In one mad day I went out to the Kathmandu airport, took a flight to Delhi, got drenched by a monsoon in a two-hour attempt to see something of Delhi, bought a ticket to Karachi and flew there, bought a ticket to Islamabad and flew there, and at two o'clock in the morning had a cab driver I didn't trust drive me through dark empty streets to a hotel I had no confidence in. The next day early I caught the bus up the Karakorum Highway to Gilgit, and the day after that I hired a jeep to take me to Baltit. I stayed there for several days, hiking up a steep canyon to a high plateau or just sitting in my hotel room and looking at the huge rainbow that ended at the base of the brilliant, 25,600-foot gleaming snow pyramid of Rakaposhi. The next day I got a jeep to take me to Sost, the last town in Pakistan before the Chinese border.
The bus company didn't have enough people for a bus, so they stuffed us into two jeeps. The other foreigners with me were Seiji from Osaka, David, a civil engineer from Scotland who had just finished working on a 10-kilometer causeway bridge in Pakistan, and a Scottish couple now living on the Riviera, Scott and Ann Morrison. Scott was in cable networks and Ann was an unemployed pharmacist; they were on vacation. I told Ann she looked like Hilary Clinton, and then quickly added that I thought Hilary Clinton was a very attractive woman.
The road followed the dramatic canyon of the Hunza River to its end--Utah, only bigger. The area was deserted except for the occasional herd of goats with a goatherd, and several police posts. The road switched back and forth up a mountain and then we were at the high Khunjerab Pass, 15,600 feet, with a stone monument to mark the China-Pakistan border in the midst of wide sweeping deserted grassland surrounded by snow-capped peaks.
We reached Tashkurgan, the first town in China, by late afternoon. I walked streets photographing women and girls in their colorful Tadjik outfits. Gangs of children begged to have their pictures taken. Goats and cows had their run of the streets and courtyards. I found my way to the large ruin of a fort, more a pile of rocks in which wonderfully curved walls could be discerned. At the top, there was a view of the large flat grassland with grazing livestock, riven with streams, extending all the way to the chocolate mountains in the east. Two Western photographers waited there to catch the last spangle of sunset on the rock wall.
The next day's bus arrived in Kashgar mid-afternoon. That evening I joined Ann, Scott, and David at the Oasis Cafe, across from my Seman Hotel. At the next table were a Norweigan Olof and three Americans, Mike from Jane Street in Greenwich Village who had been studying in China for a year, Will from Oakland with red hair and dry humor who renovates houses for a living and takes long travel breaks in between, and a man from Wisconsin.
They had just been to the former Soviet Central Asia, and were stuck with $25 worth of Khazakh money and a book by Petrarch. A Uighur man came by trying to sell them knives, and they enlisted his aid. He went away and came back with a man who was willing to buy the Khazakh money for 120 yuan ($14.40); he wasn't interested in Petrarch. They negotiated a long time, but no deal.
I joined them after Ann, Scott and David left. All were around thirty and long-term backpackers. We traded stories of being shaken down by police. I told my Ukraine and Mexico stories. The Wisconsin man had been shaken down once in Kirghizistan and twice in Kazakhistan. A policeman will stop you for no reason, often shortly before your train is to leave, and pull you into a little room where there are about twenty other policemen. They will make you take all your money out and lay it on the table, and then take all your other stuff out, and then in the confusion will try to steal something. He advised being calm and friendly during all this. They are just trying to have a little fun.
The next day I explored the bazaars, parks and mosques of Kashgar by foot, taxi and donkey cart. In the evening I returned to the Oasis Cafe, and joined Mike, Will, Sam from Antwerp, Marita from Holland and Kristian from Zurich, a couple, and Olof and his travelling companion Heidi, a veterinarian from Syracuse, New York, an attractive, vivacious, exuberant woman in her mid 30s. All had been traveling for months and living on nothing.
We concocted a crazy plan to sneak into the buffet dinner for tours at the Qiliwak Hotel. We appointed Mike our tour leader and he led us in. But they caught on to us right away. They led us to a back table, let us eat our fill, and then brought us a bill for 30 yuan apiece, reasonable enough.
