WESTERN CHINA:
RETURN OF THE LOST TOURIST
The queue to get into China is tedious and is made even more so by the Mongolian approach to gaining entry. Endless jeeps try to squeeze past each other through non existent gaps and then inside the immigration building people continuously jump the queue. I enjoyed the Mongolian simple approach to life but when it comes to queues they are brainless animals. The only reason they are coming to Erlian just over the border is to buy stuff. Mongolia has got to be one of the most expensive countries I have ever been to. An apple in UB train station costs 90p.I can buy seven in China for the same price.
No sooner have we arrived in Erlian than my connecting train to Hohhot is about to leave. I don’t even get the chance to have lunch with my new Breton hippy friends.
I have no seat on the train so I can either stand up for the entire 10 hour journey or I can sit with the smokers at one end of the carriage or wedge myself into the cleaning cupboard opposite the squat toilet at the other end of the carriage. I become human origami but at least it’s a space to call my own. Various people decide that they are going to stare at me. Now, are they staring at me because I am a foreigner, or is it because I am wedged sideways on top of a metal bucket and a mop? Probably both.
I arrive at Hohhot at nine pm. Hohhot station is one of the only Chinese train stations I have been too that is peaceful. Usually it’s an endless stream of near deafening announcements on auto repeat designed to prevent the Chinese from having any independent thought.
At ten I get on the overnight to Yinchuan. A pretty young lady comes and sits opposite me asking if she can practice her English. Sometimes I find the prospect tedious, but she does have a fascinating mouth…
Sitting on the hard seats we are joined by two young lads who are part of a basketball team on their way to play a game. I can’t imagine that sitting on an overnight train is going to do Much for their chances at winning.
Out of desperation, I abandon the seat and curl up to sleep on the floor underneath.
At Yinchuan I sleep for three hours at the station. It’s absolutely pouring down with rain. Doesn’t bode well for camping out with Sheetal.
I take a slightly more local train to Guyuan, talking to a young ecologist who is very interesting and is recording our conversation for the purposes of improving his Chinese. This is fine but I am slightly disconcerted by the nature of his questions… What do I like about China? What do I not like about China? Maybe he is employed by the government to find out how to make the tourist experience better. Maybe I am just being slightly paranoid.
Eventually we reach Guyuan and on his advice, I jump on the waiting bus which will take me to the bus station.
I board my cross-town bus and once I have done so I get a message from Sheetal to say that a friend she wants me to meet is at the train station . a messaging fandango ensues between me Sheetal and her Indian friend Ondrilla… By the time I reach the bus station for my onward journey, I buy the return fare for the train station to meet Ondrilla. As soon as I have done that, Ondrilla then tells me that she’s made a mistake and that she is actually at the bus station… I get off, we find each other, head back to the train station and spend the night on the grass outside waiting for her 3am train back home.
I sleep in a beautiful bit of waste ground right next to the station and then in the morning take my bus to Longde. I see my first Chinese mosque and the towns resident Muslims. Men wear Musial Chinese/western clothes and little white caps. Women head open faced head scarves, sometimes beautiful black Lacey ones.
At Longde I take half an hour trying to get seven taxi drivers to grasp where it is I want to go; a campsite near a little village in the nearby mountains. I don’t know what language they speak here, but my attempts at Chinese place names completely fails.
A taxi driver takes me to Sheetal’s campsite, not without him deliberately diverting the long way round and my attempt to talk to Sheetal for specific directions being screwed up by my increasingly useless mobile phone and its shitty Chinese fake battery.
Somehow, we get there.
I spend four days hanging out at Sheetal’s camp whilst she conducts her volunteering post helping run kids group activities.
Every mountainside is terraced. It’s vineyard country I think.
Whilst here, I meet the lovely Algerian Steve, Ion from Romania and a score of beautiful Chinese young ladies.
