Lake Pleasant
For twenty three hours we watch the view from Turpan to Kashgar - nothing but desert. It's not the hollywood style desert of romantic, rolling sand dunes, wild horsemen and graceful eagles. No this a desert, a real desert. A barren wasteland of dead, lifeless rubble and gritty sand. It's flat in all directions, and nothing lives here, no animal, no plant. It 's the sort of place that eats horsemen and eagles whole.Rain is barely a remembered legend - an ancient myth of a strange liquid that falls from the sky.
Surprisingly the train is modern and clean, with comfortable beds and airconditioning. We have only one complaint. Once again, in this land of midgits, the beds are half a meter too short and half a meter too narrow. To make matters worse, there is no place to put our packs, so we have to squeeze these in along side of us. When the lights go out, Glover and I curl up into fetal position, jam our legs into the side rails to stop us falling from our high bunks, and try to get what sleep we can. It's not much.
Occasionally, a town appears - a strange island of green life in this dead landscape. These oases appear suddenly, the land suddenly changes from dead sand to lush grass, as if some agreed upon boundary existed between the two. At some of these towns, gnarled desert folk get off or onto our train. These people are Uyghur, the traditional muslim inhabitants of this land, and with few ties to the Chinese. I'm not sure what is more amazing: that these towns exist where life has no right to be, or that people choose to live in them.
Eventually the train pulls into the desert city of Kashgar. This was once one of the great trading posts on the old Silk Road, that joins West to East. Now it has been 'modernised' by the Chinese. Huge cement buildings crowd around an open plaza, dominated by a huge statue of Chairman Mao, the previous leader of China.
Kashgar is famous for its traditional muslim sunday market. Locals and foreigners alike gather here every sunday to trade everything from rocks to yaks. As a result of our detailed and intense planning we arrive on a tuesday, no where near market time. We decide to wait it out. We spend a few days in Kashgar, it's an easy town to hang out in, and there are a few other travellers around.
By chance we discover the old town, carefully concealed behind Chairman Mao's massive effergy. Stepping into these back streets is like stepping into another world. Mud-brick shantie houses huddle together. Inside these dark and dilapidated homes, weather worn Uyghurs eek out a living. The metalic din of hammer on anvil echoes out from most, as scarred men beat out blades and cooking pots from hot, glowing iron. Muslim men and women watch us warrily from the shadows as we wander down the rotten smelling streets. Afterwards we wonder how safe this little adventure was, but at the time we are too mesmersmerized by this mysterious world to think about such small concerns as safety.
Later that night we locate the night food markets. Several alleys are crowded with food stalls, selling everything from fried fish (a little odd in the desert) to stewed goat. After a few false starts we manage to seat ourselves at one of these exotic stalls and point to what we hope is food. We are rewarded with a reasonably tasty dish of cold noodles and chick peas. While we eat it, Uyghur people gather to stare at these two strange white men. Few foreigners venture this far it would seem.
The man at the stall next to me, refuses to believe that I can't understand a word he is saying and treats me to a fluent monologue in Uyghur. In the end I decide it's better just to play along and nod. All the while he is talking to me, he hacks a fried chicken into small pieces with a cleaver the size of my head. If he wants me to understand Uygher, I'm willing to do my best.
Confident after our successful noodle dish, we manage to purchase some fresh, juicy water melon (a regional speciality and just in season) and sweet cakes for dessert. The entire meal costs us around AU$1 each.
It takes only a couple of days to exhaust the local attractions in Kashgar, and we are still no where near market time. We decide to make an over night trip to a nearby mountain lake, Karakul. A Danish couple are heading up there as well and we organise to share a cab.
Our vehicle is actually rather impressive. A four wheel drive Mitsubishi. We are glad of this as the road is windy and rough. The weather is overcast and the trail is littered with debris from what looks to be recent avalanches. We are suddenly less impressed when, halfway up the mountain, the motor gives out and the car rolls to a halt.
So now we are stranded in the middle of nowhere. It's cold and windy. It begins to rain. After messing with the motor (in what looks to be a random manner) for almost an hour, our driver decides to give it in. He indicates that we will hitch the rest of the way. A brilliant plan, someone would surely be along in the next day or two.
Despite the fact that there is nothing resembling civilization anywhere near us, a Uyghur lad appears from behind the rocks. Stranded and cold, we are amazed. Where the hell did he come from? Even more amazing is how quickly he pulls out a little stone bauble and tries to sell it to us. I can only imagine that he spends his days hiding in the rocks waiting for cars to break down so he can peddle his wares to a captive market.
