I'm back in Chengdu after a few more grueling weeks on the road. While the past few weeks were definitely easier than my trip to Litang that I wrote so fondly of in the last e-mail, it was still a bit more demanding than I initially planned for. That combined with rather disappointing news a few days ago put an early cap on a trip that should have lasted through the end of the month. I was just too tired and had no desire to travel anymore. This is the first time this has happened to me in my last 7 years of traveling and I'm a bit disappointed in myself for not sticking with it. At the same time, I feel much better now that I'm back safe in Chengdu and I'll definitely be able to recuperate much faster here. It really hurts to have blown US$200 on a plane ticket back here, but there were no sleeper tickets for the train from Xinjiang to Chengdu for about 10 days, and the thought of riding in a hard seat on an overpacked Chinese train (people sleep on top of each other in the aisles it's so packed in the hard seat cars of the train) for 52 hours (nope, not an exaggeration) was not exactly appealing. So all and all, despite being tired and exhausted and not having anything in particular to do for the next 2 weeks until classes start, I'm rather relieved to be 'home,' if I can really call Chengdu that at this point.

So I guess I should start where I left off in my last e-mail. After the rather strenuous trip to Litang, I came back to Chengdu for a night and grabbed a non-A/C sleeper train the next afternoon to a city about 20 hours north of Chengdu called Lanzhou. It was my first non-A/C train and as my fabulous luck that you will read about plenty in this e-mail would have it, I just had to take it in the middle of the summer. Brilliant idea. I was smart enough to buy a little fold-up fan at the station at least, but during the day with the windows open at 50 mph (just like the good old days in the Festiva), it was still miserably hot. I tried sticking my head out the window several times, but every time I did someone outside tried to sell me something. I guess I should have stuck my head out the window when we were actually moving and not docked at one of the many country-bumpkin stations we stopped at. Night time wasn't too bad, but I still had a hard time sleeping. Might have been the people at the stations sticking their heads IN the window during the night trying to sell me stuff. Gotta love the economic drive that keeps these people on their toes... except for 99.8% of the time when you really just don't want to buy anything.

Lanzhou isn't supposed to be much of a city for sightseeing, and most travelers who end up here are merely using it as a transit point much like myself. According to the all-knowing Lonely Planet, it was a rather small city on the Yellow River (China's second largest river) until the Communists came into power, and after that it increased ten-fold in size in one generation. The train ride into Lanzhou was as desolate and barren as a waltz through the Sahara, so it was surprising to find such a bustling metropolis in the middle of one of China's vast wastelands. I first checked on tickets to my actual destination, Dunhuang, famous for it's ancient Buddhist caves with their intricate artwork that have been painstakingly carved and inscribed over more than a millenium by a number of monks and followers of various origins. Lanzhou and Dunhuang are both in the same prefecture of Gansu, one of China's most oddly shaped prefectures with it borders squeezed tight between several other prefectures. It's mostly a very long, skinny corridor running from southeast to northwest, and despite it's odd shape and seemingly small size, it's chock full of relics and sites because this is the corridor where the silk road once ran.

At any rate, back to my introduction on the many joys of buying train tickets in China. It's pretty much the same process at any major station, and it all starts like this. You go into a huge hall with the capacity to fit at least 500 people, and depending on what time of day you go in and how good your luck is, there is anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people in there. Ok, so I'm exaggerating the numbers a good bit, but trust me, these places are gigantic but still always packed with people. There are usually at least 20 ticket windows open at a time, each one feeding a line (more like a mob, but I'll get to that exciting aspect of ticket purchasing in just a moment) that usually runs to the back of the hall. Behind each window is always a friendly, smiling face ready to BITE YOUR HEAD OFF IN A HEARTBEAT IF YOU DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHERE YOU WANT TO GO AND EXACTLY WHEN YOU'LL BE GOING. Although if you're really lucky, they only give you dirty looks and spit on your ticket before they pass it under the window. On a sidenote, I'm pretty sure that window must be pretty solid, because otherwise there would be a lot of handicapped or seriously disfigured ticketsellers in China by this point.

So the best part about this joyous event that is a highlight for most every foreigner brave enough to travel in China is that Confucius, in his vast wisdom and many great teachings, forgot to emphasize the importance of waiting in line to his beloved Chinese. Granted, there wouldn't be any lines flowing out from the windows if all Chinese were ignorant of the simple principle of lining up, but let's just say that more than a few of them choose not to be good little comrades and wait there BLOODY FREAKIN turn in line. Not that I mind. I thoroughly enjoy every opportunity I get to slap one of my dear comrades in the back of the head and tell him to get in the back of the line and wait like the rest of us. Unfortunately, this only works when you are already close to the window, but that just means I have a lot of love built up for my fellow cutting comrades by the time I get to the window, and you all know as fellow Huberts how good we at expressing that kind of love. A few times my dear comrades have not taken their repremandings lightly and become a bit confrontational, but as soon as I raise my voice and the 2,000 pairs of eyes around us catch site of a foreigner lecturing a local on elementary social principles in Chinese, they tend to back down. Not that they go back to end of the line and wait. Oh no, they just go find the nearest line without any foreigners in it.

