The wild, wild west of China

With a fairly difficult and long minibus / train combo to get from Dunhuang, we wearily arrived in Turpan, our first stop in China's westernmost province, Xinjiang - closer to Baghdad than to Beijing geographically, religiously and linguistically. We were immediately nabbed by security getting off the train and brusquely marched to the police station, where we waited nervously outside the jail cells. A series of young Han Chinese policemen with very big guns milled around nearby. Eventually, we underwent some questioning by a policeman, had multitides of photographs taken of us, us with our visas and us with our passports and were gruffly told to be on our way. By the time we were halfway to our hostel, we'd been stopped again by another group of armed policemen, who wanted to ask the same questions, take the same pictures and texted through to HQ before allowing us to continue down the street. A fitting welcome to the world's most effective police state - a high tech and oppressive regime aimed at erasing an entire culture, that of the Uigher people who live in the enormous, mineral rich desert province of Xinjiang. The BBC describes the province as being subject to "some of the most restrictive and comprehensive security measures ever deployed by a state against its own people." It is home to the now notorious "Re-Education Camps", where the open-ended internment of millions of Uighur people without trial is currently taking place. Mass passport recalls, control of movement and restrictions on religious and cultural practices complete the picture. The BBC has been a leader in reporting on the issue, and I highly recommend reading their reporting on it, starting with this terrifying summary: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Chinahiddencamps

Needless to say, we were a little rattled when we arrived in our hostel in Turpan (through metal detectors and past a rack of riot gear in the entranceway), with the police interactions and quiet streets, largely lacking any evidence of Uighur men of working age. We had already questioned the ethics of travelling through here, hoping it wasn't a form of tacit approval of what the Communist Party is doing to the people here.

It's difficult to say on reflection whether it was the right thing to do, and I think it probably wasn't.

Nonetheless we were there, and were relieved to drop our packs in our room and drink a cold beer under the grape vines in our beautiful hostel - the only one in town. Turpan, incredibly, is the second lowest land area on the planet, being in a huge depression in the desert and clocking in at 154 m below sea level! It is also one of the hottest cities in the world - we were there in May and it was between 30 and 40 degrees every day. Temperatures are well above 40 degrees all July and August. In 2008 it registered a 66.7 degree day. The only reason the city can exist in the surrounding Mad Max dreamscape is because of an incredible ancient irrigation system called the karaz, which channels water underground from the Tian Shan mountains by hundreds of vertical wells and sloping channels. There are more than a thousand of these wells in Turpan alone, and at its peak the system extended for 5,000 kms. It's a pretty incredible place - and likely the source of every green raisin you've ever eaten!

The hostel had a handy van tour service, with a vehicle being essential for getting around the scattered attractions around Turpan (and private car hire was not looking particularly likely. In fact, as it were, we were stopped several times at police checkpoints, had our details recorded and car searched during the course of our day's driving). The first stop was a viewing spot for the Flaming Mountains, the barren, baking, eroded sandstone mountains that are the northern border of the Taklamakan Desert. In the Chinese epic Into the West, the monkey king knocked over a kiln and scattered embers across this land, which solidified into the flaming ridges. The Uighurs say it is the blood of a slain dragon.

It was bakingly hot and glarey, so we were glad to get back on the road and head into a valley housing the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves, grottos dating from the 5th-14th Centuries that are important sources of information as to the cultures and practices along the Silk Road at the time of their creation. It has been particularly useful to the research of the Sogdians who inhabited ancient Uzbekistan and who dominated the Silk Road for centuries. The caves are not in great condition - defaced by Muslims, pillaged by Westerners and chipped away for fertiliser - but there is enough remaining to get a good sense of how beautiful they would have been.

Next up was a quick stop at the Astana cemetery, a complex of 1,000 graves dating from the 4th C, in which natural mummies formed and art, food (including a jam tart!), documents and sculptures have been recovered. The mummies were something of a shock when we walked down some clay stairs into a small underground room in which two dead bodies were chilling out without any warning!

