UNLOCKING CHINA | SILK ROAD
Revved up for a tour of China's Silk Road
Marco Polo never had it like this. A motorcycle tour across his ancient route offers luxury hotels and stunning scenery.
Kashgar, China
After 36 hours, three flights and two sleeping pills, I arrived in the western Chinese city of Kashgar. It was 10 p.m., and the sun was only starting to set when I disembarked on the runway, collected my bags from the airport's single conveyor belt and boarded a barely functioning minibus for town.
The long haul to Kashgar was the first leg of an exhilarating, exhausting and occasionally annoying journey to a part of the world I would never have associated with the China I hear and read about.
FOR THE RECORD:
Travel: An article in the Dec. 2 Travel section about a motorcycle tour in China said that the Uygurs are of the Uzbek ethnic group. The Uygurs are of Turkic origin. Also, the town of Aksu was misspelled as Akso, and the population of Aksu was reported at 3 million. The area has just more than 2 million residents. Additionally, the article said that the city of Jiaohe was a few hundred years old. Its age is estimated to be 2,000 to 2,300 years.
As the sort of traveler who prefers surprise to preparation, I found Kashgar to be just my style, but it was only the starting point of an 11-day motorcycle tour I was about to undertake with eight other paying motorcyclists. We would ride 1,700 miles as part of the new Silk Road Tour offered by Edelweiss Bike Travel, a longtime Austrian motorcycle adventure company.
Now I just needed to get to the hotel where our group was to meet. As the minibus chugged along the six-lane, poplar-lined boulevard, we were -- at 30 mph -- the fastest thing on the road as we jockeyed with donkey carts, motorcycles, pedestrians, bicyclists and taxis, passing mud-brick homes, smoking kebab stands and high-rises that had seen better days.
Rundown and exotic, Kashgar is a far cry from Beijing, both in distance (2,135 miles) and cultural orientation. The city is just as sooty, but Kashgar lacks that distinct whiff of capitalism. The predominantly Muslim population subsists on very little. With heightened interest in both the Muslim world and China (the latter centered on Beijing because of the 2008 Olympics, Aug. 8 to 24), the Silk Road Tour offered the best of both worlds, with a twist. My tour didn't just offer a close-up view of China's Islamic western frontier. It did it from the saddle of a motorcycle. That's my preferred mode of transportation, because it engages all the senses and allows for a more off-the-cuff experience.
The tour had been run only once before my May trip. Because of the extreme changes in elevations (sea level to 13,400 feet) and temperatures (zero to 120 degrees), Edelweiss runs the trip only in spring and fall, with two in each season for 2008.
Kashgar, the first of seven cities we visited, is in Xinjiang, the country's largest province but among its least populated. The province pushes up against the borders of Pakistan, Kashmir, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in China's northwestern corner.
Its center is the Taklimakan Desert, an area so forbidding that some visitors don't survive it. Wisely, my tour skirted the Taklimakan, along a 1,700-mile stretch of Marco Polo's turf.
CLIMBING THE PAMIRS
Our first riding day started along flat country roads and at a temperate 70 degrees that cooled to freezing at night. We encountered mostly foot traffic -- women balancing buckets of water on sticks across their shoulders and men in embroidered caps herding sheep, goats and yaks -- as we worked our way toward the military checkpoint that granted us access to the Karakoram Highway and scenery so spectacular I could have crashed.
As my Chinese motorcycle -- a Jialing JH600 -- and I climbed the Pamir Mountains, monochromatic rocky passes gave way to snow-capped peaks and the postcard-perfect but incredibly windy Lake Karakul.
Despite its status as an official Chinese tourist destination, Lake Karakul had almost no visitors that day. It did, however, have an abundance of wind-worn and persistent peddlers who saw us coming and sped into the dirt parking lot on their motorbikes to try to sell us camel-bone flasks, polished stone necklaces and rabbit-fur caps.
Alas for them, we were there only to admire the lake, with its camel and yurt backdrop, and for lunch, a delectable smorgasbord of mutton soup and entrees made with eggplant, peanuts, bell peppers, eggs and tomatoes, cooked in a place that got its electricity from a wind turbine.
Then it was back on the bikes to continue on our way to Tashkurgan, a town just 60 miles from the Kashmir border. Tashkurgan is also known as Stone City, partly because the main tourist attraction is a crumbling, 600-year-old stone fortress once occupied by a Pakistani emperor and also because of the terrain, which seemed to me mostly rocks.
We stayed at the Crown Inn, a Best Western-esque place that had been open just a month, in anticipation, it seems, of spillover tourism from the Olympics. To celebrate our arrival, flute-heavy Tajik music blared, and a pair of dancers spun through the lobby. At dinner later in the hotel restaurant, I recognized one of the dancers. She was one of the waitresses.
CHILDREN'S HELLO
Tashkurgan's town center consists of two intersecting streets lined with fabric shops and hardware and other stores with crumbling facades signed in Chinese characters and Arabic. There weren't any sidewalks, but there weren't many cars either, so the streets were freed for other activities, such as walking the family bull or playing ball.
The people were friendly, for the most part. A smile or wave typically won the same in return, but no one spoke with us except children, who giggled and yelled "hello" before hiding in their mothers' flowing skirts.
Even our Chinese tour guide, nicknamed Rick, had difficulty talking with the locals because this part of the country is populated by Uygurs, an Uzbek ethnic group that has its own dialect.
Because we were so close to Pakistan, the tour brochure offered an optional trip to the border over the 16,000-foot Khunjerab Pass, notable for its glacial landscape, oversized Himalayan squirrels and proximity to one of Osama bin Laden's reputed hiding places.
Most of our group was game for the trip, but Rick said new laws bar motorcycles from traveling the pass. My tour group figured Rick knew what he was talking about, but later that same day, we ran into a pack of New Zealand bikers who had just traveled the road.
So our ride on the second day was exactly the same as the first, only back the other direction, from Tashkurgan through the military checkpoint and into Kashgar.
The tour guides let us go ahead of them to explore the area's mud-hut towns, which looked a lot like Luke Skywalker's home town in "Star Wars." I checked them out with a couple of other riders, one of whom brought his GPS. It really wasn't possible to get lost. There's only one major road between Tashkurgan and the military checkpoint. It's also the area's only paved road -- a well-kept military thoroughfare with asphalt so smooth it could have been poured the previous day.
At Kashgar, we had a night of rest before exploring the weekly livestock extravaganza known as the Sunday Market and visiting the Taj Mahal-esque Tomb of Abakh Hoja, an Islamic spiritual leader. For that day's sightseeing, we swapped our motorcycles for bicycles because it was easier to negotiate the chaotic city streets.
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