So back to the story I was telling you a few days ago about Lanzhou. I was right at the part where I was trying to get a ticket to Dunhuang. Fortunately, the ticket hall in Lanzhou wasn't too crowded, althought that may only have been because it was the buttcrack of dawn when I arrived. I made it to the window in a record 15 minutes time, only to find there were no sleeper trains to Dunhuang for the next 10 days or so. I must have forgotten to mention somewhere in here that it's high travel season in China right now, and even during the low season there are just too many people in this massive country trying to go too many places to get a sleeper ticket on short notice. Not wanting to ride hard seat overnight for 14 hours to Dunhuang, I walked away empty-handed from my much coveted position at the ticket window and headed straight for the bus station. I got there to find that the all-knowing Lonely Planet was again right in mentioning that foreigners traveling on buses in Gansu province (or at least buses originating in Lanzhou) had to pay a ridiculously expensive fee for insurance coverage, which ironically enough only covers the bus company from getting sued by foreigners in the case of an accident but gives absolutely no compensation to the poor foreigner who is maimed in an accident even though he footed the bill for the insurance. It's brilliant how screwing over foreigners in this country is unofficially endorsed by the government, although I must admit from much reading and secondhand knowledge that it is immensely better than just 10 to 15 years ago. The bus was a bit expensive anyway, so I decided to give the old hard seat train ride a go.

First I figured I'd rather not battle the ticket crowd at the train station again with all my luggage, so I poked around nearby hotels for a cheap room. Many of the hotels near the station didn't take foreigners, which is still the case with the majority of cheap places in this country because they are required to get a special permit for 'alien residents,' but I finally found a pretty reasonable place on my 5th try and crashed into bed for a quick nap before braving the station crowd again. My quick nap turned into several long hours of much needed sleep, and by the time I got back up to the front of the ticket line that afternoon there weren't even hard seats left on the trains from Lanzhou to Dunhuang. I enquired into trains passing through Lanzhou from other cities, and the lady behind the window, a most surprisingly patient woman (by Chinese standards at least), quickly found a train coming all the way from Beijing that was heading out to Xinjiang (Dunhuang is on the way). She said it was a hard seat ticket, so I went ahead and bought it, but was a bit surprised to see 'no seat' written in the top corner of the ticket. Turns out you can't really get an assigned seat on the hard seat cars, just the sleeper cars, so you are pretty much SOL if you try to get a seat on a train that isn't originating in the city you're departing from. DOH! So yes, I knew I was in for yet another exciting first in my China traveling experiences, and was thankful that it was only a mere 14 hours of standing I'd have to do, a rather short train ride in this country.

Well, before I get into the gory details of how to stand up on a train full of chain-smoking Chinese packed like sardines for a full night, I should probably finish my chapter on Lanzhou. So this city of several million that supposedly didn't have much to recommend it, as is really the case with most Chinese cities of several million people (of which there are several million I'm told), turned out to make for a surprisingly pleasant visit. By Chinese standards of course. Just for the record EVERYTHING I mention in this e-mail is by Chinese standards. If you are drawing comparisons with New York or LA or even Houston, then you are most definitely on the wrong page. Just think dirty, polluted, chaotic, and overcrowded. Ok, so that's New York, LA, and Houston in a nutshell, but multiply by a factor of 10. Or maybe 100 would be a more appropriate factor. Not that these things are bad, as they provide part of the key to the 'adventure factor' that makes China such an enjoyable place for me (I'm not being sarcastic this time). Back to Lanzhou, the best thing about the city by far was the amazing view of the city from above, a view made possible by the fact that Lanzhou is a long, narrow city squeezed into a valley along the Yellow River with mountains on either side. The larger mountain range to the south is a good 1500 feet above the city, and a cable car can take you to the top for a rather spectacular view. I went up in the late afternoon and stayed until right before closing at 10PM, snapping lovely pictures at the top and eating some overpriced food at a restaurant that looked out into the countryside on the back side of the mountain. Probably merely because this was one of the few places I had time to visit in Lanzhou, I was left with a fairly decent impression of the city. Oh, that and a Canadian guy I met here in Chengdu that lived in Lanzhou for a year told me that hash grows wild in the city even on public streets. I didn't bother looking for any myself, but I'm sure the hash factor would be a major plus for a lot of the weirdos (i.e. foreigners) you meet traveling here in China.

