Vignettes From China - Part Three - Kashgar
From Turpan we went back to Urumqi, and then caught a flight to Kashgar, for less than $300 round trip apiece. Kashgar's old city was my favorite place in the UAR, with buildings that appeared not to have been built but to have grown over the centuries into long narrow brick avenues and small mosques hidden around corners. Many doors were left open or only loosely curtained, offering second views into courtyards with drying grapes, beds, and families preparing food. These permeable doorways, the crowds in the bazaar, the children playing in the fountain and the old men watching them, all put me into a soppy, romantic mood about the close social ties I imagined the people (who stared at us as we walked by) to have. Regan politely tolerated me.
The elaborate mosques and Islamic tombs of Kashgar are well worth a day of taxi fares if nothing else than for the fun of photographing the many ways in which these austere building seem to frame themselves in their own arches, doorways, and rooftops. One of the most interesting things about many of these buildings is that the patterns employed often didn't repeat themselves in parallel construction - for example, two pillars on the opposite sides of a doorway would be carved with patterns that were from a distance similar, but upon closer inspection quite different. Regan and I argued for the rest of the trip about why this might be - I thinking it represented a very different kind of asthetic than we're used to, and he saying that it was simply a result of employing artisans to construct components of a temple or mosque in a pre-industrial age.
From Kashgar we took a taxi up five hours of the Karakorum highway (which links Islamabad to Kashgar) to Karakul. The road itself through the Pamirs is worth the time and money, and I found myself envying the German cyclers we met in the hotel restaurant who had come through miles and miles of this from Pakistan. In Karakul itself, we passed the tourist hotel on the lakeside to stay with a Kyrgyz family in a village a mile further up the road. The town itself was at about 9000 feet. They took us on a very, very bumpy ride in a poor, breaking-down land rover, up to the base camp of Muztagh Ata, an ice-shrouded four mile-high peak, at the base of which there was a village of Kyrgyz yak and sheep herders. We had salty tea (Kyrgyz drink tea with salt and milk) and fresh yogurt (which made Regan sick for the rest of the trip) in one of their stone houses, and I chatted with the children (Kyrgyz is almost exactly like Kazakh). In a surreal touch, next to the yaks, stone architecture, cheese drying on hand-woven netting, and other signs of a pristine, ancient society, many of the houses had little folding solar panels on top of them.
That night, we were treated to a concert by the family father of cafe-pop on his Casio synthesizer. At first it was enjoyable because of its strangeness, but there's only so long you can enjoy solo synthesizer music, so we finally hurt his feelings and said we were ready for bed.
After Karakul, we gave up on sights and wound our way backwards through Kashgar and Urumqi, gathering souveniers as we went. (I resolve that if I ever have an absurd amount of money and time, and an empty house to fill up, I will go to Urumqi and Kashgar to furnish it. The carpets and furniture were wonderful.) The trip back was marred only by the inevitable lateness of Chinese airlines, but this went well with our lateness arriving at the airport.
The elaborate mosques and Islamic tombs of Kashgar are well worth a day of taxi fares if nothing else than for the fun of photographing the many ways in which these austere building seem to frame themselves in their own arches, doorways, and rooftops. One of the most interesting things about many of these buildings is that the patterns employed often didn't repeat themselves in parallel construction - for example, two pillars on the opposite sides of a doorway would be carved with patterns that were from a distance similar, but upon closer inspection quite different. Regan and I argued for the rest of the trip about why this might be - I thinking it represented a very different kind of asthetic than we're used to, and he saying that it was simply a result of employing artisans to construct components of a temple or mosque in a pre-industrial age.
From Kashgar we took a taxi up five hours of the Karakorum highway (which links Islamabad to Kashgar) to Karakul. The road itself through the Pamirs is worth the time and money, and I found myself envying the German cyclers we met in the hotel restaurant who had come through miles and miles of this from Pakistan. In Karakul itself, we passed the tourist hotel on the lakeside to stay with a Kyrgyz family in a village a mile further up the road. The town itself was at about 9000 feet. They took us on a very, very bumpy ride in a poor, breaking-down land rover, up to the base camp of Muztagh Ata, an ice-shrouded four mile-high peak, at the base of which there was a village of Kyrgyz yak and sheep herders. We had salty tea (Kyrgyz drink tea with salt and milk) and fresh yogurt (which made Regan sick for the rest of the trip) in one of their stone houses, and I chatted with the children (Kyrgyz is almost exactly like Kazakh). In a surreal touch, next to the yaks, stone architecture, cheese drying on hand-woven netting, and other signs of a pristine, ancient society, many of the houses had little folding solar panels on top of them.
That night, we were treated to a concert by the family father of cafe-pop on his Casio synthesizer. At first it was enjoyable because of its strangeness, but there's only so long you can enjoy solo synthesizer music, so we finally hurt his feelings and said we were ready for bed.
After Karakul, we gave up on sights and wound our way backwards through Kashgar and Urumqi, gathering souveniers as we went. (I resolve that if I ever have an absurd amount of money and time, and an empty house to fill up, I will go to Urumqi and Kashgar to furnish it. The carpets and furniture were wonderful.) The trip back was marred only by the inevitable lateness of Chinese airlines, but this went well with our lateness arriving at the airport.
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