Into the Desert of Death

We arrived in China with dust between our rattling teeth. Due to the roads of uneven rubble and our Chinese truck's complete lack of meaningful suspension, we had to cling to the bundles around us to avoid being thrown out of our seats. The greenery of Kyrgyzstan had dissolved to leave barren red mountains and clouds of dust so thick you could see it wafting through the windows like smoke. We were entering the great Taklamakan desert, the most deadly stretch of the old Silk Road. Some believe Taklamakan simply means 'once you go in, you never come out' others have referred to it as The Desert of Death. The Desert of Considerable, if not Fatal, Discomfort might be a more apt title today. Alongside the 'road', wind-blown construction workers slept in bleak encampments, trying to lay a 21st Century highway in this ageless wilderness. For the moment, the wilds appeared to be winning.

After five hours of this truck-based torture, a Chinese terminal building emerged from the murk surrounded in Disneyland streetlights. 'Welcome to China!' cried a uniformed guard. In customs there were informative signs in Chinese and Arabic characters but, beneath this, the thoughtful English translation simply read 'Times New Roman'.

Kashgar, our first stop in China, is a predominantly Uighur city. The Uighurs are a Turkic, Islamic people who have found themselves, largely unhappily, under Chinese rule. The people are far closer in appearance to Uzbeks than to Chinese and the language is a close cousin of Turkish. Interestingly, Iran aside, we've been using the same words for numbers ever since arriving in Istanbul. Who said foreigners weren't all the same?

The streets of old Kashgar hummed with life, skull caps and wispy beards decorated the wizened faces that gathered around the market stalls as hawkers sold herbal aphrodisiacs, bear fat skin ointment and a yellow juice that came from a weird stew of scorpions, snakes and hedgehogs. Bewhiskered men spilt from the Friday mosque and ate bread hot from the street tandoors or bundled their veiled wives and kids onto their scooters, puttering off into lanes of mud and smoke. Most of the surrounding buildings were in a state of ruin, bulldozed to make way for Modern China. Gaudy new malls sat like abandoned spacecraft amongst the rubble, sending neon messages back to the mothership in Beijing. Here, Han Chinese (the predominant ethnic group in China) shopped for fashions and face creams and there was barely a Uighur in sight. Over-loud sound systems blared the latest pappy Chinese pop but failed to drown out the honking cars and the Mandarin being barked on every street corner. Though muted by the ever-present dust, the Han buildings had their own volume, assaulting the eyes with their acid-trip technicolor. We were saddened by such Han imperialism, but largely delighted, after months in the Muslim world, to be in the brash, noisy silliness of China.

On the outskirts of Kashgar sits the near-legendary animal market. We rode out there on the back of a kind of motorbike trailer. Other visitors were taking the same method, stupid looking sheep and angry looking bulls eyeing us warily. The market was a mass of hoof and dust, the air filled with a lowing and braying and whinnying that mingled with the cries of the traders as animals were led off to new homes (or perhaps new pots), horses were test-driven and fat-tailed sheep's fleshy rumps were fondled for maximum fat. Though Nic had her eye on some pathetic-looking donkey or other we managed to leave empty-handed.

One of the true highlights of Kashgar was the people we met. Having spent months travelling less-travelled roads, it was lovely to meet a hostel-full of fellow backpackers. It is remarkable how quickly strong friendships can form and we spent a happy week eating, sleeping (in dorms, you understand and generally in separate bunks) and living with a wonderful group of people. Sadly but inevitably, these relationships are always wrenched apart by the pull of the road and soon our group was scattered to the sands and to the mountains.

We headed east along the northern Silk Road, spending 24 hours on a train that smelt of stale cigarettes and instant noodles. Despite an almost unassailable language barrier we had soon made friends with our fellow passengers and even, after a few hours' struggle, managed to ascertain their names. Outside, the desert was bleak and forbidding and barely a non-humped soul stirred. We finally arrived in Turpan, a hot, dusty (apologies for my constant references to dust, it's just so, well, dusty) town that sits in the second lowest depression in the world! I was quite excited by this fact before we arrived but then realised that there's not much to be said for being low. It's just hot. And dusty.

We cycled out into the countryside (read: dusty plain) and waved at the cheerful locals who called out 'hello!' I like to think they thought we looked like nice sorts and were seeking to form some cross-cultural relationships but fear they may have been saying 'look there's a hairy freak on a bike, let's wave and see what it does!' The hairy freak and his spaniel-eared companion dutifully waved back. Anyway, this is all rather tangental. We reached a ruined city that had been half-consumed by the desert, ate a picnic in a 5th century Buddhist temple and returned to catch a night bus to the Silk Road hub of Dunhuang.

The bunks on the bus were two feet too short for me but even with my knees round my ears, I still managed to enjoy the moonlit desertscapes and fell asleep watching the glowing cigarette ends of insomniac passengers. In Dunhuang we slept in a cabin that sat in the shadow of a vast range of perfect sand dunes and were awoken by the cries of goat kids and the papery flap of the birds that darted from the eaves. Nearby was one of the 'sights' we've been looking forward to since London, the Thousand Buddha Caves.

