In Search Of Cloths Of Heaven.
March 17, 2008 @ 2:51 PM
He Wishes For Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly
because you tread on my dreams.
- William Butler Yeats
Words by Danny Burrows
Photo’s by Antton Miettinen
The side door of the van slid to, and we sped off towards the Great Wall of China- via a roadside restaurant for beer. These stops would become a litmus test of the temperament and skill of our drivers; the quicker they were at finding the golden nectar the more respect they earned, and if they could distinguish skate spot from skate rink, then all the better.
Mao Zedong said of the great wall: “you are not a real man” unless you have climbed it. We took the chair lift, a contraption erected in the heyday of the People’s Republic of China, and felt no less manly. The Great Wall draws a 6,700km line across China, from Shanhaiguan in the east to Lop Nur, and denotes the northern limits of the old empire. It is said that the core of the wall comprises of the bones of those who died building it. But then Ripley’s ‘Believe it or Not’ said that it was the only manmade structure visible from space, which has since been proven to be bollocks.
Over the years much of the Wall has fallen into ruin, its structure looted for building material, but sections still remain intact and some, like the part we visited, have been restored to their former glory for the growing tourist trade. Skate wise it will forever be remembered as the big wall that Danny Way jumped, however from our visit on it would be the wall that Daniel Cardone flipped. Dating back to the 5th Century its surface is not what you would describe as skate-friendly and although Daniel’s stairs were modest the landing was sketchier than wet cobbles and the run-in was a sprint through an unevenly paved watchtower to a slanting takeoff. But then this was Daniel, the man who never folds. With a flip and backside ollie bagged we rode bobsleds to the bus and from there, via a beer stop, to Beijing.
Javier Mendizabal, frontside ollie
Beijing is an angry sea of a city, prowled by predatory traffic and a mass of humanity that moves in darting shoals. The capital of China since the Ming dynasty, its fabric reflects centuries of history, the latest wave of which is the arrival of the Olympic circus. As well as instructing civil servants to smile and implementing a ban on spitting, an affliction which affects Chinese both young and old, the PRC has undertaken an aggressive building spree which combined with the economic boom has buried many of the older quarters below towers of glass, steel and marble. Although disastrous for the local population this state-orchestrated blitz has provided skaters with a boundless playground of hubbas (described collectively as “so 90s”), rails and stairs. But we’re moving on, heading west to Kashgar, a dusty, unruly trading hub on the old Silk Road.
Kashgar was cold, and gone was the polished newness of Beijing. The airport, a tired artefact from when air travel was restricted, now bursts with China’s travelling nouveau-riche. Extensions sprout like warts and on the forecourt a new surface was being laid. We watched as a crew worked the wet Tarmac with five large paint-brushes nailed to a cross arm and drawn across the surface by a long handle. The method was primitive but the result was outstanding, producing an expanse of skateable blackness, smoother than most skate parks. Onto this a long handrail slid, which Javier decided to frontside halfcab and Dominik found a handrail on a quieter corner of the building. But both would have to wait.
Before leaving for China I had found a damning description of the men-folk of Kashgar; I could only hope that it was a poor translation from Chinese to Ingrish. It went as follows: “The disposition of men is fierce and impetuous and they are mostly false and deceitful. They make light of decorum and politeness and esteemed learning”. This description, although worded like a National Socialist guidebook, was in part true. We saw few smiles on our forays into the city’s markets, eateries and skate spots and strapped to the hip of every male was a large knife. Not the sort of place to go in search of sketchy bars, at least not until we had armed ourselves with daggers of our own. And when we did venture out after a night on the fifth floor of our hotel playing karaoke, we only succeeded in getting ripped off by a stall holder offering balloons to shoot and acquired our very own spook who followed us home and slept in the lobby.
Dominik Dietrich, 50-50
Kashgar provided us with few spots to skate except for a rutted bank to wall, which Dani signed with a signature frontsided drop-knee, and plenty of rails that were “good from far but far from good”. The airport proved our saving grace and on Sunday afternoon, after a morning of watching the animal population of the province get sheared, beaten and sold, we found it deserted. Dominik and Javier popped over the forecourt rail, Javier landing a couple of peachy frontside ollies which Dominik followed reluctantly, as is the way of skate etiquette, with a flip. In this age of terror of terrorism this was probably the only airport in the world that could have been skated without the session being shut down or shot up.
The following day we drove west, towards the Afghan border, exchanging the chaos of Kashgar for Lake Karakol and its mirrored peaks of Muztagn Ata (‘the father of Ice Mountains’) and Kongur. By the time we arrived we were a man down, as the usually faultless TM Tomi had committed the schoolboy error of leaving his passport at the hotel and been forcibly removed from our midst by checkpoint cops. The last we saw of him was as he thumbed down a truck heading for Kashgar, the look of disappointment on his face hard to hide.
