There and Back Again – a journey through remote ru
It’s 3.30pm and our second stop of the day; the first was also in the middle of nowhere. As were yesterday’s. We grow to like this place, ‘Nowhere,’ grateful for the chance to stretch our limbs and sweat in the sun. The vast distances and rough roads of northwest China, conducive to slow travel, make each day’s destination a mini epic and our driver is reluctant to stop. So we and our bladders go with the flow, or the ebb, as the case may be. The country we are driving through is vast and, for a dry arid plain, remarkably diverse and interesting, its colours and patterns a varying mosaic of earthy tones. Unexpected flashes of yellow mark feral sunflowers, escapees from summer’s seed crop being trucked to market. We are on the first leg of a four-day package bus tour, heading north from the city of Urumqi, capital of China’s northwest province, Xinjiang. Our destination is the nature reserve of Kanas Hu, a lake surrounded by mountains and boreal conifer forest, lying close to the borders with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and southern Russia. To get there and back in four days, our route runs 2000-odd kilometres counter-clockwise around the Gurbantunggut Desert in Junggar Basin. China’s second largest desert, Gurbantunggut’s rainfall is as little as 100 millimetres a year. We are the only native English speakers on the bus. Our guide, Mister Li, does a good line in ‘sorry,’ but that’s where his English ends. And our Mandarin doesn’t get much past ‘hello,’ ‘thank you’ and ‘did you sleep well?’ – none too useful when asking for the toilet or ordering noodles. Our contact in Urumqi, who booked us on the bus, is wry with his smile when he suggests we will have “many interesting experiences” joining a local package tour. And so far he is right. Day one turns out to be 15 and-a-half hours of desert travel, with sporadic air conditioning and a surreptitious battle over curtains with the people in front. Most Chinese buses have curtains, usually drawn, protecting passengers from the sun, prying eyes, the view. We want our curtains open; they want the glare off the in-flight video screen with its kung fu movies and musical video of a popular female singer who’s high pitched nasal strains, like the local beef testicle dish, are an acquired taste. Our driver saves Ms Nasal, played extra loud, for the humour testing 1.00am shift. It’s thanks to his penchant for hitting humps at high speed that we are jouncing along in the small hours, delayed by the evacuation of a woman to hospital with neck injuries. She failed to co-ordinate her descent with that of the airborne bus after a particularly big hole in the road, and whacked her head on the ceiling. I soon envy her early departure. After the second run through of an especially dire movie I realise only five tapes are on board, and they play on loop. We get to know the characters intimately; they’re now like family. When we finally arrive in the town of Burqin, near the border with Kazakhstan, at 1.45am, everyone else goes in search of an evening meal while we crawl off to our room and bed. And we’re still last to the bus in the morning. Chinese package holidays appear to be an organic evolving event; timetables and other schedules provide an excuse for argument, often good-humoured. Usually we can only surmise the cause or outcome – wrong place to stop for lunch, accommodation no good, the air conditioning is broken, the video isn’t loud enough, we haven’t seen that film often enough yet. Everyone has an opinion that must be aired; nothing is resolved in a hurry. As we move toward Kanas Lake in the higher, cooler north, the landscape grows imperceptibly greener and the roads perceptibly worse. Winding our way through immense grasslands and hilly ranges, river flats alternate with precipitous drop-offs and we get our first glimpse of camels, yurts (the round felt tents of Mongols and Kazakhs) and China’s peculiar floppy bottomed sheep. After a trifling seven hours on day two, we arrive. Kanas Lake lies at the northern part of the Altay Mountains, within a reserve noted for its Siberian forest and hint of snow leopard. Summer lovers are cheated here; winter lasts seven months and spring kicks straight into autumn. But nature lovers can fill their boots. Kanas and its environs offer permanent snow zones, alpine tundra zones, alpine meadow zones, sub-alpine meadow zones, low hilly zones, mountain marshlands and aquatic vegetation. Its hills are cloaked with virgin coniferous forest known as ‘taiga’ – bounded by tundra to the north and steppe to the south. Among these trees, the visitor information signs tell us, are 99 kinds of fungi, though maybe fewer after our visit. At each stop two fellow travellers, Fat Man One and Fat Man Two, fill bags to bulging for a slap-up feed of mushrooms back at the hotel. The Chinese thrive on facts and figures, which they recite at will and random. Kanas Lake, I learn, is more than 24 kilometres