Finally in Uyghurland!

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  Yecheng, China
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

We technically arrived in Xinjiang yesterday, in a small deserted bubble claimed by both india and china, but today was our real entrance into xinjiang.  After driving nearly 800 Km over the last two days, reaching our top hight of 6100 METERS, we finally descended from the Tibetan plateau and entered the barren and still mountainous deserts of southern Xinjiang.  We spent last night at a small guesthouse ran by three sichuanese women in the middle of nowhere for only 10 Yuan per bed, and then cuntinued our drive this morning across the rocky and sandy mountains of southern xinjiang until we reached the official Xinjiang entrance checkpoint.  After we had our passports and "xuke" examined, we continued deeper into this wildly awesome region.  Along the way we passed numerous bactrian camels grazing on the little remaining bits of grass along the road.  The sight of these strange creatures amused Jamdv, our Tibetan driver who has never really left tibetan areas, like no other. 
We stopped for lunch in a totally Uyghur village, which was a great change in culture , environment, and especially FOOD for us and absolute culture shock for Jamdv, who had a hard time dealing with the Uyghur's extremely flavorful food.  Uyghurs look more like us and anyone else in china, and they are also first to recognize this fact.  Its a different world being here.  Unlike the Tibetans, Uyghurs have developed a much more modern and secular society of their own within China.  They have their own Uyghur language tv stations, and boy are those stations popular, even uyghur talk shows!  Uyghurs are much more literate in their own language, many refuse to speak chinese, and most signs are either bi-lingual or only in uyghur down here in southern xinjiang, where uyghurs continue to make up the vast majority of the population. 
Tomorrow we will explore the Yecheng and Shache (Yarkand) area and the next day we are headed to Khotan! 

-matt

in another note, kevin had officially shaken on next years final adventure. 

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