The Trans-Asia Trek

And then the time will come for you to leave Turpan. Like awakening from a dream, the cheery villages and vineyards dry up around you and the freezing desert compasses you about once more. I left the oasis of Turpan by wandering along the foot of the Flaming Mountains to Pichan (Shanshan, 鄯善), a journey which should only take a day or two but ended up taking four or five, due to a series of interesting things that I kept stumbling on and wandering off to investigate.

I arrived in Tuyuq (Tuyugou, 吐峪沟) in the middle of the night and was promptly invited in by a very friendly and interesting Uyghur chap, who sat me down by the stove in his living room and told me strange tales of weapons testing in the desert to the south, how his father told him stories of the first nuclear tests and how everyone was told to hide inside that day, how there were places in the Taklimakan now where you could go and pick up unexploded mines and hand grenades out of the sand. Up at the head of the village, he told me, were some ancient houses that tourists often went to, along with some shrines and Buddhist caves.

That morning I wandered up there, where a river flowed out of a canyon in the Flaming Mountains, and the ancient town of Tuyuq sits on hillsides before the cliffs.

The place receives a trickle of tourists; for an entry ticket of twenty kuai you can wander in, down through winding streets to the mosque and up onto the hillsides beyond.

Above the town, accessable by a flight of stairs that climbs up through old graveyards, is the large green dome of the Khojam Mazar.

Within the Mazar (tomb) is legendarily contained the bones of one Yemunaiha (叶木乃哈, presumably a transliteration of something in Arabic, but I’m not sure what). According to the explanatory material at the shrine itself and corroborated by the Baidu Encyclopedia (sort of the Chinese Wikipedia, from such do I get my information,) Yemunaiha was a early 8th century Yemeni missionary who traveled with seven disciples to Xinjiang. After enduring many hardships, they at last arrived at Tuyuq and made their first convert, a local shepherd. Here they and their new flock settled down, the first Muslims in Xinjiang, and their bodies are interred beneath the green dome of the shrine. According to a chap I met beneath the shrine, they are not dead but sleeping, someday to awake. It is one of the most holy places in Central Asia, and pilgrims travel to the place from all around Xinjiang, the ‘Stans, and Islamic China.

A few carloads of devotees showed up while I was there and climbed up to the little arched antechamber of the shrine, men in skullcaps and beards, women wrapped in skirts and severe headscarves. While I watched curiously from the hillside above, they slaughtered a chicken and then settled themselves into a westward facing room and began to pray. There was something faintly eerie, faintly fantastical about the place, with the queer little tumuli lying all around it, above it the huge red cliffs, beneath the crumbling alleys of Tuyuq. The sacrificed chicken, the scraps of votive cloth tied along the walls of the shrine enclosure, and the presence of ancient Buddhist grottoes (now closed to the public) just up the valley made it hard to believe that this place was holy only because of the Islamic saints supposedly buried there. On the wind was a palpable sense of oldness, of strangeness. The shrine itself was locked. I walked down thoughtfully.

I went across the desert at the foot of the mountains for a while until I got to some oil wells and then hitched to a town called Lukchen to spend the night, then hitched back to where I’d left off the next morning. Walking out along the highway that led to Pichan, I could see the snowy dunes of the Kumtagh desert rising off to the south. The Kumtagh (库木塔格 I think, in Uyghur it just means “Sand Mountains”) is a massive field of dunes, perhaps 120 kilometers across, that pushes up against the base of the Flaming Mountains to the north and dead ends into the desert flatness of the Taklimakan to the south. Liking the idea of climbing up some sand dunes, I made my way over to the edge of the dunes and wandered up.

I didn’t end up finding my exhausted way out again until four or five that afternoon, having at first wound deeper into the desert than I’d quite realized. I camped out in a hidden flat surrounded by sand dunes that night, and when I awoke the desert was glowing pink in the soft dawn light, glittering with frost.

