12 Days: Day 2

Day 2: Sept 18: Over the Mountains and Around the Lake.

Now that it is not one in the morning, as it was when we got in, people are naturally out and about.  This revealed just how different this area is from Beijing and X'an.  There are almost no straight up Han Chinese people here, only Uygers.

Twenty minutes into the bus ride to Karakul the bus started spewing thick black smoke.  Now we are pulled over in a muddy smelly lot in the rain fixing the bus.  Things break down a lot, but thankfully that means that people know how to fix things.  After a long long wait and lots of exhaust fumes the smoke is more of a white color, so lets go to the lake and hope for the best.



We stopped for lunch in the last township before going onto the plateau.  The watermelon and cantaloupe thing were delicious, as well as the noodles and the giant bowl of tea, and the amazingly fresh bread.

Shortly after we passed into the Kurgish area, almost hit some cows in the road, which i would soon learn is just a part of life in herding areas, and when the poplar trees parted we were met by one of the most beautiful sights.  It was hard to get it on camera which is sad but is just what happens when taking pictures, especially from a moving bus with dirty windows.  A plane of rocks with water streaming through it and amazing cliffs stretching into the clouds.  Camels, sheep, goats, and cows walk along the road, across the road, and in the mountains.

On occasion I could see rough switchbacks carved into the side of steep mountains with buildings perched over halfway up.  We got to a checkpoint where we deboarded, and half of our group mysteriously disappeared for several minutes and gave no explanation when they returned.
At one point I heard a loud bang as we climbed the higher into the mountains.  when the bus didn't stop running I put it out of my mind until I opened my back pack and found:
The pressure form the planes and the altitude finally burst my bag of chips, which, by the way, were Lays original potato but they were not the same as the American kind.  By that, I mean, not as good.  The one bag of regular potato chips and they were a let down.

It is mildly disheartening to see chunks of the road you are driving on missing because they have fallen over a cliff, all this while the bus driver fast and furiouses around blind corners.

We stopped to take pictures of sandy mountains where the wind is so strong and one directional that it blows the sand created by the merging of the two rivers, that I forgot which they were, up the mountains.  It was so terribly windy and cold there.

3600 meters above sea level, about two miles, and 2 to 300km from Pakistan, 5 of us set off on a roughly 9 mile hike around Karakul Lake.  Walking through a field of yaks with big horns when you don't know how they will react can be mildly intimidating it turns out.  Meeting a yaks eye while peeing not more than ten feet from it: also rather scary. Since I know pictures are better than lots of words here are a bunch of pictures from the walk.  All the pictures of me are on Cora's camera though...

That is a herd of horses we found running around the lake.


That night we slept in Yurts.  Outside was freezing, inside was freezing, under piles of blankets was freezing, everywhere was freezing.We had a little coal stove thingy for heating which was nice except for having to tend to it in the middle of the night.

The location finder on google says we were in Tajikistan but we were still in China, just really really almost outside of it.