The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  As for me, I was hitting the road.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Kashgar's Lost Arch

  Two and a half days later, after pushing west along the fringes of the mighty Taklamakan desert, I arrived in the oasis town of Kashgar, the last major settlement in the west of China before the high mountain passes of the Tian Shan range, a giant frozen barricade of rock thrusting skyward to heights of 24,400 feet, beyond which lay the former Soviet republics.

  A cool wind blew through the town’s crowded streets, and a bright but tepid sun shone down at an oblique angle on the central square and its six-hundred-year-old Id Kah Mosque, bathing it with a holy crimson light and casting passing faces into portraits of distinction. When you’re this far west in China you are nearer to Baghdad than Beijing, and it shows: a Uyghur heartland where the faces of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and, increasingly, Han are also found. An intoxicating ethnic mixing bowl, whose very name conjures up the evocative romance of the Silk Road; a location where the southern and northern branches converge on either side of the Taklamakan before splintering again on their long and arduous journeys west and north.

  I arrived in Kashgar in the late afternoon following an interesting, if somewhat tiring, hitch to get there. I had made slow progress the first day on the road out of Urumqi, reaching Korla, only two hundred miles away. The view there had been magnificent, the road weaving through a dramatic mountain gorge that was strangely bereft of snow, and rose almost vertically from the roadside in angry crusted fractals, fluctuating in hue between golden and scarlet depending on our vehicle’s meandering angle of orientation. At one section a giant sand dune spilled down over the rocks, smothering them with a creaseless layer of silica several hundred feet in depth, betraying a wider ocean of sand out of sight beyond its craggy breaches.

  I spent the final few hours of the first day with the same driver, an affluent-looking Han Chinese man in his mid-thirties wearing a canary-yellow golfing shirt who, once again, drove a white SUV. There was no chance of us verbally conversing, but we got on nonetheless and he proved the epitome of generosity when, after our arrival in Korla, he insisted on driving me from cheap hotel to cheap hotel, until we found one that permitted foreigners to stay—a process that ate up around forty-five minutes of his time, and ultimately proved a failure, with me settling on somewhere that wasn’t really cheap at all purely to bring his inconvenience to an end.

  At this establishment I learned a valuable life lesson: never pinch a towel from a hotel.

  For some reason the room I was given came with a gargantuan abundance of drying cloths—seven towels in total, all graduated in size, every one soft and fluffy—and so, having used but a tiny flannel in place of a towel since setting off from Hobart, I thought it was high time for an upgrade. There wasn’t much thought process beyond this, in fact it was something of an afterthought once I’d packed up and was ready to leave. If a pang of conscience did exist, then it was swiftly batted away by the counter-thought that the hotel was part of a large chain, and not a particularly cheap one, so hey, no one was going to miss it; right?

  Wrong.

  With hindsight I should have seen it coming. When checking in the previous night, the staff member on duty had only agreed to waive the hotel’s substantial room deposit, the cash for which I did not possess, in exchange for my passport as security. So when I handed my room key across the reception desk the following morning, and asked the dead-behind-the-eyes female employee for my passport back, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but of course was, when in unusually good English she announced, “First we need to check room.”

  My heart sank.

  Picking up the reception phone, she punched in an internal extension and began barking orders at some hapless colleague, presumably instructing them to launch the inspection. As she hung up the phone I did my best to appear nonchalant. Casting a little smile her way, I rolled my eyes ironically, as if to say, “Protocol, hey, what a bore?”

  She stared back at me without warmth, her face unchanged like she’d been paralyzed from an industrial syringing of Botox. Time passed agonizingly slowly but still her colleague had yet to ring back—and I bloody-well knew why too: she couldn’t find one of the towels and was turning the room upside down to make absolutely sure of as much, before going out on a limb and pointing the finger at me.

  Eventually the phone rang.

  If it is possible to let out a deep internal sigh of foreboding while simultaneously maintaining a gormless casual veneer, then that is what I did. As the receptionist took the call she momentarily looked away before suddenly whipping her head back and fixing me with an accusatory glare.

