Let's Play North Pole: Hemu 禾木

The first week of October is a big holiday in China. For many people, it means a chance to sit at home, watch TV, and sleep. For a small minority, it's a rare opportunity to go on a slightly longer backpacking trip and enjoy the wilds of Xinjiang.

Me and the girls once again signed up, geared up, and got on up to Northern Xinjiang (in my opinion, the overall nicest part of this vast province due to its remoteness　and Kazakhness).

We tripped along happily for a couple days, walking through rolling hills alternating between barren winter-is-coming brown, and brilliant yellow autumn trees. Nights were cold, days were cool.

Then one day while eating lunch, I spotted dark portents of troubles to come hovering over us. The temperature dropped rather quickly, the clouds moved into position, and soon fluttery little flurries were floating down around us. I don't think anybody was really happy about it, but we all know that if you insist on coming to this little corner of the world that borders on Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan in October, you can't be surprised at the weather. No matter what it does.

So we trucked along. A couple hours after lunch, we lost our guide right about here. Coming up over the crest of a hill, we were faced not only with black clouds and snowy mountains on all sides, but a disappeared guide, and no one could hear our shouting through the howling wind.

We hadn't been far behind, at all, but as soon as he dipped down on the other side of the hill, he was temporarily hidden from view. A couple short minutes later, the clouds took care of hiding him after the hill couldn't. We waited for a while, turning in circles, looking for footprints, half-heartedly shouting for him every once in a while. Finally, I spotted him at the base of a hill in the distance, obviously about to head into snowy, tall mountains.

The happiness of spotting him was dampened a little bit by the fact that he had lead us over that hill in vain; the stragglers who were lagging way behind were in a little valley that connected to the next valley and had seen him. So instead of going up and down a big hill, they just cut straight through the flatlands.

But no point in complaining. All's well that ends well, right? So, we set off into the dark, snowy mountains. For the rest of the afternoon, all we saw was this. Actually, most of what I saw was my feet, as raising my head would just expose my face unnecessarily to the icy wind and snow.

There were speculations that our guide was lost and leading us in circles; I certainly couldn't tell left from right, much less north from south in those conditions. But there's nothing you can do except pretend you're on your way to a prison camp in Siberia, lost on an arctic expedition, or muse on other such imaginations to keep your spirits up.

We did, eventually, get to a little flat area tucked between hills and set up camp right before dark. It was one of those nights where everyone dives immediately into their tents and sleeping bags. On previous nights we had been chided for not having team spirit, for not participating the campfire-side drinking and singing games, but there were no such reprimands tonight.

The next day we woke up to biting cold and were still fogged in, but the sun soon came out, burned off some of the haze, and we were on our way. The rest of the hiking trip was, how can I put it? Cold.

Really, really cold. I enjoy snow, unfortunately my hands and feet refuse to play. They go numb in protest. The strike doesn't end till I've gotten them to a warm place for an hour or two and coax them back to life.

But there was nowhere else to go. These mountains are pretty much uninhabited at this time of year; in the several days we walked, we ran into just a few abandoned cabins and no people except the front end and tail end, closer to villages.

We did walk out of the snow, but as we slept on the eve of our departure, the snow came back and found as again. We woke up to a winter wonderland. Again. To make a long story somewhat shorter, we walked out that day to the road, but because of logistics problems waited for our bus for hours. It was dark. The temperature was around freezing, and several hours of sitting around outside in freezing weather is not pleasant.

But the bus did come, my hands and feet did return to normal (the next day), and I was very grateful to come home.