Kashgar posts

We seem to have chosen a route through the areas of the world with the worst internet connectivity. This is the third time I've started a post about Kashgar but, if you're reading this, the first time that anything has made it out into the ether.

As a result I'm getting a bit fed up with all this blogging business and we're getting further and further behind our actual location when writing entries. This can only negatively impact the already fairly low quality of our writing. I'm now trying to write something interesting about a surprisingly modern Chinese city on the edge of a desert whilst wrapped-up warm in a yurt halfway up a mountain in Kyrgystan. By the time this gets posted we'll probably be in Bishkek, which will hopefully be a whole new story.

I think the best way out of this is to do away with prose and write some entries in bullet point form. For any of my consulting comrades reading, these will be neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. I'm on holiday.

Some good things about Kashgar:

• Being in a modern city for a few days. Amazing how developed Kashgar is, given the distance from anywhere and particularly from Beijing
• The contrast between the old and new cities: Maze-like mud-built Muslim areas are hidden behind a one building deep layer of shiny malls, banks and government buildings
• Diversity of the local Uyghur people: Everything from 100% oriental to plenty that would pass for Spanish or Italian (if they kept their mouths shut and dressed a bit differently)
• The Sunday market: Not as chaotic as we were expecting, but great to see locals and country folk going about their business buying goats and kebab sticks
• Uyghur women's fashion: There is no such thing as too shiny, with head to toe red sequins being particularly popular
• Uyghur architecture: No spectacular buildings, but a colourful take on islamic style, with Chinese touches
• Great peaches, plums and apricots

Some less good things about Kashgar:

• Less friendly than Pakistan, by some measure, although nothing like the rudeness that I'd been led to expect from China
• People minding their own business on public transport: The contrast between everyone sharing food and chatting non-stop on the Pakistan bus from Sost to Tashkurgan and the nice, polite, modern Chinese bus from Tashkurgan to Kashgar was a bit sad
• Not being able to speak the language, read menu or even make ourselves understood with the phrasebook (tonal languages must only have evolved to stop anyone else ever understanding you). As some indication of the depth of our underacheivement, I still have no idea how to pronounce the word 'Uyghur' other than it involves a whining noise and can only consistently make one word (hello) understood in Mandarin. At least in Russian the phrasebook is fairly effective
• How much of the old town has been knocked down since our guidebook was written (published in 2007!)
• No yaks or bactrian camels at the animal market
• Segregation of Han Chinese and Uyghur neighbourhoods and shops
• 'Meat' pies consisting entirely of mutton fat

A first load of photos of Kashgar is up at http://picasaweb.google.com/trevorcot (or whatever it was before). There will be some more whenever it is raining hard enough to spend all day in an internet cafe. All the PCs we've met for a while speak only Russian or Chinese, so I've no idea how to compress the files from my camera to make them uploadable in any sensible timeframe. If anyone can tell me which menu options to choose (in either language neutral terms or cyrillic), there will be a special reward of a bottle of fermented horse milk. That is assuming it is not intercepted by Kyrgyz or British customs. The former at least seems unlikely, given our customs check on arrival consisted of the guard waving at our driver from across an empty car park.

T.