That day a wind was blowing and and my hands ached with coldness all day. Fourteen kilometers away from Pichan city I spotted niches carved into a cliffside. At this moment my good friend and former Trans-Asia-trekking buddie Avi chose to drunk-dial his lady friend in Beijing and got my number instead, so we had a talk while I headed for the cliffs. I crossed the river and made my way through a little Uyghur village to the foot of a graveyard there. A man out playing with some children assured me that I could go up if I liked, it was, he said, simply a place where the dead were put. Above, accessed by little switchbacking paths that ran across the slope beneath the cliff face, were a series of queer little niches. Some of them had obviously been sealed up and used as graves; recent dates were printed on them. Others seemed a bit more ambiguous. Little scraps of prayer cloth fluttered in the chilly wind. I had seen these before: It is one of the oldest traditions of Central Asia to tie scraps of cloth at holy sites. Three or four times in my travels, in remote places in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang I’d seen trees hung with white scraps, usually over holy springs. Like many ancient Central Asian things, the practice survives best in a slightly mutated form in Tibet, in the form of prayer flags.

Around this point my phone ran out of batteries and my impromptu heart-to-heart with Avi came to an end, standing high up on the frigid slope, overlooking the tombs, the little village beneath, wreathed in hearthsmoke, the whole wide valley of houses and dry vineyards, the dunes of the Kumtagh spilling down towards the river, and beyond, grizzled desert hills, white winter sky. Down below the niches on the cliff face was a little shrine of white, chalky clay. The base of the dome was adorned with ram skulls, another characteristic mark of old holy places in Central Asia.

Inside a small enclosure was a flagpole tied with more scraps and a door that led in, blocked by boards and a carpet hung over the door. It was possible to move the carpet aside a bit to get a view of the little shrine room inside, carpeted, facing Mecca.

That afternoon I walked into the town of Pichan and was given a hotel room with a computer in it for 120 kuai, where I wrote these last three blog posts. Beyond the oasis of Pichan there is three hundred and fifty kilometers of desert to Qumul (Hami, 哈密), the last city in Central Asia, and beyond it another four hundred or so kilometers of empty Gobi to Dunhuang (敦煌), the first town in China and the gateway to northern Tibet. The only way to get there is to walk down the highway. I have a month’s walking time left; tomorrow morning I’m going to drop everything I can out of my pack, stove, tent, snowshoes, spare clothes, books, and see if I can make it in one marathon push to Dunhuang by mid February. I can see the end of Central Asia from here – and I’m feeling lucky. God willing, the next post will be from Dunhuang!

After a quick swing through Urumqi, I took a bus back to Dabancheng where Jasper and I had set out the summer before. I spent the night in a field outside of the town and a long day’s walk the next day brought me out onto the open, snowy desert on one of the high plateaus there, where camels wandered scenically beneath snowy slopes.

I spent the night in an abandoned herder’s shack with no untoward incidents and woke up with the high crags of the Boghda Tagh glowing far off across the desert plateau. Leaving the road, I set out towards the mountains to the south, meeting on the way a Kazakh chap on a horse.

He’d rode up from the village of Aksu (about twenty kilometers away) that morning to check on his camels, which were pastured about the foothills of the mountains. He accompanied for me a while and pointed me towards a spring, and then galloped off after his flock.

I went on climbing up into desert foothills, and came at the afternoon to a massive, rocky pass overlooking the whole desert plateau, dropping down into the haze towards Urumqi in the north and lost in a dazzle of snowy slopes to the south.

I walked down through freezing canyons and came out onto the empty desert by dusk. I was weirdly full of energy. I followed jeep tracks across the blackness until twelve or one, pitched my tent, and was up at dawn again. Walked down across empty desert and dry, silent orchards through the day to come to a town on the railway tracks by afternoon, where some friendly Chinese folks in a shop gave me directions and then, my body aching but not feeling any need to stop, went on into the empty desert. Night came there and I was filled with an extraordinary exhileration, stumbling over an endless black plain of broken gravel beneath the dark, hazy stars. I sat laughing in the dark, looking at constellations and wondering what everybody else in the world was choosing to do with their lives if not this, and then stumbled and staggered and tripped for another three or four hours until I came to a broken canyon and, unable to find my way in the dark, pitched my tent. Then the next day I got to Turpan, which is the end of the Tian Shan, an ancient silk road city, and deserving of a post of its own.