Yeah, so day two in Lanzhou I slept late, checked out of my hotel about 20 seconds until noon, and wandered around for a few hours before my mid-afternoon train departed. The weather was pretty nice, which helped boost my impression of Lanzhou a bit more despite Lonely Planet's warning of smoggy air trapped in by the mountain ranges hanging almost perpetually over the city. I rather relunctantly made my way to the train station to queue up for my next adventure. I got on board my assigned car (with no assigned seat I remind you) to find even more people than I had thought there would be, sitting, standing and lying in even more places than I thought existed on your average Chinese train. The majority of the people who actually had seats must have been riding the train from Beijing, already 30+ hours behind them and another 30+ hours on to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Yippee!!! So after squeezing into the train with at least another 100 brave souls getting on at Lanzhou, many of which were making a much longer journey than me, I found a dead body to set my bags on and managed to squeeze the upper half of my body into a tiny little knook in the wall, the lower half of my body left exposed in the middle of the aisle where it was thoroughly abused by passerbys looking for a dead body to put their own luggage on. After about an hour of this exquisite form of Chinese torture, most of which I spent cursing the lady who sold me the ticket, I crawled out from under the pile of dead bodies that were continuing to accumulate and made my way to the restaurant car in hopes that I might be able to find a place to park my entire body in one place. As it was still a few hours until dinner, I found a near empty car with plenty of room to park more than my entire body (not bad for a Hubert, eh?!). I figured I had to eat something in order to avoid dirty looks for the workers in there, so I bought a whole canteloupe (well, the Chinese version thereof) and begin to slowly devour my juicy new friend, savoring not so much the fruit itself but the luxury of my own seat that it was allowing me to enjoy.

Dinner time rolled around before too long, and having exhausted my canteloupe supply already, I was forced to make a decision. Stay and eat the overpriced food in an attempt to maintain my right to a parking spot, or go back to my assigned car and enjoy some delicious instant noodles with the dead bodies. It was a difficult decision, but in the end I opted for the former and indulged myself in some tasty train food. Since dinner time lasts a good 3 or 4 hours, I dug into my dish of bony chicken and vegetables at a pace of about one small bite every 10 minutes, and before I knew it people began clearing out of the car. This is when I made my move. Brandishing my cutest smile and making sure no chicken bits protruded from between my teeth, I approached the friendliest-looking waitress in the car and asked her if it was possible, being such a frequent customer and all, if I could shack up in the restaurant that night. "30 yuan for the night, be out of here by breakfast time," was the blunt reply. Evidently I wasn't breaking into any new territory here, as they must have regularly had homeless/seatless vagabonds like myself roaming into the car looking for shelter for the night. 30 yuan is a little less than US$4, so I gave in and dished out the money, knowing that we'd be arriving in Dunhuang at 5AM the next morning anyway. For a while I even thought I'd have the whole table to myself, meaning I could lie out on the bench and get a little shuteye. My aspirations for a night of semi-peaceful sleep were soon dashed though as a wave of vagabonds and nightowls made their way into the car looking either for their own place to sleep or a place to play cards and down copious amounts of liquor to pass the night away. So I had to share my bench, and I got to enjoy the clamour of Chinese men playing some strange card game that must have required you to scream at the top of your lungs every 10 seconds in order to win. Or maybe that's just how they play cards. And I won't even tell you about the cigarette smoke in the car. Suffice it to say tobacco companies are making a killing over here (no pun intended). I've honestly only met two Chinese men thus far who don't smoke, and fortunately one of those is the husband of the professor I live with.

Ok, so I've droned on about the train ride long enough. Maybe that's because it was to be my last train ride for the trip, a horrifying thought considering I was heading into China's largest and one of it's most undeveloped provinces next, which is definitely not the best place to ride around on a lot of buses. But for now I was in Dunhuang, a comforting thought considering I knew I could finally settle down for a few days and enjoy some spectacular sights. As I mentioned earlier, Dunhuang is famous for the Mogao caves, a collection of over 400 caves clustered together in the side of a mountain that contain some fabulous Buddhist carvings. Since I arrived early in the morning, I first found a place to stay and crashed for about 4 hours, getting up at noon to go in search of breakfast. After a nice 2-hour meal, I headed out for the sand dunes just outside of town, renting a bike from a local diner to get there. The only problem is that the finals of the Asian Cup (Asia's biggest soccer tournament... the European Cup of Asia... duh!) were that night, and China and Japan were facing off in what promised to be a gruesome match. For those of you that don't know, there is a lot of enmity between these two countries, especially on the Chinese side, so anytime they face off in sports there is definitely some bad blood. Oh yeah, China hosted the tournament this year, so the game was taking place in Beijing. At any rate, a man must have priorities in life, and if soccer is not high up on the list, then he must not truly be a man. Just as I cleared the outskirts of town and saw the massive sanddunes rising in the distance to greet me though, I knew I had a full day of exploring ahead of me.

