by Dina Bennett
Normally, a desert is traversed by one track and one only, and for good reason. Desert journeyers like to ensure they are safe and well-watered on their trek through the wastelands. For some reason, which ignores the potential for stumbling onto the previous idiot’s bones, following someone else’s footsteps seems to offer that security. Not so with the Taklamakan. This is a desert so barren that travelers kept searching. I can see that intrepid camel caravan leader, white dishdasha whipped round his legs by a ground breeze, checkered ghutrah cinched over his forehead by a ropey black agal to shield against the sun’s brutal rays. He looks at the track, wipes away a bead of sweat, squints in thought, then mutters a profound question: “They really thought this was the best way?” before setting off to find a better route. Eventually a northern route and a southern route proved viable, both doing a decent job of skirting the worst of the desolate interior.
The Taklamakan has more to offer than just desolation, however. It also has desert cold, which is an oxymoron if ever there was one. Finding itself thousands of kilometres from the warm embrace of water, this desert allied itself with the frigid north, cuddling into Siberia’s armpit, the better to make subzero temperatures common in winter. Not only that, but its sands are in a depression, hemmed in by the Tian Shan mountain range to the north and the Kunlun Mountains to the south. Thus, the sands are constrained to doing an endless vicious swirl within the same concavity, rarely rising above the depths to create new dunes elsewhere. If that were my condition, I’d be depressed, too.
If by now you’re inclined to agree with those who ascribe Taklamakan to taqlar makan, a Turkic phrase meaning “the place of ruins,” wait one more minute. Because I’m not done yet. As we drive through the Taklamakan, I discover that my research hasn’t revealed the worst of it. Unlike most deserts, which vie for ranking as the world’s best dark-sky areas (because most countries don’t want to pursue the folly of creating another Phoenix, Arizona, in their midst), the Taklamakan is smothered in leaden haze. This desert is coal-fired power plant heaven. The sludge with which they’ve been replacing normal air is now so dense I can’t even see the towers from which that sludge spews. But I can feel it. It’s painful to inhale, each breath as if I’m trying to suck oxygen through a mask of Thousand Island dressing. I cough even though I am not sick—yet. My eyes are having problems, too, watering so continually I try to find something to be sad about, just so I won’t waste the tears. The air is murky enough to obscure road signs until we’re nearly upon them. I assume it’s a clear day, though verifying the weather by looking at the sky is futile. I take it on faith that there’s even a sky up there.
We entered the Xinjiang autonomous region through its border with Kyrgyzstan, staying briefly in Kashgar to complete China’s vehicle entry and driver formalities before pushing eastward on the long drive to Tibet. This is Uyghur country, and Uyghurs are a people cursed with being in the wrong place at the wrong time. First off, they’re Turkic, with roots in Mongolia, both regions thousands of miles from where they live now. Second, though they originally were Christian they are now Muslim, neither of which wins them the lottery in China, an overwhelmingly Buddhist country. I’m not surprised to hear that Uyghurs feel more kinship with their neighbors in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan than with the Han Chinese. This doesn’t please the Chinese, the result being clashes and jailings throughout the region.
We drive a broad strip of gray highway for hours, passing neither an exit nor a turnout. It’s as straight and unswerving as a West Point cadet on parade. When I need to pee, Bernard stops on the highway itself. I squat in the desert sand on the shoulder, which by definition continues to shift. Pants lowered around my ankles, I’m unable to scuttle aside as a tumbleweed the size of Kansas bobbles toward me. This is the local edition of Russian thistle weed, a highly invasive species, much like the country whence it came. Beset by visions of my nether parts being invaded by the prickly orb, it’s all I can do to keep my knees from clapping together like magnets. Behind this one I spy others heading my way. It’s alarming that these roaming dead plants, with no stake in any patch of ground, think I’ve invaded theirs. Or maybe they just know I’m vulnerable.
The driving days in the Taklamakan are monotone to an extent that leaves us dreary and drained, unable to alleviate the ennui. This is China and even in matters of driving, the government has decided what the experience will be, by designing a highway with no exits. There’s a steel divider painted robin’s egg blue, separating us from the occasional truck or car in the oncoming lane, etching a solid, pastel line to the horizon without an opening for hundreds of miles. I clench my teeth at a road building philosophy that seems to declare if you’re going in one direction, that’s all you’re allowed. But it doesn’t matter. We have no intention of ever doubling back the way we’ve come.
