The Great Irkeshtam Pass Adventure

Irkeshtam Pass Adventure Part 1
There are two entrances into Kyrgyzstan from China: either over the bureaucratically difficult to organize, but beautiful Torugart Pass or over the Irkeshtam Pass, also beautiful and one which the Lonely Planet Guidebook describes as a “straightforward”, hop-on-the-bus experience.
Of course I had wanted to take the Torugart Pass, but the thieves who had robbed me managed to steal my time along with my passport. I had three months left on my original visa, but the newly issued one had the clock ticking into days, if not hours. With an approaching holiday, which was going to shut down both countries for four days, I was told I had to take the bus through the Irkeshtam Pass. No Problem, I’ll just take the bus, it’s “straightforward”, right?

Cut to Monday morning:
Me: When does the bus leave for Osh (in Kyrgyzstan)?
Moon (Hostel Owner): Monday, Thursday and Friday.
Me: Well, I will take the Thursday bus because Friday is the start of the holiday and my visa expires on Saturday.
Moon: Yes, you have to take the Thursday bus. Friday, everything will be closed and China has big fines if you overstay your visa.

Cut to Monday afternoon:
Moon: Um, well, I called the bus station and they said that maybe the bus leaves on Thursday, maybe not. It depends if it fills up.
Me: Well, when will they know this?
Moon: We must wait until Wednesday and then call.
Me: Shouldn’t I try to book a ticket now and at least count for one.
Moon: No. We can’t do anything until Wednesday.
Me: Hmmpf.

Cut to Wednesday morning:
Me: Good Morning Moon, did you sleep well?
Moon (slightly panicked, but ultimately not his problem): I just called the bus station. They decided to close the border two days early - by this afternoon. There is a bus going to Osh today, but it’s full.
Me (in denial): O,K, let’s try that again… Good Morning Moon, did you sleep well?
Moon: Your only option is a driver to the border.
Me: What the @%$#! What exactly does “afternoon” mean and what happens when and if I get to the Kyrgyz side, how the heck do I get to Osh?
Moon: They won’t tell us exactly when it is closing, they only said afternoon, and I don’t know what happens on the other side. I hear you can maybe hitch a ride with a truck. You better pack your stuff, you have to go….now!

Without a Taco Bell drive-thru in sight, I was literally making a run for the border. How poetic. After three months in China and two robberies later, here they were, mercilessly booting me out. “Thank’s for your business Ma’am, now don’t let that customs door kick you in the ass on the way out. Have a great holiday and come back again soon! (after you have purchased yet another expensive visa from us that we will eventually try to steal from you)”


The Great Irkeshtam Pass Adventure Part 2
The chain-smoking driver showed up, but without the necessary permits to get to the border. He had a friend who had a friend who was friends with his friend’s friend who could get him the permit, just not quickly. My head was ticking seconds. It was already eleven o’clock in the morning and the drive was over three hours long. This already put me in the murky “afternoon” region.
Finally and thankfully a driver with permits and without a chain-smoking habit showed up. I threw my bag in the car, looked at the clock (noon), said goodbye to my friends and prayed for the best.
My anxiety was in fourth gear, but as soon as we got out of the city and rolled onto the pages of Geology Magazine my jitters were smashed under the weight of all the incredible surrounding mountains. In the very last stretches of the country, I saw some of the best scenery it had to offer. It was as if China was telling me, “Think what you want about everything else, but one thing is clear - you will never forget my undeniable beauty.”
The clock had now hit 3:30 p.m and we were finally approaching the border, which was in the middle of nowhere, flanked by open fields, a few rusty trailers and snow-capped mountains. We hurried up to the office entrance where a middle-aged Kyrgyz trucker gave us the international sign for “closed” (two arms criss-crossed). Closed! Closed! My heart landed in my shoe. But no sooner had he signed “closed,” when he was already adding on another internationally understood hand movement, food going into mouth. As he pointed to the clock, I understood that the border would re-open at 4:00, right after lunch. Aha! I made it! My first ever Border Run ends in success!

