Near Ulugqart

Having failed to get across the border yesterday afternoon we headed there when it opened in the morning. It all went smoothly.

On the Kyrgyz side we went through a variety of posts, at each having our passports checked by serious looking. At one point noises were made for us to open up our bags for inspection, which neither of wanted to do for fear of looting by the customs officers, however they lost interest & appeared satisfied when we said that we didn't have any narcotics.

We'd both heard that the Chinese customs & immigration people were rather strict & unfriendly. The opposite turned out to be true, with the officials being quite pleasant. Though we had to wait around until they returned from their lunch break (due to them running on Beijing time corresponded to midmorning) we got through quite quickly. The feared full baggage search to find evidence of intent to sneak into Tibet never happened. The customs official asked me to open my handlebar bag & took a look at my Pakistan Lonely Planet then sent me on my way. At which point I was in China.

Once away from the slightly less (than the Kyrgyz side) squalid border settlement we saw that the land had quite abruptly changed, Kyrgyzstan was green while this part of China was very dry. The dryness wasn't seasonal, the hillsides had virtually no vegitation. Oddly there was evidence that at times there was lots of water with empty water channels carved deeply into the hills.

The road went through a sparsely populated area, even so the local human handprint on the land was different to that in Kyrgyzstan. Mud seemed to be used extensively as a building material, & gone were the Russian inspired cottages that dot the ex-Soviet Central Asia countryside. Initially we thought that the local people were unfriendly as they just stared at us without waving or saying anything. However when we stopped to take photographs in a village people came to talk.

The landscape was spectacular. Though the hills had almost no vegetation they were lovely. Water had eroded channels down them. Sometimes they were of hard rock with sharp edged layers resisting erosion & at others they were crumbling away. They were constantly changing in character & colour though mostly a shade of red.

There camels everywhere, for the first time (after seeing them in Iran, Turkmenistan & Tajikistan) I saw them put to work as pack animals.

I really enjoyed the change of scene. I'd had enough of ex-Soviet Central Asia & wanted something different. So far China has been that.

Throughout ran a wonderfully smooth road. The Chinese certainly know how to make roads well. Thanks to this we got quite a long way despite losing much of the morning at customs. We camped near the top of a pass, at just under 3000m. We have about 170km to Kashgar.

I cycled 91 km in 6 hours & 19 minutes
Total so far 10220 km in 150 days
GPS Coordinates of end point - N 39°9.869, E 74°9.939