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Published: September 15th 2010
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The next day, we set off for Korla, not really knowing what it would be like! The drive was pretty cool - a classic, super flat, straight desert road for part of it and then a windy hairpin turn mountain road after. The bus was playing some movies I forget what they were. (The movies on the bus the day before were very memorable Jurassic Park-giant snake-military themed.) Our bus driver was a little too interested in the movies! He kept taking breaks from looking at the road to have a little watch. When he wasn't doing that, he was getting really in to picking his nose. We had front-row seats and a perfect view of all of this. I wish he spent more time driving!
Driving out to Korla we could really see China's "Develop the West" program in action. Many of the roads we were driving on had just been paved and we could see a lot of roads and tollgates and buildings in the process of being built. Korla looked like industrial crap with few scenic or culturally interesting spots. They did have an internet bar that let foreigners get online. The internet bars we tried in
Turpan and Chengdu did not let foreigners get online, but the ones in Korla and Urumqi did.
So just a few hours after arriving, we were already ready to get out! Thankfully we were just able to make a 15 hour overnight bus through the highway that crosses the Taklamakan Desert to Hotan/Khotan/Hetian/和田. (The Uyghur transliteration, Pinyin and English were sometimes quite different, which was confusing). To buy tickets, we had to fork over 180 kuai each to some random not-uniformed dude and just hope we were able to get on the bus. In our rush, we didn't stop for dinner, but thankfully they had chuanr and delicious meat, onions and grease buns at the bus stop!
When we boarded the bus, they handed us plastic bags. Everyone had to take their shoes off and put them in. The bus smelled like FEET and it never got better. When we were moving a breeze blew in through the windows and that helped. The guy in front of me always wanted our window closed so we had a little window war going on. Other than the raging smell of feet, the sleeper bus was quite comfy. I read my
book, the desert sunset was gorgeous, and eventually Kayleigh and I went to sleep. At 3:30 AM the bus driver woke us up. We were at a police checkpoint and we had to get off the bus and show our passports. (WAT?!)
I woke up pretty early the next morning, to find ourselves in the middle of the Taklamakan Desert! There was NOTHING out there - I guess you can't really develop things in the shifting sands. It's pretty cool that they were able to build a highway through it. The northern and southern Silk Road routes went around the desert and here we were driving through it! On either side of the highway there was a grid of dried-out grass/bush stuff. I wonder if they planted bushes in the sand to hold it down and keep it from blowing over the road.
By late morning, we were in Hetian. The first priority was to find a hotel and shower off the feet smell. It was cheap, it took foreigners, the bathroom sucked, and the people who worked there were lovely. I especially liked nainai, the Uyghur grandmother I never had. She spoke great Chinese too. We headed
New Road
Spraying out of a hose. out to check out the bazaar and quickly realized that we were in a majority Uyghur, more strictly Muslim city. The Uyghur women in Urumqi and Turpan generally wore dresses and wore their hair tied back in a scarf around their head. In Hetian we saw many more women with scarfs that went down over their neck and soldiers. Some women had their faces covered, a lot of women wore a loose long-sleeve outer dress that went down to the floor, some people had gloves to cover their hands and some people had their eyes covered too. I was wearing shorts and Kayleigh was wearing a tanktop. Oops.
The market sold the things you might expect at a market - scarves, fruit, fabric... but also things like baby chicks and pots and pans. They had dead skinned animals hanging with flies buzzing around them where you could buy your meat. We were very excited to see lots of naan and also BAGELS! I suppose Beijing is about as far from the U.S. as you can get. So traveling west towards Central Asia, we ate food that was a bit more familiar to us and were with people that looked
a bit more like us. I felt like I wasn't wearing enough clothes, so I bought a long skirt at the market.
We headed back to our hotel and I changed into my skirt and Kayleigh put a long sleeved shirt on. Then we headed to the river where the local people search for jade among the rocks. Hetian is very famous for its jade. Jade comes in all kinds of colors and patterns and we both can't tell the difference between jade and any other random rock. Some of the rocks there were very beautiful and we had a nice time strolling around. There were lots of people there using all kinds of tools to dig through the rocks. One guy kept following us and trying to sell us "jade." We tried to explain to him that we didn't come there to buy anything, but he wasn't having it so we had to kind of run away from him. Just above the river bank, many men were buying, selling and bargaining.
After that, we strolled around the old town, where we saw lots of agriculture and mud-brick buildings. Then we headed back to our hotel and took
a nap until the sun went down (it was Ramadan so if we wanted Uyghur food we had to wait!). Then we set off to find some dinner. First we tried a restaurant that apparently only sells "大盘鸡" which is a big plate of cold vinegary chicken. Then we settled on a place that had tasty dumpling soup. After dinner, we wandered around and then called it an early night.
The next morning we went to Yarkand/Yarkant... the Chinese name was 莎车/Sache... nothing like the English/Uyghur. The bus ride was long and VERY bumpy. This part of "the West" had not been "developed" yet! Surprising that in some parts, the only thing connecting the largest cities in that area of Xinjiang was a dirt road! We arrived in Yarkand at around 6 pm and went to check out the Altun Mosque Complex and Ammanisahan Tomb. I thought they would be in two different places but they were actually all together. I really like Islamic architecture with the domes on top. After about an hour and a half we were done looking at the sites. The town looked similar to Hetian - sort of dusty, sleepy, glimpses of real Uyghur
The Sun
It was gorgeous that night. farming life. Really interesting, but we already spent a day strolling around that kind of place, and we were excited to get to Kashgar. So we returned to the bus station and hopped the last bus to Kashgar!
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Muhammad
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Hello good forum