The Great Ishketam Pass Adventure Part 3
The border opened, my friendly non-English speaking driver left, the sun was starting its descent and I was wading in a thick marsh of rough testosterone. I was surrounded by weather-faced Kyrgyz and Uzbek truckers with skull caps, cigarette stained fingers and gold teeth, most all of whom were intently staring at the one person who clearly didn’t fit into this picture…me. All of a sudden I became acutely aware of my femininity: the brightly patterned dress over my jeans, my hair tied up exposing gold and emerald earrings, the handbag over my shoulder and the shiny pink lip gloss which I had started to apply frequently out of mounting nervousness. I quickly put on my new army jacket to showcase my rugged side, but unfortunately next to this crowd I would have had to bathe in motor oil and dry myself with sandpaper to fit in. Like surrounding wolves, they started to bark, Osh? Osh? Osh? In my vivid imagination, I saw dripping saliva and fangs and in reality, they were probably very respectful family men, but I couldn’t get past the image they were presenting. Then they started to sign language that I could ride with them in their trucks. This, I thought, was going to take some crafty maneuvering.
As we were in no man’s land (literally between two borders), accepting a ride in a truck was the only option. Standing in the customs line I started devising all sorts of plans in my head. I would accept a ride, pretend my ipod was a phone and somehow communicate that I needed to call the U.S Consulate before we left– just in case. Or I would use the restroom and carefully hide the knife I had bought in Kashgar somewhere on my person. But before I could hatch anymore of these clever plans, the entire building started to rumble and shake and everyone inside started running for the door. An earthquake? A damn earthquake? As the apocalypse seemed to be upon me, I quickly started repenting for my sins.
The tremors soon stopped but my heartbeat was as fast as ever. Confused and panicked, I turned around and, just like an angel sent from above, there stood a short man with grey hair, a red mountain sport jacket, high-jacked khaki trousers, sensible shoes and holding a large framed picture of a pastel colored embroidered horse. “Osh?” I asked. “Yes, Osh,” he replied and it was as if the heavens opened up and started singing carols of pure, cool comfort.


