August 19, 2011
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The Silk Road (Sort Of) Overland
Sunday 14 August 2011
Everything turned out just fine today. There was an English-speaking girl at the reception this morning and in less than half an hour, I had a Chinese taxi driver knocking on my door, showing me a small notebook with recommendations from earlier customers written in English. What caught my eye instantly was the sentence, “He even helped me getting a train ticket” and I thought, “This is my man!”My taxi driver turned out to be very resourceful and he was able to show me not just the sights in and near Kuche, but he even included a trip to a place 70 km from Kuche itself. So, today I’ve seen eight sights for USD75 – very different from the prices I was offered in Kazakhstan!
First I saw the ruins from the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Quici – Subashi Gucheng – from the fourth to the twelfth century. A few minutes later, I saw the 16-metre Kizilgah Beacon Tower, a former garrison point on the northern Silk Road, dating from 206BC-220AD. This was from the Han Dynasty.
Wow! Where can you see two archaeological sights of this kind of quality before it’s even time for mid-morning coffee? But that was just the beginning. Next, we drove through Yanshui Gui – Saltwater Gulley – with amazing rock formations on our way to Kezier Qianfo Dong, a Buddhist cave temple complex from the third to the thirteenth century. This is an amazingly beautiful oasis in the middle of the mountainous desert. I got an English-speaking guide who showed me eight of these caves – there used to be 263 caves but now there are only 80 left.
Absolutely fascinating! Some of these caves were completely covered by frescoes of very high quality. Amazing. However, it was a bit difficult to follow what my guide was saying as I could hardly hear any consonants at all – it actually gave her English a bit of a Danish twang – but I got most of it. It took my about half an hour, though, to realise that when she said “pretty”, she actually meant “preach” – as in the Buddha preaching.
Back in Kuche, I saw the Friday Market (busy!), the Great Mosque, Qingzhen Da Si (beautiful), some ancient walls from the Qiuci Kingdom and the Mausoleum of Ashidin Khoja (absolutely delightful).
I’m amazed that I’ve been able to see much more than I had hoped for with my tight schedule. In other words, it’s been an absolutely fantastic day.
As I couldn’t get a sleeper or even a seat for tonight’s journey to Turpan, I had to buy a stand-only ticket. Finding out there were no seats was a bit of a damper this morning. Now, I would find out for myself what it was like to join the seat-less crowd (which I felt sorry for yesterday). A kind station guard wrote a note in Chinese, asking the conductor to check if there wasn’t a bed available for me, just before I got on the train. However, when I saw the crowd of people all pushing to reach the conductor’s little mini-office when we got on the train, my earlier optimism disappeared. How can you fight for a ticket in a queue if you don’t speak one word of Chinese?! I just sat down on a seat a friendly young guy offered me temporarily and chatted with the people around me – or tried to; very few knew any English at all and my best option in this case is to show the map of the Silk Road in my travel book and show people where I’ve been. Everybody I’ve tried this with so far have understood.
Suddenly, several people started shouting in my direction. Apparently, the train people had decided to offer me one of the unclaimed beds. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that I was the only European on the train, but I was not going to argue against the decision.
The bed was heavenly. Nice, clean sheets and a lovely, comfy duvet. As I was getting into bed, the unclaimed bed below me was being taken by a lady, whose son spoke to me in fluent (more or less) English.