Further Wanderings

The trip over the Torugart pass from China to Kyrgyzstan was meant to be something of an adventure.
But the fact that it’s only possible to do as part of a well organized pre-booked tour meant that actually it went very smoothly with nary a hint of the unexpected.

The owner of the tour company, Abdul, walked into the lobby of our hostel just as we did, and after some fond farewells to the staff and the kitten we headed downstairs to our oversized (for two passengers, a driver and a guide) ride, a shiny, clean new minivan.

On the way out of town we stopped and traded Abdul for his brother, Petty (not sure of the spelling there) who would be our guide until we crossed the border.

Our final non-official stop was at the dusty, frontier-feeling town of Shang’atushixiang where we picked up some bread, fruit and water for the trip.

Our final Chinese town. The main intersection in Shang’atushixiang

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While my parents had been in Kashgar we’d made an effort to get out and see the sights. When they departed, Sarah and I still had another six days until our Kyrgyzstan visas started their validity period, so we actually did relatively little IN Kashgar.

We sat on the rooftop of the Pamir Youth Hostel. We read books. I wrote. We baked in the early summer Xinjiang heat (it had, of course, stopped raining when my parents went home.) We made salads of cucumber, tomato and onion (three local staples.) And we took turns going on several short missions a day to buy iced tea, bread (expecially “Xinjiang bagels”) and chocolate bars (there was a huge selection of Turkish manufactured chocolate at the local supermarket, doubtless a result of the strong linguistic connection between Uighur and Turkish.)

However the only really interesting thing we got up to wasn’t in Kashgar at all, but further afield and much, much higher up along the Karakoram Highway.

Muztagh Ata (the mountain in the background, 7546m) and the tiny stream that drained the fairly large Karakul Lake (which, as with so many such things, is redundant, as Kul means lake in Uighur)

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Though we were already far out in China's western reaches, we were headed still further west. A long way further. The train trip from Urumqi to Kashgar took us over 26 hours, and passed through some of the ... [Continue reading this entry]

The next stop on our journey through western China (we being Sarah, myself and my parents in case you haven't been keeping up) was Urumqi. Urumqi is the capital of and largest city in China's Xinjiang province. And, ... [Continue reading this entry]

The train trip from Lanzhou to Dunhuang took a lengthy 16 hours. Given that it left in late afternoon and arrived in mid-morning, this meant that it was a journey we actually got to "experience" rather than simply falling ... [Continue reading this entry]

I concluded the last entry by saying that we were headed west on the silk road. And while that's not untrue, it's perhaps a little bit misleading. (I begin so many entries with these aplogies for minor faults at ... [Continue reading this entry]

Our train trip up to Xi'an (my mom's first in China) was a bit of a non-event. We went to bed almost immediately on boarding. The views out the train on waking were surprising. My initial visions ... [Continue reading this entry]

This entry is actually more about the city of Leshan, two hours away, than it is about Chengdu itself. But: A. Many people (though not us) just visit Leshan as a day trip from Chengdu and B. I really like this ... [Continue reading this entry]

Even with Kangding to warm us up, arriving in the big city of Chengdu after over a week in the small, isolated, high altitude towns of western Sichuan was a bit of a shock. Hazy, polluted skies, hot and ... [Continue reading this entry]

The bus trip from Litang to the village of Tagong was clearly the most epic road journey we'd undertaken in China. And not in an entirely good way. In fact, although the scenery was often jaw-dropping, not even ... [Continue reading this entry]