My weekend adventure to one of the westernmost cities in China began Friday when it appeared we had no food except Oreos and peanuts, and no shelter whatsoever, and it seemed no other living soul existed at Heavenly Lake except for our small group of four. And we were in the middle of a blizzard.
Thankfully, though our group consisted of not one boy scout, we had watched Man Vs. Wild enough to know that we could die out here. With this conclusion in mind, we checked the status of our sleeping bags and noticed that each one provided warmth only in weather amenable to camping, hiking, backpacking, and other activities typically experienced in more logical seasons.
This discovery naturally made us quite hungry. We ate an Oreo for dinner, put pants on our heads and socks on our hands for warmth, and then ate another Oreo for dessert.
Just when it seemed likely that we would run out of Oreos before morning (Death Threat Number One), we encountered a beacon of hope in the form of a Chinese man.
“Shui jiao zai nar?” we finally whimpered at him, a broken phrase roughly translated to mean “Sleep is where?”
Lo and behold, there appeared a second person out of the snow—a Kazak Chinese man named Matt who wore jeans. He rescued us, took us in, presented us with a humble and beautiful yurt (a cupcake-shaped, hut-esque structure padded with rugs in the walls and the ceiling and, in our particular case, ornamented with a bowl of fossilized chocolate balls in the corner), and three plates of rice and carrots.
A little past midnight, Matt woke us in his long johns and asked for our passports. Apparently, the police were on the lookout for three suspicious waiguo ren and needed confirmation that our group was not, in fact, suspicious. We reluctantly handed our little blue books over to him, not knowing whether or not we would see them again. Terribly concerned as I was, I fell asleep within a few minutes and found my passport on the table the next morning.
I woke early and saw my first shooting star. It was beautiful, as if God took a glow stick across the sky, and followed by a black, white, and silver sunrise that illuminated Heavenly Lake as deep bruised blue.
We ate peanuts for breakfast and headed out to discover that, once again, China time is not U.S. time. Our driver was 45 minutes late, and as we were driving down this snow-capped mountain near the border of Tajikistan, the song Hey Juliet came on the radio. Oh, beautiful day.
From Urumqi we flew to Kashgar, and in the course of our plane ride the terrain changed from blue and brown mountains to elephant skin tundra. Kashgar, called Kashi by the locals, is a wonderfully Muslim city dominated by Chinese Kyrgyzstanis, Pakistanis, and Tajikistanis, and, over this weekend, four Americanistanis. The city is also known for its pomegranates. I had my first one this weekend, and it was swell. I have decided that someday I will have a husband who will peel pomegranates for me.
Immediately we met our first English-speaking guide, Allabardi (which means “God gave it”), who had a cold, and departed for a new lake of yurts and camel riding.
We never made it.
First we journeyed to a market and ate gumdrop oranges, crunchy apples, skewered mutton, and pizza-shaped nan. Then, we drove for three hours to a snow-drenched mountain pass, where the road was made of ice and the sun had disappeared, and stopped.
Death Threat Number Two:
From around the corner ahead, an 18-wheeler driving down the mountain lost control on the ice and began to slide toward our van. Gradually, the truck picked up speed and turned perpendicular to us, effectively blocking any chance of escape. Our driver gurgled and shrieked simultaneously, and rammed into reverse. We proceeded to play an eerie game of tag as the truck slid toward us and as we backed into the black night, down a mountain road made of ice. There was nowhere else to run. Suddenly, the caboose of the truck smacked a rock jutting out of the mountainside with enough force to realign the truck with the road, and it slid parallel to us without harm.
Death Threat Number Three:
Then, we realized we were stuck. Allabardi called us forth to push the van, so we dutifully jumped into the ice and blizzard like tourists, filming the events on camera and playfully skating along the road.
Immediately, Dujon slipped, hard, and landed on his forehead. He got up and was quiet, and almost certainly concussed. The rest of us kept interviewing each other, oblivious, and as the camera rolled our van lost traction, with us behind it, and began careening toward us. Everyone dove left and right, and I had no choice but to scramble up the rocks, higher than the van, so that when it hit the mountain I would not become an Alex sandwich with mountain and van bread.
Well, I survived, because I am writing about it, so no need to fret. And, luckily, we caught the whole thing on film.
Anyway, we eventually succeeded in turning the van around and essentially tiptoed down the mountain. We distracted ourselves from the black ravine to the right and the road, which lacked guardrails, by asking Dujon whether he had any fun date ideas and other such questions to keep him conscious.
The rest of the trip proceeded casually, and there were no more death threats. Dijon healed. We saw an animal market, and a bazaar, and a mosque. I got to ride a camel—that incredible, ginormous creature, so strangely shaped, and strong, and warm, and surprisingly comfortable between those two humps. Allabardi kept going on and on about how the best traditional food of Kasghar was “pluff.” I got so excited for this mysterious food that sounded like marshmallow ice cream, until the truth came out of the toothpaste and we discovered that the famous dish of Kashi is, in fact, rice pilaf. And then, on the plane home, two little girls from Kashgar named Mary and Dai Wen came and spoke mandarin with Calvin and me for thirty minutes. We talked about gum and kangaroos and tongues, and they made faces at Calvin and giggled and played “made you look” by squeezing our noses.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
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