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It was hard to tear ourselves away from Kashgar, particularly our hotel room. We don’t often get attached to hotel rooms but this was a heart stealer – the perfect travel room. The location, staff, bed and shower were all perfect and it was also the cheapest room we’d had so far. But quite apart from that little sweetener Kashgar is quite simply an amazing place. We spent the last few days wandering around what remains of the old town. The heart of the city is a rabbit warren of tightly packed courtyard houses where the Uyghur people have lived for generations. It’s also prime real estate. As we walked around it was easy to see that old town’s days were numbered – the houses are being torn down by the government to make way for the sort of generic city centre that they prefer. Uyghur residents are being moved to the outskirts where land is less valuable and as usual in China they’re not happy with the compensation. But what can they do? As one told us, “There are no laws in China”. We walked through large swathes of the old town that have been reduced to rubble and dust, small pieces of beautifully decorated walls peeking out through the destruction, reminders that someone’s house once stood here. Not far away green cladding covered a construction site.

At one stage we walked out to a main road and realised we were in what had once been the paid section of the old town, an area cordoned off where the local government charged a 30 kuai entry fee. There was nobody collecting tickets because there was nothing left to see. The ticket sellers have been moved to another area where an English guide tried to get us in by assuring us that this neighbourhood would be knocked down in a year or two so we’d better come in and see it now. We declined but a busload of Han Chinese tourists enthusiastically followed their pretty female tour guide into the pay per view city. It’s hard to comprehend or explain the destruction that is going on in China. The hutongs in Beijing, the old town of Kashgar, and I’m sure many other historic places around the country are being completely destroyed and there’s no point in protesting because it’s the government, in cahoots with developers, who are swinging the wrecking ball. Attitudes toward preservation are starting to change but not quickly enough to save these places.

On a cheerier note the bus ride to Hotan was horrible and first impressions weren’t great either. Maybe it was the brothels only thinly disguised as hotels that lined the street coming out of the bus station? The kind of place that every bed comes with an accommodating woman. I’ve been there twice before but struggled to find the city I remember. The Sunday market was great though and apparently it’s the biggest in Xinjiang. I thought that was Kashgar but I guess I got that wrong. Hotan’s jade has been traded since 5,000BC and there was still plenty of it left to sell – big sheep-sized chunks of it down to small pebbles polished and coated with oil.

Outside town we went to a place called Imam Asim which is the tomb of one of the first men to spread Islam in this area in the 11th century. The tomb was on the edge of the Taklamakan desert and we wandered for a while in the dunes before heading back toward civilisation in search of a drink. In no hurry to head back to Hotan we dallied in the villages along the road home, ate some freshly baked naan bread, visited a silk factory and had multiple cold drinks.

The next day we caught a bus across the Taklamakan desert to Aksu. The road we drove along had been open less than 2 years and is the second across the desert. Dune stabilisation is important to keep the shifting sand dunes from covering the road and about 3m on each side is covered in squares of reeds. Further out a fence of reeds stops sand from approaching the road but I wonder how easy it will be to stop the movement of the sands in the long term? I guess the first road across the desert, built in 1995 is still OK so they must know what they’re doing.

En route to Aksu a text message from my dad told us that something was going on in Urumq1. We were planning on arriving there the next morning but decided to avoid it after hearing details from him and also talking to someone we were planning on visiting in the city. At the time we thought it was a protest by Uyghurs and a brutal response by the army but the truth (when we finally found out) is that and so much more. We couldn’t book train tickets all the way to Beijing so we bought to Lanzhou (38 hours) and decided to look up options from there to Beijing online. Beware: saga following.

There was no internet connection in all of Xinjiang. We had to text a friend in Beijing to get the phone number of a travel agency because the local agency couldn’t book anything. Their entire system was based on having access to internet and so they could do nothing. We called and booked a plane ticket from Lanzhou to Beijing but couldn’t pay for it as we had to register our card details online. Back to trusty Robin (bless his heart) who went through the process for us from Beijing. The credit card was denied so we had to call the U.S. based bank but we were barred from making international calls (another part of the communication lock down). Thankfully at that time text messages still worked (later both domestic and international text services were blocked) and so we managed to get in touch with Brett’s family in the states. They could unblock the card but they needed to talk to Brett himself. Their department wasn’t allowed to make international calls and we couldn’t call them. Stalemate until Brett’s dad called someone in the bank that knows him and Brett. Small town connections came through and finally at 2:30am we managed to confirm our flight.

