It's been five months since I made this trip. Obviously I've not been writing it up at a blazing pace. But here, at long last, is the third instalment. There will be one more. At this pace, you can expect it around Christmas.

-Will

Previously:
Part one: The town at the far end of China
Part two: A roaring trade in fat-assed sheep
Imagethief and the hell of yurts: Video companion
Xinjiang photo gallery

Part three: The hell of yurts
On the evening of our second day in Kashgar we negotiated at John’s Travel Café --a standard-issue tourist service trap-- for a car and driver to take us to Lake Karakul the next day. We must have negotiated badly because we hired the world’s slowest minivan driven by the world’s surliest Cantonese driver. But he showed up the next morning on time, so we left most of our luggage at the hotel and threw a bare minimum of fresh underwear, toiletries, road snacks and twenty-five liters of water into the back and headed for the hills.

The first part of the drive was across the desert plain surrounding Kashgar. Aside from the occasional, leafy Uighur village, the surroundings were flat, barren and arid. One side of the road was the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. It did not look like the kind of place you’d want to cross with just a camel and sheep’s bladder full of water. Only a colossal listening station interrupted the monotony of the desert. It must provide the Chinese with bang-up intelligence on Kazakh, Turkmen and Uzbek intrigues

After a couple of hours we left the flatlands and entered the foothills of the Pamir Mountains. The drive up to the lake follows the road that eventually becomes the Karakoram Highway, into Pakistan. At the earlier stages of the ascent into the mountains it is a good road, the surroundings look as exotic as the name would suggest. We drove through a series of steep sided gorges and spectacular, brown valleys punctuated by occasional irrigated villages shrouded in birch trees.

As we climbed the scenery changed. The trees become scarce and the villages became progressively smaller and more hardscrabble. Horses and donkeys began to give way to camels (sheep were constant). The terrain became less hospitable, and the rugged peaks of the Pamir Mountains, which line the Tajik border, began to loom overhead. At one point the road passed by a vast, windswept marshland ringed by hills. We stopped for a while to admire the spectacular desolation and answer various calls of nature. I’ll say this for Xinjiang: I have seldom relieved myself in the midst of such awe-inspiring splendor.

As befits any Central Asian border, there is a degree of tension. We passed through two police checkpoints. The first was an impromptu one, shortly after we had entered the foothills. All cars were being stopped and checked by the police for, we were told, militants. There were a few stressful minutes when it appeared that our driver’s papers were not in order, and we thought we might be sent back to Kashgar. But eventually the police decided that we were, in fact, tourists and not Central Asian militants and we were, in any case, headed the wrong direction to cause them trouble, so they let us through. Despite its remote sounding location, the road from Kashgar to Karakul is a well-beaten tourist path for Chinese as well as foreigners.

The second checkpoint was a more organized affair higher in the mountains, marking the entrance to the official border region. There all passengers had to disembark from their vehicles and present passports and visas to guards in an office building. As befits a checkpoint with an air of permanence, a thriving village of snack stalls and drink vendors had sprung up on both sides. After the second checkpoint, things got rugged. The land rapidly became inhospitably rocky and barren. The paved road soon gave way to rutted gravel that tested the decrepit springs on our aging van as well as the patience of our driver. The air also got conspicuously thinner and colder, and we started feeling the creeping edges of altitude headaches.

Not nearly soon enough we arrived at the lake, which sits in a long valley tucked hard against the Tajik border. The lake was picturesque, but somehow smaller than I had expected. It was surrounded by a fringe of scrubby dunes and marshland that extended to the foot of the mountains that flanked the lake. Tongues of glacial ice lolled from valleys between the mountains. Looming over the entire valley was colossal Muztagh Ata, a broad, 7,500-meter tall mountain that dominates the area. A large village was just visible, wedged between the lake and the foot of the mountain. Unfortunately, the valley was shrouded in clouds, so it was hard to take in the scale of the scenery.

It was also cold. Equipped like idiots only for the broiling lowlands, we were ill prepared for the frigid air at Karakul’s 3,600 meters. I had a fleece, a long-sleeve t-shirt and a hat, the limitations of which became obvious the moment I stepped out of the van. But we figured that wouldn’t matter once we had shelter arranged, and someplace warm we could retreat to.

And arranging shelter was the very next step. There are various small villages (Tajik mostly, I gather) ringing the lake, and many isolated households that rent out round, concrete structures rather generously billed as “yurts”. In retrospect, we might have done better had we stayed at one of those locations. But our driver took us straight to the official Karakul Lake tourist depot, which, in our oxygen-deprived state, seemed like the correct move at the time.

The tourist site consisted of one building encompassing a restaurant and dormitories. There were also six or seven semi-traditional, wood and fabric yurts and a profusion of locals offering camel rides, horse rides, souvenirs and other forms of recreational harassment.

