Tashkurgan

We hired a car and driver to take us to Tashkurgan and back, a 5-hour trip each way. The journey takes you along the Karakoram Highway which connects China's Xinjiang province with Islamabad, Pakistan and travels through the volatile Kashmir region -- China, India and Pakistan are in a border dispute in this region. Although the India-Pakistan dispute is most volatile, it was this region that brought India and China to war in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Here's a map of our path from Kashgar to Tashkurgan... we decided not to continue on to Islamabad on this trip.

We stopped a couple of times along the way for pictures along the highway...

...camels in the wild, we couldn't pass this up.

The road through the mountain pass...

"Welcome to Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County," what "autonomous" really means in China is anybody's guess...

This mountain pass is at over 14,000 feet! And you thought Pikes Peak was high...

On the way to Taskurgan, we stopped at Karakol Lake which was still mostly frozen over. We stopped here to negotiate a "yurt" to spend the night on the way back from Tashkurgan. After securing our place for the evening, we took some pictures with the family's camels.

This was the first time I had ever seen a camel in snow. What a rugged animal! The are more traditionally like this, as my brother-in-law Brigham shows on his current deployment to Iraq...

I was a little nervous getting to close as I had heard that camels like to spit and snot on people...

... and they do! Fortunately it wasn't on me, but unfortunately it was on Enrique! Good times...

We made it out to Tashkurgan and the Ancient Stone City. "Tashkurgan" is actually Uygher for "stone fortress"

Looking down from the walls...

I felt torn while I was here... it was fun to climb all over the remains of a 2,000 year old fortress, but sad to think that there were no efforts made to try to preserve the remains

Descending down into the neighborhood next to the fortress and wandering around was fun. This lady followed us the best she could!

Cropped in...

More wanderings...

Then we made it into the town of Tashkurgan itself. The town has a population of 30,000, mostly Tajik.

Next time I'll have to bring an old pair of shoes just to watch one of these shoe repairmen do their work.

This COMPLETELY made me laugh. Here we are in small, but historical town in western China, on the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, and what are they selling at the market in town?

U.S. Air Force hats! They had two styles, the "Aim High" hats and another hat with rank on them. No question people on base would have looked at me funny wearing one of the hats with the rank on them, so I passed on them.

Our driver then took us to a Tajik family to visit. They all spoke Chinese as a second language. Here are grandmother, mother and daughter together...

They had a traditional men's hat, but it was a little small. The picture makes it look like I just have a 'fro.

These are a dancing people. There doesn't need to be a special occasion, they just dance. Here's our driver showing us some Uyghur moves...

And the daughter as well...

Yup, you guessed it, we all got to participate...

Then Papa came home. If I could be anybody in Tashkurgan, this is who I would want to be! He was just cool! When he came home, he turned off the stereo, ate some bread and drank some tea with yak milk. Then he stood up and said his only words in English, "We Dance!" He played some music from his cell phone and we started dancing again...

We called him Sonny Bono for his obvious resemblance. He was so happy and his smile was so infectious. I tried to mimic his every move...

It was then time to go from his home to his cousin's home... yes, more eating and dancing was to follow. Here's a group shot of when we left the first home. This living room actually doubles as the bedroom. All of the blankets and pillows are neatly stacked against the wall during the day. Makes me wonder why we need to waste the space of having bedrooms...

A picture of me next to Sonny, my hero.

Tashkurgan sits at an altitude of 3,600 meters... 11,800 feet! So when the sun set, the temperature rapidly dropped. So our dancing now was around the stove! Turn on a music video DVD and round and round we went!

We left at around 10 pm and then drove back to the yurt that we arranged for to stay the night. If you can believe, we got a flat tire on the way back. Fortunately our driver changed the tire in less than 10 minutes and we were on our way again.

The blessing about the flat tire was being outside at 12,000 feet altitude with a crystal clear night sky. I wish I would have known how to have captured a picture of it. As we got out of the car to help, Enrique got his flashlight. We noticed, however, that it was bright enough that we didn't need a flashlight and then we looked up to see the most amazing night sky that I have ever seen... stars upon stars upon stars. The sky was more white from stars than it was dark from night. It was amazing, and just beautiful. After returning home, I related this story to some friends and one of them said now you know what it means about the glory of the sun, the moon and the stars... and that the stars really are glorious!

Here's a picture of our yurt during the day. It's 10 RMB($1.50) per person per night. That's a good deal! The yurt is equipped with a stove for heating and cooking and and a small solar panel to power satellite TV and other small electronics...

Our Kyrgyz host preparing our beds... three blankets below us and three blankets on top of us!

Another shot inside the yurt.

The three of us settling down for a long winter's nap.

When we woke up, Enrique's Swiss Army knife with a thermometer said it was a cool 40 degrees inside the yurt. Fortunately our host lit the fire to the stove and it was quickly warm.

A picture of my Coke by the window sill... you can see the ice that formed at the neck of the bottle. This is no ordinary cola, however. This is "feichang kele" in Chinese or Future Cola. In the Chinese tradition of knockoffs, they totally knocked off Coke's style.

We made it up in time to watch a beautiful sunrise. After living in Shanghai's humidity and smog, the colors of the sky were even more brilliant.

These yurts are on the shore of Karakol Lake... the lake sits at 12,800 feet altitude. This is where distance runners should train...

Enrique talking on his cell phone here at the lake with several yurts in the background. Complete cell phone coverage is available even out here, but only during the day as the cell phone towers are solar powered.

You can see the lake was starting to melt. This mountain is called Muztagh Ata, or "Ice Mountain Father." It

A view from the top! This may be the best view I've had from a bathroom. The hill that I'm standing on is "suibian hill," meaning anywhere hill. When we asked where the bathroom was, they pointed to this hill and said "suibian," meaning anywhere on that hill. Fortunately it was still so cold that any and all previous droppings were completely frozen. For the record, I still have only gone #2 in traditional sit-down, western style toilets... no squatting for me, yet!

We walked over to another side of the lake and came upon more yurts...

Looking back across the lake at where we stayed...

These mountains are basically foothills to the Himalaya Mountains, the world's tallest mountain range. The world's second tallest mountain, K2, is located here in the Tashkurgan prefecture and reaches an altitude of 28,251 feet!

After our morning pictures, we hopped back in the car and three hours later we were back in Kashgar. The next day we started off on the Southern Silk Road from Kashgar back to Wulumuqi.