xinjiang

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."

Janne and I left Kashgar on August 27th, leaving me with about three weeks on my visa. (An aside here: Hong Kong agencies can issue six month visas to just about anyone, but since the beginning of 2007, US passport holders can no longer get six month visas. Again, I carry the cross...) Our plan had been to cycle from Tashkurgan east towards Mazar, but Steve had just been in the area with horses and camels, and had run into major washouts along this road, ending near the settlement of Pilu with an uncrossable river that had eaten the entire road along its bank.

We left for Muztagh Ata in a truck I arranged in a lot with a Uighur driver named Turghan. He was timely - much more so than the four of us who were to be taken the 3 hours to Subashi - and Steffan and Janne crawled sleepily into the cab and fell asleep. We were off on a fresh morning, clear skies lending views towards the Pamir Mountains and the massifs of Kongur and Muztagh Ata, which tower more than 7500m above sea level, and nearly 6000m above the desert oasis of Kashgar.

We left Golmud a day later than we had anticipated: my illness was harder to shake than I had expected. Martin kindly supplied me with antibiotics which eliminated the lung infection in 3 days' time, and made significant inroads against the sinus infection that I had also developed...

The road out of Rouqiang passed through oasis farmland, peopled by a mix of Hui, Han, and Uighurs. Bicycled traffic, heavy at first, decreased, and I was on my own 10km down the road. The pavement ended soon after, and again it was desert. Work had begun on continuing the sealed road towards the east, but hadn't gotten very far at this point. I came across a solitary Uighur worker, shoveling sand into a trailer bed. It seemed ludicrous to shovel sand to take anywhere in a place with nothing but sand, but there he was, standing alone, doing his job 20km from anywhere.