Happy New Year! I’ve finally made some headway into getting my site back up and running. The current site design is a placeholder, but at least the content is back up. I was worried about the possibility of corrupt images but after two months of downtime I gave up and uploaded all of my old images—saving them out again would have taken much too long.
I’m still looking into which gallery software I will so my gallery of images will remain down for now. You may notice that the address has changed a bit. When I started the site back in 2003 I had grand plans to use it to document my travel from 1997–2003, so adding “/rtw/blog” made much more sense. Since I was starting from scratch once again I decided to shorten the address and streamline the site a bit. With redirects in place you shouldn’t notice the change at all but I would appreciate if you notice any broken links you may stumble upon.
I hope everyone had a great fall and will be somewhere warm for the holidays. I’m still in Chicago which has dropped from “cold” to “way too cold” quickly but I’ve been powering through the weather and am trying to ride my bike as long as possible (even if my friends and family call me crazy). With the holidays coming up I hope to have some time to finally get this site back up and running after it was hacked. My first priority is to get my financial details up, which has always been popular with travelers planning trips, followed by my photo gallery.
Have a wonderful end to 2009—stay warm wherever you are and happy travels in 2010!
Urumqi – Dunhuang, China | 16 October, 2006 | $10.51 (over night hard seat train)
Although I waited around for a sleeper train for a few days this leg was totally full. I finally gave up and decided it was time to have my hard seat overnight experience in China. I sat at a table with four seats. It was impossible to sleep with the lights on and the shuffling of passengers coming and going. When I got too tired to keep my eyes open I nodded off for a few minutes only to open my eyes and see completely different people sitting across from me. A particularly memorable pair of passengers was two women who spent their time across from me playing their phone’s ringtones at full volume to pass the time but I also had men spitting out sunflower seeds, friends talking and families eating steaming ramen. It would have been easy to chalk it up to an experience if I didn’t have an entire day of waiting around Dunhuang in store for me before my connecting bus on my way to Tibet.
Urumqi, China | 15 October, 2006 | $0 (couchsurfing)
I met David first back in Mongolia but the first time I came through town he was somewhere in Western Mongolia. This time around our schedules matched up and I took a bus over to his apartment next to Xinjiang University. After four months on the road staying at David’s apartment with a couch, kitchen, washing machine Mac-friendly wifi and wonderful roommates was just what I needed.
We quickly got to work getting massages at his favorite place, going to dinner and meeting up with his ex-pat friends for a game of ultimate frisbee. I could have breezed through Urumqi in a day but after so long on the road you start to appreciate a rest here and there. I spent my days walking around town looking for fabric to patch my pants or a way to watch the newest Superman movie in English and my nights hanging out with David and his friends. One of the only bad things that happened while I stayed in Urumqi was forgetting my travel towel at his place. I received it back three years later when David visited Chicago. There are a handful of people I met on my trip that I consider friends and David is one of them. We’ve met up in Mongolia, China and the US and he’s gone as far as to track down people in Tajikistan for me. Hopefully the next time we meet we’ll be somewhere new to both of us.
This is the same hotel I stayed in the first time I was in Urumqi and I thought it was easiest to go there since I knew where it was and what the rooms went for. After the rough travel I put myself through in Central Asia I was ready for a bed with sheets and my own shower before heading into Tibet. I got in touch with David, who I met through this site and had dinner with in Mongolia in June, about couchsurfing while I was in town then hit up KFC for a chicken sandwich and was once again able to access the internet. It was nice to be back in Urumqi, a place where I had figured out the bus routes and where the best internet shops were. I did run into some more difficulty this time with the internet girl asking for my passport before giving me access. I don’t carry my passport around (although you’re supposed to by law in China) so I just feigned ignorance and managed to get on after giving a fake name. I had no reason to conceal my identity but there’s something that bothers me about it and I derived great pleasure from giving them the name of a common American celebrity.
This was my second time on this train and this time it was almost totally empty. I shared my 4-bed compartment with a middle-aged woman was quiet and courteous. She noticed I had a cold and insisted I take a few different kinds of medicine she had with her and kept giving me more food to eat. When I fell asleep on my bed during the day she tucked me in. Next door was a family with a teenage girl who spent half of the ride practicing her English with me. She was an above average English speaker compared to most people I’ve spoken to in China and we were able to communicate well enough for me to get something out of the conversation.
You can see by the price that it was an expensive train and it was in better shape than most. This track is relatively new and there are only a few stops in-between the two cities. Traversing the desert before this train existed must have been quite a journey.
Osh, Kyrgyzstan – Kashgar, China | 8 October, 2006 | $50 (overnight sleeper bus)
This would be my third time traveling between Osh and Sary Tash on this trip and this time I decided to go by bus. The first time was in a large China Aid truck after my accident and the second time was in a jeep hired in Tajikistan at night. The bus was quite expensive but I wasn’t having much luck finding enough people to get a shared taxi together. Ideally I would take a taxi during the day, sleep in Sary Tash and then leave first thing for the Chinese border so we passed over while there were taxis still waiting on the Chinese side and before the border closed for lunch at Beijing lunchtime.