We would be housed in a yurt at the lake, the only accommodation available to both locals and tourists. These round tents, heated by dung-burning stoves, were made from a wooden frame onto which yak skin and blankets were strapped. After a dimly lit game of poker we slept fitfully under piles of blankets, disturbed by wolves, dogs and hawkers, our only warmth – once the dung had run out - a bottle of the local tipple, which we name ‘gasoline’. The yurt provided meagre protection against the bitter night but even less against the army of trinket sellers who descended upon us with the persistence and menace of horse flies. While we ate, slept and shat in holes in the dirt we were bombarded with carpets, beads and crystals. Resistance was futile, it was buy or die.
It was here that the stümpf-o-graph was born: a yardstick of just how shafted we could get by China’s army of marketers. Dominik secured an unbeatable first place when he paid handsomely for a lump of salt masquerading as amethyst, while I slid into a comfortable second with the purchase of an ‘antique’ Omega clock, which we would later find in an array of sizes, in virtually ever souveneir shop along the Silk Road. We even got mugged on the price of our horse or camel rides, incredible as they were, as our steeds were a pack of nags that we had to kick around the lake for an hour before retiring for a cup of yak milk tea and some more haggling – stümpf!
Now a stümpf can be many things: positive or negative, a noun or verb. Or it can be what happened to Javi on our twenty-hour train journey from Kashgar to Lanzhou. This was the lightning strike of food poisoning that made arse and mouth a hole from which hot liquid shot without warning. The only cure was a cocktail of Tomi’s clogging pills, painkillers and a strong pair of legs on which to hover over the hole in the train floor, whose only similarity to a modern toilet was the sign on the door. With our imprisonment on the train lengthened by six hours as we sat out a sand storm that threatened to overturn us, this could only be described as an ultra-stumpfing.
We dismounted the train in Lanzhou, a cloud covered city that appeared to be at war with itself. The roads resembled a post- bombardment Somme and the throng of people that streamed down its pavements were tinged with the same mud that filled its potholes. Avenues of trees had been cut to stumps around which people gathered shattered branches for firewood. The train station, however, was a skater’s paradise with a main square bordered by marble drops, ledges, hubbas and stairs all arranged in perfect lines. Judging by the crowds and police patrols this was going to be a harder nut to crack than Kashgar’s airport. When we did skate it, it took less than an hour before we were shut down. It was a spot that could have been shredded all day. Thankfully a hundred yards away we found a big double set that Javier immediately frontside nollied. Dominik was after a fakie flip but snapped his deck and was whisked back to the hotel for a replacement. A crowd had gathered, attracting the attention of the local constabulary and it gathered all the elements of a hidden demo on the edge of a bust. Dominik returned new deck set up and banged down his trick. The stairs were done.
Our driver was by now tuned in to the skate and took us to a leisure plaza where fishing ponds bisected an expanse of stepped marble. Unfortunately the surface was too slick to even get speed and the hunt continued. A handrail outside a hospital provided Dominik with some entertainment and although he leisurely locked the 50/50 he was angling for a 5/0. Then some hag, suffering from a lack of cock, blocked the rail and was threatening to call the police. Dominik bluffed a run-in to the rail at the other end of the raised walkway, she stalled and Dominik went all in to stick his 5/0.
Daniel Cardone, frontside boardslide.
We were well and truly making up for our lack of skate over the past days but still had a marble bank to ledge that we spotted on the way into town. Here Javier, Dominik and Dani wallied the last of the daylight away until a man with a badge moved us on but not before frontside and backside wallies were dialled and Thrasher had bomb dropped to the bank from a four-metre roof.
I never did hear Thrasher’s real name and it had been so long that he had been known as Thrasher that I’m not sure if he remembers himself. The story goes that a visiting American skater had seen him ripping up the streets of his home town and in a Cali drawl said: “Dude you rip! From now on you’ll be known as Thrasher!”
And so it was.
Now religion and skating are not institutions that you instantly house under the same roof, however our next stop was Xiahe in Gannan, a Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, which is home to the Labrang Lamma Buddhist monastery. With sleet smearing the windscreen, we weaved our way into the mountains, our driver playing chicken with bikes, cows, pedestrians, motorcycles and on-coming trucks. Mist covered peaks towered from the valley floors where paddy fields and plantations hemmed the road. It would take five hours to reach Xiahe and a whole lot of poker before we stumbled from the bus onto a snow blown, darkened street. The rows of souvenir shops were pulling down their shutters and the street was clear but for monks in robes of crimson, like hot punctuation marks in the grey town. They walked quickly in the cold towards the walls of the monastery, which was separated from the town by an open sewer and dirt road. These neighbours were only metres from each other but worlds apart.
Around the monastery rises a wall lined with painted prayer wheels along which processions of the faithful move, not with Catholic piousness, but at a commuter like pace. We arrived at the wall en masse but the deeper we moved into the monastery’s labyrinth, with its golden roofs and carved doorways, the further we drifted apart. Soon each of us was alone in the majesty of the building, bird songs in the still cold air and the undulating drone of monks chanting in halls beyond walls. Alone in this vociferous silence you could not help but feel enlightened, if not religiously then culturally.
