Kashgar

We are now back from China! More importantly we have escaped the Great Chinese Fire Wall, which had made blogging virtually impossible. Over the next few days we shall gradually post the remaining details of our trip as I am sure you are desperate to find out what happened (or is that just our parents :-)

We left you last when we had just arrived into Kashgar from Kyrgystan. Kashgar is a really amazing place in the far western corner of China, wedged between the Himalayan Massif and the Taklamakan Dessert . It sits at the crossroads to Pakistan's Karakorum Highway and is, of course, the gateway to central Asia from where we had just arrived. Kashgar is a centre of Uighur Culture. The Uigurs are a Muslim ethnic minority, who were in the news in 2009 following riots in neighbouring Ürümqi. The means by which the Chinese supressed these riots drew international condemnation.

Here is a flavour of Kashgar

The Old Town:

The New Town:

Welcome to Chinglish (I):

Chinese soliders saluting in front of the Great Wall of China and... the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau (Switzerland)!
The bride and groom dancing at a Uighur wedding to which we were invited . The bride looked beautiful but exhausted because she had already been awake for 24hours and was just about to go to her husband's village for the second wedding there! She is wearing a western-style dress supplemented with traditional fabric.

Uighur lady in the old town:


Escaping the searing heat at the famed live-stock market chinese-style A Kyrgyz , a Uighur and a Hui man all enjoying Laghman (pulled noodles)- you can tell their ethnicity by the hats!

No comment!

A demolished section of the old town. You can call it modernisation or ethnic control, either way vast areas of traditional Uighur homes are being knocked to make way for modern development. The inhabitants are moved to blocks of flats out of town. In the time that we were in Kashgar, whole streets had been pulled down. This man contemplates the rubble that was once his house.

After a couple of weeks in Kashgar we had recovered and eaten enough to contemplate moving on. Originally we had planned at this point to take the road to Lhasa through Tibet, but because of increasing surveillance in recent years this has become virtually impossible without the aid of an expensive guide. This meant the Taklamakan desert stood between us and the rest of China and since it is one of the hottest places on earth and this was summer, we decided to take the train!!

We decided to head for the ethnically Tibetan regions further west for a month of cycling and then carry on to Beijing.

A mere 24 hours on the train saw us half way across the Taklamakan. The company was very good- the seats were not and nor was the air-con!
Halfway stop at Turpan- the second lowest place in the world at 154m below sea level. This means it is also very, very hot. Mercifully, the second day was overcast allowing the temperature to drop from the high forties to high thirties.

Thankfully, there was space in the sleeper compartment of the next train we got and a further 24 hours saw our arrival in Lanzhou.