When the camp finishes, me and Sheetal get the bus to Xining. Sheetal is an expert at negotiating information via her phone, talking to random people and getting us to where we need to be. Handy as I tend to be rather more imprecise in that department.
At the city centre, we get a taxi to the poorer part of town where we stay in a difficult to find hotel that is tucked away behind absolutely everything. The big metal doors are exactly inviting, but I feel reassured when the door is opened by a smiling old man accompanied by his equally smiling elderly wife.
We stay two nights, fending off the attentions of a very bored five year old boy on the second night. I really don’t understand why he isn’t at school. Maybe it’s the weekend. I have lost all sense of time…
We board a bus to Qinghai lake, a journey of four hours which is made all the more exciting by my suddenly having developed food poisoning. Hopefully we will get to our destination before I squit all over the coach seat. There is no toilet.
Halfway, we stop for a toilet break and we investigate the weird foods on offer. Dried snakes, dried lizards. Yum.
I am midway through tasting a tasteless blue liquid on offer when the coach driver comes and tells us off for holding up the coaches departure. Oops.
The road rises ever upwards onto the Tibetan plateau. Winding up through foothill mountains, strings of prayer plays start to become more frequent., though I can’t help but suspect that some of these are merely here to impress tourists. Well groomed roadside yaks stand on duty occasionally.
Riders on horses… This is horse country again, the area and the locals seeming a mix of Mongolian and Muslim. These are Tibetans it would seem. Eastern ones anyway. Even the language has the weird soft clicky sound of Mongolian in it. We are stuck in an hour long traffic jam just before our destination and I ask if we can get off. The driver doesn’t like me now, and refuses. Ten minutes later he is helping a young lady get her bags out of the vehicle as she leavers the coach. I decide that now’s our chance. I get off and the driver starts swearing at me in Chinese so I just have a go back at him in English.
Its about to get dark, so I am anxious to get the tent up. We find a nice lakeside spot where we camp for the next four nights.
Qinghai is an odd place. One tourist spot costs a 100 yuan to get in, and seems to feature not very much. So we skip that, and spend our time getting to know each other better and eating stir fried shredded potato and salad at the restaurants in the area.
We must be quite high up because we both seem to feel exhausted all the time.
We leave our luggage during the day in the garage of a nice Tibetan family who are also putting up four monks, who we see doing rituals in the evening that involve a big fire, bell ringing, chanting and throwing incense and various burnable plants into the fire.
I am going through some degree of distress about what it means to be having a short term holiday fling with someone I might never see again. It doesn’t do much to make my stomach feel better very quickly.
I don’t know whether to go back to Mongolia, take up the offer to visit Taiwan, go back to Japan, go to Tanzania to hook up with a friend I met in Rajasthan. I am something of a mess and not at my best.
Sheetal makes friends so easily. She endears herself to the family we are leaving our stuff with, and they feed us a meal one night, and she goes horse riding with one of the young women.
I decide not to go to Xian with Sheetal but to stick to my original plan to head west overland to Kazakhstan. If I follow her east, I won’t have enough time to go back west.
We go back to Xining where we stay at another difficult to find hostel. It’s on the top floor of a grotty block of flats, and is a hidden gem indeed. Inside, the hostel is decked out to look like a Tibetan tent. There’s incense and the vibe is earthy and lovely. It’s quiet and the current clientele fascinating. I chat with a posh English chap who seems to be researching a book about Tibet. A lovely young woman from Washington DC is researching coal usage and it’s implications for US trade relations.
Here, me and Sheetal part company. This is the most down to earth we have been with each other. We both have some rubbish tendencies in amongst what feels like what could be a very lovely friendship given some time. She is the first person I have ever met to give herself almost an orgasm when she mixes hot chilli sauce with Pepsi. She’s a talented woman. Not necessarily because of chilli-Pepsi orgasms. She annoys me sometimes but somehow I still like her a lot. I’m sure I must annoy her too, with my odd little ways.
