We met up in Fubar at 9.00am for a fry up outside the Chini Bagh Hotel in Kashgar. This is the old Caravan Cafe site, and was going to be my last taste of Western food for a week. From now on it was going to be Laghman (pulled noodles) and other local food. After a good feed we made our way to the bus station. At the bus stations in Xinjiang there are usually plenty of long distance taxis whose prices are negotiable. Chris negotiated with one guy until we got a good price of about 300Y. From Kashgar to Yarkand is about 200km.
It took us a surprisingly long time to get out of the cultivated area around Kashgar. These cities on the Silk road around the Takla Makan are frequently called Oasis cities/towns, which makes you think of a place with just a few square km's of palm trees. When we left Kashgar we must have gone about 50km's before we hit the desert. Calling our driver would be an understatement. He proved to be one of those who couldn't resist overtaking even when it was apparent there was never enough room. Our journey was rather hairraising to say the least. There were a couple of checkpoints outside Kashgar but they were pretty lax to say the least, made up of part-time militia types dressed in a mixture of uniform and casual clothes.
We didn't see so much true desert on this leg, most of the intervening country would be best described as scrubland, with none of the classic sand dunes you so often see in photos of the Takla Makan.
We made it to Yarkand in about 2 and a half hours. Yarkand's very much a modern Chinese town these days with big wide boulevards and lots of characterless concrete buildings. This was one of my biggest dissapointments about the trip, the term Silk Road captures the romance and riches of these once mysterious remote desert cities, yet now the Chinese have pushed these massive boulevards through them, destroying much of the old towns and their city walls, and replacing them with their usual drab concrete blocks.
We asked the taxi driver to stop at the Shache Binguan, this being apparently the only hotel in town that accepted foreigners. We entered the building he dropped us at, but were refused entry by the staff, who pointed down the road. We marched down the road in the direction pointed and found another hotel that agreed to take us. I don't know if the actual hotel we were dropped at was the Shache Binguan and our information was wrong, or the taxi driver got it wrong. Price for a room at the hotel was 120Y.
We dropped off our stuff and then went for a look around town. We ventured into a Uighur restaurant where to our amazement, we found a young Uighur girl working there who spoke fluent english. After consuming our bowls of noodles she took us to the chief attraction in town, the blue tiled tomb of the famous wife of a local Khan from the Sixteenth Century. We imagined that the tomb would be several hundred years old befitting the age of the tomb but inside we found a plaque which states that the tomb was only built 20 years ago by the locals as a tribute which was a bit of a letdown.
We then ventured into the what was left of the old town, but there's basically just a few alleyways left and after a nosy poke into a few courtyards and a few snaps of the local kids who were following us and loudly demanding 'photo, photo', we were soon back to where we started outside our hotel. In Yarkand the sights and activities are pretty limited to say the least.
In the evening we found a restaurant that served dinner and had more noodles swallowed down with a good few beers. The conversation got round to the current political situation in Xianjiang and Tibet, and I noticed we getting hostile stares from a uniformed Han Chinese guy across at the next table, whereupon we decided it was time to call it a day and it was back to our hotel.
