Talk about Geographic extremes! On its way to the top of the world, the East Turkistan Express makes a whistle stop at the lowest train station in the world.  Talk about the middle of nowhere!  It starts in Urumqi, the furthest inland city in the world, on the western edge of China where the Gobi Desert, the Cossack Steppe, and Siberia all come together.  It then travels one thousand miles across the Takla Makan – the “Desert of No Return” – to Kashgar, a much fabled oasis and market town at the junction of two ancient trading routes, the Silk Road and the Karakorum Highway.   Shimmering like a mirage out of the desert just beyond rises a gargantuan wall of mountains, a frozen tidal wave of rock and ice called the Bamyi Dunya, the “Roof of the World,”  where ice-covered peaks touch the sky and legends like Kublai Khan’s Xanadu were born.  Here Arabs, Persians, Cossacks, Tibetans, East Indians and Celestials create a colorful, if not sometimes volatile, mixture of Asia’s nationalities.  In a region of geographical superlatives and cultural anomalies, the East Turkistan Express is one of the most curious – and least comfortable - train rides on this planet.

The ticket line at Urumqi station was not just one, but some fifteen lines of thirty to forty people each.  It did not matter which one you got into; none of them appeared to be moving. The lines were kept orderly by one harried looking man in an out of fashion Mao-tunic who was very nearly the only Chinese in the entire station. Most of these fellows were Turkic speaking Uigurs and Kyrgyz, and shuffled about in line wearing short-brimmed Russian “shapki” caps or colored felt skull caps.

As I stood there and pondered the plethora of Chinese ideograms that lit up a giant board above the ticket windows – electronic bingo came to mind - it dawned on me that people were leaving the line before they even got to the ticket window.  Instead, near the front of each line was a bustling activity of ticket scalping fueled by a hidden but steady supply line of little Aladdin’s who dashed in and amongst the adult legs and luggage in furtive syncopation. This infuriated the lone official who raced around the large room like a dog chasing its own tail, trying to keep the determinedly unlinear Uigurs and Kyrgyz in line and the ticket scalpers from doing their thing, with the inevitable result that he only succeeded in working up a sweat, and a temper.  Eventually he coaxed in several reinforcements from their lunch break and had the scalpers removed from the premises.  They were immediately replaced by a second phalanx of scalpers, and so it went.  Determined to try the official way first, I made it all the way to the ticket window, only to be informed by the glassy-eyed bureaucrat near the end of her work shift, and with studied economy of emotion, that the next available seats were for a train two weeks hence. 

 Outside in the sun in front of the station, a Chinese fellow approached and asked whether I might be interested in a ticket on tomorrow’s train to Kashgar, leaving early in the morning.  Three minutes later I had not just a ticket but a sleeping car ticket – a crucial difference, since I had not yet developed the ability to sleep sitting upright on wooden bench seats, packed sardine-style next to coughing, hacking, spitting, crying, moaning, snoring, eating, drinking, talking, yelling, farting, belching and sometimes vomiting people. We humans are quite something, best observed from afar.

The train was not really named “East Turkistan Express;” that was just my geographically correct, politically ignorant name for the train that crosses what has always been known as East Turkistan to its de facto capital, Kashgar.  Instead the name that was printed in blue Chinese ideograms on the side of each passenger car was minzu tuanjie which means “united nationalities,” a rather idealistic way of describing the sudden impact of bringing one billion Chinese to within a simple train ride away from Kashgar.  Alas, that famous Confucian saying, “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away”, no longer applies to this end of the empire. 

 With twenty-three passenger cars, the East Turkistan could carry over one thousand passengers.   Picture three 747’s all ready to load passengers at the same time.  Now pack those passengers all into one waiting room – temperature one hundred degrees, no cooling or even fans, and no deodorant allowed.   Now take all of the luggage that they would have checked, add an average of one caged hen per person, and pack it around the passengers.  Now try to get the passengers, their luggage and their caged hens, without any hand carts, through one small door.  If just getting a ticket was an adventure, so too was getting to the train. 

