by Chris Tharp
“How was it?” asked Steve.
Ian put his hand on his hips and shook his head. “Y’all can go if ya want, but there ain’t much to see. It’s just a pile of rocks.”
“It is a beautiful drive,” admitted Chris.
“Yeah… it’s nice drivin’, and all,” continued Ian. “But that fortress? It’s just a pile of rocks.”
Tashkurgan is the end of the line, the last main town before Pakistan, and an ancient trading post. The Chinese wouldn’t let us continue on without the proper visa and no doubt some other onerous permits issued by the local Public Security Bureau, the government cops who regulate travel through “sensitive areas,” of which there were many in the summer of 2008. The place is mainly occupied by Tajik people—close cousins of Persians known for their tall hats, fierce tempers, and large hook noses. There is little in the way of tourist diversions in the town, save taking in the ruins of an ancient fortress.
On the way to Tashkurgan we went through another military checkpoint, this one more sinister than the first. Again, we were all made to get out of the vehicle and present our passports and travel permits. A dour military officer questioned Bao in Chinese. I understood just one word from his response: Meiguo, or “American.” When the officer heard this, his expression turned grave. He slowly perused our documents, repeatedly looking at the photos and faces and back again, examining each stamp and visa for the slightest irregularity. Two soldiers—each clutching a Chinese AK-47—came up just inches behind our backs. The one nearest to me was a towering, broad-shouldered brute. He stood so close that I could nearly feel his breath on my neck, as he menacingly clicked the safety switch on his rifle on and off, on and off.
After about fifteen minutes we were allowed to press on. We drove along a vast, flat region, rimmed with even bigger mountains. A couple of tiny villages dotted the plains, like clusters of dollhouses against the imposing landscape. We then switched back up even higher, until the road came to a slick pass absorbed in moist white clouds. The surroundings took on an eerie, otherworldly flavor, and the road was covered with visible patches of snow and ice. These treacherous conditions did nothing to deter Bao, who pressed on at terminal speeds, chain smoking and singing along with his stupid tapes. I felt the blood pour out of my face. I looked to both Steve and Sam, who were just as scared as me. We were now screaming along the highest highway in the world, when in fact we were in no hurry to get anywhere.
Steve erupted first: “SLOW DOWN!” he yelled. “SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!”
Sam and I joined in: “SLOW DOWN!”
We all pressed our hands down in unison, making our point absolutely clear. Bao gave us a sheepish grin and lay off the gas pedal… slightly. We were paying him to deliver us in one piece, and he was putting everything at risk. He lost some face, but a lot more was at stake.
Bao managed to get us to Tashkurgan safely, just in time for lunch. I wanted to try Tajik food, but he instead brought us to a tattered joint owned and run by people he knew—Chinese—which I’m sure was the plan all along. The meal was oily and unremarkable but did the trick, and after lunch he took us out to see the fortress, driving us to the back side to avoid the entrance fee. He stopped the van, pointed, and signaled for us to get our cameras out. We obliged him and shot away.
Ian was right. The vaunted fortress was indeed “just a pile of rocks”—so ruined and rubble-strewn that it held little interest for the three of us—historical and architectural philistines that we were. After a few clicks I looked at the shots on my camera and realized there was no way to make the object come alive, so instead I pointed my lens in the opposite direction, shooting the herd of yaks grazing in the brilliantly green field to the side of the road.
You don’t have to guess which side gave me the better photo.
Ugly at the Arch
We had just arrived back into town after our jaunt up the Karakorum Highway, having dinner and beers (of course) at the Chini Bagh’s John’s Café.
We were joined by Simon, a towering Englishman we had met the Olympics opening-night piss-up. He was sinewy and bald and looked a lot like Peter Garrett from the Australian band Midnight Oil. His eyes shone wild as he carried on about a day trip he had just taken to Shipton’s Arch, a rock formation a couple of hours outside of town. Shipton’s Arch, or Tushuk Tash (“Pierced Rock”), is the tallest natural arch in the world, standing at over 1,200 feet, and located in a very remote part of the desert.
“I was just out there today,” Simon said in his lilting Yorkshire accent. “I had the whole place to meself. No one goes there. It’s spectacular. I would highly recommend checking it out.”