When we finally are able to leave the highway for a side road linking regional villages, my joy is the joy of the wrongfully jailed, suddenly released on bail by an anonymous benefactor. Even the omnipresent speed cameras constraining us to progress at twenty-five miles per hour cannot dampen my enthusiasm. Inevitably we are stopped by a traffic cop, part of a roadside operation complete with a squadron of policemen in full regalia. They are small men in straight-legged pants with creases as sharp as the prow of the Titanic, gray jackets cinched with wide black leather belts complete with holster, and gray caps with black patent leather bills. They’re frighteningly efficient in the way of a candy dispenser at an automat, no personal discretion needed to issue tickets as all the data is right there on their laptops, transmitted from those aforementioned cameras. When we are shown a photograph of us defying death at thirty miles per hour on a smoothly paved, straight, empty road, we swallow a brief laugh and stare at the ground.
It takes only a brief upward glance at our red-faced traffic functionary waving a thick wad of tickets, each waiting to be filled with a litany of vehicular misdeeds, to remind me that impatient is a word that’s suddenly left my vocabulary. I turn Zen, exhaling peacefully at the prospect of looking at people, stretching my legs, rummaging among the detritus that has mounted in the back seat to find the bag of biscuits I know I put there three days ago. When a local miscreant of the road peremptorily demands the return of our passports and loudly shames the policeman for ticketing these pleasant visitors to their country, we are speedily on our way once more, speedily being of course a relative term.
The best part of leaving the highway is that we can now stop to eat. Road food on our drives is the inverse of the United States, having everything to do with eating whatever local people eat, and nothing to do with the wrinkled mauve hotdogs and pallid microwave burritos of American gas stations. Here in Uyghur country, kebabs are ubiquitous, as is the clay oven, tandoor cooking commonly associated with India. Though at first puzzled, I decide the tandoor isn’t the purview of Indians at all, just a simple transportable way to bake whatever one has on hand. As we creep down the road, spotting a café is easy: anyone willing to sell travelers a meal hangs a raw haunch of lamb from a lattice shelter. It’s a roadside tautology. If there’s raw meat, someone must be around to cook it, and if there’s a cook in the house, it implies someone who’ll want to eat, hence one should hang meat outside to attract the hungry traveler. And that would be us.
We pull off the road next to a long table set under the interlocking branches of several gasping trees. A ripped white plastic cloth covers the top. Splintery benches line either side. The rest of the village appears to be populated by tire and engine repair stalls, the ground saturated to an opaque blackness by years of drained oil and hydraulic fluids.
As soon as we park, a man emerges from a nearby doorway, knife with long, curved, oxidized blade in hand. I point to the haunch. He unhooks it, slaps the blade on his trousers, and slices a plateful of red slivers, to be speared for the grill with pieces of lamb liver, onion, and fat. His chopping block is sodden and slick with blood and grease, a chunk of wood that has only rarely known the sweet caress o
f a swab with clean damp rag. This delights the flies, who in their delirium can’t seem to decide whether to suck on the wood or nibble on the haunch.
In the kitchen, a fire roars, flames leaping out of a blackened stove pit with such intensity there’s no smell of cooking foods at all. Over the heat, a grizzled wok proportioned to fry an ostrich egg for a giant sizzles with oil, whose splatters goad the flames to leap higher still. A young Uyghur man stands ready to orchestrate my order, shovel-length spatula lifted. Beyond him, two men pulls gobs of dough from a tureen, hand-rolling noodles as fat as garter snakes but as long as a python. The stir-fry cook eyes me, raising black beetle eyebrows. His T-shirt and stained trousers also are black, as is the long wood bench behind him on which he has mounded chopped vegetables and long beans. Though soot rules the day and cleaning doesn’t seem to be a point of pride here, the kitchen is so hot no flies have survived and I figure bacteria won’t either. To add to our kebabs, I choose a mix of eggplant, onions, and cabbage from the ready-to-cook piles. The lightly seasoned mix of vegetables, which is brought to our table with large plates of cold noodles, arrives just after the kebabs. A Parisian restaurant couldn’t have timed it any better.
