The landscape from Kashgar starts as flat plains of small to midsized rocks and rises through sandy plateaus and low hills to iron-rich red mountains to a ring of dark mountains dusted with white sand dunes surrounding a shallow lake and culminates in the dramatic glacial peaks of the Pamir Mountains. The Karakorum Highway connects China with Pakistan over the highest mountain pass in the world, and while we were stopped at the side of the road perusing billiards tables spread with geological treasures and taking in the majestic scenery, we were passed by a convoy of about six trucks from Pakistan all draped with green canvas signs that read “Relief Assistance”. It was really a moving sight. I think particularly because the Western media gives a somewhat mistrustful portrayal of China and often presents a decidedly negative image of Pakistan. It was a small glimpse of a humanitarian gesture of assistance that just made me smile and feel happy with the world for a while.
We arrived at Karakul in the early afternoon, were shown to our yurt, and collapsed into a high altitude-induced coma for an hour or more of recovery. The lake is at about 3000 meters, and you really do feel it. Walking 100 meters takes the wind out of your sails and makes your heart beat quickly, and I developed a pretty raging headache – probably partly because of my sinus issues from a few days prior. The yurt was awesome. And I just love the word yurt. Yurt yurt yurt. Ours was a more traditional yurt than the modern concrete structures and was shaped as a rounded tent with molded bare tree branches as the frame draped in camel hair felt. The door is covered by a flap of felted camel hair to block out the cold, and the roof has an opening for the stove pipe. It was really quite cozy, even into the bitterly cold and windy night, and we had a nice fire in our little stove fueled with dried yak poop. The smokey dung fragrance provided some authentic ambience to the experience. It was actually a remarkably good sleep considering there were five of us together on the floor of a yurt not meant to sleep five. I kept singing in my head “5 little Indians sleeping in a bed. One falls out and the little one says, Roll over. Roll over.” Fortunately when you’re already on the ground, there’s no way to fall out of bed.
Some of you have previously noticed my obsession with “the toilet situation”. This is a very common topic of conversation in this part of the world, and any backpacker will ask another when returning from the toilet “How was it?” Chinese toilets are generally ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 based on whether it’s a squatter or Western, whether there are actual stalls or if it’s communal, the amount and type of bodily excretions visible, the smell, the presence of a sink, soap, and a hand drying device. The vast majority of toilets rank below a 5 - smelly squatter coated with nasties and no place to wash you hands. Therefore most foreigners are thankful that a squatter means they don’t have to touch anything and keep a “toilet pocket” well-stocked with tissues and hand sanitizer. The one at our yurt site was about a 1.5 on the Chinese toilet scale. In Amy’s eloquent choice of words, it was literally a “brick shit house” – past the three grazing camels and on the left. This is common for rural toilets – a small brick structure divided into the men’s side, and the women’s side slightly elevated above the pile of waste with two “stalls” each (a 2 1/5 foot wall dividing but no door). You squat over a slit cut in the floor and do your business. Right over everyone else’s business and usually a swarm of flies. So instead we opted for the great out doors. But there are no trees or shrubbery in these mountains, so we stood guard over each other behind the biggest rocks we could find. You lose any sense of shame pretty quickly in this place.
Our hosts were a Kyrgyz family who live in the yurt cluster during the summers and have a winter house over the mountains. They were a warm and welcoming family, and it helped that my fellow travelers speak Chinese so that we could have a real conversation. The family is held together by the matriarch – her husband passed away years ago. She has three sons and two daughters, and the middle son runs the tourism business. He was a cute and smiley young twenty-year old who seemed to love the company of foreigners and was eagerly attentive to our every need. The mother was a very kind and quiet woman, a little plump with a round face and deep-set eyes. She makes camel hair Kyrgyz carpets by hand, and they were the most beautiful rugs of their kind that we’d seen on this trip. The colors were vibrant, and she takes great care in her work. So three of us each bought a small rug. It’ll be a nice keepsake from the experience, and I’m going to pretend that mine was made of the hair of my own personal camel, since it has not been proven otherwise.
