Submitted by jeff on Sun, 11/14/2004 - 01:00
The village of Qarasay was...disappointing. At first my heart jumped as I saw the poplar trees and mud houses of the settlement. We followed a jeep track down the west side of the village, which petered out almost immediately. "That's it?" I asked, while Martin was even less generous to the place. It looked nearly abandoned. Two donkeys were tied to a post, and there was a gate locked and blocking access to a now fallow wheat field. I walked up a sandy lane past three houses, which appeared to be empty: a cat sauntered out of one, looking up at me and meowing loudly. Across the field there were more buildings, including one with an antenna of some kind hoisted up on a wooden pole.
We made our way back to the top of the village and tried the other direction. We met an older villager, with a furry black sheep's wool hat on, and I asked if there was a shop in town. He equivocated (this was in sign language). Another two shepherds came up, and a discussion of what to do with us ensued. We were kept standing for several minutes as they discussed the finer points of our presence, and kicked our tires, commenting on our mode of transportation. I said we were looking to get to Minfeng, a small city on the Silk road that looked to be about 120km away to the northwest, although our map showed a road heading more or less straight north from Qarasay to the Silk Road, joining at Andi He, the junction for the paved "Oil Highway" across the sand dunes of the central Taklimakan and the Tarim Basin. The discussion ended with a younger man on a donkey guiding us into town to the shop.
The village was aligned along a sandy lane lined with poplars: the trees were leafless, but piles of yellowing leaves in the irrigation ditches told me that it hadn't been long before that the place had been warm (we were now at about 3000m elevation, but it was overcast, cold, and windys). We passed slowly along, looking out of the corner of our eyes into the courtyards of the houses, usually holding piles of firewood and wool. A small group of men were gathered near the store, but the shopkeep was not around. "Wait a few minutes, we'll get him" said a young guy about my age in Chinese. While we waited, one of the men from our first foray into the village came out with a few papers folded and clipped together. He pulled out one, which I gathered was the document naming him the local deputy. He asked to see our passports, and tried to write down our names in a tiny book usually reserved for phone numbers. The pen barely functioned, and eventually I was asked to fill in my own name. This sort of officialdom put a smile on my face: I could have written anything I liked, and noone would be the wiser. A toothless grandmother hunched down next to me and returned a gummy smile when I "salaam aliekum"'ed her.
The shopkeep showed up and unlocked the store. It was a dusty room with no window that we couldn't see in for all the people crowding the threshold to see what we would buy. There were four items for sale: honey, candy, walnuts, and batteries. We bought some of the first three for the equivalent of about two dollars. We shoved this stuff into our bags, and another old man produced naan for the journey to the next village. The young guy who spoke Chinese offered to show us the way to the next town, named Qandaghay, since he was going there today. He jumped on a donkey, grabbed a friend on another donkey, and said "let's go".
The ride to Qandaghay was anything but easy: the way was very sandy, and there were tracks heading out in all directions. The men, Ghassem and Juman, told me it was 23km - not a long way, but it took us three hours to cross the desert. Without the guides, we might have gotten hopelessly lost in the sand dunes, although we eventually found a river canyon and followed it along the western rim much of the way. We stopped twice, the two of them singing and talking playfully, while Martin and I panted, exhausted from pushing our bikes over sand dunes. The scenery was spectacular, as was the moment, but I had no time to take any pictures: Ghassem and Juman were in a hurry to get there, and as it turned out, we didn't arrive much before dark anyway.
Ghassem asked if he could wear my winter army coat from Ali: I said sure. As we approached Qandaghay, he took it off and brought it to me, beginning "The weather here is nice, right?" I could see he was angling, in a friendly way, for my coat. I cut him off at the pass: "Truly, but I'm only here for two weeks before I head back up into Tibet." (This is my plan; I wasn't having him on.) He smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and strapped the coat to the back of my bike. He pointed into the town: "Follow that road into town. You'll find a shop. I've got business on the other side of town." I thanked him with a "rahmat", we shook hands, and he was gone.
Martin and I crossed the irrigation ditch and walked down the treelined lane, leaves still clinging to the branches at 2500m, and watched an old shepherd threaten sheep with a shovel to drive them into their pen for the night. The light was a warm orange, the water babbled in the irrigation channel, and when we approached a tin shack, the stunned looks from the local men and women quickly melted into smiles. The shop was a room with a diesel grain mill and a guy selling grapes, raisins, walnuts, and dates out of big sacks in the dirt. I bought some raisins for a ridiculously low price and asked if there was any food to eat in town. There was a short discussion among a few men, and we were referred down the road to another shop where we would be able to get dinner.
The villagers laughed and followed us along, children staring and women looking out from underneath their red headscarves as they did washing or collected water. A building with three doors was where we stopped, and soon the owner, Osman, was called out. Osman showed us a room with beds, which wasn't exactly what we were looking for, so I asked about food. "Sure, sure, you can eat with my family" he signalled. I asked the price for the beds. "On guai". 10Y, or about a dollar. "OK, yakshi". He set up a candle and hung a drape from the door, shooing away the kids who had come to see what these two foreigners were about. He gave us a couple of apples and some dates, and said we should wait a bit. We reclined on the wooden boards and talked into the darkness.
