Riding the Silk Road

I was delayed in leaving Hotan for two days, one because I was treated to an enormous dinner which laid me out flat with diarrhea the following day, and then another day because I missed the bus to Qiemo by 5 minutes. So I wandered Hotan the last day, eating little, and enjoying the sights and sounds of a large Silk Road city, not expecting to see another on this trip.

The bus to Qiemo, about 600km east, and 175km east of my initial contact with the Silk Road at Andi He, left at 11am. "Left" means the engine was started and the passengers were on board, but the two-man driver team tinkered with the engine before we had even left the lot, foreshadowing something ahead. And there was the predictable circling around the city calling out "Qiemo! Qiemo!" for another 30 minutes, picking up the odd passenger or two that way. At last we got underway, myself, two Han Chinese, and a bus full of Uighurs.

The bus was an older model, a cramped sleeper which shoved your feet underneat the head of the person in front of you. Heat was provided by a shaft coming from the engine running back through the middle of the bus - perhaps the exhaust, though I hoped not. The sheets on the sleeping berths were US Confederate Stars and Bars, which brought a small smile to my lips, being from the South myself. We picked up passengers in the small outlying towns between Hotan and Minfeng, stopping at Yutian for a meal at 5pm, having covered no more than a quarter of the trip.

The Uighurs were boisterous and jovial, while the Han, completely outnumbered, were quiet and reserved, unusual behavior for most Han on bus trips. We travelled on a paved road into the night, and I drifted off to sleep cooking on one side and freezing on the side shoved up into the window. At various wakeful stages I was able to look out and see that we were travelling the oil highway north from Minfeng - the worlds first road crossing a drifting sand desert, for an impressive 600km - and then turned right at some point, on another paved road, towards Qiemo. The dunes were stabilized by squares of straw tacked down by road workers, and apparently they did a good job, since the whole thing was free of sand.

I woke up with the bus stopped, the drivers poking their heads down into the transmission, which was gotten to by lifting up a cover next to the driver's seat, banging away with hammers, wrenches, and screwdrivers. The bus laughed about this good-naturedly: everyone expects this on a long distance bus trip in China. We sat stalled out in the desert for about an hour and a half, but the drivers were able to resucitate the bus - also not surprising - and carry on to Qiemo.

We arrived at five in the morning. It was cold, well below freezing, and pitch black. I figured I would be walking some distance to a field and pitching my tent, until someone pointed out a hotel 100m away. I went in, and woke up the front desk attendant from her sleep to ask the price of a room. She was very good-looking, with the sleep-pinched face, and long loosely curled dark hair falling down around her shoulders, something I hadn't been able to see on a Uighur woman since their heads were always covered. The room went for about $6, and I took it, not expecting much, but actually finding a room with an attached shower, running hot water, and clean sheets. The toilet was a sit-toilet, the first such I had seen since Nagqu, some two months before. I got into bed and fell asleep quickly under warm sheets.

The following day I wanted to get a decent start on the road, so I left in a hurry, rushing around town and only buying a few things, since my map indicated that there was a village about 30km away. The road was paved out of town, passing through the typical oasis poplar-lined lanes, donkey carts, and people working the end of the harvest: in this area, this was mostly cotton, with a few bolls still clinging to the woody shrubs being packed up by crews of Uighurs.

About 15km out of Qiemo, the oasis ended and gave out onto desert, stony and sandy. I pedalled on, expecting to make it to whatever was on my map at a bend in the road, where it turned northeast from its present southeastward course. I reached the mark, but this turned out to be a turnoff for a road to Tula, well into the Kunlun mountains, and not somewhere I was eager to go to given that I had just come out of those exact mountains a week before and was looking forward to a leisurely ride along the Silk Road towns and villages of eastern Xinjiang province.

The road crossed a river, and the pavement ended. I was somewhat disappointed with this, having hoped for more good road. I went down to the river and filled my water bottles, as a precaution, although I was sure I would reach something before long.

