Grain Trade Hotel Turpan

... no colour -- reminiscent of the wonderful Ismail Samany Mausoleum in Bukhara;

We visited two ancient cities:
The Jiaoh Ancient City - and Gaochang. Both very interesting - we were able to travel by 'donkey taxi' ! It is a kind of flatbed cart drawn by a donkey.



The Flaming Mountains made ...

We left our mosquito ridden hotel and set off into the Taklaman desert. We had been expecting a lot more desert, but as is the way with all things Chinese development had been shielding us from the real desert. The mountains that run alongside the northern Taklaman desert are permanently snow capped and as such provide a ready supply of irrigation water. This water is of course grey and full of sediment. A fine state of being for irrigation as they are supplied with sediment ...

Tours were finally going out to Turpan, so LX and I had booked in for one the next day. They hadn't been able to run for the past two weeks due to fears that the area was dangerous. LX was pretty eager to go because he hadn't been there before. I was interested in going to Flaming Mountain (Huoyanshan, famous from Journey into the West aka the Monkey King) and Jiaohe Gucheng (some old ruins in the desert near Turpan). What we didn't realize (well perhaps LX did, but he neglected to tell ...

... 14 92;, יש לה מים בשפע יחסי.
העיר עצמה פחות מעניי 04;ת וחוץ משוק אין יותר מידי מה לעשות שם. לעו ...

Liu Chang has to fly back to Beijing for a few days for a meeting. We decided that I will try to hitchhike as far as I can before meeting up again when he gets back. After dropping Liu Chang off at the train station where he will take a train to Urumuqi and then a flight back to Beijing, I go to the intersection north of town where the highway goes to the direction of Turpan and Urumuqi. I hope to find a truck to take me to Turpan, over ...

... out in the hills around the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves. These grottoes were hollowed out and painted to honor the Buddha about a thousand years ago by the royal families of Gao Chang, then-capital of the then-province in what is now XinJiang. This was a few hundred years before the local people converted to Islam, the latest religion brought to them on the Silk Road as Buddhism itself had been before it.

The Turpan basin, though famous for growing ...

... north. The residents, who were ousted by the Mongols in the 13th century, lived far above the flowing waters, protected by high cliffs on both sides of the river. The main gates led visitors up through the residential districts to the government buildings and then out to the temple district on the very tip of the willow leaf . The monasteries probably housed tens of thousands of Buddhist monks, centuries before Islam made its way along the Silk ...

... it even got slower when I saw one of the road signs. Not that I can read chinese but I compared the characters to the roadmap I had and realised that it was 15km more than what we were told this morning...poo, bum, wee..I say! Especially when I looked at my speed, 18km per hour. At lunch it was confirmed that they had made a stuff up, I guess that can happen. So for the first time ever I put on my ipod, to keep me going for the rest of the afternoon. And no dont do ...

... I decided to stop and take another picture of the desert. I got off the bike and took out my camera. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. In the distance, maybe 100 meters away, there was a camel walking near the road. I looked more closely and saw the rest of his family standing together much farther away. I got back on my bike and drove closer. The camel seemed unfazed by the giant trucks, but when he saw me get off my ...

... park officially closed at 8pm but due to how far West I now am in China (& the fact that China is stupidly all on the same time zone when really for the size of the country it covers almost 4 zones) the sun does not set until about half 9, we luckily managed to avoid the security guardsand even when they did find us pleaded ignorance, pretending we didn't understand when they asked us to leave, it was worth it and the sunset was ...