The Next Chapter Begins
For the past two-and-a-half months, we’ve been shuttling ourselves back and forth from Guangzhou to various points around China, done three separate visa runs to Hong Kong or Macau, spent more than 30 nights at the IT World Hotel in Guangzhou, seen places we otherwise probably never would have reached, and been mesmerised by the canyons of Zhanjiajie, the karsts of Dehang, the lakes of Jiuzhaiguo, the Buddhist caves scattered all around Gansu and the architectural beauty of Huangyao and Lijiang.
We suffered a huge letdown when we lost the bid that most affected us (despite winning a separate bid), but within 24 hours we received an equally surprising piece of good news – that Wendy had passed a very competitive and difficult United Nations translator exam she sat four months earlier. This turned our fortunes upside down overnight and we soon realised that on a personal level, losing the bid was the best thing for us. Now, with Guangzhou in the rear-view mirror, we have plenty of options for the future and (most importantly for the purposes of this blog), plenty of freedom for the present.
A long time ago (nearly two-and-a-half years, to be more precise), we sat with a handful of travellers and an atlas on a guesthouse rooftop after the Monday market in Djenne, Mali, and plotted our conquest of Asia – a one-year-or-more sweeping overland journey through Southeast Asia, China and Central Asia, then winding back through the sub-continent and finishing in Nepal. Since November 2007 we have pursued this dream pretty relentlessly, albeit in a broken up form with work stops in Beijing and Guangzhou, by completing Southeast Asia, spending significant time in China, returning to India and Bangladesh, and trekking the Annapurna Circuit and Sanctuary in Nepal. Apart from a return to Pakistan, which has now descended into complete chaos, the only place unvisited from the plan formed that evening in Mali is Central Asia. And with nothing else in our way for now (though that could change at any moment), it seems as good a time as any to finish off the ‘task’ we set ourselves back in March 2007.
To that end, we have arrived in Urumqi, the major city of Chinese Turkestan (or Xinjiang province, to be official) and a city further from any ocean than any other place on earth. We intend to spend about two weeks in Xinjiang before moving west to the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia – “the ‘Stans”– beginning with Krygyzstan and continuing into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. After that? Who knows…
Tags: Asia, Central Asia, China, Guangzhou, Xinjiang
Nick