Urumqi

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I was pleasantly surprised that the train journey only took about 40 hours, rather than the 44 I was expecting. This time I had a “hard sleeper” with a middle bunk - in the hard sleeper compartments they cram the bunks in three deep. So the train ride from Beijing to Urumqi was much more comfortable than the one from Guilin to Beijing had been. Still the beds were very small (almost exactly the same width as my hips) and being on the middle bunk there was nowhere save to put my day-pack in which I keep all my valuables such as my computer, money, and passport. So at night I slept with it like a hard, blue, smelly, teddy bear. There was space for my big backpack of course so that was alright.

On my middle bunk there wasn’t enough headroom to sit up, and not enough of the small, uncomfortable, seats along the window for everyone, so I spent a lot of the time lying in bed, which didn’t give me much of a view of the scenery. Not that there was that much to see, it was mostly desert. At first we’d pass small towns and what seemed to be small farms, and I couldn’t work out if the dryness and soil erosion was caused by human factors or not, but by the second or third day it was clear that much of this area had been desert for a long time. There were houses and villages on the first and second day, made mainly of brown brick with walls of mudbrick, looking as if traditionally the houses too were made of mudbrick. Then suddenly there was a city of a few million people in the middle of the desert, and then there was nothing. Late on the second day, and on the third day, we seemed to follow the snow-covered mountains for much of the way. We passed a herd or two of Bactrian camels.

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I’m getting a bit behind in my blogs. I left Beijing on May 6, I think. I’ve now left Almaty, and won’t have Internet access for another week or so, so the blog about Kazakhstan will be late as well. If you want to complain bitterly, remember that you get what you pay for. If you want to know where I am now, my friends can probably get a better idea through facebook, and for the rest of you, it’s probably somewhere in Europe or Asia. I wrote most of this from Almaty (or “Alma-Ata”, “Father Apple”, the historical and business capital of Kazakhstan, and the place where apples come from). I’ve had to keep editing it because I kept accidentally putting in bits about Kazakhstan.

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So the while the scenery was nice enough, particularly later in the journey when it was dominated by the snow-covered mountains off in the distance, and sometimes quite close, for much of the trip it was very much the same, not even colourful and bushy like the Australian desert. Not even any sand dunes. Just grey soil with occasional erosions, and a few tiny green bushes. In general I really like deserts, but I prefer the Australian kind to the Northwest Chinese kind. No-one in my compartment spoke English nor was very receptive to trying to communicate with hand gestures and drawings. Apparently there was a compartment which Westerners kind of commandeered and spent the whole trip in, with eight people in a six-person compartment, but I only found that out a week or two later - they must have been in a different carriage. One Chinese man a bit older than me did start talking to me and without a word of a common language we had a bit of a conversation through hand gestures and what we could draw on bits of paper. This was good, as I found people in China not all that friendly and not very good at understanding gestures (for example I would have thought that in a small store if you point at something and hold up one finger, it was obvious that you wanted to buy one of that thing, but it didn’t always seem so obvious). This guy was from Urumqi, and had cycled all the way to Beijing via X’ian, and was returning home on the train, with his bike dismantled and bundled up under the seat. He said it was about 3500 km, if I recall correctly, which sounded about right. Most of the time he’d camped, but sometimes he stayed in hotels, I think he said it took him 50 days but I can’t remember that exactly. I couldn’t ask him if he got bored through the desert bits. He was keen to get his photo taken with me. It was kind of good to find a local with whom one could communicate a little, even if it was without words, after a few weeks in China.

So I arrived at Urumqi. I’d booked into a backpackers of some sort, but the taxi driver couldn’t find it. He took me to what he swore was the correct street, and I found where the street number should be, but it wasn’t there. Eventually, sick of his driving up and down and our not being able to pronounce a single word in each other’s language, even with the few words listed in Lonely Planet I gave up and walked around for a bit, then got a taxi to take me out to another place that’s in the Lonely Planet. Here for about $AUS 20 a night I got my own spacious room, which reminded me of SE Asia.