The next day we went to try to extend my visa and the amount of security was incredible. As we were waiting for the PSB (Public Security Bureau) to open a convoy of trucks full of soldiers in riot gear parked outside. Surveillance vans bristling with communications technology and small round windows for video cameras cruised the streets. Inside I was told that I had too much time left on my visa even though in Hotan they could have extended it the day before if we’d been there. We mentioned that we’d been planning on going to Urumq1 but now simply wanted to leave Xinjiang and in an exchange that I still can’t quite believe happened the officer told us that Urumq1 was now safe and that there was nothing abnormal about Aksu at the time. I could use (and have used) all manner of expletives to describe this irresponsible (adjectives deleted) man who would toe the party line ahead of looking after the safety of two bumbling tourists. Urumq1 is a chaos of vigi1ante attacks and people are being murd3red by mobs based purely on their ethnicity. The army is sho0ting into crowds. The train station where we would have come in is listed as a hotspot. The chances of being caught in the crossfire of racial hatred are extremely high, to say the least. And yet on July 7th Mr Chen (badge number 140486) assured us that it was safe to go there.

He also told us that the 40 s0ldiers in full riot gear with machine guns encamped in the PSB a few metres from where we were talking were simply “relaxing”. A prisoner shuffled past with hands cuffed to his shackled feet. Walking as he did, completely bent over, it was impossible to tell if he was Han or Uyghur. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Our 38 hour train took us into the province neighbouring Xinjiang. It’s easy to forget how big and far away Xinjiang is from the rest of China. From Beijing to Kashgar takes about 75 hours on the train and we weren’t really far from Kashgar. Our flight from Lanzhou to Beijing accrued more frequent flier miles than the one from Seoul to Beijing. Security on the train was tight, my bag was opened going in to the train station for the first time in years of travel in China and before we left Xinjiang a policeman came through and scanned people’s ID cards in a device that obviously had a list of people who should not be allowed to flee. As soon as we left Xinjiang we could send text messages and make international calls. In Lanzhou we went on the internet and found out for the first time the true extent of the chaos gripping Urumq1. Convoys of army trucks headed west as the trains of oil headed east.

Back in Beijing it’s easy to be optimistic about China’s ability to change but at the same time the divide between the coastal and interior areas is growing. Even within the city there are migrant workers barely eking out a living as Ferraris drive past. It’s easy to be cynical about people with a lot of money in China but I think the best thing that can happen is for a growing middle class to realise that their own country needs to change. It’s hard as an outsider not to come across as anti-Chinese when I get frustrated with China and I hope that the Chinese themselves can make it a better place.

Talking about Xinjiang it’s very easy to make it into a black and white picture but that’s not how it is. Hatred and tensions have been simmering for decades, exacerbated by pro Han policies promoted by a government terrified of Uyghur autonomy which they fear may lead to Xinjiang breaking away. The individuals being murdered by vigilantes in Urumq1 (Han and Uyghur) are no more to blame for the situation than I am for say the White Australia policy (as an Australian) or the Nazi Gas chambers (as a German). Having said that both of those are in the past and I hope that Han Chinese today take a good look at their government, themselves and what’s happening and find a way to make things better. I can’t do it; I’m just a little outspoken laowai who tells it like I see it.

Tags: China, Hotan, Kashgar, Xinjiang

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On our last day in Turpan we headed to the Emin Minaret, built in 1777 by the head of the Turpan prefecture. The 37m high tower and accompanying building are constructed out of mud bricks and while you can get to the top of the building you can’t go inside the minaret. That afternoon we got on a 22 hour train to Kashgar, the last major city in Xinjiang/China before you hit Central Asia. We arrived on a Saturday along with a whole lot of other tourists who were timing their visit to coincide with the Sunday market.

