May 11th Urumqi to Kashgar

The day started slowly with a Chinese breakfast and coffee that we were carrying with us. Our tour company had given us a very good packing list which included coffee, powdered milk, salt and pepper. We enjoyed our excellent room at the hotel and the wifi system that we made for ourselves. The room came with a small computer so we just borrowed the cable and plugged it into the airport express that we are carrying with us.

Our first tour stop was across the road at the Urumqi international bazaar. We had two items that we wanted to purchase for our granddaughter - squeaky shoes and split pants. Our guide in Xian is the mother of a 1 year old so we had her write in Chinese these two items on a paper. 

Abdullah had been warned we were looking for these items so his wife had given him some ideas of where to look in the bazaar. We were not successful there as the market was not fully opened. We did browse through all the various local atlas dresses, the embroidered men's shirts that have been inherited from Russia, the fur hats, leg warmers and other gear.

sand playtime

Next stop was the Red Hill, which is a hill in the middle of the city which is bound on the north and south sides by the mountains. It is a park now and it was fun to see all the families out walking and children playing. We then stopped at a mall that was basically all baby items and found the squeaky shoes for about $8. 

Found Squeaky Shoes!

We had lunch at a Chinese hotel and then went on to the Museum. The museum had an ethnic section and then also the archaeological finds from the various sites in the Xinjiang province.  It was interesting but a bit gruesome to see the preserved bodies so no pictures of those included but the reconstruction of the face of the "Beauty of Loulan".

Beauty of Loulan

She is one of the 200 non-mumified corpses found in the Tarim Basin around the Taklamakan Desert and is listed as 3,800 years old, with some reports from non-local experts, that she is almost 6,000. As you can see, she is surprisingly a Caucasian, and a textile expert has said that her clothes come from the Caucasus.

Our flight on a small China Southern airplane took 2 hours to reach Kashgar. We were met by our guide Adil and taken for a good Uyghur meal before being dropped at our hotel, Tianyuan International Hotel. We were given a room on the 11th floor that was very hot, so we checked out another room on the 11th floor that was smoky, and finally ended up on the 8th floor in a room that gets a breeze. There is theoretically air conditioning in the room but it is not the season to put it on. We set up our little wireless and learned that the internet speed is also faster on the 8th floor. So  it was well into the next morning before we got to sleep.