I've been meaning to write about our trip along the Karakoram Highway towards the Chinese border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I haven't had a chance yet. It was a truly amazing place, with a landscape like no other I've ever seen (I'll post photos later -- I can't wait to come back!). Instead, here's an email from Rick about the trip.

We arrived in Kashgar where ethnic Uyghurs (descendants of a Turkic-Uzbeck people) fill the landscape in what feels a bit like Russia, Arabia, and Eastern Europe combined.... the arab includes grand Mosques, arabic signs, camels, swords, spices, and an air of exotic that is nothing less than mind-blowing.
We toured the Kashgar market and I shot more than 5 rolls in less than an hour.

Now, we are just back after an incredible journey which took us into the soaring Pamir Mountains along the Karakoram highway just short of the Pakistan border.
Please put away visions of Taliban rocketeers hiding behind every rock and replace them with a huge, peak studded land, strewn with Kyrgyk herders chasing yaks, and flittering from yurts.
We hired a driver (paraquot), a Uyghur taxi driver for a two-day drive up the karakoram where we shrank into a landscape of 7000 metre peaks where wild camels crossed silt-glaciated-streams through boulder-strewn depostion-fields.(modifier fest here).
The Karakoram climbed to a max 16,000 thousand feet and we sputtered in a battered volkswagen santana past vast green fields and rolling tundra scattered with mud and straw huts.
As we stopped along the road to photograph a sand dune (whose peak was so high it held snow), we were gang-rushed by Kyrgyk women and children dressed in fantastically colored dresses and scarves, shoving handfuls of handmade crafts in our faces....
Lucky me I thought....and my camera. (today marks my 70th roll).

We finished our drive as far as Tashkurgan, ( just a ways from the Pakistani border) and entered a rather anticlimatic village contructed almost entirely of what looked like leftover ceramic bathroom tile. Althoug ethinically Tajik and Kyrgyks dominated the Han Chinese and the Chinese Army loomed over everything. (this area is a closely watched).

We turned around there and came back to the Exquisite shores of Karakul Lake.
It was a mongolian looking venture where we a Tajik version of curly from the three stooges showed us to our dreary Yurt. As the rain pummeled the yurt, the 8 other yurt mates we were staying with moved themselves around the yurt floor like chess peices to avoid leaks in the roof. Christina was not happy.
"Good time to find a beer" I thought.
Unfortunately Westerners are the only ones in the area who prefer their beer cold.
So I enquired...
"Pijou bingda?" I queried.... knowing full well the answer.
"Bingda!" curly said and handed me a warm bottle.
"Bingda?" I said as I handed it back>
"Bingda!" he said as he handed it to his assistant who immediately ran to the lake and through it in.

A while went by, and we sat in our leaking yurt and curly forgot my longing for cold beer when I saw curly' assitant pick up the beer from the lake and return to the tumble-down "lodge".
After a long while I returned to the lodge to find my two beers back on the shelf, warming themselves quite nicely.
"Bingda?" I enquired, and curly smiled, this time with a different tack.
He waved me to follow him into a run-down kitchen where thick white smoke poured from a small coal fired stove. The roof was leaking and peices of rotting lamb accompanied wilting peices of cabbage surrounding a cutting board and knife.
"Bingda!" he said proudly, then opened a grease-smudged freezer in the corner.
I watched as he slid his hand, then his forearm, then his elbow into a large pile of lamb carcass and bones.
There beneath the carcass he pulled out my bottle.
Ice cold.
"Bingda!" I said apreciatively, wiped the guts off my bottle, and poured myself a long one....

That is all for from china for now...


Peace and mutton.

Rick