After a few hours in the cold wind, we finally get lucky and a car picks us up. We leave our driver at the side of the road with his broken vehicle. Apparently he intends to wait for a vehicle willing to tow him to a mechanic. We never learn his fate, though his plan seems optimistic at best.
Finally we reach the top, with barely a few hours of sunlight. The lake is quite beautiful, nestled in amongst snow capped mountains, though clouds obscure our view. At 3,600 meters above sea level it is close to the height I reached in my futile quest to track snow leopards. The air is thin and the wind carries a chill that cuts us to the bone after our week in the dry, hot desert.
The scenery is beautiful, the accomodation is far from it. The place is a tourist trap, and prices are double what we have come to expect (i.e. AU$10 instead of AU$5). We have no choice of course. Worse than the accomodation is the food, and worse than this, by a long, long way is the shitter.
We attempt a hike around the lake, but a cold rain convinces us this is a bad idea. Instead we are lured into one of the local yurts and offered tea and a chance to buy any number of cheap, tacky tourist items. The tea is cold, and contains a tangy milk (possibly goat or yak). It is horribly foul, though we drink it out of politeness.
We escape this gift shop and return to our hostel for dinner. Not long into the meal, all of us are hit with a sudden and urgent need to use the local facilities. I quickly come to the conclusion that it was not actually tea we were drinking but a potent, liquid laxative. Despite the rain I take up my post in the cement block set aside for such a purpose, squatting over a steaming, stinking hole filled with human shit. For some unknown reason, there is no roof and the cold rain trickles down my hood, soaking my precious supply of toilet paper. There are few experiences in my life that quite compare to the long, cold minutes spent squatting over that putrid, stinking cesspit in the rain, straining to empty my bowels of their contents.
Luckily the event is isolated for me, and I spend the rest of the night in relative peace. Glover is not so fortunate. After a night of tormented sleep, he rises at dawn and hurries from the room. He returns, perhaps an hour later, too disturbed to speak. He just shakes his head and grimaces in response to my questions.
I spend the morning watching Glover run back and forth between the shitter and the hostel, a roll of toilet paper clasped tightly in his hands like some sort of talisman. He speaks little during this ordeal. There is little he needs to say. No man should have to suffer this way.
Even worse, now that it is day, the shitter is frequented by local Uyghur mountain men, emptying themselves of yak meat. The toilet block contains three stalls, though between each is a wall under a meter high. This means that while busy taking care of 'business', crouching next to you, barely half a meter away, is a fellow shitter. It's hard to know the expected ettiquite in such a situation. "So how's it going over there?" seems inappropriate at best.
The rain continues to fall all morning, and we catch only fleeting glimpses of the mountains. At lunch time we decide to call it quits and head out to catch the bus back down to Kashgar. The Danish couple join us. The bus is an hour late, and we spend this time on the side of the ride, huddled together for warmth, while the rain and now sleet pelt down on us. When the bus finally arrives, Glover almost misses it, as he is crouched behind a rock with the remainder of his toilet roll.
The five hour journey is quite smooth, though Glover barely moves or speaks, not wanting to upset the delicate truce he has reached with his stomach. Things do not go completely to plan however. Much to Glover's horror, the bus pulls into a small town for a half-hour food stop. At bursting point, he manages to locate a shitter in this town. He still refuses to talk about his time spent inside. This in itself is bad enough, however after pulling out of the town, the driver does a u-turn and stops the bus. We are all offloaded and moved onto a smaller bus. The driver of this smaller bus heads straight back into the town we have just come from and stops, once again, for food. Glover is a gibbering mess by this stage.
Eventually we are moving again. At last, in the distance, we can see the city sky line of Kashgar. "Not far now", I say to the distressed Glover. "I'll make it", he replies through teeth clasped tight, a true hero. About ten minutes out of town however, the bus driver pulls into a driveway, in the middle of nowhere, falsly claiming we are at Kashgar bus station. Glover, eyes bulging from his head, half jumps, half falls from the bus into a waiting taxi. Barely waiting for me and the Danish couple, he demands the driver take him to the nearest hotel.
Perhaps because he senses Glover's urgency, but more likely because he is a complete madman, the taxi driver drives like a man possessed. He runs at full speed down side walks and straight into on coming traffic. The whole time his hand is pressed against the horn. Within moments we are at our hotel, and I am left to pay the bill, as Glover dissappears into the foyer, once again clutching his bog roll. I find him some time later, exhausted but relieved. He'd made it, though the dunny apparently is now blocked.
