Urumqui to Kashgar

Our first group breakfast and we met our new best friends at the buffet breakfast. The group looked pretty bleak and very “crunchy”. Before we headed off for the day, we attempted to ship Mao back to the states… $136! We decided to carry him.
In the bus, we were back on the road heading south. We headed to “Bia Yang”—a.k.a. Burt’s Yurts. A real Disneyland adventure with concrete yurts and gangs of Kazaks on horseback.

We opted to take a jeep (only 10yuan/person extra) to the waterfall. It was still iced over. The road was a challenge with huge boulders and a Kazak driver.

After the tourist extravaganza, we actually got a chance to visit a real Kazak family. We got invited in to see their house, meet the kids and get some sense of their life. We took Polaroids of the family and kids and they were thrilled.

Then it was back to the Overseas Hotel Restaurant. Lunch in group mode was a real eye-opener. Tea equals an automatic time extension to lunch.
After lunch we had time to see the Urumqui Museum, The Qu Bowuguan. It houses 2-4 thousand-year-old corpses, still intact down to their clothing. Their bodies were found in the Tarim Basin and are in a remarkable state of preservation due to the drying effect of the burial in a desert. Most interesting is that the high-cheekboned bodies in the museum are obviously Caucasian and that they were buried hundred of years before the Han Chinese can claim to have ventured in the area. The “we were here first” argument of the Chinese is questionable.
At the airport, the men check their knives at security. We were on a Tupelov 154…with no air conditioning, smelly Germans and a very heavy handed pilot. We got crackers and cokes and wonderful raisins.
We landed in Kashgar and were met at our hotel by dancers and musicians.

We checked in to find that at the “Semen Hotel” the beds have special dropcloths and special instructions.

We dumped the group and headed across the street to the Oasis Café for a few beers. It was filled with lots of western hippy-dippies, drinking beers and eating cheap food. The beers were 40 cents (3.5 yuan) and the schechwan noodles $1.00 (8 yuan), the chicken with green peppers 13 yuan…. our entire bill was $5.00. We met the “knife guy” who tried to sell us a Uighur knife and teach us a few Uighur words. Then we met Elvis; an aspiring Lonely Planet contributor and a climbing guide from North Wales. He gave us a ton of advice on the Karakohrum Highway.
In Kashgar there are no street lights…next door to the Oasis was Curly’s Video Emporium. In Asia- volume wins—all the TV’s were blaring English TV shows…