The Return

I got to Dahongliutan in the late afternoon. I figured my best shot was a truck ride back down to the desert, since the bus from Ali would likely be full. I went back into the Uighur restaurant, and asked if I could have laghman.

"Sure..." No one was moving very quickly. It occured to me that perhaps it was Ramadan.

"Has Ramadan started?"

"Yes."

"Ah, well then, hold the laghman - I'll break the fast with you tonight."

This brought smiles all around to the tired faces of the road workers and the various truckers assembled here. They sat having animated discussions in a tongue I couldn't understand at all, sometime rising to a level that it looked like a serious argument, only to break out in smiles again at the tensest moment. "OK, OK, I concede that point" they seemed to say. As the sun set, people were almost pacing. A few went back into the spare room where a couple of prayer rugs were angled to the southwest, pointing to Mecca.

When the fast was broken, it was broken with a communal bowl of water, and broken up pieces of naan that the truckers had brought up from the desert. I waited to be the last one served - although I was hungry from the climbing, I had eaten noodles for breakfast, and a couple of pieces of hard candy. It was hard to say what the fasters craved most, because no more than sixty seconds after the fast was broken, the room was choked with smoke: every person in the room was pulling furiously on a cigarette. I asked around for a ride back down to Kargilik, and a Uighur named Tokhtay said that he would find us something (he wasn't a trucker either, but was hitching down from Ali, where he had moved some months earlier). We talked at length about the situation in Xinjiang.

"The Chinese get the jobs, the money, the influence. There used to just be a few, but in the last twenty years, they have nearly become the majority. Urumqi [the provincial capital] is a Chinese city now. They are sucking all of the oil out of the ground here, and who gets the money? Not us. Who gets the jobs on the rigs? Not us. Who drives the trucks that make the money? Not us. And they wonder why some of the younger generation are drawn to Islam...Look, I'm no believer - this Ramadan thing is just social pressure - but more and more people see it as a mark of resistance. The Han get tax breaks for moving out here, driving up the prices, and we get nothing in return."

He went on like this for more than ten minutes, as we squatted down in the dusty parking lot in front of the restaurant. We went back in and I wrote in my journal while violent crime caper movies from Turkey blasted from the television, relieved by the occasional power cuts as the generator blew out or gave up. I could have eaten a second meal, but noone else did, so I didn't ask. My bike was stored in the prayer room: I oriented it towards Mecca just to be complete. The bedroom filled up with six of us, Tokhtay and I the first in bed, the others trickling in as they grew tired of the movies, and in the end the proprietor said enough, its time to go to bed, you have to wake up early for iftar.

Indeed, we were woken abruptly by the proprietor who threw open the door and turned on the light, commanding people to wash and pray before iftar, which was some 15 minutes away. I took my time and packed, while the others shuffled into the makeshift prayer room. None of these looked very devout - it was probably just the peer pressure and guilt trip from the owner that had done it.

Iftar - breakfast and lunch, essentially - when it came, was a greasy bowl of mutton stock with some bones and pieces of potato and winter sqash cooked nearly to a paste. Bread was passed around, and everyone slurped down large quantities of tea. Tokhtay kept trying to push extra quantities of food at me, and told me I was under no obligation to observe the fast. "I know, " I said, " but its not a big deal." Under normal circumstances this would have been true, but I was hungry from climbing, and wouldn't have minded munching candy all day long.

My driver was Abdul, a handsome guy of 25 with a round face and a thin mustache, wearing an orange cloth jacket that I envied. We loaded up my bike into the back of his truck, and tied it to the scrap that he was hauling from Ali down to the desert and the metals market in Xinjiang. We pulled out under the crescent moon and a canopy of stars that was lightening in the east with the rising sun. Although it was only mid-September, it was cold in the predawn. We exhaled steam into the cab of the truck, negotiating a price - he stopped in the middle of the road to clinch the deal. He asked me how much I was going to pay, and I asked him what he wanted. He wouldn't state a price, so I started at what I thought was a low price: "200 to Kargilik". He agreed, and off we went on the jarring road as the sun lit the tips of the Kunlun. We passed the time teaching each other words in Uighur and English. "Ice", "snow", "rock", "truck", "army", "bridge", "sheep", "camels". I felt like sleeping the whole time, but Abdul wanted to chat, and Tokhtay would become animated from time to time, and launch into a fifteen minute monologue punctuated by the occasion assenting or dissenting grunt from Abdul. I came to understand this as the manner of conversation among Uighurs - less back and forth than a long monologue countered by another long monologue.

