An apt juncture to start

Travelogues has been one my favourite from of writings. My blogs the last few years are more about Everyday life, at school, at work and at home. I was keen to start writing about this trip but had left this particular penmanship exercise till halfway into this travel adventure. At this point, one the 11th day of the trip, I am ready to pour some thoughts onto the page.

This trip that has lived up to all the mystique surrounding the Silk Road, and none more so than having to sit here in the lobby of the border crossing into Krgrzystan awaiting our passports, bags, phones, photos and books to be cleared. In fact clearing these staging posts has been an adventure in itself. Whether departing or arriving from train stations or crossing checkpoints on the highway, they are very careful who and what they let through. It is good precaution and one of the reasons why the country is so safe.

We started in Beijing, flying in from Singapore while Josh flew in from Tijuana after his project in Baja California. It was nice to meet this way. Really shows the globalised state we live in.

We were there on May 4th, and while this date is more popularly known as Star Wars day, it is also the anniversary of the rise of significant philosophical school of thought in the country, the anti-imperialist new culture movement. In fact, this was its 100th anniversary. It was a good time to share with Josh and Meg my thoughts on this matter.

Beijing technically is not part of the ancient Silk Road. Though the seat of the Yuan dynasty, the Silk Road terminus is Xian. So we made our way there not on the high speed railway but on the overnight sleeper train. If I find it hard sleeping in SQ, you can well imagine I hardly caught 40 winks. The rest of the travellers though slept soundly, for 8 full hours. So, they arrived all fresh and we were met by Jolene, a friendly Chinese guide who were relieved we spoke Chinese and are not from UK. A local from the city, she started us off the right way by bringing us to the museum and narrated the history of the country and city.

Xian is a key destination on the Silk Road. The first thing that underlined this fact was that Xian housed a mosque which is a living tourist site today. Then known as Changan (Long Peace), it was the capital of the very first unified China. Though his reign and indeed the dynasty Qin Shi Huang founded was short lived, he introduced one common language, one key factor to ensuring seamless communication. We saw his the warriors and horses guarding him in the afterlife. And it was here that I realised how I preferred my archaeology: raw!

I liked seeing the half buried, even fragmented pieces, in situ, rather than completely done up. I know get why some vintage car collectors prefer to keep their barn finds as is.

Xian’s ancient city walls still stands today and a timely reminder of how walls work. Our experience of walking on it is only enhanced by the viewing of Netflix’s Marco Polo that dramatized Kublai Khan’s efforts to rule all of China. That was merely 800 years or so ago but they found an advanced matriarchal civilisation of Banpo right in the middle of the city which dates back 6000 years ago. Indeed, this city is Changan.

We continued westwards just like the great monk and stopped next in Dunhuang. We were very much in Silk Road adventure mode (albeit gentrified for tourists) and rode camels (and ATV) on the sand dunes of Mt Mingsha and took in the beautiful view of Crescent Moon Lake.

What really took our breath away though is the desert scape. Dunhuang is an oasis at the edge of Taklamakan desert and the Silk Road branches into Northern, central and Southern pathways from here. And seeing how beautiful it is here, it makes sense that this strategically located town is the Crossroads. Much of the town is new but the landscape is not and we were well awed.

We also visited nearby Mogao grottoes, where the rich and the religious carved grottoes out of the sandstone mountain adorned with beautiful Buddhist art. Some of these have survived incredibly well hidden from the elements within the grottoes. It is however much harder from the theiving hands of man and sadly ancient Buddhist manuscripts were taken from one of the grottoes back to Britain.

From Dunhuang, we took another overnight train to Turpan. To do so, we had to drive almost 200kms to Liuyuan past the Gobi desert, with the Hei Shan in the background. There are two types of desert: sandy ones or rocky ones. Gobi is as rocky as Taklamakan is sandy. Both are dry but Gobi is also flat and so for miles all you see I are flat arid plains, which is cleverly utilised now as wind and solar farms turning a barren wasteland into energy producing areas. Dunhuang has been rebuilt for tourists but Liuyuan certainly wasn’t. It’s a railway station town and looks as grimy and greasy as industrial outposts are expected to be.

