Tourin' Turpan

Day 3: Back at Urumqi from Tianchi Lake, busride to Turpan
Day 4: Turpan

Hello! I've been incredibly busy lately that I barely have enough time to sleep/eat/poop these days. I've been to Shanghai for 2 weekends straight and homework still keeps on piling up. Ah well, if I don't continue posting Silk Road photos up then I'm afraid details are going to start slipping away. Girl's getting old, you know. :p

The Fabulous Four left Tianchi Lake bright and early on Day 3 and arrived back at Urumqi in the afternoon. Honestly, Urumqi isn't very interesting... it's pretty mundane except that: 1) the signs are in Uyghur along with Chinese, 2) half the people there look like hapas, 3) you can see yellow sandy mountains in the distance. Aside from that, it has the same feel, the same hustle, the same meh-ness of a regular Chinese city. Unless you see...

... that maybe it's not so normal for a Chinese city?
:p

Our next destination was Turpan (吐魯番), but we hadn't bought tickets there yet. Fortunately, a billion buses leave Urumqi for Turpan daily so all we had to do is drop by the bus station and buy our tickets on the spot.

Lining up at the Urumqi bus terminal.
A vast majority of the travelers here were Uyghur, which made sense since most of the Han people live in Urumqi and not the smaller cities/towns in Xinjiang. P.S. Uyghur babies are the cutest! They all have these extremely large and spherical heads. More evidence at the end of this post. :)

A typical Xinjiang landscape.
We saw fields of windmills on the 3 hour busride to Turpan... quite impressive, with no East Coast yuppies to petition the uglification of the no-one-cares land.

By the time we got to Turpan, it was already getting really late and we were starving like ravenous baby wolves. We hadn't reserved a room in Turpan and hoped we could play it by ear like the free-spirited backpackers that we were, but the 2004 Let's Go guide that we brought along (ahem, Gene) was indeed outdated. :( Desperate, we tagged along with our cabbie (he looked like a Uyghur George Lopez), who suggested another motel near his "tour company"... to our great surprise it ended up being a decent, clean, economical choice. It was also right across from the night market! Really -- there was 101 ways to rip us off that night, so I was relieved to not be cheated in China for once. But then again, we were still in China? Hm. I like the Uyghurs. :)

Feeding on (the best) lamb (ever!!!) and freshly-made Uyghur wontons.
We sat with several groups of local men at the night market (very few women out at night unless they were serving/making food), who were very gracious and offered to share their dinner with us. Otherwise they didn't really pay us any mind, but we felt a little uncomfortable drinking our beer at the table since Muslims don't consume alcohol.

The next day, we hired a driver to take us around the various tourist spots around Turpan. The area is a very interesting place in that it was once the Uyghur capital and a very important staging post on the Silk Road. The Ugyhurs were Buddhists until around the 8th century when they converted to Islam, so there's a lot of ancient Buddhist relics around this town. Turpan is the lowest spot in China (-154m sea level, 2nd lowest depression after the Dead Sea) and also the hottest spot in China (121.3 Fahrenheit). But because of the extreme heat and lack of humidity, Turpan grapes and raisins are super famous and delicious. :)

First stop -- Jiaohe Ruins (交河故城), an ancient Han dynasty city settled almost 2000 years ago. The reason why this place is called "jiao1 he2" is because this capital used to sit atop an island that was in the middle (交) of two rivers (河), with steep cliffs on all sides of the river that acted as a natural defense. Well guess what happened once the rivers ran dry... :/ Just ask Boyz II Men, or Genghis Khan who pillaged the shit out of this place.

Peering into what used to be the river bottom...

I really enjoyed walking around Jiaohe and imagining what life was like back then. When we think about people from the past, it's easy to believe that they were not as smart/advanced as we are today... but human civilization is a gradual technological and societal evolution with sporadic bursts, and seeing how complex yet transient this city was, standing 2000 years ago with garrisons, monasteries, trade avenues, town halls... it all makes me feel quite small and flimsy in the whole scheme of things.

Freshly baked nan (bread) for 1Y each.
Gastronomically orgasmic as it was, it was all we had for lunch. Not enuff.

After "lunch", we drove over to Huoyan Shan (火焰山), which is the famous mountain range in Journey to the West (西遊記) that monk Xuan Zang, Monkey King & Co. had a really tough time crossing. Supposedly they are named "blazing fire mountains" because they look like they're on fire with their purplish-brown color? Well, all I have to say is that people had a pretty active imagination back then. :)

"I'm on a horse."
"BLAGHAGHAHHHGGGGGFART."
"Camel."
* reference to the Grover Old Spice commercial* :)

Look, I'm on a Journey to the West! Wheeeee~~~! ^_^
It was a really nice view up here, but Dunhuang (our next stop) ends up being even prettier.

All done with our excursions, we sought sustenance at a market back in town where literally every stand served the exact. same. thing. Which was the exact same thing that we ate the night before. At the time I didn't really care since you can't go wrong with more mouth-watering lamb. OH WAIT... you CAN go wrong with too much lamb... as I found out later that night during our overnight train, keeled over and numb with pain at 4am. @_@

But backtrack to the dirty-ass market, aren't these munchkins so adorable?
I've never seen such a young child so adept at using chopsticks. Survival skillz.

Next time we pick up from our overnight train Dunhuang, our first stop in Gansu Province!