May 12th Kashgar On Our Own

In our plan of this Silk Road trip we wanted to be sure to visit Kashgar as it has been a key stop- over place for 2,000 years and Marco Polo visited Kashgar some 900 years ago, and gave it a rich description as the joining place of several caravan routes.

We asked the ladies at the front desk for directions to the Id Kah Mosque (probably the number one tourist attraction in the city) and were given blank looks. After much discussion they gave us a map and we pointed to the picture of the mosque shown on it. They said go out of the hotel and go straight.  Unfortunately their directions proved to lead to a very long round about way to get there but we saw a lot of the old city as we walked along.

Around the Mosque on various streets are the barbers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, musical instrument shops and bedding all clustered together. Souvenir shops are closest to the Mosque. What was special about this old town section was the old building style and the fact that the craftsmen can still be seen practicing their trade right there. It was fun to have the freedom to just browse and look around and not be on a schedule. The baby cradle with the hole for the babies rear was a concept we had not seen before but could well understand.

baby cradle

stamps for bread

carpets for sale

cotton filled blankets

traditional houses

Taking the "bagels" out of the oven

"bagel" bread

wonderful antique stores

We ordered our lunch at a roof top restaurant we found overlooking the Mosque square. We ordered using the time honored "Point to the Picture Method" and had a delicious meal even if we hadn't quiet realized all the chillies there were in one green  bean dish.

Wonderful meal but too many chillies

Atlas fabric (Ikat)

We crossed the street, Jin Fang Bei, just in front of the mosque and wandered through the underground clothing market. Beautiful Atlas material hanging everywhere. Atlas is the Uyghur term for Ikat. The fabric is sold in lengths of 6 feet by roughly 2 feet. The fashion designer Oscar De La Renta loves to use Ikat in his collections. The fabric that we saw seemed to be printed on rayon and not hand done but was stunning in all it's colors and it was delightful to see all the ladies in the shoe buying atlas.

We bought Yasmine some "spit pants" which is what they use in China, sometimes with a diaper underneath and sometimes not.

Split pants

We were back at the hotel just before a huge sand storm arrived. We did laundry until it passed and then went back out again the the goal to reach the old British consulate and have dinner. We walked the long way to the Qinibagh hotel and asked where the British consulate was. Once again all blank looks and stares. We were given a useful map of the town that also had some Uyghur expressions which would be helpful in Khasgar as well as the rest of the journey.

Dinner was a "pizza" in a cute place that had mainly Uyghur food and clientele, in which we noticed several "girls parties", tables with women and girls only. On the way back we purchased some "energy bars" from a local vendor made of nuts and honey at a cost of $0.80 each.

The Smithsonian Magazine did an article in March 2010 on the destruction of the City's old quarter. The article noted that "In 2007, Hollywood director Marc Forster used the city as the stand-in for 1970s Kabul in his film of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel about Afghanistan, The Kite Runner. "