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Published: February 26th 2018
Ok, 9 am breakfast in Silk Road Lodges, Turpan, a veritable feast including nan bread, feast of local delights and, rather quaintly, four budgerigars flying around our heads. 10.00 our driver arrived and we went to see Jiaohe ancient Buddhist century, largest mud city in world, check it out - walked in, saw the whole site in perfect weather, cloudless sky, all to ourselves. No point in my describing it, as it is so famous, but well worth our trip if we see nothing else. Then we went to see a section of the Karez system, whereby ice-melt is fed through underground hand-dug conduits for thousands if kilometres to help the desert blossom; again, very famous but great to actually see for oneself, and another private viewing! More power to the Chinese, they have everything open and available, even out of season. Stopped for lunch in extraordinarily magnificent modern Uighir restaurant; our driver is Uighir and made sure we left nothing to chance - a feast again! Then past the Flaming Mountains (very red indeed, evidently sedimentary and quite frankly rather daunting; it is possible to climb up (about 1000ft) using ladder system, then skate back down on a mat, but we gave that a miss and instead continued gto see the Buddhist art (what little was not taken by Le Cog and Sir Aurel Stein) at Bezeklik. Again, no point in my repeating what is so famous... enough to say that the approach is through magnificent scenery, we had it almost to ourselves and the site is very well presented. The art itself is mostly in foreign museums (apart from the stuff that was bombed by the RAF when it was in Germany), but it was interesting to get a feel of the site and the ambience that lay behind it. Excellent day, ready now for yet another great feast in a small and rather local restaurant, tomorrow we make our way to Kuqa / Kucha by lengthy train journey, Hard Seat. Sorry our first report did not appear, I may yet discover it and repost.
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Alastair Scouller
non-member comment
Good to hear from you
Glad to know you are now in communication - I had feared it wasn't going to work. You certainly seem to be seeing some fascinating things, in a very remote part of the planet. You also seem to be doing a lot of eating! Here we are gearing up for one last blast of winter, then I'm off to Islay for the month of March to play at being a minister. Hope the rest of the trip is as good as the beginning has been. Love to you both, Alastair.