The Silk Road (Sort Of) Overland
Thursday 11 August 2011
At the very end if this day, when the clock struck midnight, I was still sitting in the front seat of a pickup truck bouncing up and down as we were were slowly making headway along the atrocious Chinese roads from the Kyrgyz border towards Kashgar. I had not expected things to go this way when I woke up this morning.
But first things first. And I have this feeling this will be a long post; it's been a long day.
Having your own taxi is expensive, but one advantage is that you can ask the driver to stop anytime you want to take photos. This is exactly what I did as I travelled from Osh to the Chinese border this morning in a black, powerful 4x4. This road is a mix between very good, OK and almost non-existent. However, the scenery is stunning all the way, and although I had planned to listen to my audiobook for the five-hour journey to the border, I got so taken in by the scenery that I forgot all about it.
First, we had the rolling green hill-like mountains, with yurts here and there - the nomadic tent-structures common to this region. Next, we started the long ascent towards Sary Tash and it just got better and better as we went along. When we got to the point where we started to see snowy peaks, we came across three young kids selling fermented mare's milk, a treat you might be offered if you visit Kyrgyzstan (I've only tasted one mouthful and it's not a favourite of mine). I don't think they were getting many customers; traffic was light to say the least. But they didn't seem to mind at all. They seemed happy just to get some company up at this altitude (it was cold now, probably around 5-10 C).
However, when we reached the village of Sary Tash (3,500m), the view of snow-covered mountains in the distance - with the peaks of Lenin and Korondu (7,000m & 6,600m) - absolutely blew me away. And it went on and on as we drove along a plateau with these mountains in view for almost two hours. No wonder I was on a high when we reached the border.
Before my Kyrgyz driver left, we checked the details. I was told a black 4x4 would be waiting for me on the Chinese side, with one other passenger, and this taxi driver would take me directly to my pre-booked hotel. All I needed to do was to ring a number when I had cleared Chinese customs.
Clearing customs took much longer than I had anticipated. On the Kyrgyz side, we had to wait over one and a half hour for the border to open as they apparently had a lunch break 12-2PM (and we arrived 12.30). After clearing customs here, there was a 3 km stretch of road to the Chinese side and we were told we might get shot if we tried to walk this bit. Instead, we had to wait to be assigned an empty seat in a lorry by a customs official.
It was probably one of the highlights of today when I was sitting in this lorry and then seeing a red Chinese flag blowing in the wind as we turned a corner. I have been travelling through several of the Central Asian republics since 20 July, and even though I theoretically know that China takes over to the east at some point, the idea of the Stans turning into China is very exotic in a way. It's like travelling from one end-of-the-world (the easternmost point of the Stans) to another end-of-the-world (the westernmost frontier of the giant China). As I was exiting Kyrgyzstan and waiting to get to the Chinese side, I was constantly thinking about how remote this place was in every sense. This is the remotest I've ever been is my conclusion. 
When I reached the Chinese gate, a border guard shouted at me, "One, two, three, four! We open the gate when there are four!" As I was the only one there, I just had to sit down and wait. Eventually, a small group of us were let in and we started the entry procedures for China, including having all our bags checked. The border guard didn't ask anything about my protein shake power, iPad or box of tablets (Immodium, Laxal, zinc supplements, antihistamines, statins). Instead, he started to read through my folder of daily prayers - The Hours - reading some of the prayers aloud. His questions were endless: What is this? What is the purpose of this? Why do you have this with you? Is it like the Bible? Eventually, he put the folder back in my suitcase and said it was OK. I think St Basil (or David in the Old Testament) would have found this response quite apt; prayer can have quite an impact.
Next, we all had to wait yet again. Apparently, the customs for China included two check points with a few kilometres in-between. So again, we had to wait to be allocated an empty seat in a lorry. And again, were were told we could not walk. As we were waiting, I was watching with fascination the solder who was responsible for waving a red or a green flag to the approaching lorries. He stood straight like the Queen's soldiers in Buckingham Palace and waved the relevant flag with vigour and precision at the appropriate moment. When the time came to swap flag-wavers, the exchange was also reminiscent of the Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace. They do take these things seriously, the Chinese.
As we were waiting for the lorries to give us a lift, I rang the number for taxi number two for the day. However, the lady answering did not speak one word of English! How am I supposed to confirm my arrival time for the taxi on the Chinese side if the contact person has no English?! Well, they know I'm coming and they presumably know how long the crossing usually takes.
After reaching the second check point on the Chinese side, we all had to go through four separate passport checks plus having our bags X-rayed. It was nearly 4.30 PM by now, and it had taken a total of four hours to clear customs.
This is the point of today when things started going pear-shaped. There's a two hour time difference between Kyrgyzstan and China, since all of China is on Beijing time, and exiting customs at 4.30PM, it was now all of a sudden 6.30PM. There was only one taxi outside the customs exit doors - a guy with a pickup truck asking for much more than the agreed price for my pre-booked black 4x4.