Once onboard, I was dismayed to find that the rolling stock was very old and, like the waiting room, had neither cooling nor fans. And my berth was open “hard seat” – a term used in the classless People’s Republic of China to distinguish from the more expensive “soft seat” closed compartments. But at least it was a sleeper.  Some people were less fortunate.  Among them was the hapless Marco, no relation to his namesake who passed this way centuries earlier, but a dread-locked Swiss backpacker whom I had met in Urumqi the night before at an internet café.  Marco’s ebullience belied a string of bad luck and expired visas which had caused him to bounce back and forth between the Kazakhstan border and Urumqi twice already, each time in an agonizingly slow and uncomfortable  three-day mail train with hard bench seats that spent more time on the siding than on the tracks. 

 Marco too was headed for Kashgar but had only been able to secure a bench seat in one of the East Turkistan’s few non-sleeper cars.  Having just ridden three thousand miles of Chinese trains from the Vietnam border, I happened to know that the conductor auctions off spare sleeper seats about an hour after the train has left the station, after he has had a chance to check tickets and account for no-shows.  I passed this information on to Marco and sent him off. He looked more like a homeless person than a respectable traveler, so it came as little surprise when he showed up at my compartment a few moments later, empty handed with a sad frown. I took his ticket and made my way to the auction car, dressed impeccably in my Ex Officio no-wrinkle travel blazer.  The conductor was busy telling everyone that there were no more sleeper berths left to Kashgar, so when it came my turn I asked if some sleepers might become available further down the line, after some passengers got off. He looked up at me and I smiled.  "There's a soft class sleeper available now, until we reach Korla station.  Maybe after, but no guarantee.  You want it?"  "Yes."  I paid for the upgrade and gave the ticket to Marco.  He now had a separate compartment until 3:00am; after then, he would be on his own.  As I pushed my way down the crowded aisle, I overheard the next person in line try the same tact I had; the manager's reply was "no berths available!"  It must have been the blazer.

 Hard class sleepers are not actually hard, they are just crowded:  open compartments of three stacked berths facing each other in pairs, six berths to a compartment. The lower berths cost more because they afford just enough headroom to also sit on; the downside is that you also have the occupants of the upper two berths sitting there with you shoulder to shoulder because the upper berths are so close together that you may as well be in a Russian submarine.  I occupied a middle berth, which from my limited experience was prime real estate:  a place to escape to when one wanted to be alone, yet not at the top of the compartment where all the heat and stale cigarette smoke collects. 

Thirty years ago Paul Theroux wrote a book about his rail travels from Europe to Asia entitled “The Great Railway Bazaar.”  I began to see where he got the title. Each “bazaar” is made up of a number of different “markets” – individual train cars – and each market is divided into a dozen separate “families” – the individual compartments.  Like your own family, you have no choice over who your brothers and sisters are; you simply have to get along with them.  Luckily for me, this particular microcosm of life would last only thirty-two hours.  Sharing the same compartment were two families - a young Chinese couple with their son of about four, and an elderly lady with her daughter's baby girl of about two.  The couple was both very tall, indicating that they were Han Chinese from the northern part of China.  He had long, jet-black hair tied back in a ponytail and wore a Tommy Hilfiger "TH Expedition" vest.  “Tommy” also sported a belt with all the requisite male charm bracelet trinkets - beeper, cell phone, sunglasses, key chain with at least a dozen keys, and a jade good-luck stone in case nothing else worked.

Apparently the jade had not worked on their bratty little son who, by virtue of being male and their only child, came with the nickname Xiao Huangdi meaning “Little Emperor.”  In an attempt to limit population growth, China has pursued a policy of one child per family ever since the 1949 Revolution, with mixed results. It is only enforced in the cities where only a quarter of the country’s population lives.  In the countryside, where the agrarian economy requires manual labor, the government turns a blind eye towards multiple-child families.  An increasing number of those kids then move to the cities so that they too can get cell phones.  The result?  In fifty years, China’s population has nearly tripled from 500 million to 1.4 billion. 

