Negative Altitude… ahhh

For those of you still wondering, the last leg of my trip to Turpan was quite nice, uneventful in plain words, and truly luxurious comparatively speaking. I got a meal yesterday on my really nice train here to Turpan. I asked the guy for rice, and egg & tomato stuff (just pointed to it actually) but, him being tired, I guess, he refused to speak Chinese to me. I say 'Wo yao yi wan mi fan hai you yi wan nage ji dan', (I want some rice and some of this chicken). He points at some greasy chicken parts and says 'cockadoodledoo' in Chinese and starts acting like a chicken in case I couldn't figure out what a chicken leg looked like, then gives me a plate with a scoop of everything on it, most of which I did not want and did not eat. Anyway, that was the nice train, why don't I not ruin it for myself? I saw a lot of yaks from that bus (before my eyes got full of smoke) and a lot of sheep and donkeys from yesterday’s train.

There was a Chinese lady on that bus from Lhasa that was sleeping on her 'bed' with some kind of steer or yak skull (one of those with big horns, like the kind they put on pick-up truck hoods in Texas) wrapped up in newspaper. Yes, I think Tibet is the Texas of China, a lot of Tibetans wore cowboy hats, which were actually a lot more useful there than I think they are in Texas.

Turpan has been good. Let me preface this with the following comment - in Lanzhou I was in a 'dorm room' with three beds, but there was only me. On the train here I was in a hard sleeper with six beds to a compartment, but there was only me. Here, I am in a huge, sort of Mediterranean style (if you can picture that in China) hotel, my room has five beds, but there is only me. In fact, last night I asked the friendly lady who unlocks my door for me, and she confirmed my suspicions that there was indeed no on else on the third floor! This is the dorm floor, you have to go outside and walk like a block (yes, literally) to the public showers, (open 3-9 pm, (that is Beijing time - which by the sun is two or three hours ahead here, but we are in China and Beijing IS the sun...), except when they aren't, when I had to track down some staff to ask them to unlock the door the other day, and the lady sits there on a barbershop chair knitting, waiting for me to get done in the shower so she can go back inside to hotel and knit there), I guess no one else wanted to put up with that...

Turpan is cold. My guidebook says 'zui ri de difang zai Zhongguo' but in my limited experience Turpan is not the hottest, but rather the coldest place in China! Summertime here is hot, (supposedly 121 F is the record!) Turpan is in the second lowest depression on earth, (only above the Dead Sea) the lowest spot is 154 meters below sea level - no wonder it took me so long to get here from Lhasa, lets see, from that one pass I dropped 5,330 meters, hmm. And they grow grapes here, on trellises hanging over the tourist streets, no cars allowed, and I think it would be really neat in the summer. Not bad now either, but there are no grapes, no music, no dancing in the streets...

I went to two ancient city ruins, some grave/mummy sites, a mosque with a big minaret that I wasn't allowed to climb, and some other places. Saw a Karez museum - these are the underground tunnels that they dig from the mountains (where there is water) to here (where there is no water) in order to water the grapes, and drink, and to live in general, pretty interesting. They do this also in Afghanistan, Iran, etc. And the old cities were really fascinating - unlike how I would picture such a thing being presented in America, these things are just there - you just buy a ticket then you can go walk around and climb on whatever you want. Felt sort of funny, I touch something and my gloves get dirty and I feel guilty for destroying relics... They get like no rain here at all, which is I guess the only way that these sorts of things have lasted for so long. They are huge, mostly just walls left, with doorways here and there, and wells that you don't want to fall into. Both places had leftovers of Buddhist Temples (these were from 3rd Century BC, and 5-7th Century AD - before Islam came here along the Silk Road).

In the one place you could rent a 'donkey taxi' (the preferred form of tourist transportation in this place) and go racing along to the monastery leftovers - allegedly six kilometers away. I told them I wanted to walk (there was no one else there and there was about ten donkey cart guys with nothing to do) so I walked (it wasn't anywhere near six kilometers) and had a nice time exploring in the silence, then heard some shouting and somebody came racing out the road in a cart to convince me to have a ride back, which he gave me for free after realizing that I really would just walk right beside his cart the whole way back unless he told me to ride for free... That was funny.

My guide/driver for two days of excursions was called Ilham - another 28 yr old guy who I had a lot of fun talking to. His Chinese was definitely better than mine, but still limited to a second language. Most people here speak Uighur, and depending on what kind of school they went to, also learn Chinese and English a bit. Uighur is closely related to Turkish. This ethnic tie is why the occasionally violent separatist group (in Xinjiang in general, probably not Turpan) is called the "East Turkestan Movement".

Today I went to a museum. I had to search out the lady selling tickets. Then she takes a flashlight and leads me into this big dark room and runs off to find a light switch, which when she does find it and turn it on, I see that I am standing underneath a dinosaur. So the museum had dinosaurs, mummies, and various cultural relics. I was the only person there. My tour was also much more interesting (and more expensive) because I was driven around in a van, but there was just me and the driver.

If anybody gets the impression that there are no other tourists in Turpan, you're right. I did see one group of apparently American travelers at the bus station the other day, and one old Japanese guy with a personal translator whom we ran into about three times, but that was it. The fancy hotel, with the decent restaurant (not the one I am staying at, the one I eat at!) has a post office, but it is closed; and a CITS (travel agency) office, but it is closed; three quarters of the stuff on the menu they don't have; but the staff is nice - I learned how to say squid in Chinese.

So that was Turpan, and I am leaving this afternoon for Kashgar - assuming that I can buy a ticket. In a strange bid to draw tourists, the Turpan Train Station is actually in Daheyan - a very bumpy 60 some kilometers away from actual Turpan. So anyway, assuming that the train to Kashar is as empty as the train here was, buying a ticket should not be a problem!

I just had dinner in a coffee shop - the Oasis Hotel, ate some kind of ham and egg sandwich that was designated as "Muslim" - I don't know if that meant the chicken, or the pig, or whoever ate it, or what but there it was: Ham (Muslim) and egg Sandwich...

For those of you in places with less character than this - enjoy your flush toilets. I long ago decided that I could live with squatty potties if I had to, but that was in a warm place. Somehow that thirty or thirty five degrees (C) makes a big difference!