Desert Oasis

It was a fool proof plan. Glover would fly from Australia to Beijing  and then from there onto Urumqi. He would arrive on the tuesday. I  would kick back for a few days in Bishkek after the finish of the project and then take the wednesday flight from Bishkek to Urumqi. We had arranged to meet in a dorm room in Urumqi, one we'd picked from the lonely planet.

I had my few days of 'R and R' in Bishkek. I had a slight fever after  coming down from the mountains (possibly from a combination ofdehydration, exhaustion, sun exposure, malnutrition, sleep depradation,  hyperthermia and wind burn, but that's pure speculation). I was feeling  better by the Wednesday, packed my bags, said my goodbyes and jumped a  taxi to the airport. I was feeling good, glad to be on the move again.  I gave the cab driver my Kyrgyz small change. I wouldn't need it.

I sauntered into the Bishkek airport (under construction, like most of  this ex-soviet country), and glanced at the Departures monitor. A  flashing little symbol next to my flight was not overly alarming. It was next to about six flights. Probably meant 'boarding soon'.

I located the only check-in desk in the place and handed over myticket. The rotund Kyrgyz woman behind the desk looked at the ticket  and rattled off a string of Russian without once looking up at me. This was normal, but then she did something strange. She handed back my ticket. That wasn't right.

I tried again. This time the woman looked up, realised who she was  dealing with and said 'niet Urumqi'. This I understood. No Urumqi. I  decided to reinvestigate the little symbol flashing next to my flight. It was quite easy in the end. It meant 'cancelled'. Or rather 'CANCELLED'.

I hunted high and low for someone who spoke English or at least someone  who had played charades at a professional level. Apparently thisairport had no English speakers, and only amature charade players at best. My only option was to head back to Bishkek and sort it out from there. Of course I had no small change for the taxi driver going home so had to pay him with big notes. He of course suddenly also had no change and decided he was owed a tip. I gave in, long past caring.

I emailed Glover but knew there would be no response for a while.  Meanwhile I discovered that flight cancelations were regular atBishkek. Maybe there weren't enough passengers, or the plane had broken down. Maybe the pilot had  locked his keys in the cockpit.

After four hours in the China Southern Airline office, I finally had my  new ticket to Urumqi for friday, in two days time (assuming no  cancellations). I emailed Glover to let him know.

After that things went relatively smoothly, apart from having to extend  my Kyrgyz visa for a whole month for the extra two days (at a cost of  US$30) and not hearing from Glover till midday Thursday (I figured he'd been arrested for subversive behavious but it turns out he couldn't  find a net cafe in Urumqi). On the friday I made my flight to Urumqi and arrived to find Glover had booked a double room with hot shower, air-con and even little bath towells. After two weeks of cold showers  and hard beds in dorm rooms, this was luxury.

This was the same hotel I had stayed in a few weeks earlier but I had stayed in a dorm room. In my previous post I had deliberately left out a little story about this place, not wanting to spoil the surprise for Glover.

You see, there are no showers in the dorm room. Instead you have to go down into the basement. It's a dimly lit place, with tacky red lamp shades and questionable wall hangings. There you find a room full of young, attractive ladies in bright clothes, wearing far too much make-up and who are far too friendly. They greet you with a "hallooo, you want showarr?". You pay them a dollar and they lead you into a large showering room, with four shower heads, black granite floor and walls, and little antique wooden stalls to sit on. Around the walls are antique paintings of nude women in various provocative posses.

It is quite obviously a 'work room'. There is no lock on the door, and your entire shower is spent with the expectation that at any minute a horde of young ladies might come bursting in to help clean 'hard to reach' places. Unfortunately, for me this didn't happen. I suspect they have become familiar with the budget restrictions of your average baclpacker.

At any rate, Glover missed this wonderful cultural experience. He did however find a little culture of his own. It seems that when you stay in the more expensive double rooms (rather than the dorms) these young ladies make frequent calls in the middle of night asking if you were in need of a 'massage', which, for a small fee extra, have a 'happy ending'. Glover claims he refused these insistent calls, but I did notice that the phone was still on the hook when I got there.

We decided not to linger in Urumqi. Apart from the working girls in the hotel, it was a dull place, a big city with big city things to do. The next day we jumped a bus to a nearby town called Turpan, a comfortable three hour ride.

Turpan is famous for being the lowest and hottest place in China. This is an interesting stastitic when you read it in a travel guide. It's a  different ball game when you step off the bus and experience what must be the only place on earth hotter than hell.

You don't feel the heat here, you wear it. It's a dry searing heat, that has you coated with a thick sheen of sticky sweat within minutes. New words need to be invented to describe this heat. If people ever land on the sun, their first words will probably be, 'Damn, it's hot, but at least it's not as bad as Turpan'.

Apart from the heat, which has you dripping sweat by the bucket full,  it's quite a nice relaxed, tourist town. We decided to do one of the  organised tours, that takes you to all the interesting sites in town in  a single day. It sure beat trying to organise anything for ourselves in  this heat.

The tour was interesting, but as touristy as you would expect. Several  ruins were visited, but in the blaring heat, the best we could manage  was to sit in the shade of the ruined mud brick walls. Conversation was slow and confusing. Our brains slowly baking in the sun, we would  manage a sentance every ten minutes at best. Generally we gave up half way through and just nodded at each other.

Surprisingly the most interesting site was the tour of the irrigation  system. This town is obviously built in a desert. It may not be a  surprise that being in a desert, water supply is somewhat of a problem.  The locals came up with a solution to this some 2000 years ago. They dug dozens of little tunnels, funnelling water underground from the snow covered mountains many kilometers away.

The tour also took us through the flaming mountains. These are incredibly dry, barren uninteresting mounds of rock, except for one thing: they are the mountains that Tripitaka hiked through, with Monkey and Pigsy on his quest to find the holy Buddhist scriptures. That's right boys and girls, believe it or not, Monkey Magic is based on a true story. It seems that the original story was a little more dull however, lacking a few key elements (like monkey kings, demons, dragons, flying clouds, etc) but it did happen!

Now we are off to Kashgar, a market town to the south west. It's a 24 hour train ride (possibly longer if there are sand storms), which is going to be painful. It seems most of the journeys in China are this long however so we have to get used to them. We do have sleeper berths however, and this is a step up for Glover, who last night came back to the hostel to find his bed was missing. Literally missing. The staff, for some unknown reason had cleared his room of all the beds bar one, and there was someone sleeping in that. They sorted it out eventually, but he is definitely going to keep a close eye on his bed on the train.

By the way, the Chinese government seem to have put a ban on access to blogger. Possibly it contains some subversive material about China, possibly written by some guy called zonski. Ay any rate I am posting these messages by proxy now. If anyone does post comments, I probably won't be able to read them for a while.