Warsaw to Bangkok

Well into the 30’s, Kashgar was exotica. It was beyond the back of beyond. It took five months to get here from Beijing in the mid-30s and was such a difficult haul that it was made the subject of books (News from Tartary by Peter Fleming is an excellent one). It was a closed world, beset by insurrection and the last vestiges of Great Game intrigue as the Soviets involved themselves in the fray between the Communists, the Kuomintang and mujahedeen groups.

At the time, the only outlet to the West was via British-held Kashmir, which being on the other side of the Himalaya was only reachable for a few months each summer. The situation did not improve. Sino-Soviet tensions led to the closing of the border with the USSR in 1960. The Karakoram Highway to Pakistan was but a mountain caravan trail. India’s border remains closed to this day. Coming from Mongolia would have meant trekking through both the Gobi and Taklamakan (”go in and you won’t come out”) Deserts. Rail only reached here in 1999, and then only from Urumqi, which itself is 30 hours from Lanzhou, an isolated backwater beyond the ends of remotest Sichuan.

It is, judging by the number of travellers here and the strong Han influence, not what it used to be. But whether you’re spent big bucks flying in with a tour group or whether you’ve spent days or weeks getting here overland, clearly at least a little bit of old Kashgar remains. It’s still an oasis in the middle of steppe, mountain and desert. It still takes upwards of forever to get here. It’s going to take several more days for me to get to China proper. And though my name won’t go down with the Silk Road’s famous “foreign devils” of yesteryear, I still feel pretty good about having made it to this remote outpost. My journey is halfway done. The Russian world is now behind me, and unadulerated Asia beckons.

Kashgar is by all accounts a very rapidly changing town. My first morning I walked through long stretches of Chinese luxury clothing stores and electronics shops. It didn’t seem like Central Asia at all. I finally arrived in the Uyghur old town, and it was like stepping back a few centuries. I didn’t have a map of the old town and didn’t feel like getting lost, so I just stuck to my game plan of grabbing breakfast. You could see the dirt roads being ripped up by Chinese workers, who were installing sewer pipes. The Uyghurs just sat in their chaykanas and watched. A few years ago, there were seeds of rebellion sprouting as Uyghur resentment over Chinese “invasion” of their land started in earnest. That seems to have faded to resignation now.

I ate some laghman - noodles with garlic, meat, peppers, etc, and walked back to the hotel, having in mind a grand plan to explore the area in much more depth that afternoon.

By the time the afternoon rolled around, I was quite tired and decided a nap was better. That lasted 3 1/2 hours and I felt even more tired when I awoke. Still, I set out for the old town. I didn’t make it very far before sickness took hold. I went back to my room and proceeded to spend the next two days in bed sick as a dog. I threw up in the sink a couple of times.

Why the sink? Well, squat toilets are not amenable to technicolour yawns at the best of times, but the toilets at the Seman Hotel are particularly nasty. The place is full of Western tourists but still they haven’t bothered upgrading what are surely some of the filthiest, smelliest holes I’ve ever laid eyes one. It didn’t matter how sick I was, I wasn’t going to throw up in those!

Upon my recovery, I decided to swear off Uyghur food for the duration of my trip. I’d had enough Central Asian food anyway by this point. I wasn’t in a huge hurry to dip into Chinese food, given that I am spending several weeks in the country.

One of the best parts about Kashgar is the atmosphere. It is a market town and people come from all over to trade here. Uyghurs, Han (garden variety Chinese), Hui (Muslim Chinese), Kyrgyz, Kazak, Tajik, Hunza (from near Tashkurgan in the direction of Pakistan) and Pakistanis fill the town to conduct business. There are many Pakistani restaurants to cater to that group and I decided to eat there most of the time. The curries were mild and tasty, if a little cheaply-made. I was especially impressed with the friendliness of the Pakistani clientele, and had many interesting convesations. It really made me regret that I’m not travelling to Pakistan.

One of the most disorienting things about Kashgar - well, Xinjiang Province in general - is the dual time zones. The entirety of China runs on Beijing time, but that is 2500 km east of Kashgar. So Xinjiang has its own time as well. All the “official” stuff - post office, banks, trains, etc run on Beijing time, the rest on Xinjiang time, which is two hours behind Beijing time. I thus managed to make appointments for 11am Beijing time and 9am Xinjiang time the same day.