long, an average of 1.9 kilometres wide and 46 square kilometres in area. It stores about four billion cubic metres of water and is the deepest alpine fresh-water lake in China. In turn, we mortify them with ignorance about New Zealand’s land area, the number of sheep or our Olympic gold medal tally. Kanas and its lake is, without a doubt, off the beaten track in Xinjiang, a province that is already off China’s beaten track. The area oozes remoteness. But the ubiquitous satellite dish has reached even here, atop a newly built and self-styled ‘groggery’. And authentic Swiss chalets are sprouting among the yurts and traditional wooden huts. What the customer wants the customer gets. As long as its not hot running water. Horse rides are compulsory. So we do. Well used to the routine, Kazakh horses plod or trot to their own rhythm. On our way back we are privileged to a shyly delivered tour of two-yurt family home and bowl of delicious homemade yoghurt. The larger tent is the lounge-cum-kitchen. The smaller is the family of seven’s sleeping room; the beds are carpets layered upon the ground each night, and stacked up on the side by day. Grey-brown outside, the felt yurts are cosy and colourful within, walls covered in vibrant embroidered rugs made by the family women, and the occasional badger skin, caught by the men. On day three we actually get to see the reason for our trip, Lake Kanas. To our consternation we are given two hours to explore its vast area. The driver is impatient to hit the road and unswayable. His bus will leave at lunchtime, promptly. As we enjoy what we can of the lake and the view, we make sure we stick to the paved paths, exhorted by signs that read “Protect a leaf. Give your love to green lives,” a more eloquent version of “Keep off the grass.” Back at the bus, our unexpectedly shortened exploration is made more annoying by yet another long argument - the horse wranglers are unhappy with yesterday’s pay. Our ‘prompt’ departure is delayed for 90 minutes. While the debate rages, the driver checks our fuel supply and the news is not good. An expensive can of fuel helps appease the Kazakh horsemen, but it’s a long remote way to the nearest bowser. When we do slowly, inevitably roll to a stop, it happily turns out to be within a short pushbike ride of a petrol pump. Re-fuelled, the bus journeys south along the western side of Gurbantunggut Desert, circling back to Urumqi, first through vast grassland steppes, then huge sand lands with immense mudstone pillars. Random camels appear as the bus flies by; their humps at half-mast in the heat and dry. At some point of our final day, the beautiful landscape morphs into an ugly one. When not barren, flat and brown, broken by treeless mud hut settlements dusted black with coal dust, it is barren, flat and brown and dotted with hundreds of oil wells. We drive for an age through a sea of drills, their eccentric drive shafts rising and falling as far as the hazy horizon on each side of the road. In its midst is the city of Karamay, meaning ‘black oil,’ China’s petroleum capital. But I notice that only we think the look is ugly. Our travelling companions are delighted and the driver press-ganged into a photo stop. Oil fields indicate progress, development, wealth. And here in the economically poor northwest, are some of China’s most abundant fields, including this one in the Junggar Basin, with proven deposits of 320 million tons of crude oil and 52 billion cubic metres of gas. These figures ring like music in the ears of a country whose growing appetite for oil is widening the gap between domestic oil production and demand. All along the roads leading to Urumqi new gas stations are sprouting in a building boom to feed the rapidly increasing numbers of cars and trucks that loudly and incessantly toot their way through Xinjiang’s towns and cities, displacing donkey carts and cycles. We reflect on the death of donkey-cart China as we drive back into Urumqi nigh-on midnight, and jostle among the grid-locked traffic. No-one else seems to mind. Ah, for the serenity of Kanas and its hint of snow leopard. Fact File How to get there: We flew to China via Hong Kong, care of Cathay Pacific and Dragon Air. Cathay offer daily flights out of Auckland; Dragonair flies from Hong Kong to 27 destinations in China - we landed at Chengdu (home of panda bears) and flew from there to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Who can help: Kiwi company, Silk Road Adventures New Zealand, organised our travel contact in Xinjiang. Check out its website on www.silkroad.co.nz When to go: Summers in the northwest run from May to August and can be fiercely hot. Turpan, a city 150 metres below sea level has maximum temperatures of 47 degrees Celcius – the washing is dry before it gets hung out. Because winters get fiercely cold, guide books recommend spring (April) and autumn (September – November) as the best time to visit, though be prepared for rain. © Marieke Hilhorst/ORIGIN NATURAL HISTORY MEDIA |