The road was corrugated and miserably sandy, and my pace was maddeningly slow. I camped, having covered only 50km from Qiemo in the afternoon, and went to sleep. A wind flapped at the tent all night, and the temperature dropped to somewhere around -8C (about 18F). I heard something brushing against the tent, and figured it was sand. I woke to a light dusting of snow in the desert. I packed up in the cold and carried on. There was no traffic, no telephone poles - nothing. The clouds blew in from the southest, a headwind in my face, and a snow began to fall, accumulating on the road and the waves on the low dunes. There wasn't much in the way of foliage, just sand and stones. A group of camels clustered along a low rise, though I couldn't figure out what they ate, and my best guess was that they were 30km from water. I was cycling at only 8km per hour, on account of the wind, the sand, the corrugations, and what I discovered, when checking my altimiter, was a steady climb, imperceptible in this landscape. Finally I approached some hills and the mountains came into view, pulling in quite close and turning white in the snow. I decided to make it over one last hill and then stop for something meager to eat, and as I did so, I found a compound laying across a stony riverbed.

Two men stood outside in the snow looking at me and wondering what I might be doing there in this weather. I stopped, smiled, and asked whether there was a shop or restaurant in the compound. An older man, wearing the typical worker's cap, said there was a restaurant, and that I should come in to eat. I was shown to a room along a row, and the door was pushed open to reveal several Uighur men sitting around talking and sipping tea, having just finished lunch. Room was made for me, and I sat, munching on naan, while an order of laghman (noodles) was served for me. The men were quite interested in me, what I was doing, and what I thought about the war in Iraq. More or less the normal routine: I gave them my route, my age, and told them I thought the war was "bad". Everyone laughed and I ate ample food, although there was nothing to take away with me. I asked if there might be some naan I could buy: the women had none, but a worker went and got some out of a jeep and gave it to me, refusing money and saying, "This is what friends do for each other". The whole bunch suggested that I stay the night there at the settlement (Munabulak) and wait out the inclement weather, but I said I had to keep going. The good news, they told me, was that from here it was downhill to the next place, Janggasay, 80km east. I looked at my altimeter, and found that Munabulak sat at the foothills of the Kunlun at an elevation of 2160m, nearly 1000m above Qiemo.

The ride after lunch was easy: the road was downhill, the corrugations and sand seemed to ease, and the weather cleared, so I was able to cover about 45km in the afternoon. I camped in the dunes, and had another cold night, down to -12C, which made me wonder what lie ahead when I gained the Tibetan plateau again...

The next day there was almost no traffic, just a couple of Land Cruisers speeding past kicking up dust and stones. The wind and sand returned, and it took me over 3 hours to cover the remaining 30km to Janggasay. Janggasay, as it turned out, was a walled compound with a restaurant attached to the outside of the wall, run by three women who urged me in to the heated room.

Lunch was laghman, which I watched them make with interest, hoping to learn the secret to the pulling, stretching, and slapping of dough into noodles. It is a mesmerizing process, the quick, sure movements, the twirling of the strands around the fingers and the wrists, and then the pounding of the noodles on a flat surface before tossing them into boiling water to be cooked. The food was good, and since there was no store in the settlement, and I had far from enough food to make it comfortably for another day, I asked to have a second serving in a takeaway bag - a strange request, but they delivered. A bus, heading from Qiemo to Rouqiang - the next large town on the Silk Road - pulled up, and perhaps 20 passengers filed in to eat, with three Han staying outside and kicking at the dust, one of them a woman wearing a skin-tight white outfit with knee-high go-go boots, looking very odd and out of place here.

I filled up with water, got charged too much (right in front of my eyes I watched everyone else pay the going price and then have a 30 percent tax applied to myself. I raised this quietly with her, asking repeatedly the price - giving her a way out that saved face - but she wouldn't relent. In the end, I just paid the extra money, and figured karma would set things right), and set off. The rest of the day was monotonous desert, just stones and sand, a few dry watercourses, and no plant life.