Tommy’s Little Emperor was used to having the rule of his roost. The little brat climbed up and down the ladders of every triple bunk in the train car, and screeched at a pitch that should have shattered crystal.  When he climbed the ladder to my berth, he took one look at my long nose, registered in his little child-mind that I was a foreigner, made the form of a gun with his index finger and thumb, then spat right into my face and shrieked with glee.  Meanwhile, Grandma had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get her little charge to sleep ever since we left Urumqi. She just kept shouting "Lie down!  Go to sleep!  Lie down!" and the little girl just squirmed out of her grandmother's hands and flopped onto the floor like a beached fish.  How can a child possibly go to sleep at 11:00 in the morning in the middle of the Great Railway Bazaar? 

Moments later, the Little Emperor was back at it.  I was sitting at one of the fold-out seats in the aisle, filming the view out the open window, and he was trying to crawl out the next window, hands outstretched, to get at my video camera.  At this point Tommy, who had studiously ignored his son while enjoying a beer opposite me, suddenly grabbed the little brat and gave him a long overdue spanking with a plastic slipper.  It was too little too late; after a brief sobbing period, the little terror climbed to a top bunk, dropped his pants, and produced a stream of pee down onto his Papa below.  Tommy merely jumped out of the way, careful to take his bottle of beer with him.  Nary did a passenger raise an eyebrow, here on the great railway bizarre.

By now we were several hours outside of Urumqi.  We passed the glaciated pinnacle of Mt. Bogda, meaning “The God.” Fertile alpine grazing land gave way to rock as we dipped down through a crack in the earth that became a canyon that led down into the desert.  As we dropped, the temperature rose to well over 100 degrees in the train car.  People scrambled to open the windows and the middle and upper berths were all vacated in favor of cooler weather at floor level.  But then along came a dust storm and suddenly the entire train car – indeed, the entire train – was filled with this Asian oobleck that would not disappear. It found its way into our hair, our eyes, our clothes, our teeth.  Passengers managed to close the windows, thus sealing in both the dust and the heat. 

I took a stroll through the bazaar in search of food.  On a train, moving about is actually closer to rock-climbing than strolling; the general rule is that you keep at least three of your four limbs firmly planted at all times.  A train is possibly even more dangerous than climbing because the other people on the same “rope” are constantly falling against you as the train lurches back and forth.  I was just coming to the conclusion that there was no dining car on the train when that impression was forcefully confirmed; we pulled into a station and I was swept up and off the train with a crowd that surged towards a group of delighted merchants on the platform.  Like Piranhas feasting on a hapless cow, within minutes we had cleaned the merchants of their supply of boiled eggs, dried fish and packaged noodles.  Of course, they had cleaned us of our money; it was a symbiotic exchange.

The station, Turpan, is the lowest train station on earth.  Just a few miles from there is the second lowest spot on earth, so that is a fair assumption. At any rate, it couldn’t have been much hotter. Armed with newly purchased bottled water, crackers, mandarin oranges and spam, I was ready for anything.  Most of all, I was ready to get the gritty feel and buttery taste of sand out of my mouth, but that proved impossible; even the spam was unable to cut through.

From Turpan the train began to climb. Well, that makes sense doesn’t it?  We certainly could not go any lower.  The ascent was rather quick – ears popped and people opened their mouths in forced yawns - and within an hour the temperature had dropped noticeably.  As we ascended an outcrop of the Tien Shan Mountains, the desert gave way to sparse huddles of deciduous forest.  Higher we climbed, for hours, and as the sun set the sky turned a deep purple, mixing in with the long shadows of mountains cast across our path.  I lay in my bunk luxuriating in the cool temperature and gazing outside the window.  There I saw the indigo color and unmistakable shape of mountains capped with dollops of snow, bathed in a kind of ethereal alpenglow that slowly transitioned to moonlight. Now shivering, I pulled the warm, dusty blanket over me and ran my tongue across the grounds of sand still stuck in my mouth from the hot desert storm only hours earlier.  Perhaps a more appropriate name for this train might have been the Geographically Schizophrenic Express.