After paying the ridiculously expensive entrance fee of 80 yuan and then dishing out another 20 yuan for a shuttle ride to the main attraction (which I was told was VERY far away... much to my consternation we arrived 3 minutes later driving at 15 mph), I got my camera out and started snapping away furiously. I was surrounded on all sides by massive sanddunes, rising up hundreds of feet in the air. Unfortunately, there were as many touts as tourists there with me, so everywhere you turned someone was either offering you a camel ride, a slide down the sanddune, or a cup of almond tea. But admittedly, the attractions on offer here were 10 times better than most Chinese tourist places I'd been. Having already shelled out over 100 yuan here though, I was content to just walk around with my behemoth camera and watch desert life through the extension of my lens. I first explored Yueyaquan (Moon Tooth Spring), named after the fact that the beautiful 6-story pagoda in the middle of the complex is partially surrounded by a moon-shaped pond. Pretty impressive considering I was in the middle of the desert. Next I hit the dunes. The climb is pretty steep, but I figured that's why they had wooden stairs there. As soon as I hit the first step though, I had three touts on me asking if I wanted to slide down the dunes on their little wooden sleds. At 10 yuan a go, I figured I could do without and politely refused. At that point they told me not to use THEIR stairs. I told them I just wanted to climb to the top and take pictures and that I prefered to do my sledding on icier terrain, but they still insisted that even just to climb to the top using THEIR stairs carried a 10 yuan fee. So I jumped into the sand immediately next to the stairs and began my descent, sorely tempted to drop my pants in the process and show them a much curvier moon than the little pond we were next to. Halfway up and thoroughly exhausted, I gave up on sand hiking and got back on the stairs, not caring if I got yelled at or not.

At the top I took some fabulous pictures, including a great shot of the moon I just mentioned (not the pond, the other one that I almost exposed to the annoying touts at the bottom). At this point it was already after 7 and I knew I needed to be going if I was going to catch the soccer game at 8. But it was just too beautiful up there, and the lower the sun sank in the distant horizon, the more beautiful its light reflected on the sand. I ended up staying until almost 9pm, snapping pictures and enjoying my desert oasis (along with about half the Chinese population... did I mention this is peak travel season... did I mention there are a lot more Chinese tourists nowadays than 20 years ago... did I mention that Chinese tourists are about the most annoying tourists the world has ever witnessed). The crazy thing is that the sun was only just setting at 9pm, because those brilliant Chinese officials in Beijing have set one of the world's largest countries all on one time zone - Beijing time (which means as I headed west into Xinjiang I was going to see sunsets well past 10pm!). So I missed the soccer game, which Japan ended up winning 3-1. I'm not too disappointed I missed it, considering what a spectacular view I enjoyed at the top of the dunes.

The next day I headed out to the famed Mogao caves, a good 20 miles outside of Dunhuang. After paying an even more ridiculous entrance fee of 100 yuan, I ventured off with my Chinese tour guide and 20 brave Chinese companions to go cave exploring. Ok, I should probably explain at this point that these are not caves or caverns like you find in New Mexico or Colorado. It's merely the side of a small mountain where people dug small enclaves and painted and carved all sorts of fascinating things. The 400+ caves are all within close proximity of each other and in fact go up for 3 stories, meaning the many artists and monks who contributed to the caves over the years made good use of space. Each cave now has a locked door at the entrance, and each tour group only gets to enter 10 of the caves. I'm told that for rather exhorbitant fees you can get the guides to let you into the more impressive and exclusive caves, some of which have sexually explicit content that the Chinese government deems unfit for human consumption (unless of course you have several hundred yuan handy, in which case it's perfectly acceptable to view such material). At any rate, I made the mistake of not investing an 20 yuan and waiting an extra 30 minutes or so to go with a foreigner group and English speaking guide, thinking my Chinese was up to the task. I failed to consider that we were going to be talking about Buddhism and ancient artwork the entire time, a far cry from the vocabulary I'm used to using over here ("Hey baby, can I buy you a drink" or "No thank you, I'm not interested in marrying you and giving you a green card" - these two phrases often come one after the other in fact). So I lost out on a lot of useful information as we made our whirlwind tour of the caves, but I still enjoyed looking at the art and pretending to understand everything our rather cute tour guide was saying. I think she knew I was bluffing though. At the end we got to see the second largest Buddha in the world, number two behind the one here in Sichuan just a few hours south of Chengdu. Sadly, it only recently attained this distinction because prior to 2000 it was only the third largest in the world. That's the year the Taliban blasted the world's two largest Buddhas in Afghanistan to bits. And we all thought they only hated Christianity.

