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Published: June 16th 2008
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Heavenly Lake sign
"Green grass is afraid of your trample" hehe. Travels along the Silk Roads From Turpan we headed north, via the capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi and it's rather wonderful museum. We got a guided whirlwind tour through the collections, including an entire section on the different peoples that make up Xinjiang's population, a history of the region, and a number of mummies. The highlight for me was the absolutely charming captions on the exhibits - my favourite being "Colourfully patched and embroidered felts resemble colourful dreams". :-) So cute!
Our destination was Heavenly Lake in the Tian Shan mountains, where we stayed in yurts for two nights with a Kazak family. It was quite interesting, the Chinese Tourism Machine is trying to make these wilderness places more accessible, so there were cable cars, concrete paths, fake concrete tree stumps and large white statues which felt a little out of place on this beautiful lake... and the gravel mining at one end of the lake was also a bit disruptive. But some of us went for a horseride up into the hills, and once you're above the lake a bit, you can't see all that stuff and it was very peaceful and lovely.
Leaving the Lake we travelled
Heavenly Lake view
Me, Sian, Roseanne, Stephen and Mark after our horseriding. south again and onto a town called Korla, but we didn't get to see much as we arrived in the evening and left in the morning, but we did eat some tasty food at the night market - and find a bakery that sold "New Zealand Bread" (which was actually more like a cake and not particularly tasty!) The following day was our Taklamakan Desert adventure day - 13 hours through the desert, but actually it was one of our more comfortable bus days - the road was pretty good, and despite poor visibility due to blowing sand and the rather unfortunate loss of our brakes halfway across, at least it was straight and flat! What amazed me was the immense irrigation project that maintaining the road takes - to keep sand from reclaiming the road, borders of plants have been planted - which of course requires water... it's a massive job, but works remarkably well!
By the time we arrived in our next major stop Hotan, on the Southern Silk Road, Cielle and I had been struck by the stomach bug that had been doing the rounds of the group, so we spent an afternoon in (thankfully) a
lovely hotel with a great view out onto a large square which happened to transform into a night market and fair ground at night, so that was pretty nice. We'd recovered enough the following day to participate in the planned activities, visiting some cottage industries out in some local villages - sponsored by Intrepid one of them was allowing women to earn extra money by embroidering tapestries for the tourist market and it just amazed me the evenness of their work which they managed to do while cooking, cleaning and looking after the children. It was pretty cool. We also stopped at a carpet factory, a wood turners, a village Friday market (which was so cool - by the time we'd finished walking around we had an entourage of curious locals following us), a water driven flour mill and a silk 'factory'.
After another bus day we arrived at our finishing point - Kashgar. It's a pretty amazing place, the mixing of Chinese and Muslim traditions, architecture and cultures gives it a really vibrant feel. We wandered some of the back streets the evening that we arrived and I was fascinated by the people, it was very difficult not
Group photo
Outside our yurt... to take photos! The old men have the most amazing faces, and the women look so mysterious with just their eyes showing through their veils. The Sunday Market wasn't quite what I was expecting but walking back skirting the old town, we walked through an amazing local market that let you glimpse what the Silk Road would have been like centuries ago, so that was pretty cool.
We had a long travelling day getting back to Beijing, but there were a whole lot of our tour group with us so it was neat to have others to talk to! The flight from Kashgar to Urumqi was stunning though, we had some amazing views looking out to the west and the mountain ranges. I've had a fantastic time in China, and we're going to miss so many different things: the people, the food, the amusing signs translated into interesting English, using chopsticks (they have really good reach for getting things that are two plates away!!), the buzz about the Olympics and the general feeling that China is moving forward at huge speed. Construction projects are everywhere so it will be really interesting to see the difference when I eventually make
Our happy bus
Before it broke.... it back (I just want to see more of China now!!).
We are currently in Zurich, staying with one of my oldest friends and cursing the weather (it's a bit cooler than China, and has been raining today). We had a brief stop with my cousin James in Stuttgart (thanks again James!) who took the time to ferry us around and then allowed us the luxury of a lazy evening eating in and doing all the housekeeping things - backing up our photos, booking tickets and then having an early night! We went for a nice walk through the German countryside in the morning and then caught our train to Zurich. Saturday we spent up a mountain - and actually got sleeted on, but warmed ourselves up with hot chocolate, and yesterday we caught a boat to the other end of the Zurichsee and had to have another hot chocolate to warm ourselves up again!! Next stop is Italy, where we are off to visit my Uncle in Asti and then our plans are a bit fuzzy until the 29th when we have to be in Budapest to meet our next tour!
Take care everyone, would love to hear
any news or gossip from home! :-)
TTFN, Sarah
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