Morning was calm, clickety clack.  Before I opened my eyes I had that song running through my head “Say don’t you know me, I’m your native son / I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans / I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.”  Then the pungent odor of cheap cigarettes brought me back to the here and now, a train on the western edge of China.   The good news was that some windows were open.   There are signs above the windows that caution passengers "no littering through the window" in English and in Chinese, and "no smoking except between train cars," however both are treated as if they didn't exist.  Windows are seen as a bottomless rubbish bin that doesn't stink and doesn't have to be emptied; how much more convenient could you get?  As for smoking, why sandwich yourself between cars and subject yourself to the shrieking squealing noise of the train car couplings clanging and banging, all amplified as if you were a mouse inside of a 100-watt speaker?  Why indeed, when everyone is smoking openly, right where they sit?  Even better if you have a cigarette in one hand and cell phone in the other; just don’t forget which goes in the mouth and which in the ear!  Of course, rules only work if they are enforced, and the train attendants here did not enforce them, perhaps because they did not want to disturb the peace.  An attendant came by and perfunctorily asked a young man not to smoke in the train car.  He glanced around at the other smokers as if to say “why me?” then shrugged his shoulders and continued to smoke, adding a smirk as she moved on down the aisle.

On another foray through the bazaar I did an informal passenger inventory and the only non Chinese passport holders that I could make out were Marco, two Frenchmen and a Malaysian woman traveling a trois, two women and a man from Singapore, also a trois, and a Japanese girl traveling alone.  Marco was now lodged between train cars, like the aforementioned mouse, having been booted from his bunk at 3:00am, seeming to prefer the constant cacophony of the car couplings to the noise of conductors and passengers berating him in a language he could not understand.  Speaking of which, the Japanese girl could not communicate with anyone and somehow found herself taken under the wing of a well-meaning but entirely possessive Chinese woman who in turn spoke no Japanese.  I had seen them at the various “fire drill” station stops where the Chinese girl led the Japanese one around by the hand as if she were blind, talking to her nonstop in Chinese. Perhaps by the time they reached to Kashgar, an osmotic miracle would have occurred and the Japanese girl would have been cured of her inability to speak Chinese.  At Aksu I asked her, in my pigeon Japanese, how she was doing.  She paused while her mind told her that a foreign gaijin could not possibly be speaking to her, in her tongue, on a dusty Chinese train in China.  Was she imagining it? Was this person a mirage? Then her face lit up in comprehension and excitement that she could actually communicate with someone.  As she nodded enthusiastically, she was promptly led away by her captor.

The second day usually goes by faster than the first, as passengers gradually settle into a temporal languidness.  In our case this was neutralized by the train slowing to about 25mph for the last several hundred miles to Kashgar as we just crawled across the desert floor, testing this newest portion of track.  If an analog clock had been on the wall, its hands would have spun around in a blur. 

Early in the evening we pulled into brand new Kashgar station, which appeared as a cubist architect's attempt to look Islamic while remaining atheistic.  Instead it more closely resembled a cheap movie set.  I shared a taxi into the city with the French trio.  It was a long but straight drive along a four lane road cut through the desert, with poplar trees on both sides.  The city planners deemed that this would become the new Main Street for the modern "united nationalities" city that had recently sprung out of the old Kashgar of narrow walled streets. 

We found lodging at the Qini Bagh Hotel, which used to be the British Consulate, situated on the edge of the “old quarter.”  The old British consulate had been one of the staging places for the Great Game of Asian domination and influence that was played out between the British and the Russians.  During the first half of the 20th century, the Soviets gradually expanded their influence eastward across Central Asia, building railroads as they went. The British expanded theirs northward from India.  Because of the wall of mountains encircling it on three sides (the desert forms the fourth boundary), neither the British nor the Russians managed to reach Kashgar by train; indeed the two highest border crossings in the world link it south to the Indian subcontinent and west to the former republics of the Soviet Union.  And so it was left to the Chinese, nearly a century later, to finally reach Kashgar by crossing the desert.  Back then, though, an isolated Kashgar was the unlikely buffer zone between the two imperialist powers. Although controlled by neither, Kashgar was the one diplomatic outpost that happened to be situated between the two and so it was a center of intrigue, diplomatic and military gamesmanship, and, on a few occasions, brinkmanship.   None of this had anything to do with the Chinese, who had their hands full with not just a civil war but a horde of invading Japanese as well.  As the saying goes, “the mountains are high and the Emperor is far away.”