From Kashgar to Lhasa, I inspect the markets of one rural Chinese city after another as we drive our way through the desert via Aksu, Korla, Turpan, Dunhuang, and Golmud. Gourds are plentiful. Sacks of various dried fungi lounge next to bins of gelatinous brown wood ear mushrooms, while enormous oyster mushrooms cluster nearby. There’s bitter gourd, which looks like a prickly cucumber, three-foot leeks, all sorts of greens, pale purple eggplants the size of a baby’s foot, and many roots that I can’t identify. Plus, plentiful ginger and ropes of garlic. There are melons, apples, bananas, and clementines, and piles of deep purple grapes, which are large and sweet and make a refreshing if sticky road snack. Alongside the highway are miles of mats on which pale jade-colored grapes are laid out for the sun, weak though it is, to transform into tender golden raisins.
The back of most markets is the poultry arena, where crates hold ducks, chickens, and pigeons, necks wrung to order. A dark alley houses troughs of carp, the silver kind that is a delicacy in China, not the orange and pink kind that laze in hotel koi ponds. Water burbles into the troughs and overflows, keeping the air moist and fishy and the rough concrete floor in a perpetual state of puddles. The moving water makes it look as though the fish are swimming. At first, I think they are alive, then realize it’d be unlikely for a fish to swim belly up of its own accord. A young woman lifts a heavy, silvery fish by its tail and it hangs limp. She grabs a thin-bladed gutting knife, waving it at me in a way that would be threatening if I were facing a Congolese rebel but here is meant to invoke temptation. The fish heads piled on a platter do not entice me. They stare unblinking, mouths agape, as if no one told them they no longer need gasp for air.
The market street-front is for meat displays, each vendor willing to use a practiced cleaver to hack off a chunk of mutton or pork on a wood block turned purple and shiny with fatty gore. Here, the air is heavily scented with the tang of rancid meat mixed with a tinny, back-of-the-throat slick of clotted blood.
As long as I can remember, I’ve loved smells, using them to link me to experiences in a visceral way. To this day scent is one of my travel touchstones, informing most of my memories from childhood to the present day in all its savory, spicy, even stinky glory. So I inhaled deeply, even though this particular stench was not exactly the fragrance du jour at a Bloomingdale’s perfume counter. I was never a Bloomingdale’s shopper, but my mother was.
While my mother charged toward the escalator to the first-floor juniors section, cheering us on with an eager, “Come on, darling, let’s see what they have for you!” I took the long way, sauntering through makeup instead. This puzzled my mother; she marveled at her daughter, a child of the sixties, who eschewed makeup with a sense of mission that would have served a Benedictine nun—well, except we were Jewish. I didn’t care about the powders, creams, and lipsticks, all of which fell into my personal teenager category of “gross.” Instead I kept my eyes out for the pretty lady holding a shapely glass bottle aloft, spraying whoever came within range. I’d stroll nonchalantly into her orbit, feeling the cool aromatic mist alight on my hair and skin, then scurry to catch my mother before she stepped off the elevator lip. She’d sniff the air gently as I arrived behind her, perhaps nursing a faint hope that a soupçon of her French sophistication had indeed rubbed off on me.
The smells around me in the Dunhuang market speak of all the richness of life. At the edge of the meat lane are villagers in kerchiefs, long dresses, and embroidered caps selling bowls of homemade curdled milk, which might or might not be yogurt. One tells me he’s walked in that morning. When his milk is gone, he’ll walk home. Beyond them, on roomy corners where logs can be stacked, are wood-fired bread ovens from which golden pizza-like crusts embellished with pin-prick designs emerge every few minutes. People walk away with teetering stacks of ten at a time.
Somewhere in the middle of all this are carts mounded with varieties of black, brown, and golden raisins, almonds, sunflower seeds, and walnuts. And there are dates now, fresh dates, which are yellow green and the size of miniature pears. They taste like an unripe pear, too. It’s hard to believe that they will eventually dry and turn into the pasty, honey-sweet brown Medjools I am used to. Stalls offer a host of spices and ground chilies, which make me sneeze. Those evil, tiny, red peppers that have been hiding slyly in my food, sneaking into my mouth under cover of gravy are everywhere. In the markets, they fill the air with a fierce and pungent bouquet which slips unbidden into the back of my throat, coating it with a warmth that soon turns fiery.