About half an hour later we were led to his house, around the corner, and shown into a very warm room with the smell of cooking. Three women squatted in their skirts next to the stove, chopping vegetables, and preparing laghman, the noodles that form a large part of the central asian diet. The broth was cooked in a heavy iron wok, vegetables were added, and the noodles were stretched and slapped. The process was mesmerizing to watch: the women giggled when I showed an interest, probably because it was so mundane to them, or perhaps because the men in town took the whole thing for granted. In any case, sometime an hour or so after dark, we were served, and then several more men from the village appeared, ready with their appetites. The whole thing was eaten by candlelight, since the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling didn't want to work, much to Osman's consternation. Two men came in, one of whom spoke Chinese, and identified themselves as deputies for this village. Again the process of writing our names on a scrap of paper, again the request for me to write my own name. They asked how we had come to Qandaghay, and when I told them we had come over the Kunlun from Tibet, they were quite surprised. I honestly couldn't really see any other way someone would go to the town: no other tourist would make the there-and-back trek from the Silk Road to this incredibly out of the way place. We filled up on our first real meal in weeks, and were then escorted back off to bed by Osman. I slept splendidly on the wooden boards under a real blanket, not my tired sleeping bag.
Osman came to wake us up shortly after sunrise, offering us chay (tea) and naan (flatbread) at his place. We warmed ourselves by the stove and sipped tea, looking around the place in the morning light. The walls were slanted away from floor to ceiling, and were made of mud. A broken cabinet rested at an angle along one wall, and the whole place was draped with tapestries. The place we were seated at was the raised platform the family used for sleeping, and was covered by a large rug. Osman's wife, Amina, told me the names of all the different carpets and rugs, but I could only remember the top one, called a ghillem, which she herself had woven on a loom sometime long ago. It was deep red, with geometric patterns in strips colored green, yellow, blue, and purple. I was impressed by its size, and it seemed to be well-made. She smiled when I complimented her handiwork. More names were passed around, with Osman's father and both of Amina's parents in attendence. We were told to stay for lunch, which I was not at all opposed to, still savoring the taste of anything other than instant noodles, so I proposed to Martin that we clear out and give them some space, taking a stroll around the village.
The place was smaller than I had thought, perhaps 25 families in total, each with its own compound. There were squares of irrigated land, divided by poplar shelterbelts: beyond the village, the desert began again abruptly. It is a lot of work to grow anything in the desert: an irrigation channel must be built, carrying water from a perennial stream, trees needed to be planted, and the soil has to be somehow converted from lifeless sand to decent ground that can sustain crops. The process is long and slow, I imagine, especially without modern trucks and heavy equipment to irrigate and bring in topsoil. We watched an old couple herd sheep out to some pasture out of town, and wandered past the local school, where children played in the sandy school lot. After an hour we had thoroughly taken in the village, and returned to Osman's household to watch the final preparation. Lunch was somian, a soupish broth of flat pieces of noodle, with mutton and potato in this case. Again, several men appeared magically, ready to eat, although Osman was not among them. Afterwards, a price was quickly determined, which ended up being about five dollars for the two of us to eat three meals and spend the nighgt. Not bad, said I, and Martin responded, That's ridiculously cheap. We collected our bikes, and were seen off by a large part of the village, directed to follow the river to the north where we were told there was a "good road".
The road was indeed quite good for much of the day, and we passed a couple of groupings of wild camels in the stony landscape. We sat out a sandstorm in a ditch created by the now dry river, munching on candy and raisins, and then carried on, camping in a sandy terrain about 50km from Qandaghay and (we guessed) 30km from the Silk Road. I gathered driftwood from the riverbed near sunset, and we sat around a fire for a couple of hours, thinking about our trip, which for Martin was about to end.
I slept well on the sand, in a tent which didn't even get below freezing for the night: Martin woke feeling like hell. He suspected food poisoning, but I had eaten the same food and felt fine. Whatever it was, he was vomiting and had a fever. We waited for a couple of hours, but without more water we couldn't wait out the day, so we moved on, finding the road very sandy and difficult to follow. Martin's pace was very slow, and I just hoped we could make the Silk Road before nightfall. After more than 10km of pushing our bikes through saharan sand, we found an improved road, with a bed built up over the sand, and an area with trucks going up and down the canyon walls a few hundred meters away. A Uighur driving a tractor came bouncing down the road, and he went slackjawed when he saw us. I hailed him and asked how far it was to the road, and he signed 15km. I told Martin this, and he just sighed and moved on.
Five kilometers down the road, a truck came the opposite direction, with a 4WD behind it. Martin was collapsed on the ground, not looking good. The men, all Han Chinese, jumped out and asked if he was OK. I said he was sick, but not dying. They said we could get food in 10km, and that if we waited a bit, the jeep would be returning and could give him a ride. I told Martin this, but he wanted to cycle the last bit, saying "I'll hate myself if I have to take a ride the last 10km..." We cycled slowly down the road past a grove of dessicated Dr. Seuss-type trees, and an hour before sunset, found ourselves at the junction with the Silk Road.