We were guided around by torchlight for each of the 700-odd caves contains exquisitely delicate wall paintings and sculptures dating back more than a thousand years. The artwork is a clear child of the Silk Road, where Persian, Central Asian and Indian styles mingle with the more local Tibetan and Chinese aesthetic. It was here that European archeologists first discovered the Silk Road's importance in spreading Buddhism to China. It was here also that the British explorer Aurel Stein ran off with thousands of priceless Buddhist scrolls some of which you can still see at the British Museum. 'You've seen them?' said our guide with great excitement. It is times like this when I realise how miraculously lucky we are to be able to see all these wonderful things. With the Buddhas left once more to their peaceful slumber, we set off toward the setting sun, nothing but a dull glow in a sea of dust.

In the Valley of Horses

Firstly, can I apologise for the lack of photos. Once again, we're in a country where this blog site is banned (this is coming to you via my wee brother) so doing anything other than text is a bit complex. You'll have to just make do with the boring wordy bit...

After weeks of desert dust, leaving Uzbekistan by the  verdant Fergana Valley was like jumping into the sea on a hot sticky day. Black smudges on the eastern horizon slowly thickened to become a rampart of mountains that marked the border with Kyrgyzstan. It was in Fergana that Central Asians were first met by Chinese travellers who had ventured into the unknown west to find the near mythical Fergana horse. The horses were rumoured to have wings and to breath fire, but the forlorn donkeys and scraggy old nags I saw gnawing on the fields didn't quite live up to expectations. It was this first meeting of east and west, however, that first began the exchange of goods and ideas that was to become the Silk Road.

*a short disclaimer: all history included in these blogs is based on stuff I've read and quite possibly misremembered over the last year or two so it could be complete rubbish. Let's just keep quiet about it and carry on...

We first stopped in Osh where the wounds of more recent history still lay unhealed. In 2010 Osh was the scene of serious ethnic violence and rioting (it seems Stalin sneezed while drawing the border and annexed thousands of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan). Trying to find differences between these groups other than language is difficult. The best we could come up with is that they wear different silly hats. Traditional Kyrgyz men wear tall felt hats that, along with shiny boots, big belts and beards, gives them an almost gnome-like appearance. In Osh, they pottered around the  bazaar eyeing up bridles, horseshoes and shinier boots. The bazaar itself was patched together from rusty Chinese shipping containers and a few riot-damaged buildings. After the relative order of the more Sovietised Uzbekistan, we revelled in its filth and chaos.

We next took a string of minibuses into the  mountains, squashing in between head-wrapped country women until forest draped the valleys and white peaks surfed the clouds. We stayed in a homestay in the amiable and amiably named village of Arslanbob. The bridge to our house had been  washed away in the spring melt so we had to cross the gurgling  water via a makeshift construction of old plastic pipes. Every house has a yard with chickens, a donkey or goat (both if you're lucky), fruit trees and an outdoor mud ovens. Last year's harvest is stored beneath the seating platform and truly fresh produce is rare, the seasons here still mean something (generally wooly apples and hairy potatoes).

From Arslanbob we hired horses and a guide and  clopped through the dappled light of the world's largest walnut forest. My steed was not far from the Great Glue Factory in the Sky and wheezed along grumpily. I had visions of him collapsing beneath me with his legs splayed in all four directions. On the road we passed old 1950s Russian trucks  carrying dozens of hoe-wielding locals on their way to the high pastures. Here they planted potato and corn, hacking with mattocks at the damp earth in the shadows of the mountains.

We rode up to a rocky promontory where I really felt my horse should have reared up on his hind legs so I could wave my Stetson in the air. Instead he decided to turn around and sullenly chew the grass behind us so that my back was turned to the glorious view of the valley, twinkling as it was with zinc roofs and a thousand meltwater streams.

After only a few days in Kyrgyzstan we discovered the border to China was about to close for ten days and that we would have to make a premature dash to the frontier. We took a shared taxi to the village of Sary Tash. Normally, you share taxis with other people but his one was partly shared by a hundred loaves of bread, some putrid smelling eggs and a bag of meat that kept dripping blood on the floor. Sary Tash was a town of collapsing outhouses and muddy yards churned up by peasant boots and mountain drizzle. For the first time since Albania, we slept more or less fully clothed in beds so saggy we were nearly folded in two.

Early the next morning we stood by the road stomping our feet and praying for the sun to rise. We were hoping to hitch a lift to the Chinese border but for a while all we saw we're a gormless cow and man having a poo in his yard. We didn't have to wait for too long before a Tajik truck stopped and we clambered into the cab. 'To China!' we cried (well, that's at least how I see it in my memory), climbing the passes into pristine snowfields that stung the eyes. After only half an hour, we had to join  a queue of trucks that were attempting to cross a stretch of lethally bumpy ice. When some inevitably got stuck, I jumped off to relieve myself and, in a thoughtful bid to entertain the weary truckers, fell waist-deep into the snow. After a lot of waiting followed by a lot of juddering around painfully we cleared the ice and finally reached a border town of rusting caravans. Across the border lay China! 

But that will have to wait for the next exciting installment! Did our intrepid explorers make it to China? Did Nic have a sudden bout of food poisoning? Had the Chinese border inexplicably moved 150km to the east? Find out next time...