Hotan

Armed with a bag bursting with snacks we board our bus. Three rows of bunk beds seven deep stretch the length of the vehicle. We have two beds on the bottom and towards the front, the best place to be in terms of comfort. The bus leaves at 2pm Beijing time but doesn’t even get out of the bus station before it stops and waits… Eventually it seems they round up all the awol passengers and finally at around 3pm we start to make real progress in the direction of Hotan, a destination we should reach, inshallah, in around 25 hours or so. Despite the sometimes overpowering smell of sweaty feet the bus is very comfortable. The beds are slightly too narrow and not entirely flat but despite this I am pretty sure I’ll sleep well enough, provided the road quality is good, that really is the deciding factor above all else. The only other complaint I’d make is that they should either leave the air-con on or off or better still find a medium setting for it. Instead we are treated to an increasingly stuffy environment where the quilts are a pure nuisance followed by a blast of icy air, imported from Siberia no doubt, that has temperatures plummeting and everyone burying themselves under as many blankets as possible. Still, mustn't grumble.

After an early evening break for noodles at a roadside store night falls and we turn off the main road. Suddenly the glare of street lighting is replaced by a whole lot of darkness. This is the start of the 500Km long trans Taklamakan Highway, an audacious feat of brazen engineering right through the middle of one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world. At 3am the bus halts, the lights are turned on and we all get a chance to empty our bladders. The desert night is so dark it reminds me of caving. A thick blanket of cloud obscures any glimmer of the moon or stars above and not a single vehicle, building or road light can be seen in any direction, save the running lights of our own bus. Stepping off the road into the lines of hardy grass planted to stabilise the desert our feet break through a thin hard crust of sand to a dusty layer beneath. Every 5km a small building houses a lone caretaker who looks after the irrigation system that keeps the grass alive and the road open. After irrigating the grass ourselves everyone is back on the bus and we are off again.

Not long after dawn I am woken by some strange antics. I find the bus appears to be doing a hundred point turn on an unsurfaced road. With bed head hair invariably sticking out in random directions and a perplexed look on my face I join the rest of the passengers all trying to figure out what on earth is going on. After a while the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. The actual road is being upgraded and is currently blocked by a very wide resurfacing machine. To avoid this we have taken a dirt road running parallel to the main road. During the night however, and oddly I thought for a desert, there has been a fair amount of rain, it seems that this is pretty normal for the season. This has caused a small but dramatic flash flood that has washed away several sections of our dirt road. Most of these we manage to bypass by judicious use of the currently unsurfaced main road with its unfinished bridges sprouting rebar like a concrete hedgehog. At one point however we are forced to wait whilst JCB’s are brought forward in order to temporarily repair the temporary road long enough for us to get through. Meanwhile the muddy brown water backs up behind the road/dam making it obvious that before long this repair will indeed be washed away as well. It all looks slightly suspicious and I am relieved when we find ourselves back on a surfaced road once more. It is clear that keeping the desert highway open is far from easy and requires a significant amount of round the clock effort.

Once the desert is traversed we hit one of the oldest routes of the silk road and turn west on to it. This old southern section of the silk road is little used and far removed, in several respects, from it’s modern superhighway equivalent on the northern edge of the desert. There is little to see in terms of sights along this route but it is the authenticity of this road combined with its numerous Uighur Oasis towns that draws us to it. First stop, Hotan. We complete our journey in the expected 25 hours and check into the “Happy Hotel” which is clean-ish, cheap and comes with an interesting variety of smells both inside and outside the room. Despite dozing plenty on the bus we are both exhausted and crash out early.

In the morning we try to take local buses to the Atlas Silk Factory but this doesn’t work out. Bus routes have obviously changed since the guidebook was written and at times it seems I speak better Mandarin than some of the locals, my Uighur is certainly as good as their English which means that communication is hilariously unproductive. I am regretting not buying the Central Asian phrasebook now, things could get interesting at this rate. Good job I like playing charades. We decide to jump a taxi instead and third time lucky we find one that knows what we are talking about.

The Atlas Silk Factory is a traditional workshop in a small village about 10Km outside of Hotan. It turns out to be so good it deserves to have busloads of tourists waving 100 Yuan notes at the ticket office but fortunately for us it has neither tourists nor an entrance fee. We pay 5 Yuan each for the privilege of taking photos. I’d happily pay much more as the subjects are about as good as it gets. Grizzled old mama’s pull and spin fresh silk filament out of boiling cauldrons full of cocoons whilst toothy old men with skull caps and wispy white beards work ramshackle looms with dazzlingly dyed threads. It is a gem.

In search of the carpet factory we end up at a Jade market on the banks of the Yurungkash River. Here the swirling brown river courses between great braids of gigantic river cobbles on it’s journey from the high mountains of the Kunlun Shan to the sands of the Taklamakan. On it’s way the waters deposit their precious cargo of Jade into the river bed, a commodity that has provided Hotan with it’s most reliable form of income for the past 7000 years, yes, 7000! Long before silk became fashionable and even to this day numerous people dig up the river bed with picks and shovels in search of it. Behind the endless stalls of Jade merchants though is something that takes our fancy, a restaurant. Redolent of luxurious caravanserai the decor and tableware sweep us back in time to another life and the food is equally as good.

Continuing our search for the carpet factory we get distracted again, by a barber shop. My beard by this stage has gone untamed for some time and is starting to provide suitable nesting facilities for small birds. I try to explain what I want to the well manicured chap brandishing scissors but he isn’t interested. I get ushered into a chair where he starts combing and clipping with scant regard for my protestations. I give up on trying to get my point across, he is the one holding the sharp implement after all and my barber is chomping at the bit like an artist with a blank canvas, he seems determined to give me a Hotan special. Once the preliminaries are over I am asked to lie down on a bed so the razor work can begin. Very deftly I get what Jude describes as a “biblical” beard sculpted like topiary out of the ragged mess that once ruled the lower half of my face. Twenty Yuan is a steal in my book for what I think might well be the best shave of the trip so far, not as much pampering as the shaves of southern asia but I like the look of this more, sharp. There will be just enough time to let it get raggedy again before Kygyzstan and my next barbers visit.

Fed and shaved we eventually find the carpet factory where not only is there no charge for a tour but there isn’t even a tour. We wander in and wander round taking pictures as we like of the women at work on a dozen or more vast carpets expecting to get stopped at any time. As we leave we contemplate going to the show room but decide against it, we have already bought one carpet on this trip…

My deep appreciation for Uighur food research just keeps getting better. For dinner I order ‘Suoman’ which are fried noodles with a similar sauce to Laghman but instead of noodle threads they are small pasta like squares. There is a generous quantity of pepper added to the dish and the result is divine. For dessert we head back onto the street to a vendor we spotted on the way in. With the point and pay method of food ordering in effect we take our seats at a bench. A small portion of sweet sticky rice is unwrapped from a pyramid shaped leaf bundle and squashed flat onto a saucer, over this is drizzled some dark syrup followed by a large blob of yoghurt followed by another drizzling of syrup. Do I really need to tell you how good it was? Oh alright, sharp yoghurt tanginess bursts through thick layers of fruity christmas cake like sweetness to create an orchestral movement of delight on the taste buds, and that from somebody who is not generally sold on desserts as a rule. Magnificent. I ask what it is called and the answer was something like “Soza”. The fella next to me asks me if we have “Soza” in America, I take an educated guess at the answer and reply “Mei you” (Not have). More’s the pity…

Uighur Bagels are on the agenda for breakfast, I look forward to telling you about those later.