I am about to leave for the biggest, most exciting adventure of this trip so far, that will take me to Tibet, starting in Lhasa, travelling with a 4WD throught the Tibetan Highlands via the Friendship Highway
The last three weeks in china took me around regions sparsely populated and visited by very few foreginers. The northwestern regions of Gansu and Xinxiang, which are about evenly populated by Han chinese and Uighur people. Leaving Chengdu, i took a 22 h train to Xian, where the word famous terracota warrier army is situated.
However gave that a miss as i had seen it in 98' when I travelled the north with my ex-wife Theresa, but met up with Manfred and Francesca to continue our travels together.
After a night of good sleep (the 22h in a sleeper train do not qualify as quality rest time, the compartments are nice, but the chinese snore louder than canadian woodworkers), we took another 33 h train to Dunhuang.
Some city wall...
Random friendly locals wanting to take a picture of the weird, bearded foreigner
The train ride was much more beautiful, I like the north better, even though its sparser in terms of vegetations, the changing colors of the deserts and mountain ranges are super impressive! Thirty-three hours of constant train riding (maybe two times 30 minutes to strech the legs at a larger train station) is no picnic for the faint-hearted traveller, but with books, games (even though Manfred and Francesca do not want to play!), and a couple of interesting tourists such as the canadian guy that I chatted to for many hours about philosophy and philantropy.
The camel on the camel's back
Crescent Moon lake nestled between two large sand dunes...
Sand dune sledge race!
In Dunhuang, the lush green regions ofchina give way to sand dunes, mountain-tops covered with snow and deserts of all kinds (sand, rock, dirt)...
After a bit of a fallout wiht Francesca (gosh is she complicated, close minded and terribly boring), Manfred and I went off by ourselves for a day and decided to play real Tourist just that one time.... we rode a camel!! , and also surfed down the sand dunes on a boogie board, causing massive sand deposits all over my body which seemed to last for days to clean out... but boy was that fun! There was like a bit of a fair between dunes with tours, camel riding and boogieboarding down dunes, plus we rented a bike and explored the whole area which was much more fun than taking a taxi.
The real reason to go to dunhuan was naturally not the camels and sandunes, but the word famous 1000 buddha (Ma-Gu) caves, which were built around the time the silk-route was flourishing. Over about 1200 years, new caves were constantly added by rich and poor buddhists, adding up to 750 caves that can be visited today!!! Surprisingly most of them survived the cultural revolution, it is unclear why, the very decentralized location, or maybe they were hidden.... We spent many hours there and looked at a good two dozen caves and were astonished by how wellthese amazing caves were conserved... clearly because after the English, French, Russians and Japanese explorers stole most of the valuable goods, deporting them to their museums, the chinese ended up closing the caves again for a long time, thus no sunlight could destroy the thousands of wall paintings and buddha statues....
After Dunhuang, the real hardcore travelling started, taking bus, overnight train and overnight bus in a row. We wanted to make it to Kashgar in one step, but even with good travel organisation, one can not avoid the MASSES of people travelling in china. Coincidentally, October 1st and a week thereafter, several hundred million people were planning to return home to see their families due to a big national holiday....
We started off by taking a beater bus and then tracking down one last 1st class compartment from Dunhuang to Korla, about halfway to Kashgar, where we intended to go. There we did not know what expected us, no city for tourists.. in fact noone had heard of it, and the fact that its not in the lonely planet speaks books of how unimportant it is to tourism..... Well we got there fortunately in the morning, and after talking to about 75 different random people on the street I did what I always do... statistics.... see most people tell you their best guess, and they never say no, its supposed to be unpolite.. so deducing the correct information can be tricky...
After a bit of searching and constant asking (it helps the conversational chinese so it really is a win-win situation) we found the bus depot and one bus that claimed it would go the 600 miles or so to Kashgar..... "only" 16h.... yeah, right... and i can fly. These are very common things to get used to when travelling, why tell the truth when you can make it sound better... not that we have a problem with that, whether it takes 16 or 30 hours, we need to get there, so lets hop in....
The bus was half empty (or almost empty) when we left the station, yeehaa, would we have a row of seats all to ourselves until we reached Kashgar? Hehehe, here is a funny one... buses have to charge passengers an added tax (like 20 cents) when in a bus station, so its a bit cheaper to track down the bus along the route, even if for a 600mile ride that means after 0.25 miles... so there were hordes of people (mostly sheperds with a LOT of livestock) waiting along the road to track down the bus... cheaper, but with the risk of the bus blowing by.... well this one didnt, and stocked up about 20 of the smelliest men plus chickens, goats, whatever you can herd... in the bus. So we ended up squeezed into the back, for 28h (16h plus the time they did not account that is needed driving through completely rutted river beds, and fix a broken bus by pounding on something at the bottom with a metal object for hours during the middle of the night when we tried to sleep. We got there, not though before we saw the most amazing and scary thing during the first 5 months of travelling...... the driver was heavyset to make him a compliment, more like 5ft tall and 300lbs (1m60 and 150kg), and had a seat with shock absorber.... at one time, when we finally were able to get the bus above 60mph, we hit a huge pothole and the driver's seat ended up as a spring, catapulting the driver out of his seat, straight up... somehow he held on to the steering wheel and ended up landing back on his seat... the bus swerved like crazy and we almost tipped over at full speed.... there it goes... Roger's first encounter with Death during traveling #1, with many more to come!
Anyhow, I am exaggerating a bit as usual.... we got to Kashgar finally, the norhwestern most city of China, where in the vicinity of few hundred miles, countries such as Kyrgistan, Kasachstan, Usbekistan, India, Pakistan, Afganistan and Russia lay, and one finds an immense multi-cultural scene, even exaggerated by the worlds biggest Sunday market, where about an additional 50'000 people from the surrounding cities and countries flock into to sell everything from rug to potato, from watch to camel....
Hordes of well dressed men selling grapes at the market...
Spending 3 days in Kashgar, we did nothing much other than eat tons of mutton skewers and enjoy the different kinds of Uighur breads (much like bagels in the states), sit around and watch the people (and being watched too, obviously)... it was traveling at its best... just being part of the city... watching and interacting...
After Kashgar we decided to make our way to Wulumuqi, all the way north, trough travelling the southern silk-route to hotan, and via several busses, cross from there through the taklamakan desert via a 700 km road straight through the desert. We used a sleeper bus, wich is really only slightly more confortable then the small busses, where even 1.60 meter (5ft) chinese suffer, not to talk about my 1.93cm (6ft4), which really gets in the way sometimes i must say.
Colorful vegetable store....
I really enjoyed that part of the trip and was happy to practice my chinese and guide our travel group savely to Wulumuqi....There, in the largest city in the north (3 Mio), we left quickly for Heavenly Lake, where a lake serves as a backdrop for a scenery much like the Swiss mountains...
Colorful Market
We stayed for 2 days and slept in Yurts with Kasak people, enyoing the warm hospitality and food in the cold surroundings, and absolutely stunning views.... it was a great start for acclimatization and getting ready for the Tibetan and Nepali Mountains, with more, much more to come.....
