Hitchhiking to Avoid the Cops

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After leaving Gaochang, I walked the same road I had come in on. I was again taking photos. I could not resist, but I was more watchful. I was still tired from walking in the heat of the desert afternoon. I had recovered from my dehydration, pounding two liters of water, but my energy was still sapped.

Still taking photos

Still taking photos

As I got closer to the police station where my interrogators had come from, the event which I talked about in the previous post, I put my camera away. I began to think about cutting around the back of the village to avoid passing in front of the station. The paranoia was returning.

As cars drove up behind me, I began to turn back and try and wave them down. Even hitching a ride in the bed of a three wheeled cart for half a mile would allow me to avoid exposing myself to a chance for more interrogation.

I was only a few hundred feet from the police station. I turned around. A long sedan was approaching. I waved. It slowed down.

There were two Uighur men in the back seat, along with a Uighur man in the driver’s seat. “Where are you going?” I began as I always do with hitchhiking in China.

“Turpan” the driver said.

“How much.”

“Thirteen kuai.” He said. Not even two US dollars. Two kuai less than the bus.

I got in, blasted by the air conditioning. The driver sped down the village road, and we passed the police station in a blur. I sighed, relieved. We slipped onto the interstate, and the Flaming Mountains appeared.

Return of the Surveillance State

Galen was down sick again, so I took the camera out by myself to see the ruins of Gaochang. The bus dropped me off where I had expected, at an intersection in Second Fort Village. I began walking in the direction of the ruins of Gaochang.

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Interested in all aspects of village life, I tend to be snap-happy in these situations. The width of an alleyway between houses, water running through roadside canals, children screaming as they play, each of these things teaches me something about Xinjiang, and I naturally want to take pictures of them.

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And that is exactly what I did.

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Galen has often talked to me about how the camera is his language; though he does not speak Chinese, he can form a bond with people by taking their photo and then showing them the picture. Instantly, most people become his friend.

 

Not sure about this stranger

Not sure about this stranger

That day, I felt the power of its language. I took photos of the girls playing from a distance. At first, they seemed a little standoffish at a stranger, a foreigner to boot, taking pictures of them. Then, I turned the screen to them, showing them the photos I had taken. When they saw their faces on the screen, they erupted into a storm of giggles. Soon, they were posing for me, wanting me to take more. I obliged. When I walked away, continuing towards the ruins, the gaggle chased after me, waving and screaming, “Bye, bye.”

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I continued down the road, taking pictures of whatever I wanted. Hanging outside a school, I saw an interesting poster, and I was about to take a picture of it. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see two men in blue uniforms walking my way. I tried to act normal, hoping not to draw their attention. Further down the road, I could see a sign for a police station. They were probably just taking a stroll from the station, I thought.

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They were walking closer and closer to me. I did not look at them.

I had not even noticed the woman in a white dress walking beside them, but it was she who spoke to me. “Excuse me,” she said in her best broken English, the two uniformed cops stopping beside her. “Why are you taking photos?”

I looked at her, surprised. “Because I am a tourist.”

“What are you here to see?” she began the interrogation, translating each of my answers into Uighur for the two uniformed cops.

“I am here to see Gaochang,” I said.

“Gaochang is very far.” She responded.

“No, it isn’t. It’s just down the road here.” I shot back at her.

“You come by taxi?” she asked.

“No, I came by bus.”

“Bus?” She puzzled over the matter for several seconds, but appeared to not be able to come up with the English she wanted to continue this line of interrogation. She had trouble believing that some foreigner who could not speak Chinese could really travel all the way here by bus.

“What is your work?” she asked.

“I am a student.” I told her.

“You have a student card?”

I nodded.

“Show me.”

I fumbled for my wallet, handing her my old University of Georgia card instead of the student card that I had from my year studying Chinese literature in Taiwan. I wanted to give no hint that I spoke Chinese. As long as we were speaking English, I had some control over my interrogation.

The woman looked over my card. Saying something in Uighur, she handed the card to the two cops. They examined it, photographing it with their phone.

“Do you have passport?” she asked.

“No. It is in my hotel.”

“Which hotel?” she asked.

“Flaming Mountains Hotel. In Turpan.” I said. Immediately, she translated the hotel’s name into Chinese. This was the only part of their conversation that I could understand, since it was the only word they said in Mandarin.