She goes, and I leave a couple of hours later, just about managing to buy a ticket for the afternoon train out west.
The Golmud/Ge’ermu train is massively overcrowded. I find a spot and glue myself to it. I will not move, except to let enormous luggage burdens past.
Squatting on the floor in close proximity to everyone else brings a sense of comerardery to the occasion. Knowing looks are exchanged, food shared along with slightly abortive conversations. Lots of middle aged women wearing a variety of head scarves. Some of them being black Lacey affairs that seem to be regional costume. An old man gives me sunflower seeds, someone else gives me stale cake and bread and sweets. Pretty much every time I find bread in China, it’s stale. They don’t really do bread the Chinese.
In Xining though, I had the wonderful experience of finding processed cheese in a big department store. I was very happy. An hour later, a street vendor was selling roast potatoes. China doesn’t really do potatoes much either, except in great long stir fried strands that look like giant beansprouts. And this was the first time I had seen anything that resembled cheese since Shimla.
The train to Golmud empties out a little, and I someone impromptu toddler minding for a young tired and stressed young couple. Trying to pacify your children by feeding them sweets is only going to make them hyperactive. And possibly train them up to be drug addicts in later life. I wish I could speak to them…
We pass through desert. 900 miles of it. The Taklimakan Desert I think. I wouldn’t want to cycle it. Bit barren. It’s an interesting series of ever changing landscape shapes, low distant mountains the Tan Sien to the south, flatlands in the middle, badlands, unexpected road tunnels. Pretty much no buildings, only the very occasional mining operation. I think this may be one of the places in the world where ‘rare earth’ metals are dug out to make sexy smartphones.
We arrive at Golmud, saying goodbye to the stressed family.
I find a hostel. It’s super grotty, but the bedsheets are clean. There’s no shower, only a sink with cold water. The toilet smells. We’re in a desert. Of course it’s going to be a bit grotty.
Golmud exists solely as a mini town and as such is populated almost entirely by incomer eastern Han Chinese. What I’m saying is that it’s not very interesting.
My phone is broken, sort of. I can’t make calls on it or use WhatsApp. Unless I get WiFi. I have become a reluctant tech dependant. My China Lonely Planet guide is on a tiny e-reader and not as useful as an actual book. I am fed up having not very good technology that I am dependant on. It limits things.
Today I try to get a bus to Liuyuan in the north. I was going to try to go to Kashgar but it’s too much hassle and I probably don’t have enough time.
Saturday August 6th
Being alone again inclines me to write again. Spending all day socialising knackers even my attempts to maintain regular meditation sits, let alone the further introspection of writing properly.
My phone slightly up the spout, I am guessing what time it might be by the hue of the morning light and the degree of street noise. It actually turns out to be 7.45am and I have an idea there’s a bus that’s heading north at 8.00am.
There doesn’t seem to be a bus, but a tout is pointing me into his friend’s taxi, actually a suave, chunky four wheel drive.
300!
120!
Scoff! 280!
150!
230!
160!
200!
Okay, 200….
Having spent enough time with Sheetal to see her ruthless Mumbai bargaining tactics in full brutal action, I have finally learned not to merely buckle like a soggy lettuce straight away at whatever preposterous price sellers initially throw at me.
I knocked a third of the price off. Still more expensive than a coach, but in principal, I’m happy to have finally engaged in ye olde barter banter.
Enough of this ‘I’m wealthy, they are not’ nonsense. They are making a buck every day. My bank balance heads in one direction only, that being downwards. At some point possibly, it might feel like it’s plummeting like a rock.
I am sharing with three other Chinese chaps, one a young lad seems to be terminally asleep. Must have been a long night I think. And two others, one possibly a tourist. Not sure. No conversation ensues. Friendly enough though.
Wending our way out of Golmud, the town evaporates into a wasteland of mining operations. Nothing drastically messy or disgusting, just low level industry digging a few things up.
