Final Post on our Xinjiang trip...

Just one last post about our trip at the beginning of the month to Urumqi, Kashgar, and other stops in the Xinjiang Province. What we may have slightly understood but didn't fully grasp was how much of the original Silk Road we were traveling.

The stops that we did - Kashgar, Urumqi, Turpan, Dunhuang, Jiayuguan, and even Xi'an (we will count our airline stopover, and we had been there before) were all main stops along the route that Marco Polo had taken all those years ago. From the Marco Polo hamburger we ate in Dunhuang to the livestock market in Kashgar there were constant reminders of how important these cities had been in the past and you found that you were always trying to see the cities as they must have looked over 600 years ago.

And then a final point about Xinjiang is just that it is incredibly far west, sort of like going to Los Angeles from Chicago, but because China only has one time zone everything seems shifted. It's about a 2 hour difference in time, the sun comes up around 08:00 and sets much later at night then you would ever expect. The local Uyghurs all talk on their own local time, which is shifted 2 hours, but hotels, the airport, the government, all of those items run on Beijing time. This can get slightly confusing, and that is the reason I use for waking Tina up too early only to spend time in the hotel lobby waiting for Hasan to come and meet us. Mohemmed told us that they have to always think about it, as when they are talking to any of their friends it will be in local time and then if they are talking to a Chinese or planning trips they have to revert back to the official Beijing time.

That's all, just some interesting facts and tidbits. With this I think we should be done with our Xinjiang posting....

Xinjiang Wrapup....

So, we hope you all enjoyed reading about our short trip over to the crazy Uyghur occupied world of North-Western China and the Xinjiang Province. Overall this is easily our best trip ever within China, and we are trying to figure out where it goes in our overall list of top trips. That's top trips since we've known each other since earlier Tina already had the pyramids of Egypt and I had trips to Saint Denis. It doesn't quite top Easter Island, but it's edging in on Mongolia and Argentina....

So, we would recommend this trip to anyone, as the tour we took just got better and better with every day. Maybe we were lucky with the weather, but it seems like out in this section of China you don't have the smog and pollution issues that plague the east coast.

What we will do is list our guides and suggest that you contact them - we can't say enough about them and how they would quickly adjust tour plans based on what we wanted to see...

Urumqi, Turpan - Mohemmed Ali
Mobile - (+86) 13999920477
Skype - Burket1129
Email - Burkut1129 @yahoo.com, md_burkut @yahoo.com.cn, or burkut1129 @hotmail.com
He told us not to post his photo since it would only act to break the hearts of hundreds of European women - we respect his wishes.

Kashgar - Hasan Osman
Mobile - (+86) 9982846633
Fax - (+86) 9982843322
Email - Kashgartour @yahoo.com or Kashgartour @hotmail.com
Website - www.pamirtour.com

Right now, as of 09.23.2009, the internet is still blocked in the Xinjiang province so we would recommend just calling them to make plans....

When we get to it we will load copies of their business cards up to Flickr, but right now I'm guessing that's a month away.

Get there soon.

Day 2 – Urumqi Regional Museum and Tianzi (Heavenly Lake)

After our interesting encounter with the cops, who basically told us we are no longer allowed to take pictures in Urumqi, we were quite happy to leave and head to Tianzi, but first, our guide recommended that we go to the museum.

Originally this was not on the agenda but Mohemmed, strongly recommended that we visit it. At this point Mark and I were pretty much done with museums, as we have been over exposed to porcelain from the Ming and Qing dynasties, Bronze pots, and ceramics, but this was different. Mohemmed explained that this museum had mummies. Now that caught our attention.

We arrived at the museum, and though large we only did a couple of the exhibits. Even Mohemmed thought it would be too much. The first part of our tour was the history of the minority groups that live in Xinjiang province. The best part was the exhibit that held the mummies. The guide from the museum explained where they found the cemeteries and others are being excavated as we type. The first mummy was a young women around the age of 40 who was buried 4000 years ago, though that is currently disputed by others stating this could go back 6000 years. The second mummy was a women who was about 65 and was thought to be of some influence due to her clothing. We managed to see a mummy who was thought to be a general, and the last mummy was a women who was an older gal, and was buried in a reclining position, knees bent and head propped up. According to the guide this was the position of choice to save space in the family burial plots. Due to the dessert conditions, these bodies became mummified. The found a cemetery in the Taklamakan desert that had over 1000 bodies, and assumed there are more bodies to be discovered.