“This place is not city,” she told me. “This is not Turpan. This is a rural area…and in rural area, many people do not like their photos taken. They are conservative. Please put your camera away, and not take it out until you arrive at Gaochang.”

I agreed to do this. They handed my student ID back to me, and I walked away quickly. For the next ten minutes, I swore a man on a black motorbike was tailing me. I walked further, getting into an even more rural area, and the man disappeared. I am still unsure whether the black motorbike had really been following me, but the encounter had left me paranoid.

Later, after visiting Gaochang, I returned to Turpan. A police car was parked outside where we were staying, the Flaming Mountain Hotel. The cops were exiting as I entered. They did not seem to notice my presence. When I asked the receptionist whether the cops had anything to do with us, she told me, “Don’t worry about it. They were just investigating us a little. No big deal.”

For several hours, I turned these events over in my head. At first, I seriously considered the possibility that someone had been offended at me taking photos of the little girls at the beginning of the trip. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was unlikely. We had been in rural areas before. No one seemed bothered by us taking pictures.

The explanation for my interrogation was more insidious. Perhaps, they had been alerted to my presence by someone calling about a foreigner taking pictures, but that was not the reason they had gone to the trouble to find an English speaker, interrogate me and send someone to investigate my hotel.

With the outbreak of ethnic violence, anywhere Uighurs lived had become sensitive. The authorities were on the look out for anyone who was not a tourist, anyone who might be a journalist.

Ruins of Gaochang

Turpan in China

Turpan in China

The day was doggedly hot. I had walked a long way to get to the ruins of Gaochang, downing a bottle of water at every store I saw. But, as I got closer to the ruins, the landscape became more rural, and there were no stores to buy water.

The road came to a T-intersection. Behind a fence and a set of trees, the walls of Gaochang rose from the flat, green vineyards surrounding it. A hand-painted sign had an arrow pointing to the right and said, “Gaochang, Half a Mile.”

Beside the sign, there was a hole in the fence just barely large enough for me to squeeze through. I had already had one encounter with the police that afternoon (to be described in the next post), but I decided to risk another. If anything, the first encounter drove me to roll the dice.

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I squeezed through the hole in the fence. On the other side, there was a line of trees and then a flat desert field from which the walls of the ancient city arose.

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Gaochang was gigantic, much larger than Jiaohe, the ancient Silk Road city about thirty miles west. The walls of Gaochang, at least those that remained, rose thirty feet up. The walls stretched out as far as I could see in both directions. Jiaohe was a mile long but barely a tenth of a mile wide, the city sitting on a slab of rock carved out between two rivers. Gaochang was a mile wide and a mile and a half long. Looking from above on a satellite photo, Gaochang looks like a giant stain of dirty yellow amidst the green fields of grapes.

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But if Gaochang was bigger than Jiaohe, it was also in a greater state of disrepair. Little was left in the wide expanse that had once been Gaochang, other than the walls. Most of the interior, where urban life had once bubbled, was flat dirt, with a few remains sticking up in the distance.

 

The ancient city was leveled

The ancient city was leveled

Genghis Khan has a well-earned reputation for leveling cities, but it was Jiaohe, not Gaochang that Genghis Khan destroyed. The Mongols used Gaochang as a Silk Road oasis town. It had not been until the fighting after the Mongol empire evaporated that Gaochang had been so thoroughly decimated.

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Before its destruction, the city had laid out a long-lasting legacy in religion and trade. It had been from Gaochang that the Chinese first stretched out into Central Asia. Though the area has been largely populated by Muslim Uighurs for a thousand years, the city that once existed was largely a Han Chinese city in the first millennium, spreading Chinese culture to the west and channeling Central Asian culture into China.

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Gaochang had also been an important conduit for spreading Buddhism to China. It was during the rule of a Uighur empire seated at Gaochang that many of the grottos at Bezeklik were built, and it was through Gaochang that many Chinese monks passed on their way to India, to retrieve Buddhist texts.

Gaochang even played a major role in the spread of Christianity, though this turned out to have a less long-lasting effect than Buddhism. Nestorian Christians from Gaochang were active as far as the southeastern coast of China, near Hong Kong, and spread their beliefs as they traveled and traded in China.

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Despite this history, the city was now trashed and was, apparently still being trashed. I walked into some of the storage space along the walls. Trash was strewn about in them, broken bottles, empty beer cans and cardboard packaging. These storage rooms had once housed Silk Road treasures, but now had become a place for teens to get drunk.