In the office, which doubled as the restaurant, we were one of about four parties bargaining for accommodation. As a group we were somewhat disorganized about whether we wanted to stay in the dormitory or in a yurt. The operators didn’t make our lives any easier, insisting first that the dormitory was full before miraculously discovering some open spaces. After much back and forth we ended up settling on a yurt, which would enable all six of us to stay together. My participation in the negotiations was limited by Mrs. Imagethief’s slow descent into mild altitude sickness. All of us were headachy, but her headache had become severe, with attendant nausea, and she had gone to lie down on one of the benches in the restaurant. In retrospect, given the risky nature of altitude sickness, the best move would have been to put her back in the van and drive down the mountain.

Having settled the accommodation we had a quick and utterly unremarkable meal at the restaurant before hauling our assorted possessions to our assigned yurt. There, in process of unpacking I discovered that the mountain ascent had caused my sunscreen to undergo explosive decompression in my toiletry kit (a quirk of Coppertone’s packaging makes it uniquely susceptible to this). Greasy sunscreen had coated everything, so I took the kit up to the outdoor sinks by the restaurant, which were the only sinks available for public use. The sinks were fed by metal tanks topped periodically with water drawn from a well. While sitting in the tanks the water had time to match the ambient temperature, which was just above zero. That made it extraordinarily painful to wash with, and my hands were blue and immobilized after just a few moments of rinsing, and felt like they were being skinned with razor blades for twenty minutes thereafter.

The other nicely primitive facility was, of course, the toilet. There was a lovely cinderblock bathroom just behind the restaurant building, but it was padlocked shut for reasons unknown. Instead, we were directed to a pair of open pits --one for men and one for women-- ringed with gap-ridden walls cobbled together from corrugated sheet metal. There was no roof, and the flimsy walls were scant protection from the wind sweeping through the valley. Three pairs of boards crossed each pit. To use the toilet, one delicately squatted on one of the pairs of boards, trying to maintain stability while praying that neither of the boards broke and sent you plummeting into the great mound of mostly frozen excrement below. The only positive aspect (and I struggle to find one) was that the low temperature kept the odor down. Also, it wasn’t raining.

After we settled in, all of us except for Mrs. Imagethief, who was still feeling ill, went for a walk down the lake. As with many Chinese tourist locations the area around the restaurant was fenced off, but in this case that may have been to keep unauthorized locals out rather than tourists in. Either way, enormous holes in the fence made the purpose moot. A kilometer or two along the shore there was a graveyard tucked into a small hollow in the hills surrounding the lake. On the top of the ridgeline surrounding the graveyard a single crypt stood out against the sky. Two of my companions had turned back, but two others and I decided to climb up to the isolated crypt and see what the view was like. This required a difficult scrabble up the steep hillside, which was coated with treacherous, loose rock.

If you’ve ever watched documentaries about mountain climbing, you will have seen people at high altitude reduced to slow, plodding steps as the announcer intones about the “death zone”, where oxygen is so thin that every move is difficult. Struggling up that hillside in Karakul’s thin air, I gained a new appreciation for mountain climbers. Any fantasies I may have had about summiting Everest without oxygen were duly scrapped. Nevertheless, we made it to the top, and the effort warmed me up. From the ridge we had nice view along the lake and wetlands lining the shore. A lone camel rider wound his way along the shore, in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks, more or less fulfilling my mental image of Central Asia.

Unfortunately, the clouds and mist still obscured much of the view. If we’d been smarter, we might have realized that they portended bad weather. Being idiots, that didn’t occur to us until, up on that nicely exposed ridgeline, it started to hail on us. Hard. With the hail came cold wind. At that moment, the climb down looked much steeper and more precarious than the ascent had been. But, on the bright side, at least weren’t trying to take a shit in the roofless pit toilet at that moment.

We made it down safely, although we moved somewhat faster than was prudent. An hour later we were back at the threadbare resort. All of our companions were tucked into the restaurant, which was the only warm area. And that was only relative to the outside. Mrs. Imagethief was clearly not the first visitor to suffer from the altitude. For 50RMB she had acquired herself an “oxygen pillow”, a large, blue sack inflated with oxygen and equipped with a nasal tube. She looked a bit ridiculous desperately clutching the enormous blue pillow with a transparent tube hanging from her nose, but she was clearly much happier.

Outside the hail had changed to a May snowstorm. Such are the mountains of Central Asia, and if you plan on traveling to them, you’d do well to be better prepared than we were. However, the snow only lasted an hour or so, after which the air cleared completely. Suddenly, the entire valley was visible, with the sunset casting a warm, orange light on the ice-clad mountains on one side of the lake and newly snow-dusted hills on the other. All of immense Muztagh Ata was visible, and the face caught the evening light. Tourists emerged from yurts, dormitory rooms, and anywhere else they’d sheltered from the cold, and gathered on the lakeshore to watch the sunset. Until that moment we’d been wondering if we’d made a mistake coming up to Karakul, but watching the shifting light on the mountains and water we saw how the lake has earned its reputation.

However, once the sun had set the air gave up what little heat it had left and there was suddenly absolutely no reason to be outdoors. We returned to the restaurant for a dinner every bit as forgettable as our lunch, and then retreated to our yurt.