We crossed the same passes I had taken in the bus two and a half weeks before in the opposite direction. A flood of foreign cyclists were riding in the opposite direction towards Tibet: I counted 16 in one day. Evidently there was nothing very special about cycling the Tibet Highway - one group numbered eight. Some were case-hardened loners, some were wearing helmets, cycling gloves, and spandex. One guy was wearing a turban and goggles, swaddled in enough goretex and down to be ready for an an Antarctic expedition. From my vantage point, perched in the cab of a truck, we (the foreign cyclists) looked ridiculous, peddling into the wind and dust in a completely desolate place jousting with trucks full of iron ore or scrap or cement headed to and from the Chinese colonization of Tibet.

At the pass before Mazar, we stopped to take a photo in front of a glaciated peak. Some foreigners (Swiss) approached me and asked about how much I was paying and so on, and whether or not it was possible to hitchhike. I said "Obviously" with a smile. My presence seemed to have robbed them in their minds of the uniqueness of their trip, of the rigorous nature of travel in far-blown China. They went on about their 2 year trip, their budget (which was not low, incidentally), and asked about getting farther into Tibet from Ali, which was as far as their Land Cruiser was taking them. Their driver chatted with my drivers for a while, and took a photo of the three of us arms around each other's necks, like the best of friends. When he left, Tokhtay said "Those people are paying him a fortune." I knew that was true, on the order of two thousand dollars. They had gone to great lengths to justify the expense to me: "We can stop where we want to, you know, its convenient, and we have two nights in hotels." I chuckled. They were likely to stay the night in a concrete box in Dahongliutan, paying thirty dollars for a thirty yuan room.

Abdul's drive was over in Mazar: we stopped in the Uighur part of town, which lay to the east of the strip of Han shacks that the bus stopped at. No one was moving much, the lethargy of a Ramadan afternoon having set in, in addition to this being Mazar, and therefore not very lively at any time of the year. I got out and paid him 200, but he wouldn't take it all, on account of not reaching Kargilik, so I took back 50 yuan and a bag of dates, figs, and bread from his stash, which he wouldn't allow me to say no to. I pedalled off, with Tokhtay saying, "If I get another ride and I see you, I will pick you up." I said "khosh" ("Goodbye, go with God") and headed towards the beginning of Xiraksaldi Daban, and, just beyond, the desert.

Xiraksaldi is a fairly substantial pass, rising to nearly 5000m, while Mazar sits in what are relatively the lowlands, the canyon cut out by the Kargilik River which lies at 3300m. I opted to break the fast in a Sichuanese restaurant before climbing. What was to be a quick meal turned into something much longer as a stream of foreign cyclists came down from the pass in the afternoon sun. First a trio from England and Germany, followed by a Swiss, and then three cyclists I knew were coming (although I hadn't expected to see them in Mazar) who were to meet up later with Janne for climbing further into Tibet. I lingered over my bowl of rice for nearly two hours, while cyclists kept coming in. When I got ready to leave, the woman running the place gave me several snacks for no charge - I suppose it was her way of thanking me for bringing quite a substantial business to her restaurant. The styles ran the gamut, from low-budget, essentials only, to massive loads on trailers with every conceivable item, up to and including the kitchen sink in the case of the three who were heading up to meet Janne.

I passed on Janne's whereabouts and schedule to the trio, waved goodbye to the restaurant, and began the climb up the pass, thinking somehow that I would make it to the top with an hour and a half of daylight left. I soon realized there was no hope of this, and I pulled over to camp in the gorge about 10km past Mazar. Just as I had set up my tent, a truck pulled up across the way and honked. Out jumped Tokhtay, who waved me over. I packed everything up, and jumped in the cab after loading my bike on the top of a bed full of iron ore from the mining works near Xaidulla. My new driver was Turghan, a man of 30 with a pair of kids who plied the route between Kargilik and Xaidulla, back and forth, day after day. The sun was setting so Tokhtay broke the fast (I offered him some biscuits, but since they were not explicitly halal, he passed) and we chatted as we wound up the final 500m to the top of the pass.

