Arrived in Xiamen! Finally, an update...

Hello! Before I go off into endless descriptions of my travels again, let me start with the most important part of this message: I made it!!! As I'm writing this, I'm in Kashgar, Xinjiang province, China (I wrote this blog in parts – I’m now actually in Xiamen). Of course, I'm really happy I'm here, in one piece, with everything that I own still on me, but after recovering from the state of bliss I was in after having crossed the border of Kyrgyzstan and China, I also realized that I will have to start my studies in Xiamen, on the other side of the country, in two days time already! Luckily, I've managed to find flights from Kashgar to Urumqi, and from Urumqi to Xiamen for tonight and tomorrow morning respectively, so I do not have to rush through Kashgar, which I've found to be a very interesting city. So, if all goes as planned, I will have a nice and quick, if rather uninteresting, journey from here to Xiamen, but at least I can take a look around here. After all, when will I find myself in a place like Kashgar again?

Right, now that I've told you about that last, rather boring leg of my trip, I'll try to give an impression of the time I spent in Kyrgyzstan after I wrote the last update from Bishkek, and about how I got to Kashgar.

After I posted the last update, I left Bishkek to go to lake Song Köl, roughly 5 hours away by car. I had planned to do this for a long time because I had seen some stunning pictures of this lake back home, and I had planned to go there hitchhiking. In Kyrgyzstan, the culture of hitchhiking is actually very wide-spread. They just don't call it hitchhiking. They call it taking a shared taxi. People who have a car and want to drive somewhere gather at the bus station, and everybody who wants to go to the same place by car seeks these people out and negotiates a very small price to cover the gas costs of the driver, shared by all the passengers. You can do the same thing by standing at the side of the road, and many people do that too. In fact, several of the rides I got in Kyrgyzstan while standing at the side of the road were also for free, but mostly you're expected to pay a small fee for the gas. After thinking about it, I decided I really didn't object to paying a little for the gas, as both the gas costs are very low here (less than 50cts per liter) and the people that picked me up were usually a lot poorer than me. The feeling of standing on the side of the road waiting for someone to pick you up, though, is still the same, so I kept on doing that most of the time.
Going to Song Köl is not a very straight forward business though. There is a 100km (dirt-) road to the lake, which is itself more than 3000m up in the mountains, that ends there too, meaning that there is no ongoing traffic passing the lake. The only cars on this road belong to a few local travel agencies that bring a handful of tourists to the lake every day, and they ask for much more money than local people going there anyway (I tried...). To find a way to get to the lake that fit into my budget, I thought it would be a good idea to go to the town/village that had the best combination of being close to the lake and having a lot of traffic passing through: Kochkor. This is also where I had agreed to meet up with Grant, a cheerful Australian guy I met in Almaty and with whom I had planned to go to Song Köl together.
I had no trouble at all finding an extremely cheap shared taxi, but when I got there I realized Grant would only be coming the next day. That meant I had to find a place to sleep. This proved to be rather easy, as in Kochkor, as well as in many other smaller and bigger towns in Kyrgyzstan, an organization calling itself 'CBT' (Community Based Tourism) keeps a list of people in the village that offer a simple Bed & Breakfast to tourists coming through. My experience with this has been really good, as you get to stay with local people, paying about 6-7 Euro for the bed and food, while still enjoying the really great tradition of hospitality in the region. From that money the homestay where I spent the most nights, for example, could finance the construction of a real bathroom, and more generally speaking this system enables the effective exploitation of tourism to relieve the poverty of the entire village (which was quite ubiquitous).