The next morning, in the cold of my tent, I warmed up my semi-frozen block of noodles with the last of my fuel, which didn't even last to heat the noodles up beyond cold. I thought to myself that I had left Qiemo seriously underprepared, with not enough food, and less money than I had wanted to leave with (the ATM in Hotan broke the day I went to use it, and the bank wouldn't give me an advance on the card I had just successfully used 3 days before, in a frustratingly arbitrary ruling by the bank official I couldn't reverse). I chewed on the greasy cold noodles, glad to have something, and headed off, unsure of what was to come, since according to the map I had bought in Hotan, I had about 100km to go to a settlement, and on this road I was unlikely to cover more than 75km in a day. In the distance, a cluster of trees appeared, meaning a waterway, and perhaps a house. When I got there, I found an abandoned restaurant, with battered couches and car seats outside, and piles of trash but no people. Across the street, however, was a road workers' compound, and I went in to see if I might find water and maybe a bit of bread.

A dog barked loudly, and a man was working on a truck, but the place was mostly deserted. I poked around, and found 3 men preparing lunch. I smiled and said hi, and (I was counting on this, I'll admit) I was invited to have lunch with them. We sat in the room, mostly silent, as the men washed rice, chopped mutton and squash, and cooked a large pot of polo (usually known as pilaf in the west). When it was done, it was tasty: fatty and sweet. I asked if I could buy a couple of pieces of bread for the haul to the village, which, I had been assured, had stores and restaurants - the whole works - and was given almost more than I could carry, with any attempt at money refused. Again, they said, "this is what friends do for each other". They also said that in 20km, the road became paved, which surprised me greatly. I left, smiling, full, and feeling good about people: with all the positive experiences I had had travelling among the Chinese people, it was easy to forget the incidents like the previous day's overcharging - I was still well ahead on the balance.

The road crossed an area with 50m high sand dunes in ripples running along ridges to both sides, and then entered a dry dusty forest, the kind that seems so out of place in the middle of the desert. There was no running water, nor any pooled, just sand and trees. After a low rise, I saw, just past a tin shack with smoke coming from a chimney, blacktop. My spirits rose as I rode up onto the smooth road, one of the best I had encountered in China. A few hundred meters down the road was a road workers' camp and an asphalt mixing tower. Two workers in orange jumpsuits said that the road was brand new, and, with the exception of a 20km stretch, ran the rest of the 110km to Rouqiang. I sped off past dunes stabilized by straw, racing past a settlement loading the last of the year's melons onto trucks in cardboard boxes, and covered 20km in no time. I couldn't make the village that night, since the last 15km I did was a construction zone, with a constant stream of trucks carting sand and gravel from pits to the new road bed being built up out of the desert. I camped at sunset, able to see lights in the distance: a town, and food, and water, and a good road.

I woke and rode into the village, past a host of cyclists heading out to fiels, past shepherds driving sheep into the dry stalks of the wheat harvest. The village, Waxixar, was nearly a town, with a market at the central junction with a dirt road, and the village mosque at the corner. I stopped in for samsa (tandoori-baked dumplings: the word comes from the same root as the Indian "samosa" and the east African "sambussa") at a small cafe, and then went to look for something a bit more substantial when the town had begun to open for business. I ended up in a small restaurant, being served mutton and squash soup - again greasy and sweet - and boiled dumplings. I was informed that the road to Rouqiang was new this year, and smooth sailing all the way.

I pedalled east, and the desert quickly closed back in on the road. A dune-filled landscape was broken up by a hardscrabble settlement of a few homes off the road to the north, where dry fields were able to sustain a few crops, and then absolutely nothing for 60km. The terrain was completely flat, and except for signs of road construction, such as tractor tread marks or scooped out areas of sand, it was the most featureless place I had ever seen. Literally nothing: no plant life, no dunes, no stones, nothing on the horizon. a completely flat calm ocean of sand stretching in a 360 degree panorama around me, with the occasional minivan running passengers from Waxixar to Rouqiang and back. At sunset, after riding 90km, the outskirts of Rouqiang rose up out of the sand, and as the light faded, I was on a road through the trees to Rouqiang, the last town on the Silk Road in Xinjiang before I rose up into Qinghai.