Urumqi is cold and snowy in december. The sky in the lowlands is covered perpetually in a haze of whiteness from which snowflakes unceasingly flutter down. The whole of Xinjiang is white and gray and silent. I spent a day sulking in Urumqi, feeling old and tired at the idea of setting out on the road again and hanging out in a hostel with a sort of bemused German Turkologist who was going off to the Altai to study Zhungarian Tuvans and professed to dislike Turkic languages intensely. After that I took a bus to Shawan and a taxi up to where Jasper and I had left off in the summer and started walking.

What had defeated Jasper and I during the summer was the dusty windings of what the locals refer to as the Guofang Dao (国防道), the National Defense Road, a disused dirt track that coils through the northern foothills of the Tian Shan. While the numerous access roads that run up into the mountains are well paved and well maintained, the Guofang Dao itself appears to have been generally abandoned due to its remote and impracticably indirect switchbacking through the rolling, corrugated hills; presumably if China ever gets invaded by the reconstituted Soviet Union and the highways and rail lines that run across the lowlands thirty kilometers to the north are bombed into unusability by the enemy, the People’s Liberation Army will outflank the invaders by means of this ingeniously situated road. The road is generally useless for any other purpose (almost all of the settlements in these foothills are connected by direct routes to the lowlands and have no need of it) other than to people like myself who are disallowed into the more interesting parts of the Tian Shan because of their nationality or snow conditions and need to somehow cross the province of Xinjiang on foot. The thing is dotted with destitute little Kazakh herding hovels and scenically placed graveyards. In summer it is hot and dusty and interminable and in winter it is wind-blasted and incredibly, unbearably cold. Daylight, and warmth, lasts from around ten AM Beijing time to six thirty, meaning that the walking day is extremely short. When dark falls the temperature drops like a hammer to below -25 celsius (-10 F). Jasper and I had given up walking on it due to heat, general exhaustion, and the lure of cool and rainy Tibet; there was a gap of a two hundred or so kilometers still left to walk, fourty or fifty of them along the Guofang Dao and the rest by other means.

I quickly became disenchanted with the idea of actually sleeping in my tent, which was a flimsy summer contraption which had a fly that didn’t come within a foot of the ground and thus wasn’t actually possible to set up properly at all. The second night, some police who’d apparently heard that there was a foreigner walking about came and found me in a little village called Anjihai (安集海). When I’d convinced them that I didn’t need a ride anywhere, they talked me into the house of a Han Chinese farming family, where we ate potstickers and I lent a five year old girl my camera, to chaotic results.

By evening the next day I was still not much in the mood for sleeping outside. When the sun went down I went over to one of the abandoned herding shacks that Kazakhs use in the summer, unwound the bit of wire that was holding the door closed, and went inside. The house was just a little mud and plaster-walled room with a dirt floor and a small fire pit, divided by a raised platform on which in summer would be spread carpets and blankets for the herders to sit and sleep on. The windows were just wooden frames over which was spread a sheet of translucent plastic that flapped and rattled in the wind. I spread out my mat and bag on the floor, pulled out my book and read for a while as it got cold, and then went to sleep.

At about twelve or one I heard footsteps in the snow outside. I sat up in my sleeping bag and listened. The footsteps came up to the door and stopped. Thinking it must be a herdsman come back to his shack for the night, I called out in Chinese, “Hey, who’s out there?” but there was no response. The footsteps slowly moved off, circling the house once and then returning to the door. I called out again, thinking that the Kazakh outside must not understand Mandarin, but again there was no reply. Suddenly, a massive shadow passed in front of the moonlight coming through the plastic-wrap windows. My heart was pounding; the shadow was far taller and broader than a man. It must be someone on horseback. Being attacked in the night is the walker’s constant nightmare; I quietly pulled myself out of my sleeping back and forced my frozen boots on. Outside, suddenly, I could hear more footsteps. Another massive shadow passed in front of the window, and then more. A whole half dozen men on horseback, circling the house, now congregating in front of the door. I shouted out again but there was only silence. It had to be a posse of Kazakhs who’d seen me walking and come down on horseback to rob me. I took my stick and I took my light and went to the door. If I was going to get murdered by Xinjiang Kazakhs (not even Kazakhstan Kazakhs, a far superior group of people in my opinion) I would at least die like a man. The door was just held shut by a loop of wire – I threw my weight against it and pushed the door open, shining the light out into the coldness.