To cut a long story short, the lady with no English appeared and we had a conversation that was translated via a guy in Osh on the phone. My taxi had left as it had become late! What kind of tour operator does that!? They knew I was on the way! People don't just disappear when crossing a border - especially not with five separate passport checks and two luggage checks!
Being cross didn't help of course. The lady wanted me to get on one of the lorries. Not exactly the 4x4 I had expected. However, in the end she managed to find a guy with a pickup truck who was going to Kashgar. So I got some Chinese money and off we went. It was now 7.45PM local time and the journey is supposed to take five hours. I now realise I won't be in Kashgar before midnight.
After 15 minutes, the Chinese driver stopped the pickup truck and started making phone calls, fiddling with pieces of papers, adjusting the radio etc. With not a word of Chinese, and the driver not having any English, I could not for my life work out what was happening. Was I going to be kidnapped or robbed by some people he was calling? Was he going to start renegotiating the agreed fare? Were we waiting for another customer? Being at the most remote place I've ever been and not understanding a word of Chinese, my mind started going through all sorts of options as to why my driver wasn't driving. However, the fact that the second passenger was a 10-year old boy made me think he was just innocently waiting for something. But what?
After half an hour, we started driving again. No idea what happened. By now, it's 8.30PM and we are passing though the most stunning landscape with red mountains and a nearly full moon. Normally, this would make me go camera crazy. However, this is about the time I start to realise that this road is the worst road I've ever been on. Most of it is gravel road with bits of wobbly paved stretches, and the gravel road was very bad, with speed bumps made of sand and clay at regular intervals as well as weird twists and turns.
I must have missed any info on this road as I read up on this journey in my travel books! I seem to remember reading that on the Chinese side the roads "even have hard shoulders". In other words, the roads would be better than in Kyrgyzstan. In my mind, I always imagined that the tiger economy of China would have put a lot of money into its infrastructure and that its network of roads would be superior to any road network in the Stans. It's because of this assumption that I was so utterly unprepared for the nightmarish road journey I suddenly found myself being a part of today.
The whole journey took six hours, not five, and the car I was in was bouncing and shaking and twisting and turning non-stop the whole time (I think there were about ten minutes of even tarmac somewhere after the first city we drove through). Some bits were incredibly bad, and since most of it was gravel and we were continually overtaking lorries (or being overtaken by lorries!), we had these clouds of sand and dust flying around us. And the worst bit of all was this area of a few kilometres that looked like a war zone: this huge piece of rescuing equipment/lorry was parked in the middle of the road, pulling up a large lorry that had slipped off the road, and we had to manoeuvre around it while making sure we wouldn't slide off the road as well! At this stage I felt we were driving through some kind of no-mans-land that lay outside normal civilisation.
It was like a never-ending nightmare, with the realisation that I have no other choice than to sit in my seat and endure it. Fortunately, the driver wasn't a maniac driver. In fact, he was very sensible considering the road conditions.
For a while I was wondering to myself whether I would get ill being tossed back and forth for hours on end. Is there a condition resulting from bring shaken for an extensive period of time? Don't know. But I had this image of lying in my hotel room with curtains drawn the following day. However, in the end I just entered this state of timelessness and endless bouncing. Though I also had these images of caravans of camels and cargo slowly making their way through this landscape, following the Silk Road, and I guess I've now had a real taste of what travelling along the Silk Road really was like.
One thing that did happen in my mind during this journey was a sort of readjustment of my view of China, from a rich and well developed country to a country that has the worst roads in the the world (I've never been to China before). Which would mean a different kind of expectation of what the cities and towns would be like as well. If this is one of very few roads leading from China to the Central Asian republics, and if China's commitment is to business and trade, surely a wide, good-quality road, able to cope with this endless stream of lorries, would be a top priority?! As I was bouncing up and down, I was kind of downgrading my expectations of what houses, hotels, city centres etc. in China will be like.
However, on a more positive note, I warmed towards the driver after a while. He wasn't, after all, responsible for the roads. He tried to communicate with me, and I discovered he did know a few words in English: "OK", "toilet" and "hours". He also smiled every time he said something, for example when we made a loo stop, he smiled broadly and said, "toilet". I can't help, though, feeling that the smiling was a bit incongruous at times. When we after four hours of driving stopped to let off a third passenger he had picked up earlier, my calculations told me we only had one hour left to Kashgar. However, at this stage my driver turns to me to correct my error by saying "Two hours!" with the broadest smile I've ever seen. No - correction - he looked positively ecstatic when he said "Two hours!" The message of two hours was more like a doubling of a prison sentence for me. The smile thing really threw me at this point.
So, as I said in the beginning, as the clock strikes midnight I'm still bouncing along the gravel road winding its way through the Chinese mountains. It's not until 3.00AM I've checked in at a hotel.
Going through the Irkeshtam Pass has been an experience of a lifetime, though I think once in your life is quite enough.
Travel tip: the only way to do a single-day crossing of the Irkeshtam Pass is to leave Osh 5.30-6.00AM to ensure you reach the Kyrgyz border before they close for lunch at 12 noon. In this way, you should reach the taxis on the Chinese side at a decent time.
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