As we were leaving camp, an old man with a toothy grin appeared, wading across the river and stomping into our campsite. He had come down from the nearby village, around the cliff face where the vineyards began.

The man was completely bald, his head shinning bright in the morning desert sunlight. His ears bowed out a little, and he gazed at me with a happy but intense squinting.

His squint’s intensity came not because of any epicanthic fold (he did not appear to have the fold), but because the sunlight was so intense it was difficult to do look in any way other than squinting. His eyes’ wrinkles spread out like the roots of an old tree, as though he had been doing nothing but squinting for his whole life.

He had the figure of a trim old man. He was probably somewhere in his sixties, though it was tough determine. He could have been eighty. There was almost no fat on his belly. I could see most of his belly clearly as he had rolled up his gray t-shirt into a sort of bikini top.

The man was a local farmer, I guessed, looking at the contrast between the color of his head, a glowing orange ravaged by the sun, with the color of his chest, a gray peachy tone, normally covered by his shirt.

He wore a leather belt around navy blue pants that had been rolled up until they became short shorts, his underwear rumpling out. On his feet were two totally different shoes, the right with an old tennis shoe, the left a flip flop.

When he emerged onto our side of the river, I greeted him. “Salaam alaikum,” I said, using the salutation common throughout the Muslim world.

“Wa Alaikum Salaam,” he returned. “What are you doing here?” he asked jovially.

“Oh, we were just down here walking around.” I told him. He nodded. I was not sure if he realized we had camped there the night before.

“What do you do?” I asked him.

“I’m a farmer.” He said.

“Oh, those vineyards just up there,” I asked, pointing at the vineyards within sight of our site.

“Yeah, I farm grapes up there.” He waved indiscriminately up the canyon.

“Can I take a picture of you?” I asked, fishing my phone from my pocket.

He laughed, raising his arm in the air dramatically. “But, I’m very dirty. I’m not really ready to have a picture of myself.”

I pushed. “It’s okay.”

“Fine,” he said, posing a little. “By the way, where are you from?”

“Guess.” I like to see where people think I am from. When I lived in Taiwan, most people thought I was German.

For a second, he looked at me and considered what country I was from. “Pakistan?” he hesitated.

“No. America.”

“Oh, America.” he said.

With that, we soon parted. He continued walking in his half flip-flop ensemble down the river, along the dirt path that headed to the foot of the Bezeklik Caves. I turned up a dirt road leading out of the canyon.

This was not the first time someone had guessed I was from Pakistan. The first meal I had in Xinjiang, at some cheap noodle joint, the waitress asked where I was from. I played the same game, asking her to guess first, and she also thought I was Pakistani.

Galen had also had several similar experiences, where people guessed that he was Pakistani.

We are in the far west of China and off the beaten path. Westerners here are so unexpected that they guess that we were Pakistani. I do not think we could pass for Pakistanis anywhere else in the world.