After waiting for around ten days in Abra, our drivers were finally beginning
to load. Celebrations would have been premature though - there were still
a couple of long days spent seeking elusive cargoes, and repacking the results...
Finding a lift initially seemed simple, but promised rides invariably failed
to materialise after a night around the local rumour mill. Timekeeping is
a low priority in the region as a whole. The drivers we eventually travelled
with - a Tibetan family of brothers and a wife from Kham, in Eastern Tibet
- fell several days behind schedule after overdoing their alcoholic celebrations
at our agreed price of nearly $70US a person. It took another couple of days
of watching them loading, reorganising, and unloading cargo, before we finally
set off.
Our eventual departure time of three in the afternoon was carefully chosen
to take us through the checkpost at Mazar in the dead of night, hopefully
passing a sleeping sentry.
The narrow valley of Mazar was still far off! There was great anticipation
in the back of the lorry as we started to move, unseen under the canvas skin,
out of the truck compound and south; finally beyond the 3km post! Shortly
after the trucks turned and returned to the compound to retrieve something
forgotten, but the setback was short-lived!
Though Abra is built entirely on servicing trucks and drivers, local traffic
around Yecheng is equine!
Seen through the a slit in the canvas back of a truck, this corner of Xinjiang had a timeless air. Beneath the scorching sun, Uighur men were riding or leading donkeys along the desert road, between horizons virtually unobstructed by human endeavour. The occasional mud house stood as the only discernible human feature beside the road. Small villages clustered around the flashes of green that marked out oasis's.
Meeting of generations; southern Xinjiang (Akmat?)
It was in one of these groups of houses that our drivers unwisely stopped
to change a puncture that had been troubling us through the last few unpopulated
miles of desert. Stopping in a village, it wasn't long before a child caught
sight of us, and the village policeman had hauled us out of our cocoon into
the public glare.
It rapidly became apparent that the policeman didn't know what to do or expect,but
he wanted his pound of flesh... Figures of $3000 were being suggested, though
this fell rapidly. The situation diffused itself when he came to copy down
our passport details. He produced a crisp white notebook from his breast pocket,
and with a flourish took the first passport. As a native speaker of the Uighur
language, most closely related to old Turkish he was faced with an array of
foreign scripts and languages across the pages of the passports he had confiscated.
Taking Bruce's passport, he laboriously copied down the letter-shapes, from
a couple of randomly selected pages, to spell out a nom de guerre -
"P A K I S T A N B R U C E".
In the face of our unsuccessfully stifled laughter, he hurriedly decided to
send us on our way before he lost further face in his village.
From the 1100m elevation of the Tarim Desert, the road moves into a more
rocky setting, and climbs rapidly through gorges through the mountain barrier,
eventually reaching the 5060m Chirangsaldi La (pass) just before Mazar. A
late dinner in a high valley was our first 'official' stop, and our first
introduction to our drivers hospitality. A meal of Tsampa and Butter Tea,
around the light and warmth of the fire, which together with their laughter
broke the otherwise absolute and frigid surrounding darkness.