Reality

Turpan to Urumqi

Distance: 190km
Scenery: B+

Road: B

Winds: D-

Climbing: pretty easy

Clear skies.

When I set out from Turpan, I didn't plan on cycling the entire 190km (118miles) in one day. My plan was to overnight in Dabancheng, which was 100km from Turpan. But when I got to Dabancheng after a tailwind assisted climb up a gorge, I felt good and it was still early in the afternoon. Dabancheng was nothing special and it was not worth spending the night there so I decided to push all the way to Urumqi, perhaps 3 hours away according to the pace I had set that morning.

And then I encountered the wind.
In February 2007 a train was overturned by winds in this section, killing 3 and injuring 30.

A businessman in an Audi pulls over to give me 3 bottles of water to help me through this section.

The tailwind turned into a headwind. Elation and optimism turned into self-reproach.

The road deteoriated as I got close to Urumqi, but I rode aggressively because I didn't want to ride in the dark. The bouncing around broke my rear rack.

As if to welcome me, the streetlights were just being turned on when I rolled into Urumqi. I was really tired but I was enjoying the exhilaration that one feels after accomplishing a task which has been the focus of all efforts for a long time. Urumqi has been the subject of my thoughts ever since leaving Kashgar and I couldn't spend a night in a small town knowing that all the comforts and food of a major city were just a few hours away. Like a kid, I couldn't wait to claim my reward.

But when I got into town, I had to contend with congestion and constant honking. I was hungry and tired so I checked into the first hotel within my budget. After a shower, I found cockroaches in my room. I went out to get a late dinner and many places were closed. I went to an internet cafe to check on a package of parts being sent from the states. It's being sent back because they can't find the address. People in the internet cafe smoke next to me and I can't stand it. They clear their throat and spit on the floor and the sound of it just grinds in my ears. Disappointment, it always happens. I pedaled furiously to get here, but in the end my paradise meets reality. I just hate it when small things get magnified in my mind until it makes me angry. A loss of self- control, understanding, and persepective. It's one of those things that I'm finding about myself on this trip that I don't like.

The following days were better. I found a new hotel at a good price. There aren't many touristy sites to visit so visitors without their own transport would find it a boring place. But I can ride around town as I wish.

Urumqi skyline from Hongshan Park.

That's Hongshan Park on the hill.

Gridlock

Nice internet cafes they have here. You have to register your I.D. card so they can keep track of your online activities.

My favourite part of Urumqi is the Wuyi night market where I ate dinner every night. We don't have places like this in the states, but in China it seems like every major city has one. Chinese people have an intense fear of loneliness. They always ask me why I travel solo, and every time they ask, they advise me to pair up with someone else. I acknowledge the drawbacks, but they can't seem to grasp the benefits.

Yes, it all seems very nice. The sleek skyline. The hustle and bustle of economic activity. Construction and investment everywhere. But that's just the surface of Xinjiang. The reality is much worse.

I met a French expat in the Xinhua bookstore. With my tan and lanky height, she took me for a Uighur so she asked me whether a certain English book that she was considering was a real reflection of the current Xinjiang political situation. I wouldn't know of course, but it was nice to be able to speak English after 2 months on the road. We agreed to have dinner later that evening at Wuyi with her Uighur friend Alfonso (not his real name).

We meet at Wuyi and eat at one of the stalls. I can tell that Alfonso is uneasy. He doesn't eat much and only drinks water. We converse in English and Carol tells me that Alfonso will be the next Che Guevara. Alfonso advises her not to speak about "sensitive topics". Alfonso gradually opens up. We finish dinner and go back to my hotel, where the 3 of us talk over cheap Chinese wine (Carol, being French had to have wine after dinner). Alfonso tells me about how Uighurs resent the Chinese "occupation" but they're afraid to express it because they'd be arrested or executed along with their family. He tells me about how he was arrested and interrogated for talking to foreign volunteer English teachers. He says that if Uighurs get into an argument with a Chinese person and it gets reported to the PSB, then they'd get arrested for subversive activities. He says that Uighurs live in fear and resentment. They had hoped that in 2002, when the US invaded Afghanistan, that the US military would also come to Xinjiang. They resent the eradication of their culture. Uighur language is taught in only a handful of schools, but everyone has to learn mandarin. Uighurs live in the poor outskirts of town, while the modern city center is inhabited by Chinese. They're being outnumbered in their own land. They see Chinese people getting rich, but their own standard of living has gone down. Alfonso is torn between going abroad because he "wants to be a free man" and staying with his people in his motherland.