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After my earlier encounter, I was still a little worried about the cops, so I squeezed back out through the fence and went to find the ticket booth. I searched for twenty minutes in the hot desert sun and yet I found no water. Along the way, I came to more holes in the fencing of the ruins. Each time, I would slip in, look around and take some more photos of Gaochang, but still, there was little more than city walls remaining.

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After walking to one corner of the city walls, I decided to give up my search for the official entrance. I knew there had to be a designated entrance; in today’s China, there was always someone to take your money. Yet I had not seen any sign of the entrance since that first hand-scribbled sign, nor had I seen any signs of tourism at all, no buses nor tour guides with flags and a line of followers.

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I turned back around. I needed water. I had to get back to somewhere that sold water.

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Along the way, however, I stopped. Just across from the ruins was an old Muslim graveyard. There was a working mosque nearby, but the cemetery appeared to have been abandoned and trashed, like in the storage rooms of Gaochang. Some of the graves had been dug up. Bones lay scattered around randomly. I could have put a whole skeleton together. Atop one of the graves, a jawless skull had been left in the sun, looking towards the road.

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Not sure what to make of it, I left the dead to themselves to find water.

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Silk Road Hitchhikers on Amateur Travelers

I got an interview on the Amateur Traveler to promote the Silk Road Hitchhikers. Chris Christensen does a great job of putting these excellent travel podcasts together, and I had a great time talking with him. If you’re interested in hearing our show on our travels in Gansu, check

http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/travel-the-silk-road-gansu-china/

A Man and His Grapes

For I was hungry, and you gave me food: I was thirsty and you gave me drink: I was a stranger and you took me in…

Matthew 25:35, King James 2000 Bible

Outside the Village

We were wandering up a hot dirt road in a rural area, looking for water and a way to get back to Turpan. Sweat was pouring down our faces. From a distance, we could see where the lonely, uninhabited desert ended and the villages’ vineyards began.

We walked into the village, but it was mostly quiet. We could hear a few voices, children playing and screaming in Uighur, but they were all secluded behind the walls of houses.

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We crossed a stream where geese were swimming, moving deeper into the village. There were houses all around us now, but none appeared to be open. By now, we were getting desperate for water.

Soon, I found someone standing inside their house’s atrium. “Do you know of a store near here? Somewhere where we can buy water?”

He pointed me across the dirt street, leading me into the atrium of another house. At first, no one appeared to be there, though, the man shouted something and entered into one of the side rooms.

Soon, the shop owner appeared, unlocking the room where the shop was. Inside, he showed us his freezer. Everything was frozen. We could not find any bottle that was not completely ice. That was almost better. We bought six waters and two sprites.

Then, we asked him if he knew how to get to Turpan.

“Sure. There is public transport,” he assured me.

“How long will it be until they come past here?” I asked.

He quickly dialed a number on his phone. He went back and forth with the person on the other end, speaking in rapid Uighur.

“The van will come by here in about fifteen or so minutes. Maybe thirty,” he told us.

We set several of our bottles out in the sun to melt the ice inside them. The rest of the bottles, we shoved in our pockets, hoping that they would cool us down.

Into the Vineyard

Into the Vineyard

After we talked with him for a few minutes, he invited us to go take a look at his grapes. He led us across the village, greeting a friend we ran into, and then led us out into the fields. Bending over, we walked beneath the grape vines and into his patch. “This one, these and this one are mine,” he said, pointing out the handful of vines that he took care of.

“These are local style grapes,” he yanked a knot of grapes off the vine behind me and handed them to us. “Eat up.”

“And those,” he continued as we sat on the grass underneath the vines, “those are American style grapes.” Apparently American style grapes were popular out here as well.

Structures used to dry grapes into raisins

Along the sides of the vineyards stood imposing brick buildings, filled with holes in the top and sides. Galen and I had looked inside one of these buildings near the road, as we were walking into the village, and realized that they were meant to be filled with grapes after the harvest came in, hung from wooden poles. The holes allowed air and some sunlight in, giving them the chance to dry into raisins. The farmer confirmed all of our assumptions while pushing us to eat more grapes.

Making Friends

A few minutes later, after we had eaten as many grapes as we could, the man led us back across the vineyards though he had brought some more grapes for us to take on the ride back to Turpan. Soon, the van pulled up. The farmer’s wife, son and daughter piled out. We got photos of the son and father, but, as modest country Muslims, the mother and daughter scurried out of the way of Galen’s camera. After a few moments of thank-yous and hand-shaking, we took their places in the van, which lugged us back into Turpan.