After the visit we made our way to Tianzi, Heavenly lake which is located about 90 minutes from Urumqi. Now we can take pictures. We had a beautiful day, which was a nice and cool around 64F. We were thrilled. After a long summer of temperatures above 100F this was a welcome reprieve. We rode the cable car up to the area where the restaurants and souvenir shops were located, and grabbed some lunch.We ordered some food, and the manager kept telling us we needed more, and we kept telling her we had enough. Her response, “you have to, it’s a local specialty here in Urumqi” so we conceded. Well sure enough we had way too much food, though tasty we couldn’t eat it all, and we asked for a doggie bag.

Then it was off to see the Heavenly Lake. We walked about 15 minutes and were greeted with a stunning view of the lake surrounded by these majestic mountains. The sun was shining and although Mohemmed lamented about how slow tourism was here in the province due to the protesters/riots, Mark and I were secretly glad that the hourdes of tourists we were expecting weren’t around to obscure our photos. We managed to take pictures before we hiked around the lake. The lake itself is not big only about 1.9 square miles.

Not only was it picturesque, it was peaceful and the air was clean. We could understand why it’s called Heavenly Mountain and Lake.
After untold number of photos we slowly made our way back to the car, and headed for the airport.

The airport itself became somewhat interesting, due to the issues up in this area. You see many police and everyone is searching everything, so it takes a little bit to get through security. That wasn’t the interesting part. Mark and I arrived early, so we figured we would have time to start writing the day's blog and have a beer. We go to the only restaurant past security, and no beer. No beer? What’s up with that? So we try the little shops still no beer. Next option was water. Went to the store, and asked, and they don’t have it either, okay, so back to the only restaurant, and they too have no water. I asked them what's the deal, and the entire airport past security has no water, no beer, no coke, and no sprite. They did however have coffee or tea that they could make for you.

Yea, the only thing that we could say, is TIC…This is China

Day 1 - Urumqi, and an excursion we would rather not repeat...

If you’ve only got one day of sightseeing in Urumqi, we only had 5-6 hours of time here, there are probably better things to do then spending 3 hours of that time sitting in a squalid police station or, at least, we presume there are better things to see…

Let’s just back up a bit to last Friday, we were up bright and early and sitting at the Xiamen airport by 06:30 waiting for our 7 hour flight up to the far north western corner of China. This will be a long post, we will warn you of that now, and it’s amazing how much you can see and do in just 4 hours. Urumqi is the capitol city and our starting off point. We landed at 15:30 and were leaving first thing the next morning to move on to our next site.

We had heard the day before we left that there had just been some new protests and apparently something about the Han Chinese injecting Uyghurs with syringes. Now that we are back we can finally read reports of exactly what had happened. When we finally arrived in Urumqi our guide Mohemmed Ali, he tells us there’s a famous boxer with the same name, told us that there had been protests the last two days and a lot of the streets had been blocked off. He warned us that we might not get to see the local museum that houses some mummies for viewing because it may have restricted access.

Driving in most of the exits were blocked with local cops or what we presumed were National Guard dressed in riot gear. Mohemmed laughs and tells us that we may not be able to get to our hotel, but they have a backup if required. No problems, we managed to get to our hotel with it only taking slightly more time then it should have. Our guide left us with these fine parting words – “See you tomorrow at 09:30, you should be able to get some sightseeing done, with the police around you should be fine. People’s Square is only 3km down that street.”

So it’s about 16:40 when we leave the hotel, by 17:20 we are squished into the back of an unmarked police car alongside a resident Uyghur with two police dressed all in black sitting in the front and we are getting a view of the city on empty highways that are apparently blocked off just for police use. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself again, let me back up….

Just outside of the hotel the main road is blocked with a police van and about 6 guys in riot gear with their thick clear shields ready for action. Further up the main road is blocked by about 60 army men in camouflage standing behind some serious looking steel barricades, but while cars were not allowed we could walk on if we squeezed through an entry about two people wide. The streets were fairly empty for a Friday night, but seeing groups of guys with machine guns with their bayonets attached at every street corner may be something that keeps some people at home.