The next day I took a bus from Dunhuang into Xinjiang, heading for the second lowest depression in the world - the Turpan Basin. Turpan is a small city right smack in the middle of this basin, and is the hottest place in China. When I bought the bus tickets at Dunhuang bus station I was told it was a 12-hour journey to Turpan, but they failed to mention that we would stop off in the city of Hami along the way and wait for 6 hours, stretching it into an 18-hour trip and putting us in Turpan after 2AM, not exactly an easy hour to find accomodation. So when we arrived at Hami and were told to get off the bus, we were a bit surprised. When the driver explained that we would have to wait until 8PM to ride another bus the rest of the way to Turpan, I went off. Fortunately, there were another of other foreigners on the bus not too pleased with this either (since they had all been lied to as well at the bus station), so I had some good backing. Best of all there was an American family on the bus whose mother was Chinese and not at all pleased with the service we were receiving. After we gave the driver a thorough scolding, we headed into the station and raised hell, knowing full well that in China it does no good because everyone just says "Oh, I don't know," or "It's not my fault, go talk to somebody else." But we tried anyway, and in the end a miracle occured. There was actually an official at the bus station who apologized to us (NEVER, AND I MEAN ABSOLUTELY NEVER, HAS ANY CHINESE WORKER OR OFFICIAL EVER EVER APOLIGIZED TO ME BEFORE... IN FACT, I'VE NEVER SEEN THEM APOLOGIZE TO ANYONE... ABSOLUTELY UNHEARD OF!!!). He arranged for the 12 of us foreigners stranded there in Hami to take a minibus the last 6 hours to Turpan. Although we'd already lost 3 hours at this point, it was still better than waiting around another 3 hours and getting into Turpan at a ridiculous hour. During this whole process I met some cool Koreans and talked a good bit with the American family, whose adorable 12-year old daughter and son were twins.

Turpan wasn't too terribly hot, although I may just have lucked out the one day I was in town. In a city packed with overpriced hotels, I was lucky to find a dirty but relatively inexpensive hostel to stay in, leading half of the crew from our bus over to join me. After we got settled in, we went out to a night market at midnight to have our first sampling of real Uighur (the Xinjiang Muslim minorities... they used to be the majority in Xinjiang, but the Chinese government has been squeezing as many Han Chinese into the province as possible over the past 50 years, and they now comprise 60% percent of the population) food. As Muslims, they don't eat pork and for some reason beef and chicken aren't all that common in their diet, leaving them with one staple food... MUTTON. That's right, just about every piece of meat you see in Xinjiang is straight off some poor sheep's back (actually there's not much meat on a sheep's back... I imagine most of the meat comes from other parts of the sheep). We settled for noodles and I tried some dumplings, fully aware that I was going to have my first mutton dumplings. It's not that I haven't eaten mutton before or that I mind it at all, as I certainly think sheeps long ago lost the adorable gene that dogs and cats possess, but I'm certainly not used to finding mutton in every single dish I consume. And as I was soon to find out, if I wanted to eat meat in Xinjiang, it was almost assuredly going to be from a sheep (although I had a heck of a good chicken... yes, a WHOLE chicken... in Urumqi one night).

Later that night at the hotel a multi-lingual local Uighur who was jabbering away at some Japanese guy about joining a tour the next day caught my attention. I signed onto his tour, as all the major tourist sights in Turpan are actually OUTSIDE of Turpan, and getting to all of them in one day means you have to rent a car and driver, a rather expensive undertaking if you're on your own. The 'tour' meant that a shoddy little minivan (i.e. - smaller than my festiva, but a little taller, the only reason it can even be considered a van) drove me and four other foreigners around to the eight major sights near Turpan. The fact that we had six people sqeezed into a car smaller than my old Festiva and that probably weighed less than the combined total of its occupants was a bit scary. 10 miles outside of town when it broke down I wasn't at all surprised, but amazingly the driver was able to sort out the problem in only about 20 minutes, a record in my China breakdown experiences. The main problem with going to so many sights is that each one costs about 20 yuan to get into, which adds up pretty fast. Also, a lot of the sights just aren't worth seeing anyway, so each site we had to decide if we wanted to take a gamble and pay the entrance fee or just head onto the next site. In the van with me were a Dutch couple just traveling through China, and a German woman who spoke perfect Dutch (usually it's the other way around... the Dutch are often quite good at German, but no one outside of Holland or Belgium ever bothers learning Dutch) and English who worked for a German company in Suzhou. They were quite enjoyable companions, and we all got on pretty well that afternoon. Some of the sites were a bit crappy, but a few were spectacular. We visited the old ruins of an ancient city that served as a major post along the silk road. The most incredible thing about this city is that all the houses were made from earth and wood, but despite the wood having long since perished, many of the original earth structures were still standing. Not bad considering they are several thousands of years old. The city was quite large, meaning it must have been a rather prosperous and important post for traders during the peak years of the silk road. The last site of the day was similar to this site, but much more spectacular. It was on a plateau of several square miles that was wedged between two small rivers. The plateau just rose up from the rivers about 40 or 50 feet into the air, a most unusual site. The ruins were quite similar to the previous site, but in much better condition and far more numerous. Also, this city served as an ancient capital for the region, and you can see the ruins were the old government offices were housed. We also got to see the karez, by far the most fascinating and brilliant form of irrigation I've ever seen. Although Turpan and much of the rest of Xinjiang is desert, there are also numerous mountain ranges that run through the province and large supplies of water deep underground. The karez is an incredible system in which a large reservoir is built at the source (usually in the mountains) and a long series of underground tunnels is dug to transport the water hundreds of miles to its destination. Along the way many wells are built to access the water, and the water is driven by gravity, reducing the need for pumps. Since the water runs underground, evaporation is not a serious threat. Most incredible of all is that this irrigation system has been in use in Central Asia for thousands of years. Pretty neat stuff. I tried some of the water, and it's pretty darn tasty!

