Urumqi and Turpan

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30-9 After China Southern cancelled our flight direct from Ashgabat to Urumqi we had to fly via Dubai. After around a three hour flight we arrived in Dubai mid afternoon, we were supposed to have 5 hour layover in the airport which turned into 6 hours followed by a 5 hour flight to Urumqi, not ideal as we had booked a driver to pick us up at the airport at 8am to do a full day tour to Turpan.

1-10 Our driver Ablajan Jilil picked us up to take what should have been a two and a half hour drive to Turpan, unfortunately as it was a National Chinese holiday the 185 kms took us 6 hours due to lots of stop-start traffic due to road works and accidents. We were supposed to visit of Emin Minaret which was built in 1777 by the local ruler Imin Hoja but had to miss this to allow time to see the Kariz Wells which is the network underground irrigation system and the longest in the world its type. On the way back to our hotel in Urumqi we visited the Jiao He Ancient city ruins of the ancient kingdom once flourished, which was built in 2nd century BC. This old city was very special with the natural outer wall look like little island. We arrived back late into Urumqi exhausted where we were staying the Hilton, luckily a lovely hotel with a comfortable room after our tiring 24 hours of travel and sightseeing.

2-10 We explored Urumqi finding our way to the museum of natural history to see mummies which were discovered in 1934 in the Tarim Basin area of China. Their skin is parched and blackened from the wear and tear of thousands of years, but their bodies are strikingly intact. The arid conditions in the desert and the salty sand found in this region have kept the mummies in amazingly good condition. Unlike the embalmed mummies of ancient Egypt, they were preserved naturally by the elements. The most famous mummy unearthed in the Taklimakan desert is that of woman with long reddish blonde hair. Discovered near Loulan in 1979 and nicknamed the "Loulan Beauty," she was five feet tall and was buried wearing a goatskin wrap, woollen cape, leather shoes and a hat trimmed with goose feathers. Carbon-dating indicates that her body is 3,800 years old but similar tests of the wood of the coffin of mummy found nearby remotely suggest that she could be 6,000 years old. She is also known as the Xiaohe Princess, we felt very privileged to have seen these amazing mummies. In the afternoon we walked form our hotel to a nearby large Buddhist theme park which contained a huge golden buddha, lots of shops and not much else of any interest but it did serve to give us some exercise as it was about a half hour walk through a park to get there.

3-10 We left Urumqi in the morning for our flight via Guanzghai to Seim Reap. We arrived at 6.30pm and thanks to there being lots of Cambodian immigration and customs officers and very quick baggage handlers it only took 10 minutes from getting off the plane to being on our way to our last hotel of this trip. This transfer had to be the quickest and easiest of all our airport and border crossings in our five week trip and we were thankful for an easy start to our last stop on what had been a fabulous but sometimes tiring journey.

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