Having spent the night at one of these places, I met up with Grant, and we made a plan to get to Song Köl as cheaply as possible. The CBT office in the town organized tours there with a guide, but those were not exactly within range as far as my budget was concerned. What we ended up doing, was taking a shared taxi to a nearby mountain pass, about 20km from the lake. From there, we would hike to the lake, leaving the issue of getting out of there again for later. There was a path, sort of, in the beginning, but that quickly became rather useless as a way to orientate ourselves, as it first split up into 3 paths, with no way of telling which was the right one, and later vanished altogether. Luckily, we had a hand drawn map, given to us by a young guide at the CBT office. (very) Roughly stating which mountains we had to have on our left side, and which on our right, and where we could cross the river without having to get too wet, this map turned out to be very useful, as well as a frequent cause for laughter when local nomads saw what we were navigating on…
The two-day walk is best described in pictures, rather than words, as we passed through some of the most amazing landscapes I’ve ever seen. (I’ll put photos up asap). One of the things that made the trip a bit more interesting than it already was, was the fact that the tent stick that had previously cracked in the Kazakhstani desert, now snapped completely as I tried to put up my tent at nightfall. Grant luckily came up with the smart idea of putting the tent at the foot of a somewhat steeper hill, so I could use the lines of the tent to keep it up at least a little bit. As expected, it didn’t do much, but it helped a little, as you may see on the pictures.
Hours of walking through valleys, up over passes and downhill again were at times interrupted when we passed by a group of yurts, where often we would be invited in for bread, a cup of tea, and kumys – fermented mare milk. The traditional huts they live in are made of a wooden frame and have animal skins ‘wrapped’ around them, providing shelter from the elements rather effectively, as we would notice after a few very good nights we spent as the guests of a shepherd’s family. By the way, I have always been told that when walking at high altitude – we climbed as high as 4000m – the air gets thinner, and you are out of breath very quickly, but I never knew if this was actually as severe as it sounds. What was my experience? Let’s just say I’ll give the people who told me this a little more credit from now on…
When we finally reached the lake it was every bit as beautiful as I had thought, but I was happy we had taken the walk through all those valleys before. Many people simply buy a tour from the CBT office to take a taxi up to the lake, where they stay at a yurt specially set up for tourists, but doing it this way we avoided all that and had a really rewarding experience, taking in the full breath of nature and nomadic culture of Kyrgyzstan’s mountains. The whole trip was topped off by a free ride back to Kochkor with Kyrgyz tourists from Bishkek, in a nice 4-wheel drive.
The next two days I spent at lake Issik Kul, swimming and walking about in little villages on it’s southern shore, enjoying the view. Basically, I couldn’t do much else during these days, as I had only two days before I had to get on my way to Naryn, my ‘base-camp’ for crossing the border into China’s Xinjiang province. I mentioned the border-crossing in my last blog briefly, saying that it was not a very straightforward border crossing where you simply show your pasport, get a stamp and walk on. The difficulty with the border crossing in the Torugart pass is that it has been classified by the Chinese as a ‘class-2’ border crossing, meaning only local traffic of Kyrgyz and Chinese is allowed to cross the border at this point. The only other international border, at the Irkeshtam pass, was approximately four days traveling away, a sacrifice I was not prepared to make. There was, luckily, one other option: it is possible to cross the Torugart pass after all, but the Chinese side requires you to arrange transport from the border to Kashgar before-hand, and will not let you cross the border until your driver has arrived on the other side, nor when you arrive without a bunch of special permits for going through this area. Arranging this, however, will cost you a small fortune: transportation charges range from 300 to 500 dollars, depending on the departure point and the company you book with. After doing my research, I found out that the cheapest one left from Naryn, so that’s why I had to get to this city in order to get to China. If you’ve read the rest of my blogs, you’re probably wondering now: “did he really spend 300 dollars to cross a border?”. And rightly so. Because I didn’t, of course. The costs, luckily, were for a car to drive to the border from Naryn (an otherwise tricky drive), and another from the border to Kashgar. So you were allowed to share to costs with other passengers, if you could find someone who would want to cross the border on the same day as you. Once I realized this, I set out looking for other people going my way. It wasn’t extremely straight-forward, as the number of tourists crossing this border daily is really limited to something like 20 people, who are using different agencies and will not be easy to reach when traveling in a country like Kyrgyzstan. Fortunately, luck was on my side once again, and I found two other travelers that were planning to go to Kashgar: Minna from Finland and Karine from France. Costs for the entire crossing had thus been reduced to approximately 100 dollars per person, a fee that I was willing to pay if it saved me the four days travel to the Irkeshtam pass. Time was definitely becoming an increasingly scarce commodity, and the price was rising!
A great benefit of going this way was the included side-trip to the age-old caravanserai Tash Rabat – a kind of hotel from the 12th century, where merchants on the silk road used find a safe haven from robbers, take a rest and gather strength for the next part of their journey. Set in gorgeous mountainous surroundings, the place is virtually entirely intact, enabling us to see rooms where the silk road travelers of the day would stay, eat and live for the time they were there.

