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Kashgar, cont'dKashgar doesn't want to let us go. On Tuesday we wake full of travel nerves. The bus is scheduled to leave from the Qinibak Hotel at 11 AM. We are under strict instructions to be there by 10. We finish packing and at 8:45 race across the street to the Liman Café for a quick breakfast, but at 9:30 still aren't served. I give up and dash back to the hotel for a last pee. While Jim gets hung up in one of those no-common-language arguments with a sullen hotel clerk over the return of the key deposit, I hail a horse cart and agree to a price. "Qinibak! 10 yuan!" When we get loaded up, the horse gallops off in an unusual direction, down some kind of horses-only road. Our anxiety mounts. The driver starts yelling, "20 yuan! 10 for each!" Is he kidnapping us till we agree? "Okay, okay! Qinibak Hotel!" Suddenly, there we are at the hotel. Now the driver wants an additional 10 yuan for each bag. Jim, usually soft-spoken and patient in these situations, starts yelling at the guy to fuck off and hands him 20 yuan. We grab our bags and jog over to the bus stop in the nick of time. The nick of time. 10 AM turned to 11 and we still milled around the lot watching men slowly load two buses — inside and on top — with cardboard boxes. We spoke with fellow passengers: a Canadian photographer-turned-guide, a fussy little man from Barcelona, and a couple of bedraggled young women who'd been traveling through China on the cheap for months. No one knew the rules. Everyone wanted a good seat. Were we supposed to queue up? No one knew, but a queue formed anyway. A few people threw small articles through the window to save the seat they wanted. We stood on line in the midday glare for more than an hour, like idiots. When the bus staff was good and ready to let us board, they threw off everything anyone had tossed through the windows and gruffly assigned seats according to nothing but their personal whims. They yowled when we didn't move fast enough. With the other 2 buses in the caravan already filled with cargo there wasn't enough room for all the passengers and arguments broke out. We got sent to the back of the bus. There were 5 seats across with an aisle about a foot wide, clogged with carry-ons. (Sorry, I can't report any livestock. This was a sophisticated international bus.) The bus finally pulled out of the lot at 2:45, only to stop an hour later for lunch! Everyone was irritable. Little did we realize that this crude outdoor restaurant was the last shred of civilization before Tashkurghan, some 8 hours up the road. From there we hit the desert, going slowly uphill. We were already at 4000 feet. The night would bring us to 10,000 feet. Every couple hours we'd have a "water stop," which meant getting out of the bus and finding your own private dune to squat behind for a pee.
Remember our trip with the Darlingtons? Remember how we were surprised that there was a stop at Tashkurghan? Were we any more prepared the second time around? No. I guess we had some vague notion that we'd head back to the pseudo first-class Pamir Hotel, but of course didn't think through that we'd be arriving at midnight. What, did we think we'd hail a cab, as if we were standing outside Grand Central Station? Hadn't we learned anything by now? When the bus finally stopped, everyone jumped up and rushed out. They all seemed to know exactly what they were doing. We made our way from the back of the bus and got out to find ourselves in front of Traffic Hotel. We followed the crowd into a place that had all the charm of a Soviet army barracks. To our surprise, we had no trouble getting a cozy little room with a bath. I was headachy and restless from the 10,000-foot altitude but couldn't have been happier. The bulb was burned out in the bathroom and the toilet ran constantly. There was a TV but it had a totally dysfunctional Western plug. Dogs howled outside our window. But the Chinese never fail to provide that thermos of hot water, so we feasted on hot Koolaid, wine, peanuts, and stale bread. Life was good. |
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I was squeezed in between
Jim and a civil engineer from
Pakistan, who was traveling with his 2 sons and nephew and who spoke a little English
— mostly rude questions about my marital status. He was coming down with something
and asked us for aspirin. We obliged. Then he asked to drink from my canteen to wash it
down. What was I going to do? I politely handed him my water.