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One thing that has struck me as we have moved farther west in China is how hospitable the Uighurs are. In most Muslim cultures, there still remains the idea that a guest is to be honored, an idea once common throughout America but increasingly rare. We came into this man’s shop to buy water, and, with us simply asking about his grapes, he took us out into the fields to feed us.

Father and Son

Father and Son

 

Wall Propaganda in Xinjiang

In a post in Xian, way back at the beginning of our journey, I discussed some of the propaganda that the Communist Party was placing in subway tunnels and at bus stops. This propaganda in Xian was subdued, very much promoting this idea of Chineseness, but not all that in-your-face.

Xinjiang is different. The Party sees the ethnic conflicts in Xinjiang as an existential threat. When that happens, Chinese Communists become more conservative, which means going back to their roots, and there is little that is conservative about this series of wall propaganda that I came upon.

In this one, one man is attacking another man with a butcher knife (in Xinjiang, this happens often, as a manifestation of ethnic tensions). As the victims wife screams, a neighbor is calling the police, who immediately dispatch a patrol car. The caption in the top right corner reads, "Maintaining public security depends on everyone. If you discover suspicious persons or things, promptly call the public security organs to report it."

In this one, one man is attacking another man with a butcher knife (in Xinjiang, this happens often, as a manifestation of ethnic tensions). As the victim’s wife screams, a neighbor is calling the police, who immediately dispatch a patrol car. The caption in the top right corner reads, “Maintaining public security depends on everyone. If you discover suspicious persons or things, promptly call the public security organs to report it.”

In this propaganda painting, the police are barging in, guns drawn, on a group of men surreptitiously playing Mahjang. The first officer holds a sign that says, "No Gambling." In the corner above them, the caption says, "Stay far away from pornographic things, gambling and drugs, and you will live a happy and healthy life."

In this propaganda painting, the police are barging in, guns drawn, on a group of men surreptitiously playing Mahjong. The first officer holds a sign that says, “No Gambling.” In the corner above them, the caption says, “Stay far away from pornographic things, gambling and drugs, and you will live a happy and healthy life.”

 

The message of this painting is less obvious. The caption reads, "Venerate Science, Oppose Superstition, Oppose Cults." On the right is a man who looks fairly Han Chinese. He is standing behind his well-booked desk, and he is gesticulating towards a space shuttle and a satellite. To this man's left are three people praying on their knees in front of a mosque, looking towards the science man. I am not clear on whether these propagandist are really suggesting that Islam is a cult and that praying is a kind of superstition.

The message of this painting is less obvious. The caption reads, “Venerate Science, Oppose Superstition, Oppose Cults.” On the right is a man who looks fairly Han Chinese. He is standing behind his well-booked desk, and he is gesticulating towards a space shuttle and a satellite. To this man’s left are three people praying on their knees in front of a mosque, looking towards the science man. I am not clear on whether these propagandist are really suggesting that Islam is a cult and that praying is a kind of superstition.

 

Hitchhiking Back to Turpan

Area where we hitchhiked from

Area where we hitchhiked from

Galen had been sick, so we wanted to leave our campsite at Bezeklik as early as we could. We came out of the canyon and found shade in a cellphone tower. Galen balled himself up, trying to keep his insides inside of him.

We had hitchhiked to the site, so we would have to find a ride back. If we hiked the few miles into the village, I knew we could find someone who could, with a phone call, get us a ride on the local vans that plied the area around Shengjin, transporting folks back to Turpan.

But Galen could not make the hike back to the village in his condition.

I decided that, unless it proved impossible, we should just try to pick up a ride from this road. We had already seen two vehicles, but I had not been able to get to the road in time to flag them down.

After waiting ten minutes, I stood up at the sound of a motor echoing off the red mountain walls. I ran out of the shade of the cell tower and towards the road, but I soon realized it was a false alarm. Weaving into and out of view was a one hundred twenty-five cc motorbike with two people on it.

A few minutes later, though, a van appeared on that same road. Again, I ran out. When I flagged them down, they stopped. It was an old, rough-looking minivan driven by two Uighurs, with basic auto repair tools strewn across the back.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Turpan,” answered the driver.

“Can we get a ride there?”