Visiting Tash Rabat was my last experience of Kyrgyzstan before crossing into China. The two and a half weeks I spent there were absolutely amazing, and because I feel that there is so much more to tell about random things that happened, I want to share one more anecdote with you, about a night out on the streets of Kochkor with two others, looking for our guest-house. I choose this particular story because it really made me think, and I believe it has taught me something new.
As it happened, me and the two girls that were staying with me at the same bed & breakfast had gone out earlier that evening to go to a local arts & crafts museum and workplace. Our host had drawn a very rudimentary map (they seem to like these in Kochkor) of where the house was, and where the museum was. For some reason yet to be revealed to me, we left without really remembering the name of our host, the street name, nor the house number, and trusted we would recognize the place when we walked by it on the way back. Roughly an hour later it was dark, and we realized that there were no streetlights whatsoever in this town. On top of that, all streets looked quite like each other, as all were unpaved and full of hardly visible, yet deep, potholes. Eventually, after quite a long time of walking around aimlessly, we found our host’s place again, but not before we had met a small group of 5 year-old boys and girls playing on the street when it was not completely dark yet. It is very common for children in Kyrgyzstan to yell ‘hello! hello!’ to foreigners when they walk by, and it is of course very common for those people to greet the children in return – I had happened many times already. Usually, however, the children are too shy to really come up to you. Now, among this small group of children was a boy who was not bothered by anything coming close to shyness. As soon as he spotted us he walked decidedly towards us, holding his arm firmly outstretched, ready to shake my hand. I was surprised at this sudden ‘breach of decorum’ but had no time to stare, as the boy was soon followed by all the other boys in very similar fashion. At this point we noticed that not only did the girls not come out to shake our hands, the boys also did not shake the hands of my two female companions. Coming from Western society, where it is common to shake hands with everyone, this was my first conscious encounter of this tradition. This made me think – especially as it happened several more times when I wanted to shake a woman’s hand – because, like some of you may know, a big discussion emerged in the Netherlands a few years ago, when an imam meeting a female Dutch minister refused to shake her hand. I won’t bother you with my opinion on whether the man should have offered the minister his hand or not, as I still haven’t found a really good reason why either of the two sides in the debate should be right, or the other wrong, but this incident definitely gave me new thoughts and ideas about what happens when people migrate to areas of the world where the culture is profoundly different and they have to find ways to adapt, while having grown up with very different ideas on what is correct social behavior.

Now, back to where I trailed off: China! Yes, I really made it, after roughly nine and a half weeks of traveling by car, boat, train, horse, foot and even horse-and-cart (I got a ride for about half an hour on my way to Naryn with a very kind old man on his way to the fields outside of Kochkor, who very kindly spent this time on me by lecturing me on all the different important books in Islamic religion). And I have to say: crossing this border did feel good. Not physically – it was snowing up on the pass, and it took really, really long – but in my mind it felt like I had really achieved something, and that I was now coming near the end of the journey. It was as if the border officials felt this too, and wanted to stretch the experience for as long as possible. Unfortunately, we had no choice but to accept this strange form of courtesy. After Tash Rabat the car drove further up into the mountains, and we had to pass no less than three (!) border checkpoints at the Kyrgyz side, and two on the Chinese side before we could look at the stamp in our passports and say “we made it”.
We arrived in Kashgar (Kashi in Chinese) in the early evening, and quickly found a place to stay in a cheap hotel listed in a guidebook one of the others had brought. From the point of entering the Xinjiang province, we had no access to internet anymore, nor to international phone calls, as these had all been blocked by the Chinese government in response to the Uyghur uprisings in July (This is also the reason for me writing this blog in parts: I could not post what I wrote in Kashgar until I got to Xiamen). Even though this restricted us in our ability to find information concerning onward travel, it did not prevent us from walking around and get an impression of the city, of which I will share a little with you now.

Kashgar is, on first glance, really a Chinese city. Many new buildings form a skyline that cannot look very different from many other anonymous urban centers in China, and new, modern constructions continue to be built all over the place. On second glance, however, the people living in the city come into view. Although there are a lot of Han Chinese that migrated here from the eastern parts of the country in past decades, the majority of the population is Uyghur, an ethnic group with distinctly Central Asian features, using a Turkic language. They have, of course, been on the wave of modernization that has swept through much of the Central Asian region, and you can find anything here that you will find in a Western city, save perhaps churches. In addition to this, however, they have managed to preserve a large part of more traditional customs and livelihoods. In the very centre of the city one can find the “old town”, a maze of small streets, snaking through a seemingly unorderly and chaotic collection of earthen houses, some several hundreds of years old. Here, most people are engaged in producing a range of different handicrafts, the most popular of which are hats, pottery and carpets. These are then sold as a way to supplement the family incomes, which are by no means big. One more aspect of the city, one that in fact immediately sets it apart from those cities that I came through in Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, is the way the roads in the city are used. Whereas in the rest of Central Asia (actually, in all countries I passed since Bulgaria) the outer lanes of any road would be used not for driving, but for parking, letting people out, driving the other way, and any other business that involves a car but not driving normally, in China, as we got closer to Kashgar, the road became a chaos of people walking, people cycling, people selling their stuff, people riding their mopeds, and cars trying not to hit anyone. And sometimes the road would be completely blocked when a shepherd was driving his sheep and goats across.

