Between mine and pasture

From the black of the mine to the green of the plains

Today, I wake up in the middle of this four hard-bed dormitory that hurt your back all night long. For once, I am quite happy to wake up because we have to go by car to Zhangye. I find myself facing dad and Yang Dong who are taking their time when we actually have to leave quickly. That’s group life: to find a common rhythm for everybody without arguing. I decide to quicken the pace and bring down a bag, then a second, a third, a fourth and so on until I realize that I have brought everything down. I wait for the two late-comers but they don’t come; I go back upstairs to see where they are and I find them in front of the window photographing, filming and looking at what is essentially the city of Reshui, that is, its mine and factory. It’s a group of buildings surrounded by dozens of black and terrifying coal mountains that swallow up your vision by their imposing size. A few meters in height, these pyramids are transported by men covered in black, the black of the mines, of work, of coal, but also the black that marks their lives. These men stack them roughly like pyramids, and in the evening before going to bed, to forget the difficulty of their labor, they head towards a shack to drink loads of beer and perhaps sleep a little. The next day, they go to the bathroom, get ready, and do something that is natural to them: they spit a coal-black liquid mixed with leftover beer. Morning grooming finished, they leave their house and look at the night sky, thinking they still haven’t seen a blue sky, since they begin work when the sun is still asleep and finish after the sun has gone to sleep. They dump the coal outside so that trucks can transport it to another place. The trucks leave in all directions and we, in our small car, take the road towards the Zhangye train station where we will take our train to Turpan. A few minutes later, we find ourselves in front of a tent around which graze a dozen goats, sheeps and Yaks. We get out of the car and see that it’s the last Tibetan family to keep its heard at the bottom of the mountain and that soon, they will move it towards the top of the mountain. These Tibetans invite us to go into their tent where in the middle of it, a white liquid in a kind of basin is heating with coal. We encounter a mix of smells and tastes, and when we drink this strange tea, we see that it’s Yak butter tea. The man of the house is tanned with slit eyes and a Tibetan cap on his head. Our tea finished, we say goodbye to our new friends and resume our journey.