We were happy to be in Turpan, which is of Silk Road heritage, with security and border controls to match. How we wish we had the Khan’s golden tablet to facilitate easy passage through all of these stops but alas, two penknives and a bottle of perfume short, not to mention much time taken to record our passports (manually and photographically), we remain mere tourists on this historical path.

Turpan is proud, and rightly so, of its past but I feel it tries too hard to showcase it. With its landscapes of the Huoshan and Tienshan in between both Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, Turpan is a crossroad city just like a Dunhuang before. It too has its Buddhist grottoes in Bekzlekik but nearly all of these have been defaced by Muslims who came to dominance here 800 years ago. This is located in a canyon so all very picturesque, and so they built up new “old” structures and even film sets around these sites.

We thought we would had left Disneyland meet Haw Par Villa behind after the Bekzlekik when we visited the Grape Valley that Turpan is famous for. Alas this was no Napa Valley but rather almost an amusement centre with bright coloured shuttle cars with dance floor music and acrobatic shows. We did buy some raisins though.

The day was much redeemed when Momingjie, our jolly chain-smoking guide brought Josh and me to the ruins of the 2000 year old Yar City which is perhaps the best preserved site from two Millenia ago in the world. They’ve made no gaudy embellishments here and made the experience so much more authentic. The fact that we saw Banpo just days ago also allowed us to imagine our minds what that could have looked like.

I mentioned that only Josh and I saw the Yar City ruins. Meg had fallen ill in this desert town (just like Josh ten years ago in the Indian desert town of Rajasthan) and supermom Dawn stayed at the lodge to look after her. In fact, supermom whom we just celebrated mother’s day with came fully prepared with medicines, herbs, rice and even a cooker!

She need not rely on any shaman of the steppes to nurse our daughter back to health and in no time, Meg was up and about. The recovery was fortunately quite speedy that even at sunset dinner in Turpan at the rooftop of the lodge we were staying in, we played a question game Josh introduced us to. We continued it and learned that as parents, we have attributes that provides deep roots and strong wings. No prizes for guessing who is which.

The combination of these traits are strongly required as we pushed to the westernmost tip of China, into Kashgar. It too has the setting of a period movie and in fact The Kite Runner was filmed here. It is here in Kashgar, esp within the walls of the ancient city with its free-range kids that the full experience of travelling in these parts come alive. The people, young and old, male and female, are of all complexions. They are truly a blend of all worlds, and a living testimony to global integration.

Sure, it has it sites, like the beautiful Abu Hojak tombs which I felt was a predecessor to the Taj Mahal (and we were to learn more about the founder of the Mughal empire later) not just for Xiang Fei but also for its architecture.

Then there is the Sunday market and their great bazaar. Sadly, there was an outbreak of swine flu when we were there and the livestock market was closed. We saw the bird market instead and that experienced extracted from Dawn the observation if there was a categorisation of 4th world economies. For the way the market is (dis)organised, the throngs of people through it, the mode of negotiation (hanging out a 100¥ note to the seller indicating your last and final offer) and the general din of the place truly hark back to an earlier less developed era. Silk Road, did I hear anyone say? It’s just as well that the livestock market was closed for I dare say adding to this chaos the putrid smell of live animal droppings would be too much to bear.

The grand bazaar is much more organised until we reached the outside for on Sunday all sorts of people come out to hawk their wares and some even the household items of their grandparents on the streets. In the market, in the bazaar or on the streets, these vendors all deserve their place in the tapestry that is life in Kashgar. This has always been a trading city, from the old days of the Silk Road, and making/trading is very much in the lifeblood of the people here.

We have now spent 11 days on the road and have another dozen days to go. Our experiences on the China Silk Road have been unlike any other trips we have taken. Describing this as a trip is quite inadequate, as this is turning out to be a voyage. Strong wings, deep roots.