One thing which is most annoying in many of the more touristy parts of Central Asia is “Hello!”. This is pretty much the only word of English that everybody on the planet knows, from little kids to touts and vendors. After a month in Central Asia, “hello” has gone from being a polite greeting to meaning “hey, you, whitey with the money!”. It is very annoying to be singled out from a crowd by every vendor, moneychanger, taxi driver, and tout for attention. When it is being shouted at you, sometimes by someone who has decided to follow you down the street shouting it many times, without an ounce of friendliness, it strikes me as ridiculously rude. Thank goodness the Han don’t bother which such things (author’s postscript: this comment may hold for Kashgar, but as for the rest of China…). I looked forward to hitting China proper and being singled out because I look funny rather than because everybody thinks I’m rich and want to spend all of my cash on their stupid trinkets, rotten fruit or whatever.

The Chinese influence on Kashgar was lamented by a few locals that I spoke to. Travellers, too, pointed out that a few years ago Kashgar had far less neon, far fewer Chinese people and a much better market. It is easy for us as Westerners to lament the loss of an ancient culture, but the truth is that culture is one of grinding poverty. The Uyghur people are poor, lack educational opportunities, lack plumbing and medicine, and this brings with it higher than normal infant mortality and lower than normal life expectancy.

We as a people certainly were eager to leave our 19th century lifestyle behind, and it is ultimately a little bit arrogant to wish other cultures would not do the same. It smacks of seeing places like Kashgar’s old town as little more than a human zoo. Sure, it is really fun to walk around the adobe houses and narrow laneways, but we wouldn’t want to live there ourselves.

That said, and it sort of sounds like the Beijing party line, one Uyghur in particular at the Urumqi train station argued quite vociferously that his people in fact did not receive the benefits of such modernization. When old areas are bulldozed or gentrified, the Han move in. The wealth of Kashgar has increased, yes, he said, but the wealth of the Uyghurs has not.

An example of Chinese mismanagement of modernization has to be the world famous Kashgar Sunday Market. This market has existed for a couple of thousand years. The travelling Polos traded here. However, the open-air market of yesteryear has largely been replaced by an “International Trade Centre”, with sterile metal stalls aligned in tidy little rows. The hat section is over here, the knives over there. There is no bustle here, no atmosphere. Thankfully some pockets of the old market still remain, where traders haggle over trussed-up chickens and stuff pigeons into bags to take back to their restaurants (Chinese eat the things - ew!).

At the end of the day, however, my impression was that the Kashgar Sunday Market is dying. It is a major tourist draw, not to mention the heart of the region’s economy. But people don’t come all the way to the ends of the Earth to bargain for cheap flip-flops and children’s clothing. They don’t come for an “International Trade Centre”. Aside from a few Uyghur hats and knives, there’s nothing you can buy there that you can’t buy somewhere else. Tourists go there for the atmosphere. The Chinese have killed that, and when word gets around, Kashgar will die. Hotan to the south will be the immediate beneficiary, as it too has a famous Sunday Market. Hopefully the Chinese leave that one alone.

The other thing that disappointed me about the market was harder to put my finger on. Until I left and the answer came from below. GRRRRROOWWWWLL. I’d come to the market without breakfast, and left still hungry. There was hardly any food there, and nothing you can’t find at even the lowliest bazar in the dustiest Central Asia village. In places like Osh, Samarqand and Tashkent, not only did food abound but local specialties were plentiful. There were no local specialties here. Melons, cheap candies, honey and nuts, sure. Bread, and standard chaykana fare yes. The only new thing was opke - the infamous goat head soup with intestines. I gave it a pass.

To me, markets are all about food. For a market to feed my soul, it must feed my stomach. The Kashgar Sunday Market came up completely empty in this regard. In fact, on this trip nothing has topped Riga’s market, even though that one never gets any press at all. I dream of returning to Toronto and stuffing my face in Kensington Market or at St. Lawrence Market.

All along the way, apparently from Sary Tash onwards, there were trucks hauling scrap metal - rusty scrap metal to be precise - from Kyrgyzstan to China. Apparently one of these 40 ton loads is worth $5000. One poor bastard had the side of one of his trailers collapse and his load had been dumped on the road.

Adjacent to the border is a trucker’s hostel where much of this scrap metal sits. Truckers gather here in the evening to await the re-opening of the border in the morning. As did we.

We were able to secure a room. We investigated the local store, which sold all the essentials - candy, booze and smokes. Nothing else. Not even water. The entire place was quite surreal. Rusting metal in heaps everywhere, bored people living in rusted trailers either wandering aimlessly or getting hammered. The ochre river and barren mountains provided the backdrop. It was like we’d been dropped onto the set of a sci-fi movie about a forgotten Mars colony.