 The Qini Bagh may have been the British Consulate at one point but when we entered, it more closely resembled that frontier bar scene from the first Star Wars film.  People milled about in strange costumes.  Most prevalent were the Pakistani men wearing their loose-fitting pajama-type garb. Today Kashgar is the northern terminus of the Karakorum Highway from Pakistan, and much of the commerce between the two regions takes place here at the Qini Bagh.  Naturally, with trade and traders goes the world’s oldest trade, as witnessed by the preponderance of lithe oriental ladies in the lobby who more than made up for the conspicuous absence of Pakistani women. Presumably many a Gideon’s Koran was turned to face the wall in the guest rooms of this establishment.  Completing the melting pot was a kaleidoscopic mixture of disheveled western travelers arriving and leaving by train, plane, bus, mountain bike and thumb. 

The Qini Bagh may have been the British Consulate at one point but when we entered, it more closely resembled that frontier bar scene from the first Star Wars film.  People milled about in strange costumes.  Most prevalent were the Pakistani men wearing their loose-fitting pajama-type garb. Today Kashgar is the northern terminus of the Karakorum Highway from Pakistan, and much of the commerce between the two regions takes place here at the Qini Bagh.  Naturally, with trade and traders goes the world’s oldest trade, as witnessed by the preponderance of lithe oriental ladies in the lobby who more than made up for the conspicuous absence of Pakistani women. Presumably many a Gideon’s Koran was turned to face the wall in the guest rooms of this establishment.  Completing the melting pot was a kaleidoscopic mixture of disheveled western travelers arriving and leaving by train, plane, bus, mountain bike and thumb. 

It was here at the Kashgar Bazaar, nearly a dozen years earlier, that a group of friends and I – we called ourselves an “expedition” – had gathered supplies before heading up to the Roof of the World to climb Mustagh Ata, the “Father of Ice Mountains.”  Two goats made the trek with us but, alas, they were not destined to return.  In 1987, the only way to get up to the Pamir Plateau was in the back of a four-wheel drive truck or, if you were lucky, a Beijing Jeep, courtesy the new joint venture with Chrysler.  Today, the Karakorum Highway has been paved from Kashgar over the highest border crossing in the world to Pakistan, and so at 5:00 in the morning we simply stood outside the locked gates of the Qini Bagh hotel and, accompanied by the hoots of owls, flagged down a taxi. 

The “expedition” this time consisted of Roger, Jenny and Marcel, fellow survivors of the East Turkistan Express.  I had ear-marked this trio as experienced travelers back on the first day of the train trip when I passed through the single first class train car and saw them sitting comfortably in their spacious compartment, the only foreigners in a car otherwise filled with army generals, factory owners and other Chinese VIPs.  The smell of freshly brewed French dark roast coffee was so unexpected in the context of the rattling, dusty train that it did not even register in my brain until two days later when I saw them standing in the taxi queue outside Kashgar Station.

 “Kalakuli Hu” I said, giving the driver the Chinese name of Karakul, the twin lakes that sit atop the Bamyi Dunya. He raised a thick dark eyebrow, dollar signs flicking through his head. We walked away from him twice, finally bringing the price down to $100 for the four of us.  He then sped away, and in fifteen minutes returned with another car and driver that was licensed to make the drive up into this sensitive border region that threads a virtual DMZ between China, Tibet, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.   Pocketing his $20 share of the deal, he bid a Uigur adieu to us and sped off, leaving us in the questionable hands of a somewhat groggy and hesitant looking young Kirghiz man.  Kalil was his name and, we were assured by the first taxi driver, mountain driving was his game.  We soon learned that the drive up to and back from the Roof of the World was more than likely an initiation rite for greenhorn drivers in the taxi company.  Those who returned alive from the treacherous trip were not only skillful drivers, but were also clearly favored by Allah. 

