If you’re going to drive people across the desert in a ‘coffin’ bus at least make sure your aircon works.

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Until this point we had decided you can tell a lot about your future journey by the outside of the bus and the attitude of the driver. We hopped on our next sleeper bus and were asked to remove our shoes which we did excitedly assuming this bid positive signs for our 11 hour trip. Oh how wrong we were! As we got started on our very bumpy trip, we are actually convinced that we were literally driving off-road directly through the rocky desert, the driver turned on his version of an aircon or what we would call the fan. Not only was the air coming out hot (we measured it with our travel thermometer the next morning and it reached 39 degrees) but it stunk like a combination of a baby’s nappy and off milk. For this trip we both had top bunks (instead of a top and bottom) which meant one of us had to be in the middle minus the security of a wall to lean against. Dani happily took this option thinking I was a sook for not wanting it, however as the bus started rocking she quickly realised why I didn’t want it and we had to use her jacket to literally tie her in to the bed. The beds were also much skinny than our previous buses which meant I had no option but to lean against the filthy window and try not to think about what the sticky marks could be. A few hours after the sun had gone down we suddenly stopped in the middle of nowhere to be boarded by police, they took everyone’s ID cards including our passports and dragged a couple of young boys off the bus. Confused about what was happening and with no shop to sit in or toilet to go to we stood outside in the dark waiting for all our passengers to return. This occurrence happened twice throughout the night with the police boarding a 3rd time but not taking ID’s. As the sun came up we realised our journey was not going to be complete at the 11 hour mark, after 12 hours we were getting very restless, at 13 hours Dani started worrying that we had missed our stop, by 14 hours we were so hot and sweaty a slight delirium set in and finally after 15 hours we were released from hell and dropped on the side of the road in dusty hot Turpan. Oh and during that 15 hours we only had one toilet stop!!!

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