Tarim Hotel Urumqi

... 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!

My last day in Xinjiang was spent mooching about Changji with LX and Ma Jun. It was exactly the kind of day of doing nothing much in particular that I needed in order to wind down from too many days of seeing and doing way too much! First we went off for a big lunch at another Hui restaurant. Then as we dawdled towards a video arcade, Ma Jun saved me from having to buy a new back pack by getting the old one repaired (the one where the zipper busted just as I ...

... Chinese people show their affection through food. She was pretty keen on me and wouldn't take no for an answer. After I got back, LX and his friend Ma Jun (who is Hui) took me to a Hui market area selling traditional foods. The food was good but we got harassed continuously by two wasps that were pretty keen on sharing our meal with us. Plus I got stared at a lot again. After being mistaken for being Kazak or Russian (?!) for the past few days, I was not particularly phased, but I ...

... family. There was much muttering outside the temple from travelers who complained that the whole thing was a capitalist venture poorly disguised under a cloak of religion. Whatever, even Daoist monks need to make a living, I guess. However, feeling scandalized by the cost of incense did not stop us from making a donation so that we could beat the **** out of a huge bell overlooking the lake. It was supposed to be lucky. And let's face it, hitting noisy stuff is fun. On the way back we ...

... were green, covered with flowering petunias and the streets were clean and well maintained. The city is a fascinating melting pot of Uighur and Han Chinese peoples and modern sky scraper buildings sit side by side with mosques, old city housing and fabulous bazaars. <br><br>The most striking feature of Urumqi, and of other cities in the far west of China, is that most of the people no longer look at all Chinese. They are of course not Chinese but are mostly ...

... doing our own stuff, learning many new things from our range of BBC DVD's, internet and books;) For now well keep it short' but we'll soon fill some space up with stories about our daily experiences in Urushitty, as we call it. Love to you all! Carolien &amp; Jerry

A 24 hr train ride from X'ian lead us to the bustling metropolis of Urumqi. We managed to make a friend on the train, Qu (pronounced Choo). She helped us book a fairly respectable hotel downtown, and assisted us in navigating the Chinese telephone system. There's no standard from province to province, so every time we seem to switch cities, it's like starting all over again. Qu's English was more than passable, and as a student ...

... This is typically, downstairs from a very nondescript entrance, but it is one of the largest we have seen anywhere, full of locals playing combat and other games. The girl beside us spends about 3 hours playing a computerised "spot the difference" game. The system is quite sophisticated, with Y10 smart cards inserted into the floppy slot, and the time read out on the chip at the end for a refund. The first computer DP found had ...

This 5 day trip provided me with some idyllic R&R. Up to now China had not offered restful travelling. It was see a place, take a long bus ride or three, see another place, move on. And there were some long, long bus rides. I spent much of my time chatting with other travellers who were staying in a small community of yurts run by a Kazakh man called Rashit, getting over a slight ...