Tu-Ha Petroleum Urumqi

... we were a little bit more cynical about it.


After a tasty dinner of street snacks and draught beer at the plastic tables in the main square, we headed back for some drinks at the hostel, meeting some more interesting people, including an American girl with the Peace Corps. on her summer holiday, a Canadian guy who lived in Almaty and a French lad making a film about the muslim community in Urumqi.

We headed to ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... guide, but I had kind of thought as much anyway after running to the bathroom several times in the middle of the night. It had been good to meet LX's friends and to go do something as inane as play pool. Wandering around Changji put me completely at ease and destroyed any last butterflies of fear I might have been feeling, but I was worried that my body was trying to tell me, in an extremely unsubtle manner, that something was wrong.

... were probably not indicative of all foreign media reports or all western opinions. He told me the reports were hurtful and prejudiced. I told him I was sorry. He told me of his friend's aunt who was beaten to death on the street, with half the back of her head missing when she was found. Of her husband who was beaten in the face and had lost his sight. He told me to stay off the streets after dark and to not go out alone. He told me he hoped I would stay safe and remember that the ...

... that would occur here some weeks later. But then again, we were tourists in a city of never ending tension between the Chinese authorities, the Han Chinese and the local Uighur people.

That evening we finally enjoyed our smorgasbord meal at the hotel. We left very early the next day together with our Bukhara Bellies back to Shanghai, and then Sydney via Melbourne and onto our nearest local township of Taree on the mid north coast of New South Wales.

... an attractive downtown brimming with imaginative (and, in some cases, gaudily colorful) architecture, and a snow-capped mountain serving as a backdrop for the city as Mt. Rainier does for Seattle. We also discovered that Urumqi has an exceptional museum filled with ancient artifacts from the region and an exhibit on traditional clothing of the ethnic groups that live in the region. (An exhibit on the Chinese military must ...

For the first time, I felt like I had bit off a bit more than I could handle. Urumqi (pronounced woo-loo-moo-chee by the Chinese) is the capital of remote Xinjiang Province in China's North West. It's basically Chinese Turkestan and borders all the ex-USSR 'stans (Kazakh, Kyrghiz, maybe Uzbeki, -stans). It also shares a border with Pakistan and Afghanistan and it's a fair bet that Islamabad is a lot closer than ...

... like the money will even go to the mosque anyway. But apparently it is a nice and pretty temple close up. Instead, we wandered around the perimeter, idly looking for ways in and checking out the grape farms surrounding it. Definitely a different sort of life here - seems to share more with the middle east than Chinese lifestyles. NZ is about as similar to the lifestyle here as China is. Everything is made of mud-bricks, and its easy to see why ...