  I responded with an innocent inquisitive look that begged, “Is there a problem?”

  There was. And her expression said it all: “You’ve nicked one of our towels!”

  She hung up the phone.

  “One of the towels is missing,” she stated with the authoritarian air of an SS commandant.

  “Really?” I replied. “How very odd. Are you sure?”

  She didn’t answer, but burned a hole in me with her cold eyes, while an uncomfortable silence lingered in the air between us.

  I broke the deadlock. “Oh!” I responded from out of the blue, as if a cartoon lightbulb had pinged into existence above my head, alerting me to some previously overlooked nugget of information, “What color are your towels?”

  “White,” she spat through gritted teeth.

  I tutted in a way that implied: “Oh, how could I have been so silly.”

  “So is my towel,” I exclaimed. “I must have confused the two and picked up yours as well by mistake.”

  I could see what she was thinking: “Yeah, sure!”

  She knew that I was lying, and what’s more she knew that I knew as much, but I continued with the charade regardless—there was little other option now.

  Unclipping my backpack I opened up its main compartment. Sitting there, as plain as day, right smack on top of the contents was a fluffy white towel complete with fetching corporate motif. I lifted it out and handed it over, receiving a dagger-like stare in response. Begrudgingly she reached down and retrieved my passport from beneath her desk. As I went to take it she grasped a hold of it for a second longer than necessary, requiring a little yank from me to free it from her claw-like grip. With a contrite little smile I slid it into my pocket, then turned and made a hasty beeline for the exit.

  It was time to get on the road.

  Clambering over a pile of rubble left from the collapse of a large wall blocking access to the highway, I stumbled onto its roadside heading west. I was on the far outskirts of Korla, and here picked up a ride in a clunker of an old people carrier. Two middle-aged Uyghur men sat up front, big and stocky with large rounded stomachs. Residing in the back among a sea of luggage and bags were two Uyghur women wearing dark brown headscarves. Verbal communication was non-existent, but from what I could gather, the men, Yusup and Karima, were brothers, and the women, whose names I didn’t make a note of, were relatives but not their wives; sisters or cousins, perhaps.

  Several hours of driving and we stopped at a café in a little dusty village lined with fastigiate poplar trees, where we settled down for lunch, this time traditional Uyghur cuisine of fresh seeded bread, pigeon soup, and kebabs made from succulent “fat-tailed” sheep. On finishing up, Yusup and Karima got their heads down for a brief nap in the vehicle. It was now that I encountered the most ridiculous, even comical, snoring I have ever come across—and I’ve come across plenty—with both of them releasing great fog horn grunts, staggered slightly so there was no respite from the noise. As soon as one great emission finished, the other would begin, providing a near constant groan. It was insanely loud, so bad that I got out of the vehicle and went for a stroll nearby, shaking my head in disbelief.

  “Thank God,” I thought, “I don’t have to share a bed with them.”

  By dusk we rolled into Aksu, one of many oasis settlements dotted along the northe
rn border of the Taklamakan desert. Much the same situation occurred as the night before, with all the reasonably priced hotels refusing to let a foreigner stay. One apologetic English-speaking owner summed up the situation: “If the authorities discover you have stayed here I will lose my license.” It was a convincing argument. In the end the brothers invited me to crash at their place. After dropping the women off in Aksu, we headed out of town into the surrounding countryside, bumping our way along a gray and dusty potholed road until we reached a rustic little dwelling with blue window frames and faded whitewash plaster walls. Tagged onto its side was a collection of stable buildings constructed from mud and straw, where roughly twenty inquisitive-looking sheep mingled, penned off from the main area in front of the house. To the side of the stables stretched a small orchard of fruit trees, currently bare in the winter cold.

  People erupted from the house on our arrival, pouring out to greet Yusup and Karima, who were mobbed by their extended families; eleven people in total, spanning three generations, all living together in the same little house. The brothers received a hero’s welcome with hugs and back-pats flowing all round. I was introduced to wives and sons, aunties and uncles, their mother and father, all of whom accepted me unquestioningly into the fold. Several of the men wore traditional square turquoise Uyghur hats, decorated with bold white geometric patterns. All the women wore headscarves.

