Bananas Don't Travel Well

the condos beckonThere aren't many cities in the world whose names can double as verbs. Although we weren't forcibly put aboard a ship, we did find ourselves Shanghaied in a way, drawn irresistibly eastward. It all started with Facebook, to which I’d succumbed in Kyrgyzstan and where I managed to locate some old Taipei friends—Olivier and Laure—with whom I'd lost touch. As it turned out, they are now living in Shanghai and were quick to offer us a place to stay. At first we dismissed the idea; Shanghai wasn't on our original itinerary, and we'd both been there before. But leaving Kashgar, as we looked out the train window at perhaps our 5000th kilometre of dusty desert, the prospect of staying in a clean apartment and spending some time in a big city suddenly grabbed us, hard.

modern ChinaWe arrived in Dunhuang shortly after dawn, and headed to Charlie Jhong’s Café for an early breakfast. Charlie and his wife greeted us warmly and offered to take us to their new guest house on the edge of town. Cat, our travel companion, had already promised to meet friends there, so she accepted. We wanted to look around town first before committing to staying so far from the centre. But on viewing a few prototypical Chinese hotel rooms, we quickly changed our minds and opted for the more hospitable guest house. We weren’t disappointed.

Chinese touristsTurpan is famous for its grapes, and infamous for being the hottest place in China. The town is set in a depression 80 metres below sea level, on the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert. The train stops an hour short of the town, in the village of Daheyan. We alighted to find that in October the weather was pleasantly warm and sunny, not scorching. On the platform an adjacent train was transporting hundreds of gleaming new mobile missile launchers, presumably to one of the Taklamakan desert testing zones. We stared, but refrained from photographing.

Id Kah mosqueOur experience of Kashgar was all backwards. For most visitors, it is the end of the road, as far west as you can go in China, an exotic outpost nestled between the mountain ranges of Central Asia and the far edge of the treacherous Taklamakan desert, peopled by Uighurs whose culture, language, and appearance are entirely un-Chinese. But after two months in Central Asia we were more inclined to appreciate—for purely selfish reasons—the creeping development that has transformed Kashgar into a modern and increasingly Sinified city.

watch the road!After almost a month in Kyrgyzstan, we figured we ought to start moving on to China. Although we'd been dreaming for weeks of warmer weather, easier communication and vastly better food, we knew we had a long journey ahead, and it was with some reluctance that we started out. From our starting point in Bishkek, the relatively northerly Torugart pass would have been the more convenient border crossing, but the Chinese require special permissions and pre-booked transportation for tourists to use it, amounting to several hundred dollars and a lot of hassle. Irkeshtam, the southern pass, is wide open and relatively easy, but geography dictates that it can only be accessed through Osh. In the end, our Long March to China took over a week.

brooding peakWinter had come early to Karakol, dusting the surrounding peaks with snow, chilling the air considerably, and limiting our trekking options. As multi-day treks over the passes were now out of the question (the summer yurt camps had been packed up for the season and we weren't interested in renting camping gear or hiring porters), we opted to walk up to Altyn Arashan, where basic guest houses serve as a base for day hiking. We left most of our gear with Gulnara in Karakol and took a marshrutka to the trail head, where we found a Dutchman and a young Japanese couple preparing to head the same way.

Smoker at the bus stationContinuing with our plan to freeze in the mountains we decided to head east to the city of Karakol. It would be our base to do some trekking in the Tian Shan mountains. The route from Kochkor to Karakol is about 400 km and can run around either the northern or southern coasts of Lake Issyk Kul. We decided to take the southern road because it was written up in our guide as more scenic, and break the trip about halfway in the town of Bokonbayevo where we would arrange a home stay through the local CBT office.

Uzbek manThings seemed instantly different when we crossed the border from Uzbekistan into Kyrgyzstan, even though Osh, the town we were heading to, is primarily Uzbek. Nonetheless, judging by the open-air teashops with boys outside grilling lamb shashlyk (shish kebab) and the street vendors everywhere, there seemed to be more life than there had been in Uzbekistan. The Kyrgyz too, with their Asian features and distinctive felt hats also seemed somehow more "Central Asian."

lovely TashkentWe had a lot of onward visas to take care of in Uzbekistan, and we didn't know how long it would take to get them, so rather than follow the logical order of things, which would have led us from Bukhara to the famed city of Samarkand, we skipped ahead to Tashkent. We figured this way we could double back to Samarkand if we needed to wait a week for a visa. We left Bukhara by night train. Like virtually all the infrastructure we encountered in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the train was Soviet, an exact replica of the one we'd taken from Tbilisi to Baku. We arrived in the early morning and treated ourselves to a credit-card break: we stayed at the Grand Hotel Tashkent, where they gave us a fifty dollar discount just for asking.

Welcome to UzbekistanThe border station at Hojeli, Uzbekistan had the ambiance of an abandoned gas station. There were several small concrete buildings with no glass in the windows, and a tall signpost that at one time would have been lit in bright neon welcoming visitors to Uzbekistan. It was lunch time, so we had to wait for someone other than the two guard boys to process our passports. The first boy, in boxer-shorts and a tank top was having a hell of a time playing computer mahjong. The second was very serious: in full combat fatigues, complete with AK-74 and body armour, he wouldn't smile and followed us as we noodled around and waited. It was hard to take him too seriously because there was a tatty cocker spaniel constantly at his heel. After about 20 minutes another guard came back from lunch. He wrote our visa and passport details in triplicate into ledgers destined to never be read and sent us on our way. This was it. We were in Uzbekistan, home of the great silk road cities: Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand.