Marco....

Iron works district of the old town in Kashgar

I'm going to tell a story. A long time ago there was a devil living in the Bin River in Kashgar. And there was a village nearby that was constantly harassed by this devil. One day, the devil threatened to flood the river and destroy the village and so the villagers sacrificed a young girl to appease it. One year later, Sulaiman, a young villager, stood out bravely to rebel against the devil. After seeking the advice from a local elder, Sulaiman trudged over mountains and across rivers to obtain some sacred iron ore from the snowy peaks of the Kunlun Mountains so that he could use it to forge a huge iron wok. Sulaiman tricked this devil into getting into the wok and the devil was so exhausted from trying to escape that he died. This wok was so big that it eventually formed the terrace of the village as the village became more prosperous without interference from the devil (I'm pretty sure this is how Burlington was formed too). Since then the village became well known throughout the region for its iron works, even to this day.

I saw this story on a sign in some back alley of the iron works district of the old town when I was walking through today. It looks as if it was made at one point to aid in tourism but the location appears to have left it in neglect. Anyway, the iron works district was very cool. Shopkeepers and blacksmiths still work with primitive tools as they chisel away at different metals to make wood burners and knives and tools. They display their handiwork outside the shops and work in the open for potential buyers to watch.

I spent the day today solely taking pictures and film clips. I went first to the old bazaar which, as advertised, was the real deal. Just as Kashgar used to be a main trading hub on the silk road, merging wares from China, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and India, so too does it feel today. Pretty much everything is sold in this market. And a lot of the goods were clearly products of different nearby regions. I and a friend from the hostel, Chen, walked around the market this morning taking photos of carpets, silks, boots, hats, and spices. But - massive disappointment - no sheep skin boots. I'll manage.

Persian rugs for sale at the Kashgar bazaar

Then I wandered around the old town for the rest of the day making particular note to poke into the quiet, neighborhoodly, alleyways to get some good photos. Most of the buildings were constructed with this pink, clay/mud substance and the alleys are almost monotonously this color. The exception were the doors. Each door was painted with its own unique and vibrant color. Sky blue, turquoise, cranberry, etc. and although the rest of the building's facade was bland, the craftwork of the door was particularly impressive. Also, since the walls of the alleys were bland, clay surfaces, they were graffitied everywhere with chalk drawings. They look as if kids just took chalk and drew pictures of people and dogs and flowers. The weird thing is that the pictures were just a little too detailed to have been drawn by young children and were often followed by words written in Arabic script (Uighur).

Chalk graffiti in an alleyway

Tomorrow I am back in planning mode. I've got one more day in Kashgar before I head on. I think Turpan next. I'm off to the train station tomorrow to check out my options...

Camels, doctors, and such things

The biggest Mao Zedong ever

Before I get to camels and doctors and whatnot I wanted to share another fun fact. Kashgar, of all places, is home to the world's largest statue of Mao Zedong. Located across from the entrance of Renmin Gongyuan, 人民公园, aka the People's Park, in central Kashgar, Mao looms over the old town with one hand, cupped, high in the air as if to say, "Yes, even you, Uighur people of Kashgar, are my children." I took a stroll to the park yesterday afternoon and snapped a few photos of old Mao, the only Chinese man in Kashgar (more or less).

Camels at auction

Ok, now to camels and doctors. As stated in yesterday's post, I took a trip today out to the Sunday livestock auction just outside the city. I went with a girl I met at the hostel named Hong Yin, a girl from Chengdu actually, and we split the taxi fare out to the auction yard. As promised, the auction yard was jammed full of Central Asian livestock and Uighurs eager to buy and sell. The auction yard was a penned-in dirt field. Along the pen walls were different places to eat, pulled noodle stations, steamed buns, naan roasters, etc. Within the pen were different partitions set up for each different type of animal sold. There were sections set aside for sheep, cows, goats, donkeys, horses, and my favorite, massive camels. We met a foreigner, actually, as we wandered around the grounds taking photos. He was an American named Jeremy from New York and he came with a Uighur friend to buy four baby cows. Interesting guy. His friend, whose name I don't recall, was also a blacksmith from a nearby village and makes fine knives with bone and horn handles from sheep. Pretty cool stuff. Anyway, we said goodbye to them and continued to snap photos. All was well and good and we stayed for a couple of hours when my taxi-mate, Hong Yin, wandered into a cow pen and snapped a few photos of these really enormous cows tied to a post when one of them turned around and stepped on her foot. Her boots did little to stop the full weight of that cow which come crashing down and crushing her last few toes. She took the pain well, but in the end we decided it was better if she went to a hospital to get it checked out - she couldn't walk. And since we were in the middle of the desert, we had to climb on to a mini tractor-rickshaw thing which took us through the dusty terrain back to town. We went to the "People's Hospital" of Kashgar and jumped through some language barrier hoops to get her an x-ray and medicine and everything. It worked out and it turned out not to be broken. She's just bed ridden for a few days which, for a traveler, is a nightmare, but better that than broken. All in all it was a good day for me. The auction was awesome and a few hours in the hospital helping out a fellow traveler is no big deal and all part of the experience.

Hong Yin's arch nemesis

Tonight I guess a lot of the people here at the hostel, some workers and some travelers, are cooking dinner to which I've been invited. I'm happy for the community meal and it should be pretty good, some Chinese, some Uighur, and some French cuisine. There is a French couple staying here too and their plan is to go overland from here, through Kyrgyzstan, to Iran, and then back to France through Europe, having started from Australia. They've got some pretty cool stories.

Tomorrow I plan to hit the big "silk road" bazaar that has been here for centuries. Maybe I'll by some sheepskin lined boots. I really want sheepskin lined boots...

I guess too I plan to stay here in Kashgar a few days and take it easy. I really like the hostel here and the one guy working in this place is probably the friendliest guy I've ever met. That and the internet connection here is solid and the food is cheap. A good pace to bunker down for a few days...

The American

I've missed a few days in posting so this one will be a little longer. It has been quite a hectic and very tiring few days. For one, when I was getting back to the hostel I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to turn on the computer and the last couple of days have been in transit. I'll describe the transit part later...

First though I decided to wrap up my Urumqi experience a bit early. To be honest there is not much of interest in the city that you can't experience better and more genuinely elsewhere around Xinjiang. The only real draw to the city was its diversity but even that gets better outside the big city. So, I saw the major lonely planet attractions (the international bazaar at Erdaoqiao was pretty cool), and then I left.

I decided to take the train next to the southwest to a place called Kashgar. Kashgar is singularly well known for its importance in the silk road trade and much of the city looks as it did hundreds of years ago. Kashgar is the last settled area in China going west before you've reached the border and so Kashgar becomes a launching point for travelers planning on going to either Kyrgyzstan or Pakistan. In fact, Kashgar is closer, both geographically as well as culturally, to Iran than it is to Beijing.

You should also know however that right now is the official winter holiday period for all Chinese people (certainly all students and most work places). So every ticket of every mode of transport is booked everywhere. So when I showed up to the train station in Urumqi and said I wanted a hard sleeper ticket for the next day to Kashgar, the woman behind the counter looked at me as if to say, "Seriosuly? C'mon, silly foreigner. You know better than that". So, realizing my error and poor planning, I checked for any tickets, seat or whatever, and she said I could buy a standing ticket. For a 25 hour train ride. So I bought that one.

The next morning I went to train station and waited for the train in the waiting hall and watched as hoards of Uighur college students filtered into the hall around me. Apparently they were all just on break and were headed back home. As I was sitting, one of the students near me asked if I spoke English and then we were talking awhile. He told me that most of the students here could not speak English, just Uighur and Chinese. But his major was Business English and he was the sole Uighur in a class full of Chinese students with this major. And his English was very good. His name was Maimaiti.

So, when the train arrived I dutifully took my spot in the middle of the aisle of the 3rd class cars along with some other very unhappy looking standees. And then the train started and I just continued to stand there accepting my fate for the next 25 hours. Then Maimaiti showed up from his car a few up from mine. He was wondering if I had any luck finding a place to sit and seeing I had not told me to follow him. Apparently he knew just about half the people on the train so he was able somehow to hook me up with a seat. That was a relief.

The train was unlike any other I had taken in China. Well, the train was the same, but every single passenger was Uighur. And almost all of them were college age students. So I was sitting in a group of five, 23 year old girls, one of them whom of which spoke English and she did a lot of translating for me. Her name was Songsa (which she told me means flower in Uighur) and she was an English major and was also just starting to learn Russian which also goes a long way in Xinjiang. They were all interested in the fact that I was traveling and after learning that none of them had ever left Xinjiang and most never will I was almost embarrassed to tell them all the places I had been after they asked. But they were a really fun group. They made me sing them a song in English (which was really hard for me by the way) and translate a joke for them into Chinese. They reciprocated with some Uighur songs. Their songs were far more impressive. It is a strange thing to say, but the Uighur people behaved in a manner much more relatable to westerners than the average Chinese college age student (I mean that not in a demeaning way, only to mention that it was a remarkable thing to notice). Often I find myself talking with a Chinese student and I just have no idea what they are thinking, through body movement or speech or however. But I knew what the Uighurs were thinking both through body movement and behavior even though I couldn't understand their language. Anyway, off point. The train car itself was a very lively place. The central Asian culture is very strong with the Uighur people and the whole ride was filled with music and song. A few of the students brought these instruments that looked like a mix between a guitar and sitar and they played and sang while others sang along with them. It was awesome. Everyone seemed to know these traditional songs. With the company and the festivities it was probably the best train experience I have had yet.

Uighur musicians on my train

So, I arrived this morning in Kashgar and since I got almost no sleep on the train ride last night, I crashed for a few hours at the hostel and spent the day meandering about the old town, the section of the city that still looks like the Marco Polo days. There are camels and donkeys roaming about the alley ways and the town genuinely has a market/bazaar feel. All day people are hawking goods in the streets. I feel like I'm a character in Aladdin except replace Arabs with Central Asians. Apart from the characters on the signs, you wouldn't know you were anywhere near China.

Today I just walked around but tomorrow I plan to head to the weekly livestock auction with a few people I met at the hostel. Apparently every Sunday, farmers and herders from afield come together in Kashgar to sell their sheep, donkeys, camels, horses, etc. at auction and it is supposed to a pretty unique experience. So to auction I will go! 

Sorry, last thing. The post is titled "The American" because I guess in every language on the planet the word for America is America (except Chinese, meiguo, 美国) and so I knew whenever Uighurs were talking about me on the train, which was a lot of the time, because I kept hearing, America, America, America mixed into their conversation. That and the side glances were a give away. They taught me how to say "I am American" in Uighur: "Men America-lik". Nice...

New Frontier!

(back date to 1/16/13) 

Sign with Chinese and Uighur (Arabic script)

Even Urumqi cannot escape the smog

Spices for sale at the Erdaoqiao Bazaar

After 47 very patient hours I have finally arrived in beautiful Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Province in China’s far west. Fun facts about Xinjiang: Xinjiang (新疆) in Chinese means new frontier and Urumqi is said to be the city further from an ocean than any other city in the world. Xinjiang is majority Uighur and the only predominantly Muslim province in China. Facts are fun! Despite the heated interior, the cabin was noticeably cooler when I awoke in the morning and as the sun rose it became more and more apparent how far north we had traveled. The desert became blanketed in wispy snow banks and white-capped peaks loomed on the horizon.

After disembarking I decided that I could make the trip to my hostel by foot. Before I left I had made sure to take photos of different google maps of the city that I could later bring up on my iphone and use to navigate my way. It worked out well enough but the hostel unfortunately was clear on the other side of the city and after two hours or so of walking I finally found it. When I first hopped off the train I had to brace myself against the change in temperature but after a few minutes of lugging my bag around the city I became quite warm.

The hostel is nice but pretty empty. Apparently people don’t travel to Urumqi in the winter.

I decided to spend the day walking around and getting to know the neighborhood. Urumqi is a very interesting mix of ethnicities. It is strange to walk around a Chinese city and see such a diverse group of people walking around. I’ve become quite used to the ubiquitous Han cities that make up the rest of China. It’s nice though because I’m starting to blend into the crowd a bit better here. The city is comprised of Uighurs and other central Asian groups and Russians. In fact, the written signs are changed here as well. In most Chinese cities, all official (and most commercial) signs are written in Chinese characters, pinyin, and English. Here though the signs are written in Chinese characters, the pinyin has changed to Arabic, and the English has been replaced with Russian. I guess there’s no better time to practice my Russian! And most non-Chinese here sort of refuse to speak Chinese so this might be a hurdle.

Later on in the day I wandered into a bustling, off the beaten track, Uighur neighborhood. I’ve never seen a place so non-Chinese in China. I found this neighborhood because I happened to see the top of a large green mosque in the distance and decided to check it out. After wandering around and hesitating to take pictures (it felt weird and somehow inappropriate to take pictures here for some reason) I stepped into a small Uighur restaurant with just a few tables and sat down. A few people were sitting as well and all had their eyes fixed on a TV in the corner of the room watching a Chinese version of “funniest home videos”. I ordered while some of the men were peering through the window from the kitchen and laughing at a clip of some small dog on a bed jumping on his own face. I ordered skewered lamb kabobs with lamb meat, lamb liver, and lamb hearts, and although it sounds weird, it was awesome! I topped off the meal with a piece of flat bread and a roasted bun filled with boiled lamb and green onions. They eat a lot of lamb here...

