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Friday 2004-07-02 - Turpan, Xinjiang (China)
Too hot!
Most of the group has hired bikes for today to see some of the sites around Turpan, planning to leave early. I hate biking — I live in Amsterdam and don’t even have a bike! — and I’ve seen all those sites anyway, so I decline and when Carla leaves at 7:00 I just turn around to get some more sleep. At 10:00 I’m woken up again by Carla returning: they’d seen the Imin minaret and adjoining mosque but then Carla decided it was actually too hot to ride a bike and returned, immediately followed by the others. They’ll get a taxi later in the day to see a few other sites…
Desert storm
Yesterday at the end of the afternoon, a wind started blowing, people at John’s cafe hurried to lay down all the flower vases standing on the tables, so they won’t blow off. Today, the pattern repeats itself, only more so. With Turpan lying in a deep depression in the desert, dust storms are to be expected, but I never experienced one.
After drinks at John’s, some of us have moved to the Uyghur restaurant next door for dinner (very nice, and the friendly girl serving us is soon absorbed in an English-Uyghur phrase book); suddenly, the wind gets a lot fiercer, and it starts to get dark; when we look outside, the air is suddenly full of dust and it’s hard to see any distance. Curiously, through the dust, a few very thick drops of rain are falling as well. Poplar trees are bending over in the strong wind, their crowns almost perpendicular with the trunks. We’re sitting safe here, but looking outside it’s a bit scary.
Power fails a couple of times; a guy from the restaurant sits in the corner, constantly fidgeting to switch between normal and emergency power so we have light to eat by. Thom, sitting at the Internet service next door, is not so lucky: when the power fails, the computer just switches off, and he loses all he’d typed…
Wednesday 2009-05-20 - Esfahān, Iran
Where is the river?
In spite of the long trip yesterday, it was quite beautiful, and I´m glad we saw the petroglyphs hardly any traveler gets to see, so I don´t regret we gave up one day of Esfahān for that. But what´s left turns out to be much less than a day: instead of having a flight to Mashhad at 20:00 from here, we actually have a flight at 16:00 to Tehrān and fly from there to Mashhad, which means we have to leave the hotel already at 13:00. And with the very late night we had, we´re not getting up very early either. I totally give up my plan of walking along the Zāyande to the farthest bridge (a walk of at least two hours to get there): I’ll have to do that whenever I get back to Esfahān.
Before breakfast, I ask at the hotel reception desk about an Internet cafe. To my surprise, they tell me they have Wifi in the hotel lobby. I quickly get my netbook, and try. Sure enough there´s a signal: I just have to ask the receptionist for a WEP key (a password for the connection), and I´m in. I immediately log off again: I´ll check my email for any news from Mashhad when we get back. We quickly have breakfast, and head out for a walk: Carla, Uke, Ank and I.
Our first goal is the beautiful Si-o-se bridge (named after its 33 arches): beautiful as ever — but the river is not: it´s just not there any more! There is nothing more but a few small ponds of water, the swan-shaped water bikes resting sadly and uselessly on the mud. People are actually crossing the river across the bedding: it´s quite dry enough to walk on easily. What a strange sight! Since we have just a little time, we walk across the bridge, have a closer look at the river bed and the swan boats, and then walk back leisurely, taking quite a few pictures (at least I do, trying to catch the strange sight of the bridge crossing a disappeared river). We find out there hasn´t been this little water in 7 years: they closed the locks farther upriver so there would at least be water for agriculture, where it´s needed most.
From the waterless Zāyande we walk to the big Emām Khomeini square — one of the largest in the world an the most beautiful one I know. There’s no time to walk around (though I´d love to do that again): we have to pick and choose, so we go the big Emām Mosque. We walk around there, enjoying the spaces and unique tile mosaics here (with a bright yellow that really stands out and I don´t remember from anywhere else) — and then suddenly it´s 12:10 already and I have to rush off to the hotel to check my email before we leave. The good news is there is no mail from Mashhad, so our meet-up is supposed to go as planned (more about that tomorrow). The bad news is there is an email from SmugMug that my account there needs to be renewed by June 4th, and my credit card data is no longer valid so I need to update my account data: no problem — if only I had thought to bring my SmugMug password… that turns out to be the beginning of a long story that will be told in its entirety later.
