Sheraton Urumqi Hotel

... into a magical Christmas card scene - as the blurb says:<br><br>"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"<br><br>I couldn't have put it better myself! <br><br><br>So, let the photos tell the story:

... A route of over 4000 kilometres.<br><br>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.<br><br>For this entry I will let the photos tell the story!

... heading into Huashan) by a shoe repair/key cutter guy. A whole 2 RMB and my bag was as good as new. Then it was time for video games. Except for a period of time in Taiwan when I took to playing on the drum machines after work to cool down after a particularly stressful class, I have never been that into video arcades. Having said that, this didn't stop me from playing a shoot and kill zombie thing, then getting blisters from an over-excited bout on the ...

Finally it was time to go back to Changji. We stopped at a couple of shops (including a farm for deer antlers, boo hiss) on the way back, but arrived a lot earlier than I expected. The tour to Kanas was fun, I'm glad I went on it. Not only was the scenery spectacular, but I was forced to speak in Chinese for the whole time and I learnt how to split melon and pumpkin seeds fairly quickly, thanks to the auntie sitting across the aisle from Lirong and I who kept showering us in the damn ...

... doubt it. Tianchi was stunningly beautiful. We took a cable car up to the lake, which pained me when I saw the trail below us, but we didn't have enough time to walk up and even if we had, my legs hadn't recovered from Huashan oh so many days before, so LX would have left me eating his dust! I'm used to thinking about Xinjiang in terms of desert and oil, so it was mightily surprising to find, snowy mountains, forest and a glacial lake less than 2 hours from Urumqi. Being somewhat stingy ...

... authorities are concerned about its close geographic proximity to neighbouring Muslim nations, especially the more militant countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And sadly there is always underlying racial tension in Xinjiang Province between the fiercely proud Uighur peoples, the Han Chinese people and the Chinese authorities.<br><br>But for us, Xinjiang Province is a simply fascinating place to visit. The arid and forbidding countryside oozes with the rich ...

... mich hier schon fast in Zentralasien, es wird mandarin, russisch und uyghur gesprochen, englisch eigentlich nicht. Habe heute erfolgreich mein Zugticket nach Almaty gekauft, am Montag geht es um 23:58 los. Ueber 30h. Um noch einmal auszuspannen habe ich mir hier ein besseres Hotel gegoennt, das Hostel in Beijing war zwar billig aber auch laut. Mal schauen wann es dunkel wird, Urumqi hat die gleiche Zeit wie Beijing, liegt ja nur 4000km westlich ...

flew from beijing to urumqi this morning and had a layover. I got the boarding pass for my onward flight and was waiting in line for security... and said "I don't really want to wait HERE" so I went outside and it took all of one minute to find a taxi driver that spoke clean mandarin, and I told him I wanted to see all of urumuqi in three hours. he was really, really excited about it and got on the ...

Wulumuqi is also known as Urumqi (with umlauts on both "u"s) 'cos Xinjiang was only recently "liberated" and brought into China. Its story isn't well-known (like that of that other province for which everyone in the West seems to have sympathy) and I'm not going to tell it, but the main minority group located in Xinjiang is the ...

... of mainly hot vegetables and a cake, but can't eat any, and leaves to go up to the loo, while MP finishes his potato, rice and tea, which stays with him for a couple of hours. Decide not to go to Turpan today either, and to visit the bank and local museum in the PM, if at all. Repair to the cot to repair, hopefully. It has been a pretty full-on travelling programme, and hopefully a rest will do us good. By the time we get under way, we ...