Heavenly Lake and Urumqi
We have been unable to get the Internet over the last few days. We will be posting the last 5 days of entries at the same time. Please simply follow the dates on the blogs.
We are now getting into some really remote areas. I'm pretty sure that this town has never seen foreign visitors before. We were definitely getting curious looks. As we arrived at the airport it was not hard to find the right baggage claim because there is only ONE. And then it hit, Ms. Bisconti tapped me on my shoulder with a panicked look on her face.
I tried to ignore what had been like tiny eruptions in my belly on the plane, but I knew it was useless when I tapped Ms. Becker on her shoulder. The day before had been quite a rough eating day. I was surviving on protein bars and pepperidge farm goldfish (A shout out to my sister for making me bring so much food, it is almost gone). On the plane, one of our tour mates was passing out a dried fruit called Hami. It's a melon, and it is really good. Okay, it's really good but not sure I should have eaten it as a meal. And after about 10 pieces ( you know me, go big or go home) the rumble began. So I raced into the bathroom and there is a line of my tour mates not looking too happy. I am in a sweat at this point when it all begins to crystallize. There are three bathrooms, one squat without a door, one squat with a door and one western style without a door as I know well. I felt like the gods were asking me to choose a path and all options were less than perfect to say the least. Panic. My tour mates saw my stricken face and said well you are going to have to decide and certainly the western toilet one at the end ( thank god) was best for these matters. So off I went as they guarded. Now that is a real roughing it experience in my book. But it is amazing what you will endure when you have to. If you asked me before if I would do something like that, I would swear no, but you just never know.
Ms. Bisconti made it through that harrowing experience and we were back on the bus and on our way to our next hotel. I use the term "hotel" loosely. I'm not sure what star hotel this was; the tour guides previously assured us we were staying in all 4 and 5 star hotels. Well their stars must mean something different than ours. The hallway looked as though it hadn't been vacuumed in years; you could see dust build up when the light shined on the rug which was infrequent because they kept the hallways dark. Finally at our destination and there were multiple odors greeting us as we opened our door. The bathroom left something to be desired. If you looked under the sink you could see an unfinished section of room. There was a hole in the wall by the bed with various wires sticking out...the "bug highway" as it was referred to which could allow various creatures of the night to scurry their way onto your bed and into your covers. Actually, we saw a bug making his way across the floor of our neighbors hotel room. This kept Ms. Bisconti up for part of the night.
Love how Ms. Becker says ever casually states that we were back on the bus and headed to our hotel. If only it were that simple. So after holding everyone up (which is horrible enough, but everyone knows why), our one tour leader compassionately came to help me and grab my bags. Our professor Karen, came to me with three different kinds of medicine. This has become such a typical Karen moment that some tour mates affectionately call her "Dr. Kane Medicine Woman." Anyway, she insisted that I sit in the very front of the bus. Sounds like a logical move if you're not feeling well. Wrong. You and I have not been to Hotan (nor have many tourists). I watched the road with shock and horror and felt like I was witnessing our impending doom. I suddenly began to realize that we were regularly in the wrong lane . Hotan, being out in the middle of the desert , experiences lots of wind storms, so the right side of the street was almost completely covered in sand. Let me state that again, the right side of the street was almost completely covered. This would close down most roads in the U.S. or at the very least require a traffic cop. Logical ( you can guess where I am going with this). We drove into the on coming lane! Yes, not only were there lots of vehicles but plenty of them were moving at a good clip and each would simply try to avoid the other. Of course, this is no simple task. At some points I felt like the driver was playing chicken. Terrifying. I came to find out throughout the course of the day that this was THE NORM, even without all the sand in the road. Traffic signs and laws are merely a suggestion here. My initial western sensibilities were shocked and dismayed that by the end of the day shifted to admiration .
As I watched an intersection that day, I took note. In this street were the modern and the old, the fast and slow, the young and old just trying to move.They did it with horses pulling a cart, cars, scooters, pedestrians, small bikes, donkeys and trucks etc. You get the idea. They were all going in many directions. But not following what we would say are "appropriate traffic patterns." The people were crossing in front of each other, going into oncoming traffic and yet it worked. There was a rhythm to the perceived chaos, there was this beautiful ebb and flow of humanity like a well done waltz; spinning and moving coming ever so close but never quite touching or colliding because they were attentive to their partners steps and knew its continous and seamless swirl depended on it. There was no yelling or cursing if you accidentally walked in front of some one or cut them off, they simply moved aside so that the waltz could continue uninterrupted. It made me smile. It made me want this sense of community.
The sense of community Ms. Bisconti talks about was visible everywhere we went. She writes about it so beautifully, I'm sure I can't do it justice. The streets were full of people. Merchants spritzing down their fruit to entice would be shoppers, carts of colorfully dressed women being driven by donkey to the bazaar, crowds of men chatting about, well I don't actually know. Children laughing and giggling along the side of the road or in their mother's and father's arms on the front of a shooter pretending to drive. The prevalence of children is particularly striking. This is a community that looks after one another and children are a huge part of this sense of community. Their parents bring them with them as they go about their day or they play together without fear of harm. I was struck by one little boy. He had to be about 2 or 3 years old. He was clutching a blue inner tube around his tiny body at his father's place of business, a scooter parking site. When his father wasn't dealing with a customer he was throwing the little boy into the air or hiding his inner tube for the boy's enjoyment. The boy's smiling face made two things incredibly clear to me, he loved his father and he loved his life in that very moment.
People of Hotan:
Love that she is on the cell phone. Love juxtaposition of old and new:
While getting a real sense of the community was an exciting part of the day for us, the main reason we travelled to Hotan had to do with the fact that it was a major city along the Silk Road. And apparently there are individuals in Hotan who continue to make silk in the traditional fashion completely by hand. So we did a quick stop for a demonstration. We got to see the woman heat up the stone pit filled with water and as the water got hotter they loosened the silkworm cocoons so they could catch the ends of the silk strings and begin to weave them into a ball of silk yarn. Various plants and fibers are used to dye the silk different colors and giant looms and expert hands take that raw material and create beautiful dresses, scarfs, ties...
Silk making by hand:
NOTE: Many of them,western areas of China, like Hotan, Urumqi and Kashgar, that we visited are dominated by a minority group called Uygurs (meaning "united") whom are predominantly Muslim. In fact, Ms. Becker and I saw very few Han Chinese in these areas. Just for comparrison understand that 92% of the population of all of China is Han. So these regions are really like being in a completely different country. They have totally different food, dress, traditions etc. They are a Turkish speaking group with a population of about 6 million in the Xinjiang region. Their origins began as nomadic tribes that eventually grew into powerful empire that came to control economic activity on the Silk Road.
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