The Great Irkeshtam Pass Adventure Part 4
Maybe, just maybe, crossing into Kyrgyzstan on the public bus would be a “straightforward” affair, like the guidebook said, but it is anything but straightforward without an assigned mode of transportation. And I do not know how I would have managed without Muktar, my Sensible-Shoed-Savior, who was Kyrgyz and spoke about ten key words of English, but had managed this border before and knew the drill well.
First you have to hitch a ride with a truck to the first checkpoint. We loaded our stuff and got 3 km down the road before the traffic piled up and we were at the end of a long line. We then unloaded our stuff and walked the distance of about twenty big rigs, with me now holding the pastel embroidered horse picture, and reloaded our stuff in the truck that was first in line. We then drove another fifteen kilometers down the road and reached another checkpoint.
The entrance Health Minister, who was collecting and pocketing money from the truckers in great frequency sat behind his desk oinking at me. Oink, Oink and he would crumple his nose up like a pig. “No, I don’t have swine flu.” Then he started flapping his arms like a bird. “No, I don’t have avian flu.” Then he started pointing at a bunch of papers. “No, I don’t have a health certificate.” Which I guess is what required the money. No papers, no entrance. Money, entrance. My novelty as a women and an American seemed to outweigh the need for another illegal som into his pocket and so we came to a fair compromise: he could watch me stick a thermometer under my armpit and I could enter the country without health papers.
The truck let us off at a village of tin cans; a collection of rusted, Soviet era train cars that housed people, bars and restaurants. It felt like someone had rubbed raw with a Brillo pad and ammonium the lives of the locals here; they were hard and the concept of comfort was as distant as a warm sandy beach. Muktar was busy trying to organize a ride to Osh, and I was busy feeling my thirst and my hunger, but soon realized that I had no local currency. My Border Run had prevented me from going to the bank and exchanging some Chinese Yuan for Kyrgyz Som, but Muktar, my Sensible-Shoed-Savior came to the rescue once again and bought me some food and water.
As Muktar’s efforts were proving unsuccessful, I was standing outside a trailer becoming a local spectacle, of which I caught the attention of the Alai County Police Sheriff, a gold-toothed guy in his late twenties, clad in army fatigues and a Russian fur cap. He approached me and started speaking a very broken English, to which I was at first stand-offish until I realized that he was offering us a ride, not to Osh, but to a town before it that was pretty darn close. As darkness peeked around the corner and the cold mountain air started invading all layers of fabric, Muktar, and I hopped into the police car with Tokyo the sheriff and Macho, his toothless driver.
The pass, which was an unpaved, winding, cratered “road”, was packed with snow and the trucks were at many times caught in a blocked standstill. We would approach, lights and sirens flashing. Tokyo would get out of the car, make everyone move out of the way, collect money from the truckers to pad his pocket and then we would proceed. Before long the vodka came out and as Tokyo sat repeatedly scolding Macho for hitting unavoidable potholes, he would then reward him with a pat on the old man’s shoulder and a shot of the hard stuff.
The rotation of vodka shots, sirens, and money collection went on all along the pass, until the wee hours of the morning, until finally, men became men and all the formalities disintegrated into one long running joke about the American Girl, of which I couldn’t understand linguistically, but I didn’t need language to know exactly what territory the joke was in. I played along, pointing my fingers at them, accusing them of being naughty boys and dirty old men. Although I would love to think otherwise, dirty jokes at my expense were to be expected, I guess, at some point. I was, after all, still bathing in a marshland of testosterone. But even though I was trapped in a car, in the middle of a snowy mountain pass, at night time, in Kyrgyzstan, with a group of men taking hefty rounds of vodka shots, one of them a police sheriff who could cover up any crime, I never felt threatened. My hand never even approached my Kashgar Knife, not once (O.K…maybe once).
It was about four in the morning when we arrived at the town of the sheriff. Muktar and I stayed in a local guesthouse and got a few hours rest until daybreak when we arranged for a shared taxi to Osh. In Osh, Muktar picked up his car from a friend’s house and dropped me off right on the doorstep of the guesthouse.
I can’t say for sure exactly how I survived my Irkeshtam Pass Adventure; arriving at the Kyrgyz border with no money, no arranged transport and getting a lift from Tokyo and Macho, a man who liked to drive the steep, dark and winding pass fueled on Vodka. Perhaps it was through my Sensible-Shoe-Savior, or maybe my parents are still protecting me from the other side. Whichever the case, I now know that real travel does not come with a manual and life is never as “straightforward” as it may seem.

Kashgar, China

The old city of Kashgar is a place where sheep are butchered on the streets, where children in traditional embroidered vests and hats walk hand in hand with children in track suits, where men have homemade knives hanging from their belts, where blacksmiths craft nails for horse shoes by a hot fire, where electricity lines are supported by forked tree branches and where the city buses have wooden seats from a bygone era.
The last stop on the Silk Road in China, Kashgar was, and still is, a place of bustling trade, evident at the famous Sunday Bazaar, which is touted as the best in Asia. Here you can buy everything from livestock to raw goods to herbal medicine, food, clothes, household items and anything else you can think of. Walking around during the buying and selling chaos, you start to feel like someone might just run up and slap a price tag on you and before you know it you will be in the back of an open pick-up with some furry, horned and hooved friends.
The new city surrounds the old like an ugly fence, but from hours spent people watching the Uyghur people in Kashgar, it’s clear that modern tile and brick is no threat to the timelessness of their culture.

Supremely Unconnected

While I have been busy sheparding sheep on horseback, solving Kyrgyz crimes with local detectives, building yurts and throwing disco parties in the remote countryside, the internet situation in Kyrgyzstan has remained the same....very uncooperative. I am heading back to Bishkek tomorrow and I am determined to hunt down a wireless connection and post the pictures and stories I have been gathering so far. I am also determined to hunt down a "Barbie in a Burka" at the Bazar.
The adventure continues.......