Outside, in the moonlight, a surprised herd of camels struggled to its feet. I stood laughing with relief in the doorway as the camels burbled and farted and fled off into the snow. I went around the house once to make sure that there was nobody around and then, cursing all camels for scaring me that badly, went inside again. Soon the camels had come back and encamped themself in the shelter of the wall of the house, out of the wind. When I’d got sick of them unnerving me by rattling the door handle I took out a length of rope (it always does come in handly) and tied the door latch to a ceiling beam so as to secure the door and fell asleep.

In the morning as I was packing up a chap came around to collect his camels. “What on earth were you doing sleeping in here,” he said incredulously. “You should have come down and spent the night with us. At least we’ve got a fire.” When I told him how I thought the camels were a band of horsemen come to murder me he laughed. “The camels love this house for some reason. They spend every night here getting out of the wind.” I followed him as he drove the camels up to the road and then set out again down the Guofang Dao, reflecting blackly that by the time I’d quit the Tian Shan I’d have enough material for a noir collection of “Abandoned Kazakh Herding-Shack Believe-it-or-Nots” (See Jasper and my ‘The Strange Case of the Noises In the Night’ and ‘That Time An Extremely Intoxicated and Distraught Middle-Aged Woman Who Was Apparently a Hooker Crashed Our Borrowed Chateau in Middle of Nowhere in the Tian Shan’).

The next day I came to the end of the Guofang Dao, and with a feeling of victory had a pleasant lunch with a Kazakh family in a little town by the highway. Following their directions, I went down through snow-covered valleys to a little town and an abandoned military base on an empty, antarctic plane and then kept going across it to the edge of a massive chasm that cut through the flatness where I popped open the door of another little shack. I tied the door shut again and nothing untoward took place in the night. It took me most of the next day to get across the canyon, which I followed for a ways to the north and then finally crossed on the ice at the bottom. I was running low on food and had no water left, so I had a cheerless lunch of snow mixed with honey on the canyon floor and then climbed back up. I went out on snowshoes over an empty, windswept plane, where I came to a little Kazakh encampment and begged some boiled water off a grumpy old man who was awakened there by my shouting.

That night I pitched my tent on the dirt floor of a filthy little doorless shack, where wolf-tracks circled in the snow outside and the dust of excrement rose with every footstep. The next day, having fully run out of food, I walked down out of the hills to a little village where a group of excited Han farmers gathered to grin at me toothlessly and examine my snowshoes with an expression of awe and then caught a minibus to Wusu to buy food and spend the night. In Wusu I got turned out of several internet cafes for not having a Chinese ID card and a very bashful visit from the police, and the next day hitched back to the village, said hi to the same group of snaggle-toothed and enthusiastic old farmers who apparently just stood around and shot the breeze for a living in the intersection that comprised most of the village and then set out west across the fields. That evening the sun came burning through the white haze and lit up the fields of wild winter grain in gold, while beyond the Tian Shan shone white against the southern sky.

The next day all was dark and gray. I walked through desolate fields and farmhouses for most of the day until I came to the highway at dusk, where some friendly folks in a shop informed me that there was a town with hostels another eight kilometers up the road and so plugged along the highway margin for another two hours in the blackness and cold until I reached the place and a friendly little Huizu canteen and guesthouse, where I slept on a cot by the stove. Now there was nothing for it but to head down the highway; I walked beside the road all day, following the footsteps of a man with a peculiarly duck-footed walk, until I was abducted by the police at about six or seven that evening and taken to a town called Gu’ertu (古尔图) to be registered, take some photos “for mementos” and enjoined to spend the night. In the morning I hitched back and walked down the highway all day again in increasing cold.