Turpan is probably most famous in China for its grapes, so we also stopped off at a vineyard and watched some traditional Uighur dances before touring the vineyard and then sitting down to a feast of delicious grapes. Just thinking about the little green beauties in Turpan now makes my mouth water. The grapes came at a very opportune time as well, because we had just spent over an hour at Huoyanshan (Flame Mountain), which gets so hot in midday that it looks like it's actually on fire. I climbed partway up the mountain on the backside and it was certainly hot, but I didn't spontaneously combust or catch on fire at any point, so I think the name might be somewhat exaggerated. It's a very popular spot for Chinese tourists because the mountain serves as a major obstacle to the main character of one of China's most famous ancient novels. As for the rest of the sites, we took one look from the entrance and decided it just wasn't worth the 20 yuan.

That night I caught a bus to Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang and only about 3 hours up the road from Turpan. I had no idea what to expect of Urumqi, as I knew it was a major city, but unlike most big Chinese cities it was largely occupied by minorities. As I mentioned above, the Uighurs are a Central Asian people who've lived in Xinjiang and surrounding Central Asian countries for a LONG TIME. They've always considered Xinjiang to be their own land and have long been disgruntled by the 'invasion' of Chinese. They are in no way Chinese ethnically, culturally, or linguistically, and yet they are subjected to the laws of a government several thousand miles away who really only pays attention to this outback province when it comes to discussing Xinjiang's large reserves of oil. Urumqi, however, is filled with both Han Chinese and Uighur people (as well as other minorities mixed in between) living back to back, and its interesting to see the two cultures interact (and I'm sure clash in my instances) daily on the streets of this rather beautiful city. The weather in Xinjiang is the first thing that I really took a liking too, as even in the middle of summer, a cool breeze lilts through the city streets and brushes up against your skin. The skies are a rich shade of blue, and I'm told the sun is almost always out pouring golden rays of sun down on this city. The several days I was there were all like this. At first glance, the city itself looks just like any other Chinese city with its skyscrapers clustered together in various parts of the city and neon lights reflecting the colors of Easter eggs in the night sky. On closer glance though, one begins to notice very major differences. First and foremost, Urumqi is incredibly clean (yes, again, on a Chinese scale, but still rather impressive for any major city) and orderly. It also has a much newer and fresher feel, as much of the development here seems to be newer than many parts of China. And as you begin to walk through the streets and really immerse yourself in the city, you begin to understand just how different it is from anywhere else you've ever been in China. Almost every sign on every little shop and vendor cart is written in both Chinese characters and the Uighur script, a close relative to Arabic. One street vendor is Uighur and selling mutton shish-kebabs, and the woman next to her is a Han Chinese hocking her stinky tofu. In the night markets you see a table of Uighurs munching away on a goat head (yes, a local specialty, and yes, lots of people eat it in Xinjiang) and conversing rapidly in their Turkic-derived local language, while at the table next to them a bunch of Chinese guys down their beers (a no-no for Muslims) and jabber away in their northwest Mandarin accent. The city seems to merge the two cultures pretty harmoniously, and it certainly felt like a pretty laidback, easy going city to me. Best of all, Urumqi has tons of Kawas. Don't worry, I didn't know what it was either until I got to Urumqi, but it's one of the most delicious alcoholic beverages I've ever had. Evidently it's a mix of honey and beer, which doesn't sound at all like a good idea but turns out to be fantastic. Best part of all is that a pint of the stuff on tap is 2 yuan (just under 25 cents). I definitely liked Urumqi!

