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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…
Fast Internet
I go to the Internet service across the road (a few houses from John’s) to catch up with my site. I’d asked the lady about the price yesterday: only 5 Yuan per hour (it’s 10 per hour in the hotel). In fact, the shop is a small business center, offering photocopies, fax, phone, and Internet access (from a single machine), apparently competing successfully with the business center in the hotel.
When I arrive this morning, there’s only a young boy in sight, 10 years at most. “Internet?” I ask him. No problem, he turns on the modem, the monitor and the machine and waits until the connection is live: I can now work with Windows XP on a modern machine with a 100Mb ADSL connection. Half an hour later mum returns, switches on the airco for me, and asks if I want to drink something. I end up typing for more than three hours in a nice, cool room, with a large glass of hot green tea beside me — and paying only 19 Yuan (less than 2 EUR) for the privilege. “Tired?” she asks, when I get up to leave. Yes, but I’m not finished yet, I merely need a break; I’ll probably be back in the afternoon, I promise her. I still have a lot of catching up to do!
First a little walk to check out the grand “Tour and Culture Square”: I see not much changed here in Turpan since my last visit: I can find back all the shops I remember and buy some snacks for tomorrow on the train. Then after a short siesta in the hotel, I go back to the Internet service for another batch of items in my travel blog. Three more hours of typing takes care of all of Kyrgyzstan. Then back to John’s cafe for a cool beer. I feel I’ve earned it.
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…
