Shakin' and Rollin' to Kashgar

Kashgar, Xinjiang, China, June 24

It turned out getting from Osh (Kyrgyzstan) to Kashgar (China) was a bit harder than I expected, nearly 24 hours on the bus or waiting at the border.

I got on an overnight bus from Osh on June 22. I didn't particularly mind that it left over 2 hours late, since that gave me time to spend the last of my Kyrgyz money on a good meal and a few beers. We were going to be waiting a few hours for the border to open at 9:00 the next morning anyway.

The bus was a sleeper, with two decks of rather narrow beds. It would have been pretty comfortable except for the condition of the road, which was really bad. I fell asleep after a while, but then around midnight the driver slammed on the brakes hard enough to bang my head against the front of the bed (I seem to be slamming my head into things a lot on this trip), which woke me up. I grabbed onto the railing out of some kind of waking reflex, and the fact that I was holding on was the only reason I wasn't pitched out of the bunk when we hit a massive pothole a couple of seconds later. I was amazed nobody else fell out of the upper berths, and I understood why only a few of them were taken even though most of the lower ones were full. The godawful shaking stopped when we got to the border a while before dawn, and everybody got a few hours of good sleep before we began the formalities to exit Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyz customs were not a problem; the bus was done within an hour even though we weren't first in line. There were a couple of trucks full of scrap metal, bound for Chinese steel mills, ahead of us. By this time is was almost 10:00 local time, which meant it was 12:00 in Beijing, hundreds of miles to the east. And so the Chinese border post was closed for lunch, for an hour and a half. We waited in the parking lot, and I ate or gave away the last of the almonds I had bought in Uzbekistan a few weeks earlier. I'd like to say I anticipated the Chinese agricultural inspection, but in reality it was the only food I had except for a can of tuna.

Inprocessing by the Chinese took longer than any previous crossing except Turkmenistan, with a fairly detailed search of our bags and SARS-related superficial medical exams. I didn't find any currency exchange except one guy with a bunch of banknotes, but he offered 10% less than the official rate, and since counterfeit notes are a problem in China I preferred to get my first Chinese money from a safer source.

We would have been on our way by midafternoon local time except that our bus backed into a car behind it, which required about an hour of arguing between our drivers and the owners of the car. One of the guys whose car we'd hit seemed very upset (understandably, I thought, since the accident was clearly our driver's fault), and had to be restrained from throwing a rock at our bus. But eventually some sort of settlement was reached.

The Uighur towns we passed through were quite similar to Kyrgyz or Uzbek settlements, with a lot of adobe-like buildings that wouldn't have been out of place in the US southwest. In China, the Uighurs use Arabic script to write their language, and I discovered I remembered very little of that alphabet. Uighur women apparently consider a unibrow to be desirable, and if they don't have one they'll sometimes draw a connection between their eyebrows with makeup.

I still hadn't found a decent exchange rate by the time we got to Kashgar. Fortunately, the hotel right next to the bus station didn't insist on being paid until the next morning, and I easily found an ATM that accepted my card. Today I looked around Kashgar and found out about going south on the Karakoram highway and then east by the Trans-Desert highway across the Taklamakan Desert. It looks fairly easy, although sometimes the buses don't leave if they don't think there are enough passengers, pleading nonexistent "mechanical problems" or some such. I guess there can be a downside to the change to "to get rich is glorious" way of thinking.

Kashgar has many Han Chinese residents as well as Uighurs, but the local Han seem to avoid upsetting their Muslim neighbors in some ways--I didn't see any restaurants displaying pig heads or carcasses, for instance. The local mosque, built in the 1440s, has been pretty well restored, complete with an inspiring message from the PRC government about how this proves all of China's national minorities are respected and like the PRC's minority policies. There are a lot of messages like that on signs around Kashgar, most of them semi-translated into English. Instead of praising Mao Zedong thought or attacking the Four Olds, they now say things like "Forge up the Kashgar focus place of economic circle of central and South Asia, To develop the foreign trade" and "Kashgar: The Place of Achieve Your Dream".

Uighur cooking is pretty similar to other Central Asian cuisines, but with a bit more spices and served with chopsticks. I hope to have a dinner of Hui food instead. The Hui are a Chinese muslim group descended mostly from Han converts to Islam, and I haven't eaten their food before.

Tomorrow I'll check out the Sunday livestock market, and hopefully head south toward the Pakistani border by the Karakoram highway.