On 5th September we woke at Korla, a large, rich oil city.
We were driving between Korla and Aksu, both overnight stops added to the itinerary as substitutes for the Xinjiang bush camping that we weren't allowed to do. I'd just put my headphones for a classical music shuffle to stop my sleep deprived senses from stultifying when we unexpectedly stopped at Kuqa. The truck's thermostat sensor was broken and needed to be repaired. We were dropped off at a point and told to be back there two hours later.
This was a small town compared to Korla and other places we had been stopping - only one hundred thousand people rather than four hundred thousand or three million. As usual everyone was surprised to see us. We walked through a market looking for cooked food but only found food including a wider array of dried chillies than usual and fresh fish (they were attempting to swim) imported to the desert, further from the sea than anywhere else in Asia.
Having failed to find lunchable food we returned to our starting point. In the other direction we found many noodle bars. We were hoping to find giant naans topped with carrot that were mentioned in a guide book but we were in the wrong part of town. This town was split by the river into a Uighur west side and a Han chinese east side. We couldn't see the river but seemed to be in the east side. No naans were in sight because that was a Uighur thing.
We were looking for a noodle bar when we passed a group of foreigners drinking beer in the square. They weren't dressed like tourists (i.e. with DSLR cameras and fanny packs) and stared at us as we passed. The sight of them reminded me of an expat group / clique of Europeans living in Africa I had read about in a novel.
We ate our beef noodle soup. The beef seemed to have been braised for many hours and was excellent but there was too little of it and was mostly bone. Mike - the firefighter from San Francisco and my roommate the previous night - and I added chilli and were surprised by its heat. We knew how to handle it though.
I finished mine quickly because I wanted to go introduce myself to the fellow foreigners but when I returned they had gone. I wandered instead and saw a picture of something that looked like milk tea. I bought some and it was iced coffee. That made me happy, I had been yearning for coffee for a while (I also would quite like some muesli).
Our prescribed meeting time was approaching so I returned to the meeting point. There the group was idling and Kelvin was buying another massive melon. On a previous night in Turpan Kelvin and I had stuffed ourselves with a watermelon that he bought for 6 yuan - 60p - when we were done we still had half left.
There was a sunglasses seller nearby so I went to buy sunglasses. My fake Raybans from Xi'an hadn't lasted long and my ones from Manchester made the world look too brown. Amy gave me her verdict on each pair I tried and non-verbally complimented the seller on her headscarf. The seller gave me a price of 30 yuan, a far cry from the 260 yuan in Turpan or the 120 in Xi'an. We settled on 20.
The group was still idling waiting for the truck. I fancied idling with a cold beer so departed again in search. I found a beer shop but none were cold. However in the fridge there was a bottle of coconut milk. I was attracted to it a) because it looked like hair conditioner or skin lotion and b) because it was cold coconut milk.
At the checkout there was a girl and a woman. The girl asked me polite questions about where I was from and where I was travelling and the woman suggested to the girl that I would make an ideal husband for her. Naturally the woman was speaking in Chinese but that's what I believe she was saying. I told the girl that I was going to Kashgar now. The girl told me that she was going to school now. I left.
Round the corner I found Dan, the audio engineer from London, tapping away at his phone outside a shop selling bottles. There was a small audience of shop assistants watching him. It transpired that he had asked at a few places whether he could use their wifi and this place had obliged. I noticed one surreptitiously taking a photo of us so I asked whether I could take a photo of them:
Down the street I found Tom, the Bristol engineering student from Wimbledon, tapping away on his phone outside a fancy dried fruit shop. The bottle shop wifi hadn't worked for him but the wifi here did. There were two shop assistants sitting inside watching him. I stood and chatted while I tried and failed to open the foil on my bottle of coconut milk. After a while a shop assistant appeared with a small decorative knife attached to a bunch of keys. I thanked her and opened my bottle. Tom finished checking whatever online and kindly offered me the use of his phone. I leapt at the chance - my phone was on a mail truck somewhere between Beijing and Kashgar, my iPad was on our truck at the truck repair shop and I hadn't accessed the Internet for days. I checked my email to find that my friend had replied to my long email and that I owed money for storage.
A shop assistant appeared with a flowery stool for me to sit on. I liked this town. Sadly it was time to leave - three hours after our arrival, our truck had returned. The last one to board was Jenny - she had taken a long walk to the Uighur west side and returned with two large bedside table sized carrot topped naans.
Stephen
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