He showed us some video that he had shot a few hours earlier with his cell phone camera.
“See! It’s fucking incredible. I mean, look at it.”
I squinted and peered at the footage. It did appear to be a cool spot, but it’s hard to deliver the wow factor on a two-inch screen. I was skeptical, but my two companions were sold. And the next day was special: it was Steve’s birthday as well as his last day in Xinjiang. After nearly three weeks of travelling with us, he was due to fly back to Shanghai, and then on to Korea. It had been an epic trip, and we had to see him off in style.
We made arrangements to hire a Jeep and set out early the next day on the two-hour drive to the trailhead. After a little more than an hour on the paved road, we turned off onto a dried-up riverbed, where the driver switched into 4WD. We slowly worked our way up the rocky bed until we came to the stone-and-mud hut of a goat-herding family, where we were waved down by a teenage boy. Our driver—a Chinese guy in a pink polo shirt—rolled down the window and spoke with the kid in Uyghur. When they were finished, the driver told me that there was a twenty-yuan-per-person “entrance fee.”
I immediately balked. It seemed everywhere we went on this trip had some sort of hidden “entrance fee.” Plus, we were paying the café’s travel desk a lot of money for the Jeep and the driver, so the thought of coughing up extra made all of us bristle. Three weeks of hard travel had made us frequent targets for cheats, grifters, and thieves. Our patience was sapped.
I looked the driver in the eyes and said, “No fucking way.”
Whether this registered or not is anyone’s guess, but he waved goodbye to the kid and drove off.
We proceeded on for about ten minutes more until the road ended in a gravel parking area. Ours was the only visible vehicle. This was the trailhead. We got out of the Jeep and the driver pointed toward the starting point—he would wait for us in the Jeep. We thanked him and began our hike up toward the arch.
As we approached the actual trailhead, I heard the whine of a small engine reverberate up the canyon. It was the sound of a motorcycle—a dirt bike. Soon the rider came into view behind us, quickly closing the distance. It was the kid from the goat herder’s hut. He was coming… to collect his fee.
He rode his motorbike as far as it could go, got off, and broke into a sprint in an attempt to overtake us. We picked up the pace, but we saw no need to get into a running contest with this kid. He eventually passed us, and it was only then when I saw why he was in such a hurry: about one hundred meters in front of us, the canyon narrowed and steepened dramatically. A wooden ladder lay against the face of the rock. Climbing this ladder was the only way you could continue up toward the arch.
By the time we got to the Uyghur teen, he was clutching the ladder like it was a briefcase full of diamonds. He then firmly requested twenty yuan each, about three American dollars. We shook our heads and said no. He gripped the wooden ladder even tighter. It was a standoff and he had us by the balls.
We could have gone easily. We could have each just given up the twenty yuan—the cost of mug of shitty Korean beer—and been on our way, but we weren’t having it. This was the day we would stand our ground. It was Steve’s birthday. Surrender was impossible! We would draw a line in the sand and fight.
At first I tried bargaining. After a few weeks in China, I had gotten a pretty good
hold on the numbers, so I had confidence when it came to negotiating a price. I offered twenty yuan for all three of us. I was sure he’d take it. I’d given him the courtesy of saying it in Chinese, which, even if not his first language, would have been easier for him to understand than English. He understood me all right, but just shook his head and held firm. I came up to forty, but the kid wouldn’t budge. He insisted on sixty and that was that. This only served to stoke our indignation—mine especially. I demanded to see some ID. After all, how do we know that he was officially allowed to collect tolls? For all we knew, he could just be some local punk ripping us off. When no official card was forthcoming, I ridiculously threatened him with the police—using my best mime skills to act out reporting him via telephone—as if they’d race out to the middle of the desert over a disputed entrance fee. He met my eyes and stood tall. Sam joined in as I stammered and sputtered and foamed at the mouth. I tried to grab the kid’s ladder but he yanked it away. I shook my finger in his face and called him an “extorting little fucker.” Following my lead, my two accomplices joined me cornering the poor kid and let loose a torrent of abuse. The boy, however, would not be intimidated. He just stared back in proud defiance and contempt.