Wireless in Kyrgyzstan

Hi All...thanks for everyone's concern on my whereabouts....no worries, I am alive and well, but have been in the pretty disconnected country of Kyrgyzstan...and wireless only exists for $20 per half hour at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bishkek...that's equal to almost a week's lodging so I refuse to pay it. That means no entries on the blog until I can get a good connection...but it certainly doesn't mean there is a lack of material. My border crossing from China into Kyrgyzstan could possibly beat the experience of showing up at 3:00 a.m on a dirt road in Albania without any reservations or a clue....I am still having visions of gold-teeth, scull cap wearing truckers, flashing police lights, rusty train car skeletons turned into houses and bars and a toothless man named Macho swigging lots of Vodka as he tried to navigate the roads of the snowy Irkeshtam Pass in the dark...can't wait to find a connection and share the adventure!

To be continued......

The Karakorum Highway to Tashgurgan and back

The Karakorum Highway connects China and Pakistan. The esophagus connects the mouth and the stomach. And the connection between these sentences is that as I was passing through the incredible mountain ranges along the “highest highway in the world”, my Uyghur chicken dinner from the night before was passing through my esophagus, out my mouth and littering the majestic countryside all the way to Tashkurgan.
As my three travel companions sat ooohing and aaahing at nearly every new bend in the road, I was lying on a spare tire in the back of the jeep ooowing at every new bump in the road, only manually lifting my eyelids to weakly look out the back window when the chorus got exceptionally loud and excited.
It could have started as a piece of chicken gone awry, but any previous illness soon gave way to the extreme altitude at which we were driving. With over 10,000 feet below me, I spent the entire first day on one of the most scenic drives of my life passed out in fetal position, drooling on extra rubber and a flat tire jack. I finally came to seven hours later when we reached the town of Tashkurgan, which is a groovy mountain town in the Tajik Autonomous Region within China and 120 km from the Pakistani border.
Luckily for me, the way back was the same way we arrived. And luckily for me again, by the next morning, my body had adjusted to the altitude and I was walking and talking like a normal human being. With clear blue skies welcoming me back to the world of the living, I sat transfixed by the images that rolled past my window; green farmland slowly morphed into barren fields, which turned into sand dunes which drifted into rocky cliffs and then became tremendous snow capped mountains with heights of over 15,000 feet. Yaks, yurts, camels, and clay house villages dotted the landscape as sandstorms in one direction and snowstorms in the other clouded the distant view.
I was happy my own eyelids weren’t clouding the view any longer because even though I only caught the stunning scenery once on a two-way ride, once was all I needed to appreciate the endless beauty of the Karakorum.

Hotan, Uyghur Autonomous Region within China

Crossing the length of the Taklamaken Desert was like traveling through a long and sandy border, which divided a multi-ethnic region to that of Uyghur-ville. Stepping out of the bus in Hotan was like stepping into another country altogether.
It might be easier to just rip open your chest upon arrival and have someone sandblast your lungs and then sandpaper your pupils so that you get it over with all at once, rather than suffer the slow sand erosion that eventually takes over your body…breath by breath, blink by blink. Walking the streets feels a bit like your inside a vacuum trying to suck up a shoreline, but once you get used to the tearing and the wheezing, there is definitely some fun to be had in Hotan.

Catch a Glimpse of the Stone Age
On the bus ride in, we passed an incredibly white, mostly dried up river which had foggy looking humans lurking about its’ rocky bed. Inquiring about this to the only person I briefly met who spoke a tiny shred of English, I found out that this is where the locals pick natural Jade to buy and sell in the markets. Salivating at the photo-op, I found my way back to this river and to the market that sat along its’ dusty bank. It was filled almost entirely with men; men washing stones, men rubbing stones, men talking to stones, men trading stones, men transporting stones...in other words, men playing with stones. The only women that were there were the ones providing food to all the stoneheads, and since I knew more about dumplings than I did stones, I decided to take a seat with the ladies, front and center, and watch all the men getting stoned.
After leaving the market, and over the next day that I was in town, I saw many stone gatherings on the streets. The same ritual seemed to occur every time: men hanging out, men hanging out with stones, men using stones as a way to hang out, men are stuck in the stone ages.

