A Silk Road Trip-Deep Explore the western China

In August 1992, myself and my consort, Caroline, approved a tumble to situation-Tiananmen China. It was in the being when the London China Travel agency was on Cambridge Circus, converse the Palace Theatre on Charing Cross Road. It took me at slightest twenty books, a tardy-night Japanese television chain and some months to sketch and pose the stumble from what was then our sordid in Balham, south London. In the existence, you could array the stay via China Travel and then, while the route was wedged in improve, you could tour absolutely independently. Everything was pre-salaried, but on backdrop off, we had no tickets or fixed reservations apart from our air tickets in and out of Beijing. As ever, I kept a journal of the visit, which ran to more than fifty pages. A few years later, I condensed the experience to two sides of A4, ignoring policy of grammar and syntax, and created the following stroll, a perhaps poetic impression of near a month of travel.

Ex-London while the Sun dissected Michael Jackson’s nose and praised Boardman’s hooterless gold-honor bicycle. Air China to Beijing, where taxis outlay more than Lonely Planet predicts. A Chinese spirit program from one Tim Han of China Travel while fellow personnel slobber over televised agile Afro-American sprinters at the Olympics. Then to the no-longer Forbidden City. Piles of native tourists to negotiate.

Four hours of Xinjiang Airlines to Urumqi. Signs in Chinese and Russian advantage Uigur printed in Arab script (a latest innovation). Land position across Inner Mongolia. Why, and how so vertical? Urumqi numerous-fatigued. Piles of coal, shabby high revolt, snowstorm-capped Bogda Shen at lane-end. Pavement fate tellers, traders. Food stalls. Women washing sheeps’ stomachs in a stream, rubbish kebabs. Uigur city now Han Chinese, populated by Shanghai extra, over 2000 miles from ??Ome?? The following longed demo.

Uigur breakfast. Hot sheep’s milk, Chinese tea, puncture tomato bread, sweetened tomato and cucumber, pickled cabbage, fragile congee, sheep’s milk butter, two giant sweetie lumps. Uigur advertise. Fruits among a wood of hanging chicken. Chinese sell. Live vegetables and meats. Tank over-spilling with lively eels (part rate). Self-knotting spaghetti.

Woman trailing her gold watchdog at an illicit ‘find the lady’. Police officer looking on. Tears when the cost hits home. Renmin Park for noodles and rocket-fuel chili sauce. Bag slashers with identify-feel knives on a crowded bus. Care required.

Car to Turfan. Fertile valleys. Barren mountains. Occasional snowstorm. Road ploughed. Kazak yurts. Semi-hollow shade-making rammed-earth Uigur villages, imaginary at an aloofness keep for vent smoke. Steep downhill overeat, spectacular canal, rocks, colorless water and schedule-grey hills. Into Turfan depression, snow-capped distance surrounding grey seed pit 100 miles across. 42 degrees at its establish, 200 metres below sea direct. Car early goodbye tracks on molten street. A stout gob from the driver irrigates. Gobi means polish. Plenty here. And then green. A sanctuary. A giant mirage?

Turfan. Latticing vines for street-shade. Hanging raisin grapes. 15 yuan penalize for casual pick. Hotel tea in galvanised buckets. Turkish-elegance dancing and song. Genghiz-sacked rammed-earth cities of Goachang and Jiaohe. Painting tombs and brick minarets. Flaming mountains. Karez underground irrigation method. 3000 kilometres of channels. 1500 years old, gravity-fed from mountains at the depression-frontier. Uigur mores’s peak feat, and in packed working order.

Bus to Daheyan. Two hours over jerky stones to depression-bank. Dump of a railway town. Coal lots, box buildings, ravish land. Two women at war on situate forecourt. Ramming victim’s regulate onto the ground. Blood. Onlookers. Inaction. A tense town of aggrieved postees.

500 miles to Liuyuan in Gansu. Featureless flatly grey shale seed. Spectacularly single. Snow mountains to the north. Utterly clear, save for smoking coal towns. 40 above in summer, 30 below in iciness. Overnight by focus. Dawn reveals same weighty picture, now in sunburned.

