After a 10 hour sleep and much needed mini lie-in, we headed around the corner to Tashkurgan Stone City. This was the founding fortress of the town. There isn’t much to see of the fortress itself, most has turned into rubble over time, but I’d rather have a pile of stones than a refurbished castle.
Being surrounded by snow capped mountains it made a beautiful scene. It wasn’t too touristy and we crossed onto the Tashkurgan wetlands to view the Stone Fortress from the east.
Even more beautiful views from the wetlands!
And the wetlands were lovely to walk around, though I hardly spotted any wildlife. 
We then started the 320 km drive back to Kashgar down the Karakorum Highway, named the G314 in China.
We swung by Tagharma village, one of the largest Tajik villages on the KKH. Sadly for us, but probably not for the locals, the village experience now consisted of a long line of (admittedly pretty) trees and golden plains looking across to the mountains. The Chinese tourists were flying drones and taking selfies, but we walked far enough to have the lane to ourselves, give or take a cow.
I did espy one lady sewing tapestry.
We stopped at another village, Shubashi, site of base camp for Muztagh Ata. Again, due to our foreign nature, our driver didn’t want to take us into the village past a police kiosk, so we stayed on the road with the yaks.
We stopped occasionally to capture the amazing views of the ever present Muztagh Ata.
Next stop was White Sands Lake. After leaving this on Wednesday, we realised how extensive it was and wanted to return. So this time we swung into another tourist area and, fortuitously I’d kept our entrance tickets from the Wednesday which our ever resourceful driver used to gain us entrance to this site too. I do love a freebie.
This south western end of the lake was even more breathtaking than the eastern side and we wandered down to one edge. The white sand really did look like snow.
As we left towards Kashgar, we snapped a few more shots of Muztagh before we turned in the valley out of view.
We briefly stopped at an ancient caravan saray by the Kongor Channel. We asked if we could cross their rickety bridge but we weren’t able to.
We had time to stop in Opal Village for supper where I had plov and an awful lot of peanuts. We arrived at Kashgar station nearly two hours before our overnight train. Our driver gave us a parting gift of two large naan, four bottles of water and enough biscuits/cake to keep JC alive for a month. We had run our food supplies down as we didn’t want to carry much on the train and, well, there you go!
We had splashed out on a soft sleeper, which is a private cabin for four people with two sets of bunks. There were two other women in our cabin and made for a snug fit once luggage was stowed, but we were only onboard from 23:00 to 07:00 so it was all about sleep. Our tour guide had only been able to buy us tickets Kuqa, whereas we wanted to alight earlier at Turpan, so he wrote us a helpful note.
At 23:30 the guard came to check our passports. From what we could see we were only non-Chinese people on the train - you can spot the non Chinese ID holders as we have to queue at the ‘special needs’ barrier to get onto the train rather than use the automatic barrier. Manual checking and photographing passports of foreigners is the norm here as there are so few of us. We nodded off, then at 00:15 a police officer entered the cabin asking to see our passports. He was not just wearing the uniform but had flashing red/blue lights on his epaulets. He wanted JC to do something with his bag but we couldn’t understand what, so he wished us a good trip and left us to sleep.
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