From the air, I couldn't quite tell what I was looking at. The Longmenshan Mountains had been obvious, pressing themselves upward out of the clouds. Obvious too were the northern Kunlun, their dark craggy shapes traced in the snow that fed rivers rushing toward villages below. The desolate look of all these peaks helped explain how Tibet could so well isolate itself for all those centuries. But what was below now I couldn't quite make out. I thought maybe that it was grasslands, but the surface looked too smooth, not to mention that they would be much further north and east. Finally my eyes clicked into the features: sand. I'd never seen anything like it, these hundreds of miles of dunes, extending in all directions. It was the great Taklamakan, the "Place of No Return," the graveyard of merchants and explorers.
Kashgar at first glance hardly seemed much more welcoming, with the mob scene at the airport and the scrum for baggage. While I fought the Battle of Samsonite, LYL went out to jump the taxi queue. It was only as she walked off that I realized that she had the baggage tags. And naturally I was the only one asked to present them, standing out as the only Caucasian in the place. The cop who stopped me was friendly enough, which is more than I can say for the taxi driver that LYL enlisted, who didn't make for the best ambassador of the place. His surly, rough-speaking manner screamed of the rough China of days past. But the language pushed through his cigarette-clenching lips wasn't the familiar Mandarin but an almost Arabic-sounding Uighur.
Our Chini-bagh Hotel was a towering mass built above what had formerly been the spacious grounds of the old British consulate, also known as the Chini-bagh. These grounds had been made an oasis in their day by Lady Catherine Macartney, who for 28 years had hosted the biggest (European) names historically linked with the Silk Road. The old house remains, but that spacious green had been replaced by our hulk of a hotel, whose lobby and lounges were like a parody of Vegas glam and glitz.
As we had a few hours before meeting with our tour group, I immediately headed off to get a massage. Stepping from the elevators on the appropriate floor, I was startled by the sight of an guard there, cradling his machine gun. What followed was a parody of broken English and Mandarin, and as things grew sillier, I began to pick up some of his weapons (those of the non-firearm variety), going through a slapstick routine of how they might be used on somebody. I was finally led away through a weird Turkish bath-like room whose only real similarity with the original was the tile and steam. I met my masseuse in a private room, startled by her abbreviated skirt and the drop of her décolletage. She crossed the room atop spiked heels to show me the massage menu, though I'm sure that a number of additional services may not have been written there.
Much later, our group now properly assembled and introduced, we headed out to Kashgar's old town, a maze of streets lined with uniform two-story buildings of sandy beige walls and blue, many with corrugated-tin pigeon coops on their roofs. There were more guards at the end of each lane, and over the subsequent days I'd come to the feel that I've never seen a place so armed and fortified. Like the Tibetans, the residents here too looked pretty benign, mainly older people manning their shops, or children playing safely in lanes closed to automobile traffic.
We'd return to this place repeatedly during the next few days, and in time it began to look like a film set, beautiful, but artificially perfect somehow. From the heights of my hotel window, I could see that we were based in the center of town, and similarly old sections lay far below like scattered puzzle pieces. The uniformity had been shattered by high rise flats that occupied a few blocks here, a few blocks there. Off to the right was a collection of towers, neon lit and serving as the center of things that occupied the Han who'd moved here.
That first dinner was at the usual circular table, the lazy-Susan spinning dishes to and fro. I was filled with nostalgia for these kababs, this pilaf, reminders of last year's Silk Road journey. Some of the others in our group groaned at the sight of this fare, and over the next few days I understood why, as there was no real variety. One exception were a couple of Chinese meals, and for these our guide would excuse himself to eat elsewhere. It dawned on me eventually that halal meant not only the avoidance of pork, but the avoidance of places that even prepare it.
There were more pigs on display the following day at the animal market, which reminded much of the rodeo grounds of my native New Mexico. But the only horses in view were pulling old men in carts along the dusty paths within. Sheep made up the greatest number of beasts, tethered cheek to cheek to low posts. While it was a sad sight, there was a certain comedy to watching the animals being led to the market, riding along in an incredible variety of transport.
The animal market had once taken place in the town proper at the Sunday Market, considered to be one of the tourist wonders of the world. Expecting chaos, the bazaar surprised me in being held indoors, with tidy, well defined lanes lined with proper shops rather than stalls. I'm not much of a market person, but I enjoyed wandering freely throughout the morning, picking up a drum, some toothpaste, and dried fruit and nuts for the road trip ahead. It was more fun to watch the other shoppers, two strains of a common ethnic stock but with great variety in facial features. The Uighurs looked so European somehow, and I could now understand how a Kashmiri friend could look at my supposedly typical Irish face and see a fellow countryman.
On this final night we ate at the Chini Bagh itself, in the dining room where Lady Catherine Macartney had so famously entertained. The house itself had been run down over the previous century, but the shapes of old fireplaces still defined the corners of all the rooms, and the fixtures above hinted at long plundered chandeliers. The meal was Chinese, rotated upon the ubiquitous lazy Susan at the center of the table. Conversation too went through its various turns, yet ever tinted with excitement, for tonight we were the explorers, about to set off into unknown landscapes, and uncertain whether they would present us with joys, or with terrors.
On the turntable: Jackie Mittoo, "The Jackie Mittoo Showcase"
On the nighttable: George Orwell, "My Country Right or Left"
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