Xinjian Grand Hotel Urumqi

... in the world.<br><br>25th October:<br><br>Our last day in China, and we ended on a high note with a journey into the snow-capped mountains to visit Heavenly Lake, 2000 metres up in the Tian Shan mountains. We had read about this lake in 1987 in Vikram Seth's travel book From Heaven Lake. We had never imagined that one day we would visit it ourselves! We were so lucky. Two days before it had started snowing, and the whole area had ...

After breakfast, we left for Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Autonomous Region. It was a most exciting drive; through the Gobi Desert, in very windy, stormy conditions; on a fantastic highway [312] which stretches all the way from Shanghai to the border with Russia in the ...

... we were a little bit more cynical about it. <br><br> <br>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. <br><br>We headed to ...

... Next on the list was drinking slushies and beer in the park, then KTV. We figured an hour of KTV would probably do the trick, but ended up yowling away for about 3 instead. Finally, after noodles and beer we parted company. I was extremely happy to have met Ma Jun and sad to see him go. The next day, LX and his uncle took me to the airport. I was already out of sorts in the morning. I had had a fantastic time in Xinjiang. I had met so many lovely people ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... her to help me send a message to my Mum telling her I was fine, could not call out and to tell her the hotel number. JV was one of the few people in China who knew for sure where I was, which was why I called her. I didn't want to go getting even more people worried about me being here in Xinjiang. She readily agreed, but unfortunately while I could talk to JV and JV could talk to my mum, Mum and I still couldn't manage to talk to ...

urumqi at last (pronounced wurumuqi) i actually like this town. you can see blue sky above the skyscrapers, it has an incredible restaurant selection (several kfc's unfortunately), and a traditional uyghur part of town. the uyghur are the traditional ...

... picture. When I got to my floor, I found out that I had to get the floor attendent to unlock my room door every time I needed to get back in to my room. I suspect that this place is so untrustworthy that the management do not trust that you won't copy the key to try and get in later. Basically the Xinjiang Hotel is a really tired, rundown hotel that has not seen any improvements in the last few decades. Imagine ...

... saw a guy making dozens of them by just wetting lumps of dirt, chucking them in a mould and letting the sun bake them for a few hours. Not a lot of rain up this way obviously. We didn't realise at the time, but most of the buildings we were walking past were for drying grapes to make raisins. Obviously a popular area for raisins as well. Wandered back to town slowly, stopping for a quick dip of the feet in a ridiculously cold irrigation channel ...