Day 91, 27th August, Sarytash
An eventful night’s sleep. Woken first by the crunching of gravel as something big walked past the van. Probably a cow. Then woken by a passing truck blasting its horn at something in the road. Then woken by a huge dog just the other side of the fence which had apparently decided to spend the night barking at us. Got up and drove on for 5 miles looking for a good place to stop and had a good night’s sleep.
In the morning, we drove on through some beautiful scenery to the charming little town of Gulcha where we found a garage that takes credit cards and filled with diesel. The scenery became progressively more attractive; this was the fourth time we have driven this road and it seems to get more beautiful every time. The season has changed since we were there last and the green hillsides are now brown hillsides. It is haymaking season and the farmers are cutting the hay for their animals using scythes and sickles, with small pick-ups with enormous loads of hay constantly passing us on the road. Huge herds of sheep, goats, cows and horses being coralled down the road by farmers on horseback who gave us wide smiles and cheery waves as we crawled past. Eventually we crossed over the Taldyk Pass and a few minutes later were in the windswept little settlement of Sarytash.
We parked in a field and as the clock approached the designated meeting time of 7.30 I wandered towards the Murat homestay and saw Jim and Sonia’s landrover parked nearby. We met them on the dot at 7.30 and went inside to sit down for a rather mediocre meal. Melody and Matheu then arrived and, after uploading the past two days’ blog with the painfully slow internet, finally went to bed.
Day 92 Kashgar
The road from Sarytash to Irkeshtam on Kygyzstan’s border with China is perhaps the most spectacular on our journey. Brown, bare rolling hills with the enormous snow covered peaks of the Pamirs getting closer and closer as we drove toweards China. Getting out of Kyrgyzstan was the usual bureaucratic palava with at least 10 officials wanting to look at our passports and write things down on bits of paper. We then drove into China and a group of very friendly young soldiers wrote down our particulars and directed us to a building where we were told that the guide charged with taking us through the border hadnt arrive and the place was closing until 4 pm. So we sat down and, togeher with a middle-aged Chinese hitchhiker, put together a rather pleasant lunch. This was good because the Chinese border guards apparently confiscate fresh food, so it was better to eat it.
The road from Irkeshtam to the customs compound at Ulugqat is in an excellent state and, unlike everywhere else in Central Asia, it has numerous road signs giving distances to the next few towns. However they are in Chinese and you have to use your knowledge of the distances to identify the towns. There are pretty little villages of yellow houses with bright red roofs and signs painted on them including the traditional “good luck” sign.
The process of getting into China is best described at a later date. Suffice it to say that we were taken from the customs building to Kashgar, a distance of about 60 miles, in a bus and got to the hotel at 2.00 am utterly shattered and it required a bit of shouting by Sonia to persuade the hotel mnager to send for some bottles of water. However the hotel was ethnically authentic Uighur, as was the breakfast, and the room was clean and the bed comfortable. Piping hot water in the shower. Cant complain for £20.