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
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