Advertisement
Published: October 15th 2010
Edit Blog Post
Girls From the Bus
Playing outside. Just as I snapped the picture, I realized the little girl didn't want me to. The next morning the three of us (me, Kayleigh and the other American we shared a yurt with) packed up, said goodbye to our Kyrgyz family, and stood by the road to try and flag down a bus. Karakul Lake didn’t seem to be an actual bus stop so we just tried to get anything we could. Finally a bus from Tashkurgan stopped for a photo and pee break. A little boy squatted down and had diarrhea basically right next to where we were standing. They didn’t have any room on the bus, but we pleaded and said we didn’t mind sitting on the floor. Four busses had already gone by and the drivers had dismissed us with a wave of the hand, so sitting on the floor was our best bet. The driver and basically everyone on the bus were all extremely nice. They just told us to duck when we went by cops. This was the crazy windy broken mountain road we had come over on, and everyone around me had the pukes. Two adorable little kids were puking out the windows, on their parents, on the floor (oh yeah we were sitting on the floor). A small, so-sick-she-looked-green
girl to my right had a collection of plastic bags. One-by-one she filled them up with vomit and chucked them out the window.
After several hours of driving and the usual pit stops and passport checks, the bus stopped at the end of a long line of traffic. After waiting a bit, we all got off the bus for some fresh air. We heard there was some issue with the road up ahead and it would take 3 hours to clear. A bit of a wait, but everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves playing in the sunshine, picking mysterious fruit, chatting, wandering around the banks of a small river that ran through the same valley as the highway. At one point, a bulldozer flying a red flag drove past the ever-increasing line of traffic. The People’s Republic of China was going to save the day! After an hour or two of waiting, the girl we met and I decided to take a walk and see what the holdup was. Kayleigh didn’t want to come, so she waited with our bags. We assumed that when the problem cleared, the busses would keep on moving. Therefore, we planned to return to
the bus before the road was cleared. Worst-case scenario, we wouldn’t make it back in time, and we could just flag down the bus when it passed us up ahead. Also, I had my cell phone turned off to conserve the few minutes of battery it had left. Seemed like a solid plan to me!
We got to the place where the bulldozer was working. It was a huge rock-and-mud slide, maybe 30 feet tall and 50 feet long. The bulldozer was making decent progress, so we thought we would be out of there soon. Just for kicks, we climbed over it. Except, on the other side there was another mudslide and another and another and another. Maybe 10-15 of them stretched over a couple of miles. At one point, we were at the top of one and we heard an engine at our back… it was the bulldozer! We got away fast! Going forward, we encountered another bulldozer coming from the other direction, and we had to dodge that one too. There was a lot of mud, sometimes halfway up our calves. It was fun and pleasantly squishy. What else were we going to do until they cleared
"Watermelon"?
They were calling these "xigua." the mess? There were a surprising number of other people climbing over the piles with us.
All was quite fun until a thunderstorm started. We started looking at the rocks that had slid (presumably due to heavy rains). We wondered how the rockslide would be, if there would be projectiles, if you would get any warning and have any chance to get out of the way. The wind was strong and made the rain feel sharp on our skin. That last leg of the journey was quite wet, chilly and unpleasant. Around then, Kayleigh called and said that the bus had left. I said, “oh cool, we’ll just meet you on the other side. Actually what Kayleigh was saying was that the bus had given up and gone back to Tashkurgan. How crazy! Tashkurgan was maybe 7 hours from there, whereas Kashgar was just a couple of ours away. So Kayleigh was by herself with no bus and no friends, carrying two backpacks. Wading through the rockslides was a fun adventure for two people, but I could imagine it being scary and not fun at all as a single person. Plus, Kayleigh didn’t want to do it in the
first place. I recalled that at the lake she got cold easier than I did, and if I was cold… well damn.
The girl and I finally made it to the end, to a building where people were taking shelter and trying to find a way back to Kashgar. We did see some kind of disaster response vehicle, but it wasn’t for us. There were so many cold, wet and tired people of all ages and conditions. I was surprised there wasn’t more of an emergency government response. It seemed like the only way to get back was with a cell phone and some guanxi (connections)!
We ended up finding a nice tour guide and a really friendly and cool group of Indian foreign service officers who were working in Beijing and were currently on vacation. The tour guide had ordered a bus to come and pick them up and they were willing to take us along. No longer battling the elements and with the getting home issue resolved, we felt bad for Kayleigh, so I went to go meet her. She was actually not too far down the road and less mad at us than I expected.
Another Rock/Mud Slide.
They all looked like this. On the left is our friend wading around. Reunited, we spent a short time recovering indoors. Then the tour guide said that the road was flooding so we were going to walk down the road a bit so we wouldn’t get caught. Indeed, water was rushing down from the mountains and across the road!
Also outside, the rain had stopped and we were greeted by a double rainbow! Opposite the double rainbow was a golden sunset over misty, snow-capped mountains. It was a magical scene of the calm after the storm. Finally our bus came. The ride home came with free entertainment! A precocious 10 year old Chinese girl was sitting near me and the Indian diplomats and asked us lots of funny questions! For example, she asked all of our ages and to one of the FSOs said “25岁还没结婚啊?!” “25 years old and still not married?!”
Quite a day. Boy were we happy to return to our good old Seman Hotel!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.159s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 6; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0541s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb