Xinjiang

Turpan, Urumqi, Kashgar, the Karakoram Highway, and the Southern Silk Route Home


Just got out of China's Eastern Province after a couple of weeks kicking around: great place, great people.

Turpan was my first taste of Uyghur Muslim China. Pretty relaxed, a nice change of pace from the frenetic East. The local grape growing communities were extrememly accomodating.

I then headed for the regional capital Urumqi. More tense due to Uyghur/ Han enthic tensions, but I liked the place alot. I stayed with a couple of academics living in the southern Uyghur section of the city. They're studying Chinese history and were kind enough to give me plenty of information on the Uyghur issue.

After this came fabled Kashgar. To avoid the desert sun, I spent most of my time talking with other travellers and drinking beer. It was a welcome reprieve from the isolation of solo travel.

I journeyed next to the most eastern point of the trip: Lake Karakul on the Karakoram Highway. Spent a night in a Yurt with some locals and climbed a small mountain. The altitude (at times 5000+ metres) almost killed me and I left the place with a headache. I am no mountaineer.

Then came the arduous journey home along the Southern Silk route. To give a bit of perspective, The Northern Silk Route is serviced by a train line, so travelling is smooth and easy. The Southern route is not; It took endless, soul destroying bus rides across desert rivers fed by snow melt and some of the most desolate scenes I have ever seen. When the buses ran thin, I bummed lifts from kind-eyed Uyghurs. In all it took an exhausting four days of constant travel, but the experience felt truly intrepid and was worth the pain.

Now I'm in a tiny Buddhist locale called Xiahe, close to the Sichuan border. Plan is to make it into Yunnan within the next couple of days, then head for southern borders with Myanmar (Burma to you colonialists).

Sadly, the trip ends in 15 days. But I'm comforted by the fact that immediately following China I have six weeks in Madagascar.


More Soon…



djb