We arrived at Turpan on 1st September after driving for a day (twelve hours). The journey was surprisingly pleasant. It afforded one of the most pleasant loo stops of my life, the Gobi desert:
It's a beautiful view and there's no foul odours. There was a high wind. I was disappointed that we weren't pitching camp there but we were banned from bush camping in Xinjiang, the "autonomous Uighur region", by the Chinese authorities. This was apparently due to ethnic tensions in the region. Many of the Uighur, a mainly Muslim culture, wish to have an independent state. They aren't allowed to leave the region whilst Han Chinese are moving in. Tibet is another of PRC's autonomous regions.
A truck parked up alongside our truck at that Gobi loo stop:
Many wind farms are under construction in the desert. However very few of them actually turn. I'm thinking that one day they'll hook them up and get a massive influx of energy onto the grid. Or perhaps they'll never hook them up.
We passed through many mountains, valleys and plains (but mainly plains):
At the crossing to Xinjiang we reached border control. This was merely a border between provinces but was an important one. Here a medley of police and military were conducting passport and person checks of varying thoroughness. It was strange to me because there is no national border on any map - it is simply another province, albeit a province that is also an autonomous region.
A policeman boarded our truck where he found nothing of concern, then we all disembarked and went through the security scanner individually. Our luggage was on the truck so we had nothing to scan. Chinese residents swiped their RFID national IDs.
We passed through more police checkpoints on the way to Turpan, but no police seemed especially intent on inspecting us, though not even the police could prevent their jaws from dropping as a bright orange truck full of foreigners passed through.
Shortly before we reached Turpan we passed the fiery mountains. Apparently Monkey was imprisoned underneath this mountain before he escaped and undertook a journey to the west with pigsy and a monk. It was originally a novel written before Christ, then a popular Chinese TV series, and recently a stage production at Manchester International Festival directed by the former lead singer of Blur.
When we arrived at Turpan at 8pm the entire group headed towards the nearest wifi. The cafe hosting this wifi had poor expensive food that took an age to arrive, and even then someone received a banana pancake rather than beef with eggplant because they misread a menu number. I headed back to the hotel as soon as I'd eaten for a long awaited sleep.
Stephen
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