china

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.

I spent considerably more time in Kashgar than I had either anticipated or wanted to spend. A slew of cyclists were in town, many of whom had ridden from Europe to western China via Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. Days went by, with nothing more on the agenda than to wander from food stall to food stall, wander around the old city, and toy with the idea of fixing my bicycle - only to put it off. Martin and I stayed first at the Overseas Chinese Hotel, welcomed back with big smiles by the floor attendant, whom I had grown fond of during our previous stay here, and was now jocular and entitled.

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...

In the interests of saving time, Martin and I took a bus from Xining to Maduo, a Tibetan town on the plateau at 4300m elevation. The day began smoothly: a relatively orderly line in front of the ticket counter and about $10 each later, we were equipped with a printed ticket (the days of a hand-scrawled ticket are gone), paid a bit for the bicycles, and we were off. The bus was the typical work-horse vehicle made for short runs, seating about 40 with a luggage rack on top, with a net cast over the contents to keep them from rolling off.

I woke up early, happy to go to the complimentary breakfast buffet and sample a variety of Chinese food: steamed buns, various hot and cold vegetables, pickles and so on. As a solo traveller, or even two people, you rarely get a run of the cuisine like this, so I took advantage of the opportunity and dug in.

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.