The West to East China Trip
Trip Start
Aug 27, 2007
1
3
Trip End
Ongoing
Hong Kong, China
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
I am finally catching up with the travelblog... it has been a while but since I last wrote we have travelled across China from West to East, into Macau and Hong Kong - a long journey!
After we crossed the Torugart Pass with Helen and Sue, we finally arrived into Kashgar. The difference between the Russified Central Asian countries and China was palpable... wow! ... Finally back in Asia. I absolutely loved Kashgar with its fabulous markets, streets full of craftsmen doing wood-turning and metalwork by hand, and the amazing central square with a mosque at its heart, where all the old men just seem to endlessly hang out...
From Kashgar, we took a bus over to Hotan where we caught the infamous Sunday market. It is hard to explain but basically the whole of the town just goes crazy and you can't move for donkeys and carts and people selling all manner of goods, among them cattle and jade. I had some really fabulous street food here too - baked sweet potatoes and sticky rice with honey...
The next stage of our journey is a story in itself. Together with our new friends Paul and Helen we travelled to Cherchen, where, when we finally arrived off a long bus trip, we settled down to eat with an entire restaurant of people staring open-mouthed at us. We bussed it from Cherchen to Charklik, where Robin and I had an afternoon of playing pool in the open air. Then, the next day we took seats in a 4-wheel drive to go, allegedly, to Huatigou... But, these things just never go smoothly do they? We ended up, not in Huatigou, but in an unnamed mining town a few hours away full of cement dust and people walking around with face masks. Bizarrely this didn't seem strange for any of the other passengers, in fact we were now travelling with a Chinese man, who was also heading for Huatigou! So the five of us found rooms in a nice hotel on the edge of town (which was actually still being built), and holed up there. In fact, actually, they were concerned about us going out - if we had been journalists, this would have been a massive health and safety exposure because the conditions these poor people were working in were, quite frankly, abominable... In the end, together with our Chinese friend, we took a dusty bus full of the face-masked people to Huatigou and a taxi from there to Don Huan... wow, what a trip. I was also pretty impressed that we were able to literally flag down a taxi to drive us FIVE hours to another town! He simply drove to his house, told his wife, picked up a bottle of green tea and off we went...
At Don Huan, we visited the Magao Caves to see 1500 year old paintings and we also walked out to some spectacular sand dunes, where we saw some camels. As Helen and Paul had to sadly fly back to England, we continued on our way alone to Jiayuguan to see the end of the Great Wall of China, a great experience, and at Jiayuguan Fort I finally decided to have a little ride on a beautiful fluffy, white, camel ... Amazing despite all our time in Timbuktou I still hadn't been on one so it was great fun.
Next off, I took my first train in China... Wow, I was expecting something like India and it was just amazing with pillows, duvets and spotlessly clean - I was indescribably impressed.