There's a place far from Urumqi in the westernmost reaches of Xinjiang, near the borders of what I often refer to as the Stan countries (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan... This guy Stan must have been incredible to have so many countries named after him, but I can't seem to find him listed in any of the history books). It's been a vital link for trade and commerce along the Silk Road for several millenia, and it's name still conjures up images of camel caravans, desert traders, and ancient relics. The city I speak of is known as Kashgar, and the area around this city comprising the western Tarim Basin is known as Kashgaria. It still serves as an important trading post for people from all over Central Asia and western China, and is a very strong center of Uighur culture. Since the railroad connecting Urumqi and Kashgar was completed in 1999, there has been a large migration of Han Chinese to this area (they go pretty much anywhere money can be made), but this is still very much Uighur country and Mandarin is definitely not the lingua franco around these parts. But this wasn't what really attracted me to this distant destination. Oh no, Xinjiang has plenty of 'Uighur cities' I could visit, and most of them are much closer to Urumqi. There was a much stronger force calling me to Kashgar, and it's name was the 'Sunday Market.' It turns out that Kashgar has far from abandoned its historical position as a major trading post, and this is most apparent on Sundays when tens of thousands of people flood into the old part of the city to buy and sell everything from fur hats to intricately designed knives. It's an orgy of riotous colors and utter chaos, and for this traveler and his camera, it spelt paradise. After the beautiful minority Sunday Market in Xishuangbanna the month before, I definitely couldn't pass up on this one.

As I mentioned, this mythical city of lore and legend is on the far western end of Xinjiang, near the borders of Tajikistan and Pakistan. In fact, the famed (and absolutely gorgeous) Karakoram Highway that runs into Pakistan begins here. This presents a minor problem in that Urumqi is much further northeast in Xinjiang, and Xinjiang is about three times the size of Texas (yes, pretty hard to believe, eh?!). As I mentioned, there is a train now connecting the two cities, but during peak season it's next to impossible to get sleeper tickets within a week of departure, and I wasn't too interested in doing the hard seat thing again and sleeping amongst the dead bodies. So I opted for the sleeper bus option, being told it took a mere 24 hours to reach Kashgar, only an hour longer than the express train. I left on a sunny Friday afternoon about 1PM, expecting to be there Saturday about the same time. The bus looked almost brand new, and was in rather pristine shape inside and out, much to my liking. As we pulled out of the bus station, I was laughing at the Korean guy I'd met on the way to Turpan and run into randomly the night before in a night market because he had chosen the hard seat option on the train. What a sucker. I was living it up on my plush air-conditioned sleeper bus, and as an added bonus there were about four young Uighur girls in the bunks in front of me. I figured this might be one of the more enjoyable 24 hour bus rides I'd ever had in China. Oh was I ever so wrong.

Not even two hours outside of Urumqi, where the landscape was already as barren and desolate as a drive through West Texas along I-10 (minus the signs for 10-lb steaks that are free if you eat them in one hour or less... that idea hasn't caught on yet in Xinjiang, although I'm working on it... if they can start gaining a superiority complex about their province much like we Texans have back in America, I figure they'll be the coolest place in the country before too long... or maybe they just need to all buy handguns to gain the respect of the rest of the country), we pulled into a small town along the highway and the driver backed our massive bus into a small repair yard. I hadn't noticed the bus doing anything funny so far, but it appeared we needed to have something fixed. As there was hardly a Chinese to be found on our bus, the Uighur driver told everyone in his native tongue that we'd be stopping for a few hours to fix a problem. I didn't catch any of this of course, but stayed put on the scorching hot bus anyway in hopes that whatever we were doing would be done soon. As more and more of my fellow passengers got of the bus to walk around though, I began to wonder. Finally the young Uighur girl in the bunk in front of me turned to me and started making a circular motion with her hand in below her face. I didn't know if she was indicating that she wanted to throw up on my feet or was just trying to tell me what was wrong with the bus. I stared at her with the stupidest look at could manage, indicating that her attempt at communication was failing miserably and that I would not be very happy if she hurled on my feet. At this point her friend in the bunk next to her, also young and vuluptuous, began to make the same motion as her friend, only a bit more vigorous in her movements. My stupid look got even stupider, and this only encouraged them to increase the intensity of their gestures. Finally, for fear of having two lovely but obviously sick young Uighur girls chuck their lunch on my poor feet, I screamed out in Chinese "What are you trying to tell me?!!!" "Oh, you speak Chinese," said girl number one in pretty passable Mandarin. "I was afraid you couldn't speak Chinese, and my English is terrible." "Oh, you speak Chinese too," I said with relief in pretty passable Mandarin. "I was afraid you couldn't speak Chinese either, and my English is terrible too!" This got them giggling, but I refrained from making them laugh too hard because I was still worried about them losing their lunches on my feet. "So what exactly where you trying to tell me just now?" "Oh, we were telling you to go eat because we are gonna be stuck here for two hours while they fix the bus." "Oh, I see, so this means eat in your language," I said, making very exaggerated gestures with my hand going in circles in front of my mouth. "Ummm, not exactly, but we didn't know how to tell you to go get food." I thanked them for their help and chatted with them for a few minutes before getting off the bus and going in search of my old friend the Internet. As I put on my shoes at the front of the bus, I thanked God for letting my feet walk away from that little incident unscathed.

