navigate:
Monday 2004-06-28 - Kuqa, Xinjiang (China)
On the train
At 6:10 am the bus is already waiting to take us to the train station which is way outside the city. The train will take us from Kashgar to Kuqa, a town which is new to me. The station is modern: luggage goes through an x-ray scanner before we’re let in to the waiting room and here, at least, there are no stairs to climb to get to the platform (I have bad memories of Ürümqi in that respect). We have reserved places on the train in a hard-sleeper carriage; there are open compartments with six beds each (on three levels) and two little folding chairs in the corridor alongside the compartments. Custom dictates that as long as people are not sleeping — and this is not a night train — the people who have the upper beds can sit om the lower bed since the two folding chairs are not enough. Alas, in our compartment, a very uncouth Uyghur claims his bed and Carla is banned to the folding chair. Meanwhile I sit on the corner of the other bed, which belongs to a mother with a young boy: for them it’s no problem, even when they stretch out for a nap. Big thermos flasks with hot water are provided so we can make a cup of tea or prepare a bowl of instant noodles; every now and then an attendant comes past with a little cart with fresh hot water but on this train no food is sold and there’s no hot water tank at the end of the carriage as is normal in Chinese trains.
We ride along the edge of the Taklamakan desert, with the Tien Shan mountains in the North, here mainly consisting of bare sandstone in various colors. Near the rails, grass has been planted in a square grid pattern to prevent the sand from blowing away or blowing onto the tracks; at some stretches I even notice the tubes of a drip irrigation system: not for agriculture but merely to promote a little vegetation and stop the sand…
Apart from the unfriendly Uyghur (an exception), the atmosphere on the train is nice; people sit around quietly to chat or eat a snack; no one is loud, not even the children. On arrival in Kuqa, one man even helps us to get the luggage off the train, handing us our bags through the window. Then he waves goodbye to us.
We arrive a little late, but a bus is waiting to take us to the Min Mao hotel which has a curious “old-soviet” style with a key lady to open the room for you — who usually has to be found on another floor first. Otherwise, no complaints.
Tuesday 2004-06-29 - Kuqa, Xinjiang (China)
Buddha caves - from the outside
A two-hour drive away from Kuqa are the Kizil Buddha cases; similar to the Thousand Buddha caves near Turpan (which I visited two years ago), but supposed to be more beautiful.
The road out there takes us through some really spectacular landscapes: the Tien Shan Mountains here consist mostly of layers of sediment only partially hardened into real stone. In some place, these layers are still perfectly horizontal and water erosion (!) has worn them into near-perfect pyramids — these formations are a protected landscape. Farther on, the layers have been pushed around and in one area are now nearly vertical: erosion here has worn away the softer layers, leaving near-vertical ‘walls’ of the harder stone; sometimes such a wall has toppled but many stand. After an hour of such impressive views from a fairly good road, we suddenly take a turn to the left onto a track which first takes us through a wide river bed and then on into the desert which looks like a flood plain (maybe there are flash floods here when it does rain?). Our driver actually gets off the bus to check the track (marked with a line of little flags) before turning into the side track. We’re vaguely worried: are we really heading into the right direction? When a taxi with one passenger overtakes us a little later, it seems we are; after another hour over rough tracks, half-finished roads and detours around road-building works we do indeed arrive at the site of the caves.
Another bus arrived just before us. At the gate, the ticket-selling lady waves us through but when we have climbed a lot of stairs and arrive at the first of the caves — all locked with a padlock — it turns out we do need to buy a ticket after all, as well as a guide to open all those locks for us. So down again we go, with my knees and my hurt foot screaming in protest: stairs are not good for me now!
So I pass: I’m not going to climb all those stairs again (and then lots more) and descend them again; these caves may be better than those near Turpan (the pictures I see later do suggest that) but at least I have seen something similar already. Instead, I take a nice quiet (and slow) stroll in the little wood at the foot of the mountain, where I spot two cuckoos who refuse to sit still for a photograph, and (at last!) make my first picture of the elusive flowering tamarisk bush (until now always only seen from a moving bus). Pity about the caves but I have a nice time anyway, and the landscape on the way here was worth the trip all by itself.