Tomorrow I plan to do a bit of sightseeing. Apparently the international bazaar is worth checking out.

K2058 Part 2

(Back date 01/15/13)

As predicted, we did indeed break out into the vast Taklamakan Desert. And the further north we went the cleaner and more blue the air became. This is a huge relief to my lungs whom of which have gotten all too used to the tangible pollution in the Chengdu air! In fact, there was not even a cloud in the sky today, which, put together with the orange sand was really quite beautiful.
 

Taklamakan Desert view from the train

My hard sleeper cabin

Morning in Turpan, 2 hours from Urumqi

Nothing very exciting happened on the train. The lively bunch next to me repeated their first day's baijiu binge with the exception that today they were playing cards for money - like, a lot of money. It was fun watching them today passing around hundreds and hundreds of RMB. And I met some Chinese college students and talked to them awhile. I first met one of them, a girl who was sitting at one of the small side tables across from me, when she asked me (in Chinese) whether I was going to Urumqi. I said yes and we talked a bit about where I was from and other introductory bits. Then she asked if I was traveling alone and when I confirmed that it was just me she suddenly got super sad and seemed quite confused as to why I had no friends. I laughed a bit and assured her I had friends but that none of them were available to travel with me so instead she introduced me to her friends and we talked awhile until the car attendants turned out the lights and made me turn in. All in all it was a pretty cool experience. I found that if you know at least a little about the NBA, you always have something to talk about with Chinese college students.
Tomorrow morning I arrive in Urumqi, woo hoo! Before I left my new friend she looked at  me and said blankly I was not wearing enough clothes for Urumqi and that I will freeze to death. Hopefully I don't...

K2058

(Back date to 14 Jan 13)

K2058 Chengdu - Urumqi

Today was day one of my Xijiang travels - all of it spent aboard K2058, the Chengdu-Urumqi train. I hopped the train in the Chengdu North Train Station (a really impressive station actually - there’s a huge chandelier in the waiting rooms) without any problems or delays and said my last good bye to the city I’ve been living in for the last six months - 再见成都！

The train itself is much more comfortable than I had anticipated. All I was told about this train was that there was no air-conditioning which is kind of a big deal considering we are headed north for 48 hours. But actually so far the cabin is a cool 10 degrees celsius (50 degrees F) which is quite manageable. I have the top berth of a 3 bed bunk and my 5 neighbors are all quiet and elderly and just kind of sleep all day - works for me! The cabin beside me however is home to five men in their forties and they are wildly active. Actually, they brought two large bottles of local rice liquor (baijiu) and started drinking them as soon as we left the station (11AM)....they’re a fun group....

There was not much to see out of the windows today so I spent most of the day wandering up and down the length of the train which confirmed my suspicions that I am indeed the only non-Chinese passenger (not including, of course, the various Chinese minority groups aboard, which are many, Uighurs, and other Muslim minorities mainly). But it’s forcing me to speak Chinese which is a good thing! Tomorrow morning we break out of the Min Mountain range in northern Sichuan and head northwest along a track wedged between the Himalayan mountain range to the south and the Gobi Desert and Mongolia to the north before we descend into the Taklamakan Desert so the scenery should get better quickly. I’m hoping for a few good shots of the landscape from the train tomorrow.

And as far as I can tell there is not one outlet to charge my electronic items so I’m rationing my intake (which includes this computer)!

Time to sleep - more train stuff tomorrow!

Overview

This trip has been a long time in coming. I lived and studied in Beijing in early 2007 and quickly discovered the joys of travel. Since then I've dreamed of dedicating a solid amount of time meandering about the continent by rail, seeing all of what Eurasia has to offer. I've just finished a semester of Chinese language studies in Chengdu and am in my last phase of preparations before I hop my first train to kick start this trip on Monday.

The goal: travel from coast to coast by rail, Pacific to Atlantic, via the Eurasian continent.

The route: Chengdu, Xinjiang, Beijing, Russia, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, London. 

The plan: post an entry (with some sample photos) every day or so that I have wifi access. 

Mostly I am set to travel. My immediate concerns though are the impending weather forecasts and plummeting temperatures. With -20 degree celsius averages in Xinjiang, I should be able to get a good taste of Siberia there and make necessary adjustments in Beijing before I head north to Mongolia and ultimately Russia.

I just payed 320 RMB ($45) for a 48 hour, non-heated, hard sleeper from Chengdu to Urumqi, Xinjiang. I leave Monday at 10.30. I could not be more excited!

Stay with me!