Not knowing if it would take a full two hours to fix the bus, and definitely not wanting to be left behind in this little desert town, I decided to get to an Internet cafe as fast as possible and be back within an hour. I walked back along the road we came in on, which seemed to be the only road in this dusty town, but as I reached the bus station a few blocks down I realized there was an equally large street running out from the across station. There were five guys sitting near the intersection under a makeshift canopy selling ice cream, and I inquired about an 'Internet bar' (as they are known here in China... they are just big rooms full of computers with Internet connections, but there are no beers on offer and certainly no hot girls to be found), afraid that even if they understood Mandarin they never would have heard of the Internet, much less an Internet bar. "Oh, yeah, there's one right down the road aways. Just hop in a taxi and tell him you wanna go to an Internet Cafe," came the rapid reply in decent Mandarin from the skinniest of the bunch. When I told him I was worried about finding it, he hopped on a nearby motorcycle, pulled around next to me in a cloud of dust and told me to hop on. I hesitated for a second, but figured why not be a little adventurous. So I hopped on and in a few minutes we were at a rather large Internet cafe in what turned out to be a much larger town than I had originally suspected. I thanked the kid profusely, and as I watched his stick-figure frame drive off in the distance, I marveled at my stupidity for letting some scrawny 16-year-old who weighed half as much as me cart me around town on a motorcycle that weighed twice as much as me.

I checked my e-mail in a hurry, even though my inbox had nearly exploded from the massive amounts of mail that I had neglected since I left Chengdu. I skimmed through and only read the important stuff, occasionally turning around to stare back at the many people standing around staring at my computer screen (a regular occurance when foreigners venture into Chinese Internet bars). I grabbed a taxi back to my bus just to be safe, and paid the 1 yuan fare (about 12 cents... my cheapest taxi ride ever) upon arrival. Not to my surprise, people were still outside the bus waiting and several mechanics were busy at the back pretending to know what they were doing. I asked our driver, a large, rough-looking Uighur with dark, wrinkled skin and a bushy mustache, how much longer we'd have to wait. Without looking up he blurted out two hours and paid no more attention to me, which is good because I probably had a pretty stupid look on my face. When I had left over an hour earlier, it was already supposed to be less than two hours to fix the bus. Now it was a full two hours left. This time I figured I would take full advantage of my time here and fished my camera out from the bottom of the bus. I left my phone number with the two lovely young ladies in the bus (just so they could call me in case the bus left earlier... that's all!) and ventured off into the heart of the city. I explored for about an hour and a half, taking pictures along the way, and when I made it back to the bus almost exactly two hours later, nothing had changed. Actually, I take that back. This time the mechanics weren't working on the bus. They were sitting around waiting, just like the passengers. This time I bypassed the driver at the front of the bus and went back to my bunk to ask the girls what happened. Turns out they had to order a part for the bus and it still hadn't arrived. We were less than two hours from Urumqi and instead of calling another bus to come get us, they ordered a part to fix the bus and were waiting over five hours for it to arrive. My stupid look began to take on an angry tinge, but at this point there wasn't a whole lot I could do. So I went and walked around, taking some lovely pictures at dusk and trying to make the most of my somewhat unpleasant situation. I knew that as soon as the bus was fixed we'd be on our way without any problem, so I waited patiently.

At around 10PM, after some 7 hours or so of waiting, the bus was finally ready to go. We pulled out into the night and ventured back onto the highway, and I thanked God that we were moving again. It was only after about half an hour or so that I noticed how slow we were going. This didn't make any sense at all, as the highway here was quite good (although this would change a few hours further out from Urumqi) and the bus was supposedly 'fixed.' Yet we crawled along at about 35 miles per hour. This continued on for the rest of the night, but I didn't pay much attention and about midnight managed to fall into a light slumber. This was disrupted at about 2AM when the bus stopped. I looked outside and we were in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road, and I was afraid the bus had broken down here. Fortunately, we started moving again after a few minutes, but we were going uphill and moving at a snail's pace. The bus kept stopping and the driver would get out and take a look at the engine, then get back in and drive a little further before repeating the entire process. Not exactly an environment conducive for sleeping, but everyone else on the bus but me seemed to be sleeping just fine. We got stuck on one particular grade (which wasn't at all that steep really) and kept having to back up and get more speed to try and make it up, in the end taking a good 30 minutes of jerking back and forth to get going. After that I couldn't get back to sleep and spent the next four hours or so looking out my window into the blackness and being very thankful that I had brought my MP3 player with me. That and I was thankful for the three dancers in the beds right in front of me. Did I say that out loud?

This is as far as I've written. Maybe someday I'll update the rest of the trip, which took me to Kashgar, then on the beginning section of the world's most beautiful highway (Karakoram Highway that goes through Pakistan), then another 40+ hour bus ride up to Yiling (highly overrated!) in northern Xinjiang. Someday I'll finish this. Someday.

Written 8/23/04