Across Xinjiang with J-Lo
Turpan, Xinjiang, China, June 29
If you're travelling in China, and you get sick of being stared at, there is a simple solution. Not necessarily easy, but simple. Find a 5' 11" white woman with blue eyes to walk next to you. You will become the Invisible Man. It's kind of like being Jennifer Lopez's cohost at the Grammys.
I was able to put this method into practice with the help of a good friend of mine from high school, who happened to be visiting Shanghai for several weeks and had wanted to visit western China. She flew out to Urumqi and I met her there two days ago (June 27). Not being subject to my budgetary constraints, she was staying in one of the better hotels in Urumqi. The "non-muslim food" breakfast of bacon, eggs, and sausage was extremely welcome after close to two months pork-free.
Our first stop was the Urumqi provincial museum, which has a lot of great exhibits including some naturally mummified bodies of the mysterious Tocharian people who lived in far western China about 2000 years ago. The most famous of these is the "Luoyang Beauty", a woman whose slim physique and reddish-brown hair have been preserved across the millennia, and who has become a symbol of Uighur nationalism. She's even spookier than most mummies, and I couldn't look for more than a few seconds at a time.
After that we hired a taxi out to Heavenly Lake, a beautiful alpine lake north of Urumqi where we stayed in a yurt camp for Chinese tourists. There were a huge number of large hawks or eagles, who turned out to subsist largely by foraging leftovers from the dumpsters. They still looked nice, though. The owners of the camp assumed we were married and we decided that correcting them would just lead to unnecessary confusion.
As with most Chinese scenic areas, pretty much every rock in the place had a centuries-old name based on a fancied resemblance to some mythological scene or on the alleged fact that a famous person had once stopped there. We pretty much ignored this aspect of the experience, but some of the Chinese tour groups had very thick guidebooks explaining all these things.
Today we had the same taxi take us to Turpan, an oasis with some interesting sites in the surrounding desert. We skipped most of the ruins, but stopped at the 1,000-year-old city of Jiaohe, carved out of the hard dirt on top of a mesa, and also looked at a museum related to the underground karez tunnels which bring water to Turpan from the snowy mountains miles away. The oldest tunnels were first dug around 1 AD, and the system has been maintained ever since. Many of the tunnels are lined with concrete now. It was nicely cool in the underground museum after an hour baking in the ruined city.
Our next step will be taking a sleeper train to Dunhuang, which has some of the best Buddhist art in western China. If all goes well, we should be there tomorrow.
If you're travelling in China, and you get sick of being stared at, there is a simple solution. Not necessarily easy, but simple. Find a 5' 11" white woman with blue eyes to walk next to you. You will become the Invisible Man. It's kind of like being Jennifer Lopez's cohost at the Grammys.
I was able to put this method into practice with the help of a good friend of mine from high school, who happened to be visiting Shanghai for several weeks and had wanted to visit western China. She flew out to Urumqi and I met her there two days ago (June 27). Not being subject to my budgetary constraints, she was staying in one of the better hotels in Urumqi. The "non-muslim food" breakfast of bacon, eggs, and sausage was extremely welcome after close to two months pork-free.
Our first stop was the Urumqi provincial museum, which has a lot of great exhibits including some naturally mummified bodies of the mysterious Tocharian people who lived in far western China about 2000 years ago. The most famous of these is the "Luoyang Beauty", a woman whose slim physique and reddish-brown hair have been preserved across the millennia, and who has become a symbol of Uighur nationalism. She's even spookier than most mummies, and I couldn't look for more than a few seconds at a time.
After that we hired a taxi out to Heavenly Lake, a beautiful alpine lake north of Urumqi where we stayed in a yurt camp for Chinese tourists. There were a huge number of large hawks or eagles, who turned out to subsist largely by foraging leftovers from the dumpsters. They still looked nice, though. The owners of the camp assumed we were married and we decided that correcting them would just lead to unnecessary confusion.
As with most Chinese scenic areas, pretty much every rock in the place had a centuries-old name based on a fancied resemblance to some mythological scene or on the alleged fact that a famous person had once stopped there. We pretty much ignored this aspect of the experience, but some of the Chinese tour groups had very thick guidebooks explaining all these things.
Today we had the same taxi take us to Turpan, an oasis with some interesting sites in the surrounding desert. We skipped most of the ruins, but stopped at the 1,000-year-old city of Jiaohe, carved out of the hard dirt on top of a mesa, and also looked at a museum related to the underground karez tunnels which bring water to Turpan from the snowy mountains miles away. The oldest tunnels were first dug around 1 AD, and the system has been maintained ever since. Many of the tunnels are lined with concrete now. It was nicely cool in the underground museum after an hour baking in the ruined city.
Our next step will be taking a sleeper train to Dunhuang, which has some of the best Buddhist art in western China. If all goes well, we should be there tomorrow.
posted by jeros | 12:43 PM
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