Walking on we ran straight into a market selling grapes, tomatoes, peaches, nuts, all sorts of items off the back of their flatbed tricycles. Behind them was a market of lamb and goat carcasses, all on hooks and being cut apart and then loaded onto smaller bikes that would quickly pedal them away to other markets or restaurants. This is what we wanted to see, and we were snapping away photos as we’re always doing. Walking out through the market onto smaller back streets, we were happy and figured that we weren’t going to make it to the People’s Square, but we would make up for it with stopping by a mosque or two...

We had stopped and where taking photos of a guy holding a lamb head in a pot of fire with some long tongs, while his wife pulls three more sheep heads (one with nice horns) out of plastic bags getting them ready to be next in line, when a girl comes up to us and starts talking English to us, much more then the hello’s we get from the small kids wandering around, and she points us in the direction of a good mosque to see. One of her friends says something to her and she says “Oh, I’m sorry to tell you that you can’t take any photos today. There are problems in the city and the police won’t allow it.” It’s then that we notice that all of the group she is with had little red armbands on, her friend say’s something else to her as a few more friends join the group. “Sorry my supervisor wants to see you, you need to follow me. Are you guys reporters?” followed by “You aren’t allowed to talk to any of the Uygher’s, no interviews of anybody”

Ah, now we understand, they think we are here to report on the latest issues that they are having. “No, we are not reporters, we just want to walk around and get some photos of the locals.” A five minute walk and we are back to the main street and then surrounded by a ring of police followed by a huge collection of the locals that all want to see what’s happening. A car pulls up and we are directed inside….

A 20 minute car ride later, along totally deserted raised highways (special for the police, we did pass through a few checkpoints before getting on the highway), and we are at the local police headquarters and directed into the “Foreign Services Department”, luckily the girl that had been talking to us they dragged along so that we would have a translator. She works in finance for the government and since the issues arose all government workers have been pulled into service to help patrol the streets.

As we figured they are worried that we took photos of the army, we show them a few photos and delete them for them. I’ve got two cards in my camera and had switched photos from one to the other in an attempt to save some of the urban tank and police lines in riot gear photos that I had snapped with the telephoto lens. We sat with 3 police in a really nice room, we explained that we lived in Xiamen and they complimented Tina on her Chinese. A woman came in, took our cameras, and walked away. Ah, no problem, just please don’t delete our market photos. We sat there for an hour and a half, answering questions like why we didn’t have our passports on us, how long we had been in Urumqi, and when we were leaving. The cop that had been the lead guy and had us driven over here started to get frustrated with how long this was taking, and it was explained that it was because we had too many photos to look at. We had only been out 30 minutes, between us we had maybe 100 photos, but then I realized that it was because my photos are shot in RAW so if they try to download off the memory card they can’t view them. They don’t know how to switch cards on the camera to see my other card and they need to find a way to convert the photos. They question why my camera had two cards and Tina’s only one – they presumed that Tina must have taken her card out. Tina suggested that maybe it was taking a while so that they could search our hotel room to see if we had been telling the truth.

Eventually they bring our cameras back, tell us sorry for the delay and while we tell them it is no problem and that we are sorry for the problems we head back to the car for a ride back to the market where we had left from almost 2 hours ago. We look at our cameras and luckily all of our market photos are still there, there were new files added on mine – so they found a way to convert and view the RAW files. Overall these guys were incredibly friendly and nice to us, other then the time delay which bothered the one cop more then us, it was just great blog post material. I can honestly say this was the best two hours I have ever spent in police custody.

We lost only our police presence photos, which they kept showing on television that night, and some of our time. They told us that we were not to talk any more photos, but our impromptu Uyghur translator told us we could probably take photos on the mosques. They were surrounded by more police so we decided not to take our cameras out, and the one had a Carrefour built into the back of it which seems to take something away from the whole thing…

The best part of the entire police excursion was the ride back, our new friend pulls out her cell phone and shows us photos of the riots that happened back in July “Here are photos of the Han Chinese with iron rods marching down the street attacking Uyghurs and destroying their shops. I slept in my office that night…” Wow, “Don’t show these guys.” I tell her gesturing to the front seat, to have her respond “Oh, no way… I can never show them...”

Good times, what a way to start our trip…

Oh yeah, here’s the best of the photos that met police scrutiny:

Local girl

Fresh lamb for sale
Roasting a lamb head
Preparing the next heads to be roasted
Local market - apparently just set up in the street due to the police blockades
Local streets

If you enlarge this last one you can almost make out the row of army men lined up blocking the street going forward, they must not have noticed this when they were deleting the rest of our photos.