Monday 15 May-Friday 19 May 2006
Long, long drive across the northern part of the Taklamakan desert, which is yellowy-brown and featureless.
So instead of a travelogue, three features. First, a description of our guide, called Jimmy. He is about 5.10, skinny, 30 years old and wears thick-lensed glasses, and has short wiry black hair that stands up in a brush. He is very anxious to please and just generally very, very anxious. He jumps up from table at least 10 times every meal, does everything at the run and frets madly. In fact he is the original blue-arsed fly, which is why we have nicknamed him “Bluebottle”. We make buzzing noises when he is particularly manic and do rather pathetic Goon Show imitations which I suspect he does not understand. However he is very keen to please and I just hope that he makes it to Shanghai without a nervous breakdown.
The next item follows a request from a Mrs H. of Pewsey .She writes…”please can you tell us more about what things smell like ? “Well Georgie, until we got to China things smelt pretty good. Walking down the street in Syria or Turkey, say, there would be odours of grilling meat, mixed with herbs and spices, with occasional wafts of newly baked bread, patchouli oil, frangipani etc. China on the other hand just plain stinks, mainly of poo, which comes in waves, sometimes in the most unexpected places, like in a restaurant or a department store. The loos are REVOLTING…all squatters, often in an outhouse raised on concrete blocks, with just a drop. This means that there is a pile of poo, up to 2 feet high just below you, never mind the people who have missed the hole altogether. We have a scale, called the CBS….Chinese Bog Scale, which goes from 1-10, where 5-10 are unusable. The worst we have seen so far is an 8…which is “run out retching”. Does this answer your question?
Food. Very good and very cheap. Lunch for 4, pork, 2 veg dishes, rice, 2 large beers, £3. Its very spicy over in West China, full of little red devils. Alex resembles a sweating Sioux after a meal. One good story. In a resto in Kuqa, the menu was a row of dishes in a cooler, covered in food and you pointed to the ones you wanted, that looked good. There was a small wok, with lots of veg in it and some thin strips of meat.” Lets have that “I said .Furious exchange between Bluebottle and the waitress and then he said “she doesn’t think you’ll like it….its donkey stomach”. Nice.
Enough of this. Tuesday we go out of Kuqa into planet Mars scenery, weirdly contorted, eroded rock mounds, and red sandstone hills with vertical strata. We go for a walk through “mystery canyon”, which is pretty amazing, being around 1 mtr wide at the narrowest and 200 mtrs high at the tallest, with blue, blue sky high above.
Conversation of the day…
Greg :”What are all those white birds over there on the hill side “
Alex:” Those are sheep”
Oh yes, it should also be mentioned that after a large Chinese lunch, Greg sat in the back of the car and ate an entire packet of Cream Crackers, saying” its good for my stomach”. Yes, Greg, but only if you’re a Sumo wrestler.
Wednesday, and another very long drive through desert. Boring, except that Alex got stopped for speeding and fined Y200. Yes, that’s right, ALEX GOT STOPPED FOR SPEEDING. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Came down into the Turpan depression, which is in the Gobi Desert and the temp went up to 41. Phew what a scorcher. Its 60 mtrs below sea level and that beats our previous record of 17 mtrs below on the Caspian.
Thursday, sightseeing. We went underground to see man-made water courses called Karez, up to 10 km long and 75 mtrs deep. There are still 1600 in operation taking water from the Tien Shan down to irrigate Turpan and its many vineyards. On this subject, I drank a bottle of Turpan white the night before, which the others refused…wimps. A bit like Uzbeki white, but not too bad. We also tasted some red called “Scent of a woman”. Probably best not to pursue this one.
On the subject of Chinese red wine, we found a wine list in Kashgar advertising a wine called “ Great Wall Fucks Red”. After the giggling stopped the wine list was taken to the business centre and photocopied by an unsmiling young lady in a dark blue uniform. Copies are available at £2.50 each+P&P.