  Yusup guided me indoors, through a small entrance hall that led to three equally small rooms, all with bare concrete floors. Most of the walls were similarly barren, save for a couple of posters displaying a picnic spread and a bunch of flowers, both laminated with wipe-clean plastic. Whether the house had electricity or not I don’t know, but the only light inside while I was there came from an orange glowing central hearth in the kitchen area. But the real light that spread throughout the interior was from the atmosphere: laughter permeated the dwelling, filling it with love and tenderness, a womb of happiness and sanctuary for the departed brothers to return. In Western terms these people were poor; they had no central heating, no carpets, no iPhones, no internet, no McDonald’s or Starbucks, but they were rich in spirit, so much richer than so many materially better off in the West. I cast my mind back to the misery of commuting on the London tube, of trains stuffed full with dead-faced corporate types, staring zombie-like into colorless voids of isolation; of carriages imbued with a collective cold depression, the sum total of all the desperate individual spirits poisoned by the virus of never-ending acquisition; of muffled spirits screaming silently to be somewhere else. I might not have been able to communicate verbally with the family, but through their acceptance and generosity we spoke a shared common language of the heart.

  One of the women began cooking in a large cast-iron cauldron above the hearth, producing a delicious meaty stew, which we all ate sitting around a tiny wooden table, no more than a foot tall. Just like the traditional welcome for visitors to a Central Asian yurt, I was given pride of place nearest the hearth.

  With nightfall’s arrival, the household began preparations for bed. It quickly became apparent that the men slept in one room and the women in another, all lined up sardine fashion on floppy roll-out mattresses placed on top of the raised platforms. One of the women kindly prepared a bed for me right up next to another little hearth. Once lit, it transformed the men’s bedroom from cold and uninviting into a haven of toasty warmth.

  Being amid such hospitable surroundings, I really should have felt relaxed and at ease before I got my head down, but I felt nothing of the sort—for I knew what awaited me if I didn’t get to sleep and fast: earth shattering snoring. It began all of a sudden, erupting from the grizzly-bear-like form of Yusup next to me, and moments later from the one prostrate next to him—snoring so loud and in such close proximity that I could actually feel its vibration. I had my wax ear plugs in but they were as good as useless against such a brutal onslaught of dissonance, and after about thirty minutes I admitted defeat. With a reluctant exhalation of breath, I said farewell to my comfy position by the fire and crept with my bedroll and sleeping bag, past multiple groaning bodies, to the cold concrete of the hallway instead. It wasn’t the best of locations to bed down, and one that caused all manner of confusion come the morning when my former sleeping partners emerged from their room to find me here. I mimicked the sound of snoring. Everybody laughed.

  After a hearty breakfast of leftovers from the night before, Yusup drove me to the main road for Kashgar. With a hand on my heart I thanked him for his generosity. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a wallet and retrieved his official Chinese photo I.D. card, which, bizarrely, he handed to me to take. At first I thought he wanted to give me this as a souvenir by which to remember him, but after a bit of miming it seemed that he was passing it on in the misguided belief that it would enable me to stay in budget hotels from now on—at least, that’s what I interpreted his gestures to mean. Despite trying repeatedly to refuse this odd offering, he was adamant, so I accepted it.

  Several car, truck, and SUV rides followed, including one from two young Uyghur guys who at one stage pulled over to smoke hash from a bong made out of an old plastic water bottle, and by the time the sun began to set I made it into Kashgar. Having arranged to meet Danilo, Manon, and Etienne at a hostel in the historic old town tomorrow, I made my way there first along twisting ancient streets of quiet decay that ran behind the town’s iconic pastel yellow Id Kah Mosque. I knew the area well, having walked through its interconnecting labyrinth of alleyways lined with mud brick homes years earlier on my first visit to Kashgar.

