Days 17, 18 and 19 - Travel to Kashgar

[niniane]

 10/20 – Turpan to Aksu

 

Got on the taxi bright and early and made it to the train station with time to spare. We went through security five times to get in. (I mean, I guess it's not really all that surprising that somewhere where you have to go through security twice to get into a grocery store also requires five security checks for a train, but it did feel a bit silly, especially after tickets had been checked against passports for the third time, luggage x-rayed for a third time, being patted down a third time, etc.)

 

Got on the train, which quite frankly, is rather miserable. The sleepers are nice enough...if you're sleeping. But they don't fold up and aren't high enough to sit comfortably in, so you have to lie down, which isn't exactly fun in the middle of the day. Also, people are smoking (gross....) and children are running around and shrieking (<3 one child policy). So meh. I'm going to look forward to being off this cursed thing.

 

(To be fair, I'm rather grouchy as I spent last night throwing up. Woke up around 2 am and felt about to throw up, then didn't – just spit out gross, pre-throw up spit. Did that twice more, then repeated the process with dry heaving. Then repeated the process a few more times while vomiting up bile. It made for a pretty miserable night. Not sure whether it was something I ate – although why not vomit up food were that the case? - or dehydration or a virus or something entirely different. It seemed gone as of breakfast – I threw up for the last time at 7 am, then was able to eat and drink normally, so who knows – 5 hour flu? - but I was still worried about upsetting my stomach and spent the day rather sleep deprived.)

It does not help that the only thing to see on this leg of the trip is 1) scrub, 2) completely barren desert, 3) sad farms.


Speaking of sad farms, here are some tiny cotton fields being harvested by hand. I can't even imagine how hard the lives of the people out here must be.

10/20-10/21 - Aksu

 

So Aksu was something more of an adventure than I'd been looking for. I got off the train (tired, oh so tired, 12 hours of a train ride after having not slept well due to vomiting all night the night before really sucks) just to be pulled aside by security and asked for our passports.

 

Oh well...I mean, we already knew that security would be a bit more of a deal here, so whatever. I showed him my passport and told my parents to do the same.

 

This began (what I hope) was the most harrowing moment of my trip. The police officer looked at the passports (so far, not a big deal) then herded us into a walled off concrete coorider and started asking me a lot of questions (fairly aggressively) about where we were, where we'd been, where we were going, where we were staying, etc.

 

I answered truthfully (I mean, none of this should have been a big deal, right? We'd been...doing the silk road trip and stopping in pretty conventional tourist spots). Our papers were in order. Our visas were valid. I had a hotel booked for the night....

 

But then he kept asking me the same freaking questions again and again, like he expected me to screw up, his hand straying to his gun...he kept asking me where I was staying, what I intended to see in Aksu (I just wanted to rest, I told him. It's a 22 hour train ride...I wanted to rest and take a shower half way through. We were leaving in a day, anyway...), on and on and on...

 

It was pretty frightening, especially with no sleep. (And the whole hand touching the gun thing, like...WTF???) Then he got on his phone and called his commanding officer, and there was stuff about detaining us...but I guess the officer was like, "WTF dude? They're tourists whose paperwork is in order..." So then he just took a picture of our passports, gave them back, and had as escorted by a half dozen armed men to the taxi stand. (I mean....???? What did he think we were going to do? Run off into the night when we had a perfectly good hotel booked?)

 

Then the next day, my computer died. Like, I'd played some of my stupid games the night before and checked email and it was working fine...then suddenly something was wrong with CMOS. I like to think that it was just a stupid refurbished computer being weird, but still...really, really weird (and kind of creepy).

 

I got a bit paranoid and didn't especially want to leave my room. (Since...ugh.) But I needed food and water, so slipped out for that to a convenience store. (Where I met a rather hilarious Chinese woman who seemed fascinated by the thought that there were Chinese people in the US, that I "could" (weirdly in Chinese, they seem to ask whether I "can" or "am accustomed" to eating Chinese food vs. whether I enjoy eating it. Go figure...) eat Chinese food, use chopsticks, etc. She seemed delighted to learn that there are many Chinese people in the US and that I find Chinese food delicious.