The road to Dunhuang is spectacular. At about five hundred miles, the first hundred is flat and non-descript. Almost no building at all bar the occasional quarrying ops.
Every time we encounter a road toll, we suddenly veer off road and wind through labyrinthine bumpy tracks only to reappear somewhere else further down the road out of view and past the toll booths.
I have never been a fan of desert landscape. I have always assumed them to be vast expanses of dreary sand and rock. I have passed through Arizona at some point in life. Not a thrilling place. Except for the thrilling bits of course.
Today we pass through a never endingly broad range of hills and mountains, as if rock and sand are putting on their best show. With almost no plant life or people around, I would never have though I would have enjoyed my time passing through such a monumentally barren place.
To have passed through here in past times must have required quite some degree of courage and determination. We pass by one beautiful lake in the whole journey.
All so some fellow could swap silks for mints with holes in them when he got to the other end.
I try to imagine what it must have been like to trek across Europe all the way across dangerous and inhospitable lands for trade and no doubt for the thrill of it too. Incredible.
After the mountainous desert, the road starts to drop down into a winding valley that drops and drops and drops for possibly about thirty or forty miles. Don’t try to cycle up it. At intervals, huge long gravelled ramps rise off the side of the road, giving trucks somewhere to land if their brakes burn out. Considerably better than making a nasty mess in the valley bottom. Everything today is on a grand scale. When we get to the bottom, sand dunes the size of mountains wait to impress us. Herds of freely wandering dromedary camels dutifully fill the foreground. (Camels make a sand dune look more beautiful- not Alice walker quote)
An Ariel railway appears suddenly from nowhere. Raised some forty foot up, it runs along like a concrete city monorail for some ten miles or so. At first I take it merely to be a typical grandiose and gratuitous waste of concrete, but it’s actual purpose soon becomes apparent when the mountainous sand dune starts to creep under the struts. The train still runs, unaffected. Nothing the occasional bit of bulldozing and dumper trucking can’t sort out. Yet another example of Chinese superlative ingenuity.
At Dunhuang I first stop to buy a nice big yellow melon. I sit outside the nearby bus station and scoop out it’s insides in the blistering heat, eating seeds and all. An hour later I get the next bus out to Liuyuan where the scenery immediately becomes incredibly dull. For two hundred miles it’s flat sand with nothing in it excepting one admittedly enormous wind farm with about three hundred tall white turbines.
The land appears to be useless. What does China want with all this blank space? It doesn’t even look like it has any water. No soil. I wonder whether with some permaculturally inclined act of will it could be turned fertile.
Getting out at the end, I hook up with a French couple also travelling in the bus, and we have supper together. They are heading for Kashgar… And then Uzbekistan Tajikistan and Iran. I am envious. I would really love to go to Iran but it’s not easy in the first place and currently too hard for where I’m at now.
Hanging out with them is really nice. Neither of them looks at a mobile phone once. After meeting so many travellers in the last few months, this is one of the few times I get to talk with people directly, unhindered and uninterrupted by technology. Sheetal spent at least half the time fiddling with her phone. It drove me nuts, making me feel unimportant and uninteresting. It meant I couldn’t find my way into a conversation easily either unless it was about mobile phones.
When I travel solo, and am missing having a companion, it is because I would like to enjoy the shared observations and insights that two people can have together. Stupid phones get in the way. Bloody things. And now mine won’t work. Argh!
Anyway. One plate of steamed spinach, two beers (them), one bottle of water (me) and three ice creams later (also me) we part company, them heading for the midnight train to Urumqi (Urumchi) and me down a likely looking empty road that seems to go nowhere. I reach the end, passing numerous interesting scrap yards en route. A security guard wants to know my business. I gesture that I just want a place to put my tent. He offers me washing facilities and points me to a nearby spot where he can see me. I tent up under some wind gushing willows on a concrete path. Very nice. I sit. I write. I notice that it’s a new moon. Well that explains the last week. Goodnight.