  I felt like I’d stepped into another century. Donkeys dragged carts laden with firewood along winding lanes past homes clad in timber scaffolding; cobblers demonstrated their skills by the roadside; butchers cut up great carcasses in the open air; shoeshine men hawked for business; wily carpet traders sat in their lairs piled high with Afghan and Persian rugs; Arabian music played out; women shopped in bright multi-colored silk headscarves; and old men in sheepskin hats sat watching the world go by from the comfort of tea houses. It felt great to be back in such an atmospheric place until, that is, I rounded the corner.

  My heart sank at the sight that stretched before me. A vast block that had once consisted of a vibrant community, made of row upon row of mud and straw clad homes and businesses, hundreds of years old and dripping in character, was now nothing but a razed and empty lot of rubble—a literal hole in the heart of the district where no doubt another faceless Chinese tower or shopping precinct would soon emerge, planted like a flag of occupation. The official explanation for much of this comes under the guise of planning regulations, to make the region earthquake proof, to modernize, but a more sinister reality exists beneath the surface: the greater the destruction of Uyghur history, culture, and identity, and the greater the number of Han Chinese settlers that swamp the area, the more Uyghurs will be forced to assimilate into China proper, and forever give up the dream of independence. As if on cue, a platoon of Chinese soldiers marched past, batons swinging from their wrists, souring the atmosphere in an instant.

  I located the hostel, which had escaped the destruction but was all locked up. As I stood pondering where to go instead, a Uyghur man approached me.

  “My name is Elvis,” he said in good English, flashing a beaming smile my way and holding out a hand to shake. “I am tour guide. They mention me in Lonely Planet book. I like to help the foreigners. Can I help you?”

  He could indeed.

  “Is there another hostel nearby?” I asked.

  “No. But I will show you hotel off the main square.”

  “Does it let foreigners stay?”

  “Yes. Yes. I will talk to them.”

  Together we ambled back past the Id Kah Mosque to a hotel on the corner of the square, where Elvis got me a room for ninety Yuan (about fourteen dollars). He wished me well, gave me his business card and promptly departed.

  After dropping off my gear, I headed back to the locked up hostel, where, wi
th some sticky tape borrowed from my hotel’s reception, I stuck a message on the door addressed to Manon, Etienne, and “Germany’s great linguist—eight years study!” letting them know where to find me.

  * * *

  By the time they arrived in Kashgar, arrangements had already been made to get them and me to Shipton’s Arch. After visiting several tour operators, I selected one that seemed the most confident in providing an appropriate guide and four-wheel-drive to tackle the winter terrain we’d have to negotiate to get within hiking distance of the arch. This was imperative, since a fresh layer of snow had fallen the night before.

  Danilo booked in at the same hotel as me, whereas Manon and Etienne selected a more interesting-sounding place on the other side of town—the former Russian consulate, now converted into a hotel. When last in Kashgar, I stayed in a hotel on the grounds of its one time rival establishment, the former British consulate, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a hub of espionage and intrigue when the political struggle known as the “Great Game” played out between imperial Britain and Russia.

  For the players of this titanic game of strategic chess, the grand prize was the domination of Asia. Lying at the junction between these great powers was Xinjiang. Although ostensibly controlled by the Chinese, the region was no stranger to uprisings, subjugation and civil war, making the authority of a then impoverished China a tenuous one, and the ultimate future control of the territory an unknown outcome.

  From the British consulate Eric Shipton had despatched his secret reports to India, the jewel in the British Empire, detailing movements of troops, uprisings, intrigues, and counter tactics of the Soviets—information often gleaned through his climbing and hunting expeditions around Kashgar’s surrounding terrain. Following India’s independence in 1947, the Great Game came to a close, with neither Britain nor Russia having achieved much of anything. Had the ebbing tide of fate and empire shifted away from stalemate, a very different reality would exist today for the unfortunate pawn of Xinjiang. If Russia had won and subjugated the region for its own ends, then with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Independent Republic of Uyghuristan would have risen out of the smoldering ashes of empire, rich in black gold from the colossal oil reserves under the Taklamakan.