Since I do not have a kitchen in which to experiment with market ingredients, I am partial to the sector offering cooked foods. Every market has one, in tacit acknowledgement that shopping for food is a hungry business. In Dunhuang, I find the best of both worlds, a thriving open market next to an outdoor food court in which twenty local entrepreneurs have opened restaurant-ettes with names like Wang Strotters Bubble Up, a tiny place with a few red plastic stools around tables bolted to the floor. The locals know something about Wang and his family’s generations-old recipe for Strotters Bubble Up, giving his shop a wide berth. I follow their lead, sampling steamed pork buns, dim sum, and stir-fry elsewhere.
Entrepreneurial cooks who can’t afford permanent walls set up stoves and roasters in the open alleys outside. A tantalizing breeze of caramelizing sugar and strong coffee pulls me to a blackened wok the size of a manhole cover, half-filled with an unruly gallon of oil. It spits and hisses, tamed by a broad-shouldered woman, sleeves rolled up to reveal arms speckled with years of oil burns. Her skin is tawny, her smile welcoming, her black hair tightly bunned under a white cap. As I watch she takes a twist of sweet soft dough, rolls it into an oval pillow and drops it into the sizzling oil. In a minute, it has puffed like a balloon, rising to the surface where it bobs, buoy-like, till she scoops it out with a wire ladle and rolls it in a bowl of coarsely ground sugar. Nearby a coffee vendor stirs beans in the ashy coals of a brazier. Not only is the coffee freshly made, the beans obviously are freshly roasted, too. Even though it’s mid-afternoon, no sane person could argue that now isn’t the perfect time for breakfast.
Fortified, I turn to my main goal, a desire to taste camel pad. I first encountered Bactrian camels in the Gobi during the P2P and have felt fondly about them ever since, their two humps reminding me of rainy childhood weekends in which Dr. Doolittle’s menagerie played an important part. So I was dismayed, in a way one can only be when a childhood favorite turns up on one’s plate, to learn that camel pad is a delicacy in Western China. It takes some objective talking-to to remind myself that in this part of the world the Bactrian is not a fictional animal of disarming cuteness. It’s food. It’s income. It’s clothing and shelter. Through the Taklamakan I’ve been looking for Bactrian camels. Recent desert surveys have found fewer than fifty wild camels left
. I have no hope of seeing those, as they stick to where the desert is deserted, but I do see herds of domestic Bactrians raised for food and fiber. And I give silent kudos to the Chinese herders for making sure they use everything that camel offers, right down to the soles of their feet. More properly called pads. And if ever there’s a place to sample camel pad, I’m in it.
In the thriving small metropolis of Dunhuang, still linked to its desert denizens by tradition and proximity, I have a feeling camel pad should be sold. Puffing on my scalding doughnut I walk around the corner to the meat stalls. Right away I see it: two bones sticking straight up from a fat-encased, pad-shaped lump of muscle. The whole thing has been fried or roasted till the fat forms a crackling golden brown skin. The vendor, a middle-aged man whose face glistens as slickly as the fatty products around him, lifts up the chunk and slices me a thin sliver of pale brown meat. This time around there is no scorching fire to sanitize the cleaver or the wood slab permeated with the drippings from a generation of bloody carcasses. I pop the sliver in my mouth and chew, savoring what could be my last bite before armies of bacteria attack. It’s mild, slightly unctuous. The taste reminds me of something. I swallow and think. I’ve never eaten camel, not pad nor hump nor anything in between, so I’m not in a position to recognize the taste of a Bactrian. But camels use their feet for every step, and I have a notion that camel pad should be more muscle-y and less fatty.
I gesture for a bit of paper from the newsprint in which the butcher wraps his sales. He tears off a strip and hands me his pen. Normally I have trouble drawing a straight line and can barely make a respectable showing when playing hangman. Travel has cured me of any shyness about this limitation, and over tens of thousands of miles I have made great progress by fearlessly drawing toilets and other daily necessities. Now I tackle my most ambitious project to date: the Bactrian. A quick few pencil slashes for two humps, four legs, plus an arrow pointing to the feet, and I reveal my cartoon to the butcher. Looking at it, his shoulders start to heave with laughter. He shows the drawing to his partner, who leans back emitting cackles and gales. They oink a Chinese oink at me. I oink back in English. Then we’re all laughing, as I realize what I thought was a camel’s pad was actually the front shoulder of a pig, placed upside down so the flesh looked like a broad round foot.