Kashgar

Today was supposed to be a continuation to near completion of the cycling to Kashgar. Things turned out a little differently.

I awoke at my usual early time & cooked up a breakfast of rice porridge with milk. Nick emerged from his tent suffering from a stomach bug. It was going to be tough &fslow day for Nick & me respectively. Nick tried to cycle but after 30km & with 100km to go it was too much, so we stopped & tried our hand at hitchhiking. It didn't go so well, there just wasn't any traffic on the road. Eventually a car stopped & said that he could take us but only from the next village where he needed to drop some people off. He told us that this village was only a couple of kilometres away & all downhill. We thought he was a taxi driver & would charge us big bucks for the ride, my guide quoted a figure of $120 for a car from Kashgar to the border. However we seemed to have little option than to continue anyway. We met the guy in the village & it turned out that he wasn't a taxi driver, he just wanted to help. First he paid for our lunch (we had no Yuan & there was no facility for changing money in the village), then he organised a taxi for us to Kashgar. The latter step involved him driving to the next town, finding a taxi, agreeing on a reasonable price ($19 for a journey of 110km) & getting the taxi to come back & pick us up (there wasn't room in his car to take us with him). When he found a cab he phoned the caf?& confirmed that it was communications & the price, & requested that we let him know how everything went. The taxi duely arrived & took us to where we wanted to go in Kashgar as agreed. We owed many thanks to the kindness of a stranger.

I would have loved to have cycled into Kashgar. The countryside was no less spectacular & characterful than that which we had ridden from the border. As we approached Kashgar the terrain became more dominated by humans, by cropland & settlements. The crops were the same as on the other side of the mountains in Kyrgyzstan however the settlements had quite a different feeling to them. They felt more Asian, free of the Russian/Soviet influences that Kyrgyzstan had. I imagined that Kyrgyzstan may have been like this had the Russians not come through in the 19C & that Kashgaria (the area around Kashgar) was 'pure' Central Asia. Of course this is wrong, as the Chinese have greatly influenced this part of Central Asia as much as the Russians/Soviets did theirs. There was no doubting that the Chinese influence made the place more oriental & I liked that.

Kashgar turned out to be, as expected, not a particularly 'local' city. Our hotel of choice was a large affair, located where the old Russian consulate had been at the time of the Great Game. It had a large range of rooms & we took a couple of beds in a pleasant dorm. The area of town was thoroughly modern with modern Chinese buildings surrounding the hotel. Only after dinner (delicious, eaten at a Chinese restaurant) did I venture for a short stroll into the old non-Chinese part of town. Tomorrow I'll explore more thoroughly & report.

I cycled 37 km in 2 hours & 2 minutes
Total so far 10257 km in 151 days