Having been told by the bus driver that we would leave at 7AM, we are up before dawn packing our gear by torchlight and washing with warm water from the two thermos flasks provided.
Of course, the bus doesn’t leave town until 8:30; the time of 7AM was given so that a group of Pakistanis travelling to Kashgar would be there on time. Apparently, they are notorious for not putting their watches forward, so 7AM was actually Pakistani time. From the hotel, we drove up to the bus station, where there was a delay of one hour while the driver chatted with his friends.
It was very cold. The surrounding mountains were covered with fresh snow, and a cold wind was blowing. The two American guys whom we had seen the day before are there. One of their cycles had broken a pedal on the way into Tashkurgan during the night. One of them, Mike, was going to take the bus to Kashgar with the broken bike, while the other guy, Terry, rode. He says to me, “I kinda hate buses,” when I ask him why he wasn’t also taking the bus.
Eventually, we rattle out of town into the desert, where the wind howls across a landscape of stones. Two hours later, at the top of a small hill, up which the driver had gone in first gear, the engine blows…POOM! There is no doubt that it is a major breakdown. The driver fiddles with the carburetor, tinkers with the distributor, pokes around with the coil. I tell him to turn the engine over while I look down into the oil filler. The rockers aren’t moving. It is a broken timing chain.
We are stopped in a wilderness surrounded on all sides by an expanse of brown, windswept hills wrapped in grey cloud. Fine snow, whipped around by the wind, finds its way through the cracks in the door and the small holes bored in the windows, with which they can be opened and shut. When I go outside for a piss, the ground is frozen solid, and tiny drifts of powdered snow are piled up downwind of each rock and mound.
Eventually, a truck comes along and the driver flags it down. They begin to tow us, with the driver, who is a complete fool, I decide, trying in vain to crash-start the bus. We are towed for about two hours. The driver tries continuously to crash-start the engine, which emits horrible grinding and knocking sounds, accompanied by puffs of oily smoke.
At the top of a long straight descent, we are cast loose — like a glider from its tow-plane — and career down into the valley, swerving around rock-slides and rocketing around bends. At the foot of the incline, a clear-flowing river has washed the road out, and we hit the rough detour around it at full speed. Amid cries of, “Fuck!” and “Jesus Christ!”, the luggage bounces around us as the bus lurches across the wash-out, and out onto the road beyond. The wash-out steals all of the bus’s momentum, and we coast to a stop on the other side. When the truck arrives, we carry on being towed, until we arrive at a tiny squalid village beside a cold lake. Bringing the bus to a halt, the driver announces, as if delivering a revelation to us, that “…bus…broken”.
We all climb onto the back of the truck and wrap ourselves in sleeping bags and warm clothes. Riding in the back of the truck is fun and not too cold, providing a good view of where we have been. Descending a wide river valley where herds of yaks and sheep graze, the temperature begins to rise slightly. Across on the opposite side of the valley, huge sand dunes buttress the mountains. Shaped like classic erg dunes in the Sahara, they are a light beige colour, almost white, and they lean against the black rock of the mountains as if propping them up. The dunes have been blown from the river flats, collecting in the folds of the mountains. Racing along, we pass through several oasis towns, separated by tracts of flat, stony desert.
We reach Kashgar at about 5pm, and with the help of Mike, who speaks fluent Chinese, we take a motorcycle taxi to the Lemon Hotel. Settled into a comfortable dorm with hot showers and TV (the Asian Games are on) we shift into a mode of well-earned, if slightly lazy, sloth.
CurseOfTheTraveller 