While in the midst of repression, it is difficult to see much beyond your own personal experience. Only with the removal of the repressive element is one able to see the overall scale of the repression itself. So it was with the ever-present sand that had draped itself in the air around us for the past week. And now, all I saw below our plane was a layer of brown that stretched from horizon to horizon. As we traveled further north, the mountains I'd longed to see began to appear, until a vast array of snow-capped peaks ushered us in to the airfield at Ürümqi.
While Ürümqi may be the city furthest city from the sea (3620 kilometers), the first thing I did back at the hotel was to hit the pool. I longed to be immersed in water, to scrub clean all pores and orifices of grit and dirt. Unfortunately, midway to the water I was accosted by the staff, who were trying to get me to purchase a swim cap. With a brusque "Mei yo!" I hit the water, and during the few minutes it took them to get an English speaker, I slid beneath the surface, buoyant, knees slightly bent, arms wide like a crucified man.
We met our guide early the following morning, who proved to be the best of the entire trip. He stood out due to his height and unique facial features, of an ethnicity that was the Silk Road personified: part Uyghur, part Kazakh, part Uzbek. When we asked he where he got his excellent English he claimed to be a fan of "Everybody Loves Raymond."
The drive through Ürümqi revealed a city on the grow, with shiny towers and ribbons of overhead expressways. The railway station was new and spacious and would have been at home in Japan or in any major European capital. I was amazed by the cashless nature to things, how everything could be charged through your phone to your Wechat, including vending machines and even the toilet paper dispensers in the restrooms. We joined the orderly queues and boarded our high-speed train which then sped east, beneath the snowy Tianshan on our return to Turpan.
As on the previous visit, we were pulled aside for a passport check. Unlike the stressful experience we'd had the previous week, this one was pretty quick and relaxed. Our guide G was easy through the whole thing, and appeared to know the security team. We'd run into one of them later on his break, who joked and smiled and seemed like any other young man required to put on a public face while doing his job.
We met our driver D, a local guide who too had excellent English. G asked us what we knew about Turpan, a neat trick that freed him from over-explaining things, and also freed us from the boredom of hearing things we'd heard before. As we drove out into the desert, he and the driver told us tales and legends of the locals, as the Flaming Mountains rose outside the window, this time in hues of red which finally allowed us to fully understand the source of the name.
The hills narrowed into striated walls cut by the run off of what must be ferocious rain storms. The deeper cuts synced up with the low bridges along the road, which in turn were aligned with groves and fields on the opposite side. (And later in the day we'd see that these too were in line with the pockmark of wells that formed the Karez irrigation system we'd seen on the previous visit, which had proven difficult to understand due to all the Disneyfication.)
The land flattened out, begetting crops and the little aerated huts for drying grapes. We'd leave these to follow a rutted road out along a canyon, stopping a few times to take photos of a landscape rich with fantastic shapes. There was a series of Buddhist grottoes at the far end, but these were now forbidden to visitors due to the crumbling nature of the cliffs above.
The road dropped us in Tuyoq. The locals here are known as the Auger, and I'm forced to rely on a truthful cliche when I say that there way of life seemed timeless. We followed the narrow lanes around this beautiful village, past the crumbling old house where Albert von Le Coq stayed during his 1905 excavations of the grottoes, and between the small stands the local women have set up to sell their grapes and walnuts. The entrances to the homes revealed covered courtyards within, anchored down by the massive platforms where an entire family could sleep during the hot weather. Our walk was nearly truncated by a local policeman whose surliness and laziness fought for dominance, but G worked his soft magic on him, and we were finally given permission to climb up to the village's higher reaches, now crumbling and abandoned as the diminished population sought to live down below, before the hills began.
Lunch was long and leisurely, under the shade of poplars. I longed for a nap afterward, but we moved back out into the sun, part the extended limbs of the karez to the ancient city of Gaochang, a 2nd century BCE garrison town. Dealing with dates stretching so far into the past alters your perception of time. At the beginning of this trip, in Xi'an, the 7th Century T'ang dynasty had seemed old. But now it felt recent when compared to the Wu and the Han that came before.
Older even than Jioahe, Gaocheng sprawled across the desert, the earthen walls surrounding it a mere fleck against the snowy Tianshan to the north. We traversed the site by small tram, being the only visitors but for a foreign couple who were probably regretting doing it by foot. Abandoned in the 14th Century as it was, there wasn't much to see, mainly little towers of sand-colored bricks dotting the landscape. The only exceptions were a trio of temples and a mosque, though these too were taking great pains to hold their form. The biggest temple would have been the size of a cathedral, and in its shade a old man bowed a spike fiddle ghijak, whose mournful sound resonated off the sand walls. He had a couple of drums for sale on a carpet before him, so I accompanied him on one, playing a tune that we later realized was the Italian ballad, "Ciao Bella."
Our final stop of the day was the one I was most anticipating, but the drive out revealed a site that was almost better: an old Japanese film set cut into the cliff of a steep valley. But Bezeklik itself had the edge, in terms of history, and colorful paintings inside. (Sadly many others were removed by von Le Coq and later destroyed during the bombings of Berlin in the second World War. Others were damaged by the Uighurs themselves.) While the frescoes (in caves 16, 17, 20, 27, 31, 33, & 39) had their own charm, the atmosphere was the real highlight, set as the grottoes are along a cliff face that opens out to the towering peaks to the north, under kiva-like domes which somehow make it look like the Anasazi ruins of the American southwest.
We had an hour to kill until our train back to Ürümqi, so we stopped for a beer and some kebabs in a shaded courtyard ringed by the drying houses for grapes. One of these had a variety of raisins for sale, and I was amazed at the array of flavors that the fruit can take. (Less surprising I suppose if we shift the context to that of wine.) Burdened thus with a few kilograms of the fruit, we returned to our hotel, to meet a bizarre spectacle of a Russian fair, complete with balalaikas and spinning blondes in tight, colorful costumes that looked pilfered from the wardrobe of Snow White.
On the turntable: Allman Brothers, "Shades of Two Worlds"
On the nighttable: Tim Severin, "In Search of Robinson Crusoe"
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