At the top we were flagged down by a young guy whose truck had broken down, and after some discussion, we got out and hauled up his engine into the truck bed (not an easy task, since it probably weighed about 150kg), and in climbed one of the stranded truckers - the other was to watch the truck overnight, or however long it took for the engine to come back...It was definitely chilly on the pass, but he bore the job stoically, even cracking a smile after the initial shock of meeting a foreigner in the dark when he saw me helping to haul the engine up.

From here it was downhill for 80km to Kudie, which is a truckstop and checkpoint for the police and army. We wound down on a road which was alternately paved, broken apart, washed out, and full of running water. We caught up to a friend of Turghan's who ran the same route, and rode as a pair of trucks down the pass. Both trucks broke down on the way, each of us having to stop and help the other with either a nudge (I had never seen a truck push start another truck) or tools and fuel filters. Our truck was plagued by a dirty fuel filter which caused the engine to choke out if it was brought to a low idle. Each time, we would get out, upend the cab (a clever design for Dong Feng trucks), bang the filter against the truck tires, flush the engine, and I would push a small rubber pump to flood the engine before trying to start up the motor again - all of this by a dim LED flashlight (I had given my headlamp batteries to Janne when we parted) in the cold and under a fabric of stars.

Eventually we managed to make it to Kudie. My expectation was that I would get out a kilometer before the checkpoint and cycle in, since it was illegal to drive a foreigner in a truck. We discussed this on the way down, but before I knew it, the checkpoint appeared and my driver simply said, "Stay back here" and went in with Tokhtay. I stood in the shadows on the opposite side of the truck from the checkpoint, and when they came back I dove under blankets while we pulled under the floodlights and into the town of Kudie.

Kudie is a long stretch of low-slung buildings along the narrow west bank of the Kargilik River, a mixture of Uighur and Han establishments. The two groups rarely have anything to do with each other, with the exception of Han PLA soldiers coming to uighur butchers for cuts of mutton. As I was with Uighurs, I expected to stay at a Uighur guesthouse, but these were all closed, and the only game in town appeared to be a Sichuanese restaurant that had cubicles to sleep in for 10 yuan each. We went in and had some tea before Tokhtay went to bed: I stayed up a bit longer talking with the owners and a pair of Han truckers from Gansu about food safety and recalls of Chinese-made products in the US. Han can be pretty nationalistic, but we all agreed that in the end it was people being greedy on both ends of the process that made it possible.

Tokhtay asked for a wakeup call at 4:30am, so we would be able to eat before the sun came up. The owner's alarm went off, we got up (Tokhtay rather more slowly) and went to check on Turghan, who had spent the night in the truck. He wasn't interested in eating, or moving in any way, so we wandered the street looking for some halal restaurant that would be able to feed us. There was no luck here: apparently Kudie is a rather less religious place than Dahongliutan. We went back to the restaurant and Tokhtay fell immediately back to sleep, while I ate some fried rice in a plastic bag that the woman in Mazar had given me as insurance against not being able to eat all day.

This turned out to be unneccessary: Tokhtay, when we finally got up at 8am, was perfectly happy to eat at the nearest Uighur restaurant, which was perfectly happy to serve us the same greasy mutton soup I had had in Dahongliutan for breakfast, along with a stale ghzdze. When we boarded the truck, Turghan was smoking and singing, and I felt like my exposure to the Uighur Ramadan had ended...

We were flagged down several more times by broken down trucks, and we ourselves broke down twice more, owing to the same problem. Tughan's friend was just ahead of us, and he had stalled out, so we gave him a push with the corner of the cab just in front of the bed (a pretty remarkable feat of driving on Turghan's part). As soon as his friend got going, our truck died, and we were stuck beating the fuel filter again. After nearly burning out the starter, the other trucker was able to produce a dented filter that seemed to work much better and we started up the hill towards Akmeqit Daban, the last pass before the flats of the Taklimakan. While I was waiting for this, a man from a hovel across the road sold the trucker three goats, and slaughtered one right in front of me on the pavement, slicing the goat's neck and bleeding it out in the sun. This sort of thing used to bother me, but I have seen it so much at this point that I hardly bat an eyelash as an animal struggles, a look of fear as it is held down, and then the panic ebbs with its life as blood sprays out of the jugular. It seemed unfair to then tie the two other goats up right next to their dead brother, but there is little to be said or done about it in Xinjiang: concepts like "animal rights" or "animal cruelty" simply don't exist.

