Old Charioteer's Road: 车师古道

You will start noticing a pattern in my posts very soon. A word to the wise: if you have no interest in hiking, stop reading now.

I went hiking again.

It was with the same group of friends and a bunch of other people. The bunch of other people thing is pretty unavoidable in this country. Wherever you go, there are five hundred others.

We got to the trailhead in an unconventional way due to its inaccessability. We were supposed to be driven to our campsite that night and start hiking in the morning.

Unfortunately, the truck couldn't get past a certain point, and just as night had fallen we were already getting off the truck with quite a walk ahead of us. Wild rumors were flying around about how far we had to go: three kilometers? ten kilometers? Some said we could get there in two hours, some said we would be walking till dawn.

The pessimistic predictions ended up being more accurate, and I began wondering as we once again found ourselves running across loose rock in the pitch black, if I am not bad luck on backpacking trips. I started to wholeheartedly believe this after our fourth river crossing: sandals on, pants rolled up, and up to my knees in snow runoff ice-cold river water in the middle of the night.

The bad luck did not stop with that entirely. We unfolded out of our sleeping bags after a couple hours of sleep the next morning and tried to face the day with an optimistic disposition, but things did not improve.

We discovered our guide was incompetent. There was one guide and several assistant guides. Usually, if there's a big group of hikers, the guide goes at the front to lead the way and there's at least one person bringing up the rear. On this trip, everyone who knew the way was in the back and we were running all over the mountain like mad.

The scenery didn't fail to impress, though, with grand views of snow-capped peaks and rocky faces plummeting down to the deserted valley we were making our way through.

The going was rough, but not impossible. Unfortunately, some of the less fit people on the hike were lagging hours behind me, even after hiring locals to haul their bags on horseback.

That day was the most difficult, and I accidentally ended up so far ahead of everyone that come nightfall, my friends couldn't find me, I could find my friends, and I ended up sharing a tent with another swift hiker and waiting for them to appear on the horizon in the morning.

Appear they did, full of concern and reproaches, and we started out on the last day. My bad luck continued to follow us around. Much of the team lagged far, far behind, and when we finally made it out to the bus, we still had hours to wait for the ones stumbling along in pain somewhere up the mountain.

A few of the guys used this opportunity to stop in at a little store there, buy some liquor, and get obscenely drunk. One charming young fellow ended up making a big scene replete with kicking, crying, and screaming, refusing to get on the bus and yelling so incomprehensibly that my Chinese buddies couldn't catch all of what he was saying either. We were glad to be going home, and even gladder when he passed out.

Yet another unlucky hiking adventure with Tiffany. Stay tuned.

See Ya in La-La-Land: Urumqi

After Sulaxia, we cancelled our planned trip to Turpan (with no great regret an anyone's part) and hung around the city. We didn't do much, but we did eat.


We had Beijing Duck at the most famous place for it in Urumqi (which isn't saying much, but it was good duck).





I took them to sample Kazakh food, a diet made by and for nomads with little access to vegetables. The staples are meat and dairy products, the fattier the better. I got them to drink salty milk tea and eat a little bit of horse meat, even Christina.



We went to a Chinese-style fast food restaurant, where Alan enjoyed the mirrors and the plethora of options on the menu, which spans the wall near the entrance.





And we had hot pot at a nice little place called "Yak Hot Pot". Yes, there really is yak meat on the menu, but we didn't sample any of it.




After all that eating and wandering around the city, we were more or less recovered from our Sulaxia ordeal, but there was no time to do anything else in Xinjiang as I had to take them to the airport to bid them farewell.

Let's Go For a Stroll: Sulaxia 苏拉夏

I asked Christina and Alan what they wanted to see here, and at the very top of Alan's list was: the mountains. Getting to a good hiking trail is not as straightforward here as it is in California. Hardly anyone has a private car, the buses don't go anywhere good, and these mountains are truly remote and you can get in real trouble if you don't know your way.

So I exploited the contacts I have painstakingly built up over the past few years here, and organized our own private little expedition. It included: a professional guide and assistant guide, a car and driver to drop us at our starting point and meet us on day three at our exit point, and the security of knowing we were going somewhere good and probably wouldn't get lost and die. All that for about $12.

Unfortunately nobody really told us what we were getting into, but I started getting suspicious about the nature of this hike as my friend Wang Jing's text messages to me continued getting more and more dire. Dress warmly, it'll be cold. Be sure to bring good mats, it'll be cold. Dress really warmly, we'll probably be camping above the snow line the second day. Then: wear pants that can be rolled up and shoes you can change into to wade into water, we'll probably have to cross a lot of rivers.

All of her dire warnings turned out to be understated, and we all hobbled along after our (thankfully) very competent ex-Special Forces guide for three solid days of scrambling across rock faces, hopping from rock to rock by the Sulaxia river, and making extremely harry crossings sometimes by wading in and sometimes by leaping over rapids, pulled and coaxed by our strong, tall, heroic leader Lao Mao. (老猫: means "Old Cat". Old is a marker of respect, not age, and Cat because he says he has nine lives. I believe it.)

It was, in a word, relentless. Our first day started with running across loose rock in the dark, and the second day we hit the really challenging parts which a very small number of us were up to the challenge of facing more or less on our own.


There was no trail, there were no flat bits where you could just raise your head and look at what was around you without possibly falling to your death. We just kept climbing, crawling, jumping, slipping, scrambling, kneeling, and cursing.

It was, in another word, fantastic. Those hikes are the kind I live for: where you're simultaneously regretting your existence and stupidly happy to be there. I rarely meet a trail that can wind me, but I could barely walk my own way out of this. Not everyone fared as well as I did though...one member of our team actually did have to be carried out by our guide. Not from injury, but exhaustion.

Poor Alan had another souvenir from a falling-over incident on the part of another hiker, but luckily we all came out with all parts of our body intact and our five senses as intact as they started out as.

Back in Urumqi's Sweet Lovin' Arms

I landed back in Urumqi from the village feeling disoriented and disgruntled, just a few days before the arrival of Christina and Alan. I had been bugging them for as long as I've been here to come visit, to see this crazy never-never land where my feet have landed before it disappears, or I disappear, or both.

Unfortunately, they came at a time when my feelings about the place were at an all-time low, but I did my best to show them around. They had ten short days here, so we ran hither and thither: to a farm in the suburbs, some locals' homes, shopping around town, fancy dinners with fancy dancing, and of course, the infamous death march along a "classic" Xinjiang backpacking route.

This is my friend Nisagul's family farm in an outlying town called Miquan (米泉). We trekked out for the day for a long lunch and a look at Xinjiang cows.

We were treated to a nice traditional Xinjiang dish: 大盘鸡 or "big plate of chicken". It's basically a whole chicken hacked up (bones, head, claws, everything) and pressure cooked in with potatos, peppers, and some spices. It's then served with thick noodles.

So, just in time for C&A to get over their jetlag, we prepared for another little trip out of town. I thought it was to be a 3-day backpacking trip of the sort I had taken before in these wilds. Through some of my friends, I had organized a trip to the mountains with a professional guide and all I knew was that we were going to be going on a classic route, and it may be very very cold. Little did we know....