It was Steve who caved in to reason. After huffing and puffing and thumping our chests, he yelled out, “Hey Tharp. Let’s just pay the kid! It’s my birthday and I want to see the arch.”
I turned to him in disbelief. He just shrugged and reached for his wallet.
That was that, then. We finally relented and gave this kid his nine bucks, though I did feel the need to dramatically spit on the ground when I handed him the cash, likely a grievous insult in honor-driven Uyghur culture.
What is it about righteousness that can be so all-consuming? All three of us were convinced that we were in the right and that this kid—this goat herder—was trying to rip us off, that he had seen an opportunity to squeeze some foreigners for money and was jumping at it. At no time did it occur to us that EVERYONE who comes to the arch had to pay this little tax to the locals who live on and work the land, who make and maintain the ladders. And twenty yuan certainly pales in comparison to the two hundred or more that we had to pay at other sites during the trip, sites run by hordes of uniformed, unsmiling Chinese.
After paying, we continued up the trail—scurrying up five or six more ladders—rattled by our anger and loss of face. We plotted revenge against the kid, even having a serious discussion about shitting on his motorcycle. But our anger quickly gave way to serenity because of our surroundings. We were enveloped in pure silence, save for the light breeze blowing up from the desert floor.
We ascended a canyon of red and ochre, of stone worn into gnarled, psychedelic shapes by centuries of desert wind, only to come across a hole at the canyon’s end.
As we approached the hole, we realized that we were actually on top of a mountain. On the other side of the hole was a chasm, a sheer drop of over one thousand feet.
Shipton’s Arch.
English Simon was right. It was absolutely amazing.
The arch only reveals its true size once you are up on it. It looks slightly dramatic from a distance, but you have no idea of its scale until you are right there, almost on top of it. It is enormous. It ripped the breath right out of us. We were floored. And, like English Simon the day before, we had it all to ourselves. We were at one of the most beautiful sites in the most populous country on Earth and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Everything about the place simply blew us away, but our euphoria was soon dampened by the realization of the people we had just been thirty minutes before: terrible, terrible people.
Shipton’s Arch is in a very inaccessible part of the desert, and this is why the Chinese have yet to destroy it. They have yet to build a road and a parking lot with souvenir stands, a cable car cranking out awful pop music, and soft-drink advertisements. They have yet to pave a concrete stairway up to the top, with a fenced-off viewing platform and karaoke room. They have yet to open the sieve and direct fleets of tour buses there on a daily basis. They have yet to ruin the place.
Let the Uyghur goat herders maintain their stewardship. And please, unlike us, don’t give them any hassle when they ask for your three bucks.
Consider the alternative.
Donkeyland
Yarkand is a town dug into the sand, originally an outpost on the southern Silk Road. It sits on the fringe of the Taklimakan, a place of moving sand dunes so desolate that the Uyghur still refer to it as “Desert of Death” and the “Place of No Return.” The town itself is famous for its knives, which is appropriate: it seems like a very good place to stab somebody. Other than that, it’s dusty and unremarkable, save for the spectacle I took in when I left the bus station that morning in search of a cup of coffee:
As I exited and descended the building’s steps, I noticed a small crowd of people gathered around a cart attached to a donkey. In the back of the cart lay a horribly deformed child. His head was swollen, gargantuan, the size and color of a twenty-pound holiday turkey. His eyes glared out from deep-set sockets; his mouth was a maw of jutting teeth, and his pink tongue writhed wildly. I heard myself gasp as the blood left my head and then shot cold. The boy lay on his back and jerked and twitched, moaning intermittently. The throng of locals standing around the poor kid gawked accordingly. What I took to be the boy’s father addressed them nonchalantly, perhaps appealing to their charity, or just describing the horrific extent of his son’s infirmities. After recovering my breath, I had an impulse to snap a photo, but surrendered to the better part of my nature. Instead I rushed away, half-jogging down the street, where I ducked into an unlikely, garishly colored Chinese fast-food joint called Veary Hamburger. There I ordered an obscenely sweet iced coffee drink and sat down, attempting to erase the image of the disfigured boy from my mind by bombarding it with the radioactive combination of sugar, caffeine, and blaring pop music.