August 8th.
Its a short walk down a dusty road to get back into town and a woman masked up in bright colours offers me a ride in her tuk-tuk. Three minutes later we’re there.
Its not exactly a tourist hotspot, a tiny town clinging to it’s desert existence. A few people are staring at me but that’s nothing unusual.
I have no idea when the train to Turpan is. I rock up to the counter and buy my ticket, and then discover it’s delayed by two hours. No loss. A gaggle of bellowing chattering people carrying a mass of luggage seem to be after the same train as me. Their luggage seems to consist half of cloth and half of watermelons and other fruity veg things. Trains are cramped at the best of times, and I get a kind of sinking feeling at the sight of these peace-mangling groups that use the train to ferry their trade wares. Everyone’s got to live, so I don’t feel too bad about it really.
I thought yesterdays journey was amazing.
At school in geography classes, I dimly remember learning a whole host of names to describe various types of geological features; drumlins, moraine, terminal moraine, hanging valleys…
I never understood why anyone might find a desert beautiful. My journey from Liuyuan to Turpan lasts seven hours and I am amazed to see rock moulded into shapes and colour combinations that I have not only never ever seen before, but would not have thought possible. It’s as if nature has willfully decided to indulge itself on a series of free-form sculptural experiments just for the heck of it.
We pass places that look like they must have been river beds in the dim and distant past. Vast curving channels, rolling down away from the distant mountains on the horizon but with not a drop of water in them.
An ever changing landscape with no apparent signs of life in much of it.
Very occasionally, some outpost where a building must be housing some engineers to maintain the few areas of wind turbines that are around. Dirt tracks weave through almost impossible terrain that though sometimes flat, will soon enough begin to undulate into ducking and diving clefts, crevices and folds of unforgiving rock and dust.
Getting off at Tuluafan, I merely presume to be the chinkification of the higher name Turpan. I have a rough map of a hostel I am aiming for, even though they seem to be fully booked when I managed to look online in Liuyuan.
Taxi drivers are on me like flies. ‘Turpan! Turpan! Turpan!’
But I’m already in Turpan. Why are they wanting to take me where I already am? Idiots.
It soon becomes apparent that with my combination of slightly inadequate information technology and my general tendency to never really plan very much, that Tuluafan and Turpan are indeed not only two totally different places but also that Turpan is fifty kilometres away.
Its 8.30pm. I am filthy. I neeeed my WiFi fix. Or I think I do. I don’t even know if the hostel I am aiming at (which is fifty kilometres away) will even have a bed for me.
I finally get in a taxi. Two Uighur guys with their music on the stereo. Sounds Islamic. Thank god. Getting really bored of Chinese everythingness.
Not totally convinced in should even bother trekking all the way out there just so I can come back tomorrow. The amount it’s going to cost me (about 22 quid, for a room and two taxi rides) just so I can have a shower seems daft.
I’m in the taxi. For three minutes I try to tell myself not to be bothered by it. It’s only money. It’s all part of the Grand Plan. It’s an adventure. Let go.
OK. Stop the taxi please. I want to get out.
We are passing just outside of Tuluafan through some industrial wasteland full of nothing. The taxi driver is confused. Eventually after repeated requests from me, he stops. I get out. He gets out. He convinces me to get back in. I get back in. He gets back in. We drive off, in the direction of Turpan.
We pass through a village, lush with vineyards. All fine looking camping spots.
Outside the village, I signal for him to stop, again. He doesn’t. I ask and ask until I am shouting at him, swearing and everything. His refusal to stop is really pissing me off. Eventually he stops.
My ambivalence and our almost total non comprehension of each other hasn’t worked out too well. Once out of the taxi, I explain that A)I don’t need to go to Turpan because I have a tent, and B) I’m not made of money.
I end up giving him the 60 yuan he originally wanted. He will still need to go to Turpan anyway to get his next fare, whether I go or not.