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Part 2:
Now, looking back at the few days I spent in Kashgar from Xiamen I can say that, all in all, the city was very different from any other place I had seen before, and here the feeling of being in Asia was much more present than in either Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan. It was a pleasant place, a lively city centre and a few good, much used parks. I think that the only reason that I did not feel completely at ease there was the fact that I was getting so close to reaching my final destination. I was getting anxious to finish, also because I thought that the last bit would be just a boring flight trip that I wanted to be over as soon as possible.
As it turned out, however, fate had one last surprise in store for me. Minna (the Finnish woman) and I had decided we would fly to Urumqi together, as she had booked a flight to Beijing from there and my flight to Xiamen would also depart from there. Our flight was on Saturday evening, and our onward flights would be the next morning. That meant we had to find a place to sleep right there, but because internet was blocked it was a bit tricky to book any place in advance. We decided to just go there and look for something once we arrived. This turned out to be exactly what a group of money-hungry local people were hoping for, because once we arrived we found out that there was a curfew in the city, and we could not enter the center to look for a room. Of course, everyone but us knew this, so the prices for beds went up accordingly. Add to this that many hotels were not allowed to host foreigners – they need a special permit for that – and that it was already around midnight when we got out of the airport, and you have all the ingredients local extortionists need to ask for the maximum price for a room.
Then, out of nowhere, a Pakistani businessman and his wife showed up to help us. They had, as we found out later, been living in Xiamen for eight years already (so the coincidence was quite big to find them in Urumqi), and were looking for a bed for the night too. They spoke excellent Chinese, and the man assured us that he could bargain with these Chinese people to get a good price for all four of us. They had a lot of luggage with them, as they had just come with the same flight, so we decided to help them with theirs as we walked around the area of the airport (the people directly at the entrance wouldn’t give in to the Pakistani’s demands for a cheaper room). There were a lot of hotels really close to each other, and we walked in and out of a few. I have to say that, even though it was nearing 2 a.m. now, I was having a really good time, mainly because of the way the man was arguing with every single person that offered us a room, and because those poor Chinese people did not really know what to do with the guy. When Minna and I were getting really tired we thanked the Pakistanis for their efforts and walked back to the airport terminal to catch a couple of hours of sleep there. My check-in was at 6:50 a.m. anyway, so it would be better to be at the airport already. Getting closer and closer to the terminal building, we were getting more and more certain that the lights were off and the building would be closed. When we found out it was really closed, and the only place nearby that we could see that looked like a hotel, also looked like a really expensive hotel, we decided to put our bags on the floor outside the terminal and just take a nap on our bags. After we had drunk a beer (bought from the hotel) and listened to some music, I finally fell asleep (I think Minna did, too).

The next morning (I mean two hours later), Minna and me said our goodbyes and I got on the plane. I ended up sitting next to two Xinjiang government officials, who turned out to be really nice, which made the six-hour flight a bit less boring. Finally, I arrived in Xiamen, and after walking into a wall of hot, humid air that would make you sweat if you were dead, I set out to find my way to the university, and to find the other students from University College. It wasn’t hard to find someone to tell me where to go, and after a few busses I got off at the university campus entrance. I was walking around looking for an internet cafe and a local phone card in order to contact the rest, when I saw three familiar faces right next to me, browsing through the CD collection of a local street vendor: I had found my classmates! Jeroen, Jet and Erwin quickly helped me find everything I needed and showed me to the dormitory building, where I met the rest of the group too.
Now I’ve been here for two weeks already, started studying, moved to an apartment off campus, got a residence permit and met a lot of new people. It’s been a lot of fun already, and my mind changed from ‘traveling-mode’ to ‘studying-and-living-in-one-place-mode’ without me even noticing. However, since this blog has so far been mainly about my travels from the Netherlands to China, I think it would be nice to take a paragraph or two here to give a proper ending to that part.

Why did I do my trip like this? I suppose the most important reason is that I’ve found that hitchhiking has always given me a better look at a new culture than when I was traveling by train, simply because it becomes so easy to meet local people. The second important reason is that, when traveling, I don’t like to have to plan ahead too much and too detailed, because I learned that the more I do plan what I will do and where I will be, the more cramped up I get about actually having to do it, while in the mean time missing dozens of opportunities of having genuinely new and spontaneous experiences.
When I heard that I was admitted to this exchange program, in the beginning of March, I needed only 2 more minutes to decide that I was going to get here overland, and 2 minutes more to decide that I was hitchhiking. The next few months, until the moment I left, were full of looking for information about the countries I would be passing, preparing myself, but mainly daydreaming about all those places I would be coming through. Now, looking back at the whole thing, I remember that hitchhiking that far looked like a very difficult and adventurous thing to do, but the most difficult and adventurous thing ended up being just taking the first step. Just leaving. Every time again when I had been somewhere for a while, that was the trickiest part, because once I was underway again everything went more or less by itself and was not that difficult at all.
Having seen how such a thing that may seem very hard can turn into something quite doable, if only you just start doing it, and also knowing how much I actually like doing it, I think you can definitely expect me to do a similar trip again. I don’t know when, I don’t know where, and I don’t know what or how. Maybe through Africa, or finally get across the Atlantic, who knows. We’ll see.