Urumqi seems much more “multi-cultural”, in that it’s of course traditionally Uighur territory, but there are many Han Chinese (I think they make up the majority, as the government of course had a policy of encouraging domestic migration of the Han Chinese). There also appear to be a lot of Russians and people from the central Asian countries (I assume mainly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan). Most of the signs are written in Chinese, then in Arabic script (which I assume is the Uighur, which used to be written in Latin but is now written in Arabic again), and Russian. The Russian may have actually been Kazakh, I didn’t at the time know the Cyrillic alphabet well enough to tell the difference (I now know that the Kazakh alphabet has quite a few extra characters). I did read on Wikipedia that in China the Kazakh language is written in Arabic script (and in Turkey it’s written in Latin characters) so it probably was actually Russian. Since many people in Kazakhstan and some people in Uzbekistan can’t speak Kazakh or Uzbek, that’d make sense. There wasn’t much in English at all, except for some of the road signs.

A problem I had in China is that often the road signs are not actually in Pinyin, but more in English. So your map might say “such-and-such nan lu” but the road sign might literally translate it was “such-and-such south road”, so it would really help to learn the Pinyin for the four directions, “road”, “street”, etc., more to read the maps than the street signs. Since I hadn’t been that interested in China, and can’t of course learn the language of each country I go through, I hadn’t really done this. Pinyin doesn’t show the tones, and I can’t really get the hang of pronouncing them anyway, so its usefulness would have been fairly limited anyway.

Urumqi gets freezing cold in winter and stinking hot in summer, so early May is a good time to visit. The Backpackers I stayed at was near a park, facing off into the snow-covered Tian Shan mountains, next to a large park. On the weekend, locals were out flying their Chinese kites and with the backdrop of the mountains this made a nice scene. Urumqi has about 2.6 million people and is very close to the spot in the world that’s furthest from any ocean. This area, particularly the small towns closer to the Kazakh and Uzbek borders had in the 1990s been the scene for some racial riots, since the Uighurs are of course not Han Chinese and never have been. It seems reasonable that they wouldn’t be happy about being controlled by Beijing, with such a different culture, three thousand kilometers away. The problem for any nascent independence movement in the cities here though is the same as for Tibet, or for many parts of Indonesia for that matter - the Uighurs are now a clear minority in their own homeland.

I wasted one day trying to organize the bus from Urumqi on to Almaty (Kazakhstan). For some reason the border was closed for two days, so this meant that I arrived late and wasted almost two days of my Kazakh visa. For some reason when I applied in Bangkok, I had been given a visa valid for the exact dates I’d said I was going to be in the country - May 11 - 24, even though everyone else I met in Kazakhstan had been given 30-day visas even if they said they were only going to be in the country for two weeks. So since I arrived into Almaty late on May 13, I’d basically wasted two days of my visa. Anyway back in Urumqi, apparently you can’t book tickets for Almaty at the central bus station. I finally found the train station after a scenic trip around Urumqi, thanks to being given wrong directions at the Backpackers, and Urumqi being too large for the Lonely Planet map to be any use. I passed through a strange part of town just down from the Uighur slums where a little shanty town appears to be dug into the side of the hill and all the shop signs are in Chinese and Arabic script. I walked and walked, through the area where all the shop signs are in Chinese and Russian, to an area where all the shop signs were in Chinese with slogans in English. I finally found the central bus station, and found one lady who spoke a little English at the counter with the sign in Chinese and English. She told me that they can’t sell them there. She told me to go “right”, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out whether she meant to go out the door and turn right and keep walking, or whether to go right out the door and then turn right again. She said it was a white building, which narrows things down of course.