Speaking of my own personal camel – we got to ride camels around the lake! Camels are awesome. They’re so expressive and funny. If llamas are sarcastic (as I hear they are), then camels are sly. It’s the eyelashes that give them that coy look that they’re up to something – like eyeboogering your knee when you least expect it. Amy’s camel must have developed an itch that could only be cured by a vigorous rubbing of eye snot and camel hair. Lovely. We didn’t have to drive our own camels – four of the guys went with us, and they took turns leading and tying groups of camels off to each other in a caravan. At one point our friend Jonathan was in the lead of our caravan, and we were joking that he was leading his harem of wives to our new home. There is a remarkable amount of camel innuendo what with the humps and camel toes and all.
The next morning we awoke to join the family for “bagels” (circular nan with a hole in the middle that looks and tastes remarkably bagel-like) and salted yak milk tea. Yaks are such useful animals. The yak milk made the tea nice and creamy, and the salt helped combat the effects of the altitude and dry air. From the lake, we drove further south into the mountains to Tashgarukan. That leg of the trip was only marginally worth it. The famous site is an old stone fortress that supposedly marks the mid point on the old Silk Road between Europe and China. There’s not much more than a pile of rubble left, but it was cool standing at a site that has been around since something something BC. My favorite part was the grasslands to the east of the city. The river coming down from the mountain glaciers opens up into the Tashkarugan Oasis that is a sprawling field of emerald grass at the base of the mountains, dotted with livestock herds and white yurts. Standing on the edge of the grassland, you hear the giggle of children, people shouting at their animals, and the low rhythm of drum beats. The grassland itself is kind of boggy, and we each took turns carefully staggering over carpets of thickly woven patches of grass suspended over water that truly felt like stumbling across a waterbed. Fortunately no one fell through. It was great fun, but I would really hate to know what the water underneath looks and smells like, and I'm not sure how deep it could have been.
While the vast majority of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang are Ughyur, there are pockets of other groups like the Kyrgyz family we stayed with, the Kazakh family across the lake, and the Tajiks in Tashgarukan. On the way back, we stopped at the home of a Tajik family – just for a short visit. We all felt a little weird invading their space until we realized the driver knew them, and they were thrilled to have us there. There was an older woman with her two daughters, a teenage grandson, and a younger granddaughter. They made us take lots and lots of pictures and kept squeezing our hands and touching our elbows. They seemed just as interested in us as we were in them, and it was a nice moment of sharing without the ruining tourist experience of someone demanding money. My travel buddies are going to try to get prints of some of the pictures in Kashgar and send them back with the driver the next time he passes by their house. They had a large collage of various family photos on the wall, so I think they’ll like to have copies of our pictures. I thought they were beautiful people. A lot of the Tajiks have very different features from the other minorities since they're Persian rather than Turkish – very sharp angular noses and jawlines with narrow and long faces. It’s kind of fun trying to figure out what ethnicity different folks are, but there’s a lot of gray where features run together in the middle.
Security in Xinjiang is definitely higher than anywhere else I’ve traveled, and we had to pass through two police checkpoints on the way up and the same two plus two more on the way back to Kashgar. We returned on Saturday, so I guess the heightened security was because of the increased number of people flooding into Kashgar for the Sunday market. The two permanent checkpoints required us to get out of the car and present our passports for inspection, and they recorded our information. No big deal except that the last one on the way up had a machine gun nest perched on the top of a building. Empty, but still not so comforting. Whatever. On the way back, we stopped at the third checkpoint, and four officers surrounded us wanting to inspect our bags. They nosed around inside, and I just didn’t so much like the idea of some strange guy poking around my belongings with all of my valuables. I’d packed a clean change of clothes in my small day bag, but we didn’t get a chance to clean up or change, so they were still in there, and my undies were on top. So when the guy came to me, I politely unzipped my bag and pulled out the undies. The guy just said “Okay, okay” and walked away. No bag search for me ☺
But the absolute best police checkpoint ever in the history of the world was the last one leading into Kashgar. Same story as the one before – the van stopped at the lowered gate, and we were surrounded by police officers wanting passports and wanting to search our bags again. This time we rolled up next to two donkey carts pulling piles of neatly stacked onions. As the officers asked us to get out of the van, the second donkey suddenly mounted the onion cart in front of him. At first we thought he was trying to eat the onions until we realized that he was having a lustful moment with the voluptuous pile of produce. We all started laughing so hard my eyes were tearing. The officers turned around to look at the ruckus behind them, were absolutely mortified, and before we knew it the gate was raised and we were on our way into Kashgar. Thank you, donkey! Now I wonder who actually ended up buying those onions...
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