Pakistan Holidays

Jeep Tour K2 Trek Snow Capped High Mountains Valley Travel

Friday August 22: Kashgar

Tiandong - Tushuk Tash - Shipton's Arch

It is impossible to describe how hard the hotel bed was – suffice it to say that the floor would have made a softer sleeping place. It wasn’t just this hotel, apparently all the hotels in China, or at least this part of China have exceedingly hard beds. The Shears family are nothing if not resourceful though, and for the subsequent nights we blagged lots of pillows to use as a sort-of mattress topper and slept on these – don’t knock it, it worked! The hotel had two other failings. Firstly, on only one occasion, and then at 22.00hrs (!), did we manage to get hot water, so showers were a lot less than comfortable. Secondly, although the hotel catered for quite a lot of western guests, breakfasts made no concessions whatsoever to western tastes. Now, I buy the argument “why should they?”, but simply providing a toaster would not have gone amiss. Again, being resourceful, we solved the breakfast problem. Almost opposite the hotel was the “Karakoram Café” which, being owned and run by a Singapore couple understood several important concepts:

· Real toast, real New Zealand butter, and real marmalade

· Hygiene and cleanliness

· That everything should work

            China was very much like Pakistan and Iran in that most things seemed to be ‘bodged’ or like   ‘poor DIY’, and most things didn’t quite work properly. Several examples can be given such as the lack of hot water at the Kashgar hotel, pictures not straight, woodwork or plastering poorly done, appalling translations into English (so easy to fix) and the fact that at the Crown Hotel in Tashkurgan the shower tray was not sealed to the wall so there was a flood in the bathroom when   you had a shower.

It should not be taken that I am only critical of China – in fact we had a great time – but the Chinese consider themselves superior to their neighbours and are trying to promote tourism, so they really do need to try much harder. Maybe it is all so much better in the tourist hotspots of the East, but out in the ‘wild west’ they really only get about ‘3 out of 10’.

In the morning we did a walking tour of the old town. A Dragoman group that we met later in Tashkurgan said they had been advised to miss out Kashgar as it was unsafe – the recent police killings and all that. However, I can honestly say that at no time did we feel other than perfectly safe and surrounded by friendly people – even when we went out walking on our own. The old town is absolutely fascinating. It is a maze of narrow streets and alleyways and chock-full of eating stall, shops, and artisans workshops. The workshops seem to be able to make anything you (as a Kashgari) might want. There are whole streets where people are turning spindles or doing other woodwork, others where knives and axes are being forged, workshops making musical instruments and so on.

At one musical instrument shop a local lad gave us a recital on a sort-of long necked local violin; and very good he was too. The eating stalls come in all sorts of guises; there are stalls making and selling Uigar bread, bagels, lamb and/or chicken kebabs, dumplings, soup, yoghurt – a seemingly endless variety.

Hats are a particular speciality as the Uighurs, Tadjiks and Uzbeks each have their own distinct traditional style. It was interesting to see how they are sized – they are wetted and then pushed/bashed onto a wooden sizing head.

One thing we never quite got used to was the electric scooters and mopeds – these are totally silent, you just do not hear them coming, so it’s a good job they all drive rather slowly. Apart from the lack of noise which could be dangerous, electric scooters are clearly a great idea as the significantly keep the pollution level down – other countries in SE Asia please note.

We had an early lunch at a very up-market and very good Uighur restaurant. In fact, throughout our stay in China we only had one ‘chinese’ meal. The restaurant had only been open a couple of years and war decorated with carved wooden panels and had lots of fish tanks and a traditional Uighur group serenading the customers. You could tell by the clientele that it wasn’t cheap in local terms.

It being Friday, Quing Li had to go off to the mosque for Friday Prayers. We had visited the central mosque earlier when it had been virtually empty and quiet and contemplative, but now there were thousands of people there; Friday Prayers is a big occasion. Lots of tourists too, together with locals selling prayer carpets etc. You also get beggars, particularly those with missing limbs, as it is a Muslim’s duty to give alms to such people. Those praying take their own small prayer mats, and those who cannot get into the main mosque either pray in the main square or else by the shops in the roads around the mosque.

After prayers we drove out to see Shipton’s Arch. This involved a one hour drive out of Kashgar and then a 25km drive up a wadi which is cut through several hundred feet of river gravels. As we were driving over pebbles ad boulders it was severely bumpy and slow going. The wadi got narrower and narrower and we thought we were at the end, but oh no.

When we got out of the Pajero we met a guide who lives in a hut here in the summer, but moves back into Kashgar for the winter as: a) there no tourists (principally locals), and b) although there is not a lot of snow, it regularly drops to -25 centigrade. The ‘walk’ to the arch involves climbing up no less than six strategically placed ladders – all home made, and quite scary. It is all hard work at 2,700 meters. Mind you, it actually is worth it. Shipton’s Arch is the largest natural arch in the world at 180meters high and is cut into the river gravels – which just goes to show how thick all these river gravels are; the remains of the Pamirs. It is another 300meters climb up to the arch itself, but we declined. If anything, climbing down ladders is even more difficult/scary than climbing up them. When we got back to the Pajero Quing Li produced a Kashgar melon which was sliced up and we all (including the Arch’s guide) shared it. Kashgar melons really are ‘something else’. They are ‘ordinary’ melons, but are as large as a large watermelon and are just the tastiest, most juicy melons you will ever taste, and cost just 1yuan (about 10 pence). In this part of the world (ie. for several hundred miles radius) they are famed.

The journey back passed along roads lined with poplar trees, which are a major feature of central Asia. We also (each way) had to pass through two police checks.

            Getting petrol is a major exercise, presumably because of the fear of bombs. You drive up to the entrance to a petrol station, and stop by the guards at the entrance. The passengers then get out to wait, and the guards note the car registration number and then note the driver’s ID number, holding on to his documents till he leaves. He then fills up with petrol, drives back to the entrance and collects his documents and passengers. Paranoid.