August 19, 2011
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The Silk Road (Sort Of) Overland
Friday 12 August 2011
I really like Kashgar a great deal. It has a vibe and a feel I haven’t come across since, perhaps, Istanbul. I don’t know if I wanted to live in Kars if I was offered a job there. Or Van. Or Tashkent. Or Osh. Or Actau. Almaty perhaps. But one thing is for sure, I could definitely live in Kashgar. Maybe it reminds me a bit of Cairo. The charming chaos, the crazy mix of the past and the present.After a short sleep, shortened by the two hour time difference and the fact that breakfast finished at 9.30AM, I went back to bed to get the nightmarish taxi journey from last night out if my system before I could face Kashgar. By 1.00 PM I was ready to face the day.
I found a cafe with WiFi opposite the hotel and discovered quickly that Facebook, Xanga and Twitter are all blocked in China. I hadn’t really thought about this, or planned for an alternative, so now I’m disconnected from the whole world. This is very annoying! To know that people know where I am and what I’m doing means a lot to me when I’m a solo traveller crossing Asia.
Next, I walked towards the Id Gah Mosque in centre of Kashgar, the main building in the centre of town with a Silk Road past. This mosque is probably the biggest in China and can accommodate up to 20,000 worshippers I’ve read in one of my travel books.
Now, normally I would not have seen any evidence of Friday Prayers if I was walking past a mosque on a Friday around 3.00PM, but I now understand that the Chinese province Xinjiang operates with two times: the official Beijing time (GMT+8) and “Xinjiang time” (GMT+6), which follows the sun more closely and therefore the Muslim prayer times for this city. So as I was approaching the mosque, I saw a lot of Uighur worshippers carrying their prayer mats, heading for Friday prayers. There are about seven million Uighurs in China and almost all of them live in Xinjiang. They are a Turkic nomadic people who settled in the region in the ninth century and they obviously have a real influence on the feel of a city like Kashgar. In fact, the large number of Uighurs makes my arrival in China a sort of soft start to China as there are a lot of similarities between the Uighurs and the Uzbeks for example.
Tourists are not allowed in the mosque during Friday Prayers of course, so I was kind of circling the square for an hour or so, before people started exiting the mosque. Very interesting. First of all, there were so many worshippers that quite a few were praying in the streets outside. If this mosque can take 20,000 worshippers, does that mean that there were more than that number there today? The square really filled up after Friday Prayers finished and it certainly looked like many thousands to me.
Another interesting fact was that I somehow ended up right next to this guy with a key to a small cupboard located at the edge of the square in front of the mosque. It turned out that he was responsible to collect any knives the Uighur worshippers were carrying before entering the mosque. After Friday Prayer, they simply came up to him with with a number that identified their knife and they got it back. Since there were a lot of knife shops opposite the mosque – and from what I saw in the market later in the day – the knife is culturally important to the Uighurs.
When I finally was allowed in to see the mosque inside, it was beautiful and there was a strong garden feel to it as the different sections for prayer were partitioned by trees. However, I was not allowed to step inside the area at the very front so I couldn’t take any photos of the stunning ceiling – only from an angle.
The rest of the day was fun. I took masses of photos of the Old Town, next to the mosque. I also took a moped-driven type of of mini truck/taxi that took about ten passengers to the main market, the Yengi Bazaar – which was this huge, crazy place.
Tomorrow, I’m going to visit the Abakh Khoja Mausoleum before taking the early afternoon train to Kuche. It’s going to be interesting to see how the Chinese trains compare with the Kazakh and the Uzbek ones.