The good news is he's stable now, and we are relaxing in Kashgar, recovering from our mountain ordeal. We are only a day away from the Sunday markets. After that we have to work out how we are going to cover the several thousands of kilometers of desert between us and the more civilized east coast of China.
Surprisingly the train is modern and clean, with comfortable beds and airconditioning. We have only one complaint. Once again, in this land of midgits, the beds are half a meter too short and half a meter too narrow. To make matters worse, there is no place to put our packs, so we have to squeeze these in along side of us. When the lights go out, Glover and I curl up into fetal position, jam our legs into the side rails to stop us falling from our high bunks, and try to get what sleep we can. It's not much.
Occasionally, a town appears - a strange island of green life in this dead landscape. These oases appear suddenly, the land suddenly changes from dead sand to lush grass, as if some agreed upon boundary existed between the two. At some of these towns, gnarled desert folk get off or onto our train. These people are Uyghur, the traditional muslim inhabitants of this land, and with few ties to the Chinese. I'm not sure what is more amazing: that these towns exist where life has no right to be, or that people choose to live in them.
Eventually the train pulls into the desert city of Kashgar. This was once one of the great trading posts on the old Silk Road, that joins West to East. Now it has been 'modernised' by the Chinese. Huge cement buildings crowd around an open plaza, dominated by a huge statue of Chairman Mao, the previous leader of China.
Kashgar is famous for its traditional muslim sunday market. Locals and foreigners alike gather here every sunday to trade everything from rocks to yaks. As a result of our detailed and intense planning we arrive on a tuesday, no where near market time. We decide to wait it out. We spend a few days in Kashgar, it's an easy town to hang out in, and there are a few other travellers around.
By chance we discover the old town, carefully concealed behind Chairman Mao's massive effergy. Stepping into these back streets is like stepping into another world. Mud-brick shantie houses huddle together. Inside these dark and dilapidated homes, weather worn Uyghurs eek out a living. The metalic din of hammer on anvil echoes out from most, as scarred men beat out blades and cooking pots from hot, glowing iron. Muslim men and women watch us warrily from the shadows as we wander down the rotten smelling streets. Afterwards we wonder how safe this little adventure was, but at the time we are too mesmersmerized by this mysterious world to think about such small concerns as safety.
Later that night we locate the night food markets. Several alleys are crowded with food stalls, selling everything from fried fish (a little odd in the desert) to stewed goat. After a few false starts we manage to seat ourselves at one of these exotic stalls and point to what we hope is food. We are rewarded with a reasonably tasty dish of cold noodles and chick peas. While we eat it, Uyghur people gather to stare at these two strange white men. Few foreigners venture this far it would seem.
The man at the stall next to me, refuses to believe that I can't understand a word he is saying and treats me to a fluent monologue in Uyghur. In the end I decide it's better just to play along and nod. All the while he is talking to me, he hacks a fried chicken into small pieces with a cleaver the size of my head. If he wants me to understand Uygher, I'm willing to do my best.
Confident after our successful noodle dish, we manage to purchase some fresh, juicy water melon (a regional speciality and just in season) and sweet cakes for dessert. The entire meal costs us around AU$1 each.
It takes only a couple of days to exhaust the local attractions in Kashgar, and we are still no where near market time. We decide to make an over night trip to a nearby mountain lake, Karakul. A Danish couple are heading up there as well and we organise to share a cab.
Our vehicle is actually rather impressive. A four wheel drive Mitsubishi. We are glad of this as the road is windy and rough. The weather is overcast and the trail is littered with debris from what looks to be recent avalanches. We are suddenly less impressed when, halfway up the mountain, the motor gives out and the car rolls to a halt.
So now we are stranded in the middle of nowhere. It's cold and windy. It begins to rain. After messing with the motor (in what looks to be a random manner) for almost an hour, our driver decides to give it in. He indicates that we will hitch the rest of the way. A brilliant plan, someone would surely be along in the next day or two.
Despite the fact that there is nothing resembling civilization anywhere near us, a Uyghur lad appears from behind the rocks. Stranded and cold, we are amazed. Where the hell did he come from? Even more amazing is how quickly he pulls out a little stone bauble and tries to sell it to us. I can only imagine that he spends his days hiding in the rocks waiting for cars to break down so he can peddle his wares to a captive market.
After a few hours in the cold wind, we finally get lucky and a car picks us up. We leave our driver at the side of the road with his broken vehicle. Apparently he intends to wait for a vehicle willing to tow him to a mechanic. We never learn his fate, though his plan seems optimistic at best.