He drives off, I sit by a barren roadside. I attempt to wash in a very fast flowing dirt coloured stone lined irrigation channel.
I up tent a few hundred yards from the road in what in many countries would be a farmers field. This however is a vast tract of grey shingle with a grid of straight tracks criss-crossing through it.
I don’t feel good. I just shouted at somebody. I am leaving China. I am leaving the Far East. I have slid through China in a series of hostel/train/hostel/train linkages. Camping out next to the security guard last night makes me feel like I have had quite a limited experience of China. I guess though on the other hand, I have encountered the traveller community, and that has introduced me to further possibilities about life. It’s good also to know that there are other people out there, all around me and in my future, who also look at the world through a similar lens.
I can’t talk to Sheetal. She leaves in a few days. I could still be with her, but I chose to carry on with my original plan.
My phone won’t do communications. The battery is rubbish. I’m carrying way too much stuff.
I am out in the desert. I have had almost no time where I have not been surrounded by people or in a city. In the distance a main road that maybe goes to Urumqi. Or maybe it doesn’t. I could hitch hike. In some ways it feels like it’s time to leave China. I have seen enough. In other ways I feel like I have barely scraped the surface. China is vast, and I have managed to cross from the east coast to the south, back north to Mongolia and now out west for a Kazakhi exit.
I’ve eaten too many noodles and not enough chips. I never ever ever want to eat instant noodles ever again. They are vile slimy dead things. Fresh noodles I like. I seriously miss cheese on toast. And baked beans on toast.
Chinese bread is hard to find sometimes, and when you do find it, it will vary from being stale, chewy and tasteless to being rock hard, stale and tasteless. Ditto cake.
Chinese snacks at service stations invariably take the form of endless vacuum packed mysterious dried out objects that look like they have either been retrieved from down the back of a sofa or are vacuum packed slimy squishy things that look like they have been lifted out of that part of the fridge where you get a small pool of manky water with ex-food sitting in it quietly rotting.
I thought western service stations were crap, with their 80 percent chocolate content. Surely is it not possible to get real actual food at the roadside somewhere in the world? That’s cheap and tasty and good for you? I guess you need to be in India.
I sit in the wasteland/maybe farmland in empty space, It gets dark. Car head lights define a distant road just in front of the furthest mountain line.
I am naked, because I can be. It get blowy the breeze is warm. It thinks about raining once or twice. It feels good on my skin.
I put up my tent, just in case. It’s good to be outside. I’m glad I didn’t go to Turpan. The wind get stronger and it brings proper rain. It’s still warm.
Finally the wind gets so strong that I have put rocks on everything to stop it all blowing away into the vast flat distance never to be seen again.
The tent is ‘crisp packeting’, my own term for when a tent is flapping wildly in the wind making it impossible to sleep.
I take the poles out of the tent in order to flatten it to the ground so the wind can’t get under it. Tent becomes bivvy.
Next morning, the combination of sleeplessness and enjoying the solitude inclines me to go nowhere. So I sit and write this. And maybe fiddle with my tent a bit.
Next day. August somewhen.
Not feeling inclined to move, it finally occurs to me that I’m overdue a dose of open space, unbothered by people and buildings. Here is not exactly picturesque, but it fits the purpose.
After some fiddling about with a tarp I bought, doing some basic experiments in alternative tenting possibilities, I pack away and opt for heading to Turpan rare than straight back on the train. I might as well break the journey up a bit.
Walk in the hundred yards to the road, I immediately get offered a lift in a grape grower’s tuk-tuk. It’s all grapes in this end of the world. In Xining 50 percent of what was available to eat seemed to be humungous watermelons. Here it’s grapes. And slightly fewer watermelons.
At the crossroads to the main Urumqi-Turpan highway, what amounts to a truck stop (with possibly the filthiest toilet I have ever encountered).
Sitting a safe distance from the aforementioned, I have a delicious lunch.
