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Published: April 23rd 2009
Flaming Mountains
Don't forget your magic fan..Xinjiang literally translates as
the new frontier. And as soon as you step across the border you know how this province earned its name: it is home to the Uighur minority, with their own language, religion, food and dress that is much closer to that of its western neighbours than the rest of China. We may still be in the PRC, but this definitely already feels like central Asia.
Our first stop is Turpan. We hire a driver to take us around the sights, from
Huoyanshan, the flaming mountains, immortalised in the Chinese classic Journey to the West, to
Jiaohe an ancient city of the Han dynasty eerily well preserved by the dry climate around here. Our driver is a chubby 30-year-old who, over lunch, blames the high obesity rates among his people on the traditional diet, which seems to consist primarily of lamb. His concern does not, however, go as far as to stop him from tucking into several skewers of lamb kidneys before we move on to the next sight. Perhaps the most memorable experience for any visitor to Turpan is its dried goods market: rows and rows of dried fruits, nuts, spices, sugars and most of all:
Jiaohe
Past it's prime, but then again, it is two thousand odd years old. raisins. They come in every shape, size, colour, taste and every vendour beckons you over claiming only he has the best. It takes a while to taste your way through them all before making a choice of which ones to buy, and by the time you get to the end you have to start over again to remind yourself what the first one tasted like. Had we not had a car to catch to get to Urumqi that same evening we may easily have suffered death by raisin.
A couple of hours drive away is Urumqi, the provincial capital. Sadly we don't have much time to spend here, but then again we're not here for the sights, but to see old friends from Olympic days. Following the dissolution of the Organising Committee of the Beijing Games, many of the staff have picked up jobs throughout the country, and three of them are here. They take us around the bazaar and treat us to milk tea and lamb kidneys before bundling us on the 24 hour express train to Kashgar.
Kashgar is a tale of two cities: on one side the central People's Square, surrounded by wide avenues and
dominated by a huge Mao statue and large red lanterns, and on the other side the old town with small brick houses and busy narrow alleys besides an enormous market. This market really conjures up images of the traders of the silk road. Not only is there every sort of dried fruit that we found in Turpan, but fresh produce, household goods, hand made artifacts, clothes, medicine, cooked food stalls - you name it and someone
will shuffle off and fetch it for you. There are markets like this all around Kashgar, including a big live stock market where people gave me looks as though they weren't sure if I was trading or being traded. Kashgar is a fantastic place to take a few days break, soak up market life and savour some great street food. Which is exactly what we did.
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