A heat wave called TURFAN
Trip Start
May 2005
1
6
17
Trip End
Aug 2005
Turfan,
China
Monday, June 13, 2005
So, why was I spending time in this furnace anyway? Well, Turfan happens to be a relatively new town that is very close to a few very old towns. Within a half hour drive are the towns of GaoChang and Jiaohe, but major towns with a lot of power in the first millenium. They carried a lot of clout in the Silk Road days. There isn't much left of the cities, but you can still get a feel for how they were laid out and what it must have been like to live there. Pretty amazing places, really.
Ancient city of GaoChang
Turfan is a "cool" place. Even though it is "hella hot" and in a place called the Turfan Depression, which is the second lowest place on earth after the Dead Sea, there are snow capped mountains not too far away. The locals have mastered the art of channeling this water right where it has to go, through underground channels called Karez. There are hundreds of kilometers of them around Turpan, and they are big enough to walk around in. The open canals are excellent sources of evaporative cooling, and often times you see beds straddling the canals themselves.
The city of Turfan also happens to be inhabited mostly by Uighur people, instead of the usual Han Chinese. You can feel a difference in the town the minute you get there. I have to say that the people are much "warmer" than the Chinese, and I really like their food. The first hour I was in Turpan, I strolled through a park and found myself drinking at 3:00pm with 5 Uighur guys in the park. Good folks, the Uighurs. They are gradually being displaced by immigrant Han Chinese, but they still maintain a strong presence in Xinjiang Province.
Turfan is a fairly romantic place. There are vine trellises everywhere, and donkey carts are almost as common as taxi cabs in town. They make tasty wine there, and like I said, the food is excellent, too!
As nice as Turfan is, it's too hot for me, so I'm off to the capitol city of Urumqi to buy a few last minute things before heading into the Kingata Shan mountains for three weeks of hiking and climbing.
