Prelude to the rest of my China blogs - In case you are interested in our route and/or don't have knowledge of the geography of western China, please see my map. Red shows flights, purple our train journeys and blue the longer car journeys. We travelled across nearly half of China, over 1800 km, by train in 5 journeys - fun!
Monday 13 October 2025
Sunrise is late here! At 09:20 this was our view.
There is just one time zone for China, which is also known as 'Beijing time' and Kashgar is over 40 degrees west of Beijing. As each degree of longitude makes sunrise/set 4 minutes earlier/later, 40 degrees is 160 minutes, eg 2 hours 40 minutes adrift. So our sunrise was at 09:03 whereas it was 06:22 in Beijing. Sunset is correspondingly later, 20:20 in Kashgar, compared to 17:38 in the east. The day kind of shifts in the west - shops and attractions don't open until the sun rises and schools run on until early evening. The locals use a local time system which is more in keeping with the natural rise/setting of the sun so you need to know which time zone events happen in.
Over breakfast (cute buns!) I checked WhatsApp to find that Riona and Mark became engaged on Saturday. Huge congrats to them both and sorry to have missed them telling me sooner - apparently I was proving hard to track down.
We headed off to explore Kashgar and find one of the original parts, the mosque. On our way we found a tower with a bronze statue of someone not unlike Ghengis Khan. The tower contained an exhibition which seemed to be about how Kashgar’s irrigation worked. We didn’t bother to translate the signs to check.
Then we meandered up the ‘old’ lanes exploring side alleys (many of which were cul-de-sacs) and found, to our delight, a coffee shop. Aside from the word 'Police' which is always in English as well as Chinese, coffee was another word we sometimes saw in English, basically because the locals don't drink it and the tourists do. The coffee menu didn't translate well "wipe the whole latte anyone?" but the coffee itself was great. The barrister had cycled from Beijing to Istanbul, along a Silk Route, and his walls displayed some amazing photos. He looked knackered in half of them.
The streets are dry and dusty - we think the 'ancient carts' are quite new. I was surprised any plants survived, but certainly better than this 15 year old wall.
The 15th Century Id Kah Mosque is apparently, one of the largest in China but a little hard to see its scale as it’s broken up by tree lines pathways. I presume the worshipers gather in the courtyards as the main mosque area was quite small (I’ve seen a few). However, according to Wiki, it's only now open for older Muslims on Holy Days.
I enjoyed using my translation app to decipher the signs dotted around.
We're back in the land of bronze camels, along with a few real ones.
After lunch we went to find Mao. This is the largest statue of him in China (the world?) and presumably built to make a point about how supportive China wanted to be of the Urghur peoples.
Pomegranate juice is a thing here, so we stopped and sampled some which had been freshly pressed as we watched. Dried fruit is also very prevalent, especially jujuba (Chinese date) and apricots.
The rest of the day was spent wandering the old town and browsing the street markets. Lots of dead fried things - sheep's head was popular.
I found plov in a massive cauldron which was very exciting (not the quantity, but the fact that plov existed here). It’s a central Asian dish I first met in Uzbekistan and subsequently in Kazakhstan and, if they serve it without the lump of mutton on it, is a Ruth friendly meal. It just shows how close to Kazakhstan/Tajikistan we are.
Tuesday 14 October 2025
So dark, it felt like getting up in the middle of the night!
We started our tour with Old Road Tours today by visiting Shipton’s Arch. We headed west/northwest out of Kashgar, stopping for frequent checks by police, including one stop where we exited the car and had our passports double checked. Abriz, our Old Road Tours driver, had all the necessary paperwork for us so all passed smoothly.
Shipton’s Arch was ‘discovered’ by Eric Shipton, the last British ambassador in Kashgar (1940-1942). Politics was certainly not his first love, having been a climber most of his adult life. It’s 500 m high and until a decade or so ago was an arduous trek to reach. Since then it has been developed, which basically means tonnes of concrete poured to make the attraction as accessible as possible. This doesn’t mean in a disabled friendly way (there were still steps to climb) but to save effort for the tourists.
Everyone had to take the shuttle bus to the base of the cable car which saved kms of walking over scrub desert. We declined the cable car opting for the walk up which took 10 minutes! Ok, it was uphill and, at 2800 m above sea level our lungs were working harder than usual, but it was the shortest cable car I’ve seen. And then we still all had about 100 steps to climb.
They have built what looks like a huge dam in front of the arch, ostensibly to house the viewing platform, but it doesn’t enhance the natural aesthetics to put it mildly. The image on the right is from Wiki, which looks to before they built the monstrous platform.
You can peer over it, and our iPhone took a good shot, but the key view has gone. Give them a few years and there will be a light show here.
Our driver kept appearing like Mr Ben and seemed to have some kind of arrangement whereby if the cable car was empty he could hop on. He certainly was travelling ticket free. [We later found out that official tour guides get free entry to attractions].
We drove back south to Kashgar, frequently stuck behind a near constant stream of construction lorries. It never seemed to stop here - new buildings, new roads etc.
We had to go to the immigration centre to get a permit to enter the border area the next day. It was full and we had 52 people in front of us according to our ticket number. Actually it was treble that as many tour groups had one ticket but a coach load of people to get permits for. Each person had to be photographed with their ID so it was extremely slow. Suddenly we were called to the desk by our driver and were next! We got our permit swiftly and before we knew it we were leaving the building, permits in hand. We never asked how he did that and we don’t need to know.
After an extremely late lunch at 16:00 we visited Afaq Khoja Maussoleum. This too has been turned into a theme park with numerous mock-authentic concrete bamboo structures, pagodas and randomly placed ‘ancient’ carts. From what we could see, fortunately the star attraction, the 17th Century mausoleum, had been left intact and tastefully repaired.
I do love a tile and the greens and ambers shone gloriously.
We also found the oldest building on site, the sermon hall and the Jiama mosque. This mosque was built in 1873 and has 62 wooden columns in the outer hall. Inside two women were vainly sweeping the dust into the air and, as it settled, sweeping another spot to same effect.
The artist at work.
We couldn’t enter the big/small mosques but the 1812 tower gate was beautiful.
For our last evening in Kashgar we returned to the food street for our third meal.
Well, it was more like a snack of veg skewers for me, meat for JC and then melon for afters. All washed down with the ubiquitous, and much appreciated, green tea which is poured gratis with every meal.