Off we roared into the desert, speeding down the road towards the rampart of mountains in the distance, horn blaring away, sounding out the alert to all and everyone on the road that we were coming and they had better get out of the way.  Of course, there was no one to pay any attention.  One would think that with an empty asphalt highway that stretches straight as an arrow for thirty miles, it would be easy to drive straight.  Instead, Kalil treated the two edges of the road as carom boards from which we had to bounce the entire way as we swerved back and forth, dodging the demons of his delirium.  Or perhaps he just knew every pothole between Kashgar and the Bamyi Dunya? 

As so often happens when you are approaching the mountains, they have a way of creeping up on you.  The illusion is that as you drive towards them, they appear to be moving further away; then suddenly like a silent tidal wave, they turn and rise up above you.  One moment we were caroming across the desert; the next we were spiraling upwards through a narrow gash in the otherwise impenetrable wall of rock.  Scenery that had been defined in terms of horizontal planes only moments before had morphed into a world of vertical.  This gash in the bulwark, appropriately called the Gez Defile, was strewn with a cataclysmic stew of gigantic boulders, some of which had been flushed out of alluvial cascades from steep or hanging gorges; others of which appeared to have simply broken away from the granite walls far above and impacted the earth like meteorites.  The road snaked around the debris, climbing up and over the more permanent slide zones.  Although nominally paved, much of the road was in a continual state of re-repair, as witnessed by bulldozers on standby.  As the taxi bumped and grinded its way up, by leaning out of the open windows we were able to catch glimpses of sparkling blue glaciers and white needle peaks poking precariously into the heavens far above. They all seemed poised to fall.  And if they fell, it would be straight down here into the Gez Defile.

After nearly two hours of climbing, the road suddenly and simultaneously leveled off and straightened out, and we found ourselves on the grassy plateau that is the Bamyi Dunya – “roof of the world.” The air was cold and thin; we were 12,000 feet above sea level.  Flurries of snow drifted by like cottonwood seeds in the wind, sublimating in the thin air before they could accumulate.  Tibetan yaks, mountain goats and camels shared the sloping pastures.  Black-skinned, bearded herders tended their flocks while the womenfolk, dressed in traditional bright red, tended their own flocks of runny-nosed children. 

A wide alpine valley stretched before us and there at its end, some twenty miles straight ahead, stood the massive multi-shouldered hulk of Mustagh Ata, the “Father Ice Mountains,” dominating everything around it.  The peak presents several sheer faces of granite and ice that plummet straight down from its 25,000 ft summit, but framing those edges are several more benign shoulders that drop away at a constant angle, giving the peak the appearance of a massive Mayan temple.  Each shoulder offers an alternate stairway to heaven, which explains why the Kyrgyz who live at its base believe that the prophet Mohammed was borne to heaven on the back of a white camel that ascended the slopes of Mustagh Ata to bear him to his place of eternal rest.

We pulled to a stop at the Karakul Lakes, which mean “Black water.”  How they got that name is beyond me and anyone else who has been to this region, for the water is shallow and the lakes normally reflect the brilliant blue sky and the white-blue glaciers of Mustagh Ata and its higher twin Kongur, which frame the lake on two sides.  Thirteen years earlier we had slept in yurts here before loading our gear onto camels for the march up to the snow line.  Thirteen years earlier, as greenhorn climbers, we had set up our new tents in view of the lake so that we could take photos of them for our sponsor, only to watch a wind pick them up and whisk them all into the lake, bobbing upside down. Wading out in ignominy to retrieve our truant tents, we learned, the cold and hard way, that the lake was quite shallow.  Such was not the case fifty years earlier when British consul to Kashgar Eric Shipton ventured out into the middle of the lake in a small skiff and somehow managed to sink it, nearly drowning in the process.

