped at the Last Resort for lunch.

I heard their Mandarin as they worked their way past me on the road side of the bridge. I was there waiting for Jeremy to bungee. After he went I crossed the bridge and found the party at the resort's outdoor restaurant, playing cards and sipping herbal beverages they brought from the Motherland. I introduced myself, in Chinese, and they invited me to sit down.

They were from Guangzhou, the huge city of trade near Hong Kong. They worked in different companies, but were on a trip to Nepal that mixed business and pleasure. There were a couple business meetings, dinner with contacts, but mostly the trip had been about seeing Nepalis dance and good food in Kathmandu.

I tried to figure out the card game they were playing, which involved dealing 24 cards and then throwing them down in an aggressive manner (the harder the better). Twos seemed to be good, but not as good as threes, although sometimes a player would save the threes only to lose the game. They bet with Chinese money, and a couple hundred renminbi changed hands each round - a fair chunk of change for the Chinese.

"He doesn't get it," one man said to another, gesturing over to me. I didn't, so one man took me aside for some additional conversation. He showed me pictures of his wife and son, who recently performed in a talented competition in Macau. He played the drums, and in the pictures the boy of seven or eight looked thrilled on the set of the television program.

Later today the men would travel to the border town of Zhangmu, where they would reenter China. There they planned to visit a couple friends from Guangzhou who now worked in the Tibetan government. They were Chinese, and the man said they were helping to develop an undeveloped region.

"Wen Jiabo and the Chinese government care about Tibet. They have given aid to build schools, hospitals and roads there. I'm proud of my government."

This was close enough to the border that Chinese politics found their into innocent conversation. A couple hours later I got back in the bus, heading south, away from China.

Friendship is Radioactive

XIHAI, China - I'm warming up to this industrial outpost on the far end of China. My first impressions, that this might be a sneak peek at the world during a nuclear winter, are slowly changing, and it's not because of a sudden love for Soviet block-housing. A Mongolian, Tibetan and Muslim changed my mind.

The Mongolian prefers to be called Xiao Tian. He lives in a guesthouse near Xihai's main outdoor market, an works as an independent truck driver. Because he's self employed he works everyday, hauling supplies and food around town. He started talking to me as I was registering at the hotel, and looked at my Tsinghua student card with interest.

"You're from Tsinghua?" he said. "Then I'll have to take you out to a bar tonight, my treat."

We left the guesthouse around 9:30. Xiao Tian wore a crisp button down shirt with brown vertical stripes. His shoulder length hair was freshly comed. We walked through the center of the market, now deserted.

"Don't worry," he said. "Xihai is a safe place." This made me more nervous, as I was trying to forget that I was in the middle of the Tibetan Plateau, 100 miles from the nearest foreigner in a strange town. The only people who knew I'd come here were Rebecca, now back in Changsha, and my father back in New York. I hoped Xiao Tian was right, and this was a safe town.

We went to a small club, a multi-purpose place setup to handle all of the town's entertainment needs. On the back wall was a small bar, covered in Christmas lights. At the front was a stage and a microphone for crooning karaoke songs. The middle served as a dancefloor, and it was ringed by tables and chairs.

"There's not too many people here!" my host said, apologetically. It didn't matter, I wanted to watch the town have fun, and there were enough people to do that. The DJ played mostly slow Chinese pop songs, occasionally letting a person in the bar sing the vocals live. At a song's beginning, the dancefloor would be clear. Slowly four or five couples would come dance, each holding hands and doing some that resembled a waltz. Many of the couples were single sex, men who I had seen carrying wood through the market were now dancing with a colleague, slowly moving to the beat.

A Tibetan woman came over to our table, a high school student celebrating the final night of her May Break. Tomorrow she'd go back to school, and there could be no more trip to the bar for some time. Her friend went to the stage and sung a song in Tibetan. People seemed excited, and Chinese and Tibetan couples took the dancefloor.

The Tibetan girl wasn't terribly happy about living in Xihai, things were boring here, she said, but it seemed like not a bad place to be. The different ethnic groups seemed to mix relatively well, sharing public spaces and enjoying songs of different cultures.

Toward the end of the evening, after several bottles of Yellow River Beer, the DJ switched the hard Chinese trance music. The couples on the dance floor broke up, and finally Xiao Tian, the Tibetan and I stood up and started handbanging.

The next morning I took my still ringing head to a small Muslim restaurant several blocks from the hotel. The restaurant occupied an enclosed patio off a four-story block-house, and was run by a young Muslim man with a small son, who watched him make my noodles and fried dough. When serving the meal, the Muslim brought over a small bowl with a thick white liquid in it. He told me to try some of his yogurt, which I did, at first with small spoonfuls but then with bigger bites.

"It's horse milk," he said, and I had fight not to spit out the piece in mouth.

"What?" I said.

"This yogurt. It's made from yak milk."

I'd heard incorrectly.

When I finished, the owner refused payment.

It was a great final meal in Nuclear City. While the physical city remained ugly, my encounters with the town's people meant it's a place I might come back to even before the next nuclear holocaust.

Supermarket Sweeps

BOSTON – After a long, arduous journey, I have made it out of the wilderness. I went to a Trader Joe's.

Trader Joe's is a supermarket, but that's like saying brie is a type of cheese. Joe's is market with specialty foods in Coolidge Corner, a fashionable part of the Bostonian suburb of Brookline.

The cornucopia of foods available include eight Merlots, Greek style yogurt and a whole aisle of fruit leather. I heard someone ask an employee, "Where are your Thai dumplings?" (Answer: Aisle 7.) All the creature comforts are here, plus items that can make a long day at work more tolerable: heat-and-serve masala, for instance.

Every country on Earth now has a supermarket, even Taiyuan, China. I stopped into the Taiyuan store to purchase a few supplies for an overnight train to Zhengzhou in May. Taiyuan is the dry, dusty capital of China's Shanxi province. It is the third-most polluted city in the world, and is almost completely without charm. My view of the city skyline was blocked out by a dust storm. Taiyuan's supermarket matches the end-of-the-Earth feeling of the city. Partially open containers of crackers were $0.50, melted chocolates around $1. I grabbed a couple dusty plastic bottles of water and bought dinner next door at a KFC knockoff.

A week later I was back in Hong Kong, the city of Wellcome. As I've mentioned before, Wellcome is a clean, rather Western store. But the Western trapping means its shortcomings can be more apparent. There's no sharp cheddar cheese or couscous. Apples are the nuclear Granny Smith variety or include a worm. Don't even think about buying grapes. I refuse to buy seafood from any tanks that include frogs.

From Hong Kong it was on to Kansas, and the Super Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart's made large strides in its grocery business since 2000 - it now accounts for 40% of Wichita's grocery sales. Food at Wal-Marts tends to be in about a dozen aisles near the entrance. Prices are low, but there isn't the variety found in a traditional American supermarket. Forget about gourmet anything, and stock up on all the $0.30 taquitos you can eat. There's no couscous here, either.

So now I'm in Boston, happy as a pig in shit, because here's grocery store not only has couscous, but 15 varieties of it.