One of the guys I traveled with in Tajikistan came back from Bishkek and took the bus with me. We would finally part ways in Kashgar (he was heading to Pakistan and I was aiming for Tibet) but it was nice to have someone along for the ride. We didn’t leave until after dark so we didn’t see any of the gorgeous scenery along the way. I also had to fight for my bed as they tried to place me on the back bench sleeping in-between three local men. I flat out refused. It was a strange bus ride—we were woken around midnight when the bus pulled over for a bathroom stop on the top of a high mountain pass. I followed the women to their side of the bus and tried not to fall through the ice on the ditch I was hovering over.
We were again woken up at 4am when the lights were flipped on and everyone on the bus besides me, my Australian friend and a Japanese traveler started inhaling food and chugging large bottles of coke. We looked at each other in stunned silence until I realized that they were eating their meal for the day before the sun came up—it was still Ramadan. Because of Ramadan no one needed to go to the bathroom and the bus didn’t stop during the day at all. When we got to the border the driver came around taking everyone’s passports filled with money. He got pretty mad when we refused to slip a bribe inside—we had our visas and had paid plenty for them already. The Chinese border closed as we pulled up and the entire bus ride ended up taking much longer than expected. You can read my entire story about the trip here.
My brilliant plan to get a ride from Tajikistan to Sary Tash, Kyrgyzstan and then to hitchhike on a truck to the Chinese border didn’t quite work out. We arrived in Sary Tash at dusk and were told that the Chinese border was closed for the next 7 days during their huge October holiday. I’ve dealt with the travel problems surrounding this time in China before but I never thought they would close the border! Apparently it only close the “insignificant” borders, leaving me stranded. I continued on to Osh (Sary Tash is little more than a truck stop) and spent a week sitting in my hostel bed updating my web site and gorging myself on real food again. Despite being in a Muslim town (and Ramadan in full swing) the restaurants were crowded throughout the day and I had no trouble replenishing my strength.
For a special treat click on the thumbnails below to see the employees at the guesthouse—one of whom recently proposed to me via email in a thinly disguised effort to get a green card! Unfortunately it was not the cute one.
Murgab is the main town on the Eastern end of the Pamir Highway near the Tajik, Kyrgyz and Chinese borders. We arrived in Murgab around lunchtime and our driver took us directly to the police station where we were ushered into a concrete office with a man in full uniform. We spent two hours in the office being threatened with jail before my travelmates gave in and decided to pay the $15 bribe to settle our OVIR (police registration) stamps in our passports.
Although our driver had a friend he wanted us to stay with we decided to stay at an official homestay which turned out to be incredibly nice. I slept in what seemed to be a dining room (next to another traveler who I’d never met before) and the other two slept in another large room. Most people in Tajikistan sit on the floor, hence the lack of furniture. This house had a gorgeous outdoor “shower.” It was more of a sauna, really, with wood floor slats and a large hot coal stove. We were instructed to take one bowl of cold water and one bowl of boiling water, mix them and then pour them over our heads. We hadn’t showered since Dushanbe and it was heavenly.
This home also had a outhouse on its property. Although it was only a small shack with a hole cut out of wood floorboards it was much more luxurious than anything we’d used in the past week. I came down with either a case of food poisoning or more likely altitude sickness—Murgab is at nearly 12,000 feet (3,650 meters) and we drove through passes higher than 15,000 feet—so I spent most of my time curled up on those floorboards. We stayed in town two nights, waiting until my Kyrgyz transit visa became valid. The price included two meals a day and the owner spoke a touch of English.
Here is a video I took of our driver while we were delayed at the police checkpoint before entering Murgab:
We arrived in Alichur with an hour or two before sundown so I went out exploring. I took wonderful photos of the local kids and the father and daughter I had tea with in their home. Unfortunately, this is the one memory card in my camera I managed to erase by mistake. When I got back to the house I learned that one of my travelmates had been sent out to look for me since I was a woman alone and it was almost dark. Staying with Rahima and her daughters was a great experience. She was a teacher at the town school and a transplant from Dushanbe who spoke passable English! It was wonderful to finally learn about our driver and the Tajik culture without pantomime.
I took down Rahima’s address hoping to communicate with her in the future. Amazingly, my friend David was traveling through Tajikistan recently and hand delivered my photos to her and a few other people in the towns along the Wakhan Corridor. You can read about his quest to find the people in my photos here at his blog.
At this altitude the nights were bitterly cold and we had drunk a lot of tea. The house was small with a narrow entrance hallway where the driver slept, the main room with the stove and a platform where we slept and a small room where the Rahima and her three daughters slept. The baby was colicky and up most of the night crying but I had trouble sleeping for other reasons—imagine waking up in a dark house at a high altitude and trying your hardest to go back to sleep instead of going to the bathroom. After an hour you give up and put on your clothes, boots, coat, hat and gloves. Once you find your flashlight you make your way outside and navigate the frozen dirt path to the public toilets a few doors down. You have to hold your flashlight to make sure you don’t step through into the pit (see the photo below) while looking out for any animals or neighbors.