The toilets here were uniquely bad. Typical squatters, but the lights didn’t work so even in broad daylight you couldn’t see what you were doing. And they reeked not of the expected unmentionable effluvia but of ammonia - suffocatingly so. My poor lungs were not having a good day.

At dinner, we arranged transport over the border to an equivalent speck on the map on the Chinese side. From there, we’d arrange transport to Kashgar.

In the morning, our driver was a no-show, so we walked through customs and the Kyrgyz exit control. The Germans had hiked into Kyrgyzstan from Kazakhstan and they had not received an entry stamp. I’d heard this before, about the border post near Karakol not giving stamps. A token bribe was required for the authorities to overlook this. There is a no-man’s land of 7km between the Kyrgyz exit post and the Chinese post. You are not allowed to walk so we were forced to hand over our remaining som (about $2) to a border guard to have him force some trucks to take us. I was first up, and found myself on a very slow truck with an ineffective driver.

We were passed by many trucks, but surprisingly not by the Germans, who ended up with our no-show from the morning. After 45 minutes, another check and a couple of long, meaningless stops we got in the queue for the Chinese side. There was a gate 100m away. For the next four hours.

You see, while in theory the Chinese guards are supposed to work in the morning, they decided not to bother, showing up only after lunch. At this point my driver had allowed several other trucks to pass us, despite my passport having been checked and cleared twice. The Great Wait continued. I read my new China guide extensively. With most of the other trucks now past the gate, we found ourselves at the front of the line. And went nowhere.

There are a couple of tanks on display on the Chinese side. Very scary ones, too. So scary that when it started to rain the soldiers ran and put them under tarps. Tanks that can’t handle a bit of rain are not so high on the intimidation scale, if you ask me.

The hours dragged on. Numerous passport checks were conducted. I’ll spare you the gories but suffice to say by the time my passport was actually stamped and I was free to go I was in a state of advanced stupefaction. Better still, the Germans were nowhere to be found.

A tout had a shared taxi to Kashgar ready to go. But I decided to hold up my end and wait, as I would not have wanted to be abandoned. While I waited, every man in uniform that passed by decided that he needed to see my passport, even though I was already free and clear. One of them graciously decided to practice his X-ray machine skills on my bag, nuking it for a full five minutes. It read “Film Safe”, but this still worried me.

After nearly an hour, the Germans arrived, having been subject to much delay earlier. We were able to arrange transport fairly smoothly.

The transport itself was absolute hell. We’d been dazzled by the sparkling new Mitsubishi. It had been a while since we’d seen a car with airbags, a CD player, and rear selt belts. We talked money, sure, but we forget about the little details.

One fun game travellers to Central Asia play is “guess which one is our driver”. We lost, as it was the third person to get behind the wheel. Then the dreaded “extra passenger” climbed in - a large Chinese who I can most politely describe as being ***faced. If only that were sufficient. The driver was a Chinese lady and this guy stumbled into the back seat. They proceeded to have a multi-hour conversation in the subdued, hushed tones and elegant pontificatory style that the Chinese are famous for. Did China’s famous poets - did Confucius himself - really talk like this? In addition, the music was blaring, and the vents were open so the mountain air could penetrate our bones.

The driver was actually the antithesis of the stereotypical Chinese woman driver. But make no mistake, she was equally incompetent. More so, really. The stereotype drives like she’s never been to drivng school This one drove like she’d never operated a motorized vehicle before.

Kashgar is 280km from the border and she took nearly five hours to get there. For once in Central Asia, the roads were immaculate. But this woman drove 60 the whole way, in places where most of us would have been going in the 80-100 range. She was completely unable to deal with the following: passing trucks, being passed, other vehicles in general, livestock, turns, cracks, minor potholes and patches, bridges, butterflies, bumblebees and rocks at the side of the road. She approached hairline fractures as though they were railway ties. A patch of dirt necessitated a complete stop. Wide, sweeping curves were hairpin mountain bends to her. I know what cautious is, and this wasn’t it. This was a complete and total lack of confidence and ability. Oh, and just because every fish and burnt raisin cake must have its vegemite and goat head icing, she spent half the time jibber-jabbering on her cellphone, with the requisite swerving and irrational, unpredictable speed changes.

My brain was siphoned of all positive thought by the time we pulled into Kashgar.

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