10/23 – Kashgar

Got up bright and early in Kashgar and went hunting for a travel agent that would take us along the Karakorum highway. It took us a bit to find him, but he was in a lovely hotel that used to be the Russian embassy in Kashgar dating back from the 1950s. We arranged the tour and managed to get by without a guide since I speak a sufficient amount of Mandarin that he thought it safe to leave us with a Mandarin only speaking driver. (He could not go as only ethnic Han Chinese are allowed permits to leave Kashgar.) He arranged all the visas for our trip (...why do we need a visa? We're not leaving the country...but such is the deal with travel in Xinjiang) and made some remarks about security being tighter, supposedly because of ISIS, etc.