A yurt on the edge of China

It turns out hanging around at 3600m gives you a headache and means you don’t sleep very well. That, and the fact that the stove in our yurt ran out of fuel about 2am, made for a bit of a chilly and uncomfortable night.

Lake Karakul on the Karakoram Highway didn’t really live up to expectations: The lake itself and the snowy mountains behind were picturesque, but the only yurt still pitched at this time of year that wasn’t a concrete pretend version was 6 feet from the main road and a few metres from a hotel playing loud dance music. Nevertheless, this would have to do as our ‘yurt experience’. Perhaps by way of protest, but more likely due to some ‘dodgy tofu’, Claire was secretly sick in the nomad’s washing up bowl.

Cold and groggy in the morning, we crawled out from piles of blankets and stood hopefully on the road outside, waiting for a bus, car or friendly truck driver. We were heading to Tashkurgan, the last Chinese town before the Pakistan border and the infamous Khunjerab Pass. Khunjerab means ‘valley of blood’ and it’s the highest road in the world.

Eventually a truck stopped and drove us 20 minutes up the road until it turned off to a quarry. Now with no yurt, building or traffic between us and the distant horizon we began to wonder if we would have been better staying put. It was 85km to Taskurgan and about 15km back to the nearest human habitation – a long walk with a backpack and a biting head wind.

Like all episodes of ‘Ice Road Truckers’ however, the impending disaster and certain death was never realised. With two further lifts we were in Tashkurgan before dark – relieved that we seemed to be in an crap Channel 5 documentary where nothing really happens.

Similar to much of the China we’d seen, Tashkurgan was half building site and there seemed to be more construction going on than was warranted by the size of the current population. We asked around for buses to Pakistan, got told to come back tomorrow, had a heated argument over what time it was (not such a simple question in a place where so many time zones converge), stuffed ourselves with rice and more tofu and went to bed.

Tomorrow we’d attempt The Pass.

Trucking off to China

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.

White rice in a drowning town

The last ten days have been characterised by heat, parched mountain vistas and dust clouds. We had high hopes for something cooler and greener on leaving the north eastern Turkish city of Kars – an ex-Soviet city near the Armenian border.

We boarded our millionth Turkish ‘otobus’ in the direction of the Kackar mountains. We haven’t seen sight nor sound of a train since leaving Bulgaria. The odd railway line has convinced us that they do exist, but when we last enquired about departures we were pointed to a calendar: “Wednesdays and Fridays only, sorry.” Roads, however, are generally four lanes wide and empty, so using them is tempting unless you’re on a bicycle.

We were dropped at a dusty junction on a dam construction site in a gorge. Thick dust clouds blew past as we waited in vain for a promised minibus that would take us 10km to the nearest town. When it failed to turn up, we hitched a ride in a truck and were dropped in Yusufeli, a small town soon to be drowned by the rising dam. For the moment though, a clear, slate-green river rushed down from the pine covered mountains and through the town. Claire even managed to find a plate of rice that hadn’t had miniscule bits of pasta (that she’s alergic to) helpfully added to it. Smiles all round.

The village of Barhal that we were aiming for was another 30km into the mountains, so after enquiring about town and utilising both our Turkish words (one of which is only really useful in a breakfast context), we managed to get on a minibus full of dead chickens heading in what turned out to be the right direction.

‘Karahan Pension’ where we’re staying is pretty close to everything we’ve always been looking for. It’s perched above a river up a dirt track with other-worldly sized mountains crowded around it (even the valley bottom is the height of Ben Nevis) and the views from the veranda are nuts. They even had a small supply of red wine, but we drank it all. I guess you can’t have everything all the time.