We started our Sunday in Kashgar at the Livestock market, where people come to buy and sell sheep, goats, cows and donkeys. It was a dusty mayhem of animal noise and bustle as men sheared sheep, argued over prices and animals made their discomfort known. The sheep for sale were the local variety known as fat tailed sheep for the lump of fat hanging off their backsides, and in the process of evaluating the worth of a sheep the men would fondle the bottoms in a most indecent way. Those who had a lot of sheep for sale often tied them together by their necks with every sheep facing 180 degrees in the opposite direction to those on either side (hard to explain, look at the photos). Next to the area where sheep were tied up was an area of complete chaos by the end of the day, where every person with a few sheep to sell wandered around with them tied to a leash. We saw one very lost old man with a lone sheep who broke my heart. He was completely out of his depth and struggling to make eye contact with buyers, while protectively shielding the sheep’s head from the surrounding chaos. We almost came away with a lone sheep and an adopted grandfather.

In the donkey section men wandered around with their animals and prospective buyers checked them out by riding them, prising open their mouths to look at teeth and squeezing meaty backsides. Some of the donkeys were feisty little things and you could see buyers move away when an animal wouldn’t do as it was told. One donkey had been tied to a cart but simply pulled the cart along behind it when it wanted to move. Every now and again one donkey would start braying and soon enough a whole chorus would join in, just like babies crying. There was a lady selling a donkey and once again we would have loved to know her story because she was the only woman we saw buying or selling livestock. Nobody seemed to be paying her much attention but when we went back later in the day she wasn’t there anymore, hopefully she sold at a good price.

Goats weren’t as common though those that were for sale were near the sheep, tied together in long lines of bleating animals. Cows had their own section, with a solid framework provided to tie them to. On the way in there was the Ferrari of cows, a bull of such gigantic proportions that it must have made buyers drool and curse their limited finances. It truly was a monster. Cows were unloaded from trucks in a most inelegant way. The tailgate was lowered and the animals were unwillingly pulled from the tray by the rope around their neck, some of them protesting pretty effectively until 3 men helped with the pulling. It’s quite a jump for a cow to come down off some of those trucks and I remember in a previous visit a cow breaking its leg in the fall.

We spent most of the day at the animal market until we were so covered in dust that a shower became a priority. After washing the dust and animal poo off us we headed to the Sunday market, a massive convergence of buyers and sellers which must be one of the biggest markets in Asia, if not the world. The market actually happens every day which is why we focused on the livestock market, but Sunday is busiest with an extra 50,000 people coming to Kashgar to buy and sell. If something exists then I’d say it’s for sale at the Kashgar Sunday market.

On Monday morning we left for a 2 day trip to Karakul Lake, toward the border with Pakistan. Actually it’s also near the border with Tajikistan and Afghanistan though there is no crossing into Afghanistan and the Tajik border is closed to all apart from Chinese and Tajik nationals. We tried to go along the road toward the Khunjerab Pass (Pakistan) but the official guarding the checkpoint wouldn’t be swayed by my smiling pleas. It was a matter of safety and Pakistan is a “messy” place at the moment. I protested that we were always going to be within China and surely he knew that China was a completely safe place? He laughed, agreed, but still said no. Oh well, it was worth a try.

That was in Tashkurgan on Tuesday morning, we spent Monday night at Karakul Lake, at 3,600m elevation in the Pamir mountain range. Overlooking the lake and our yurts was Mustagh Ata, a snow capped mountain towering to 7,546m, a little lower than Kongur (7,719m) which we’d passed en route from Kashgar. We talked to a guy who’d been a porter for a foreign expedition to the summit of Mustagh Ata and he said it took about a week to climb up the southern slopes. He only looked about 20 and spoke fantastic English which he’d learned from tourists who stayed in the yurts around the lake. He was Kyrgyz, as were most of the people living around the lake, but his experience of learning English without going to school was similar to what we’ve heard from Uyghurs we’ve met. Our driver for the two days taught himself to speak Chinese and spoke it fantastically, though he said in English he was “like a mute”. To be fair I think he understood English pretty well and the words he did say were pronounced excellently. We’ve certainly been impressed with the amount and level of English spoken by Uyghurs. Despite the fact that they don’t necessarily study it at school, they speak it better than a lot of Han Chinese who spend their entire schooling life studying but can’t speak a complete sentence. Of course the Han Chinese can often read and write due to their formal education. Uyghurs are the opposite as they’ve often not studied formally but speak very well.

