The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  At last, emerging from one of these clefts, we were confronted with a sight that made us gasp with surprise and excitement. The gorge widened into a valley which ended a quarter of a mile away in a grassy slope leading to a U-shaped col. Above and beyond the col stood a curtain of rock, pierced by a graceful arch.

  Climbing the grassy slope, the Shiptons looked out through the elegant window of rock at a monumental panorama. Here the arch continued downwards, dropping abruptly into a sheer and dramatic gorge a thousand feet below, where several canyon walls rose up at angles beyond vertical, curling backwards like giant top-heavy waves about to break. Beyond lay “scores of bold pinnacles,” the formations that had thwarted Shipton’s previous attempts from the south; and further on, about a hundred miles away across a rippled ocean of desert, were the distant peaks of the Pamir Mountains, thrusting skyward over twenty-four thousand feet at the colliding junction of the Himalayas, Kunlun, Tian Shan, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush ranges.

  It was a view I had previously savored with Emily. We reached it several years ago on a snowy day when the sun’s back-lighting created a giant ethereal beam through the archway, highlighting gently falling snow that filtered through it.157 It created a poetic scene, and one we had mostly to ourselves. We made our way there with a local Uyghur guide and an American gentleman we met the day before in a café in Kashgar, who, on hearing of our expedition, asked to tag along. However, both he and the guide headed back long before Emily and me, leaving us in the valley all alone. It was a special moment that I will never forget.

  I was determined to visit this enigmatic wonder again and encouraged the audience in front of me at the hostel to come too. It wasn’t a hard sell.

  “We will join you at this place!” stated Etienne with excited eyes.

  * * *

  At a camping store I purchased something I should have bought a long time ago: a super thick goose-down jacket and thermal inner pants. They made a world of difference and filled me with a new-found confidence for the difficult Silk Road journey ahead.

  Urumqi wasn’t a bad sort of place to spend a couple of days. There were two main attractions within walking distance: the People’s Park and the Xinjiang Museum. The park was a winter wonderland, the center piece a two-tiered pagoda with bright red columns and traditional tubular tile-roofing. It stood in the middle of a huge boating lake, accessible over a gray stone bridge lined with elegant arches. The water was frozen solid and covered with a thick layer of snow, with sections cleared to create circular ice-skating tracks. Elsewhere the park was a celebration of trees, dormant skeletons hibernating until spring, naked now but for a coating of snow, leaving them resembling great growths of coral. Despite the conditions, the park was alive with activity. Jugglers and string musicians practiced their skills in the hazy frozen air. On opposing ends of a seesaw sat an elderly couple, merrily swinging up and down while letting out whoops of delight with every rise and fall. A communal ballroom-dancing class was in progress, men and women waltzing together with big beaming smiles. The male to female ratio was out of kilter, but no problem, several guys spun around by themselves, grasping the hand and waist of an imaginary partner, holding the gaze of make-believe eyes with a smile that was all courtesy and respect. There was something so innocent about it all, that I almost wanted to grab a hold of my own fantasy partner and lead her onto the floor for a twirl.

  In the early afternoon I wandered over to the Xinjiang Museum. It was a large blue-domed building in the center of the city, with a rounded façade of smoky glass and smooth white-stone-cladding that was very much in the communist style. Few of its exhibits had English explanations, but most were visual and self explanatory. I went first to a section related to the lives of Xinjiang’s thirteen different ethnic groups: Uyghur, Han, Kazak, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Uzbek, Daur, Russian, Tatar, Tajik, Xibe, Hui (Chinese Muslims) and Manchu. Collections included everything from traditional clothing to hunting and farming tools, as well as mock-ups of traditional yurt housing—the once common portable accommodation of Central Asia’s nomads, and still a quintessential icon of the region.

  Constructed around a circular willow frame swaddled in multiple layers of felt, the outermost one waterproofed with a sloppy application of sheep fat, yurts are the perfect answer to the region’s extremes of weather. Of great importance to the yurt is the central hearth, both practically, for heat and cooking, and symbolically, with guests given pride of place at whichever spot is nearest to it yet farthest from the door. Belying their rather simple external appearance, yurts’ interiors are often sumptuously decorated with colorful cushions, textiles, quilts, tassels, horse and camel bags, and beautifully carved doors—all reflective of the owner’s status. Lightweight and taking only three hours to erect, they are also highly portable. Although somewhat rare today, yurts were once a common sight across Central Asia, stretching from the grassy plains of neighboring Mongolia through Xinjiang, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and beyond.

  Other exhibits were of an altogether more macabre nature. One of the museum’s proudest collections is the preserved bodies of several men, women, and infants, discovered in Xinjiang’s ancient tombs, whose center piece is the “Loulan Beauty,” a 3,800-year-old woman with long fair hair. I can’t say I’ve ever liked the idea of digging up the dead and sticking them inside sterile glass display cabinets to be gawked at, but I seem to be in a minority here, at least if my visit to the Xinjiang Museum, and indeed my last visit to the British Museum, is anything to go by, so I did now as I had then—had a quick cursory glance, then wandered on to examine something else. Pottery and bronze statues were the next to catch my eye, all coming from the great trading corridors so synonymous with Xinjiang and Central Asia as a whole: the Silk Road.