Arrive Liuyuan. Daheyan writ akin. 120 miles south across the desert (black at first!), bygone vestige walls of Han Dynasty Greater-Great Wall. Camels and dunes of Taklimakan, world’s prevalent sand desert. Near Dunhuang refuge blossoms again. Sand and scree abruptly crop and tree. Feitian Hotel, with complimentary toiletries labelled Sham Poo and Foam Poo. Lunch. Fourteen dishes. Duck, foo-yong, cucumber, cabbage, oyster swell chicken, coriander pork, steamed buns, steamed bread, rice, beef broth and noodles, pork and green beans, pork and friendly chili, chicken and squash, basic noodles, water melon. Then to get the elemental torch for the caves. Houses huddled together. Wood supplies for winter piled on top. View across the roofs like a piece heap. Ground balanced claustrophobic ceramics maze.

Cave day. Mogao Buddhist caves - closed from 12 to 2, plump day required for perhaps the most stunning scene on earth. 400 ‘caves’ (some cathedral magnitude) in a sandstone esophagus, between 400 AD to 1100 AD. Utterly dry, always brown, entirely preserved. Everything painted. Tang episode difficult and colourful. A world of scenes by torchlight. Buddhas reclining, meeting, existence, posing. Thirty metre seated diagram with thousands of unsmoked cigarettes and coins on his lap as offerings. Shock of Qing-renovated cave with Taoist facts. Ghoulish features, knobby, and a face in the groin. 40 caves seen in the day, archaeologist as a delicate lead. Stunning. Fourteen dishes for banquet.

Desert bus back to Liuyuan. Always a brawl for seats. Three dirty hours. Train to Lanzhou. 800 miles along Gansu-Qinghai mountainous border. More black desert, then blond earth. Jaiyaguan castle at the limit of the Ming empire. Overnight by series. Country misused. Mountain bypassed, green rolling hills and stepped fields. Wheat reaped in. Straw dollies like children at meeting. Houses still of rammed earth. Lanzhou a booming industrial city. Thirty hours of travel. Walk by Yellow River.

Fish in lodge restaurant cistern all tedious. Lanzhou bus expensive. 50 fen per journey. Radios and knitting banned. Han house airborne horse and figurine warriors. Steaming complain with rape on menu. The fish comes first. Train to Xian through fair loess country. Deep furrows and gorges. All downright land cropped. 500 miles overnight.

Terra cotta warriors facing east to safeguard Qin Shihuang’s vault. Made in pieces. Assembled in situ. Partly excavated part where piles of dismembered limbs emerge from the earth. New terra cotta warriors for auction from the factory behind the museum. Exact replicas of originals. Wheeze at the thought of the undivided thing as a bogus for the tourist trade.

Xian, like all Chinese cities, a just. Roads open, intersecting always at right angles. Ancient centre walled, Ming rebuilt. Old mosque wonderful. Xianyang adjacent, with Seventh century Qian tombs, museum with another 3000 Han terra cottas like a football crowd. Train to Beijing. 800 miles, 26 hours. Houses often caves in valley plane. Later immense flat land, maize everywhere.

Temple of Heaven, Tiantan, and then Beijing Opera. Pause for beer at edge stall. Served by moonlighting novice stockbroker! Breakfast stored amazing, like four year old camembert out of a shotgun. Taking the move off. Great Wall. Mucho touristico, but still stunning. Like climbing a giant ladder in spaces. “I climbed the Great Wall” T-shirts, prices minor the expand you climb. Must be the air. Ming tombs dismissed by leader-book. Wrong. Amazing barrel arched quarters nine stories underground. Jade doors, carved thrones, limestone, granite, sensation. Reminiscent of renaissance Italy. Everlasting bricks etched with names of their makers. Souvenir jaded ferry for 55000 pounds.

White drapes over erotic statues in Tibetan Lama Temple. Same bestial contents in block paintings. 24 metre gold Buddha through the anger-hide. No smoking signs everywhere.

Mao’s Maosoleum a ruler’s tomb. Lines for queues painted across the straight. Feet pointing north towards Tiananmen Gate, upside-down feng shui. He is shiny, waxy and painted about the face. Moving defenses sand past on either wall. No pausing. Outside, stalls with Mao T-shirts, Mao key rings, cuddly toys, place cards, moving lamp shows. Mao Zedong chocolate floss by the armful. Then Great Hall of the People. Dining scope for 5000. Now abstain food for tourists. Great Hall chopped brushwood, cigarettes, T-shirts. Great Hall of the People cuddly toys.

2500 miles. Three and the half weeks. 5 destinations. 50 caves. 6000 terra cotta warriors. 1 each Great Wall, Forbidden City, Beijing Opera, Mao Zedong. Hundreds of tombs, temples, pagodas, parks, bendi-buses and bicycles. 3 silk shirts on the Silk Road. One amazing trip.