The Southern Silk Road

This is the last post of my Xinjiang trip. With being behind on our blogging, and China's recent ban of blogs, it's really back to catching up.

Kashgar and Tashkurgan were the gems of the trip. Driving the Southern Silk Road back to Wulumuqi on the other hand, was interesting but probably not worth the 8-10 hours between desert oasis towns.

First town, not much interesting here. Lots of youth hanging out, not in school and not at work. At least they were friendly...

The next town was much better. I mean, just check out the parking lot...

Get your knock-off Coke ("Future Cola") here. It's actually very good. Basically they stole Coke's recipe, but they make it with sugar instead of corn syrup. If it wasn't for those pesky trade laws preventing infringement, you might see Future Cola at a store near you...

A section of the market. Even out here in the remotest parts of Xinjiang province the ladies can buy their heels...

Then a bite for lunch. Yup, we blended in

Stopping to water the desert.

Again, we're in the remotest parts of China and check this out, you can get CNG (compressed natural gas) for you car at any gas station.

I ask again... WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE UNITED STATES? We have more than enough natural gas to cheaply and cleanly power all of our cars and become energy independent with a proven resource and technology. Instead we waste billions of dollars pursuing things like ethanol and hybrids that don't live up to their billing.

Next town.

Hungry for some raisins? These kids played in the raisins for the couple of minutes while mom looked at the different raisins. I guess it's not a problem...

It seems that kids and adults outside of the Western world can all do this squat without a problem. Meanwhile American boys struggle in baseball to stay in the catcher's squat for more than a few seconds at a time.

What would it be like to have knees that would allow me to squat like this and find it restful?
Taxis out here...

Another parking spot...

Could never figure this out... dentist offices all over the town all with new, nice looking equipment. They must have the best teeth in China here...

We sat down to dinner and the menu was all in Uygher... not helpful. We asked them if they had another menu and they took us here...

Scary moment at this restaurant. There was a 20th wedding anniversary party going and that was fun to watch. One of the men at the party came over to talk to us... he was Uygher and spoke in Chinese about as good as we did. He was so happy to meet Americans and bought a bottle of "Baijiu" (rice alcohol) to celebrate with us. Here's a cell phone picture of the scene...

Then he started to pound the drinks, one after another. My buddies started to take the drink into their mouths, then spit it into their cans of soda or beer bottles. This guy pounded around 15 shots in front of us. Then all of a sudden he grabbed my video camera and said let's go. I tried to get my camera back from him as he was a bit rough with it and I feared he might break it, but he wouldn't give it back. We got to the steps and he took the first step and went head-over-feet the entire flight of stairs. It was one of the most horrible sounds I've ever heard as you could hear and see his head hit again and again. One of my buddies went down and grabbed my camera that was still in his hands. Then we checked how he was... amazingly no blood. We helped him onto his feet, took him over to the check-in desk, informed people from his party what happened and we were out of there. Fortunately my camera came through just fine. I'm sure this guy was hurting the next day...

Typical scene checking in or out... employees crowding around trying to figure out what to do with our passports and visas. The obviously don't get too many foreigners traveling through these towns.

Our driver's seatbelt. Note the screw in the belt. That's because he doesn't actually use the belt, but has the belt pulled out to a preset length to put it on quickly when he sees cops.

This is Hotan or Khotan depending on what book you're reading. This was one of the towns we were really looking forward to, this is where China's best jade come from.

But the jade market was a huge disappointment. The market consists of a few larger sellers...

and lots of people walking around with the smaller pieces they've found ("mined") that are looking to trade with each other.

So you walk around look at everybody's hand to see what they're holding and how much they're looking for. Perhaps somebody who actually knows anything about jade would enjoy this, but this was a waste for us, although slightly entertaining.

Enrique actually bought a couple of pieces. I guess they'll look nice in a fishbowl...

Everybody is in on this business... old ladies, young boys... find a jade stone and come to the market to make some money

We then went to a jade store to see their overpriced products. This was the welcome sign... Comrade? Looks like their target market is their communist Russian friends...

This group of presumably unemployed men followed us around the town to watch us buy things. Here they are watching us buy bread...