The tombs were where the inhabitants of the ancient city of Kara-Khoja were interred and Kara-Khoja was next on the itinerary. A 2,200,000 sq m ruin of a walled city built as a Chinese colony in the 1st century BC and abandoned in the 14th C after falling to Ghenghis Khan and his Mongol horde, it was an eerie, massive, dusty place. We decided to hike through it rather than take the little golf cart used by our tourmates, and therefore were totally alone in the hot and silent ruins. It was pretty easy to see that in its heyday it was one of the biggest towns on the silk road, with walls 11 m high and temples and churches throughout. The mummies and paintings indicate that Caucasians, Mongols, Chinese, Uighers, Sogdians and other Central Asians lived here - quite the party I imagine.

The final stop on the tour, after going through a lot of security checks, was Tuyoq village, another incredibly ancient and quiet spot. It's a 1,700 year old oasis town made from clay in the middle of the sandy, dusty hills with sleepy wee stores selling raisins and lush patches of bush along an incredibly unlikely looking fresh water stream. It's famous for its Buddhist meditiation caves and for being the place where the first Muslim missionaries in China arrived and preached. The religious sites were closed when we visited, but we had an amazing time strolling around peering into crumbling houses and eating mulberries from the bushes along the sides of the paths!

A long bumpy ride back to Turpan was then rewarded by more incredible kebabs from the place up the street.

After a very lazy last day in Turpan lolling around under the grape vines in the hostel in the 34 degree heat, we were on our last major train ride in China on the furthest reaches of rail infrastructure in the country - and the only one we royally ballsed up. We ended up adding another eight or so hours onto what was already a 17 hour trip by way of an accidental dog leg to Urumqi ... But once we were en route, it was good to be zooming past the Taklamakan desert, so vast and unwelcoming the name is said to stem from the Persian for "those who go in never come out"!

After a fairly restful night on our three-man-high train bunks, we arrived mid morning in Kashgar. Even the name sounds like Silk Road romance, and the city is still the crossroad of Central Asia and China. Though practically all of the historic old town has been razed in the name of progress, the rebuilt centre is still beautifully atmospheric. Surprisigly, Kashgar also felt a little less locked down than Turpan, with a lot more working aged men around and plenty of Uigher language being spoken.

After eating multiple more meals of what felt like straight lamb fat (tasty but beginning to make us feel a little ill by this stage) we headed to the famous Kashgar Livestock Bazaar on the outside of town to see the source of all that meat. Farmers and herders bring their animals into the city from nearby villages, until every sheep, camel, donkey, horse, goat and cow from kilometres around is penned or tied up in the enormous dusty bazaar. It really feels like nothing's changed since the Middle Ages, except when the animals are zoomed off by their new owners in trucks, on motorbikes and in cars. It's a serious scenario!!

The most shocking (funny? ludicrous??) were the big booty sheep, the source of all those fatty lamb kebabs we'd been eating ...

We had dinner at an extremely fancy establishment as a treat (still less than NZ$20 between us though) and wandered through the old town for the evening, getting potted plant and interior decoration inspiration everywhere.

The next day was haircut day! Easy as pie for Nick, who got a slick cut at the barber below our hostel. I, on the other hand, was more problematic. No female hairdressers would agree to cut my hair, I assume because it was short, and the barbers I tried were very emphatically not interested. After a very frustrating half hour calling into several salons and miming my request for a trim, I stumbled into a fabulous young hairdresser, who was ECSTATIC to be cutting my hair. The haircut itself took 20 or so minutes and was fairly low key, but the styling was a much more intense affair, including multiple types of hair spray, curling tools, glitter and who knows what else. The whole process was livestreamed on Weibo and I think we managed around 15 selfies and boomerangs. Thankfully the extreme volume washed out with the hairspray!!

After another relaxing day, visiting mosques and strolling the old town, we awoke early to attempt what we by then realised was going to be a very long difficult day crossing the land border between China and Kyrgyzstan.

Well, we weren't wrong. With 17 passport checks, four entire searches of our bags, malware installed on our phones to strip the data out, a lot of money paid to taxi drivers, every photo on our devices looked through and being separated and interrogated by police officers in a huge empty border station (during which I was required to formally acknowledge that Taiwan is part of China in order to keep my Lonely Planet book (sorry Taiwan) and Nick was required to explain at length why he and I had previously taken holidays without each other), we were very happy to be walking (!) over the border by mid afternoon into Kyrgyzstan, watched by very bemused truckers!!

As you can see above, we weren't arriving into a bustling metropolis, so there was still plenty of adventure to come getting from the border to our first real stop in Kyrgyzstan, but after months in China, we were officially in Central Asia!