Kezhou Hotel Urumqi

... into a magical Christmas card scene - as the blurb says:

"Nestling among Alpine scenery, with melted snow as its source, lies Heavenly lake. Its crystal clear waters are surrounded by green pastures dotted with the yurts of nomadic Kazakhs, and the silvery mountains soar into the blue sky, their slopes full of fragrant pine and juniper"

I couldn't have put it better myself!


So, let the photos tell the story:

... A route of over 4000 kilometres.

The Chinese are brilliant at building roads through incredibly difficult terrain - as we saw when we travelled on the Karakorum Highway from China to Pakistan in 2007.

For this entry I will let the photos tell the story!

... the military presence, especially as they were camped out in our hostel, but virtually every major street corner had armed soldiers on guard and around the Muslim areas their presence was increased massively. Urumqi is meant to be one of the most inland city it the world, i.e. the furthest from any ocean.


I submitted my final second visa extension here. The ...

... so much beauty... I was not ready to leave. I was glad I hadn't listened to the people who told me to stay away and glad that I had not been scared off. I had gambled and it had paid off. Xinjiang is one of the best places I have been to. But perhaps most of all, I was really bummed to have to say goodbye to LX. Somewhere along the line, he went from being my student to being my friend. A good friend. And goodbyes always suck. Goodbye Xinjiang. Hello Sichuan.

... the curiosity was even more noticeable when walking around with LX (Han) and Ma Jun (Hui) than usual. After being very nice, but glancing at me surreptitiously when she thought I wasn't looking, the waitress finally couldn't contain herself and the question "Which race is she?" burst out from her lips. I can see if I come back to Xinjiang I am going to have to have a t-shirt made with this information printed on it in order to stop people from dying of curiosity regarding my heritage.

... decided to walk about the lake instead of taking a boat with the rest of the tour group and opt out of going to the Daoist temple, which had an entrance fee, but then the tour guide, who somewhere along the way must have taken a shine to us, snuck us into the temple and back on the boat for free! Actually, in retrospect, it was probably because we had already been ripped off at the Chinese medicine shop. Tour guides get commission at those kinds of shops, so I guess she figured we had ...

Abundant Natural Landscapes Multiple Ecosystem Nationalities Wide Open Prairie, Forest and Snow-capped Mountain It is absolutely heaven for people enjoying horseback exploration Orign The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, also called Xinjiang for short, is located in north western China. Largest in area in all the province-level administrative regions of China ...

... puffy dress and wanted to be friends with everyone. These kids liked playing with cameras even more than the ones at the Heavenly Lake and there were camera flashes every as they ran around with our cameras. I ended up with photos of elbows, the ground, feet, and a bunch of myself because the boy I gave my camera to decided I made some pretty funny faces ...

... in Xinjiang, the food of Wulumuqi is also lovely: perfect dried fruit, flatbread as round as one's face, da pan ji, and lovely la mian (stretch noodles) everywhere. Pomegranate juicers are all about. We stepped into a little shop and drank the richness down. The ruddy-faced workers wanted to learn some English: how difficult the word pomegranate. 3. The Ughyer section of the city felt like another country. We saw very few Han Chinese while there. More to follow ...

... much we just bludged off Tiffany's (main claim to fame - weird, dwarfish Han-Chinese men run up to her, pinch her arm, and then run off) hospitality, feeling rebellious in that we hadn't registered with the PSB. Our flight leaving China was for the following Friday, so we booked a plane from Urumqi to Shanghai for Thursday. After the Kashgar train trip and back, there was not a reason in this big wide world that was going to get us on a 50hr ...