  No matter which route you take through Central Asia, you will almost certainly be following a branch of the network of historic Silk Roads that weave across the region like great arteries, connecting the dots of a string of desert oases and high mountain passes, creating a way through what would otherwise be a landscape of impassable physical barriers. The genesis of the Silk Roads came around 105 BC when China and Parthia (the empire of the nomadic Parthians from the Iranian plateau) opened up corresponding embassies and initiated official bilateral trade along the Central Asian lands between their territories. For at least a century prior to this, the Parthians had been the largest consumers of the mysterious, shimmering Chinese fabric, for which the trading routes were subsequently named—a term that was actually coined in the nineteenth century by German geographer, Ferdinand Van Richthofen. The Romans were quick to follow the Parthians in their obsession with silk, and came up with several false conjectures on how it was made, such as being combed from leaves after a thorough soaking. To the Romans, China was Seres—The Country of Silk.

  The journey across the Silk Road was a treacherous one, taking in some of the most challenging environments on the planet: mountain ranges so high they were known as the “Roof of the World” (the Pamirs), deserts so forbidding they acquired the sobriquet “Go in and you’ll never come out” (The Taklamakan); sandstorms, blizzards, ferocious heat, horrendous cold, attack by bandits and wild animals—just some of the challenges facing those who negotiated the route. And right bang in the center of it all was Central Asia, the territorial nexus between the great civilizations of East and West, providing the service industry to the caravans of traveling merchants.

  Cultural exchange swept in through the region like a sandstorm off the Gobi. Art, religion, technology, philosophy, music, dance and ideas were exchanged, often coalescing into new and improved hybrid forms.

  In the eighth century the Silk Road took a hit. The Chinese lost their greatest industrial secrets in the aftermath of The Battle of Talas—the knowledge of how silk and paper were produced, both obtained from captured prisoners in the know. The victory of the opposing Arab forces over the Chinese in the Talas valley (modern day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), and their acquisition of this monument
al industrial know-how, had several dramatic knock-on effects: Islam cemented itself as the dominant religion of Central Asia, the introduction of paper production in Europe served as a catalyst for a much wider technological revolution, the Arabs established their own silk makers, and Chinese expansion westward came to an end.

  Considering the tensions today in Xinjiang between the Han Chinese and Uyghurs, it’s ironic that it was the Uyghurs who came to the assistance of the Chinese after The Battle of Talas, coming down from their ancestral home on the Siberian and Mongolian borders in the north, as allies of the Tang dynasty. It was this political alliance that saw the Uyghurs settle in Xinjiang, doing so at oases along the Silk Road, making them the first of the Turkic peoples to abandon their traditional nomadic lifestyle. With geographical permanence sprang literacy—the original Uyghur writing system served as the underlying template of Mongolian script—and a flourishing Turkic culture renowned for its traditional medicine, which some credit with the invention of acupuncture.

  Although tensions have existed between Uyghurs and Han Chinese for a long time, it was shortly after the establishment of the communist People’s Republic of China in 1949, and the introduction of the official policy of “sinicisation”—where literally millions of Han Chinese settlers began flooding into the region—that relations between the two ethnicities really began to boil over. Such an influx of Han Chinese has led to them becoming the majority in Xinjiang’s north, while Uyghurs still remain dominant in the south. In the nineties a wave of violence spread throughout the region, including bus bombings in Kashgar and Urumqi, pitched battles between the Chinese police and Uyghurs in the streets of Baren, and riots in Hotan and Yining. The Yining riots alone saw at least fifteen killed and over a hundred injured. Mass arrests, “re-education” programs, and executions followed—often carried out on the day of trial—which, in turn, led to more unrest, including the bombing of three buses in Urumqi that left at least nine people dead. Further trouble has flared in this century, some igniting just three months after I left Kashgar, with a series of incidents occurring in the town, leaving at least fifteen people dead and many more injured.

  * * *

  Danilo and I trudged through a fresh layer of snow that squeaked like polystyrene underfoot, as we made our way towards the consulate of Kyrgyzstan, a more humble governmental outpost I’d never seen. Located in an obscure area of the city near one of the main highways, from the outside it looked like a dingy travel agency rather than a nation’s administrative center abroad. It was so nondescript it required several circuits of the area before we determined that we had the correct place, when Danilo noticed that one of its two front doors was now ajar. There’s something about consulates and embassies that always has me on edge, perhaps because the bureaucratic gatekeepers there have so much power. They hold all the cards, and can, at a whim, deny you access to their country, even if on paper they should not. With this in mind, as I stepped through the door I snapped into professional mode, taking on the polite, self-aware manner of someone about to be interviewed for a job.

  The male staff member manning reception was currently preoccupied with a woman in a thick fur-lined coat, so we took a seat on a comfy leather sofa beneath a giant picture of a stallion galloping across the wilds of Kyrgyzstan. If ever there was a seat made to kick-back and melt into, then this was it, but without prior consultation, Danilo and I both sat upright.