Become a Bus Driving Assistant
It’s not what you see, it’s how you get there. Or don't get there for that matter. On my first day in Hotan I had secured local lodging, made it to the white jade river, the city park, the outdoor market and the town square. For my second day, I had written down that I wanted to see the silk factory and the winery. The silk factory made sense since I was following the ancient silk road, but an Uyghur winery located in remote western China was a far, and probably very wrong, stretch of the imagination.
Traveling without a guidebook or any useful foreign language skills in places like this, I had managed to get the same guy who spoke a shred of English to write down the very simple description of silk house and wine house in Mandarin. Written characters gets you everywhere in China, but not so much in Uyghur-ville, where they read according to a modified Arabic alphabet. Mandarin is the minority language in Hotan and English is non-existent. But I had my translated piece of paper, so I started waving it about town, until I stumbled upon a bus driver who wanted to make me Second in Command. That’s right, Co-captain of local Uyghur Bus #4.
How should I describe this experience? Well, it was kind of like being a child and getting invited into the cockpit to sit with the captain and steer the plane for a minute. While I didn’t quite steer the bus while sitting on the driver’s lap, I did get to sit up front on the consul next to him and press the button that opens and closes the doors. And while we never did figure out the location of the silk factory or the winery (not that I would have understood anything there anyway), I was having so much fun on the bus that I took two entire city loops as Second in Command.

Lost in the Double Translation
As I mentioned, Mandarin is the minority language in Hotan and English is non-existent. It’s really fun if you can find a Chinese person, like I did, who can translate something from English into Chinese characters. Then you take that to an Uyghur person who then takes that back to a Chinese person for translation and then reports to you in a language you don’t understand anyway. It’s like a good game of telephone.

Trans-Taklamaken Express

Many years ago, during one of my frequent daydreaming moments of If I could travel, where would I go?, I scribbled down the Taklamaken Desert, along with a few other places, on a small sheet of paper and tucked it away in the I’m probably never going to do this file. Staring at maps and contemplating history is more than a rainy day activity for me, and when I came across the description of the Taklamaken Desert as being such a harsh and inhospitable landscape that not even the weathered and hardened people of ancient times could penetrate it’s core, I immediately wanted to go.
I read that Takla Maken in Uyghur language means, “Go in and you will never come out.” History records that even on the edges, along the very outskirts of this desert, there was an extremely high mortality rate and plentiful amounts of human and animal bones have been found scattered about the old trading routes.
After traveling on the long road of my own history and circumstance, I remarkably found myself, years later, on the fringes of the mighty Taklamaken Desert. Usually the blending of technology with a plundering of the earth’s natural resources results in a negative, but this time, for me at least, the combination of the two meant that I would have the opportunity to travel right into the beating heart of this sandy Grim Reaper.
Oil was found in this desert, and in the 90’s, the petrol companies built a highway that sliced, from North to South, right through what was once nearly impossible terrain. And there I was, standing in the Korla bus station, purchasing a ticket for a 15-hour bus ride through what I once thought was a near impossible dream.
I excitedly boarded the stinky sleeper bus, which last saw a cleaning before the birth of Jesus, and soon became the object of local fascination. My plan was to get off the beaten tourist track by traveling the Silk Road, and as I tried to ungracefully twist my legs into my miniature, assigned overnight compartment as a full busload of eyes intently watched every itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny move I made, I realized I was in the process of successfully completing that goal.
My fantasy of traveling through the desert was in motion, but the reality of actually seeing it taking place was another matter all together. The bus left in the evening, and I had about an hour’s worth of light, just enough time to enter the highway and get a brief glimpse of her surface, before night covered the view. But even though I was rolling through in complete darkness, carried by a dirty sock on wheels, it did not matter. It did not matter because I was still there. I had once written down a far-flung travel fantasy on a small piece of paper, and though many mountains to climb in between, there I was actually living it.

Turpan, China

To really feel like you are a dusty, ancient person following the Silk Road, take a three- hour bus ride from Urumqi to Turpan, rent a bike and peddle out to Jiaohe, an extremely well preserved old trading city situated by an oasis in the middle of the desert. This is exactly what Sam from Australia and I did, after the heat of the day had started to subside, and we had the entire place to ourselves, which not only made us feel anciently authentic as we walked upon a thousand years of history, it also inspired us to strip down for an International Almost Naked Photo…..naturally.