Clean, cheap hotel. Forced into a burning hot shower before allowed to lie down – too dirty, the manager seemed to think.
In the evening, I’m invited by two young brothers to spend the next night in their house – an offer that I gladly accept, since being invited to locals’ homes is unusual in China. They both work at the ”Super highway toll station”, to quote the computer dictionary which we hence use to communicate.
Sleep for 10 Yuan at a petrol station restaurant (1st floor)/hotel (2nd floor). I chat with the 19-year-old son of the owner for a while, using a Chinese-English translation application on his computer.
Pleasant hotel just East of Yengisar. 20 Yuan.
It takes me more than two hours in Kucha to find a hotel which is cheap enough, yet still accepts foreigners. Before finding my hatch for the night – Traffic Hotel (it was situated right next to the bus station, thus the name) – I pass by one hotel where the standard rate was quoted for the hour rather than the night, and the light inside the room was so dim that I had to use my torch.
In China, reaching cities large enough to have 3- and 4-star hotels, but too small (or uninteresting from a tourism point of view) to have any youth hostel, I face a new problem. The government here has decided to ban tourists from staying at the cheaper hotels (3-5 US dollar), so that the local community can squeeze out a few extra dimes even from those who don’t need a satellite TV in their room.
So after an hour in Aksu, I realize I won’t find anyplace cheap enough there. I head out again from the city to the highway, and pedal a further ten kilometers before I finally find a roadside hotel where the caretaker doesn’t oblige the rules and lets me stay cheap (you can tell if they play by the rules or not, by whether or not they register your passport).
I’m invited by an old man – with a very elegant mustache – to both eat dinner at his house, and then spend the night there. But just as we’ve finished eating – dumplings with a vegetable stir-fry and some locally grown peaches for dessert – the police arrives. There are four or five of them, first checking my passport, then telling me to leave. It’s all part of the sensitive issue of the Uyghur minority – to which the old man who invited me belongs.
After having briefly flipped through the photos in my camera, the police tells me to leave for the next town, 100 kilometers away. I try to explain the impossible of reaching there in the bare hour of sunlight that’s left, but they refuse to understand. Maybe it didn’t help me that I acted stubborn; laughed at them? I couldn’t help but – nothing irritates me more than repressive governments, that can’t even understand their own best. Lacking any bit of sense.
I pretend to leave for the desert outside, but am able to sneak into a local hotel two blocks away from the police station – out of sight for the officers, who remain on their station courtyard, away from the street.
Stay the night with dwarf Zeidila in his roadside shack, 20 kilometers before Bkaharkolznan. He’s got some drinks and cookies for sale, but by looking at the battered outside of his shelter one would have thought that it’d been deserted many years ago.
From Samarkand I followed a quick half-day of cycling to the border of Tajikistan. There, snowcapped mountains began to frame the picturesque, green valleys I at first cycled through, leading me up to the Pamir Mountains. The latter is in fact a plateau at between 3,600 and 4,600 meters of altitude, with a much more moon-like, desolate landscape than the vegetated one down in the valleys, which rivers the plateau feeds.
It was one of the odd experiences of this trip, having cycled through numerous deserts, when temperatures now dropped below zero at night and often peaked at only about 10 degree Celsius at daytime. I had no clothing for that kind of weather – especially considering that this winter and spring had been the longest and wettest in 20 years for Tajikistan. But I waited out the rainy days, and invested in some made-in-China clothes at the bazaar in Dushanbe. It was just enough to make it through. And it was definitely worth it – absolutely breathtaking scenery, and great hospitality. I could finally conclude that hospitality wasn’t only in the desert – it’s simply so that the fewer the people, the more friendly they are.
After a week in those highlands, I slowly rolled down to Kashgar in China at 1,500 meters via a two-day trip through Kyrgyzstan. Kashgar is - with 250 kilometers to Kyrgyzstan, 400 kilometers to Tajikistan, less than 1,000 kilometers to Pakistan and 4,500 kilometers to Beijing – not very Chinese at all. Rather it is a main city for the Uighur people – one of the country’s many ethnic minorities – and spiced up by each of it’s close-by country neighbors. It’s also at great contrast with cities across Central Asia, with a great bustle instead of the previous’ tidy order. Anyway, I’ll write more about China – or it’s different parts – as I travel along. It will take between two and three months to reach Beijing – first heading northeast towards Urumqi, then straight east along the ‘northern Silk Road’ (in fact a highway) – in total some 2,000 or so kilometers of desert.
Last but not least, it’s fitting with a poem by modern Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri, without any comments:
“We should go under the rain.
We should wash our eyes,
And we should see the world in a different way.”
Reach Kashgar by noon. The city is much bigger and busier than I’d imagined. But the meaning of all the signs in Chinese are impossible to make out; the talk and chatting of people makes less sense than birds song. It’s quite relaxing to be in a busy city, without being able to understand what’s being said around you.
Anyway, after a few phone calls to a guesthouse I’ve been recommended, its staff comes out to meet me at a central square, and escorts me to the guesthouse. Time for Internet, shopping and rest-up before the two or so thousand kilometers of desert road which lies ahead.
Happy that neither the Kyrgyz nor Chinese immigration complained about me having two passports – one visa in each – I start cycling down towards Kashgar which is about two days away. First some great food in the Chinese border town: the Xinjiang province speciality ‘laghman’ (hand-pulled noodles) with a veggie-meat wok.
I stay the night in a small town hotel along the road. In fact, hotels will be dirt cheap through-out China and so I might have actually camped my very last night already.
It’s a rainy day – in fact too rainy to fit my gear, but tomorrow is Thursday and waiting another day here would be asking for spending the weekend at the border, which by then is off course closed. After 40 kilometers of cycling – including one yurt visit and one to a construction site for warming/drying up – I decide to hitchhike the rest of the way. It’s simply too cold with the rain – ironically, snow at 4,600 altitude in Tajikistan was warmer. The road is the worst so far this trip; reminding me of post-war roads in Angola, and most is downhill, so cycling would actually have been just as fast as the truck I go with. The scenery is absolutely breathtaking – very much regrettable to miss out on.
I stay the night at a very friendly border hotel for 2.5 dollars. I pray that my two passports will be accepted tomorrow – my Kyrgyz visa is in one; my Chinese visa is in another.
Before the border, there are some indescribable moon-like landscapes. Haunting beauty. I arrive at the frontier in time for lunch with the Tajik narcotics police: potato soup, bread and green tea. Just after the Tajik immigration is the climb of another pass, followed by a deep mud road down the green slopes of the Kyrgyz side. The latter’s immigration is another 20 kilometers ahead, and 25 further north is small town Sary Tash where I stay at a cafe for a small fee.
I met Canadian couple Chris and Margo, also on bicycle for quite a while, earlier in the day. Check out their website: http://candmwanderings.blogspot.com.
Next morning, we wake up to a clear blue sky, sunshine and untouched, chalk white snow – absolutely beautiful. The Caravanserai is so beautiful too, because it has helped us despite its simple structure and because it has stood proudly still for so many hundred years.
We put on lots of sun screen and pull our bikes up to the road again. 50 kilometers further on we reach the lake Kara Kul and the village with the same name, where we for ten dollars each get a place to sleep and food from a local family. In the village, there is also a shop, a bar and a mosque. The last two are probably the village’s most important institutions, and that is typical Central Asia.