  With us we had our passports, photocopies of their I.D. pages and Chinese visas, as well as individually written letters of intent. These were benign personal statements of our plans when in Kyrgyzstan: foment new revolution through cross border smuggling of armaments, clandestine visits to sensitive military sites and disputed border regions, and importation of Class A narcotics to corrupt and ruin youth of country—all your standard tourist fare.

  When the woman left, Danilo approached reception.

  Before getting the chance to open his mouth, the man pointed, with a sausage of an outstretched finger to a clock high on the wall.

  “Consulate open twelve o’clock,” he stated bluntly.

  It was only 11:15 a.m.

  He thrust some forms towards us and shooed us out the door.

  We retired to a hotel down the road where we ferreted out a gloomy restaurant area in the hope of finding food. The place was empty, and none of its lights on, giving the impression it was closed.

  “Might as well take a seat and fill our forms out,” suggested Danilo.

  Ten minutes later, just as we were finishing up the paperwork, a Russian-looking girl in a crisp white shirt and neat black skirt, came out from a kitchen area and, seeing us, threw a look our way that said, with mild alarm: “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Err, Boπa?” stated Danilo in a lilting Russian accent, impressing me beyond measure with his linguistic gymnastics.

  The girl gathered herself, nodded, then disappeared back into the kitchen.

  “I asked for bread,” said Danilo.

  “I am impressed,” I responded.

  “Oh, it is nothing. In fact it’s the only word I know in Russian.”

  “Well it’s a damn sight more than I could have managed.”

  He laughed to himself on hearing this, as if some hidden subtext existed that I would soon become aware, then leaned in towards me in the manner of someone about to depart delicate information. “But I studied Russian for eight years.”

  Cue the sound of a needle scratching off a record.

  “Eight years?!” I stated with a laugh of disbelief, my mind boggling before Danilo’s very eyes. “And this is the sum total of your near decade of diligent study. One measly word: ‘bread’? I am confident that never has such an inordinate amount of study amounted to less. You know this doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence as to the merits of a German education.”

  I was expecting my good natured banter to illicit but a mild chuckle, but German humor being the enigma that it is—at least to the unaccustomed English mind—Danilo burst instead into fits of raucous laughter.

  “I know, but the thing is,” he said, struggling to compose himself through an onslaught of chortles, as if on the cusp of delivering a killer punchline, “Growing up in East Germany, we were all made to learn Russian in school but nobody really wanted to, and so I never paid much attention!”

  More uncontrolled laughter followed, during which I mentally replayed Danilo’s last utterance, scanning it for a hidden punchline. I didn’t find one.

  Minutes later the Russian girl returned and supplied one of her own, bringing to our table not bread but a metal teapot filled with hot water.

  It was hard not to be impressed with that.

  When we returned to the Kyrgyzstan consulate at twelve o’clock, Manon and Etienne were sitting on the comfy leather sofa, diligently filling out their forms.

  Danilo and I proceeded to the counter.

  “I’d like the express next-day visa, please,” I stated politely, handing across my paperwork.

  “No,” replied the man matter-of-factly. “Five days for visa.”

  Danilo and I gasped in shock. This was an unexpected bombshell. Etienne and Manon sprang from their seats and joined us at the counter. We all planned to hit the road tomorrow and had read online that the consulate offered an “express service” for a small additional fee, which fast-tracked the normal waiting period.

  “Is there no express service?” I asked.

  “It is too expensive,” stated the man with a dismissive shake of the head, as if in possession of my credit history and full net worth.

  “How much is it?” I asked.

  “Twelve hundred.”

  “Oooh,” I said sucking through my teeth.

  This was far more than I expected. Still, did I really want to stick around in Urumqi for the next five days? I wavered for a moment weighing up my options.

  “I really do need an express visa but that is expensive,” I pondered aloud. “Erm, I’m going to have to think about
it,” I added, almost apologetically, stalling for time while the cogs in my mind slowly began turning, totting up whether or not the extra cost of five days’ worth of food and accommodation wiped out the financial gain acquired from sticking around for a cheaper visa.

  He looked at me with a touch of sympathy. “Okay then, I do for seven hundred.”

  I was dumbstruck, lost for words; this was unheard of, a consulate where you could haggle on price.

  “I’ll take it,” stated Etienne, quickly jumping in before I regained the ability to talk.

  The rest of us followed suit, hastily reaching into our wallets for the fee.

  I wondered what else I could have got thrown into the bargain with some additional negotiating, and laughed at the thought of someone trying to haggle at the U.K. or U.S. Embassy: “I tell you what, Mr. Ambassador, if you throw in the first night’s accommodation then I’m willing to come up to fifty dollars for your visa. Can’t say fairer than that. Have we got a deal?”—Spitting on palm and holding out an outstretched hand.

  Twenty-four hours later and we were all back at the office picking up our passports, complete with fresh Kyrgyzstan visas. As we stood outside inspecting them in the snow, we said our goodbyes, for now at least. Manon, Etienne and Danilo were heading onto Turpan for a couple of days, before catching a bus to Kashgar where we all arranged to meet and travel onwards together to my beloved Shipton’s Arch.