On the way back over the same tracks, half-finished roads and detours our driver suddenly stops. Photo stop? The landscape is beautiful. No — it turns out we have a very tire: no surprise really on these tracks covered with sharp stone fragments. Our driver is quick replacing the tire, obviously having done it before.
Uyghurs and Han Chinese
Back in Kuqa, Carla and I first walk around the new part of town a little, checking out the shops. In the evening, we all have dinner together: next to the Min Mao hotel is a well-stocked supermarket and next to that is the “Uyghur Restaurant”.
Although this is actually my fourth visit to Xinjiang, here in Kuqa I see for the first time ‘imported’ Han Chinese interacting normally and friendly with the original local population — Uyghurs here. (Original at least when the Chinese claimed this territory; much farther back in history, the Turkic peoples and Tajiks themselves moved into what is now the Xinjiang province of China.) What I saw until now was two different societies living almost completely separate lives, going to different schools, shopping at different shops and market stalls, eating at different restaurants. Here in Kuqa I’m interested to see a mixture of Chinese and Uyghur on the market, a Chinese woman having a friendly chat with an Uyghur woman on the street corner; and here in the restaurant, run completely by a team of Uyghurs serving both Uyghur and Chinese food, both Uyghurs and Chinese come to eat.
This warms my heart: maybe, given time, these peoples can indeed live peacefully together without the Uyghurs giving up their identity.
The atmosphere at the restaurant is very pleasant, and the food is truly excellent so we end up taking nearly all our meals here.
Wednesday 2004-06-30 - Kuqa, Xinjiang (China)
Relaxing and shopping
We will leave tonight on the night train, so we have most of the day to do as we see fit. Together with Carla I first walk out of the modern town which we explored a little already yesterday: As in Kashgar, the old Uyghur quarters are on the outskirts, but nearby here since Kuqa is a relatively small town.
We discover a small Uyghur cemetery where there even is an old tomb (which we don’t visit) as well as a small mosque. Within the walls, we sit in the shade a bit and see several men arriving for payers, several on their bike. We “chat” a bit with an old man who (of course) wants to know where we are from; he’s 100 years old, claims his companion, which probably just means “very old” — he certainly is that.
Along a small unpaved road we detour back to the modern town where we explore the nice market, and more shops; I even buy two shirts.
After dinner together, again at the Uyghur Restaurant next door, we leave at 21:30 for the station, taking four taxis this time. Our train is a slightly more modern version of the one we had from Kashgar. Lights out at 23:00.
Sunday 2004-07-04 - Dunhuang, China
End of the known world
The section of this trip covering Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang in China was “the known world” for me: I’d traveled in all these countries before and visited most of the places we visited now (with the exception of Mary in Turkmenistan and Kuqa in Xinjiang). Not that that was a problem though: it was great to be back in Central Asia and it provided some ‘mental rest’ during a trip otherwise rich in new impressions.
Today I’m definitely in a new country: neither in Liuyian nor all along the road through the flat desert to Dunhuang is there a single word to read in the Arabic script of Uyghur as was the norm in Xinjiang where practically everything is bilingual. We’ve left the Turkic languages and peoples behind now: I’m in the ‘real’ China at last.
Looking out of the window of the bus that takes us from the station in Liuyian to Dunhuang, the landscape isn’t very interesting at first: just very flat and almost completely bare desert and a very straight road. After about an hour of this, we see a slight dip in the desert ahead of us and when we get close it suddenly gets a lot greener, obviously because the water table is closer to the surface. First, tamarisk appears, always a sign of the presence of a little water; later, we see irrigation channels and fields; even tree-lined roads. Checking my map: this must be the area of the Shule He (He means river, but I don’t know what Shule means). When we leave the oasis behind, the ground stays a little greener than before, until we reach the outskirts of Dunhuang and we see fields and trees again.
Dunhuang, my first contact with a real Chinese town, has a friendly provincial atmosphere, immediately apparent when arrive after the two-hour bus ride. This town (population: 100,000) at the edge of the feared Lop desert was originally at the extreme western border of the Chinese empire — its name means “Blazing Beacon” — and the Great Wall was extended to here.
Our hotel, Fei Tian, is unremarkable but we have a comfortable little room — and John’s Cafe is right next to the hotel’s forecourt, along the street.