The desert opened up out of the gorge we descended, and the wind and the haze cut the visibility substantially as we looked out across a stony plain with nothing in it, save for a pair of oasis settlements along the river which was veering away to our right. At the last town, Turghan pulled over, and flagged a cab for me and Tokhtay to take us to Kargilik, and making sure I was packed away before leaving - he paid for the cab from his own pocket. I raced over to the window and tried to give him money, but all I could do was shake his hand as he pulled out, heading for a smelting facility between the town and Kargilik.

Tokhtay and I rode in the cab (which miraculously acommodated all of my cycling and climbing gear in the hatchback compartment) as the driver went flat out across the desert. He knew where the checkpoints were, and asked Tokhtay to hold his seatbelt over his lap as if he were actually wearing it (perish the thought of actually wearing a seatbelt for safety...). We passed through dingy dreary Abba before alighting at the bus station in Kargilik. No sooner had we arrived there than someone was hustling me into a Volkswagen Jetta, for the same price as a bus to Kashgar. Tokhtay and I went and shopped quickly for some bread, samsas, and grapes before getting in the car. Our companions were all Uighurs: the driver, a quiet man wearing sunglasses in the dark and driving gloves, a beautiful petite red-haired woman in the passenger seat, and a voluble man sharing the back bench with us. We raced out of town, and drove across the desert at a breakneck speed - enough to make me uncomfortable. Every oasis was like a video game, dodging children, donkey carts, bicycles, oncoming trucks, old men on casual evening strolls...We stopped in Yarkant so our driver could go into the mosque there. Tokhtay and I wandered over to a statue of Ammannisahan, a Uighur queen who compiled a list of scales (the "Twelve Muqam") that became the foundation of Uighur music, snapped a photo, and got back in the car. Tokhtay seemed to be alright with eating in the car in front of the others, so I assumed his piety had been for show, or perhaps since the day was done anyway, with our breakfast after sunrise, he figured it wouldn't hurt to eat now. I felt self-conscious, nibbling on a few grapes, while he devoured several samsa, permeating the car with their smell, and making the fast more difficult for the others, who appeared not to be eating.

We pulled over at a roadside restaurant to break the fast (iftar) for the evening, wading through a crowd of people performing ablutions at a tap before entering the restaurant and having plates of laghman and naan bread. The group was talkative, but as I couldn't understand any of it, I zoned out and watched the man fanning the flames on the kebab stand. The woman dutifully filled all of the men's tea cups, although we were all complete strangers. A last stretch of an hour or so and we were pulling into Kashgar, where I paid the taxi for both Tokhtay and I (he had bought the food in Kargilik and paid for iftar before I could even get up), unloaded, shook hands with him after chatting with a couple of Han children who were curious about my bicycle, and more curious to meet a foreigner who spoke any Chinese, and pedalled off for the Seman hotel.

I thought I would shop in Kashgar, buy a few souvenirs, and try to arrange a flight in the next couple of days, but as it turned out, I found a flight the next morning. I asked for my old room on the top floor.

"There are Chinese people in the room...Do you still want to stay there?"

This isn't an unusual question at a place like the Seman: foreigners are probably unaccustomed to the loud discussions and constant chain-smoking of Chinese hotel patrons. "Sure, no problem," I said.

My roommates were three young professionals from Henan touring Xinjiang for a holiday. We chatted in Chinese for a while before I went in to do some clothes washing.

At about 2am, another guy came in, and immediately cursed the fact that there was a foreigner in the room. "Um...He speaks Chinese," the Henan trio said. The new arrival was slightly taken aback, and to make amends offered me a cigarette and whisky, which he began drinking rapidly. For half an hour I watched him down an entire fifth while smoking the better part of a pack of Red Pagoda Hills. He got two phone calls and cried into the phone for fifteen or twenty minutes before hanging up and vomiting into a wastebasket. I wondered at my cavalier attitude towards having roommates...

I was only in Kashgar for a day before getting on a flight to Urumqi and then to Beijing. I needed to change my flight back to the US, which was easily done, after spending the night in the departures area of the international terminal. All told, I waited in the Beijing airport 20 hours before getting on the plane and leaving China. It was jarring to sit in the airport, hearing the disembodied voice call out about the shuttle to Shanghai Airport every 10 minutes, watching people racing from one place to the next, many dressed to the nines (or what passed for the nines in my state), perhaps businessmen and women heading for some meeting about how to extract maximum value from the low costs of production in China. An international airport is an international airport, and if I didn't think about the flight itself, I hardly knew that I had gone from one country to another when I landed in San Francisco.