In the afternoon of free time at Karakul Lake I walked around it (3.5 hours) and Brett did what he loves most – picking a high point and finding out what you can see from up there. The yurts we stayed in were disappointingly made from concrete instead of the traditional felt but it seemed to be where the family usually lived so I guess that’s modernisation and progress? Meals were noodles and rice with a vegetable sauce and delicious nan bread. All washed down with salty milk tea. The stove was fed with animal dung and kept us toasty warm as the cold wind howled outside. It was hard to believe that we’d been roasting in Kashgar when I was wearing my fleece, big winter coat, scarf and was still shivering. Still, at least I got to use the big winter coat that I’ve not used since the first week in Japan but been carrying ever since. On the way back to Kashgar it snowed on us and when we arrived back in the big city we sweated in t-shirts. Like our driver said, in the morning it was winter but by afternoon summer had arrived.

Now we’re back in Kashgar hanging out for a few days before heading to Hotan, then across the Taklamakan desert to Urumqi and back to Beijing.

Tags: China, Kashgar, Turpan, Xinjiang

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We tried to take care of a few things before leaving Beijing but were relatively unsuccessful. One pretty important thing we looked into was extending my Chinese visa to allow me to stay in China while Brett goes back to work. The longest visa I could get in Seoul was 30 days and while it’s possible to extend that for up to 60 extra days I need to open a Bank of China account and deposit US$100 per day that I want an extension. So for a 30 day extension I need to deposit US$3,000. I assume this is to prove that I have “sufficient funds” though most countries would be happy with a print out of my Australian bank statement (which I think is completely reasonable). Personally I remember opening a Bank of China account to be a process taking many hours and resulting in much frustrated pulling of hair. It’s not a process I want to go through again and it’s not a process I’d wish on any unsuspecting tourist who happens to want to spend more than 30 days exploring this massive and varied country.

Thankfully for me China’s ridiculous rules go hand in hand with rampant corruption, and for a certain extra “fee” there is a company that will “take care” of my extension without me opening a bank account. It will cost me 860 yuan (about US$125) for a 1 month extension and I’ll need to do this twice. China has just priced itself out of the backpacker market, but maybe they want to? Backpackers stay too long, talk to people and want to understand the country; maybe they’d prefer high end, short stay group tourists who only see smiles? It’s hard to tell what they’re aiming to achieve sometimes. Maybe they don’t understand that making people feel unwelcome will drive them away?

I’mgoing to spend the time Brett’s away working on my Mandarin in Beijing, though sometimes it’s hard to see the point of further study (see above). It’ll be nice to be based in one place for a while though, hang out with some friends I have there and hopefully do some photography. I’ll also be sorting out visas for Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and maybe Kazakhstan for Brett’s next break. We’ll be heading to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for 6 weeks then I’ll hang out, maybe in Almaty or come back to China (if they’ll have me). The break after that we’ll go to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Then maybe Iran, the Middle East and Egypt. Who knows where after that?

At the moment we’re in Turpan, Xinjiang province. It’s like a different country here, the people, the language and the food is all completely different to China. Depending on who you talk to Xinjiang should be an independent country, though the Muslim Uyghur minority group don’t seem to get the same sympathetic support as Tibetans from the international community. Personally I think they rock, they’re such a breath of fresh air. The smiles are genuine and I’m always treated well here.

We stopped at a few places on our way west, first at Jiayuguan in Gansu province, the Western end of the Great Wall and China’s last major stronghold on the road west. One is asked to politely overlook the fact that Xinjiang is west of here. It’s in the Hexi corridor, a narrow strip of flat land between the Mazong, Longshou and Heli mountains in the north and the Qilian mountains in the South. All overland trading caravans heading west from China came through here and during the peak of the Silk Road jade, silk, porcelain, spices and horses made their way around the Taklamakan desert to reach as far as India, Persia and the Mediterranean.