On our way back to the hotel we passed a Muslim restaurant with a singer and several Uighur couples dancing. We peeked in, and then went in, some welcoming us, some hostile to us until they could force glasses of raki down our throats, in challenges to chug-a-lug. Heidi spent the whole time dancing wildly, sometimes with Uighur men, sometimes alone, and one amazingly sensual dance with Sam from Antwerp. Never with Olof, her traveling companion, who left early. Then one final dance, more of a battle actually, with a drunk, fat, brutish Uighur man. I told her afterwards I had been worried for her. ``I could handle him,'' she said dismissively.
We returned to the Seman Hotel (or the Sperm Hotel, as Heidi called it), and went to the karaoke bar. We were the only ones there. To give you an idea of the quality of the songs, the best was ``You Light Up My Life''. We took turns singing. I deadpanned my lines, and to the politically obnoxious ``Exodus'' added lyrics about killing Arabs. But Heidi was the star; she sang with flair and in tune. The manager of the bar came up to Mike and asked if any of us men wanted a woman. Four prostitutes came in and sat in the back of the room for a bit, but when none of us seemed interested, disappeared into a side room.
After they closed the bar down, Heidi decided to lead us on a juvenile tour of the old wing of the hotel, that used to be the Russian consulate. We walked through the upstairs hallway as the night clerk followed us at a discrete distance, to make sure the drunk foreigners did no damage.
Then we turned in after one. Or so I thought. I heard Heidi whisper my name at the door. I briefly imagined she wanted a tryst, but when I opened the door, Mike was there to and they both broke into giggles. The woman across the hall, an American on a Kashgar Sunday Bazaar tour, opened her door and asked us to be quiet.
The next morning I went early to the Sunday bazaar, and found my way to the livestock market. Trucks jockeyed their way into the packed enclosure and let down the back gate. Goats exploded from the back and sheep were pulled off. The men would spread a circle of fresh grass, and that contained the sheep. They were selected one by one and noosed together in a long line, head to head, like interlocked fingers, with one long rope. Occasionally a sheep would bolt from the circle and a man would chase it and beat it on the rump with a switch or a length of rope back into the circle. One young man picked up a large stake, about two inches in diameter, and swung it at a stray sheep and klonked it on the back of its skull. It went down immediately. Several boys tried for ten or fifteen minutes to revive it. The last I saw it, it was still lying there, ocassionally convulsing, still out cold. The boys had put a stalk of green grass by its mouth. Later in the day when I returned there, sheep were being sold, and then sheared. Just outside the livestock market, sheepskins were for sale, and food stalls were serving mutton.
I ran into Scott and Ann at the bazaar, and we agreed to meet in the afternoon to go to the ruins of the old city of Hanoi, some thirty kilometers outside Kashgar in the desert.
We met at three, flagged a taxi, and negotiated a price, helped by the fact that he had no idea where it was. We circled around the Sunday market, headed northeast past the Abakh Hoja Tombs. After a while we reached a town where the road was closed because they were building grape arbors over it. We followed a narrow lane next to a ditch, and then after some lengthy consultation with locals, we jogged over to the northwest about 500 meters and continued northeast on a very rough road that had our driver cursing, whose only other traffic was donkey carts. The road was lined with double rows of poplar trees on both sides, and on the other side of the poplars were farming compounds walled with mud brick. Then the road splintered into multiple tracks across the gravel desert. We hesitated, but then I spotted the Mor Pagoda in the distance, and we followed the desert tracks that would take us closest. Eventually we got there.
I loved it. It was the real Takla Makan Desert. The pagoda and another nearby building dated from the 500s, and Xuan Zang, the ancient Chinese Buddhist pilgrim to India, had passed this way and worshipped at this temple. This was the ruin of an old Silk Road principality. Scott and Ann were excited as well, and even the driver seemed to take an brief interest.
But back on the road all that was gone. His taxi was taking a beating, and even though we could not understand his Chinese, we understood him when he said he had never been here before and he was never coming back.
That evening I had dinner with Scott and Ann in a restaurant we found, and then I joined Will, Olof and Heidi at John's Cafe. Heidi was in a desperate search for good chocolate. The sundae at John's Cafe was terrible, the Oasis was closed, and Dove bars we bought at a stand outside the hotel tasted like wax.
The party broke up at 12:30. Early the next morning I took the bus out of Kashgar.