So it's all a pack of lies.

Traveling through Xinjiang, I've never felt that it was a well integrated society. Rather, Chinese and Uighurs live next to each other, but separately. Each resents the other and both groups cling to their own ways.

Reality.

Catching Up

To recap, here's an overview of the trip so far.
I started in Uzbekistan, followed by a brief stay in Kyrgyzstan.


And now I'm in China's Xinjiang province.



Tokson to Turpan
Distance: 57km
Scenery: D
Road: C-
Winds: D-
Climbing: none
Altitude effects: none (actually went below sea level)
Cultural interest: none (didn't see anybody)
Headwind!
Overcast then rain. Abandoned country road.



The Chinese are masters at manufacturing kitschy touristy sites that cater to package groups. Most of these places are of marginal interest. Turpan has a bunch of these places, but after reading a few travelogues, I narrowed my exploration down to one place: the ruins of the ancient city of Jiaohe. I set out right after breakfast to beat the tour groups and the heat.

The verdict: B. The place is huge. You get a Indiana Jones feeling if you're there alone before the tour groups led by megaphone toting guides.





I got yelled at by the guards for stepping all over the monuments. Oops. It's an UNESCO site.


Tomorrow, I'll set out for Urumqi.



Two for one special on dirty kids.

Little brat's teasing me!

Good Night.

Winds

Korla to Tokson
Distance: some 330km
Scenery: B
Road: C to A+++
Winds: C to D-
Climbing: very little
Altitude effects: not possible
Cultural interest: B-

Day 1 (Korla to Hoxud): After a few days in the comforts of civilization, getting back on the bike takes will power. I have very little of it so I mope around , watching an NBA game on CCTV5, until it's time to checkout.
Cloudy weather. Moderate headwinds.

I find the highway and soon I'm pulled over by the police. It turns out that slow vehicles are prohibited on the new highway on this section, and we must use the old highway. So I ride on the old highway, parallel to the perfectly paved new highway with wide lanes, and I find that it's not just bicycles and donkey carts on the crappy old highway. The new highway is a pretty expensive toll road so alot of taxis and overloaded trucks crowd the old highway instead. It's the cheapskate highway.
I get to Hoxud and it's time to find a hotel. But I don't read Chinese. The solution:

I find a hotel with the nicest watchman in the world. Mr Wei is a 70 year old retired farmer.

He lives in a closet-sized shack in the hotel's courtyard. The guy's got tons of good spirit. His ecstatic friendliness and nonstop talking makes me feel like meeting me has made him very happy. I offer to take his picture and off he goes to get cleaned up and put on his hat. He comes back asking me how he should pose for the picture. It's an important occasion for him. We take 4 pictures before somebody else calms down his enthusiasm. An adorable man.

Day 2 (Hoxud to a campsite): Clear weather. Blue skies. Visibility very good. A barely noticable climb and a windy downhill.
I decide to break the law and ride on the new highway.
I'm feeling a bit soft staying in hotels every night so I decide to camp.


Day 3 (campsite to Toksun): Breakfast of Laghman again. 100km stretch of nothingness. Visibility excellent. Very beautiful landscape.
I have an old Chinese tourist map that I bought in Kashgar. It's printed in 2002 before the new highway was built. According to the map, I would pass through 2 towns on today's ride where I could rest and eat. Those towns don't exist anymore, making today a hot, windy, and hungry day.

Going crazy in the Desert

I'm in Korla, 1100km from Kashgar. Korla is a boom town. It's wealth comes from the oil that is being pumped from the desert not too far from here.

The last 4 days have been pretty good. The road is perrrrrfect. Headwinds, when they come, don't last all day. I can communicate with the people. The weather is good, no digestive issues, and I feel fit.

So what's making me crazy?

It's just that it's the same thing everyday. The landscape has not changed a bit for a week. No mountains or rivers to provide a memorable point of reference. No interesting geologic formations. The vegetation never changes. My mp3's are starting to repeat. Noodles for every meal.

So I just keep pushing those pedals because the only thing that changes is my cycle computer. I focus on the speedometer, which leads to an obsession with speed, which leads to massive daily distances. 140km, 130km, 135km, 180km.
I play this silly game of trying to draft off of passing trucks which forces me to go as fast as they drive. Once I even reached 67kph.

Once in a while, I pass through a village which is a nice relief. You can spot them from far away because they're the only places that have trees.


Nice places to eat a popsicle and try to figure out what the Uighurs are doing.

Or try to figure out the Chinese government's thinking.


