Yambu Grand Hotel Kashgar

... aan, muts op, klaar om te gaan! Dat dacht ik…Frits heeft het koud gehad vanacht en wil niet starten. Daar staan we dan. Maar Angelique heeft een wonder-altijd-starten-middel en dat werkt!

Dan verder over die afgrijselijk slechte weg. Harder dan 30km per uur is niet haalbaar en dan nog stuiter ik van links naar rechts en bonkt Frits regelmatig op het wegdek door een kuil of een bult. De Chinese vrachtwagens zoeven ons met een ogenschijnlijk gemak voorbij. Vermoeiend it ...

... on tourists. On top of this, the army was everywhere: outside the mosque, patrolling the streets and, three trucks at a time, circling the central "ring road". Stictly no pictures. "Wanted" posters featuring the faces of those involved in the Urumqi and Kashgar riots of July also drew crowds looking for people they knew. Despite all this, the locals were welcoming and were getting on with their business pretty much as usual - though the tense atmosphere of ...

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I later found out that massage in a Chinese hotel involves a real massage and then an optional upgrade to a happy ending. The happy ending is not performed by the original masseuse. She calls in reinforcements via cellphone. That explains the calls in the middle of the normal massage. Fiona’s arrival meant that reinforcements were not called and the masseuse was not a happy girl when she left. Still I was.

Tomorrow we explore Khasgar.

... 30-minutes of carefully-tailored day-old (and then 2-day-old) information fed to us over and over again. Obviously there is much more going on than the government wants people to know.

Additionally, the internet went down on the night of the disturbances and stayed down throughout our stay. On 07-08-09 we checked our cell phone. Normally it does not work in China, but today we received a pre-recorded message that the “User on the other end is busy” so it is obvious ...

... 1502; 97;ות עם חצילי 01; ובשר), יוגור 96; קר (יוגור
496; עם קרח מרוסק ומי סוכר) ופירו 14; לרוב (כולל הפרי ה ...

... entire old town is being "rennovated" which translates to tearing down of most of the old town. You can see propaganda posters everywhere. Basically it's saying replacing the old and dangerous houses for newer and safer ones. The government is probably prompted by the Sichuan Earthquake and wants to make sure the homes are earthquake proof - at least that's what the offical line is. One of the last ...

... centre dissected by the ancient clay and mud brick walls of the Old City and interspersed with beautiful mosques and more markets.

Sadly, the remains of this fascinating old city are being progressively destroyed by Chinese authorities for “safety reasons", the argument being that the area is highly earthquake prone. This is widely disputed by locals and other commentators who consider the demise of the old city as part of a much broader strategy to undermine the ...

... that the Kyrgyz officials were surly and bureaucratic, then we had seen nothing compared with the Chinese side of the border.

But then again, we were warned.

To say that Alan and I were more than a bit stressed out at this point of time would be a gross understatement. Because we could not access money through our Visa card or use our traveller’s cheques in Kyrgyzstan, we had virtually no available cash left on us. We were hoping to ...

... from our experiences crossing the Chinese side of the border into Xinjiang Province that the Chinese authorities give these drivers a very difficult time, causing them lengthy and seemingly unnecessary delays at the various check points. With Xinjiang having a largely Muslim Uighur minority population desperately wanting independence, Chinese authorities are highly sensitive to its geographic proximity to neighbouring Muslim countries. It is our understanding that ...

... as we took pictures of his donkey and cart. We were out of place here, the few straggling tour groups and touring individuals who made it to the outskirts of Kashgar for a glimpse of working history. Seeing money change hands over a few just-shorn lambs, two teenage boys desperately trying to catch a willful donkey so a potential customer could assess it, a bescarfed woman smiling privately to herself while she counted her takings, I could imagine away the cell phones ...