Now, we found ourselves in the midst of a tacky tourist trap.  A grey cinder-block building housed a restaurant, advertised garishly by blinking Christmas lights. Along its sides, local Kyrgyz nomads had found a new and much more prosperous way to make a living - selling trinkets carted up to this otherwise desolate plateau from the markets in Kashgar.  As we walked down toward this inevitable sign of change, an unshaven Chinese man in a dark blue Mao jacket intercepted us and informed us that we would have to pay him 20 Yuan (about $3) to enjoy the view from the lake.  Not sure if he was “official” or not, and indignant that I should have to pay to look at what was already there in front of my eyes; I ignored him and turned away.  Across the small lake was a small cluster of yurts; small plumes of smoke from burning yak dung confirmed that they were inhabited.  We headed in that direction to mix with the real Kyrgyz nomads.  As we approached, a family came towards us with open arms, just as they had thirteen years earlier.  I remembered a simple trade taking place in which we gave them sun lotion for their parched faces, and they kept us well supplied with yogurt and bread for much of our expedition.  I wondered if this meeting would be the same. The mother motioned welcomingly towards her yurt; I grabbed one of her three little children, hoisted him onto my back, and galloped off towards the yurt, the young boy chuckling all the way.

Inside the yurt, she motioned for us to sit down on the carpeted floor.  Then, instead of serving us tea, she brought out a bag and spilled its contents onto the floor in front of us. There was displayed a load of trinkets, identical to the ones that were being sold at the tourist trap cafe on the other side of the lake.  I reluctantly agreed to a purchase but not before our visit was further disrupted by the View Police; as we were negotiating the prices, the sound of a motor approached and an irate jeep skidded to a halt.  The felt flap to the yurt swung open, and in came the ticker seller. He had spotted us with his X-ray vision, and thrust the tickets into our faces.  "Pay," he said. “Now.”  He was not smiling. The Kyrgyz mother winced behind his back, and we had no choice but to fork over the fee for enjoying the "unspoiled" beauty of this lake. 

Behind me in the back seat, my French friends were uncharacteristically silent; here in the “shotgun” I was close to punching a whole in the floor where the passenger brake should have been.

The second obstacle was an entire flock of sheep, poised there in the middle of the road ahead of us.  Kalil set upon the horn from a far distance, and turned on the emergency blinkers as well.  He then began swerving from side to side, to alert the sheep to our predicament.  They of course just continued bahhing and pushing against each other, not just unwilling but unable to move out of the way.  The herders saw us heading straight for them and not slowing down, and so tried their best to push the sheep off the road and onto the rocky slope. Somehow we managed to slip by but not without a few “thump” sounds as we roared past. 

Next was Darth Vader von Land Cruiser with his sinister dark windows, who did not appreciate being passed by our rickety red Volkswagen Santana, made under license by Shanghai #3 automotive factory.  He swung right back past us, enveloping us in an impenetrable cloud of dust. Then, when the road narrowed to a single lane and he was quite sure we could not pass, he slowed down to a crawl.  Darth must have been a recent graduate of the SUV Road Rage School of Driving in California.  Needless to say, slowing to his speed would have meant the end of our journey. At this point I was quite willing to give up; indeed I could see the attraction of joining the Dark Side and hitching a ride on into Kashgar with Darth.  But the force was with Kalil as Allah miraculously parted the sides of the road just wide enough for us to squeeze through, flying past Darth.  This enraged him even more, and much of the remaining drive down the Gez was made up of this ridiculous and dangerous testosterone game of cat and mouse.

We careened into Kashgar without stopping and without having to shift out of third gear the entire time.  But the final test for Kalil came at our first traffic light, which of course was red.  As we approached the stopped intersection we veered off to the right as if making a turn into the crossing traffic, but only long enough for Kalil to peek through the two crossing flows and jerk the wheel back left into a small opening in the opposite stream of cars and then pop on though to the other side, like Han Solo through the asteroid belt. We continued straight on down the main street, finally screeching to a halt at the taxi office, inshala, with the help of God.  The dust settled around the car and we pulled ourselves from it, smiling at one another. Kalil nonchalantly hailed a street taxi, gave him five Yuan, and said "take these folks to the Qini Bagh."  Tsingtao beer never tasted so good.

My departure from Kashgar reminded me of the quick-witted words of Paul Foley, then head of the advertising firm McCann-Erickson, whom I had escorted around China in 1979, a trip that resulted in the first ever non-political billboard in Beijing, one which exhorted the masses to buy Kodak film.  As we sat quaffing beers at the café at the bottom of the Great Wall – unlike Nixon, Paul did not need a Photo Op at the top – he quipped, “There are two things that one should not miss when visiting China – the Great Wall, and the train out.”

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