So I headed out the door, turned right, and then right again at what I thought was the next intersection. I walked down the road for a couple of kilometers until I came to the centre of town, and the only white building which looked at all likely was a travel agent of sorts, in the same building as the hotel which for some inexplicable reason is the only place you can get train tickets from Urumqi to Almaty. I wanted a bus (quicker and leaving sooner) not a train, but asked in the Travel Agent anyway. They could neither speak English nor book bus (or train) tickets, so I walked all the way back again. I then decided that the lady at the counter must have meant to go out of the door, turn right and keep going. So I followed that road for a while but still had no luck. I then took a taxi back to the Backpackers and bumped into a European couple who explained that the bus station for Almaty is in fact hidden in a tiny alley-way behind the main bus station. I headed back there and after walking past the boom gate and down the deserted alleyway and around a deserted car park, found the almost deserted ticket office.

At the ticket office a Kazakh man who spoke Russian (and I assume a few other non-English languages) sold me a ticket, but to make sure he had communicated every little thing, he phoned his friend who spoke fluent English and we had this strange conversation in which his friend relayed information back and forth between us on the mobile phone. Thus with the ticket organized, I had one day see the sights.

The Backpackers and a few other places around town were advertising a number of tours, ranging from one to five days. It seemed a good way to see some of the sites outside the town, as I’d already seen much of the town itself by getting lost in it, so I booked onto one of them. After phoning Mum to wish her a happy Mother’s Day, me being such a good son and all, the tour bus came past the Backpackers at about 09:00. It turned out to be your typical “touristy” tour that you might find anywhere in the world, full of middle-class tourists taking lots of photos, and dawdling around wasting time, getting taken to a few key sights which are nice enough; except for one thing - the tourists were all domestic. The tour guide talked for about an hour in the bus, in Mandarin, and of course I couldn’t understand a word. She didn’t even try to say anything to me in English.

Luckily three other guys went from the same Backpackers as me and two of them were from Hong Kong and so spoke fairly good English. They weren’t too keen to translate the whole talk, but did help explain the relevant points to me, such as that we had to pay a non-opitonal extra $20 (or something) for the cable-car ride up the actual mountain. Anyway, the tour took us up the mountain to some quite nice scenery which you can see in the photos, which made me excited because I’d never seen snow in Asia before, and eventually up to a Daoist temple which wasn’t as weird as the one in my last blog, but had a guy in the same strange black dress, complete with the little pad on his forehead presumably so he doesn’t get brain damage from bowing to the ground so much.

The bus left on the evening of the next day. It was the first time I’d been on a sleeper bus, which meant it had tiny beds, which you could sleep on if you were able and weren’t so tall that your feet hung over the edge, and were used to sleeping bouncing up and down like a cowboy sleeping on a horse that’s bouncing around because of all the potholes in the road.

Things changed as soon as I got to the bus station. It was like I was in Kazakhstan already. There were Russian-looking people everywhere, and I realized then what was going to be strangest for me in Kazakhstan - for the first time in my trip, people couldn’t tell that I was a tourist just by looking at me. The mix of people looked exactly like what you’d expect in Australia. The lady on the bunk across the aisle from me couldn’t speak any English but she went through my passport and with the aid of some maps and sign language and suchlike I explained where I was from and all that. She said she works as a nurse but also does some trading … it seemed like she’d come to China to buy goods to take back to Kazakhstan to sell. China is cheap, Kazakhstan is expensive. She said she was four years older than me, and had six children, five boys and one girl. Then the usual stuff that everyone in every country asks you when you travel. I swear I’m going to get a T-shirt printed up so I don’t have to repeat myself all the time:
No, no children …
No, single …
I don’t know, Australian girls are too fussy I guess, haha …
Yes I am aware that in your country most people get married at 20. We don’t . …
Yes, local girls are indeed very beautiful …
Yes maybe who knows.

Apparently if you are actually married then you face similar questions along the lines of “why don’t you have children?” or if you do have children “Why don’t they have children?” but I can’t vouch for that.

It turned out that one of the other guys on the bus spoke English which was useful, and he was very helpful, he was travelling with his wife and a bunch of his friends, none of whom spoke English. He was a film producer and had worked in the USA a few years ago. I wanted to ask him if it was hard to introduce himself as a film producer from Kazakhstan the time the Borat film came out, but didn’t get around to it.

