China # 2 – Kashgar – August 2014

Back in the days of the Silk Road, Kashgar was one of the most important trading stops along this historic Route. Having survived the treacherous crossing of the Taklamakan Desert east of Kashgar, many merchants probably stopped here for weeks to bargain and exchange goods before returning home. In essence, it was a giant marketplace and bazaar which continues today. Our wonderful guide, Green, had some other ideas to explore and we followed her obediently.

We would be preparing most of our food on the road which included Green. As luck would have it, she was a pretty good cook herself. Our next stop was a giant produce market. Along the way we passed the hardware bazaar which is always fascinating. Wandering along alleys of “Old Kashgar”, we started to get a close-up look at the Chinese people, at least at this end of the country. They were Uyghur, an ethnic Turkic group.

Leaving Kashgar we started our journey southeast of what would be a series of superhighways. We needed to cover distance each day in order to keep on our route. We would rather have followed the many secondary roads through villages in the distance, but these main highways were protected and guarded by 2 or 3-foot metal guardrails and eight-strand barbwire fences behind them. We could drive an hour or two before there was even a place to turn off the highway.

We had hoped to stop at the famous knife factory in Yengisar, but we missed the turnoff and there was no way to make a U-turn on these highways for miles. We later suspected that Green may have missed the turnoff on purpose because Yengisar was an Uyghur Moslem town, and Green was a Buddhist Han. The majority of Chinese are Han. There had been some recent uprisings and it’s very possible that an authority ordered her not to stop as it might have endangered her and our safety or so they thought. (A political incident with foreigners needed to be avoided at all cost.)

We were starting to understand that China is not a unified nation. With so many different languages, conflicting religions and cultures it turns out that there seems to be a lot of people who don’t want to be “Chinese”, which represents quite a problem for the controlling communist government.

Then there was wild camping. RV parks or campgrounds were nonexistent, and as one overland traveler observed, if there’s a flat piece of land anywhere near the highway, someone is growing something. That was mostly true further east. Around 5:00 in the afternoon we would start watching for empty lots, gravel pits or ???. By 6:00 we got less picky. There had to be a dry flat spot for Green to set up her MSR tent.

Now we had barely a month to play, minus the two days it took to get into China and the two more days it would take to get out of China, (talk about bureaucracies), and unlike our normal mode of travel, “Don’t take the trip. Let the trip take you.”, we did have somewhat of a march route. As previously mentioned, we also had to exit China at an exact place on an exact day. There was lots to see over the next 4,286 miles (6,897 km). We were following the Silk Road and our Eurasian Odyssey goal of driving ocean to ocean, wheels on the ground, was in sight.

Without running on about all the incredible things we saw, as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. If you glance through this selection and read the captions, you will get a feeling for the experience we were having on our first real day in China. The first night on the road we prepared American style spaghetti, and Green was learning how to eat noodles with a spoon and fork instead of chopsticks. She was a real sport.

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China, The Silk Road by Turtle Expedition