Travelling in a country as alien as China for any length of time inspires peculiar cravings and although the Yak burgers of the Mountain Café in Xiahe were unassailable in their succulence the collective hankering was for Starbucks. We had eaten more unrecognisable dishes in the past two weeks than we cared to recall and seen far more that we dared not touch – unless politeness demanded. The familiarity of Starbucks sandwiches was all-consuming and irresistible. Thankfully our next destination Xian, the old capitol of China, had one and it was right next to the local skate shop belonging to a fella called ‘Crazy Eyes’.
Crazy Eye’s and his crew ushered us into a local restaurant where arranged on the reception desk were jars of pickled frogs, a sea horse, snake mix and cocks in brine. We stuck to the soup and recognisable vegetables and politely declined the sauced veins and offal.
Standing in the lobby of our posh hotel in Xian it was apparent that we were a peculiar sight to the clusters of package tourists, who descend on the city to view the Terracotta warriors. Each of us now wore a collection an indigenous items, including pashminas, carved pendants and an array of headwear from Mao caps to Wigga trilbies. Combined with beards and skate decks we put the fear of God into the blue-rinsers.
Javier Mendizable frontside nollie.
An hour outside Xian is the site where in 1974 a farmer happened on the necropolis of Emperor Qui while digging a well. Qui was responsible for uniting China between 247 and 221BC and during his reign had an army built that could continue his conquests into the afterlife. The remains of over 8000 Terracotta warriors in various degrees of collapse line football pitch- sized domes. But swarming around this shattered army are the true Terracotta warriors, an army of hawkers far more brutal than the ones we had encountered at the lake. Their coats bulging with boxes of miniatures, they prey on the flag- following tourist groups. At the centre of the museum the prices are high but as you make for the exit, awakened to the stümpf, the prices hit rock bottom. Sadly for Daniel, he bought at the very epicentre of the museum. Having bartered the price down from $40 to $10 he thought he had done well – the elated salesmen could hardly control himself with glee and pissed his pants. Not wanting to miss another sale he set about Antton and I but having been fleeced of our readies already we were not buying. The price kept falling as Daniel’s rage kept climbing. By the time we boarded the bus we were weighed down boxes of warriors that cost 50cents each. Dani had moved into second place on the stümpf-o-graph.
For the duration of our stay the weather took a turn for the worse and although skate spots were plentiful we had little opportunity to roll. When we did get a break we hit up the gardens that skirt the old cities wall that offer a superb array of skateable obstacles, including hubbas, marble stairs and ledges. But it was closely guarded by old skool PRC cadres with a hatred for white devils on decks, and so once again with a superb bluff arranged by Crazy Eyes Dominik poached a switch flip off a stair set under the noses of the flustered guards. There was also an impromptu ‘drop-in challenge’ on a humpbacked bridge to stair but again we were chased away. We were now being hounded by men in bad suits and foul tempers; the Xian shut down…
Daniel Cardone, kickflip
Driven off, we retreated to Beijing where we intended to party and skate our last days away. We drove out to a renowned raised gardens near the electronics market as much to see if we could track down the new Ipod Touch as much as to skate. This place had been built to ride but someone had forgotten to inform its custodians. Running down to the main plaza were three double sets of stairs hemmed in by marble hubbas. Dominik was amped to skate them but they were slick, fast and not much wider than a deck. He didn’t want much speed to pop onto the ledge as the acceleration down was intense. After several high-speed bails he flipped onto the ledge and rode it out. He followed this with flip on, ollie to gap the final set and was trying the a backside ollie in but the pressure from the security was too much. Harangued we moved up into the gardens and onto some ledges shadowed by our uniformed friends. Trickery was going off like Chinese firecrackers and Dominik was warming up for a frontside bluntslide I was watching from about ten feet away as halfway into his third attempt I saw his tail unlocked and the deck slide out and over the ledge. His legs were above his head when gravity yanked him downwards and I heard the sickening thump and then a moan which was pure animal. Below the ledge motionless and corpse- like he lay on the marble slabs. He had taken the full force of the fall on his hip and an ostrich egg already swelled on the bone. After ten minutes he was up and determined to nail the bluntslide which he did first time. It was to be the last trick of the tour and deserving of all the high-funfs offered. As they say “the sooner you get back on the horse the better.”
Our voyage along the Silk Road had been no seven and duce skate tour. From start to bitter end at the bottom of a vodka glass in the best sushi restaurant in town it was as real as it gets. We had experienced things that would stay with us long after the smell of yak had vanished and removed the pollution-breathing dragons suit that we are so often sold to find a country where people live to make families and die just like the rest of us. What a Stümpfer.
Dominik Dietrich, switch flip
