the ruins of jiao he and other news

last time duff and i sat down, he was intending to write about the ruins we saw in turpan, but got a little distracted. i will cover that today. we are in kashgar, after a 24 hour train ride from urumqi. i am 24, having turned yesterday. wow. traveling in xin jiang, by train or by bus, has been pure pleasure. we have had such an amazing set of beautiful rides! the desert is variable and dramatic. amazing to me are the many oases that we pass. we will be in the middle of what seems like endless flats of gravel and sand, occasionally piled up by the wind with mountains in the background, and then we will roll by farms and a town, looking as green and fresh as ohio. there are tall, thin trees between all the fields for windbreaks. all the houses are adobe, and they have courtyards with lofts and beds inside the front gate. there are so many beds outside, with people napping, elderly people relaxing in the shade, and children squatting on them playing cards. sometimes, further out of town, we have seen herds of sheep and goats in the houses, and black and white spotted dairy cows. we have seen some long haired yaks, too. in most of china we see the water buffalo, and it has been amazing to see dairy cows grazing in green pastures beneath snowy mountains. the light here is amazing. it hits the mountains, bounces off the clouds, shines off the mineral desposits and irrigation channels...xin jiang is perhaps the most beautiful place i have seen in china. we will take busses from kashgar all along the southern silk road, and i am really looking forward to it. we will also take the bus from golmud in qinghai province, into tibet, even though the qinghai tibet rail line opened TODAY. we watched a little of the coverage on the english language news station, cctv-9. the train runs from golmud to amdo, the tibetan grasslands where i desperately want to stop. they have coverage about what effect this will have on tibet, and han china, and the environment and endangered species. mostly they talked about what an amazing engineering feat building this train was, and how the world told china they couldn't do it. at one point the announcer said something like, and now china has the biggest buildings, the tallest dam, the highest railroad, and men in space. ha, china. there is no chance that we will be able to get tickets on the train, which has showers (!) and oxygen bars in the luxurious sleeper cars, but i will gleefully climb on the bus so i can see all the scenery up close.

tomorrow we will get an early start and attend the legendary kashgar sunday market. the city is riming for it already, i can tell. we walked around a lot today, and ended up buying a lot of fruit. we'll hit the sack early after eating our fruit and sampling some of the local wine so we can get an early start tomorrow.

and now for the ruins in jiao he:

after duff and i escaped the creepy, over-aggressive tour guide, and decided to leave for urumqi the same day, we decided we would spend the day riding bikes and trying to see some of the sites of turpan. sadly, we were a little confused, as was our guide book (why can't rough guide get its maps and directions right?!) and so we ended up only seeing the ruins of jiao he. we rode bikes we rented to the site, along a road 11 km outside of turpan. the bicycle ride was amazing, we passed donkey carts (which pull flat boards, and 15 people or so pile on and are pulled by one donkey, and there are no seats, the sit on an oriental rug. some are covered, some aren't), farm fields, irrigation canals, bakerys, markets, fruit hawkers, and so much more. when we got to the ruins we were spinning in the 42 degrees C heat. i have spent more money on water this trip, and it is triple the price it is in wuhan!! the ruins are on a plateau, described as leaf shaped. on either side there is a small river, and small, small scale farming. the plateau is 2 kilometers long and a city began there around the 2nd century b.c. the buildings were all adobe and have since crumbled but we can see the outlines and the foundations of some. the temples are still very distinct. there are 3 temples that i can clearly remember, and they were all at the north end of the plateau. you could still see some very worn buddha statues. the city had narrow streets, and we ducked behind the ruins of one building to eat a cucumber in the shade. we peeled it, how very chinese of us. the city apparently reached its peak from 640-840 ad, but was abandoned in 1400 after a war. this was shortly after islam was introduced to the region. it wasn't clear whether the buddhist jiao he converted or if that was the religious conflict was the cause of the city's decline. interestingly, a lot of money has been donated by the japanese to preserve jiao he. we have seen many historical and cultural sites in xin jiang where a majority of the funding is from the japanese. i am interested in this effect on chinese and japanese relations. i think the japanese are giving money where ver and whenever possible to improve their image. oh, and did i mention this is a unesco site?

in urumqi we saw an amazing museum (the best i have been to in china, aside from the shanghai museum of art) that outlined the many minority groups in xin jiang. they covered uighurs, kazakhs, tajiks, russians, tartars, kyrgyks, hui, manchus, mongols, tibetans, and i am sure i am forgetting someone. the exhibit was put together beautifully, detailing the history, housing, festivals, culture, and dress of each group. katie would have gone nuts for the costumes. at the museum we also saw some mummies, eerily preserved in burial sites along the southern silk road. with the climate, and so little rainfall, the mummies are estimated to be 4000 years old. they had painting on their faces, and they still had their hair...i have never seen such amazingly preserved bodies.

okay, time to go outside again and experience amazing kashgar. we have become slightly addicted to these little pastries filled with lamb (kellee, like the ones we had last year in mongolia, at that stand where we waited for the camping gear) and onions. we must find more. i haven't time to proof read, or check spelling and typos, sorry. the keyboards in these net bars are completely destroyed by kids playing computer games and they are really hard to type on.