Day 1: Urumqi to Turpan

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Sightseeing on the way to Turpan.

In the morning of our first day we met our tour guide Ayesha while eating breakfast. Packed our bags into a small van and headed off in an easterly direction to Turpan. On the drive we passed some of the arid desert lands that I had spotted from the plane. To my right in the distance were snow capped mountains. The van passed though massive wind farms. The Chinese Government seems to have invested a lot of money here. In fact the city of Urumqi is a city built where none existed before. It was built to service the oilfields, mining industries and administer the province and nomadic communities that previously were the only inhabitants.

Police checks and Covid Checks

On the way we had our first experience of police checkpoints and covid checks. These became a regular occurrence. Each police checkpoint basically went through the same routine. They are generally permanent structures built across the roads. All vehicles must go though a set of gates like a toll booth on a motorway. Our driver was asked to pull aside and everybody else in the vehicle was directed to a building. In the building is a gateway device like the automated passport checking gates in modern airports. Chinese nationals showed their ID and generally passed through quickly. We foreigners queued up at a window where our identity documents were photographed and checked. It seemed like quite a laborious process for the police officers who had to enter information into what I assumed to be an online database. It rarely took less than 30 minutes often longer. Some days we did this multiple times. However while annoying it did proceed quite smoothly and on the whole the police were friendly and polite. On several occasions our tour group containing foreigners was the first seen in several months. On several occasions the officers needed to refer to their headquarters to learn how to process us.
Covid Checks were often at the same locations. These were a pain as the Xinjiang Health App was difficult to set up and was not consistently used across the Province. When it worked it worked well but often there was a manual process again to register our details. Normally we were asked to do a Covid test regardless at these points.
All this slowed us down but kept us safe.

Tuyugou

We stopped in a village whose name I do not know for lunch and to stretch the legs. I had noodles from a restaurant run by a friendly bunch of people.
Then we pushed on to Tuyugou. Immediately prior to the historic town were houses with ornate entrances.
The area itself is drier than a dead dingo's armpit. It is incredible to consider people living here in a thriving community for potentially hundreds of years. A small spring is the only source of water. The water would have been gathered in ewers and pots and carried to where it was needed for drinking, washing and irrigation.
The buildings are mud brick baked into concrete hardness by the unrelenting sun.

We had afternoon tea in the grounds of a local house. At the front the owner was selling dried fruits and nuts. These are a specialty of the area. The fruits are grown by irrigation and easily dried in the blazing heat. They were fresh and delicious I bought supplies enough to last the rest of the tour with spare to bring back home.

Encounters with locals

Here I had my first close encounter with the locals. A group of kids approached our group and wanted to take "selfies" with us. I don't mind at all. So we had photos, later a group of ladies also on tour wanted selfies with us. It brought home how rare an event it is in this part of China to see a foreigner. We are different and not many of the people in this province see foreigners. There are mixed feelings about this within the group, we are not show ponies or a circus act. However I also want to meet the locals and take their pictures too, so a bit of quid pro quo is not an issue for me Maybe it helps break down international barriers, maybe it fosters like rather than distrust. I don't know, but over the course of the holiday I must have had at least a hundred people approach me for pictures.

Kumtag Desert

After Tuyugou we headed to the Kumtag Desert. This is an odd spot. An area of desert that has been turned into a visitor/recreation area. There is a large visitor centre at the entrance. Behind you is a small city or town, I guess it is an oasis, behind the visitor centre is a large area of sand dunes, true sandy desert. I don't know the extent. People, Chinese people, were visiting. They had picnics in the sand dunes, they took photos, there were camel rides, there were off road vehicle rides, there were walks.
Most of the members of our group chose to take a short trip into the desert in an off road vehicle. It was a thrill ride, as good as any roller coaster that I have been on, flying over blind crests, tight heavily banked corners, undulations, sudden drops and a few minutes later we were several hundred metres into the desert and dropped off. We took photos and climbed dunes and played with a red scarf. It was windy and the red scarf and red clothing seemed to be very popular as it provides a sharp contrast in colours with the sand dunes.

I took a walk up a dune. It was hot, it was thirsty work, it was dry, it felt isolated, the sun was blazing down, I could see the town and visitors centre in in the distance, other than that it was everything that a desert should be.

More selfies here. That is not me with the two girls, I am the clutz trying to get the red scarf to work.

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