Every Sunday 50,000 people travel to the westernmost town in China for the Kashgar animal market, the only place to buy and sell goods in an area the size of Europe.
Unaware of the sheer scale of the event we blindly wandered in and got lost amongst the cows, sheep, hairdressers, furs, tailors and food stalls. [...]
Posts Tagged ‘china’
Possibly the greatest sunday market on Earth – Kashgar, China
Karakul Lake, Karakoram – Taxkorgan, China
We’re currently in Taxkorgan, very near the border with Pakistan, so there’s a very heavy military presence here. Advice is ‘Be nice to the people in green’. The locals are quite mixed though and look like that picture of the Afghan girl with the bright green eyes.
Spent half a day walking the 4km round the [...]
I need a shower – Hotan, China
A 4 day drive directly south through the desert – no towns/shops/toilets/water refills or garages so we had to rely on everything on the truck.
The first night we camped too close to a river and I got horribly eaten by mosquitoes . To compound the pain also found a scorpion in my tent, which rapidly [...]
Grapes – Turpan, China
Turfan/Turpan (they seem interchangeable) is a little town with lots of markets and avenues lined with grape vines. They sell grapes everywhere. They also sell dried grapes. In possibly related news there is also a grape festival currently in progress. I won a pen in a game involving throwing grapes. When we got to the [...]
Ill in the desert – Turpan, China
This is short because I was mostly ill for these 4 days. Spent full days driving through the desert, with a mixture of hotels and wild camps.
Highlights include:
A near fight in a market when a lady tried to charge us GBP14 for what should have been a 50p meal.
Sitting outside Mogao caves because I didn’t [...]
Clothes Sizes – Dunhuang, China
Clothes here come in either the Chinese sizes, which are quite small, or occasionally in western sizes.
In an effort to put off doing the laundry for couple of days I went shopping for t-shirts (plus at 4 for a dollar, it would be cheaper to wear them once and throw them away). I’m western size [...]
End of the Wall – Jiayuguan, China
Image via Wikipedia
Set off down the Gansu Corridor to Jiayuguan Fort – the last point on the Great Wall before the rather large desert crossing.
The fort was fun, with camel rides and the chance to do some archery, shooting arrows at the invading Mongol hordes and Chinese tour guides.
It was also our cook groups first [...]
Back to work – Lanzhou, China
Image by are you gonna eat that via Flickr
Drive to Lanzhou across a scary mountain road was uneventful apart from having to physically remove a farmer from the roof of the truck whilst he tried to steal a broken spring – apparently they make good ploughs.
Everyone on the truck gets a job – these include [...]
No, really, we’re in Tibet – Xiahe, Tibet, China
Spent a couple of days in Xiahe, a town on the China/Tibet border that contains more Tibetans than Lhasa (the capital of Tibet). Driving through, it looks like a normal Chinese town until you reach the Tibetan monastery, then it just turns completely Tibetan.
We met up with another Dragoman truck headed in the opposite direction, [...]
Chinese Beer – Xiahe, China
Did I mention beer is only 14p/28c for a very decent 600ml bottle of TsingTao?