At dusk that evening, near the turn off for a town called Tuotuo (托托), a chap wearing a PLA coat and carrying a broken backpack wandered out of a bush in front of me and set out limping down the road. I quickly caught him up; it turned out to be a massively large and ugly Kazakh man named Khanatbek (in Chinese, Hanati Bieke 哈纳提别克), who, as it turned out, was the man with the duck-footed walk whose footprints I’d been following for the past two days.

Khanatbek’s story, it turned out, was this. He’d been working in Wusu when he went on a bender one night and woke up in another town, Hongqi, without any of his money. Since he’d no way of getting any more, he decided that he’d walk home to Jinghe, a distance of over a hundred kilometers. His backpack contained a change of clothes and two enormous jugs of liquor which he’d brewed himself. Since it was new-years eve I decided to do a cheerful deed for a fellow walker and buy him dinner and find him a place for the night. We walked into Tuotuo together and ended up in a little cafe full of partying Kazakhs, had dinner while taking shots of surprisingly good alcohol that Khanatbek was pouring out of his jugs under the table and then, considerably drunk, ended up in a nearby hostel. Khanatbek took up wailing away on a guitar provided by the hotel’s fat and diminutively cheery Hanzu owner, drinking baijiu (Chinese rice alcohol and generally the worst single thing which it is possible to put in one’s mouth) that was provided by a Mongolian person who showed up for some reason, and haranguing the manager and his teenage daughters, who’d appeared to practice English with the American, who was desperately trying not to let on how drunk he was. After midnight I went to sleep but Khanatbek announced that he thought it unnecessary to sleep on winter nights generally and went on playing guitar and drinking baijiu until five in the morning, at which he woke me up by stumbling around and then went and peed behind the front desk of the hostel. I was furious, still drunk. “You goddamn Kazakh hobo!” We escaped. We sat out on the road in the falling snow for a while until things started to open up and then went and had breakfast. Khanatbek set a liter jug of baijiu on the table and sipped it contentedly. I bid him good luck and walked out of town hung over, in the heavily falling snow. I followed the road for a while and then got up and walked along the railway tracks in the swirling whiteness. I’ve no idea what became of Khanatbek, although it seems uncomfortably possible that he ended up drunkenly freezing to death in a snowdrift somewhere.

After a while with the aid of some yoghurty vitamin drinks I’d got in Tuotuo my headache began to clear off and I decided that I wasn’t about to vomit up my breakfast. In the whiteness and quiet I went down into a forest of saxaul (?) trees that sat in the snowy desert by the tracks and wandered there for a while.

I followed the tracks all day and deep into the night, as the snow kept falling, sometimes resting in tunnels under the tracks, sometimes crouching down on the side as freight trains thundered past in a whirl of blowing snow. At about midnight I pitched my tent in a field of snow and slept until it was light and then kept going, on the tracks for a while and then onto the highway again into the night, passing through silent, dark villages. I reached Jinghe at about nine o’clock and found a cheap hotel there, spend the next day eating and using the internet, and then set out again across a field of dunes, more villages, more fields, on into a flat plain of snowy desert in the haze of whiteness. I walked for another day until I came, at dusk, to the river that runs down from the edge of Sairam Lake, along the upper courses of which Avi and I had been thrown out that summer. There was a mine of some sort at the place where it turns west and rises into the mountains. I felt disinclined to get in trouble by going in and decided that it was good enough, maybe thirty or so kilometers from the random spot in the mountains where the border police had picked us up. I’d closed the gap I needed to close. I turned around and walked back to the highway, hitched back to Jinghe that night, bought a train ticket to Yining for the next morning, missed the train, found a bus, was turned out of every hotel in Yining for being a foreigner, decamped to Huocheng for a night, went back to Yining and unlocked my frozen bank account, and bought a ticket for Urumqi.

Next, Turpan, and the desert highway to the east!