Bezeklik Caves around Turpan

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Recently I have excelled at being the good tourist! First this camel tour in sand dunes, and now a whole day in a tourist car going from different spots all day long (and ending up skipping half of them because they were tourist traps, expensive ones!). I arrived in Turpan, or Turfan, or Tulufan again, depending which map you are reading, on Wednesday the 1st of July. A historic date.

First impression: “The Great Disappointment”. The magic of Turpan, which is supposed to be the hottest place in China (and maybe on earth; after all China is ‘The Middle Kingdom’, so fuck the rest of the world), was diluted in an awful rain and sand storm alltogether. On top of it the city itself is quite ugly. OK maybe ‘ugly’ is a strong word, but I assume it. Really not nice, and worsen by the fact that big tourist buses are touring all over the place.

Yet I got to meet my first Uighur, and that was cool. I also got my first real nan bread with lamb kebab from Xinjiang: brilliant!

Apart from that the small villages surrounding Turpan are quite nice to go through, and I guess that’s how Turpan used to look like:
small canals with a refreshing water, grape trees used as roof in every houses, big beds outside people’s places for relaxing sport all day long in the nice shade… I really liked it! So hopefully as my journey goes on I will get to see some less touristy places which have kept their Uighurness…

Also impressive was the ruins of Jiahe, a town of 6500 inhabitans 2000 years old… They really had a nice life here, with the oasis-like valley on the town’s feet, and the irrigation Karez system. And they were Buddhist! There is a temple with some remnants of Buddha statues… That of course was before the invasion around 1000A.D from Central Asian people who were already converted to Islam. What a fascinating area! And you can still see the mix of Buddhism and Islam everywhere, as even some Buddhists paintings have typical persian images…

So that was for the cultural moment of the day. But as everything else, small quantity is always best, so I became bored of it and hated the end of my tour in Turpan…

hhh

So, after pligrimming for a while I decided to go camel riding for 3 days in the desert. I think that camels were part of my destiny for some time, and on Sunday it became reality. With two travel companions, Gil and Cedric, I book a tour (yes, a tour for tourists and everything) to go camel riding for 3 days/2 nights around the giant sand dunes of Dunhuang.

We thus started this thing with a strong feeling of being scammed just like any other fool tourists, and as we would later realise it was a sort of scam. We paid too much.

But as we were getting going we put our anger on the side and decided to enjoy this thing; and it was really cool. The suffocating heat and our sore ass made us understand the Bedouin life. Also my camel had some driving issue and was always on the side. But I fast learnt to sit and enjoy. Camels are a quite comfortable thing (for a while). It was the occasion to take some nice pictures, get a Central Asian suntan, and climb a dune that was high as something very (very) high. Camping in the desert is also a fun experience, but the best was when we found a little stream with some shade available and water to clean ourselves.

One of the most thrilling moment of this trip was running down from the gigantic dune, creating a mini-sand avalanche, and hearing the whole dune resonating as the sliding sand was making vibrations. Quite nice also was to arrive back in town as this lazy trek was in fact exhausting.

And now I’m barely able to concentrate so I’ll take a nap before going to Turpan tonight!