Finally we reach the top, with barely a few hours of sunlight. The lake is quite beautiful, nestled in amongst snow capped mountains, though clouds obscure our view. At 3,600 meters above sea level it is close to the height I reached in my futile quest to track snow leopards. The air is thin and the wind carries a chill that cuts us to the bone after our week in the dry, hot desert.
The scenery is beautiful, the accomodation is far from it. The place is a tourist trap, and prices are double what we have come to expect (i.e. AU$10 instead of AU$5). We have no choice of course. Worse than the accomodation is the food, and worse than this, by a long, long way is the shitter.
We attempt a hike around the lake, but a cold rain convinces us this is a bad idea. Instead we are lured into one of the local yurts and offered tea and a chance to buy any number of cheap, tacky tourist items. The tea is cold, and contains a tangy milk (possibly goat or yak). It is horribly foul, though we drink it out of politeness.
We escape this gift shop and return to our hostel for dinner. Not long into the meal, all of us are hit with a sudden and urgent need to use the local facilities. I quickly come to the conclusion that it was not actually tea we were drinking but a potent, liquid laxative. Despite the rain I take up my post in the cement block set aside for such a purpose, squatting over a steaming, stinking hole filled with human shit. For some unknown reason, there is no roof and the cold rain trickles down my hood, soaking my precious supply of toilet paper. There are few experiences in my life that quite compare to the long, cold minutes spent squatting over that putrid, stinking cesspit in the rain, straining to empty my bowels of their contents.
Luckily the event is isolated for me, and I spend the rest of the night in relative peace. Glover is not so fortunate. After a night of tormented sleep, he rises at dawn and hurries from the room. He returns, perhaps an hour later, too disturbed to speak. He just shakes his head and grimaces in response to my questions.
I spend the morning watching Glover run back and forth between the shitter and the hostel, a roll of toilet paper clasped tightly in his hands like some sort of talisman. He speaks little during this ordeal. There is little he needs to say. No man should have to suffer this way.
Even worse, now that it is day, the shitter is frequented by local Uyghur mountain men, emptying themselves of yak meat. The toilet block contains three stalls, though between each is a wall under a meter high. This means that while busy taking care of 'business', crouching next to you, barely half a meter away, is a fellow shitter. It's hard to know the expected ettiquite in such a situation. "So how's it going over there?" seems inappropriate at best.
The rain continues to fall all morning, and we catch only fleeting glimpses of the mountains. At lunch time we decide to call it quits and head out to catch the bus back down to Kashgar. The Danish couple join us. The bus is an hour late, and we spend this time on the side of the ride, huddled together for warmth, while the rain and now sleet pelt down on us. When the bus finally arrives, Glover almost misses it, as he is crouched behind a rock with the remainder of his toilet roll.
The five hour journey is quite smooth, though Glover barely moves or speaks, not wanting to upset the delicate truce he has reached with his stomach. Things do not go completely to plan however. Much to Glover's horror, the bus pulls into a small town for a half-hour food stop. At bursting point, he manages to locate a shitter in this town. He still refuses to talk about his time spent inside. This in itself is bad enough, however after pulling out of the town, the driver does a u-turn and stops the bus. We are all offloaded and moved onto a smaller bus. The driver of this smaller bus heads straight back into the town we have just come from and stops, once again, for food. Glover is a gibbering mess by this stage.
Eventually we are moving again. At last, in the distance, we can see the city sky line of Kashgar. "Not far now", I say to the distressed Glover. "I'll make it", he replies through teeth clasped tight, a true hero. About ten minutes out of town however, the bus driver pulls into a driveway, in the middle of nowhere, falsly claiming we are at Kashgar bus station. Glover, eyes bulging from his head, half jumps, half falls from the bus into a waiting taxi. Barely waiting for me and the Danish couple, he demands the driver take him to the nearest hotel.
Perhaps because he senses Glover's urgency, but more likely because he is a complete madman, the taxi driver drives like a man possessed. He runs at full speed down side walks and straight into on coming traffic. The whole time his hand is pressed against the horn. Within moments we are at our hotel, and I am left to pay the bill, as Glover dissappears into the foyer, once again clutching his bog roll. I find him some time later, exhausted but relieved. He'd made it, though the dunny apparently is now blocked.
The good news is he's stable now, and we are relaxing in Kashgar, recovering from our mountain ordeal. We are only a day away from the Sunday markets. After that we have to work out how we are going to cover the several thousands of kilometers of desert between us and the more civilized east coast of China.
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