Day 371: If I Could Stop The Sun, I Could Stop Time

Urumqi – Wucaitan – Burqin, China

Originally, judging from my limited time of travel (2 months for China, Nepal and India), I decided to ditch Nepal. Besides, it’s rainy season in Nepal in August and it’s the worst for trekking. Second option is to overland China through south of Xinjiang, through Khunjerab pass to Pakistan, then onto India.

This doesn’t work either. Due to the ethnic riot in 2009 (the Uyghur vs. the Han Chinese), south of Xinjiang is a risky place considering I look Han. Secondly, which is a more problematic for me, is that Pakistan had just recently changed their visa system and it’s no longer possible to obtain the visa at the border.

Anyhow, Xiaoyun had booked me a tour to go to north Xinjiang instead. The place Kanas and Hemu are claimed to be the Switzerland of Asia, and are marked as second of the sixth most beautiful sceneries in China.

The bus ride today was 12 hours, bringing us through different sort of landscapes. From the lands of nothingness, we’d suddenly came into a lush green field full of sunflowers. Our stops during the 12 hours were only for the loos.

Now I had been warned about the toilets here. It’s straight single long and shallow drainage that goes through all stalls. And the stalls? They are waist-height walls with no doors. Yup, you can see everybody peeing and pooping and even worse, you can see their pees and poos go through your part of the drainage. And I thought I’d seen everything. The naked Koreans bathing is nothing compared to this

During dusk, which is at around 8-10pm in Xinjiang, we visited our first touristic spot, Wucaitan. Literally translates as “Five Colour Beach,” Wucaitan was full of colour indeed. We were there at the right time of the day so it was fun taking pictures.