In LA

The October holiday has come and gone. During the October holiday, tons of Chinese people get a week of vacation and go traveling. Lisa and I left Beijing and headed far West to the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. We stopped by Urumqi, Turfan, Kashgar, Lake Karakul, and Tashkurgan. That last town being only 120km from the Pakistani border. We stayed with a Uighur family in a farmhouse in Turfan, a Kyrgyz family in a Yurt at Lake Karakul, and visited the grand bazaar in Kashgar.

Because we travelled during the month of Ramadan, most of the people we met were fasting during the daytime. They would eat breakfast around 4:00 AM, fast all day, and then eat again after sundown. When we hired a driver in Kashgar for our two day trip to Lake Karakul and Tashkurgan, I felt a little guilty eating within his presence. I compensated by only drinking water and eating an unappetizing Chinese confection labelled “milk chocolate replacer” while in his car. If you ever encounter this candy, I would not recommend purchasing it.

The Kashgar Sunday Market, or grand bazaar, feels like a place left alone by time. Tens of thousands of vendors of many ethnicities travel to this silk road oasis once a week from outlying areas, many on donkey-carts, to sell produce, livestock, medicinal items, hats, shoes, cloth, huge 80s-era boomboxes, you name it. It is a great place to practice bargaining. Try to get that 180RMB shirt marked down to 40RMB for two. You’ll probably only need to begin walking away twice. It’s fun, and the rule.

If you ever visit China for more than a week or two, I’d highly recommend a trip to Xinjiang and other old silk road towns. It’s great to see a part of China that is so very different from the metropolitan and largely Han Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai. It is also interesting to be stared at — something I experienced several times in Xinjiang but rarely experience in the more international city of Beijing. At Lake Karakul a giggling Chinese tourist even ran up and asked me to stand next to her in a photo. It was a strange feeling to stand out as if I were some sort of tourist attraction. Perhaps that’s what the Kyrgyz people at Lake Karakul felt like when the Karakoram highway was paved and the Chinese tourists began showing up to take photos of the yurts they call home.

I’ve placed some photos of the trip in an online gallery.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 10:56 am and is filed under China, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.