A little further west was Dunhuang and the nearby Mogao Caves. There are 735 caves in total, 492 of which are painted with Buddhist art from a massive variety of eras. The first cave is said to have been painted in 336AD and the site was active until the 19th century. A little further west of Mogao the Silk Road split into the northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan desert. Travellers stopped at Mogao to pray for a safe journey or give thanks for a journey safely completed. Our guide took us in to a small selection of caves and told us some of the history. The artwork was incredible, the detail and the line work in the figures are breathtaking and even an ignoramus like myself can see differences in the styles of different eras. In some of the earlier caves the figures are more slender and almost feminine while later ones are more solid and masculine. Many of the caves were built on behalf of wealthy patrons and there are often images of the sponsors as well as details about them painted on the walls. Of course we were taken to the library cave where various foreign devils made off with about 40,000 priceless manuscripts, paintings and scrolls that were discovered sealed in a secret room. There were another 12,000 items left behind, the best of which were divided up amongst various Chinese officials and are lost to unknown private collections. The foreign devils donated their findings to museums and public institutions where most of them remain, albeit not in the country they were discovered in.

The day before yesterday we arrived in Turpan, our first stop in Xinjiang. We spent the day hanging out, exploring the bazaar and sheltering from the heat of the day in our hotel room (it was about 36 degrees celcius and baking hot in the sun). At the market we discovered tangzaza, triangles of sticky rice that are squashed a little and covered with syrup. Totally delicious. We also tried samsas, baked dumplings filled with mutton and maroji, ice cream with a rich vanilla flavour and a hint of an unidentifiable spice. Back out in the cool of the evening we bought ourselves a watermelon from a small stand, cut it in half and asked the shopkeeper for 2 spoons.

We went to bed at 10pm Xinjiang time and were up at 6:30am Beijing time. Beijing time is 2 hours ahead of (unofficial) Xinjiang time because Beijing prefers to ignore the fact that Xinjiang is so far west that it needs a different time zone. We’d organised a car to drive us around the sites near Turpan and spent the morning at Tuyoq and Bezeklik caves. Tuyoq is a small Uyghur village which is near an important pilgrimage site for Muslims in Xinjiang. The Chinese government makes it close to impossible for Uyghurs to get passports and so they’re not able to fulfil their obligation to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. According to our guide the pilgrimage to the symbolic tomb of the first Uyghur Muslim, on the hillside nearby, is regarded as close enough. We met a man who had come from Kashgar on pilgrimage with his family and bought 3 goats to be sacrificed. The internal organs and head of one of them lay around on the dusty ground as another one was skinned. A goat costs 500 yuan, about US$75, quite a price for a local. As far as we could tell the villagers sell the goat to the pilgrim, it is sacrificed and then the pilgrim distributes the meat amongst the villagers. Not a bad deal for the villagers really.

Bezeklik caves are largely empty. The walls were once covered with Buddhist murals but most has been lost to pesky foreign devils, vandalism or the general wear and tear of time. Again, to be fair to the foreign men who quite literally cut out many of the frescos and left gaping holes in the walls, the ones that remained had their faces gouged out, their golden halos scraped off and were covered with wads of mud thrown where vandalising hands couldn’t reach. Unfortunately for many of the stolen frescos they were taken by a German, Albert Von le Cog, and were lost in the bombing of his country in WW2. Pass the blame to the Allies I suppose.

In the afternoon we visited the ancient city of Jiaohe, on an island between two rivers. Settled in 108BC and lived in until the end of the 14th century, many buildings are still recognisable and the main monastery still has partial statues of Buddha visible. We wandered around the streets and then headed back to our driver who took us to see the karez irrigation system. Water is channelled from the mountain snow melt into channels that run underground to villages. Oases like Turpan rely on these channels for their water and the underground tunnels are cleaned out once a year by men who drop down into the holes that are spaced every 5-10m along the channel. Grapes are an important crop in Turpan and our driver took us to his family’s grape plantation. Harvest is in about a month so the grapes were still a little sour but I’d love to be here in grape season. We might be able to buy some early harvest grapes before we leave Xinjiang.

Today we catch the train to Kasghar to get there for the Sunday market, then we head down to Hotan and across the Taklamakan desert to Urumqi. From there it’s back to Beijing in time for Brett to fly out to work.

Tags: China, Dunhuang, Jiayuguan, Turpan, visas, Xinjiang