When I returned to the bus station, I found my two travel companions where I’d left them: sitting on one of the squalid building’s metal benches while staring at Olympic coverage flickering from the TV above. American swimmer Michael Phelps stood on the platform and smiled his horsey grin, while yet another gold medal was slung around his neck.
The bus to Hotan finally arrived and we boarded. Sam and I were joined by Simon, the Englishman that we’d met back in Kashgar. During the afternoon bus ride, we passed an overturned melon truck on the side of the two-lane highway. Hundreds of watermelons had been thrown from its payload and now littered the ground around the wreck. Many had burst open, splaying their gory red innards for all to see, acting as a warning to the humans piloting the passing vehicles to slow down and look out, or face a similar fate.
*
Choking clouds enveloped Hotan, covering everything in a fine desert dust. The air was a brown haze, obscuring the shiny modern Chinese buildings, as well as the mud-built Uyghur warren-like compounds—with their carpet looms, teapots, and dried dung. Even the famous statue of Mao shaking the old Muslim man’s hand was made nearly invisible by the dull screen of airborne grit, surely to the pleasure of many of the locals, who bristled at such an ostentatious display of dominance. There was dust in my hair, granules grinding on my molars, hard clumps up my nose, and desiccated wax in my ears. The simple act of breathing could cause me to cough or sneeze. The dust scratched my eyes. It saturated my clothing. It scoured the skin of my ass and made everyday existence an exercise in irritation. No wonder most everyone we saw seemed so pissed off.
Like so many of the places we stayed in Western China, the “Happy Hotel” was filthy. Despite a glowing recommendation from the guidebook, we were received with casual indifference by the Uyghur owner. Grubby-faced kids—clad only from the waist up—played in the courtyard among the buzzing flies and grime. One of them had left a sickly yellow turd in a small grate in the concrete; judging from its moistness, it appeared to have been very recently deposited. The smell of grease and human waste hung damply in the air as
we paid and then waited for the owner to find the key to our room. He rummaged through his box-like, unlit reception office and shouted to his wife, who just shrugged and carried on hanging the laundry on the second-floor balcony. He eventually gave up on his quest, walked over to our room, and easily snapped the cheap metal lock off the door with a small screwdriver. The wooden door creaked open and we were finally allowed access to our new digs.
“For God’s sake,” Simon gagged.
A demonic, eye-stinging stench filled the room. It emanated from the bathroom, which was little more than a tiny sink, a broken mirror, a barely functioning water faucet, and a stained ceramic hole in which to crap. This hole must have led to some kind of septic tank just feet underneath, since it filled the air with a noxious miasma of piss and shit that smelled as if it had brewing for months on end in the blazing desert sun. The bathroom’s door acted as a seal of sorts that made the room barely tolerable when closed, but any time it was opened, a hot, nauseating blast filled the space, assaulting the nostrils, sticking to the tongue, and burning the lungs like some sort of biological-gas attack.
The room’s one window provided us with a modicum of ventilation, especially if opened in tandem with the door. It also gave the dank space a bit of light, which sifted through the greasy, dust-covered glass. Outside, an ancient bed lay in front of the window, on which was piled a heap of stained and neglected laundry. Above it, on the sill, sat a cracked egg. Its amber contents oozed down the outside wall like a waxy drip of hardened snot; it had obviously been there for ages. The fact that—over the course of weeks or even months, no one in the whole facility had bothered to clean it up spoke volumes to the commitment to hygiene at the Happy Hotel.
Hotan is famous for its jade, but unless you’re looking to stock up on the semi-precious gem from one of the town’s numerous Chinese-owned shops, there’s not much to do. We certainly weren’t in the market for any stones, so we wandered through the haze for a couple hours along the ruined sidewalks of the town, at one point pausing to watch a woman burn the hair off of a dismembered goat with a blowtorch. We strolled through a silk market and stopped at a PC room to check our email and illegally access our Facebook accounts through proxy servers. We then walked some more, wrapping our faces to protect our lungs from the dust, taking in the town around us, and above all, marveling at the multitude of donkeys.