There is an important thing you need to know about yurts. Real yurts have a reputation for being snug and comfortable, even in nasty, alpine weather. But --and this is important-- real yurts have stoves. Tourists yurts may have mattresses, blankets and pillows but they do not, at least at Karakul, have stoves. The staff yurt outside the restaurant had a stove, but we didn’t. We gazed at the smoking chimney with naked envy. The stove makes a big difference. With a stove, a yurt in the mountains is shelter from the raging elements. Without a stove it’s a leather refrigerator.

Everyone slept in multiple layers of clothes that night. My wide-brimmed leather traveling hat is not suitable for sleeping in, so I borrowed a scarf from one of the girls to wrap my head in. I even considered sleeping in my boots, but the ground around the yurts was muddy and saturated with camel piss (and human piss; as we discovered that night it was a long way from the yurt to the bathroom pits) so I grudgingly relented.

That night the six of us fought mighty battles with our bladders. Everyone had been drinking a lot of water to stay as hydrated as possible. The downside of that was that we all had to get up and go at least once during the night. Each of us waged a private struggle, postponing the inevitable as long as possible, but one by one we each succumbed and went through the same ritual. That involved flailing in the frigid, pitch blackness of the yurt for our mud-and-camel-piss encrusted boots, fumbling with the laces with numbed fingers, and then staggering out into the frozen night for blessed relief while trying not to kick anyone in the head. There, on the shores of the lake, bathed in the endorphin glow of contracting bladders, we all had the same epiphany, brought on by the most remarkable stars any of us had ever seen.

I’ve spent a lot of time on boats far from shore, where there is almost no light pollution to spoil the stars. But most of that has been in the tropics, where the air is thick and humid, robbing the night sky of some of its finest detail. There, in the shadow of Muztagh Ata, at 3,600 meters in the thin and freezing air, with no lights anywhere, the sky was painted in a way I’d never seen before. A band of white stretched overhead, fading to glittering filaments on either side. It made me wonder what the stars must look like from space. As a watched, a single shooting star skipped across the Milky Way, toward the mountains on the far side of the lake.

It was the coldest night I’ve ever spent, and I don’t think I slept much. The next morning, following our third crushingly unremarkable meal at the restaurant, we decided to strike out for the glacier tumbling from the mountains at the southern end of the lake. We had adjusted to the altitude somewhat, but the thin air was still obviously affecting our judgment as to what was practical or not. The previous day’s dusting of snow still clung to the low hills on the south side of the lake, reminding us of how cold it was. But it was gloriously clear morning and seemed worth exploring the area around the lake.

We first had to beat our way through the cordon of camel-ride touts that infested the tourist area. Like many of the beggars in Beijing, they have learned the technique of beating tourists into submission. It seems inconceivable to them that any soul on earth might, just possibly, not want a camel ride. And even once we had run the main camel-ride blockade, we continued to run into fresh camel-ride touts heading toward the tourist area or already giving people rides. Perhaps if you outbid whoever is already on the camel, they simply get shoved off. Now that’s something I would pay to see.

Fortunately, the camels thinned out after a while. After that, the only tout was a gentle one from a woman outside her rustic homestead a kilometer up the lake. She was supervising her small child, who was busy defecating on the beach as we walked by. “Yurt?” she asked, hopefully.

Glaciers and mountains are large, so as you walk toward them they pull a mirage-like trick where, no matter how close they appear, they never get any closer. It didn’t take us long to realize that our chance of getting to the glacier with anything less than a full-day hike was zero. Despite carrying the world’s supply of dates and dried apricots, we weren’t equipped to spend the whole day out, and we needed to head back to Kashgar that afternoon. We moderated our expectations, and enjoyed a lazy stroll through the herds of shaggy, pint-sized cows that graze on the lakeshore. (Perhaps they were yaks, but I’d always imagined yaks to be bigger.)

We climbed a line of tall dunes beyond the end of the lake, our turnaround point, and settled down to enjoy the view. The glacier was perhaps incrementally closer, but not close enough for us to entertain delusions of reaching it. But, just as the ridgeline the previous day had been, it was a gorgeous spot from which to survey the valley. The clear air and morning sun brought out all the detail and color of the surrounding area. Muztagh Ata was radiant in the sunlight, almost too bright to look at, and the village at the mountain’s foot was clearly visible, as were the settlements and ridges we had passed by on the previous evening’s hike. Karakul isn’t much for accommodation, but it is nonetheless a spectacular spot.

The sign that it was high time for us head back to Kashgar came toward the end of the return leg of our hike. With shocking suddenness one of my companions, Michael, was overcome by illness. He staggered the rest of the way back to the restaurant and we all piled back into our van. Wherever our driver spent the night, he didn’t appear any the worse for wear. Perhaps he was in the heated yurt. We were soon headed back down the mountain, into the thicker and blessedly warmer air of the lowlands.

Next: All the grapes you can eat and the night market of death.


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