Luckily we ran into the only member of staff who could speak some English and he reckoned the easiest way to get to Turpan was by taxi for £60. He asked the taxi drivers queueing outside the hotel but no-one wanted to go. Turpan is the second lowest place on earth after the Dead Sea and the second hottest after the Atacama Desert in Chile, and the temperature in recent day has been about the 50-degree mark. Eventually he flagged down a taxi driven by a diminutive and vivacious lady who agreed to take us to Turpan. While driving she spoke to her family by zoom and I had a chat with her son. We passed the strange Hongshan (“Red Hill”) in the centre of Urumqi which is supposed to be one of the oldest parts of the city and noticed a pagoda on the top. We drove along a flat semi-desert plain out of Urumqi with a range of mountains on our right and passed through them along a narrow gorge, which the missionaries described in their book “The Gobi Desert” although there wasn’t a motorway in the 1920’s. We passed the world’s biggest windfarm which extended for about 15 miles and consisted of tens of thousands of turbines. On reaching Turpan, she flagged down a local taxi which took us to the excellent Shuangcheng hotel. While checking in, we met Tony, a young Chinese archaeologist (who spoke word-perfect English) and his American and Indian friends. They had met while studying at Yale and he had invited them back to China. They invited us to eat with them and we drove to a small Chinese restaurant for an authentic Chinse meal of samsas (small pies filled with mince), a delicious soup and a stir-fry.
This plane had crash-landed in the lobby of the hotel at Urumqi