Anyway, then on to look at some mummies in tombs which were amazingly preserved in the hot dry climate, with better teeth than most English of my generation. Next were 2 ruined cities called Gaochang and Jiaohe. These are both made of adobe and while huge, are in poor repair and the mud brick blends into the surrounding country, so not really very striking or picturesque. At the former we were driven around in a donkey cart, although we couldn’t work out whether the smell came from the stallion donkey or the driver.
Another boring drive across the desert, but with a phenomenal side wind to keep one alert. We stopped for a very good lunch in a truckers eatery. When we asked for the loo we were to told to go out back and er, go anywhere…as so many had before us. Nice. On the way to Hami, we found out that the milestones with numbers on the roadside are actually counting us down to Shanghai, as we are on the main E-W highway. Its 3,600 km to Shanghai from here. All of a sudden the “we’re almost there feeling” disappeared. We have done 1200 miles in China so far , with 2250 to go….and in total we’ve done 13, 000 miles to date. Way more than we thought originally.
Also of a humbling nature, we met a French Landcruiser on the roadside that was the support vehicle for someone running from Paris to Tokyo, with no days off. My God, it’s hard enough to drive that distance with days off!
Saturday, for a change, we drive a long way across a featureless desert. We arrive in Dunhuang, a very significant trading oasis on the Silk Road. We go to our hotel, which is a monstrosity of bad taste. It’s like an enormous pebble-dashed prison, designed by Disney, in a Magic Kingdom style version of what a Chinese palace doesn’t look like. We make our excuses and left, to find a much better hotel in town, with the only drawback that in the process of road building outside the hotel, the sewerage pipes must have been ruptured. The smell walking down the street is bad enough for even a few Chinese to notice.
Sunday and amazingly we have only two weeks to go. I almost can’t believe it. That’s a regular summer holiday, except that we’ve been on the road for over ten weeks, which does now seem a very long time. We start our sightseeing at the famous Mogao Caves. These are also called Thousand Buddha Caves, but as we discover (thankfully) thousand in Chinese just means “a lot”. These caves, from the outside are just modern, metal doors in a cliff face, that was pebble dashed in the early 60’s, in much the same style as the hotel we did a runner from yesterday. Inside, happily, the caves we visited (about ten) were much better than their outside. The murals, typically busy Buddhist scenes of mind numbing incomprehensibility, were on the whole in very good order with bright colours. This is in spite of a little light looting in the name of archaeology by (in this order) the Brits, French, Japanese, Russians and Americans. There are many statues in the caves of Buddha in teaching mode, the early ones, some 6th and 7th century, are dignified and expressive, while the Qing Dynasty replacements from the 18th and 19th century are in Magic Kingdom style again. Most impressive is a 35 mtr high Buddha, also 7th century, which is supposed to represent the Empress Wu. Greg finds a vibrator motif in the pattern of her robe. What can this mean we ask ourselves? An early feminist exhortation-Empresses do it for themselves? Undignified giggling as we are ushered out by our prim lady guide.
In the PM we go to the famous Dunhuang sand dunes, the tallest of which are 250 mtrs high. The place has been fenced off from the town so that a vast entrance fee can be extracted. Inside camel rides, quad bike or dune buggy treks and dune tobogganing are all available at a price…in carefully cordoned and segregated areas, between the red flags only, please. That is when I realised that the PRC is about one thing and one thing only and that is control. Anyway we plumped for a camel ride and went off, tied together and led by a lady with knitting in her bag. Close to the top we dismounted to climb to the summit for the view on foot. That was another 10 Yuan, go through the gate, pick up your ticket, hand it to another loafer for tearing and climb up the dune using the steps only, please. At this stage I got pissed off and went dune walking by myself. I was able to run down the side of a huge steep dune at high speed though, which made the whole experience worthwhile.
Later that night, we went out to dinner and ate camel with mushrooms and garlic.Tough, but tasty. Now how weird is that ? We have nothing to do with camels for the whole trip and then in one day we have two quite intimate encounters