I get a taxi into Turpan, and spend a couple of nights there. Here, there’s a much greater presence of non-Han Chinese, i.e. Uighur people. They are much more interesting in than the Han. The Uighur dress more beautifully.
I take a bus to Tuluafan and just about manage to not miss my train.
I have bought a ticket to Kuche the halfway point to Kashgar, otherwise it would be a twenty four hour stint in one go. At least that long anyway.
The train is hopelessly overcrowded. I’m bloody glad that I managed to actually book a seat for once. Even sitting down on a proper seat, it’s become tortuous; the enormous length of journeying, the inability to stretch my legs in any direction. I have come to fear Chinese trains almost….
The desert continues to be stunning. I still don’t get why the. Chinese would want to lay claim to it
At Kuche I shove myself and my rucksack through the nonexistent gaps to get to door to get off. There are two children asleep in the doorway.
Half past midnight, I have got off here, picked up my next ticket for the next leg to Kashgar, and crashed out in the station forecourt along with hundred or so others, to wait for the next train. I could have stayed on the train I was on and it would have been a much cheaper, but the pleasure of being able to have some proper sleep appeals.
Round two… Some small grumpy Chinese woman is barking at everyone. Chinese is the perfect language to bark orders at people in. I have come to dislike The sound of Chinese. It’s not a pretty language. I described to somebody as either sounding like somebody ice-skating with fish strapped to their feet or like somebody battering the crap out of a piece of meat with a meat.
Finally, Kashgar… Apart from the relentless chinkification of as many places as possible, Kashgar retains a strong defiant heritage. Uighur, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz have been here at this silk road crossing point for nearly two thousand years. Much as the Chinese might try to put their homogenising stamp on everything, I really do feel for the original population here. The culture is here is beautiful, and the Chinese government seems to have a dread of beautiful things.
I find lunch, rice and stir fried veg. Eaten with a spoon. Middle eastern music, different food smells. I breathe in the differentness. I feel so relieved to bel asleep. I wake in time for the night market, bump into some western travellers, hang out with them and eat fabulous dumplings stuffed with green veg. Staying vegetarian in central Asia might be unrealistic. But I can try.
Aug 12.
Today is last day in China for Sheetal. She’s in Xian, she flies out just after midnight. It is also the start of the grouse shooting season in the highlands of Scotland. The latter has no bearing on anything currently, though when I was a kid, me and my parents would go to a shooting lodge in Scotland to pander to aristocrats whims in the name of the glorious twelfth. Who’d have thought that a lonely kid playing pooh sticks in a Scottish burn would end up in western China? I dreamed of it even then, and now I’m here.
I later discovered that the old city of Kashgar is yet another cosmetificification by the Chinese; levelling the real old city and replacing it with a new improved version of the same thing. Bastards.
I spend a few days fiddling with a swanky new fake Samsung phone. It doesn’t explode when I plug it in the wall. Well that’s a bonus at least.
It’s time to leave Kashgar. And China. The hostel managers are able to organise a taxi for me and a supremely beardy American to get to the Irkeshtam border crossing into
Irkeshtam.
We travel with four others from another hostel up to the border. It’s a convoluted business with a lot of slightly mixed up information about how we actually get out of China. After managing to pies off two of our group, a gay couple from Milan we finally get out of Kashgar. Beard American had forgotten his towel and I had to have four attempts at finding a cash machine that actually worked. And the Italians had an expensive plane to catch the following morning very early.
Sharing my nutty breakfast with the taxi driver we pass out of Kashgar out past a rural neighbourhood and up onto the pass road through more stunning desert scenery. After about ten miles we reach a checkpoint. We all get out and via certain amount of helpful pointing from the Chinese guards and a couple of taxi drivers we finally understand that we are to wait here for another taxi to tak3 us the remaining 130 mms to the actual border crossing. Why is there a checkpoint here? It’s China, being inscrutably paranoically Chinese
Richard Terry 