I reached out from under a pile of blankets and turned off my alarm. There were still stars visible through the window and we could see our breath inside. It was 6am in Sary Tash, Kyrgyzstan and today we were going to China.
Sary Tash is not much more than a road junction – one way leading to Tajikistan, one to China and one back into Kyrgyzstan. There are a few houses and a shop selling biscuits, sausage and vodka. A few people have spare rooms they let to tourists and all the toilets are cold, outside holes. The most remarkable thing about the place is its wildness – high in the mountains with snow covered peaks in the middle distance, some of which are over 7000m high. There is no public transport or taxis to the border so we stood on the road, stamping our feet to keep warm until we managed to flag down a truck. In Kyrgyzstan all cars are potential taxis, so hitching for free is not really a thing. However, when we tried to agree a price, the driver just waved us in and we perched on his bed at the back of the cab along with two other blokes. No one spoke English but we spent an hour watching videos on a phone of people falling over in funny ways.
When the driver refused any cash at the first border post we gave him some Kazakh chocolate and bid fairwell. The truck would have to wait in a long queue but we could walk.
Having been stamped out of Kyrgyzstan we joined another truck. There was now a lot of traffic and things got more frantic – the line of trucks seemed to be racing to be first in the queue at Chinese customs. Every so often there was a redundant looking checkpoint where we and all the drivers had to jump out and sprint over to show our passports. At one of these there was a wait and the driver of the lorry in front appeared in our cab to practice his English.
Having had our bags X-rayed and rummaged through at Chinese customs, we were bundled into a taxi with a Portuguese couple and sent 140km to the ‘actual’ border post where we’d get a stamp in our passports and be released into China.
The road had signs in Mandarin, what looked like Arabic and English with warnings such as “Longdownwardslopeaehad!” We had to slow down for the occasional camel, but there was no sign of the 1.3 billion people we were expecting. Inevitably, when we got to the ‘actual’ border post it was closed. The taxi driver got a mat out, lay on the road and went to sleep.
By now we were at lower altitude and it was warm and sunny, so waiting two hours for the border guards to have lunch wasn’t too much of a hardship. Eventually, we had our bags checked again, queued three more times to show our passports and then we were free in China.
That evening in Kashgar, my expectations of a decidedly un-vegetarian China were shattered as we stuffed ourselves with the best tofu and fried rice we’d ever tasted.
Scamps on a train 