Camel crossing the highway through the desert

We came up to an area of the desert that had some sand dunes. Enrique had the idea to run and jump off them. I was a bit hesitant so I didn't get the air he got on his jumps. So I'll post pictures of him instead

We got to our hotel for the evening... it was the nicest one in town which isn't saying that much. But apparently it's popular with another clientele... one that appreciates 24-hour call girl service posted right in the room.

Then in the bathroom there was a special message reminding you to use safe practices and prevent the spread of AIDS.

For a practice that is illegal in China, it was totally out in the open here... disturbing.

The "lovely" view from our room... we couldn't wait to get out of this dumpy town.

The next day we drove to 1,000 Buddha Caves.

Looks cool on the outside, but unfortunately the caves had all been raided so there was no artwork remaining.

The statue of of the a person regarded as the keystone to Buddhism in China. His father was Chinese, his mother was Indian, so he was the first person who could translate Buddhist texts into Chinese.

Then finally off to the next town where we had a bit of a traffic jam getting into town...

Bumper-to-bumper, I mean bumper-to-donkey head traffic. The hilarious thing was that our car got rear-ended by a donkey that didn't stop in time! Fun times!

Then the "interesting" vehicles...

These are the police's special riot-response vehicles. Apparently riot happen somewhat frequently out here as these folks were out driving throughout the town

More market areas...

We missed our chance to get a great video a couple days prior. As we were cruising on the road, we saw a donkey galloping along the road with his driver asleep on the cart! Only after a little while did we think that we should have turned around to take a video of that.

Here we saw how that can happen. Here's a guy sleeping on his cart, but the donkey is "parked."

More bagels. I could eat these every day... oh wait, I did eat these every day! They were so good. Just need to introduce them to cream cheese...
Some fellas dressed to impress...ur room at this hotel. The nicest place that we stayed in, but the shower was enough to make us get our own rooms this time! But for $15/night you can do that...

The view from our rooms... not much to see. The airport is there in the distance. Lonely Planet said that there were three flights per week to Wulumuqi, but that the often are cancelled "due to weather," but that means the flight wasn't full enough so they just cancelled the flight.

Anybody remember seeing the movie "Coming to America" with Eddie Murphy? After he came to New York from the African country of Zamunda, he got a job at "McDowells" which was a knock-off McDonalds restaurant. I thought of that here at this restaurant. They had a hamburger that was totally a Big Mac knock-off. We bought it and it tasted just like it. What did we drink with our knock-off Big Mac? A knock-off Coke of course!

We were supposed to catch an overnight train from this town to another town near Wulumuqi, spend the day there touring, then take a short bus the following day to Wulumuqi and finally fly back to Shanghai. But we were just tired of it. The first half of the trip was wonderful, the second half was just gruelling. So Ryan finally said he was going to catch a flight from here to Wulumuqi and then try to change his ticket to get home a day-and-a-half earlier. That sounded too good, so all of us did.

It was time to say goodbye to our driver...
and we flew out the next day, changed our tickets at the airport in Wulumuqi for a $10 change fee, and were on our way on a five-hour flight back to Shanghai.

We got on the plane leaving for Wulumuqi and couldn't have been happier. It had been a great trip, but it was definitely time to go...
To anybody thinking of doing this trip, I would highly recommend it... but only the first half of our trip, namely a day in Wulumuqi, a couple days in Kashgar with a Sunday stay for the market, then a couple of days driving down to Tashkurgan and staying in a yurt at Karakoram Lake, go back to Kashgar, then fly back through Wulumuqi on your way back. There are lots of travel agents in Kashgar to set up drivers to go to Tashkurgan and the area, but we would recommend our agent and the driver he used for us. The agent, Imam, speaks wonderful English and the driver's connections with families at the lake and in Tashkurgan was just so enriching to the trip. You can skip the Southern Silk Road! Imam's contact info is, his website: www.kashgarguide.com, cell phone: 15809983737 and his e-mail address is kashgarguide@yahoo.com if you need it...

Xinjiang is now blogged! Take that Great Firewall of China...