But you'd have to contend with the trash.

This was just by the side of the road, where people from nearby houses come and dump their trash. I guess their horse died and they just dragged the carcass across the street. The road is punctuated with these small villages every 40 or so kilometers. They're usually not this bad but it's still much better to camp in the wilds than to sleep in these places.

But the big cities are nice: a good reward for my sensory starved eyes. They're pretty much all the same, and in the city center you hardly know you're in Xinjiang. Very comfortable places to rest.

Aksu. The square fills with people of all ages at night enjoying the breeze, walking the dog, or dancing in unison. Charming places to be in the evenings.


Kuqa. I stayed at a Hotel owned by Mr Zheng, who moved here from Zhejiang province. He treated me to lunch before I left. It was a very Chinese event. He invited the manager of the restaurant and his hotel manager to dine with us. He ordered way too many dishes, including live fish which is very expensive here. I was the only one that ate because, as it was explained to me afterwards, Chinese people like to go to big expensive restaurants, order a bunch of stuff, and barely eat as a way of displaying wealth. Nobody takes home leftovers so restaurants usually throw out platefuls of untouched food. All this to save face.
Mr Zheng and his daughter.


Korla. Another thing about Chinesified cities is that their standardization makes finding your way around very easy. They all have a Renming Guanchang (People's Square) that is at the center of where all the action is. I don't need to have a map when I roll into town. I just ask people where the Renming Guanchang is and the hotels and wangbas (Internet cafes) are usually within a couple of blocks.

Out of the Darkness

Kyrgyzstan
Osh is the second biggest city in Kyrgyzstan, but there's really nothing much to do there.

So what did I do?

I cooked.

I guess you can say I'm tired of the same food everyday.

This was pasta with tomatoes and sausage.

This was the same pasta, but mixed with some marinated salad that they sell in the bazaar.

I met some interesting people.

The guy in the middle is supposed to be a big Bollywood film star. His name is Shahrukh Khan and he's supposedly hiding out in this little snack shop in Kyrgyzstan because he can't handle all the media attention he's getting back home.

I met him while I was buying a soda from the shack closest to my hotel. I bought my soda and out pops this really energetic guy asking me if I knew who he was. I'm like, no and if you really wanted to be anonymous why do you need to tell me who you are?


I spent most evenings in Osh eating shashlyk at an outdoor cafe around the corner from my hotel. I would sit down and pretty soon I would be joined by a group of men out for a night on the town. They'd start drinking vodka and quickly get totally drunk. After a while I found it was kinda fun to play around with these guys and we'd communicate using exaggerated gestures and silly sounds.

Time to leave Osh!

Not that easy. After two perfect days in Osh, the weather turned nasty, just in time for me to hit the road. I had to cycle into the mountains to get to China and I wasn't thrilled about riding into bad weather.

I prolonged my stay in Osh hoping to wait out the bad weather. I checked weather forecasts on the internet religiously in the morning and evening everyday, but it always showed 90% chance of rain. I was bored out of my mind in Osh and wanted to get the heck out.

Mother nature has a way of flirting with you. The day that I finally left began with partly cloudy skies. I became optimistic. I sang between breaths as I cycled. Then I met this guy on a horse who wanted me to take his picture.

The sun soon turned to wind and rain.

It was bearable in the lower elevations, but once the road started to climb the rain turned into a full on blizzard.

Cold, exhausted, and soaking wet from sweat, I was tired of this crappy weather. Fortunately a military guy in a Russian jeep showed up and insisted I get in. I put up a good resistance, but forget it I was beat.

I took a picture of my benefactor, Ylombek, at the top of the pass.

Later on, we had tea in a trailer-converted-cafe. That's my mp3 player Ylombek is listening to, having a good time as you can tell.

Ylombek took me to Sary Tash, the last settlement before the Chinese border at Irkhestam pass. To call Sary Tash civilization is a real stretch. There's no running water, but plenty of mud. At 3100m, the place was snowbound and because we were in the middle of a storm you can't tell where the snow ends and where the clouds begin. It's all white everywhere you look, except for the shacks that people live in along with their livestock.

My first night in Sary Tash was a real treat. That night a traveling vaudeville show was in town and since I had nothing better to do, I checked it out. The show was held in the school's auditorium which was about 40' x 30': a very intimate setting. The whole town showed up because this was the main event of the winter. It was ridiculously crowded. People squeezed and pushed each other for a place on the hard bench. Old men in the corner talked and spat sunflower seeds without a care. Kids chased each other in the aisles. Teenage girls huddled close together giggling, while boys hovered on their periphery trying to look cool. Women talked to their neighbors, and grandmas berated their grandkids. The town drunk went from group to group, making a fool of himself.

