Further Wanderings

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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