We arrived at the border at 07:30. Apparently it’s only meant to open at 08:00. We waited about an hour before it finally began to open and by then hundreds of other people were “queuing” for the border controls which was processing people unbelievably slowly. Of course in soviet times everyone had to queue everywhere for everything, so now they seem to have rebelled against it and refuse to form orderly queues for anything, kind of like how I don’t like lentils because I got fed too many lentils when I was a kid.

A great throng of people squeezed through a tiny gate like a herd of camels through the eye of a needle, past some guards whose only function seemed to be to check that everyone had a passport of some description. Then we entered the big hall where it wasn’t clear to queue, particularly if you couldn’t read Chinese or Russian. A metre or two back from me a young British guy was pushing a muddy bicycle with all his stuff in panniers and a small backpack. Presumably someone must have same something to him about pushing because he suddenly shouted loudly in English “I can’t f****** help it. These other f****** ***s are pushing me” and glared vehemently. It seemed to work however because he got through the gates before I did. Next to me the Kazakh guy from the bus smiled wanly and tapped his head to suggest the guy was crazy.

When I got to the customs, the lady looked at my passport photo and at me and visibly started. She then spent about three minutes flicking through every page, then motioned to someone to come over, who said to me “wait over here for a minute”. Some random guy turned up to translate, but just flicked through my passport without telling me what was going on. The bus driver turned up and had an argument with the other guy presumably saying that he was keen to get moving and everyone was waiting. After the translator guy just kept staring at a four-year-old entry & exit stamp from the USA, and clearly not able to read English, I grabbed the passport back. Eventually the uniformed Chinese lady took my passport and returned it a minute later with an exit stamp. I don’t know what the problem was, the “translator’s” excuse that they didn’t have an exit stamp was clearly a lie, and I look quite different from my 2002 passport photo, but should still be recognizable.

Anyway, when I got back to the bus there didn’t seem to be such a hurry after all as we hung around for another two or three hours before finally driving the few minutes to the Kazakh border crossing. I guess they’d closed for lunch. There we battled through the throng again, x-raying all our luggage, and finally got back to the bus. We then waited for another three hours for some inexplicable reason, before finally heading off again, stopping for dinner at some local diner a few hours later, and arriving into Almaty at midnight, three hours late. The whole journey took about 28 hours for about 1000 km.

I’ll leave the taxi ride from the station where I got ripped off to the tune of $AUS 50, for my next blog, which will be more interesting than this one.

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Photos

Tian Shan Mountains
A Daoist temple almost on the edge of Heavens Lake in the Tianshian mountains near Urumqi (no photos allowed inside)

Train ride
The Chinese cyclist and I in the train from Beijing to Urumqi

Train ride
Some small farms, taken somewhere on the train from Beijing to Urumqi

Train ride
A small town, taken somewhere on the train from Beijing to Urumqi

Train ride
The scenery from the train from Beijing to Urumqi, further west - note the mountains in the distance

Train ride
A windfarm, closer to Urumqi than Beijing, taken from the train

Urumqi
I don't know what this building is, it looks like a mosque of some sort, in Urumqi

Urumqi
There were a heap of these little cars in Urumqi, I didn't see them anywhere else, I don't know what they are

Urumqi
Urumqi, from outside the Backpackers, overlooking the park, with the mountains in the distance. If you look closely you should be able to see some of the myriad of kites

Tian Shan Mountains
A cable-car ascending the Tianshian mountains, near Urumqi

Tian Shan Mountains
A pagoda on the way up the Tianshian mountains, near Urumqi

Tian Shan Mountains
Heavens Lake, in the Tianshian mountains, near Urumqi

Tian Shan Mountains
Looking out from the pagoda of the Daoist temple in the Tiranshian mountains near Urumqi

Tian Shan Mountains
My Hong Kongese friends on the edge of Heavens Lake in the Tianshian mountains near Urumqi

Tian Shan Mountains
Heavens lake

Kazakhstan
A Kazakh farmer, on the road from Urumqi to Almaty (Kazakhstan)