The show was all song and dance, with men dressed as women which made the crowd go nuts. I didn't understand a word of it and my butt was starting to hurt from sitting on the bench so I made an early exit. I didn't want to ruin the evening for the people there by taking a picture and using the flash, so I just went back to the guesthouse.

I stayed at a guesthouse operated by a friendly family. Their point person, who did all the business transactions, was their 16 year old daughter Aida who spoke the closest approximation to English. Aida was pretty and had a bubbly personality. She always smiled and bounded from chore to chore with the springy gait of youth. Seeing her do her chores it made me think that chores were just another game for her. When I left Osh, I was warned about the wolves of Sary Tash. I saw no canine wolves, but in retrospect I believe Aida was the Wolf of Sary Tash.

 Aida is the one on the very right. This is her store. On the outside is "Kape Aida"

This girl was smart. I got to Sary Tash on Thursday but Aida told me that it was Friday and that the border was closed during the weekend. She did this so that I would have to stay 3 days until "Monday" (which was actually Sunday) when the border was supposed to open. The border actually stays open on Saturday, as evidenced by the heavy traffic on that day. Not knowing any better I stayed 3 extremely boring days in Sary Tash. You can't pick where diarrhea strikes, but when it strikes where there are only pit toilets, then life sucks.
Bored with nothing to do, no one to talk to in Sary Tash.

For food, Aida charged me $1.10 for instant noodles. She sold me a bottle of Coke that had been diluted using the local cola that tasted like medicine.

So Aida's "Monday" rolls around and I am so ready to leave. The problem is that it's been snowing for the last 24 hours and the wind began to blow. Forget cycling, I'm hitching. So I go to the road and wait for 3 hours in the freezing wind hoping for a truck to pass because up here, in this season, that's the only thing that goes to the border. I wait and the road has not been this quiet for 3 days. wtf? Well, the reason is of course it's actually Sunday, when the border does officially close. So I give up and pay $33 for a jeep to take me to the border. Aida's plan was for me to give up and pay for another night at her guest house.

On the way to Irkhestam Pass we get scary weather and I'm glad to be in a jeep.

We came upon these trucks that have been stuck up here for 3 days. We take their 2 Chinese passengers and head back. When we get back to Sary Tash, our jeep needs gas and the only place that sells it is Aida's. The driver caught her trying to sell 4L of gas in a 5L bottle as if it's 5L. How can she do this type of stuff? I mean we can get into some serious trouble if we're stuck out there. I decide to go all the way back to Osh. Osh...here we go again.

Two more days of checking the weather, debating whether I should head to Bishkek and use up the rest of my Kyrgyz visa before giving Irkhestam another try. Forget it, the entire country's got poor weather and I need to get to Kashgar to receive a package.

Irkhestam, part 2. I didn't even try cycling this time. I just cycled to the edge of town and waited for a truck. Fortunately I was picked up by two guys who knew how to have fun. Bastan and Dostik were 18 and 23 respectively and we got along really well. They were going to the border with an empty truck to haul goods into Kyrgyzstan from China so there was plenty of space for my bike.

It was a fun ride. These guys drove like maniacs. They played their music really loud and they liked to drive really close to young girls and honk the truck's air horn. They did the same thing with animals and afterwards we would laugh hysterically. We stopped at a couple of restaurants just to have tea and flirt with the waitresses. We played silly games using improvised toys like empty cigarette boxes and made a competition out of it.

Bastan

Dostlik

Irkhestam, part2: the weather's not much better.

We get to Irkhestam at 9PM. I pay the guys for the ride and take them out to dinner. They insist that I sleep in the truck for the night. Dostlik took the money I paid him and he spent the night in a brothel. He gave a chocolate bar to me as a gift in the morning and saw me to the border.

I found Kashgar in the middle of a dust storm. There was dust everywhere and you can hardly see the sun. I've been in Kashgar before so I begin cycling after a day. It's too early for Tibet so I decided to ride to Urumqi across the Taklamakan desert.

Desert cycling on the brand new 314 highway. Three years ago this road did not exits. Now 1600km of world class highway.

It's like being on another planet.

So now I'm in Aksu, 450km northeast of Kashgar. The day before yesterday I pulled a 216km day, averaging 31.6kph. I was totally fried afterwards, but Aksu has got all the comforts of a Chinesified city.