 

My parents were out wandering and eventually found a nice park that we walked out to. It was quite lovely, along a river with a statue of a Uigher woman playing a stringed instrument beside it.

Another girl saw us walking by and literally flipped her bicycle. (Whoops.) Then when we started asking if she was okay (my parents in English, me in Mandarin), she flipped out and fled. Eek. Sorry...

A group of girls also coralled us and started practicing English on us, which was rather adorable. They could pretty much only say, "What is your name?" "How are you?" and "you are so very beautiful!" But it was still adorable.

Then we went out to another restaurant with rather too spicy lamb and chicken. Went to bed quite eager to escape Aksu the next day...but my adventures were not over.

Time for a break.

A gorgeous park in Aksu! For some reason, Mom wanted to ride the ferris wheel, so I went with her. It was...a ferris wheel.


Isn't this just the coolest bridge?


I love this statue...


A Uigher fishing-tea ceremony? Unsure...

The park seemed super eager to highlight all the awesome people who had preserved innocuous bits of Uigher culture like song and dance numbers. (Which is important, just really did make them sound like a people of the past rather than an 8 million strong cultural group that's very much still there.)


We went to this "Arabian Nights" themed restaurant in the evening. The food was...okay. I was a bit too spicy for me (like, it BURNED), but the decor was cool and it was probably the last good meal we ate until we made it to Tashkorgan.

10/22 – Travel to Turpan

 

We headed out early the next day for the train station and found a driver nice and early. We loaded the stuff, just to promptly be stopped by a police checkpoint.

 

These guys were more inept than threatening (although the leader did have a semi-automatic rifle strapped across his chest, which was a bit disconcerting, although at least it just hung there...) But they asked at least a half dozen times where we were going (the train station, to go to Kashgar...not that complicated...) then took our passports. I think they had something they were supposed to scan them with, but they couldn't get it to work, so drove off with our passports (ugh...at least they asked when the train left, and since we had plenty of time, I guess they figured they did too, but still ugh...), and kept asking the same freaking questions over and over again. Again, they didn't seem aggressive so much as just...really inept. (They also searched our bags and confiscated our corkscrew a very dull knife...I know...we're so dangerous. *eye roll*)

 

Again, it didn't feel dangerous, but it was annoying as nothing else, especially as my parents were freaking out (and I didn't really want to start talking to them for fear that it would feel like we were conspiring or some such), and they did take our passports, and it lasted a full 45 minutes.

 

At last we got to the trainstation just to learn that the train didn't leave until 1. (Even though my notes said 10...ugh.) So we hung around through several trains as the station people basically just worked around us. (And one of their kids played hide and go seek.)

 

Then we got on our train at last and sat next to a rather friendly man who promptly started chattering with me in Chinese about just about everything he could think of. He offered us some delicious pears (grown in korla, a specialty!), complained a bit about Uigher food and how far apart everything was in Xinjiang (he lived in Kashgar, but was Han Chinese), talked a bit about his family, asked about mine, etc. etc. It was nice that he was so friendly, although there were definitely moments when I was like, "Yargh, forced language lesson! Tough!" He also got the train station lady (who apparently was finishing up her 24 hour journey just to travel right back...Chinese train ladies are tough!) to chat for a bit.

 

We got in just to have a bunch of cab drivers try to rip us off. We got in a cab and the guy was like, "Oh, it'll be 40!" and I was like, "No, we're using the meter." and he was like, "No, 40!" at which point I slapped down the meter and took his card (turned the wrong way) that showed his number. He fought with me over this for a bit, until I handed his ID card to my parents who photographed it. Then he did this whole BS about how he didn't know where our hotel was (at which I told him to take us back to the train station, and we would NOT pay him as he'd claimed he'd known where it was then), at which point he insisted that he knew where it was...just to drop us off at the wrong place. Dude, I will report you.

 

So a rather annoying day with taxis. But at least no more police stops....for that day, anyway....