He nodded. We did not even need to discuss the price. He knew it. I knew it.

Galen and I piled into the van’s middle seat, and they rumbled on, blasting Uighur music from their overworked speakers. Along the way, we pulled into a desert truckstop beside a busted van with its hood up. After a few minutes discussion, we were towing the second van into town.

I realized the guys had been going to give their friends a tow, and, picking us up, they had made an extra five bucks. In China, this is the nature of hitchhiking.

Mismatched Shoes

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Camping at Bezeklik    

Turpan_and_Bezeklik_and_Sanbaoxiang Bezeklik_Area

The next day, we went back to the Bezeklik. This time, we got rides from local vans leaving from Turpan’s bazaar, heading to the general area called Shengjin, an irrigated valley that drained into the canyon where the Bezeklik caves were. It was in this area that the mummies and the world’s oldest drug dealer were found.

The van was faster than we had anticipated, so we got to Bezeklik in the middle of the afternoon, the hottest part of the desert day. We had the van drop us off a few miles north of the caves. From where we were, we could still see bits of the Bezeklik compound, but the workers at Bezeklik would be hard pressed to see us.

Area near Bezeklik where we were dropped off

Area near Bezeklik where we were dropped off

The bus left us on a flat plane of the road. To our right, the ripples slowly evolved into the precipitous drops of the Mutou Canyon, the river that ran past the caves. To our left, those same ripples moved upwards and became the Flaming Mountains, the red, whipped peaks that erupted from the Taklimakan Desert.

The sun beating down on us, we had no choice but to retreat into shade. We found a road down into the canyon. After searching for a few minutes, we found a perfect camping spot: flowing out of Shengjin, the Mutou River cut close to the canyon wall before cutting the other direction. At this point, a small desert glade, enveloped by man-sized bushes, opened up. We picked this as our campsite and escaped into the shadow of the cliffface, dipping our feet in the river’s cool muddy water.

For an hour or more, we waited, reading and napping. The sun made it dangerous to try to do anything until late in the afternoon.

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Once late afternoon arrived and shadows stretched along the canyon walls, we hid our bags beneath one of the bushes and climbed out of the canyon. Bezeklik had already closed, but we were still careful to avoid being seen by anyone there. Two Americans camping will always be regarded as suspicious in China, particularly near caves where a bunch of Westerners had long ago stolen artwork Beijing considered its patrimony.

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Up the sandy hills, we climbed out of the canyon, moving high up along the desert mountain. Our path was pock-marked with places that were once mud and had been dried to form ground that looked like smashed plates. Along the side of our path, the sun had baked the sand and the mud so thoroughly that it looked to have made bricks. Some of these emerged, half-hidden, from the sandy hillsides. It was hard to believe they were not hiding some ancient, undiscovered civilization.

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From high up, we could see the canyon stretched out before us. To the east, all we could see were the side of the Flaming Mountains cut out by the Mutou River. Unlike the fiery red we had seen before, this face of the mountains glowed yellow, like some golden shivs erupting out of the earth.

To the north was the green valley of Shengjin, surrounded on three sides gray-brown desert. Beyond that lifeless expanse the Tianshan Mountains arose, making our Flaming Mountains appear as mere hills.

Dirt Road Above Us

Above us a small, dirt road had been cut into the mountain, but otherwise, there was no sign of a human presences. The sand swallowed any human footprints. I had trouble imagining anyone had walked through here for years. The landscape was desolate. The road, long abandoned, made the place seem more, not less, forsaken.

Long ago, this place had once been a center of culture, a place of learning. How many people had passed here when this place was important, I wondered. How many Buddhist monks had camped where we were camping?

But like Dunhuang, Bezeklik had become a memory of importance. Looking from our spot high on the mountain, I realized, these mountains had become wild once they had been forgotten. For much of our trip to Tianchi National Park, I had felt like I was in an amusement park. In China, it not the protected places that are best protected, but the places that are forgotten that are protected.

Galen Taking Photos

Galen Taking Photos

For those interested in camping at Bezeklik, check out this post I wrote for the Far West China blog. That post has a better section on how to repeat this trip.

Galen hung mud from his tongue using only moisture

Galen hung mud from his tongue using only moisture

Galen hung mud from his tongue using only moisture

Galen hung mud from his tongue using only moisture

Valley around our Site

Valley around our Site

Photo of a distant Galen

Photo of a distant Galen